The Color of Home: A Novel (21 page)

Debbie stopped laughing, reached down, placed her hand on top of his shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah. I think I’ll take the bill. I didn’t sleep that well last night and I’m exhausted.”

“I didn’t get too personal, did I?”

“You were incredibly helpful. I need some sleep, that’s all.”

He paid his bill and bolted out of the restaurant. He drove back to the cabin, topping eighty most of the way. Debbie and Evangeline spoke to him all the way home. In between Sassa and Rachel. Choose life over death. Get out of the middle. Through the sadness to the big blue sky. Fuck.

He pulled into his driveway. The headlights cut through the fog like projectors. At the edge of visibility, Debbie and Evangeline became one, like in the famous scene from
Persona
.

The whole black and white scene played before him. He’d been in between since his father died. Partially alive, partially dead, he’d straddled both worlds without existing in either. He’d fed on others’ emotions to taste living without committing, without risk, longing to join in but not knowing how, until Sassa. Until Rachel. And with them, only snippets. Unsustainable snippets. No wonder they left him. Fuck. Why had it taken him so long to understand the truth?

Fellini licked Nick’s face. 6:00 a.m. He rolled onto his side and brushed Fellini’s coat, already warm from the sun. A slow wake-up and stretch later, he slipped out of bed.

After whistling through his morning juice and exercise ritual, he returned to “Love.” He brewed extra strong coffee and, pot in hand, made his way to the studio. He missed Joe’s coffee. He placed the coffee on the floor, sat cross-legged next to it, and poured himself a large cup. Fellini guarded the entranceway.

He focused all of his energy on a spot right below his heart, as if it were an infinite pool of creativity. God. Muse. Whatever. The clutter in his mind cleared as the spot opened wider. Big sky. Something preverbal trickled through, like he’d found the song’s resonant frequency. Time slowed and the rest of the room blurred. A rush of warmth came over him. The aroma from the coffee deepened. He took a sip. Rachel.

He picked up his guitar and replayed what he’d already done the day before. Workable. What a great word. He opened his notebook and placed it next to him, opposite the coffee pot. His palms were sweaty. Barefoot, his feet jittered against the wood floor. Everything but “Love” cleared, making way. Dad. Sassa. Music. Great Falls. Pain. Loss. All of them made space. He glanced at the coffee pot. An amulet. Okey dokey. He strung together all of the pieces of the song—verse, chorus, bridge—as he hummed the lyric-free sections and sang where words existed. He lifted up his notebook, the melody still in his mind. It seemed to float. He jotted down new lines. One pass. He rewrote old lines. Another pass. He didn’t second-guess any of his choices, and he didn’t dwell on what Rachel might have done. He turned on his recorder and sketched out the song in one take. Tracked all four harmonies, one take each. Played back the song with all of the harmonies until he had a rough mix.

He jogged out of the house and went for a short run with Fellini. “I tapped into something deep today, Fellini. I hope it comes again.”

Back in the cabin, he cycled the song full blast until he was sure. It was better than anything he’d ever written. The infinite pool of sadness and the infinite pool of creativity had melded. He’d mastered love and loss. He’d made peace, contentment, “Love.”

There is love, love here

There is love, love here

When we wake up in the morning

and the light shines through your hair

Your beauty overtakes me

Your skin so pure, your eyes so aware

When we do simple things

We are free, we are happy, and content

In each moment I can see everything

without any fear or regret

There is love, love here

There is love, love here

There is love, love here

There is love, love here

There was time when I was alone

when love was just an evening prayer

I wasn’t sure it would ever find me

And then we took that leap midair

Sometimes when it is hard to see

I think over everything you’ve said

Your words they penetrate me

and guide me back to our bed

There is love, love here

There is love, love here

There is love, love here

There is love, love here

The next day, Nick rocked back and forth on his porch in an Adirondack cedar chair he’d built. Fellini sprawled at his side. Why did life appear fuller? He shut out his surroundings—the mountains, the trees, the yard, his truck, Fellini—and concentrated on an arrow-shaped rock he’d placed on the porch railing in front of him. Hosen in Sanskrit. Connection. He stilled without expectation.

