Lovesong

The sign read Tourist Park, I thought I was on Seventh Street, my phone, wet from the pounding rain, warbled in 400 feet, turn right, and in 400 feet on my right was a river basin that gurgled in the dark.

In a furious haze, I had stomped out of the apartment and down street after street in this new city. Now it was dark. I had no idea where my apartment, and more specifically, my car, which I pined to jump into and blaze away in, was.

This wasn’t the first time—for the walk, the rain, the lateness. I guess that’s why my phone’s mapping feature acted the way it did, as it was much like myself—waterlogged, clueless, but trying anyway. My feet slapped a half-gravel, half-mud path. The scant moonlight illuminated the mist of rain, lit my unsure way. I ignored my phone when it told me to turn into the river, which was a static of water meeting water, raindrops splattering the smooth surface. It looked unreal.

Under a streetlight, amidst the ghostly mist that rose from the ground, I poked around the phone’s navigation system. Lost Lake sat near the top, its name filled with longing. I wanted to poke those words with my big wet finger and have it warble the directions to me, but I knew that Lost Lake was a hundred miles away, near my hometown, and until I found my car, I wouldn’t be making it anytime soon.

I was at Lost Lake recently with Grace, who just an hour ago chased me down the street, asked me not to leave the little apartment we’d found together. Soaked as I was then, it was easy to close my eyes for a moment and feel like I was at Lost Lake with her again—late at night, telling her that I don’t swim well, and her ignoring that, convincing me to strip down to my underwear by stripping down to hers. It was like I was there again, and she was stepping into the warm water and smiling and pinching her nose and slipping beneath the surface, and though it made me nervous, I was doing the same. I remembered the baby smallmouth bass scattering before us in the moonlight, the thousands of frogs and toads croaking for each other across the lake.

But that was a month ago.

Earlier that day, and indeed the reason I found myself walking around all night, was that Nathan, Grace’s ex-boyfriend, who moved across the country to Seattle (“to like, expand myself”) after graduating college a semester early (he had a shitload of AP credits) had returned a month ago, and, having insisted himself back into Grace’s life, and thus into mine, was slicing potatoes with me for dinner when he let slip that, “Oh, yeah, Grace and I are going to see ‘The Cure’ this weekend, how sweet is that?”

“Oh, cool!” I had said, left a knife mid-potato and I walked outside. Grace popped off the couch and chased me down the street. Her feet pounded the wet pavement until she caught me by my shirt sleeve.

“I really was going to tell you,” she said, panting. “I was going to invite you, actually.”

I knew this was a lie for the stupidest reason. Nathan liked to play guitar, and he really liked to play The Cure’s “Lovesong” on our couch. The Cure’s “Lovesong” says “I will always love you” eight times per song. If Nathan played “Lovesong” once or twice a week—a conservative estimate, because he was over every godforsaken day. For this last month, Grace will have heard him sing, in his very nice voice, “I will always love you” thirty-two to sixty-four times. He was not unlike a television commercial in this way, I thought. The message always finds a way into you.

And because I’m a fickle little monster, I looked up The Cure’s tour dates, and there was one next weekend. Since Grace and I had collided one evening all those weeks ago and couldn’t stop orbiting each other since, we had a plan for every weekend. We were just that sort of people. We visited the little lakes around my home, saw my family. We trounced around in the woods back by her parents’ house, played in the sandbox at her little sister’s behest. We did the things we had done growing up, just together. And I thought that was enough for us.

But next weekend, the third weekend in July, remained empty, like a missing tooth in a child’s smile. So I knew, like when they were together, they were going to bomb down to some trendy city I couldn’t comprehend in the sleek SUV Nathan’s dad had bought him for graduation, the kind with the touch screen up front that told you the best way you could possibly go. It was almost hard to be angry at the thought of them together in that way. For Grace, it had to be better than trundling around in my shaky vehicle, the one that smelled sweet like antifreeze and was old enough to have a license to drive itself.

So I knew then that Grace was lying about the concert. And I hadn’t been surprised lately to walk into a room to find Nathan visiting, sitting near her, and feeling like I kept catching the tail-end of moments—the retraction of hands, the uncoupling of legs, the breaking of stares.

