Track [17] “Is This What You Wanted”/Leonard Cohen
I’d been to my fair share of sketchy back door club entrances with Dad, tagging along when he picked up Mad Dog from some meeting with a band, or sitting backstage with Velvet while we watched a musician rehearse for a live album that her dad was recording.
But none of them made me feel like I was about to be shipped out on a boat to Russia in the dead of night. Or maybe I was just nervous to be out with Fen after dark. I wished I’d told someone where I’d gone. Not because I was actually worried about being out with Fen. But if I’d told someone, then I wouldn’t feel guilty.
I could text someone now. Not my dad. Maybe Starla?
“You okay?” Fen asked. “You’re checking your phone.…”
I shoved it in my pocket. “Nope, all good. What’s with all the security cameras? This isn’t a human trafficking ring, right? FYI, I’m worth nothing as a kidnapping victim.”
“Another thing we have in common. My dad would probably pay kidnappers to take me away.” He hit a buzzer on the back gate at the top of the deck’s stairs. “Yo! It’s us, man,” he said into a speaker. “Let us in.”
“Where’s my near-mint?” a low voice replied. “You promised me a rose garden, Fennec.”
“Let us in, and it’s yours.”
“You better hold the dog until we see how Peaches and Herb take to it,” he warned.
Didn’t like the sound of that. Frida stayed tucked under my arm as we entered the gate. I spotted Peaches and Herb—two longhair cats who quickly jumped to higher ground when Frida barked—and their owner, a biracial old hippie who looked a little like the man who ran the Sierra Mono Indian Museum near the giant sequoia tunnel tree where dad and I take our photo every summer.
“Moonbeam Bowland, this is Jane Marlow,” Fen said, walking us into an outdoor living room.
“Heard a lot about you,” the man said, giving me a reserved but kind smile.
A lot? That made me nervous. I glanced at Fen. He glanced at the lake. Frida barked at the cats, who were perched atop a bamboo shelf filled with plants. “Quiet!” I scolded. “It’s ten o’clock at night. You’ll wake the neighbors.”
“No neighbors to wake,” Moonbeam assured me.
“Welcome to hermit life, Jane,” Fen said, sitting on one of the couches. “Moonbeam is a vegan vampire who watches the lake all night,” he said, gesturing toward a telescope that sat near the deck’s railing, pointed toward the other side of the lake. “So if you need to know if anyone’s dumping bodies, he’s your man.”
“Condor’s been body-free for a decade,” Moonbeam assured me, gesturing for me to have a seat. “All clear since Mrs. Abrams dumped her husband.”
I was pretty sure they were joking, but not totally sure. “Should I ask…?” I sat next to Fen, letting Frida explore around our feet, but keeping her leash wrapped around my wrist.
“Abrams didn’t kill him. She was just cheap,” Fen explained. “No money for the funeral.”
I grimaced. “This town is so strange.”
“That’s what’s great about it,” Moonbeam said, sitting across from us in a recliner. He squinted at me, and it was a little awkward. Warm light spilled over his shoulders from his house, and I tried not to look inside, but there were shelves filled with records, and something was playing on his stereo that I didn’t recognize.
“Penguin Cafe Orchestra,” Fen volunteered. “Moonbeam doesn’t listen to anything past 1985. He’s a walking, talking time capsule.”
The man ignored that. Maybe he didn’t care because he was too busy staring at me, which was a little uncomfortable. Then he clapped his hands. “Breathless! Jean-Luc Godard. What was her name? Jean Seberg. That’s who you remind me of, with your hair.”
I touched the nape of my neck, fidgeting, before I realized what I was doing. “Oh? I haven’t seen that. I’ve heard of it. It’s important, or something? French.”
“French New Wave,” Moonbeam said, nodding. “Groundbreaking and shocking, about two lovers—an ugly young criminal who thinks he’s tougher than he is, and the girl he’s in love with, beautiful and bubbly on the surface, but actually might be as nihilistic as he is.”
I shook my head, unable to tell if he was paying me a compliment. “You’re not selling it to me.”
“Jane’s not big on nihilism. She likes fluff and Christmas lights,” Fen explained.
“What a coincidence, all your favorite things,” Moonbeam teased.
Fen flipped him off and leaned his head close to mine, pretending to talk conspiratorially but speaking loud enough for the man to hear: “Honestly, he’s like this all the time, so don’t expect his manners to get better. But he does subscribe to your no-selling-out philosophy. Moonbeam loves music and hates money.”
“Wrong. I don’t hate money,” Moonbeam said. “It pays for what I need, no more, no less. Beyond that, it’s useless. Why do I need gobs of it? I don’t leave here.”
“Ever?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Fen didn’t tell you about me?”
