Save Me, Kurt Cobain Read online

  Verne watched the TV news just before dinnertime. I said I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want to see me. Then Verne made quesadillas and salad.

  “I thought you looked a lot like her, when I saw you on TV,” he said, chewing a piece of lettuce.

  My hair was now like skim milk, blond-white with a blue tinge.

  “Can you tell me something about her?”

  “Well,” he said. “You know she liked the outdoors. Her parents were quite the hikers, too; that’s partly why they immigrated to this part of the country.”

  I vaguely remembered seeing a thick green sleeping bag that was said to belong to my mother’s father. I wondered where it had been stored.

  “She liked to sing to you. Sometimes nursery rhymes, or folk songs, or some of the rock music she liked.”

  “I remember her singing ‘Seasons in the Sun,’ ” I said.

  “She called you Little Early because you were little.”

  “And I woke up early.”

  “No, actually, it was because you arrived early. We didn’t even have a crib yet.”

  “Why couldn’t you tell me about her?”

  “It was too hard, Nico. I hoped they would find her. I really thought they would find her. Then I didn’t want you to know that—”

  “That what?”

  “That she was going to leave me. I wanted you to think we were happy.” He said this in a flat tone, as if he’d rehearsed it so many times that saying it was as simple as a sigh. “I wanted you to believe we were a happy family.”

  “Maybe we were,” I said, wanting to believe it too. Verne half smiled. Verne was usually too hesitant to give life a whole smile. One biographer of Kurt Cobain said few photographs in existence captured how wide his smile could be. You could see it in his childhood photos, a joyous grin from ear to ear; then something happened. Or maybe the people taking the pictures wanted something different. Certainly no rock photographers would ask Kurt Cobain, guitar deity and lead singer of Nirvana, to beam as if someone had just promised him Dairy Queen and a free puppy.

  My mother always smiled with her lips closed, though I am told she had white, straight teeth. Had she been happy when she left me that day when I was four? If she had been happy, why did she leave? It made no sense. I needed Obe back home to listen, though he was probably tired of hearing about my problems. He had his own issues. If we ever used the Ouija board again, I thought, I would ask more about Obe’s future. Except I knew we would never use the board again. Things were different. I was done with that.

  I opened up my scratched secondhand laptop. I was glad it hadn’t been in the stolen backpack. I searched John Simon Ritchie, the name on the pill bottles. Turned out he was better known as Sid Vicious, that guy from the Sex Pistols. He died in 1979, so some doctor was being conned. Then I tried Jasper Jameson. The third suggested search term was Jasper Jameson net worth, so I tried that. The answer was $5.5 million. Apparently writing thrillers could be lucrative. Then I searched Daniel O’Ryan+Seattle. The search produced hundreds of hits, among them a publishing blog suggesting it was the real name of Jasper Jameson, bestselling author. Jameson, an eccentric, had chosen to stay out of the public eye despite creating seven bestselling thrillers published in thirty-two countries, three optioned for film. Hometown: Tacoma, Washington. Age: forty. Was once a high school teacher. Upcoming book: untitled, publication fall 2007. He was notorious for looking disheveled and poor, even though he was supposedly loaded. In 2004, there were rumors that he turned up at the Sundance Film Festival, where a movie based on one of his books was premiering. “That’s Jasper Jameson?” one festivalgoer is reported as saying. “He looks like a wino.”

  The site had a caveat suggesting that the bio was incomplete, and anyone with more information should write in. I tried another search of Jasper Jameson. I clicked on a celebrity gossip site: Jasper Jameson’s real identity has been fraught with mystery and speculation. He is said to retreat to isolated rural areas to write free from the public eye.

  It was confusing, all these aliases. Then there were the names on the prescription meds. It seemed just as well that Cobain wasn’t a high school teacher anymore. Still, I wanted to see him again. He was the first adult who was not a relative who had known me for me and liked me, besides Obe’s mom. I wondered if Detective Stanton would tell me where Cobain had gone. I only knew that the police had let him go. I had told them…well, nothing. I had said he had given me a ride, and that he’d been kind, and nothing had happened. How could I tell Stanton that I wanted to see him, Cobain/Jameson/O’Ryan? Could I say I wanted to thank him? That might get Cobain in trouble. I did not want that. He had done enough.

