1990
The spring of 1990 arrived, marking one year since Jane and Elijah had found each other in the ether of the internet. Jane had been temping at the vet’s office where her mother worked, saving money she told her mother was for her college tuition but was really for the escape she was planning the second she finished high school.
How can I be so in love with a person I’ve never even met? she wrote more than once in her diary during that year. How can I love someone who only exists in my heart, in my head?
“A guy from Sub Pop saw the Marvel Boys play and asked for a demo,” Elijah told her one afternoon on the phone. Sub Pop was a popular, if perpetually broke, independent record label in Seattle. He explained how the demo would have to be made at the Marvel Boys’ expense, which was going to clean out all the band members’ bank accounts—but once it existed, the label would help with distribution and publicity. “I guess it’s exciting,” he said. “A step forward for the band.”
“You guess? A demo is huge,” she said, but her heart was sinking. She had been hoping the Marvel Boys weren’t a permanent thing for Elijah, that the endless sleepover jam party he described as the Seattle music scene, one he didn’t seem especially enthused about, would just fizzle out. Every time he sent a song she had written back to her, his voice made it so good it felt unreal. Every song was better than the last. They were great together. They had a future. Except maybe she was the only one of them who believed that. Maybe she was wasting her time.
“Kim thinks we need to start planning another tour,” he said.
She could no longer hold it in. “So again, we won’t talk for… what, another month?” She was angry, she realized. Hurt.
“Jane, I never said I was—”
“No!” She had never been mad at him before, but she was now, and it had come on fast, like a clap of thunder. “When are we ever going to meet?” She hated how needy she sounded, but she did have a need. For him.
“I don’t know,” he said, and he sounded miserable. Her stomach swirled and plummeted. What had she been doing, all this time? Why had she been bothering? This was not first love. It wasn’t even real.
“I have to go,” she said.
“Wait, Jane. No. I just… Look, this place doesn’t feel like the right one for you. For us. Shit. This isn’t coming out right at all.”
She waited, silent, for him to try to put it another way. “I don’t know how you’re going to feel about me when you meet me in person,” he tried. “I’m scared, I guess.”
“Don’t you think I’m scared too?”
“You shouldn’t be. You’re perfect, Jane.”
“I’m not. No one is.”
“I’m a mess.”
“You are not! I know you. I love you. Saying you’re a mess is an insult to my intelligence.”
“I need a little bit more time, okay? I don’t want to screw this up with you and me.”
“What is that supposed to even mean, more time? You tell me you love me, but you can’t possibly!”
“I do, I swear. Jane, you have no idea—”
“And, what, I’m supposed to stay here and just… wait for you to sow your wild oats or whatever it is you need to do?”
“No. It’s not like that at all. Wild oats—Jane, no.”
Jane rubbed her eyes. Sow your wild oats, where had she even heard that, one of her mother’s soap operas? “Then what is it like, Elijah?” Her voice was quiet now, her anger still there, but contained.
“What if you coming now ruins it?” he said, his voice equally low. “Ruins us. You don’t know what you mean to me, Jane. But what if I’m not good enough for you?”
“Yes, I do know what I mean to you. Because you mean that to me. And there is no way you are not good enough. No way in hell.”
She waited for him to take it all back. In the silence that followed, she felt every inch of the 2,400 miles between them. She also felt all the differences. He was scared, and she wasn’t. He wasn’t mature enough for a serious relationship, and she was. It had been this way the entire time, she just hadn’t wanted to believe it.
She hung up the telephone and felt helpless tears slip down her cheeks as she walked home. She told her mother she was sick and went straight to bed.
She didn’t call him for weeks, during which time she actually did feel like she was dying. Her mother took her temperature, fed her chicken broth, let her stay home from school, took her to the doctor twice. But the truth was that she wasn’t sick, she was heartbroken.
In her bed, Jane listened to his voice, soft and romantic, singing their love song to her. It’s just a corny love ballad, she told herself. He hadn’t even written it himself.
Since she wasn’t really dying, she couldn’t stay in bed forever, so she finally made herself get up, eat, and become one of the living again. She’d get over Elijah. She’d avoid all memories of him and it wouldn’t be that hard, because actually, he didn’t really exist in her day-to-day life. She would not check the PO Box. She would forget him.
Except she couldn’t. Every day she would pass the pay phone booth and double back, stand in front of it and force herself to back away. He doesn’t want you, she told herself. He doesn’t love you. But the day she finally went to the post office to close her account for the PO Box, there was a letter waiting.
Dear Jane,
I’m sorry. I really do love you and I want you in my life. For real. Right now. Anytime.