“What’s to tell, Moonbeam?” Fen said, patting his lap to invite Frida. She happily jumped up and stood on his chest to lick his face. “Whoa! Too much, pup.”
“Calm, Frida,” I told her, accidently touching Fen’s hand as I settled her down.
He didn’t seem to mind. His eyes were sharp tonight, watching me. Observing. Never leaving me, even when I was talking to Moonbeam. I could feel his gaze on my face, and it sent a little wave of warm chills down my arms.
“There you go,” Fen said in a low voice, scratching her behind her ear as he spoke to Moonbeam. “She knows you stay up all night, and that you’re clearly a hippie, living out on your deck, who watches too many old movies. Eventually I guess you’ll decide if she’s cool enough to browse your vinyl. I already told her that Victory Vinyl’s been trading with you since before the festival existed, back in the nineties. Now he stays as far away from the festival grounds as possible.”
“Fen’s being purposely vague,” the old man said in a strained voice, causing me to look up at him. “I was Condor Festival’s first lawsuit, settled out of court.”
Huh. Something shifted in a dusty corner of my brain. I’d heard about a settlement, back in the early days of the festival. I only vaguely remembered why. But I felt uncomfortable admitting this, so I just said, “No one’s told me about this.” Which was the truth.
“Figured as much. See, I got married the second year of the festival,” he explained, “and my wife fell off some elevated seating they’d rigged up out in the big field. The crowd surged, rammed into it, and knocked her off. Lung collapsed. Couldn’t save her in time. They tried to blame it on drug overdose, but she had asthma.”
“Oh God. That’s…” I shook my head, unable to get the picture of a stampede out of my mind. “I’m so sorry.”
He nodded. “I know you’ve experienced your own tragedy at the dam.”
“I was fortunate,” I said in a low voice. I flicked my eyes toward Fen’s face to find him looking back at me.
“You were,” Moonbeam murmured. “Tina wasn’t, unfortunately, and I still miss her. But we bonded over music, and she wanted to be at the festival. So in a way, she died doing something she loved, as strange as that sounds.”
It did. It was terrible and heartbreaking, and I was so sad for him. But I couldn’t say that. So I just said, “I’m very sorry, Moonbeam.”
“It’s okay,” he replied. “I didn’t tell you to make you sad. It’s good to share, though.”
Maybe it helped him a little to talk about it. Surely he couldn’t have a ton of people to talk to, living like this. “How long were you married?” I asked.
“Two weeks. She lived in Fresno but would come to the lake every summer to hike. She liked birds and swimming. Outdoorsy type. She also loved seeing shows outside, and that’s how we met. I worked at a bar on the Strip called the Anchor, and she came in to see local bands play.”
I knew that one. Not personally, but it was close to Betty’s on the Pier, my nemesis. A few of the bars by the lake had stages that were either out on the docks or on patios that faced the lake.
“Yeah, for me, Tina was the one,” Moonbeam said. “Looking back now, I knew it for a year before I ever asked her out, but I wanted my freedom. That’s my biggest regret. Not even the festival. Just waiting so long. We could’ve had more time.”
“My mom died of an aneurysm when I was five,” I said. “I don’t remember much about her. Just small things, like her reading a book to me, and the chair she sat in—it had a pillow with roses on it. Mostly know her face from looking at pictures.” I shook my head. “Anyway, it was thirteen years ago, and my dad still misses her. He says that a lot too—that he wishes they had more time.”
He nodded and squinted. “Yeah, it’s funny how it lingers on. You get better, but it lingers. That’s why I stay here. I don’t go to the festival. Don’t like crowds. Don’t like a lot of people, honestly.”
“Especially not my father,” Fen said. “We have a lot in common.”
“True,” Moonbeam said with a small smile. Then he looked up at his ginger cat. “I think they’re going to stay up there, so you can probably let your little one roam free. The doors are all closed, so there’s no place to get loose besides what you see here. I keep things tight. You like mint tea?”
“Uh…?”
“It’s good if you add sugar,” Fen told me, gently knocking his shoulder against mine before offering to help me off the couch, eyeing his friend all the while, who was watching us. “Come on, Moonbeam, I brought the record you wanted in my backpack. Can I show her your Beatles?”
“Slow down, man. You’re always in a such a hurry.…”
It was easy to see how Moonbeam could feel that way out here, so isolated, with nothing but two cats for company. As we drank tea, he opened up about the fact that he hadn’t left the house for more than a short walk in years—how he didn’t need to, because everything came to him, and the settlement he’d received from Sarafian Events would provide for him until he died. And there was something pleasant about his little refuge. I could see why Fen liked the man, and why he spent a lot of time out here, clearing his head.
“Music and conversation,” Fen told me as we looked through Moonbeam’s record collection, all neatly tucked into plastic sleeves to protect them from the elements. “And the stars.”
