Save Me, Kurt Cobain Read online

  “See, Nico?” Verne said. “She never, ever, wanted to leave you.” He took my hand and squeezed it tight, as if I were a little girl again, wearing pink mittens attached with a string.

  It seemed cruel that my mother’s love of wild places led her to be buried in an unmarked grave, far from anyone who loved her. There was no apology, per se, from Wayne Cruickshank, but there was an acknowledgment in the press: “It was an accident. I panicked.” Some of the details made it into the newspaper. For example, Cruickshank buried her body in Garibaldi Park, but first he removed her MedicAlert bracelet. It was as if he wanted a memento, or perhaps to torture himself with the guilt. I couldn’t understand most people, let alone a man who killed animals for fun.

  The incident had not dimmed his taste for hunting, either. Cruickshank remained an active member of the Highway 99 Rod and Gun Club, a group that quickly put out a press release condemning his illegal and immoral behavior and banning him for life. Hunters don’t kill people; people kill people seemed to be the reasoning. Cruickshank claimed he was debilitated by his own guilt, plagued by alternating bouts of nightmares or insomnia, and frequent panic attacks. When he saw my photo in the paper, he could no longer bear the guilt, or so he said, and decided to return the bracelet to me. Fortunately for us, he was stupid enough to get caught.

  Perhaps my mother’s own parents, my grandparents, feared she would die of a bee sting, especially since she so loved the outdoors. Yet she died in the dead of winter, hiking alone in the snow, surely not a bee in sight. What had she thought as she walked in the woods? She was probably looking forward to seeing Janey up in Whistler. Was she thinking about Nicola at home, waiting? Did she remember her promise to me and plan to keep it?

  They were going to dig up her body. Verne didn’t want me to know that, but I did. What choice did they have?

  I couldn’t sleep the night after hearing the truth, or the next. Something bad would happen to Wayne Cruickshank, the hunter, but it could never be enough. I hated him. He took my young, beautiful mother away, and then he panicked, and then he lied. Then he nursed the lie for years, putting me, and Verne, and Gillian, and Janey, and so many people through agony.

  There would be a long list of charges against Cruickshank, including criminal negligence causing death and offering an indignity to a body. The rest didn’t register with me after I heard that last one. Both my mother and Kurt Cobain died from a gunshot, if he was really dead. I was getting confused about what I believed. I thought of Cobain’s hunting cap, the one he wore ironically as part of his disguise, and got a chill.

  After the news about my mother broke, Obe was constantly on me, phoning, emailing, and showing up at the door. He had put his new extracurricular activities on hold.

  “So what are you going to do next, Nico? You have to think about tomorrow, too. Not just the past.”

  Since when did Obe talk like an Oprah guest? I could think of nothing to look forward to anymore. Even small things that I used to enjoy, like strawberry milk, made me sick. The world was completely drained of color, like The Wizard of Oz during the tornado scene. I was having pitchforks of stomach pain all the time, not just once in a while. I thought everyone else had been given some map, some diagram, to show them how to act.

  “Verne is talking about buying a fixer-upper town house. He might have enough for a down payment. He thinks it would help to get out of this neighborhood.”

  “Get away from Mrs. Lemonpucker downstairs, too,” said Obe, trying to make me laugh, so I snorted to please him.

  “Sean, that guy I met in Seattle, keeps saying he’s going to come visit. Not sure when. I told him there was news about my mother, but I don’t want to explain it to him yet.”

  “Whooo,” said Obe, or something to that effect. He seemed to want everyone to be coupled up now that he had that girl in Winnipeg, Kimber, who seemed remarkably average. Perhaps that was what he’d been waiting for: a kind, conventional girl.

  “I do want to see where it happened,” I said after a moment.

  “Are you sure about that?” asked Obe. He’d gotten an ear pierced, and there was a halo of red inflammation at the site. I had been surprised, and wondered if the girlfriend approved. It was unlike Obe to put such effort into his appearance. Perhaps we were drifting apart. Things had been different since I returned. We weren’t seven years old anymore, or even eleven, riding our crappy bikes around town.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Do you want to ask the Ouija, find out if you should?” he asked, holding a cup of tea I’d given him. He reminded me so much of a little old lady right then that I laughed.

