Save Me, Kurt Cobain Read online

  Somehow, my mother and I had found the same music. Maybe four out of five therapists would say I’d subconsciously searched out the music from her time; what did it matter? We’d landed in the same place. The Polaroid rested on my leg, under my hand. I’d clamped it there as if I’d trapped a moth to be carried outside. Her camera must have been vintage, even then. I lifted up the photo. It felt thick, so I picked at the bottom with my thumbnail. I uncovered another photo stuck to the first, equally grainy. This one showed a microphone, a stage light, and a man’s hand reaching out. Then there was my mother’s profile: the sloping nose, her flawless teeth. There was her hand, the hand of a young, beautiful girl, Annalee, also reaching out. Reaching out to Kurt Cobain.

  I stopped the CD so I could just sit and stare at the photo. The noise of the ship filled my ears: the children squabbling, adults getting boisterous on the beer or wine, people becoming animated by the excitement of drawing closer or getting farther away from home.

  In the photo, Cobain’s hair is cut just short of his jawline. It is a moon-white blond. He wears a dark sweatshirt. His mouth is just over the microphone. Annalee would have been the most beautiful girl in the club. She always was, to hear my aunt talk. The photos I have seen (and memorized) show a young woman who liked to wear beaded necklaces and gazed at the camera shyly behind her long lashes, as if keeping a secret. My favorite photo of the two of us was taken at a local park when I was almost three. In it, my mother is holding me up in the air like a prize she has just won. I’m wearing a white cardigan over a yellow dress with white ankle socks and pink shoes. She has clipped tiny butterfly barrettes into my wispy white hair. We’re both smiling. I don’t remember the day it was taken. It is not one of my memories.

  Verne confirmed my mother’s beauty, though he could provide no great details, as if Annalee were an old hope chest that he could not bear to open, its contents left unexamined. The attic. Was it possible there were more boxes of her belongings? By 1991, the year of the concert, Annalee would have been dating Verne, who at the time was taking college courses, working as a security guard, and also sometimes driving a truck delivering frozen foods to various institutions in Greater Victoria, old-age homes and the like. When work ethic was being handed out, Verne got in line twice.

  The bar where the concert was held, the Forge, would have been filled with smoke, though Annalee shunned cigarettes. She did occasionally enjoy a drink called a snakebite, a mix of cider and lager. Perhaps that stemmed from her British heritage. I had vowed to order one someday. The lady will have a snakebite.

  A child began screaming, “I had it! I had it!” It was seven p.m. I felt like screaming the same words, for there was a thought dragging into my head, hopping on crutches into my consciousness. I had memorized a card catalog of details about Kurt Cobain: How he loved strawberry milk, just like me. How he was small and thin, just like me, and was obsessed with art.

  A woman across from me wearing shiny red boots had doused herself in drugstore perfume. It was hard to breathe. She was clearly a shopper, with shiny red nails that matched her boots, her faux-fur-trimmed vest and leather bag. You could tell a person’s style by the quality of their bag. Mine was a hand-me-down knapsack with a yellow button on it that read I Love Nanaimo, which I thought was funny, because love seemed like a pretty strong word when it came to Nanaimo, a city up Vancouver Island that was famous for its annual bathtub race.

  Rummaging in my grubby knapsack, I finally found the CD of Bleach. It was their debut, which sounds so fresh and hopeful—the way I was supposed to feel at my age. Kurt Cobain named the album after seeing an AIDS prevention sign warning drug users to “Bleach your works.” I had been putting off listening to it, her copy. I had been saving it, even though I already knew every song.

  The third song on it is “About a Girl,” which Cobain wrote after listening to the Beatles all day, and some critics say it’s one of his finest songs. It was amazing that I’d finished school that term. I’d read about Kurt Cobain obsessively, and the Internet always had more, offering up millions of hits. You could spend hours trying to decide on his brand of cigarettes or his sexual preferences, let alone whether he was murdered.