It still paralyzed me when her warm hand grabbed my arm.

“It’s not like something’s happening,” she said, blinking away the raindrops. “It’s just nice, reconnecting. I think it’s good for us all to be friends, you know?”

I shook my head. That did not sound nice at all.

“I’m going,” I said. Her hand slipped from my arm.

The rain seemed especially loud for a moment there.

“This was a mistake,” Grace muttered as she turned back to the apartment, where Nathan’s silhouette stood, centered in the frame of our glowing window.

***

There was the stupid car. I walked past the pop-up basketball hoops, the soccer balls and plastic cars scattered in the yards, and I opened the door. It took everything I had to not look back at the apartment when I twisted the key. The car started with its usual growl, as if pissed that it’d been woken up, and sped off into the rainy night.

I drove the dark highway home, and Grace’s words played like the chorus of a stupid song in my head. A mistake. I had thought of that recently. Just a week ago maybe, when I found myself sunk into one couch in the apartment’s sparse living room while Nathan was on the other, cradling his guitar. Crappy YouTube documentary after crappy YouTube documentary played through the haze of the day while we waited for Grace to return from work. In one of them, we learned about the space shuttle Challenger. Staticky footage of the famous explosion played while a monotoned man explained that a rocket booster had failed at liftoff because of a faulty O-Ring which, as I gathered, was some sort of seal, and usually a reliable seal too, invented by an old Danish man named Niels Christensen.

But the seal, I learned, despite Nathan picking through the riff of “Lovesong,” wasn’t built for the cold in January. The cold compromised the seal, which gave way, which allowed gas to spray from the internal motor to the external fuel tank, which separated the right rocket booster from the shuttle, which crumpled the whole thing. The shuttle, and all five astronauts and two payload specialists inside, streaked through the atmosphere and into the Atlantic Ocean.

What a goof, I thought.

So I drove and thought about what it must have been like to be there when it happened. Just like everyone else, I would have slapped a cupped hand to my mouth and felt a little sick to watch the shuttle and its inhabitants just turn into light in the atmosphere. I wonder how Niels Christensen would have felt, if he were told that his O-Ring was going into space.  Did he know that not everything is built for every circumstance, that nothing is perfect, that mistakes aren’t bad, they just are—and that maybe life, as annoying as it is, is about trying despite all that?

I drove too fast in the rain, like I could outrun the cloud of lonely that seemed to chase me from the apartment and down the wooded highway. It comforted me to imagine Niels Christensen in the passenger seat with his big moustache. I wanted to take this time to ask him about the nature of a mistake. He was an inventor after all—he should know all about it. I want to ask—hey, when you designed the O-Ring that would later fail and blow up the Challenger and kill a bunch of astronauts, do you reckon that was a mistake?

And I imagine he would reply in kind – hey, remember what you promised your family? Your mom and little brother? That you’d do this college thing, then come right back? And then in the eleventh hour you fell for a girl who chose her The Cure-loving ex-boyfriend over you instantly? What would you call that?

One of my few talents is to rev myself up with imaginary arguments.

Here’s what a mistake is, Niels Christensen might say, because he seemed like a guy who knows what the dictionary says: “An action or judgment that is misguided or wrong.” But then he might go hmm and rub his chin, because he’d realize that it’s hard to be misguided or wrong about something you just can’t anticipate: some Americans launching your invention into space, some kid in an L.L. Bean sweater nuking your romantic life.

The thought of Niels Christensen articulating all this through his moustache, the image of Nathan back in my apartment eating homemade potato fries with Grace, the way the sky kept pissing rain, made me punch the gas and let the engine swell.

And as I did, something huge on the side of the road whipped by me. It froze my blood. I pulled over with a squeal of brakes, a little swerve on the wet road. In the rearview, there stood a moose. A cow. Her knees stood at the height of my car’s antennae, her breath puffing like exhaust in the damp air. It was like she had an aura. I had missed her by a foot. The moon shone in her eyes as she looked over the car at my damp, tired body. She turned away as if to say, “Just get out of here,” and stepped back into the woods.