  “I think I don’t want to know if it’s a good idea. I just want to do it,” I said. “Sometimes that’s better. I was thinking of going at March break, but maybe I’ll wait until the snow melts, I don’t know. Everything seems to take a long time.”

  “Is Verne doing the night shift?”

  “No, he’s on days. He’ll be home for dinner. He’s trying not to work nights. The title of my memoir will be Everyone’s Worried About Nico.”

  “Speaking of which, don’t you have a history essay due tomorrow?”

  “I’m finding it hard to concentrate, Obe. Or give a shit about school.”

  “I can stay until Verne gets here. Let’s put on a disc and I’ll study while you type.”

  Obe often did several things at once: eating, studying, listening to music, talking on the phone.

  I would try. I would try to put it from my mind. My mother had been shot like an animal. She had been buried in the ground, left alone, while people walked above her, season after season. She would never come back. Annalee had broken her promise.

  We went to my room, and I turned on my laptop. Obe sat on my bed reading a physics text while I typed. All the letters swarmed together on the screen like black ants. Maybe one day soon I would become the girl everyone had expected me to be: a girl who flunked out of school and got into trouble.

  I made it to March break, despite my own predictions. I wasn’t failing my classes, not yet, but I wasn’t excelling. I was getting by. I carried the photo of my mother and Kurt Cobain at the concert in my wallet at all times as my protective talisman. I kept checking the Polaroid to make sure the image hadn’t faded. Sean sent me regular emails, pretending to have seen Kurt Cobain around Seattle. Saw Kurt today standing in front of Zig Zag Café. He was playing hacky sack, that kind of thing. He meant it to be funny, like Elvis sightings, or Where’s Waldo?, but it kind of stung. I couldn’t tell him why, though. Obe would have understood, but Obe and I had known each other forever. Sean didn’t know me well enough to ask me tough questions or have expectations, which made him my favorite person in the world at that time. He said he planned to see his brother during spring break, and sure enough, after a brief period of being grounded for staying out all night, he emailed to say he was on his way. Coming 2 Victoria for 3 days to see my bro. R U in town? Let’s meet up. Arriving Friday….

  Spring had nosed its way into Victoria, gently. First the snowdrops with their fairy caps, then the purple and yellow crocuses. Then came the tiny forget-me-nots, as blue as Cobain’s eyes. Many of the girls at school had already declared it tank-top weather, stripping down to the limits of the dress code.

  At the sound of the last bell, the hallways flooded with kids trying to get out of there, off for family vacations, or babysitting jobs, or whatever. Obe, to his disappointment, was not going to Winnipeg due to a shortage of funds. Instead, he’d be stocking shelves at a shoe store, his new gig. His girlfriend, Kimmy or whatever, seemed to regard this change of plans as some kind of last straw and broke things off, deeming the entire affair a “winter fling.” Verne was working most of the days, though he was home with a spring cold that afternoon. We’d made plans to see a few houses for sale. He’d been serious about that, and had already secured a real estate agent. Staring into the bowels of my locker, I grabbed a couple of empty Tupperware containers and my sketchbook.

&nb
sp; I wouldn’t miss the place. People had finally stopped talking about me. I was ignored again. I slammed my locker door shut and secured my headphones, drowning out all the chatter: the plans being made, the upcoming parties. The volume was cranked in case anyone should utter the phrase “Freako Nico.”

  I watched my own Converse slipping down the hall, tile by tile, while listening to the Pixies’ “Where Is my Mind?” which was kind of my school theme song. I scampered down the front steps. It was warm and sunny, and the air outside smelled like soil the way spring does, a relief from the hallway stench of banana peels and sawdust.