  I turned the album over and stared at it closely, realizing it was different from mine. There was writing on it, scratched in soft green pencil: For Annalee, Kurt Cobain. I stared, thinking the letters would disappear. The K looked as if it were kicking the U. The C looped. There was a bent peace sign scrawled at the bottom. I tried to explain it away. Perhaps her girlfriend had scrawled it as a joke. I knew she’d had a good friend, Janey, who’d moved away just after I was born.

  I raised myself up on Bambi legs, bumping into tables on my way to the bathroom. I banged my hipbone on the sink in the coffin-sized washroom. After peeing for what seemed like several minutes, I washed my hands with the Barbie-pink soap from the dispenser, then stuck my head under the tap under the tiny sink. It was time. I undid the plastic wrap and tossed it in the garbage next to an orange peel and a disposable diaper. I felt a head rush as I straightened up, my hair now smelling like pink public bathroom soap instead of sweet fruit. Scrubbing my head with the paper towel made the paper fiber disintegrate in my hair. I shook my head, spraying droplets on the mirror.

  My hair in the white fluorescent light was teal, almost jade, falling just to my jawline. My hair was the color of a snow cone. Tucking a strand behind my ear, I didn’t recognize the girl in the mirror: She was smiling. Heads turned as I strode back to my seat, or so I imagined. If Sean was surprised he didn’t show it, giving me one brisk nod.

  He studied me a moment, then pulled off his headphones.

  “Wow,” said Sean. “You didn’t tell me you were so cute.”

  My cheeks glowed like a burner on high.

  “Needed a change,” I mumbled.

  Sean seemed to take this response as an invitation. He moved over to take the seat next to me. I didn’t mind. “What are you doing in Seattle?” he asked.

  “Visiting my aunt. She’s a nurse.”

  “Where ’bouts?” he asked. The way he said it made me think he was Canadian.

  “She has a condo in Belltown.” Why was I telling him this? I was breaking every rule about strange young men.

  “You live in Victoria? Do a lot of chicks there have blue hair?”

  “Yeah, and yeah. But in Victoria it’s the old ladies.”

  “My older brother is working there at the Empress Hotel, so I went to visit him. We’ve got dual citizenship ’cause of my mom.”

  I bristled at the word mom, as I sometimes did. You’d think I would be used to being motherless, but you’d be wrong. Until I knew what happened to her, I would always be waiting. Every time the mail arrived. Every time the phone rang. Just thinking about her made me want to fill my head with Nirvana. I knew other kids who’d had a parent take off, deadbeat dads and all that, but none of them had just disappeared.

  “I’ll take you there, if you want,” Sean was saying. He looked at me sideways, kind of shy all of a sudden.

  “Sorry, take me where?”

  “The Space Needle. Then Pike Place Market. We can get tattoos.” He smiled and tapped his Doc Martens again.

  “You don’t even know my name.”

  “What’s your name?” he asked. “Or I could just call you Blue.”

  “Nico.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Sean, how old are you?”

  “Just turned sixteen. But I have ID, courtesy of my brother. Best not to ask too many questions.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Score.” Effective fake ID was the holy grail of high school. You could move up several rungs on the social ladder if you had ID. It was better than having clueless parents with a big liquor cabinet or being a kick-ass drummer.

  “So, seriously, I don’t live that far from downtown. I could be your tour guide.”

  “Yeah, m-maybe,” I stuttered. It seemed unlikely my aunt would go for that, but she’d be at the hospit
al during the day. She didn’t have to know. It was a revelation. I had Smurf-blue hair. Anything could happen. I felt a surge of something go through me, a cold stream of happiness.

  “What are you listening to?” He nodded at my Discman, which had been fine three years ago but was now clunky and outdated. Verne had gotten it for me secondhand or something. He didn’t like to acknowledge that we had trouble affording extras. We had never gone to a food bank, true, but I’d worn a lot of consignment-store rain boots and eaten a plantation’s worth of peanut butter.