Then the flood came.

Years of searching. Music. Pain. Words. Sex. Building blocks. Wisdom. Whatever. They’d come from nothing more than arranging puzzle pieces to avoid the really hard work, the work that would heal, the work that would lead him home.

Music. He’d found solace there. And it also allowed him to stay in the middle, close to his dad, never fully willing to grieve. His songs, lifeless, not realized, took on new meaning as unintended eulogies chronicling his own blind feats to remain stuck. Lyrics he’d written pictured an imagined life. And erected a barrier that kept him from fully experiencing it. Except for “Hold You.” He’d gotten that song right, magically, divinely. No wonder he was so scared to share it with Sassa.

What about “Love?” Generative. Did he finally know what that word meant? Did he have to grieve, to open, to not overthink first? Could he only be generative in loss?

Puzzle pieces? No more. Building blocks? No more. Forgiveness. That was key. Invisible threads of connection? They were key. He flashed on Sassa julienning vegetables. Headline: A refrigerator magnet saved his life. Within that world, infinite possibilities, more than enough for a lifetime, with or without Rachel. Sassa. Dad. And with connection, with compassion from unknowing and understanding, an older, more universal, not-just-in-your-head view surfaced. How to describe unknowing? Like dark matter. Everywhere and unseen.

He snapped out of the trance. Dribs and drabs of rain fell, followed by a short, freakish thunderstorm. Protected by the porch roof, he remained seated and steady, fingers loosely clasped on his lap. Fellini, panting, extended his paw. Nick scratched behind his ears. “Is it really that simple, Fellini?”

Fellini tilted his head, trying to understand.

He went into the cabin and found his pocketknife. Back on the porch, he picked up the stone and settled back in his chair. He opened the knife, and carved an
S
on one side, and an
R
on the other.

Two sides. Dual motivations. His quest for truth and honesty, noble in intent, had also protected him. A movie like
Persona
did push him toward intimacy, toward living without masks, and it also lodged him between two worlds. Unable to open his heart from that middle place, his most fundamental mask firmly isolating him, he remained in the dark, observing, compressed, feeling without real consequences, never re-integrating all he’d lost. For years, unsuccessfully, under the illusion of movement, of staying busy, of trying new things, he’d controlled his surroundings, had remained on solid ground, and unknowingly, had remained stuck, had remained numb. He hadn’t forgiven. His father. Sassa. Rachel. Himself.

It was as if he’d lived inside an inflated balloon on a plateau ever since his father died. With each new person or event, he stretched a little, only to wobble head-first into an unseen wall he could only scale with a leap.

And Sassa was there with him. For a year? Stuck in the same place for her own reasons. Or passing through. No wonder she had to leave.

He reached under his chair and pulled out a soccer ball he’d found in the woods. He kicked it off the porch. Fellini sprinted into the yard, then pranced back to the porch, wet, muddy, with the partially deflated ball shaking back and forth between his teeth.

“You need a bath.”

Rachel had stretched him through her sheer presence. Unable to propel himself far enough or long enough to burst out alone, she helped him stress the balloon surface close to its breaking point. He’d almost busted out before she died, but her death caused his momentum to flip, change direction, and retrace an old path back to a new middle where the balloon found its original shape, fortified from hysteresis.

The storm cleared, the air still thick with the smell of mud. Ayahuasca without the side effects. Fellini was lying in front of him, head turned back, watching his every move. He began to sob. For his father. For Sassa. For all those who had suffered. For all those that would. He wept for Rachel. An almost. He squeezed both of his hands around the ends of the rocking chair. Fuck. An almost.

Rachel came into his life to do a job that only she could do. Once she had helped him burst out of the balloon, once he no longer believed in solid ground, once he had replaced the balloon with uncertainty, with connection, once he’d found “Love,” she would have let him go. Not because she wanted to, but because she loved him. She’d known full well that she couldn’t help him leap. She’d known deep down that he would return to Sassa. And she helped him anyway. Fuck.