  Girls were screaming from the soccer field. Some kind of end-of-school game was going on, girls versus guys (or “chicks against dicks,” depending on who described the event). It actually might have been a nice day to do something like that, though I had not been invited. I could see Liam already hotdogging, thumping the ball on his knee. I was not opposed to sports for others, but I was allergic to joining anything. Or at least, I told myself I was. A pair of satiny beige underwear had fallen out of a girl’s bag, and Liam scooped it up off the grass and put it on his head, then bounced the ball again, grinning. I felt bad for the underwear, which made Liam look like a sad Kojak, that bald TV detective guy. At least Liam had finally found a use for his head.

  Standing a few feet away from Liam was the thin, tall guy, the one who liked soccer. He had an English accent and he drew. Oh yeah, Bryan. I had forgotten the name of my own secret crush. He looked up at me just as Liam booted the ball. It bounced off his sternum, causing him to turn red.

  I stopped to watch as the teams assembled, letting the Pixies’ distortion fill my head. There were about thirty kids gathered. The girls’ team had all put their hair in braids, as if they were part of some tribe. The ones with short hair wore paisley kerchiefs. For some reason the fact that they’d planned those details made my eyes sting. They belonged to something, even if it was just for a day. I had always made fun of teams and groups. The song ended and I took off my headphones to adjust them.

  I heard a sound like a needle dragging across a record. It was a guy on a skateboard heading toward me, slicing down the sidewalk. I looked around. It was the same old Fernwood neighborhood: the brightly painted heritage houses, the old theater that used to be a church. I turned to look behind me, but no one was there. The guy was coming straight toward me.

  There was a noise like vup tup as he flipped the board up and into his hand. He had on one of those puffy trucker hats that had been hip, then not, and then were hip again.

  “Hey, Nico,” said Sean, as if we’d just seen each other that morning. He looked older than I remembered, stronger. He was wearing a thin white T-shirt, army pants, a navy hoodie tied at his waist. “Your dad said you’d be here. My brother knew where the school was.”

  I couldn’t talk for a minute. I could feel everyone watching me, waiting to see how this was going to play out.

  “You called my dad?” I asked, remembering as I said it that Verne was at home, no doubt guzzling hot lemon drinks. He was a real baby about colds. I was aware of thirty pairs of eyes latching onto me. All the pregame posturing and preparation had slammed to a halt.

  Sean turned to survey the field, suddenly aware of all the people, and then squinted at Liam with a puzzled look that morphed into disdain. If there had been a thought bubble over Sean, it would have read: Dude. That is pitiful. Liam flung the underwear back to the ground.

  Sean shook his head as if making up his mind about something, and then leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. I forgot what I’d been about to say.

  We must have started walking. My legs were moving. He reached for my hand.

  “Do you want to get a coffee?” I asked, returning to my body again.

  Over the following weeks, my social status at school had an uptick. It might have been due to the Sean sighting, or maybe I just stopped caring so much what people thought. In any case, it was better. Sean and I emailed, and he tried to get me to join this kind of friendship bulletin board on the Internet that American kids were into, and some kids here, too. I didn’t need to fill my head with Nirvana so much, but sometimes I imagined what Cobain might say about certain things, like Myspace. (“No one owns space, Nico,” or perhaps a less poetic “That’s fucking fucked.”)

  I didn’t need a website to advertise that I had, like, three friends. Verne and I had a nasty fight that ended up with him cutting off my Internet, because I kept searching Cobain, and Jasper Jameson, and music websites, and he said that was it until I started getting grades that reflected my “smarts.” I had to check “the email” at the library, which I didn’t really mind because the downtown library is a lively place, filled with people Gillian would call “marginalized.” Obe went from just playing Guitar Hero to actually strumming a real guitar.

  One afternoon in May the phone rang when I was home alone. I remember my nails were wet because I’d painted them (a rather sparkly shade of violet) in a fit of homework procrastination. When I picked up the receiver, there was silence, then someone playing the opening chords of “Redemption Song.” I was confused, and then I realized who it was. Obe. I smiled into the phone until he stopped. Then he started laughing. “That’s all I learned, Nico.”

  My grades got better and I made it to the summer. I babysat. I applied for a job at the grocery store and got it, and I’d often see the familiar elderlies from the neighborhood counting their quarters for premade sandwiches from the deli section. I went to Seattle to see Gillian again, this time with Verne, who met Sean briefly when we were walking past the Armory. Sean was working, so he couldn’t talk long, but he and I had coffee later during his break while Verne and Gillian went back to the condo to start dinner.