  “Nirvana,” I said, looking at his eyes, which were a watery green. I had vowed to stop being hesitant about my retro taste in music. During a year that saw the lame anthem “Bad Day” top the charts, there was no shame. “You?”

  “The Skatalites.”

  I nodded. Obe had one of their discs. It was too boppy for me, but it showed that Sean listened outside the mainstream. And Nirvana was no longer mainstream, not in my world. Sure, roofers would sing along to “Smells Like Teen Spirit” while listening to the classic-rock radio station, but being obsessed with those old bands wasn’t exactly cool at Vic High. Nirvana was something your parents used to like. Kurt Cobain, on the other hand, had retained his cool by his grand exit through the greenhouse. He never got old.

  “My mother loved Nirvana,” I blurted out.

  Why was I such an idiot? I never mentioned my mother.

  “Cool. My mother loves Garth Brooks. There’s always a Garth album in the car. It gives me hives, Nico, actual hives.”

  We were only about a half hour from Seattle. Some of the children had fallen asleep. Adults had finished sharing bottles of wine and were bleary-eyed and subdued.

  “I could probably meet you after my aunt goes to work,” I said, surprised at my own boldness. I hadn’t even begun to think about how Aunt Gillian would react to my blue hair, or if she’d call Verne.

  He wrote a number down on a Clipper flyer that listed duty-free items.

  “Give me a call. I live in Bellevue, but I’m usually downtown. I work part-time at the Armory.”

  I frowned. He was in the military?

  “It’s a kind of historic mall, near Seattle Center.”

  I nodded. I had a strong urge to email Obe. I could make it one word: BOY! Obe would guess what I meant, or close to it.

  Sean had big shoulders, a solid-looking chest under his white T-shirt. He was closer to being a man than the reedy, artsy boys I always crushed on. My targets typically had piercings and a tendency to wear monochrome clothes, like Brit-accent Bryan did. The one thing they usually had in common: a lack of burning interest in Nico Cavan.

  Sean and I traded Discmans for the last few minutes of the ferry ride, switching back just as we landed. The ska made me jittery and awake. There was a boy who seemed interested in me. My mother had gone to see Nirvana and practically held hands with Kurt Cobain. My hair was blue. A lot had happened in three hours. Suddenly, I was starving.

  I lost Sean in the crush to get off the ferry. Standing in line to go through customs, I felt scattered, withering under the frowns of seniors who didn’t care for my teal hair. The whole room smelled like wet luggage and the sweet lily perfume favored by old ladies. The ferry terminal resembled a cattle pen rather than a gateway to international fun, despite the posters advertising the Undersea Gardens and the Empress Hotel in Victoria.

  The border guard did a double-take, looking at my passport, my hair, and my passport again. I should have put my hat back on, but I had forgotten. The man had thick eyebrows, like two black caterpillars. He asked me several questions about my aunt and then asked to see my passport again. I repeated when I expected to return.

  “I’m fifteen. A student in high school.” Hadn’t I already mentioned that? He seemed convinced that I wanted to stay in America. No thanks. Not until they got rid of President Bush.

  “Okay, Nicola Cavan. Welcome to Seattle,” he said, and slapped my passport closed. Dazed, I picked up my packs and swung them on. My knapsack was lumpy and heavy, stuffed with CDs. As I staggered into the terminal, I heard shrieking.

  “Nico! YOUR HAIR!”

  Then Gillian was upon me, holding my face, kissing my cheeks. She was wearing a newsboy-type cap over her auburn curls, and a frosted peach lipstick, both of which made her look a decade younger than her thirty-eight years. Gillian worked at happiness like a job, refusing to let things get her down. She was a kick-ass nurse on staff at Virginia Mason Medical Center, one of the top hospitals. She’d had to take all these tests to get her license in the States, but she’d said it was worth it for the challenges and better pay. I’d wondered if there was more to it, if she was seeing someone in Seattle, but if there was, she never told me. She always said she’d come back to Canada one day.

