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

strutted and cakewalked down a long, winding path, stories that were exploratory, curious, open-ended. He refused to commit them to the confines of any song form.
    “What’s that?” I’d say. “It’s pretty.”
    “It’s nothing.” This was his inevitable answer. “Nothing. Just an idea I’m working on.”
    But it wasn’t nothing. When Simon sat on the porch steps outside my cramped kitchen and played, it was as if he was giving voice to some secret, urgent, inarticulate, tangled part of my soul. I was helpless against that kind of power.
    We danced around each other for almost two weeks, each of us uncertain how to proceed. Then, one Friday night, we went to see a band play at a local pub. Out on the dance floor we swayed, a little closer, then a little closer, circling each other, and I realized what our problem was. A simple kiss would never do to break through the buffer of friendship we had built over the years. I leaned into his chest and bit his shoulder.
    Rising the next morning, I took a moment to gaze at Simon’s sleepy form. We had woken together so often over the years, him on an air mattress at the end of my bed, or me on the couch in his parents’ TV room, that I wondered what would be different this time. What had changed now that he was in my bed?
    “Your legs are gorgeous,” I said, giving him an appraising look. “I never noticed before.”
    On Simon’s twenty-first birthday, his mother, Lorna, called Halfmoon Bay to give him the news that he had been accepted to the music program at Concordia University in Montreal. It was the best birthday present. After high school, Simon had taken time off to play in a band and work. He had learned to play guitar by ear, never learning to read music, a liability he believed radically limited his chances of being admitted to an academic music program. So, in a burst of determination, he had devoted three months to cramming in two-plus years of Conservatory music theory in preparation for the entrance exam.
    Simon’s occasional but mammoth-sized crises of school-related self-doubt baffled me. Quick-witted and able to make spontaneous connections between disparate bits of information that were intriguing and often hysterically funny, Simon was inventive and resourceful—ingenious. The way his mind worked delighted me. No one I knew came close to Simon’s intellectual precociousness. I wasn’t surprised that he had been accepted into his program of choice. A little heartsick that he might leave me behind when he returned to Quebec, yes, but not surprised.
    We decided that I would drive Simon to Montreal in my new-old gold Ford van and that during the trip we would make some decisions about our relationship. As far as road trips went, this one was mostly a disaster: ill planned and underfunded. The alternator sparked out in Renton, Washington, and three days later the battery died. We blew a tire on a desert highway before landing in Salt Lake City, cash-strapped and stranded, while we waited for Simon’s parents to deposit some money in his bank account. With our last few dollars we bought a jar of instant coffee, a loaf of bread, some peanut butter, and a small bottle of bourbon, and we parked the van on a dead-end country road outside of town. It wasn’t until Simon unscrewed the lid on the Wild Turkey and the fiery whiskey-sting filled the air that the possibility of pregnancy occurred to me.
    “No, thanks,” I said and waved the opened bottle away. A small print warning underneath the image of the bald-headed, ruddy turkey on the front warned
Alcohol consumption may harm a fetus,
and I knew then, suddenly, completely: I was going to have a baby.
    I spent the rest of the trip calculating and recalculating dates. The summer had been hectic, and my memory was blurry. We had been careful but maybe not careful enough. It wasn’t until we crossed back into Canada at the Detroit–Windsor border that I found the nerve to tell Simon I needed to take a