You know my address. I’m ready when you are.
Always,
Elijah
That night, she woke up agitated, anxious. She wrote him a letter back, asking him if he really meant it, when she should come, what their plan was, exactly. But then she crumpled it up and stared down at it. She made a decision. Her high school graduation was coming up, but what was the point? She had fulfilled all the academic requirements, but her life was not here in Stouffville, and it certainly wasn’t at the college her mother had forced her to apply to.
The next morning, after Raquel left for work, Jane took her mother’s neglected suitcase with the broken wheel from a closet and packed it full of all the clothes she liked. She put her mixtapes in a plastic grocery bag to listen to as she drove. Raquel had carpooled into work that day with a friend, so her rusted gray Chevette was in the driveway and her keys were on the kitchen counter. Jane loaded her stuff into the trunk, then found a notepad and pen and hastily scrawled:
Dear Mom, I’m sorry I took the car. I left some money on the counter, and I’ll send more when I get a job so you can get a new one. Things with us have never been easy, but I do love you. And I know you love me. I just can’t live here. I want to be a musician so badly, and I know you don’t want me to, so I have to go. I hope you understand someday…
As she reversed the Chevette out of the driveway, Jane wondered if she’d forever miss the way her mother had placed her hand gently on her forehead to check for fever when her daughter was heartsick over Elijah. Strangely, those few weeks had been some of the best they’d ever had. My mother loves me, Jane told herself as she accelerated onto the highway. It wasn’t enough to keep her at home, but it was an important thing to remember. She didn’t come from somewhere that was all bad; it just hadn’t been the right place for her. She could return someday, and she’d be a different person. Maybe even a famous person, someone everyone admired. Maybe everyone here would realize they’d misunderstood her all along.
Two hours later, she crossed the border at Niagara Falls, presenting a forged letter from Raquel giving her permission to go outlet shopping in Buffalo. The border guard barely glanced at her. She kept driving, felt her old self slipping away the farther she got. The little girl her mother had loved; the teenager she hadn’t understood. The person her father had left behind just because she told him to go. The school weirdo, the “slut” who was actually a virgin. She was none of those people now: she was officially Jane. Jane Pyre, she decided, the new last name—a true stage name—coming to her like a revelation. She was heading for her destiny.
With as few stops as possible, Jane made it through Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and almost to Montana. She dreamed of a new, adult life; a sunny apartment somewhere; candles in wine bottles and instruments on the floor; and Elijah, all hers. She missed his voice more than ever now and thought many times about stopping, finding a pay phone, telling him she was coming. But she didn’t. She just kept going.
Late at night, she half slept in the car, ready to wake and drive off at the first sign of danger. She got nervous every time she saw a police cruiser, in case her mother had reported her missing, but no one tried to stop her. She turned eighteen during the trip and breathed a sigh of relief because now she was her own person. She marked the occasion with a large Slurpee from 7-Eleven. She wanted to tell Elijah this, to tell him everything. And she would. Soon.
She was halfway through Montana when the car shuddered, steam erupted from the hood, the steering wheel shook, and the vehicle died. Jane got out and kicked the wheel. Her toe throbbed as she gazed up at the vast sky, then down the long road ahead. She pulled her guitar case from the trunk and filled it with as much of her stuff as she could, crammed in around the edges. She started walking. As she did, she imagined herself from a bird’s eye: torn jeans, scuffed-up boots, dark hair, guitar case, the sun shining in her eyes. Mountains and horses in the background. Did she look like someone heading straight and sure toward her dreams as she trudged down that road? Or like some scared kid?
Jane hitchhiked. She took buses. She slept in her seat. Five days later, she arrived in Seattle and went straight to the address on all the letters he had written to her. She tapped at the side door of Elijah’s house, then realized knocking was pointless considering the cacophony of music coming from the basement. He had been right in his assessment of the Marvel Boys. Post-punk-metal-funk.
A male voice that must have been Kim’s shouted out incomprehensible lyrics delivered in staccato, machine-gun bursts. It wasn’t helping her frenzied mental state. So she closed her eyes and focused, listened only to the drum’s beat. Elijah, she told herself. I’m here to see Elijah. It helped, but she still wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do next. Knock harder? Simply wait? Go away and regroup? She had focused so hard on her journey that she had no idea what to do now that she had arrived.
Her heart was beating in her ears, so loud that she didn’t realize the music had stopped.
She looked up to see a guy staring at her from the open front door. “Hey. Can I help you?”
