I play until I run out of songs I know all the words to, and then I make up my own words and fudge the chords. It’s my funeral for my father. It’s my funeral for all the things I’ve wanted.
I play until what Margo said finally makes sense. It wasn’t about Irene and the boy, or my mom leaving. It wasn’t about me at all. He did what was easy. He didn’t have it in him to do any better.
Just because my father was a coward doesn’t mean I have to be. I won’t leave my child. I will do what it takes to give him a real home and a real bed and a real parent. I will do what it takes to be a person Max can be proud of.
Somehow these things make sense to me as I play, and I can’t stop playing because I want to figure it all out. A song I never finished comes back to me. Where you gonna stay, where you gonna stay, whereyougonnastay, and I sing it again and again, playing with the chords until the rest of the words come out.
Where you gonna stay
When flesh turns into bone
Where you gonna stay
Now that you’re not alone
When the sun shines past the treetops The light’s no longer dim
Where you gonna stay, stay, stay…
Stay with him.
* * *
I wake up on the bare rocks with my guitar still in my hands, not even in my makeshift tent. The fire is only embers and smoke. The sun is just breaking the horizon. My back throbs and my fingers are stiff like claws, but I don’t feel wrong. I feel like that place in me where all the wrong lived doesn’t exist anymore, like how I used to think there were monsters under my bed and there never ever were.
Before I leave, I bury my father’s cracked guitar pick under the rocks by the shore, because it feels like the best way to say goodbye to the person I wanted him to be.
It feels like the best way to start over.
I wad up my blanket. My legs are shaky and the pain in my back is getting so much worse, but I’m ready to go. To call Margo and tell her I need help. Face Little River and figure out what’s next. I might even be ready to sit down and have a talk with Irene.
I reach for my guitar case and all of a sudden there’s a flood of wet and warm and pain like I might break in half. I try to get up, to get to my car, but I trip and fall. I hear the crack of bone against rock. I taste dirt and blood.
— Chapter 69 —
I hear a voice calling to me, but there’s buzzing around the words, like someone turned up the drive on an amplifier.
“April. Come on! April! April!”
I want to answer, but I feel far away. My eyelids are heavy. Or maybe it’s dark. Maybe it’s dark. I forgot to tie a lifeline.
“Come on, April!”
There’s static behind my eyelids and the pressure churning through my body is so great that my ribs might shatter and my hips could explode. The pain goes beyond what I thought was possible until it gets so big I can’t feel anything at all. There’s a moment of peace and nothing. The static goes to black, and then the pain crashes through me again. I see blue sky and splintered wood and then my own static.
“Let’s get you up, April,” that voice calls through the feedback.
I think about an octopus with bright blue limbs.
“Let’s get you up.” It’s such a nice voice.
Arms hook under my armpits, pulling me to my feet. I try to make my legs work. They don’t want to, but I try. The ground blurs into the trees. Everything that isn’t my body feels far away.
“I got you,” she says.
It’s Carly. It’s a dream.
I can see the lake, so blue.
I’m in a car.
“Max,” I say, or maybe I just think it. I don’t hear the sound at all. Max, Max, Max.
I rest my cheek against the cold window. I can’t tell what’s static and what’s pavement whizzing by. There are so many bumps in the road. That pain crashes through my body again and the static turns to stars.
— Chapter 70 —
There’s a hand holding mine. I can’t get my eyes to open.
There’s humming, off-key, I think it’s Dylan. I can’t find the song in my head, but I know the voice.
“Margo,” I say before I even open my eyes. It comes out like a long lazy string of sound.
“Girlie, you’re going to give me a heart attack one of these days.” She squeezes my hand hard.
When I open my eyes, everything is blurry. I blink until my vision clears. Margo is sitting in a chair next to the bed holding my baby. He’s a little bundle tucked safely in the crook of her other arm, wrapped in a white and yellow blanket, wearing a tiny blue hat. An entire person, outside my body, and all I want to do is hold him.