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

eyes.
    “Look,” he said. “I think I made a mistake.” He was pacing around my room, which was still the room of a child, filled with books, a dollhouse, and stuffed animals, the gray-blue wallpaper patterned with small white flowers, the pink satin laces of my ballet pointe shoes hooked over a nail in the wall. Simon was gripping a stuffed baby horse, his large hands wrapped in a murderous twist around its neck. “I asked you if you wanted to go out with Cole when what I wanted to ask was whether you would go out with
me
.”
    “Oh. Well,” I said, my lips still shimmering from that first-ever kiss. I didn’t know what to say. In Veronica’s absence, Simon had quickly become my closest friend. I knew him. I loved him. But Cole? He was as fantastic and foreign as the far side of the moon. “Look,” I said, scrambling for the right words. “The thing is, as soon as you and I kiss, we are going to have to get married and have a baby and spend the rest of our lives together. I think we should see other people first.”
    “Yeah, sure,” Simon said. “Don’t worry about it.”
    We were as young as that, once.
    WHEN I WAS sixteen, my mother moved our family to Toronto, and Cole, not keen on long distances, dumped me, thoroughly shattering my teenage heart. Simon grew his bowl cut out into a mane of long dark curls and, with the help of a daily ten-plus cups of coffee habit, lost his dimply baby fat. He started a band called CODA, which played a mix of Zeppelin, Stones, and Police tunes. Always well liked by a wide cross-section of the high school population—browners, jocks, stoners, metalheads, preppies, teachers—he befriended them all, and his popularity increased exponentially when he started playing live shows. In his previous hometown in rural Quebec, he had been picked on, bullied daily, and his new social status in Orangeville was a constant surprise and gift to him.
    He started dating girls two, three, four years his senior, often calling me for relationship advice. Despite distance, his dating adventures, and mine, our friendship flourished. We talked on the phone almost daily, and every few weeks I would ride the bus to Orangeville, or he would come to Toronto. We liked to stride through the city streets framing shots for album covers and making up band names, album titles, silly songs. We kvetched about the fickleness of our respective love affairs and promised that if things hadn’t settled down by the time our hair was gray, we would marry. We sing-shouted the lyrics to the Beatles’ “When I’m Sixty-Four” to one another. I knew these particular Beatles lyrics because I’d had to sing them, memorized, for a grade 8 assembly. Simon knew the lyrics because... he knew lyrics. I hadn’t yet been able to name a song he couldn’t sing.
    Simon was a good singer who, despite being a musical perfectionist, always valued intent and commitment over technique. There weren’t many people I would trust my enthusiastic but squawking singing voice with, but I trusted Simon. Despite my off-kilter notes, our voices together created an inexplicable sense of rightness, difficult to articulate beyond a blood-deep intuition of internal harmony or the effortless balancing of opposites: together we were risky and comforting, thrilling and safe. Long before our first kiss, Simon and I were singing in preparation for the long, sweet haul of our marriage.
    WE DIDN’T WAIT until we were sixty-four. When we were twenty-one, Simon tracked me down to a small clearing on the edge of a large forest in Halfmoon Bay, on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, where he and his acoustic guitar proceeded to seduce me—some might say unfairly—with song. Taj Mahal, J. J. Cale, Muddy Waters, Paul Simon... Simon’s knowledge of music was encyclopedic, and he could play almost anything he had ever heard. And in between singing the songs that other people had written, he played his own music, instrumental stories that skipped and