Page 55 of Night Songs

We walked to a twenty-four-hour diner down the block, and over eggs and pie, he laid out the plan for the next six months—our great adventure into the wilderness, the sacred, untouched place where, just maybe, we could find a way forward after everything, and everyone, we’d lost.

Afterward, we curled up in his twin hostel bed in the morning light, and he fell asleep in the crook of my arm.

I stared up at the cobwebbed ceiling of the bunk room, and I tried to hold on to the bliss I’d felt for the last few hours.

But I could already feel it receding, replaced by the cold, tight fear that I was tempting the universe. Surely no one was allowed to feel this good and get away with it.

As hard as I tried to shake it off, I knew, somewhere deep inside me, that something terrible was lurking on the horizon.

And there was no escaping it.

16lulabelle

1973

NINE YEARS LEFT

After the divorce, I took my sack of money and bought a little white house with a red door. It gleamed with being mine.

It looked like a tidy hobo lived inside. There was one brocade couch with a cigarette burn that Martha and I found trolling the rich neighborhoods in her truck. A few plates and glasses and forks and a frying pan. A mattress on the floor in the bedroom.

I had to make my money stretch now. The label had dropped me during the legal battle with Clayton. So had all the managers and lawyers and men in suits who surrounded Clayton like a wool cocoon. There were no offers coming in. My new phone was silent. Life had been a constant stream of activity for years, and it had fed me.

Now, life stood still.

For the first time, I slept. I slept most of the day. And in the evening, Phoebe or Martha would wake me and make me eat a bit. Draw me a bath. Tima was out on tour, making her way through the summer festival circuit. She called me late at night when she knew I’d be up and told me road stories to make me laugh.

The girls knew not to talk about Hess. All I’d heard was she’d moved back in with her parents, but that was it. At some point the girls hadrealized she and I were more than friends, but we never discussed it—one day they just knew, and it wasn’t a problem.

I wanted to ask if they’d seen her, and how she was doing. I wanted to know what she’d had for breakfast that morning. If she was wearing her hair the same way. If a touch behind the ear still made her shiver.

But I couldn’t keep opening the wound. So we pretended like she’d never existed.

I tried to work on music. I had this whole wooden trunk of songs. But when I played them, the words went bitter in my mouth. They all reminded me of her.

There were no new songs in my head, either. It was like Hess had taken my music with her, just as she’d restored it when we first met. I was back to that sad, sorry girl locked in the shed, no longer able to receive the music floating down from the heavens. It was worse than death. The tree on my chest withered to a husk.

One night Phoebe brought over a box of paints and brushes tostimulate my creativity. We laid down old sheets on the floor and put on Tammy Wynette. But that just made me cry. So Phoebe switched it out for Donny Osmond, but that just made me annoyed.

Undeterred, she pulled out a record she’d borrowed from Martha. The band was called Black Sabbath, and a witch in a long black dress stood watching me from the cover.

Something seized up in me like I’d been caught. Like the devil had finally found me and now fixed me with his one yellow eye. I told her I couldn’t listen to the devil’s music, and she laughed and put it on anyway.

Rain poured down around us, and a church bell tolled in the distance. The guitar lurched through the scene like a funeral procession, slow and ominous. A man wailed as an evil figure approached, bringing his own destruction.

The song wasn’t afraid to acknowledge we were all doomed. In fact, it reveled in it.

I felt my own damned fate looming in the corner of the room, and for the first time in my life, I wondered what it would be like to give myself over to it. To stop pretending, or trying to hide from it. To open up my arms and let the devil in.

Phoebe offered me a canvas, but I waved it away. Instead, I dipped my hands in a pot of syrupy red paint. The guitar riffs picked up speed, and I smeared it on the living room wall in thick slashes. Phoebe squealed and dipped her own hands, and we stroked along with the music.

We were women possessed. It felt good.

When I woke the next evening with red under my nails, I was still empty of new music. My night of devil worship hadn’t worked.

Martha came by with a bag of Krystal burgers. After I’d eaten, she led me into the bathroom and told me to get cleaned up. We were going out.

We drove to the outskirts of town. In the middle of a dark, quiet neighborhood, one house was lit up and crawling with people. The men had long hair and beards that hung scraggled over their leather vests, and the women wore no makeup and walked barefoot in the grass.