A brief chapter here, just a few pages as the seeds of an idea take shape.

[Famous Blue Cable (Nick Drake) \\ River Man]

Chapter Two

She woke with a start, the alarm clock’s grating bell jolting her out of deepest sleep. Still not fully awake as she swung her legs out of bed, she walked quietly to the bathroom even as wispy filaments of the dream lingered. She sat on the toilet then reached in, turned on the hot water and pulled up on the diverter valve, turning on the shower. Pulling off her long t-shirt, she stepped into the shower and turned around, backed up to the spray until it was beating down on her neck, and for a fleeting moment she felt the tension in her shoulders ebb away – as the last fragments of the insistent dream remained suspended in the mists clinging to her skin. She ran shampoo through her hair – twice, because it felt so good – then soaped down and rinsed off the important places before she let the hot water beat down on her neck again. She stepped out of the shower and dried her hair then slipped into the old terrycloth bathrobe that hung on the back of the bathroom door – still unable to shake free of the dream’s lingering remains.

The train. Always the train. And then there was Sam – he was always in her dream, always walking into the dining car as she sat watching him come back to her. Always in pain, always alone. Tall and lanky, yet somehow almost emaciated, just as he had been near the end. The unspoken truth that cancer was eating him alive remained between them. Just like her father’s cancer – when he too passed. Everything about the man in the dream reminded her of the man who had raised her, even the measured way he spoke. But not when he looked her, and definitely not when she looked at him. Everything felt so real in those moments, especially when he fell asleep with the side of his face resting on her lap – because she felt consumptive electric explosions in her mind when his skin rested on her. She had never wanted that moment to end. Never wanted to wake up, just so this last moment together would last and last. When the realization came that he was indeed dying, that he would soon be gone, the dream turned into a nightmare from which she could not escape – and even then the sudden irrational fear of his looming death haunted her as she dressed for the day.

She went to her daughter’s room and gently woke her, then went to the kitchen to put on coffee. With that out of the way she turned on the television and flipped over to a channel that talked about the weather – 24 hours a day – and she groaned at the prospect of more wind and rain. She put bacon on to cook in one skillet and scrambled eggs in another, then she toasted bread and got everything sorted on two plates. She set things out on the little table that looked out over Tacoma and Puget Sound. The table that had been meant for three.

It had been her father’s house, once upon a time. He’d left it to her among the other things that followed with his passing, and she knew she would leave it to her daughter someday. She had taken root in this place, just as he had once. Perhaps as her daughter would, but that remained to be seen. In another dream, perhaps.

Tracy came out of her room ready and dressed for school; she sat down and looked at the weather on the television then put bacon on toast and spooned some scrambled eggs on the bacon, making a sandwich that disappeared in a few quick bites.

“Finish your homework?” Rebecca North asked.

And Tracy nodded, coughed once then took a quick sip of orange juice, clearing her throat. “Yup. Can I ride home from school with Ken?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

This was met with crossed arms and a stoney, petulant stare.

“I’ll pick you up at the library, at four-thirty,” Rebecca added.

“You don’t like him, do you?”

“I don’t care for the way he drives.” This said with an easy smile.

Tracy shook her head. “You’re such a…a mom.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment, even if it wasn’t meant as such.”

“Why do you always have to talk like an English teacher?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe because I am an English teacher?”

“Oh. Mom, why didn’t you take up physics, like your mother?”

“Would you rather I spoke to you like a physics teacher?”

“I’d rather you spoke to me like you belonged to Hell’s Angels.”

“Sorry. You’re fresh out of luck with that one, kiddo.”

“The story of my life.”

“Let’s get the dishes in the washer. I have…”

“…yes, I know, I know…you have a faculty meeting at seven-forty-five.”

They drove across town to Silas High and Rebecca parked in the faculty lot; Tracy came around for a hug before she darted off to meet up with friends before the first period bell, leaving her mom to her day.

They had stayed after school the day before, the two of them, decorating Rebecca’s classroom walls for a complex new assignment – one she was particularly excited about. Working with the school’s Social Studies department, she was going to introduce a new, multidisciplinary assignment to her senior AP English and Creative Writing students, an assignment that was planned to dovetail with both the senior level AP Postwar US History class and the junior level US History class, which was currently also focused on American history in the late 20th-century.

Breaking their combined classes into small groups, she and Mr Murphy, the social studies teacher she was partnering with, were going to look at music as a barometer of cultural change from the 1950s up to the millennium. To do so, each group of three to four students would be assigned a decade and then each group would try to determine the dominant cultural trends in their assigned decade; with that done each group would pick a musician or group and one song that – in the group’s opinion – best represented the trend they’d identified. 

But before these groups were cut loose to do their research, Mr Murphy had convinced Rebecca to provide an example to their combined class.

“Do the nineties, and Sam,” Ben Murphy pleaded. “There’s no better representative of the period,” he continued. And of course there was no need to add that Rebecca and Sam Stillwell had lived together for most of the 90s, or that Stillwell was Tracy’s father. “What could be better, ya know?”

So she had brought her copy of West Side Wind to school that morning, and she would play the eponymous title track for her students before she explained the origins of both the album and the song – and then how Sam’s music best encapsulated the decade. And somehow she had to get through it all without breaking apart and falling down into the black hole that always seemed to be waiting for her when she remembered those days. 

When the cancer first came for him he had been determined to fight. Surgery. Chemotherapy. Then the weeks and weeks of nausea, followed by radiation – yet he had fought his way to a brief remission, and West Side Wind had been born from that struggle. Dave Mason, his best and oldest friend, had come up from Santa Barbara for a visit, and the rest of the story had become something of a legend in the close knit community of musicians in and around Seattle.

How quickly the songs came together, how easily the words came. How vanishingly brief was that time.

And later that morning – as she stood before her AP class – she described watching Dave and Sam working together. She took her time explaining how West Side Wind was a series of recollections, but that the song itself was a more intimate exploration of growing up in the 70s and 80s, and about how people came together and fell away from each other. And how, in an almost offhand way, the people she and Sam had known began to fall away as his cancer returned.

She wasn’t aware she was crying when she told this part of the story to the class, and in truth very few people knew about her almost ten years with Sam Stillwell, but then one of her students raised her hand.

“Yes, Marsha? You have a question?”

“Uh, Miss North? Do you know you’re crying?”

And Rebecca had looked at Ben Murphy and shrugged, because she really didn’t know what to say. So Ben laid it all out there for her: “Marsha, Sam Stillwell and Miss North were, well, they were together for years.”

The news came as a shock to the class. Then another hand shot up. “Is Sam Stillwell Tracy’s father?” someone asked.

And Rebecca had simply nodded – before she smiled and excused herself, leaving Ben Murphy to lead the class after she walked quietly from the classroom.

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, every last word of it…

[Yes || And You and I]