“Let’s do this,” I said to Cal.
I pulled off my shoes and socks and took a moment to feel the cool, damp softness of the rug beneath my feet. Then I sat down and picked up the Martin. And I felt Sam there too. Inside the guitar. In the strings. In my hands. In my fingertips. In my heart.
I looked at Cal and said, “The usual?”
He nodded, grinning.
I counted to four and we both hit our D chords in unison.
The rest of the performance is a blur. I have no recollection of whether it sounded good or bad. I only know it felt like magic. And repatriation. And when we put down our guitars and stood up, the clapping and cheering surged through my bloodstream like a drug.
Cal took my hand and held it up in the air as if I’d just won a boxing match. “One more time, give it up for Joe Harper.”
I glanced at October then. Her palms were pressed together underneath her chin, frozen in mid-clap, and her face was blank, as if she was unable to find an existing expression for what she’d just witnessed.
Behind us, Wyatt was ushering the choir onto the stage for the last song. Another crewmember dashed over and picked up the acoustic guitars. Justin walked out and handed Cal his 1966 Olympic white Jazzmaster.
I remember Cal smiling at me, lofty, proud, and emotional, like he thought we’d just accomplished something momentous together. Justin nodded for me to follow him off the stage, and I bent down to grab my shoes and socks. As I stood back up, I saw something shifting in Cal. He was focused on the ground, and the joy was draining from his face, his features seeming to absorb it like butter melting into a piece of warm bread.
At first Cal only seemed confused. Then I saw something click.
I looked back down at the ground, trying to identify what had triggered him. That’s when I realized he wasn’t looking at the ground. He was staring at my feet. My toes. The little animals October had painted on them.
The rest of the band had returned, and Justin was now pulling me by the arm, trying to get me out of the way before the last song began.
Cal’s hands began to shake. His jaw pulsed, and his eyes darted back and forth from my feet to my face, searching for something that might suggest he’d come to the wrong conclusion.
A long line of lights went on above us, so bright they illuminated the rain. I swore I could make out every drop, and I remember having a strange, momentary insight that raindrops weren’t drops at all, they were sharp, vertical lines, like little knives of water falling from the sky.
Cal’s hawk eyes locked on mine. His face was like a piece of petrified wood.
“You,” he said, with a disappointment violent enough to feel like a punch.
And then the blue robes of the choir overtook me like a flight of western scrub jays. Justin had me by the shoulders now, and he dragged me and didn’t let me go until we’d made it to the outdoor lounge, where the afterparty was already in full swing.
I didn’t know where October was, but I suspected she was still standing where I’d left her, oblivious to what had just happened.
My body was cold and numb, my mind empty, void of feeling, void of language except for one word: Run.
But I didn’t run. I put my head down, pulled my collar up, and walked slowly but deliberately toward the nearest exit while behind me a chorus of voices chanted “Turn the Lights Out” in three-part harmony.
I bumped into Rae as I was heading up the stairs. She was coming out of the restroom and asked me where I was going.
“The party’s that way, yeah?” she said, pointing back toward the stage.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I can’t.”
“Huh?”
I met Rae’s eyes and held her shoulders to make sure she was listening. “Tell October this: Tell her I said I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
TWENTY-THREE.
There was a guy in Sid’s writing workshop, an ex-Marine named Santiago, who was working on a novel about a soldier from the future who returns to America in 2017 to assassinate the president and save the human race. It sounds worse than it was. Santiago was a solid writer with a strong voice. He was also an expert marksman and had served two tours in Afghanistan before his twenty-fifth birthday. He said that when he came back, his head was on backwards, and he’d been trying to turn it around for the better part of a decade. Writing helped. Booze didn’t.
Santiago was built like a gorilla: wide as a doorframe, hirsute, with long arms and a rounded posture that made him look like he was knuckle-walking when he moved. He and I were workshop partners for a session. That meant we had to read each other’s assignments and offer feedback, and every Wednesday night for eight weeks we met at the IHOP out on Highway 93 because Santiago was in AA and said it wasn’t healthy for him to be around anything stronger than coffee.
During ABANDONMENT week, I wrote a poem about how I’d left October without saying goodbye. Almost all of my assignments focused on Cal or October, with the occasional bit about Sam or Bob thrown in for good measure. At any rate, Santiago knew a good portion of the backstory from conversations we’d had over pancakes, and at the end of the poem he’d scribbled two notes. The first one said: Loving a woman who can break you is the bravest thing a man can do. The second note said: Go back, you spineless motherfucker. The clock is ticking.
It wasn’t like I’d intended to stay in Montana forever. My original plan had been to head back to California after the dust settled. The night I left, I’d only grabbed what I could
