Fallen: A Trauma, a Marriage, and the Transformative Power of Music by Kara Stanley Read Free Book Online

and my best friend, Veronica, over for lunch. The Paradis living room, painted sky blue and bathed in light from a large bay window, was home to the largest collection of record albums I had ever seen. That day we sang and danced to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, T. Rex, Lou Reed, Taj Mahal—an explosion of sound and movement nested between biology and geography class that was transformative.
    ALTHOUGH IT IS not entirely true, it could be said that before I fell in love with Simon, I fell in love with his family: his very poised older sister, Emily; his successful parents, Marc and Lorna; their beautiful, Victorian-styled home. The yellow canary named Bird. Because of Charlie Parker, Simon explained, and I nodded as if I understood the reference, which I didn’t. The Paradis family had moved to town over the summer. Emily, it was rumored, wrote poetry. Lorna was finishing up her law degree. Marc worked at the Royal Bank developing computer systems by day; at night he came home and played guitar. Marc and Lorna offered up a radical new vision of what parents could be: When Marc unpacked the groceries on a Saturday afternoon, he bumped hips with Lorna as she made herself a sandwich. They would play fight for a tea towel, teasing one another. They laughed together; they sang.
    Over the next few years, I received a comprehensive musical education under Simon’s tutelage. I first heard Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” in his living room, and Patti Smith’s “Horses.” We swayed with psychedelic surrender to Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow,” thrashed around to the Clash’s “Rudie Can’t Fail,” broke our hearts to David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust,” and had our minds blown by Hendrix’s “Manic Depression” and Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue.” I bought an old and scratched
Learn How to Disco
album at a church sale, and Simon, Veronica and I would practice the step-ball-step-turn moves, laughing until our sides ached, racing back to school between the first and second end-of-lunch bells.
    That year Veronica fell in love with a boy, an artist who made beautiful silk-screened T-shirts, and they began spending all their time together. Our cozy triangle lost a corner. After school, Simon and I went to the little Dutch deli alone and ordered Havarti sandwiches on rye with black coffee and, our favorite, strawberry tarts, which Simon, in a moment of inexplicable whimsy, renamed “friendship tarts.” One day he told me that his friend Cole wanted to ask me out.
    “He likes you,” he said.
    “He doesn’t even know me,” I said. “I’ve never even spoken to him.” Still, I knew who he was. Everyone knew who he was. A punk—an artist, too. A fine-boned beauty who dressed like Sid Vicious and who, like Simon, played guitar. They had been talking about starting a band.
    “Well, he wants to ask you on date. Are you interested?”
    “Sure, I guess.” I shrugged, attempting a nonchalance I didn’t feel. Unlike Veronica, I had never had a boyfriend. Had never kissed anyone in the back fields behind the elementary school. Never been invited to the parties where kids played spin-the-bottle in someone’s basement.
    For our first date, Cole invited me over to his house after school. He lived in a farmhouse at the end of a long tree-lined laneway on the outskirts of town. We set up a large panel of wood in a back field and pinned balloons filled with paint across its surface, then threw darts until we, the panel of wood, the trees, and the grass were dripping in an apocalypse of bright color. Back at the farmhouse, as we were rinsing our paint-streaked hands and faces, Simon phoned, his voice loud enough that I could clearly hear the question he asked Cole.
    “Have you kissed her?”
    “Not yet.” Cole smiled and looked at me. “But I’m hoping to.”
    Later that night Simon biked over to my house and took the stairs two at a time up to my bedroom. He was quieter than usual, and he avoided meeting my