Elijah? Could it be? She met his appraising gaze. His hair was to his shoulders, the way Elijah’s had been in photos, and he wore a Misfits tee. Elijah had never mentioned liking that band. He smelled like sweat and barnyard. Disappointment welled up. All the pictures she had of Elijah were taken at concerts, him behind a drum set, slightly blurred. She’d elevated him to mythic status in her mind. He gazed back at her, skipped over her eyes and stared at her chest. She had come all this way to tell him—to tell him what? Hi, I love you, I can’t live without you, let’s start a band together, let’s run away.
“Hey…”
Another guy was standing behind the first one now. His eyes were green. Or blue. Both.
Jane’s body came alive.
“Elijah?” she said. The stranger in the Misfits tee melted away.
“Jane. I thought you…” He rubbed a hand across his eyes, blinked, looked at her again. “I thought maybe you were never going to check the PO Box again. That you’d never get my letter. I filled out a passport application; I was going to show up in Stouffville.”
“You were?”
“Well, yeah.” He laughed. “Except I’m terrified of your mother. I called the other night, and she answered. She said, ‘Jane, where are you, when are you coming home?’ Then she slammed the phone down so hard I think my eardrum is permanently damaged.”
“I’m sorry. I probably should have called first.”
He smiled, and she noticed he had this one snaggletooth. It was so cute. He was so perfect. And he was real, standing right in front of her, close enough to touch. But then the guy in the Misfits tee inserted himself back into reality and she remembered they weren’t alone.
“I saw your boots, thought you were the pizza delivery guy,” he said. “So, Elijah, care to make introductions?”
“This is Kim.” Now two other guys were crowded into the doorframe, staring at her.
“What’s taking you so long? Who’s the girl?”
“And this is Ari. And John. The band.”
“Cool, great,” Jane said, feeling suddenly like a fifth wheel. She hadn’t imagined meeting him with three other guys standing around watching, and she felt shy and out of place.
“Guys, this is Jane,” Elijah finally said. “My… pen pal.” He winced. The guys mumbled their hellos, and Jane knew he wished he hadn’t called her that. She wished he hadn’t, too.
“You mean that hot Canadian chick who sent you the photos?” Kim said. “The one you’re obsessed with? She looks different.”
Jane looked away, embarrassed now. She knew she didn’t exactly resemble the innocent girl in the school picture, or the other photo she had sent Elijah, an artfully contrived image of herself playing guitar, her long dark hair parted in the middle and flowing down her shoulders, her eye makeup dark and smudged, like she was an alternative rock version of Helen Sear. She had developed two rolls of film to get the right shot, and she felt like Kim could somehow tell this. She hated that he had seen something meant only for Elijah.
“Guys, uh… could we just have a minute?” Elijah said. Kim opened his mouth to protest, but Elijah said, “Don’t worry, I’ll bring the pizza straight down when it arrives. C’mon, get out of here.” Kim cast one last suspicious glance at Jane, but then she and Elijah were alone.
Jane felt too hot in her leather jacket and T-shirt. Sweat trickled down her back. She probably looked terrible.
But he had that smile on his face again. She was mesmerized by it, forgot everything else. He stepped closer. “You’re really here.”
She took her own step. He smelled like Irish Spring soap, not barnyard. “Are you still scared, Elijah?”
He reached out and touched her for the first time, his right hand on her arm, his left hand on her waist, as if they were about to dance a routine that had been choreographed by the fates. “No,” he said. “I’m not. I promise.”
A song began forming itself in her head as she stood there staring up at him, her body tingling from the touch of his fingers on her arm, her waist. I wanted to ask, but what if you said no? Hard to remember what I was afraid of when we dance so slow.
“I’m so happy you’re here, Jane.” He added her name to the end of the sentence like a cherry on top of a sundae. She noticed how it sounded when he said it in person. Jane. Different. Real. A baptism. Janet no longer existed. She had left her old self somewhere in Buffalo.
They took each other in, memorized each other’s faces the way they had already memorized everything else they knew about each other. They grinned like the happy, lovestruck kids they were, and when Elijah pulled Jane even closer, she fit against him perfectly. To Jane, the moment felt like jumping off the edge of a cliff into a lake of cold water and knowing at once that you would take that same leap over and over, forever, now that you knew how safe it was.
He tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear and stared into her eyes. It felt like he was asking a question that didn’t have words.
“You’re here.” His lips were so close to hers.
“Finally,” she whispered back—as if she had been waiting to meet him for thousands of years, and not just one and a half. When their lips met, Jane expected a clap of thunder, a bolt of lightning—but it was just a perfect kiss. It marked the beginning of the rest of her life. Everything she had ever wanted, all in one moment.