Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,66

subset were into her dad.

Not a lot of people knew he was her dad, of course. They didn’t have the same last name, and even Marie had not known that the person her mom referred to as “your bio father” (whereas Matt was always, had always been “Matt”) had been a tragic figure, famous to fans of her mom’s friend Callie’s band and to music nerds like Tom. Her mom had waited until she could reasonably be expected to understand not only the concept of death but also the more difficult concept of “semi-famous tragic figure” before springing that one on her.

Laura told Marie about Dylan a few months after her first depressive episode, after things had stabilized. She made up a sanitized, simplified version: “Your dad was a sad guy, but he was also very talented. At least, a lot of people thought so. I certainly thought so. I didn’t know him very long. He was only twenty-five when he died. He had a stupid accident.”

“Did I ever meet him?” Marie had asked. It had seemed like a reasonable question; she knew that a lot had happened in her life before she could remember things.

“No, baby, he never knew I was pregnant with you. He died before I even knew.”

Then Laura had put an unfamiliar CD on the little kitchen boom box that they mostly used when they wanted to listen to sprightly, upbeat cooking music. They sat there without talking and listened to one of his songs together. It was hard for Marie to pick out any of the words through the fuzz and filters, but it had a nice tune. She didn’t immediately want to hear it again or anything, though. She got the feeling, though she couldn’t say why she felt this way, that her mom didn’t really love the song, either. Maybe that was why she’d never played it before. Listening to it seemed to awaken something in her mother, though. She got distracted and seemed far away.

“Do you think this is a good song?” Marie had hazarded after a few minutes.

Laura shrugged. “Objectively, yes. It’s not really my cup of tea, though.”

The song had ended, and the next one had come on, but Marie reached over and hit stop on the boom box. “Can we listen to the White Album?”

“Sure, whatever you want. Do you want to talk about your bio father more? Ask me any questions?”

Marie had shrugged. “Not really. Maybe later. I don’t think I have any questions right now.”

Laura had looked into her face for a minute, and Marie had felt, as she now often did, that the price of her mom’s love, the blood-warm ocean she swam in constantly, was this kind of heightened surveillance of her feelings. Maybe with two parents it would have been spread out a little more. Lately Laura was always checking to make sure she wasn’t sad. Sad like her dad.

Marie was ashamed of being on medication for depression, but at least it was something about her that was special. No one had ever said this out loud to her face, but Marie knew that unless she could prove herself to be exceptional in some way within the next year or so, she was going to be pretty much fucked as far as college was concerned. Unlike Kayla, who had racked up prizes and awards basically since kindergarten, and who would surely get some kind of scholarship to study whatever boring STEM-related thing she wanted, Marie mostly coasted in school. She could sing and play guitar, of course, because her mom had taught her the same way she’d taught lessons to hundreds of other kids—but in a city full of kids who’d learned to play violin at age three, she didn’t stand out as a prodigy. And while her mom wasn’t discouraging, she also wasn’t exactly pushing her onto the stage.

“I’m just glad you’re doing something that makes you happy,” she’d said once, when Marie had told her that she was probably going to place at least third in the freshman talent show. At the show, Marie had played cover songs on her guitar, but she hadn’t picked very popular songs, and had come in fourth.

Marie tuned back into what Tom was talking about as he said, “So these rare recordings, plus a whole treasure trove of Dylan juvenilia, are owned by your grandmother, but she issued a statement after he died that she has no plans to release them.”

“My grandmother?” Marie pictured her grandmother’s