But also the sadness. Because there was some of that here too. An abiding, soft sadness that clung to all the records and furniture like a hug that went on too long. The lake wasn’t healing this man. He was sitting here, nursing his pain, standing guard over the spirit of his dead wife. He wasn’t letting go.
And that’s when I knew that maybe there was some kind of twisted logic in what Mad Dog had told me. “Get back on the board,” I whispered.
“Huh?” Fen said, giving me a strange look.
I shook my head. “Just something my dad says. But… if I asked you to take me somewhere tonight, would you? You’re not going to like it.”
For a moment, he didn’t say anything. Then, “I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
After cleaning up our teacups, we thanked Moonbeam and took off around the lake. I checked my phone to make sure I didn’t have any texts—I was a little paranoid to be out. Not sure why. No one seemed to notice I was gone. And why would they? It wasn’t quite eleven, not terribly late, especially for a warm summer night, and there was still a little traffic on the Strip when we headed back through town. I spotted the place where Moonbeam used to work, Anchor, and could hear live music from another tiny pub down the block.
Not too much else was open: a diner until midnight, the gas station out by the freeway, and a couple of restaurants. But when I gave Fen directions where I wanted him to go, and we turned off the Strip, chugging up a dark road that ran up Blue Snake River, away from the lights of town, the one thing that wasn’t open came into view up ahead.
The Condor Dam.
“Can you pull over and park?” I asked.
“Are you serious?”
I nodded. “I just want to see it.”
“It’s closed to the public,” he said, slowing down. “You can walk around in the park next to the dam, but you can’t walk across it until morning.”
“Dad told me. But maybe we could just sit on one of the benches in the park? I need to. Please, Fen. You said you wanted to ghost hunt with me. Well…?”
He idled, making up his mind, and then drove farther up the road and pulled the Jeep into a parking space in a small empty lot that visitors used during the day. There wasn’t so much a park on this side of the dam, more of a small green space with some trees and grass for walking your dog or getting out and stretching your legs to look at the dam and take photos. Couple benches and a trash can. If you crossed over the dam, then you’d be on a wooded point of land between the river and the lake—affectionately nicknamed Neverland—with flowers, a place to fish, and a meandering walking path that led to the Condor Visitors Center.
But crossing the dam to the Neverland area meant using the wooden walkway.
The one that was now gated.
The one from which I’d fallen.
Fen cut the engine. I held on to Frida, who wanted to bound out of the Jeep. We stared at the back of the dam, which was connected to a quaint Arts and Crafts–style control building with a roof, ten square windows across. Just a hundred feet or so—very picturesque and sweet, not some big Hoover Dam, or anything. Tourists loved to take photos of it, and there was a permanent stone chessboard and two stone bench chairs that sat near the railing here, where locals could come listen to the calm, flowing water and play a game.
Now it was dark and silent.
“Have you been back here?” I asked, trying to ignore Frida’s soft whimpers to be let down and explore.
“So, so many times,” Fen said in a low voice. He sighed deeply. “Come on. There’s a place near the railing. I’ll show you.”
We were alone. Traffic sped in the distance over the auto bridge that crossed the river a quarter mile or so up. In the opposite direction, toward the lake, if I listened hard, I could hear music across the water from the Strip. No band at Betty’s tonight, just music from some of the smaller bars. But I didn’t really want to hear any of it, so I just concentrated on the soothing sound of the dam.
Fen and I walked together across dewy shorn grass, Frida sniffing in the dark as I looped the handle of her leash on my wrist. He stopped by the railing that looked down over the water that flowed softly from one of the dozen small floodgates that sat under the wooden walkway. The dam could raise or lower the lake by ten feet, depending on how many gates were open. The town gave free tours of how it worked, and Dad took me on one when I was a kid.
“Is it what you remembered?” Fen asked.
Yes and no.
The last time I was here, my chest didn’t feel as if it were being held by a vise. But it looked prettier than it did in my mind. A peaceful spot to rest. An in-between place. Liminal.
It was not supposed to be a place for drunk parties and rude kids to run around like wild things, screaming for the bands that they could hear across the water while their friends snuck off across the walkway to the dark of Neverland and had sex in the woods, leaving empty beer cans and used condoms for the park service people to clean up the next day.
“I was there,” I said, pointing at the end of the dam’s walkway. “Sitting on the railing. That’s where I fell. That’s it, huh?” It wasn’t very far.
“Ten feet,” he said. “You hit those rocks there, and you floated out toward the lake.”
“Where did you dive in?”
He scrubbed his face with his hand. “There, in the middle of the walkway. I swam… to about somewhere down there.” He pointed farther down from where we were. “I couldn’t find you at first. I was worried you’d floated out into the lake. It was dark and confusing, and one of the floodgates was open, so there was a little flow? Not much. But you got stuck on the rocks.”