  Obe, needless to say, was pissed at me when he heard the whole story, or most of it. He had an accordion file of grievances. I had not communicated with him about meeting Sean; running away; sleeping rough; hanging out in a cabin near Nanaimo with, in his words, “a psycho in a Pontiac Phoenix”; or finding Janey and Ange. I filled him in on all these things while we sat cross-legged in my living room, he nursing an instant coffee, me with a strawberry Quik. I did not mention the name Kurt Cobain to Obe. I figured you have to keep some things to yourself, like kindling inside for when you need it. I told Obe only that the man I met on the ferry was an artist and a writer and that no one else knew about my stay with him.

  “Obe, you have to promise not to tell anyone about the cabin. They’ll go after him. It could be life or death,” I added. “Swear on the name of that girl at school you like. What’s her name?” I felt as if we had been apart for months.

  “I don’t like her anymore,” he said swiftly. “I met a girl in Winnipeg. Kimber.” Obe looked wistful at the mention of her name. “We met at a party I went to with my cousin. We…” He paused for dramatic effect. “Hit it off.”

  “Obe!” I shrieked. “You didn’t!”

  “No, or yes, depending on what you’re asking. I’m going back at March break to see my grandparents again.” Obe had a smile on his face as wide as a fruit bowl.

  “Does she like good music?” I asked, feeling a slight rustle in my gut. I wasn’t sure I wanted to share Obe.

  “I’m helping her with that,” he said, not meeting my eyes.

  “That’s great, Obe,” I said. “I’d like to meet her.”

  “Thanks, Nico. It might not work out, but I’d rather just enjoy this feeling for a while and not worry about it.”

  I gave him a hug, quickly, just around the shoulders. I loved Obe, but I had trouble telling him so. The hug surprised him, and he smiled his sweet, lopsided smile.

  “Okay, well, so, let’s listen to some music. I got an album by Winnipeg’s own the Weakerthans while I was away. It is totally, utterly awesome,” he said. “Want to hear?”

  Yes.

  A lot of people call Nirvana a Seattle band, but that’s not where they began. Kris and Kurt were about my age when they started a band, and that was in Aberdeen. Then they both lived in Olympia. Seattle was later. It was, however, where the body of Kurt Cobain was reportedly found. It was discovered April 8, 1994, in the greenhouse above the garage of his Lake Washington mansion, which he shared with his wife and baby, a nanny or two, and some drug dealers and junkies who came and went. In the days before, Kurt Cobain had jumped the wall of a drug rehab center in California and gotten on a plane back to Seattle. His wife had frozen his credit cards. At the airport, he signed autographs for a few fans. Courtney Love was in Los Angeles but hired a private investigator to search Seattle for her husband.

  According to media reports, there was a shotgun across his body. A note was found at the scene. There was a can of root beer and some heroin paraphernalia. His death was ruled suicide, but others suggested it was foul play. The circumstances of his death have been put under a microscope over and over, just like the deaths of John F. Kennedy, John Lennon, Princess Diana, and Jesus Christ. I read that Kurt Cobain went through a religious phase as a devout Christian while in high school. He later married Courtney
Love in his pajamas on Waikiki Beach. That fact is better known.

  An electrician named Gary Smith installing an alarm system on the property supposedly discovered Cobain’s body. Upon hearing the news, someone from the electrician’s company tipped off a local Seattle radio station, saying they’d better get some great concert tickets for that scoop.

  Who wouldn’t want to leave a world with that kind of heartless greed? It would be no wonder if Kurt Cobain opted out. If the man I met on the ferry was Kurt Cobain but had reinvented himself as Jasper Jameson, bestselling author, he was a millionaire recluse again, like it or not. And even if he was Jasper Jameson (but really Daniel O’Ryan, divorced former high school teacher), then he was still on the run from fame, from life. I might never see him again.

