Page 40 of Come Back To Me

Every day I check my trash for that fucking e-mail, but it never comes. Do the guilty not send e-mails? I’m checking my e-mail one day (the trash) when I see a title in the subject bar that says: NEED A PRIVATE EYE, I’M YOUR GUY. I open it partly because it’s cheesy and I think this guy, Ed Berry is his name, could come up with a better slogan for his business. Ed claims he can find anyone, and he can do it to fit your budget. I don’t know where Ed gets off thinking anyone would call him after that awful slogan, but I call him because I figure Ed needs someone to believe in him. I leave a message and he calls me back within two minutes.

“What can I do you for?” he says in a dirty accent. I can’t tell if he’s from New York, Texas, or Minnesota. “All three,” he tells me later. “I’m a man who moves around.”

I almost hang up on him, but I remember what Ferdinand said about needing closure. Yara and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary last month. I got a tattoo to commiserate, and then I got drunk. Where is my wife? That’s Ed’s job now. I needed a private eye and he is my guy.

I tell Ed that I need to find someone and he tells me that international work doesn’t come cheap. I assure him I can afford it. When I hang up the phone, I know I’ve crossed a line there’s no coming back from. When you set out to find someone, you don’t stop until you do. And then you have to deal with what you find.

Ed sends me photos. Large 8x10 ones. He also sends the files to my e-mail. They do not go to my trash. I check the trash before opening the files. Nothing.

In the photos I see Yara behind a bar. No surprise there, she had a master’s degree and refused to work as anything but a bartender. I see her walking down a street with plastic shopping bags, her chin tucked to her chest. I see her smiling as she sits at an outside table with another woman. Ed labels each photo with what she’s doing. Female subject eats at The White Knight at eleven hundred hours. Is joined by another female. They leave together walking west on….

I don’t like that he calls herfemale subject. She’s Yara.

I check my trash for her e-mail.

I know where she is, now it’s just a matter of actually going. My tattoo gets infected. I consider having it lasered off. Bad juju when the tattoo you got to commiserate your second anniversary with your runaway wife gets infected. When it heals there is a spot in the middle where the ink disappeared. It’s perfect in a crippling way, so I keep it. When I check my e-mail, I rub that empty spot in the middle of my tattoo. It’s not something I was aware I did until Brick pointed it out. Brick can be painfully observant when there aren’t women around.

“Dude, why do you do that? It’s like the same thing every day.”

I shrugged it off, but it made me think. There was a story of a man whose wife died. He went to the graveyard every day, picked the same flowers, wore the same tie. He sat next to her grave and told his dead wife about what he’d had for breakfast, how the neighbor had raised her hand in a wave as he walked by. This was the way he grieved the love of his life, with ritual and consistency. It was a grab at control after the uncontrollable happened. Death. Me touching the blank space of my tattoo, me searching for her e-mail in my trash. I was lost forever in my grief.

I hate being home, home being my family home where my parents have a lime green golf cart that they drive around the property proudly numbered 12. My sister keeps toys for her children to play with when she brings them over on the weekends. The house always smells of apple cider vinegar, which in turn smells like dirty feet. My mother has become a consumer of apple cider vinegar.

“It kills the bad bacteria in your gut,” she tells me.

To illustrate this, she pats mine right where the bad bacteria live, then points to her own. I take a shot of it to appease her and I gag. No one talks about Yara, that’s the rule. We carry on like she never happened. Sometimes I can tell my mother wants to talk about it, ask if I’ve heard anything, but she holds the questions in her eyes instead. For the first time in my life I’m grateful that we’re the type of family who avoids talking about things.

It’s the sound of my sister’s children riding their tricycles along the pavement in front of the house that bothers me the most. I always wake up to it and put a pillow over my head to kill the sound of plastic wheels on hot asphalt. The grating roll of them, the laughter. I hate it. It reminds me of a happiness I won’t likely ever know—a family of my own, small humans who call me Daddy or Papa, a woman who I want to make them with. When I kiss my mother goodbye after the weekend and ferry back to the city I am inordinately relieved. Who am I anymore? Not the man who used to like hanging out with his family. Not the man who was thirsty for music. I go to sleep in my own condo; the hum of engines lulls me to sleep and it’s the best sleep I’ve had in days. Next week will be better. Next week I will try harder to get on with my life. Next week we play a festival in Seattle.

I check my trash for her e-mail.

She had fangs. Figurative ones, but also her incisors were sharp which made her look like a vampire. The first time I saw her I thought of the books all the girls were reading when I was in high school, the one about the beautiful vampire who falls in love with a mortal girl. I was the mortal boy and this girl—godlike—made me feel plain and insufficient. Later she told me that I made her feel the same way, and maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be—two people in awe of each other, who feel lucky to be with each other. I came back to see her again, thirsty for her attention. I wasn’t exactly starved for attention, but lately hers was the only attention I wanted. Maybe the first time was a fluke, an off night for my masculinity. But when I went back I felt the same thing—if not stronger. I flirted with her and she flirted back, but not with the soft pliability that most women flirted with.

“Hey splinter guy,” she’d say because she knew it annoyed me. “Are you going to write a song about that?

She threw barbs, they were well aimed and they made me laugh. If I were a different man I’d have a bruised ego. I took her jabs and molded them to me. She was something I knew existed but had never met: the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the leprechaun at the end of the rainbow. Terrible analogies, I know.

Yara

And then she told me, after a lot of prodding—Yara.

Her name was music.

I’d leave the bar and think about her hair. Not her tits or her ass—her hair. What the fuck was that? I told my best friend, Ferdinand, about her hair and he called me a little bitch.

A little bitch I was.

“Do you want to run your fingers through it?” he asked. “Stick your face in it and get that good smell?”

I did.

“Fuck off,” I said, but he’d just laughed.

“I’d rather have my fingers and face somewhere else, but suit yourself.”

I invited her to my show. Once, twice, three times. I’d never had to beg a woman to come to one of my shows before. And then to make matters worse, she never came. Each show I’d climb onto the stage and look for her, her blonde hair—even if it was tied back I’d be able to see it. And then I’d climb off stage disappointed. She didn’t work the same way other women did. Other women had dials, knobs; nothing was labeled. Yara had only one switch and it was either Off or On. I wanted to speak her language. I wanted to be her language. This was obsession and I welcomed it. A nice change to not feeling anything at all or to feeling disappointed.

We played The Crocodile the last Saturday of the month. I’d invited Yara again, but by then expected her not to come. We usually sat around in their greenroom drinking until it was time for us to go on. But, on that particular night, I couldn’t sit still.

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