  We sat outside on a bench, and I could tell by the way we sat apart, side by side, as if we were fishing companions on a dock, that we weren’t going to be boyfriend/girlfriend. After a few minutes, he started telling me about this girl he’d started seeing who was seventeen and played bass. What I thought was: Why do these chicks always play bass? Can’t they be good at archery, or beekeeping, or something else?

  What I said was: “She sounds really cool.” And I didn’t feel like throwing myself from the top of the Space Needle. Maybe I had been through too much, or maybe Sean and I were meant to be friends.

  “Can I walk you back to your aunt’s?” he asked when his break was over.

  “No thanks,” I said. “Don’t get in trouble with your boss. I think I know the lay of the land. Maybe I’ll stop and have a snakebite at the Five Point,” I said, to make him laugh.

  And he waved as I walked away, which was nice, and when he couldn’t see I started to cry, I guess because that hadn’t worked out, and maybe the next thing wouldn’t work out, and also because I was convinced that no guy would really like me, and also that my summer would be boring and sad. Still, it was nice to walk into Gillian’s place and have Verne there, too. I tried to get him to ask her if she had a boyfriend, but he wouldn’t. Gillian asked the questions, thank you very much. Verne slept on a cot in Gillian’s living room, and I took the guest room again, and it felt cozy even though we were all in different rooms, and I think Gillian had finally forgiven me.

  While listening to music on the ferry ride home, I had another memory, one that had been lost in a crack. I thought I remembered lying in an orange tent filled with light, listening to my mother talking, and Verne, too, in low voices. I heard a hissing sound as they conversed, and then tin clattering, then soft laughter.

  “Yes,” said Verne, looking bewildered when I asked. “We went camping when you were three, at China Beach. You screamed blue murder when I showed you a fish I’d caught.”

  I closed my eyes and replayed the memory, the orange light, the laughter, while the Clipper pulled us home. I wondered if ferries brought me good luck after all.

  Not long after that July trip, we held a memorial service for my mother at the top of Mount Doug, a viewpoint overlooking the city. J
aney, Gillian, Obe, Grandma Irene, and I attended. We wanted to keep it private. It was a sunny, blustery day, and I imagined the wind scouring all the years of sadness from my skin. Janey and my dad embraced, maybe for the first time ever, and I had to look away, unable to bear witnessing how much they still missed her. I don’t think it gets easier. I think survival is just habit: you survived one day, so surely you can survive another. Until you build your confidence up.

  After the sentencing, the newspapers ran a photo of Wayne Cruickshank. I stared at the photos of his piggish eyes and his lopsided mustache. I was sorry that I couldn’t forget his face. Some nights when my stomach ached, I’d lie awake thinking about my time with Cobain: the turtles in the bathroom, the smell of the woodstove, the sound of trees sweeping the windows, and the layers of quiet. I don’t think I could find my way back to the cabin again, but I’ve never had a good sense of direction.

  Obe passed his driver’s test that summer, on his first try, and Nadia even let him borrow her little rusty VW Rabbit to drive around town. Obe’s parallel parking was a thing to behold, precise and confident. It seemed strange to be driving around with him, just the two of us, and when I saw a couple of kids riding their bikes past the linen supply store, I did a double take, remembering us with our keys strung around our necks.

  We drove to the breakwater, cranking Obe’s new favorite album, Reconstruction Site by the Weakerthans, the band he’d discovered in Winnipeg.

  “Do you miss Kimmy?” I asked Obe. I had been selfish, I realized, not asking him about the breakup.

  “Her name is Kimber, actually. And honestly, not as much as I thought I would.”

  “You know, Obe, we can talk about you for a change. You don’t have to worry about me anymore.” I stared at his long fingers gripping the steering wheel at ten o’clock and two o’clock.

  “I’ve been worrying about you a long time, Nico Cavan,” he said, in his movie announcer voice. “And I intend to continue.”