FISH OUT OF WATER

3. Hey, Mom …-2

Even though I showered at the pool, I have a chill I can’t get rid of, so I stand under the hot water, steaming up the mirror, coating my hair in a deep conditioner. I have my mother’s hair—thick and dark with a natural wave—and I’ve managed to keep it long and relatively healthy by doing a long conditioning treatment every week. Once that’s done for tonight, I slide into my cozy bathrobe and warm socks. I’ll make peppermint tea, and I throw my biology textbook onto my bed—because nothing says relaxation like memorizing the steps in aerobic oxidation of glucose.

My dad is preoccupied in his study—a podcast blares through speakers, muffled by the closed door and underscored by the clack-whirr-clack of his elliptical—so I make tea and tiptoe back upstairs before he decides to rush out and start a new lecture on whatever self-help genius is filling his head with inspiration.

I set my steaming-hot mug on the nightstand and slide my books aside on the duvet.

“Neptune, how was your day?” My goldfish thinks he’s a puppy—I’ve trained him to jump through these tiny little hoops Sierra found on the internet after we watched a video of a guy training his own goldfish. Neptune took to it, well, like a fish takes to water.

What started out as a carnival prize in a plastic bag seven years ago has become a fish the size of my palm with a tank big enough to accommodate. He knows he’s beautiful, which is why it’s so appropriate that Uncle Tim and I named him after the Roman god of water.

I tap flakes and some freeze-dried treats into his tank; he offers his thanks with a quick hop just barely above the water’s surface. “I love you too, buddy.”

I close the tank lid and grab my earbuds, but before stuffing them into my ears, I pause and rest a gentle hand on my mother’s guitar—a Martin HD-35 Nancy Wilson Dreadnought acoustic, named after the vocalist, songwriter, and guitarist from the band Heart, my mom’s favorite growing up and the reason she got into music in the first place. This guitar was one of the last gifts my dad got for her before she died.

Now it’s mine.

“Hey, Mom …,” I say. The guitar sits quietly.

I know how to play it. They put a guitar in my hands before I could talk, but after Mom died, Dad stopped with the music. It’s as if it was surgically carved out of him. Like one day, music was everything to him, and the next day, it was all about finding something better for my future, something better than music. Music is bad. It tears families apart. It makes you crazy. The industry is full of lies. They will chew you up and spit you out.

His favorite refrain that usually ends whatever argument we’re having about why I can’t take voice or guitar instead of swimming all the stupid time: “Look what it did to your mother!”

We sold the house—the house with the pool I was attached to from the age of two, the custom-built recording studio and “jam hut” where Dad and Mom and their respective bandmates and friends would come and practice before stepping foot into the proper recording studio. They’d hang out and have long nights of playing music and trying out new stuff. My childhood was loud and percussive and filled with faces of people important to my parents, people who became my “aunts” and “uncles.”

When it wasn’t Mom’s turn to rehearse, I would sit on her lap as she swayed and hummed along with whomever was playing. She’d gently rub my hair back from my forehead, me nestled in this fuzzy green blanket with my beloved stuffed goldfish, still so new the orange fabric was practically neon. I’d catalogue the faces on the jam hut walls, the framed, signed photos of my parents’ favorite rockers from the 1970s and ’80s, the years when Trent and Calla were just kids learning how to play music themselves. Joan Jett, Fleetwood Mac, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, Debbie Harry, Pat Benatar, the Go-Go’s, Annie Lennox, and of course, Ann and Nancy Wilson from Heart, who my mom actually got to meet once.

I’d scroll through those faces, comparing which of them looked like my mom or dad or my dad’s brother, Uncle Tim, as I listened to my mom’s voice against my ear, lulling me to sleep, inhaling the smell of her perfume and shampoo with every breath. All that noise around me in the jam hut, and I would sleep like a stone, safe in her arms.

She was studying to be a music teacher when she married Trent Andersen. But when people in my dad’s world heard what Calla Stone Andersen could do, a lot of doors opened for her. Man, could she sing … my dad always knew her talents were far greater than his. Sure, he can shred on a guitar, his vocals are decent enough, and he can certainly write songs. But my mom—she was a rare talent. And the studio executives were starting to figure that out.

One night not long after she died, I heard Dad talking to Uncle Tim, my dad’s words slurred because he’d had a lot to drink. He said, “My Calla was so big. Her voice, her talent was so big. On her worst day in the studio, she was better than my best day. This business … it killed her … Marina can never know this kind of pain. I won’t let it happen.”

Within a week, our house went on the market. The jam hut was disassembled, the parts carried off by friends who maybe sold the stuff, maybe kept it. I don’t know. I was eight. The last time I saw the jam hut, it had been turned into a guest house with a tiny bedroom and kitchen and the walls were a boring white. The acoustic tiles and framed signed photos had been replaced with ugly pictures of seashells and beaches.

The chair we snuggled in was gone; even the fuzzy green blanket disappeared.

That’s how I knew my mom was really dead. She was never coming back, no matter how many promises I made to be good and do my homework and try extra hard at swim practice and brush my teeth and get As on my spelling tests.

Eight years later, and I can’t help but wonder if, wherever she is, she’s watching me, wanting me to do what Dad says and study hard and get swimming scholarships, or if she wants me to be playing music, like she did. If she wants me to use the voice she gave me.

From my perch on the side of my bed, I watch the guitar. I will it to respond to me. “Mom, give me a sign … play a single note.”

The guitar, of course, remains silent. Because this is reality. If ghosts are real, they certainly don’t play guitars.

Life would be so much better if it were a fairy tale.