Stuck on the rocks. Because I was unconscious.
“How did you get me out of the water?” I asked.
“Carried you… tried to keep your head above the surface, and pulled you up those rocks there, onto the island. It was the only place that didn’t have a railing.”
“You knew CPR?”
He nodded. “Mama made us take classes when my dad bought a new boat.”
Traffic lights flickered across the auto bridge in the distance. The vise on my chest crushed harder, and I knew I couldn’t make peace with water. Not until I gave up a secret that was clawing at the back of my throat, trying to get out.
“I wasn’t clumsy,” I confessed.
Fen’s arm stiffened next to mine on the railing. He didn’t respond or look at me. I didn’t want him to, or I couldn’t tell him the rest of it.
“I wanted to know how it felt to fall,” I continued in a small voice. “I didn’t want to die. Eddie and I had just been across the walkway, in the woods.… Nothing really happened. He was too drunk. And then he just left me there, in the dark. He wanted to be with his friends.”
Fen made a noise, but he didn’t say anything.
I looked down at Frida and brushed away streaming tears I could no longer control. “I never told anyone because it was so dumb. Just a lapse of reason for a single moment, and it completely changed my life. I was only trying to get his attention. What kind of idiot am I?”
His head lolled as he processed what I was saying. But it was too late to take it back. And I guess I was glad to finally be relieved of the burden. The secret had an unexpected weight that had been holding me down for so long.
I wanted to thank him for listening to me. For not judging. He turned from the railing and stared at me, face contorted with feral emotions that I couldn’t identify.
Was he… mad at me?
“I’ve never told anyone else this,” I said. “Are you angry that I told you?”
“I’m something.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means just that. Something.”
“Fen—”
“Yes, I’m upset, okay? If you think what you just told me is no big deal, then you wouldn’t have kept it a secret.”
True. I couldn’t argue with that.
“You asked me why I rescued you?” he said in voice that sounded like thunder. “Remember? You couldn’t figure out why I of all people would jump in the water after you.”
“Yes. I did wonder that.”
“It was because I was head over heels for you, okay?”
His words jolted through me. It couldn’t be true. We’d never even hung out before this summer. Barely even spoken. Not for years. “How?” I said, blinking. “Since when?”
“Since forever. Since we were kids, and I tore up my leg at a fundraiser for local musicians downtown. You were there with Velvet and Mad Dog, remember?”
God. I did remember. We were fifteen, and though we’d run into each other before, that was the first time we spent more than a few minutes in each other’s presence. “We talked about K-pop.… You cut your leg on a rusty nail—that’s… when my dad drove you and your mother.”
He didn’t have to answer. I knew I was right.
I thought about how he reacted when I first saw him at Victory Vinyl. How weirdly intense it had been between us. His Ophelia tattoo. Why I couldn’t stop thinking about him when I should have been thinking about my own boyfriend.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered.
“How do you tell someone that they’re your entire world when they’re staring at the person next to you?”
“How could I be your entire world when you didn’t know me?”
“How could you get so sad about a boy you didn’t even really know that you’d fall in the water because of him?”
The vise on my chest squeezed until it cracked me.
Fen stormed away, walking the length of the railing toward the dam until I could only see his dark silhouette in the gray shadows. His tall shape bent over the railing, and he shouted obscenely into the water.
Frida whimpered at my feet. I crouched down and held her to tell her it was okay. To make me feel better. Then I felt Fen’s hands pulling me up to my feet.
He gripped my shoulders and stared down at me with dark eyes, not saying anything. That was unbearable. His silence.
I wanted to tell him that I was sorry.
For not seeing him before. For screwing up his life. Then for walking back into town and not even recognizing him.
But part of me was angry, too. And not sorry. Because I didn’t ask for any of this.
I didn’t ask him to rescue me.
He shook his head over and over, still not saying anything.
His hands dropped to his sides, and I shut my eyes. He was going to tell me this was over—the two of us. No more ghost hunting, no more records. We were not friends. We weren’t even… that word I could never remember. We weren’t doing anything wrong.
We just weren’t.
Then, abruptly, he slipped one arm around me and pulled my body against his chest. He was hugging me? It was so strange and unexpected; I didn’t know what to do. Hug him back?
Before I could decide how to react, he said in a low voice, “This is how I held you in the water.”
I collapsed against him and fell apart.
I wept.
He wept.
And when I couldn’t stand anymore, we crumpled onto the dark grass, clinging to each other. I held on to him until his T-shirt was a damp mess of makeup and tears. He held on to me until it got so chilly, he put his hands inside the back of my shirt to keep them warm. We held on to each other until Frida’s leash got so tangled around our limbs that she gave up trying to get loose and went to sleep next to me.
But we didn’t do anything wrong.
Not that night.