  Nirvana’s music showed a mastery of the soft/loud: a screeching chorus, grinding guitar, and then an interlude of quiet. If you read you’ll judge, Kurt Cobain wrote on his journal. The diary was not meant for anyone to read. The art was what he left behind, the songs. Some accounts make Kurt Cobain sound deranged, an addict unable to care for himself, let alone a child. Or was he the musical genius of his time? He was a man who loved animals and children, his grandmother, a good joke. He supported feminism and gay rights and told homophobes and racists not to buy Nirvana albums. He was a cheerful, beloved child whose world was ripped apart by divorce. Maybe it’s not fair to judge the dead. Gone is gone.

  “I’m going away. But I’ll be back before these flowers wilt,” Annalee had told me. And I wonder, what if I had cried? I was only four, after all. What if I had thrown myself on the ground, or knocked over the flowers?

  Would she have stayed?

  Would she be alive?

  Here I go, I could say into the black. The black could be soothing, like a moonless night over the ocean, or sad, like dilated pupils. It could be terrifying: the tar-colored gums of feral dogs. We don’t know. I think about it, though. Oblivion. Kurt Cobain’s cousin said she thought he was bipolar, which means you swing between being sad and happy. Maybe my aunt would say the same thing about me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Gillian asked me over the phone. She was angry, most of all because she didn’t think I kept secrets from her. But of course, I did. We all keep secrets. I hated hurting Gillian. I imagined her in her neat condo holding the phone, standing in her fit, wide-legged stance, always ready for anything.

  “I didn’t know. It was all last-minute. An impulse, I guess.” Runs in the family, I thought, but did not say. “I’m sorry,” I added.

  “Oh, Nico,” she sighed. I imagined her running her hand through that red hair. “I hope Verne will let you come see me again someday. You’ve put that all in jeopardy.”

  “I know.” I just wanted her to forgive me. I needed her. “Maybe you could come visit us at Easter?” An offering.

  “We’ll see,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re not hurt.” The last word came out as a sob. “I read about all those women going missing in Vancouver. I didn’t know what to think. It made me glad I don’t have children.”

  I waited. It was true that having children seemed to make people miserable, from everything I could gather, as did being married. Buried.

  “I’m sorry, Nico. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not just children, it’s caring about anyone. It leaves you vulnerable. I guess you could care about nobody, about nothing, and you’d never worry and never feel pain,” she said. “I see a lot of people at the hospital looking for that.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It would be easier.”

  “Just promise me you won’t do that again, run away. Call me and we’ll run away together, okay?”

  Okay, Gillian.

  Kurt Cobain also had an aunt who loved him, Mari. She was a singer and helped him record at her home, both when he was a toddler and when he was older. She said that for Kurt, fame was like being sent into space without a spacesuit or spaceship. She and many other people loved him as best they could. He was not an abandoned man. That was not an excuse. If Kurt Cobain was dead, if he was really dead…The thought made me panic. The last song Nirvana ever recorded, “You Know You’re Right,” was released years after Cobain’s death. In it, the singer promises not to bother you and not to follow. “Pain,” he sings in the chorus, again and again, stretching out the word so the syllables form a landscape.

  “Nico,” I heard Verne saying. “Nico, I think we should sit and enjoy this Christmas tree. Otherwise a perfectly good pine died in vain.”

  “I’ll be there in a minute,” I said, cupping the receiver. “Wait for me.”

  The first day of school reminded me of the scene from The Wizard of Oz, when the sinister trees come to life and snark at Dorothy for picking one of their apples. Clusters of students stood together in the hall, rooted, and when I passed them, head down, they would whisper: “That’s the girl. That’s the girl.” But they wouldn’t look my way. All the other kids seemed to be wearing brand-new clothes. One girl rocked a fancy purple fleece with the tag still sticking out behind the neck. Normally, that tag would have been ridiculed, but hey, Nico Cavan had run away to Vancouver and been hauled home by the cops.

  I’d spent a quiet New Year’s Eve with Obe, and on New Year’s Day Verne assigned me various duties, including visiting Grandma Irene and helping with grocery shopping. Then I got to vacuum. Verne could be tough. Going to school was not negotiable. I had nowhere to run, so I went.

