Page 43 of Come Back To Me

“Can I see your lovely smile? Show me your lovely smile,” the grandfather says as he holds up a camera.

“Do Mister and Missus Grumpy need to go to the toilet?” the grandmother asks. “You’ll let me know, won’t you? Perhaps a little later then.”

I’m fascinated by the way they speak to each other, the attentiveness and tone.

We don’t speak to our children that way in America. We don’t direct as many adjectives at them. I think of the songwriters I love, all from here, this place of giant red buses and gothic spires. Steve Mac; Camille Purcell; Paul Epworth; Goddard, Worth, and Lennon. Their grandparents must have taken them to lunch and told them to show their lovely smiles, and offered them bites of their bacon roll—“Would you like a tiny bite, then? It’s crispy on the inside, but the bread is very soft and warm…my word! Look how many swirly twirly shapes and designs are on this table! You’re very posh, aren’t you, my lovelies! Posh and perfectly darling…”

I understand Yara more by listening to her people. The longer I walk, and listen, and stay, the more she makes sense to me. Tigers don’t make sense in a zoo—they conform to the zoo, but they don’t make sense. I order a tea the way she used to drink it, and something called porridge and banana. The girl who brings them to me asks if I want honey for my porridge.

“Yes, please,” I say.

Yara used to put honey on her oatmeal, I remember that. I’m doing this all to feel close to her. Maybe then I can find her.

The porridge is delicious. How did she ever eat oatmeal when she was used to eating this? It’s creamy and decadent. I get honey on everything—my hands, and the table, and my clothes. I want to write a song about that too—following your girl to London and getting honey on everything. She causes me to write songs without knowing it.

On the fifth day I’m there I get a call from my mother. My father had a heart attack. I run to my hotel and toss everything into my luggage. Everything is a blur after that—the cab ride to the airport, the flight home on which the wifi doesn’t work, the hot coffee I spill on my pants. My cousin is there to pick me up. Her face looks grave. I don’t think about Yara again until after the funeral. Then I feel more desperate. People die. We are not permanent. We have to hurry if we want things.

We play Bumbershoot in September, six months after my father died. It’s a largely acclaimed art and music festival in our home state, something we’ve been dreaming of for years. We climb the stage and can only describe the experience as one of the most surreal moments of our lives. Just a few years ago we were bright-eyed and hopeful, standing in the audience and dreaming of the day we’d be on the stage. And now we are. The weather is gracious, the sun pounding down on Seattle in her full majesty. I glance up and eye the scrappy little clouds that dot the sky. There will be no rain today. My mother and sister are in the crowd too, wearing matching red visors. They jump up and down and wave when they see me looking. They’re wearing their Pixies shirts and I know they’re headed to the reunion show after this. It’s from the stage that I see another familiar face. I remember a fight, yelling, Yara throwing a loaf of bread at my head and telling me to choke on it. It sounds comical now but at the time it wasn’t. The anger that spun out of her tornado-like, ripping up what we’d been building together. She said things that night that I’d rather not remember, horrible things about me and the band…my family. It was a painful memory, a gateway to the end. I catch Petra’s eye and she smiles as she sways to the music we’ve already started playing. Her hair is an ashen yellow and she’s dressed in a sheer white dress. I can see her outline underneath the fabric, the dark circles of her nipples. She wants me to recognize her—she wore that dress so she’d have a better chance of it. Women use their bodies like weapons.

After the show Petra waits for me at the back of the stage. There are a lot of people there calling my name, but she stands quietly, her hands clasped in front of her body like she already knows I will stop. If I couldn’t see her goddamn nipples I’d say she looked saintly. I stand in front of her even though security has me by the balls. A big burly guy in a leather vest says, “We need to keep moving.”

“Hello, Dave.” She pushes her hair behind her ear and looks at me shyly.

It’s so intimate, the way she calls me Dave. It triggers something, maybe my deep loneliness, and that’s why I lift the barrier and wait as she ducks under it to join me. She waves to her friends like this was the plan all along and links her arm through mine.

We don’t speak until we’re in the trailer we share with two other bands. Since they’re performing we have it to ourselves for a few hours. The guys pull beers out of the fridge and wipe the backs of their necks with plush white towels, while Petra and I move to the tiny back room where there is a double bed. I sit on the edge and she sits next to me.

“I’m not trying to sleep with you,” I say. Though saying it out loud makes it seem like I am.

She smiles that closed lip smile that she’s mastered and shrugs like she could go either way. I have a thought that I’m ashamed of: what if I should have been with Petra all along and Yara was the mistake? Well, clearly Yarawasa mistake, but I’d always blamed Petra for the initial frays in our relationship. Wholly unfair perhaps, but that’s what Yara put in my head:Petra was there to cause trouble, Petra was waiting for us to break up.Petra had been quiet in those days, trailing the band from show to show, showing up so often she became one of our entourage by default. Then the thing had happened with Yara. She came around for a while after that, but one night after I’d had too much to drink, I’d ordered her the fuck out of my condo. According to Brick, in a drunken slur I’d told her that it was her fault Yara and I had broken up. I think of that now as I sip water from a bottle and watch her studying me cautiously. Is she looking for anger?

“I’m sorry,” I say. “About what I said. I was hurting and I wanted to fuck everything up.”

“That was a long time ago.” She shrugs. And then she says, “She had this way of making you crazy. It was like she enjoyed torturing you.”

I stare at her. Maybe it was true, but no one had ever said it out loud before. I don’t want to talk about Yara. She must see it on my face because she stands up and grabs my hands, pulling me to my feet.

“Let’s get out of here,” she says. “I’ll buy you dinner.”

I only hesitate for a moment. I haven’t been with a woman in a year. That was after the initial year when I slept with anyone who was game. I like holding her hand, but more than that, I like the way she looks at me.

It’s the first day that I don’t check my trash for Yara’s e-mail.

The excitement around a wedding was contagious. Everyone wanting to know the details. Plenty of congratulations, slaps on the back, and unwarranted advice. While I was basking in the happiness of it all, my future wife was looking more wilted by the day.

“What is it, Yara?” I asked. “Do you not want to do this?”

She looked shocked by my question. “No, no,” she assured me. “I’m just not this person…who plans a wedding, you know?”

I did know and I liked that about her.

“I’ll make all of the arrangements,” I promised, kissing her on the forehead. “It will be small. Tiny. Just close friends and a handful of my family. Is there anyone you want to invite from back home?” She was shaking her head before I’d finished the question.

“I was a bridesmaid once, right out of uni—I mean college,” she said. “A girl I’d gone to high school with, pretty and popular back then. Her name was Angie. She was out of my league in high school, and I was out of hers when I moved to London. I didn’t realize we were friends until she asked me to wear a high-waisted mint dress and hold a handful of wildflowers.”

“You’d never hung out?” I asked.

“No. And I was about to turn her down. I felt awkward about being her bridesmaid when we weren’t even real friends, and then she told me that she’d always admired me, and while the rest of them cared about stupid things I did my own thing. Truly, I think her real friends had all moved away and abandoned her in a way. They saw her early marriage as something that could be viral. Anyway, I did it. I was her bridesmaid. I remember feeling panic for her as she walked down the aisle, even though she didn’t feel it for herself. How did she know everything would be okay, that he would take care of her, that she’d remain herself? I know now that she didn’t, that love was a leap of faith, and that love was just a word until someone gave it a definition.”

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