Fellini stood up and started barking at him with a special cadence. He went to the freezer and grabbed a handful of ice, then spread it out across the porch. Fellini lay down and started to chew.

Debbie was right: by choosing life, Nick had chosen Sassa. He switched on his phone and stared at Sassa’s number. Not yet. He needed more time by himself to process what had happened. More time to write songs to prove that he could follow “Love,” prove it wasn’t a fluke. More time to trust his creativity. More time out of respect for Rachel.

What would he do? He’d spend as much time as required writing
Songs of Love and Loss
. He’d do the whole album in his cabin with an acoustic guitar and whatever else he could rummage up. The title of the record, originally not right for Rachel’s CD, sounded perfect for Nick’s. He’d dedicate the album to her. “Love” would be the lead track.

He parked himself in the cabin and leaned into work, Fellini by his side. Ten hours a day. Like clockwork. The lo-fi studio fueled him, provided him with an edge and a level of honesty in the recording process that wouldn’t have existed in New York. As the year progressed, he tapped into the feeling he had when he wrote “Love” more and more. He began to trust his ability to create. Gradually, he pushed deeper, untangled himself.

At the end of the year, he finished the eleventh and final song for the album, “Good-bye.” He snapped a picture of the cabin and used the photo as his album cover. Pictures of different objects around the cabin—the juicer, his guitar, the wood pile, the furniture he’d made—as well as Fellini doing his favorite things, filled out the liner notes and back cover of the CD. He scribbled the lyrics, left in all of the scratched-out errors, and asked the CD manufacturer to reproduce the lyrics on the liner notes as an exact duplicate of his handwritten pages. The last verse of “Good-bye” closed with, “I wish I could see your face when I say these words / I’ve got to say good-bye.” The liner notes “I’m writing to say good-bye. I’m leaving the middle behind, rejoining the world, acknowledging everything that you and that place have taught me. Dad, I need to go home. Rachel, I finally broke free. I love you both.”

The CD production run of
Songs of Love and Loss
completed in three weeks. A thousand copies. When the CDs arrived at the cabin, he opened a box, loaded one of the CDs into his computer. Eyes closed, he stood with his hands tucked into his armpits, thumbs visible and pointing up, as he scrutinized the entire album. When “Good-bye” finished, he bowed. Applause.

He missed Rachel. Her face. Her touch. Her laugh. And his father. He’d so much more to add since the last time they spoke. And Sassa. For the first time in two years, he wanted to see her. His time in Great Falls had run its course.

Nick arranged to have dinner with Debbie to say good-bye, to thank her for her support, to affirm their friendship. They both dressed for the occasion. He rented a black tuxedo from a local shop. She wore a sleeveless little black dress with a scalloped hem and lace overlay, which was sheer just above the chest. Black pumps lifted her four inches. They settled at a quiet table in the back of the most expensive restaurant in Billings.

“You look fantastic,” he said.

“You’re not too bad yourself.”

“I brought you a copy of
Songs of Love and Loss
.”

“The title is perfect.”

“Yeah, I like it as well.”

“I’m sure I’m going to love the songs. I have all of the context. When will you leave?”

“Next week. I’m going to drive. I’ll get up one morning, load the truck, and go. Let me know if you want anything out of the cabin.”

“Fellini?”

“Except Fellini.”

“You love that dog.”

“Our first road trip. I wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done for me. You’ve been a real friend.”

“I figured I’d get better tips if I listened to you.”

“It worked.”

“Will you see Sassa?”

“I plan to. I haven’t spoken with her in two years.”

“A lot can change in two years.”

“That’s true, but no matter what, she needs to know.”

They stayed at the restaurant until closing time. They’d never had a sustained multihour conversation until that night. He asked her a ton of questions about her life, her goals, her dreams—until he was sure he really saw her. They talked, laughed, ate off of each other’s plates so they could try more of the menu, had three bottles of Altamura Cabernet Sauvignon, and ended the dinner with double espressos to sober up before the drive home.

“Are you up to driving me home?” she asked.

“I think so.”

“I’ll call a taxi. You can leave the truck in the parking lot.”