  Obe had shown up at my house at eight-thirty a.m., as was customary on school days, as if nothing had happened. Cold rain spat down. I had lost most of my favorite clothes with my backpack. Somewhere, a homeless man was walking around Vancouver in my vintage Sonic Youth T-shirt. I planned to keep that fact from Obe for as long as possible. I was learning how to keep secrets.

  After school I trudged home, pining for my missing CDs. I felt as if something should happen. I’d been through so much, yet nothing had changed. On the corner there was a pile of four empty needle casings sticking straight up like blue weeds. Obe had gone off somewhere to play this game called Guitar Hero, which Sean also reported being hooked on. (You must try it, Nico! he wrote.) Apparently Obe now had another friend besides me, a guy from his French class.

  The whole house still smelled of the vegetarian chili we’d eaten the night before. I sat on the carpet with my laptop and read the news articles about myself, even though I’d said I wouldn’t. When a person goes missing, a lot happens at once. The police notify the bus lines, the ferries, the airports, and the taxi companies. They check bank accounts and look for credit-card transactions. They track cell phone use. It was amazing they hadn’t caught me sooner.

  One of the papers had a quote from Liam, that dim guy in grade 11. “ ‘Nico always seemed kind of sad,’ said Liam Tuck, 16, a student at Victoria High. ‘I think she had a case of peer pressure.’ ”

  Liam made peer pressure sound like a medical condition. The story said that when a person goes missing, the case boils down to one of four theories. They are presumed to have committed suicide, run away, been murdered, or had an accident. Of those four, I would choose to believe my mother ran away, because then she could still be alive. Alive and wanting nothing to do with me, obviously, but alive. Both she and I had escaped on ferries. I guess that’s what happens when you live on an island.

  I was tired. My bones ached. I put In Utero into my CD player and lay on my bed, letting the music drown out the crash of my thoughts. I listened to it once, then started again, when I heard a clatter at the door. I grabbed the baseball bat I kept in my closet. Then I heard a key turning. It was Verne.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “Thought you were on until eleven tonight.” He’d been working split shifts lately.

  “I booked off early. Thought we’d have dinner together. You do your homework. I’ll heat up the chili and make a salad.”

  Then he walked into the kitchen. He might have made a good cop. He was level-headed and nev
er acted on impulse. I used to be the same.

  By the end of January, my blue hair was a memory and the dishwater blond was back. Obe continued to adore his mademoiselle in Winnipeg, and Gillian seemed to have forgiven me, even asking if I could come visit at Easter, perhaps with Verne. Sean had been emailing, just short messages about bands he’d seen or climbs he was planning to do. I checked my email for his messages more often than I cared to admit, smitten with the idea of him. I still had the photo of my mother and Kurt Cobain, and I glanced at it almost every night before bed, a kind of talisman, unless I fell asleep over my sketchbook.

  Using an old childhood photo of Gillian and Verne, I made a painting of them as children, but with their older selves looming in the background. I gave it to Verne as a late Christmas present, and he liked it. In the real photo, he appeared sad, one arm around Gillian, who had her hair in two straight braids and was missing her front teeth. When I painted Verne as a child, I gave him a slight smile. It was the least I could do.

  “Nico,” he said, holding the painting in front of him like a cafeteria tray. “I’m no expert, but you could really have something.”

  Verne had started talking about trying to buy a town house in Vic West, maybe even a place close to the ocean instead of close to mattress outlets and linen supply depots. And I had done some paintings that I didn’t hate. Some were pretty strange, so I kept those to myself.

  A part of me the size of an eyelash dared to believe that my mother was still alive. The rest of me slammed down the gavel, insisting that she was dead or did not want to be found. Why had she gone? And worst of all, had she suffered, or was she suffering now?

  I became used to my routine again. My sense of adventure had dulled. I plodded along. Early in February I arrived home in the drizzle to find a piece of paper stuck on our door. I never expected good news. Were we being evicted? No, we weren’t rich, but we weren’t that poor.