“Ivy.”
“So, you just started today? Where are you? Upstairs in the office?”
“Yeah, I’m just an office lackey, but they liked some of my work that I brought to the interview, so I’ll probably get to do artwork for some of the cards. I’m still taking art classes, so we’ll see. I figured it was worth a shot.”
“It’s definitely worth a shot. It sounds a lot more interesting than working down in the warehouse with all of us peasants.” He takes a few steps backwards. “Hey, what time do you take your lunch break?”
“Around noon.”
“Cool.” He jingles his keys. “You wanna have lunch with me tomorrow? I can introduce you to all the warehouse guys.”
“I do wanna. That would be very cool.”
Lance opens the door of his little green truck, turns to me one more time and points at me. “Noon.” That smile again. “Don’t forget.”
I think of how nice it is, to blend in with unexceptional people in that banal, work-a-day banter. Like regular people. With shoes. Then a thought occurs to me that nice can turn to annoying or dull if a person isn’t careful, or stops paying attention.
A few days after I finally had my own car, I came back down to Boulder, to look at the bus where Dominic died. The bus was gone, which I suppose gave me something like a sense of relief, but also left me unsatisfied, so I went over to the Pearl Street mall, thinking I’d go walk around for a while.
Chris was strumming his banjo with his little ferret Oscar, just like he was that night when I lost my best friend. He’d recognized me, and asked where my friends were. I couldn’t answer. I had no friends now. No parents and no sibling.
I couldn’t answer, so I began to cry.
“There’s nothing the dead can tell you that the living can’t,” he’d said to me. “World is indifferent to your feelings. World has no responsibility and no reasons why a serial killer can randomly create orphans and then disappear, and no antipathy for assholes who get drunk and kill, then go free a couple of years later. You gotta look for joy, not reasons and explanations.”
I didn’t tell any of that to my therapist, or to Aunt Stacey. They wouldn’t understand and it felt good to keep something for myself.
When I get to the mall, Chris is already there waiting for me in our usual meeting spot in front of the falafel place, tuning up his banjo. He greets me with a hug and asks me how my first day as a working stiff went.
I pet Oscar’s little ferret head. “Aw, you know. Sitting in a cubicle. Smiling at people. Office stuff.”
“Cool. You like it?”
I shrug. “I dunno. I think I made a work friend. It’s a good thing for now, I guess. And it seems to bring Stacey some peace.”
“That’s good.” He adjusts his hat. “That kind of stuff is important. I mean, for now.”
“Yeah. For now. So... did you bring it?”
He grins. “Did I bring it? Of course I brought it.” He hands Oscar over to me, then leans down to dig around in his big, weird canvas bag. He stands up and hands me a wooden box. “I never really got into it, but I can teach you the basic stuff to get you started. The rest you gotta do on your own. Make it yours, okay?”
“Okay.” I open the box and remove the harmonica. It gleams white and silver reflections under the street light, enough that I can make out the name Hohner clearly. “Damn. It’s beautiful. Like it’s full of possibilities.”
“It is. That’s the kind Dylan uses, you know.”
“All right, then,” I say. “I’m ready. Let’s get started.”
WAIT, JUST ONE MORE THING BEFORE YOU GO
THIS STORY IS a work of fiction, but like most fiction, is the result of several shards of broken memory and experiences that have occurred in the real world. Sadly, my mother’s cousin and his wife were murdered in 1977. Ivy and Indra do not exist in any reality, but their trauma does. A single act of senseless violence is like tossing a stone in calm water. The ripples flow outward and seem to disappear, but that stone remains beneath the surface, leaving that body of water forever changed in a way that goes unseen deep below.
I grew up constantly aware of that stone beneath the surface. It was only one among many, and for years, the need to tell the story of that stone felt necessary. Telling the story of the actual people did not. Sometimes silence is better.
As I tiptoed through those murky waters, there were friends who muddled through with me. We went on stupid adventures, hitchhiking out of town, mingling with hobos, losing our shoes, and pissing off grown ups. And much more. Many of us made it through okay. Some of us did not. This story is for and about all of them, in a way. All of those people who had fun with me and freaked out with me while we were just trying to figure out how to be people in the world, and who those people might be.
If any of you guys are still alive and reading this and have figured it out yet, let me know.
So, I thank you all, whether you happen to still be breathing or not.
And I thank once again my storytelling friends at the Internet Writing Workshop for the encouragement, the brutal honesty, and most importantly, for all the stories. Special thanks to Irma Navarro, Silvia Villalobos, and Jack Shakely for giving the early drafts of this story a read when I first started scribbling the bones of it down in 2014.
I’m very thankful to Soundgarden for Badmotorfinger. It was only after listening to the entire album on repeat that I was able to finish this story when it stalled out somewhere around the fourth chapter.