I took it slow the rest of the way home.

***

My mom put all her weight on her elbows as she leaned on the dining room table. Her eyes were as droopy as ever. A cigarette cooked in her hand. She turned to me, blinking slowly, and as if buffering, slowly figured out that I was standing there.

“Oh, you’re home,” she slurred.

“Yeah,” I said. My brother, Zach, was asleep on the couch. His head rested on its padded arm. The throw blanket he was wrapped in didn’t quite cover his whole body anymore.

“I think I might be for a while,” I said as I kicked off my damp shoes.

***

Days blurred by. Zach and I scrubbed the yellow grease of twenty years of cigarettes from the wall. Until I moved in with Grace, I didn’t understand how white and smooth walls could really be. Gritty water populated with the dust of time dripped down my arm, bundles of old t-shirts and torn socks hit the garbage bin with wet thuds once they were threadbare from their use as rags. I kept the windows open all day for a week, trying to air out the nostril-burning bleach, the stench of a mess disturbed after so long. I filled the leaking cracks in the ceiling with caulk. I opened the pantry and threw away bottles and bottles of cheap vodka and replaced it with canned beans, rice, noodles—the things Grace taught me to buy and learn to make delicious if I wanted a full stomach on our budget.

All my life, before I met her, I had just shrugged at my family’s hunger, at our diets— buttered toast or a green apple for lunch, a potato for dinner. But those days were over. I made us the meals Grace and I used to eat—shredded chicken over rice, soft-boiled eggs in bowls of ramen, pancakes packed with raspberries from the backyard.

Those meals filled us up. We ate them in clean rooms with breezy air. This was everything I wanted to make real when I graduated from college. But I had moved in with Grace on a week’s notice, only made it back here those few times with her, and then just to visit. This felt like the other side of that mistake.

***

The weekend of The Cure concert came and went. Summer was nearly gone. The crab apple tree in the back started to drop its apples, fat with sugar. One night, Zach and I sat among them on the ground. We took bites of the apples, little bombs of sourness, and flicked them into the tall grass beyond the yard, like we would as kids. I told my family about the moose on the road, and they all just said, “Oh, wow.” But I don’t think they got it, really—if the moose had been standing a foot to the left, had I hit it and broken all its spindly legs, its massive body would have toppled onto my car, and I would have been mush. And people would call it an accident: “An unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury,” Niels Christensen would say, were he there with me, stargazing.  

I laid down, ignored the fallen apples that pressed into my back. The tree cast mottled moon shade as a breeze, an unmistakably autumnal breeze, shifted its branches. A pang ran through me to think of missing the fall with Grace, my first fall anywhere but here. And I thought of that rainy night. The half-cut potato. Grace’s warm hand, Nathan’s looming figure. The moose. The moose with whom I came so close. In the moose community, would they have called our collision an accident? Or a mistake? Would they gather around the corpse or the maimed body of their sister, throw their huge heads skyward, and roar? Or would they understand that sometimes the freak thing happens, and that’s just that? Or would they just shake their great heads and think, why was she eating so close to the road?

Lying beneath the apple tree I thought, maybe therein lies the difference between an accident and a mistake: one you can blame on nothing and do nothing about; the other you can blame on something and, maybe, should do something about.

I look to my brother, his eyes full of the sky’s glow. I chuckle when I remember that him and I were both surprises, as my mom would tell us many times. Mistakes or accidents. The result of a broken seal. The things that sent Dad on a sudden, rainy car ride of his own. One pushing fifteen years, by my count.

A complete withdrawal. An utter forgetting. That’s what you do when you reckon you’ve had an accident.

“I think your phone dinged,” Zach said. I hadn’t noticed. I pulled it from my pocket, held it high over my head, read the message.

“Oh, put that thing away,” Niels Christensen said in my imagination. “You’re messing up the stars.”

He stared into space as if there was some puzzle in the atmosphere he hoped to solve.

I pulled the phone to my chest. My heart pounded.

Lost Lake, her message said. The perfect place for people like us.

If this was a mistake, we only needed to try again.