  “What does my big brother think about this?” she asked, tugging on my hair. Gillian is loud, perhaps from all the years of chaos at the hospital.

  “He doesn’t know,” I said, and laughed, because she was laughing. It was almost impossible not to laugh when Gillian did.

  “Did you eat, girlie girl?” she asked, putting her hand on my shoulder to steer me to the parking lot.

  “I had a snackette.”

  “I don’t do snackettes,” she said as we neared her car, a new-model yellow Volkswagen Beetle. “Let’s stop for some takeout Thai on the way home.”

  I put my slicker hood over my hair against the cold rain. In the rain Olympics, Seattle would take gold, even against Victoria. Gillian said she gave up on flat-ironing her hair when she moved there, but I can’t imagine her ever having the patience to use one of those contraptions.

  She opened the door for me, and I got into the passenger side. My body sighed, the way it does at the end of a journey. Gillian started the car, and I leaned my head back. I watched the raindrops race each other down the window like I did when I was little, listening to the windshield wipers mutter back and forth. Something, or someone, was coming my way. I could feel it.

  While we ate dinner, Gillian kept sneaking looks at my hair. “I shouldn’t admit this, but I like it,” she said gleefully, scraping her plate for the last of her rice. Her Fourth Avenue condo was only six hundred or so square feet, and it was jammed with belongings. Her condo was everything my house wasn’t: new, bright, and owned. There were a lap pool and a fitness room downstairs, complete with sauna. She sometimes had four days off at a time, so she had lots of hobbies. She worked her twelve-hour shifts and then she played hard.

  Gillian had already asked me about boys, my grades, my plans for the future (same vague answer as always, “art school”), and how Obe was doing. (“Obe is Obe.”)

  “Nothing new, Nico?” She looked at me.

  “New?” She couldn’t know about Sean, or the albums. Had Gillian known about the box?

  “Sweetie bun, I meant on the case.” She sighed and stood to clear the kitchen table, which was a stylish glass-topped egg shape just big enough for two.

  “No, nothing,” I said. “Or if there is, no one’s told me.” The file was technically open, but there’d been no rumblings for two years. Back then, someone with her name got a speeding ticket in the town of Hope, BC, of all places. False alarm. Next year it would be more than a decade since she’d been gone. I knew no one thought she was alive. Perhaps Gillian wondered when I would stop living in suspended animation, or whatever I was doing.

  Gillian had set up the sofa bed in her office for me. She had fresh, Granny Smith–colored bedding, abstract art prints on the wall. The office window faced the street, which I remembered could be noisy. She was right in the heart of the action in Belltown, near Seattle Center and the Space Needle, which I had never been up, not yet.

  I paged through the Kurt Cobain book Obe had given me. I had read several biographies in a row, and the effect was of having eaten too much, too quickly. All the facts about Cobain’s life were popcorning in my head.

  Kurt’s parents were working-class poor. His mother, Wendy, was a blond beauty. Donal
d was a mechanic. They married young. When Kurt was born, even the nurses in the hospital commented on his beautiful blue eyes. He was a happy kid until his parents split up, and then they fought, and hated each other, and everything changed forever. His parents thought he had ADHD, so they gave him Ritalin. He later said that might have set the stage for his drug use. His wife, Courtney, who was also drugged as a kid, said the same thing. But I didn’t want to think about her.

  When Kurt Cobain was a teenager, some people might have thought he was lazy. For one thing, he didn’t do well in school, except art. But later he was a janitor and did crap jobs just to make enough money for Nirvana’s first demo. When he really smiled, he had a grin as wide and bright as a crescent moon. He hated to brush his teeth. He loved playing his guitar. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of pop and rock. He could play for hours and didn’t mind if he was grounded because he loved to sit in his room with his guitar.

  As a teen, he was shuffled from one house to another, even staying with his grandparents and a high school teacher. He said he once slept under a bridge in Aberdeen, which he wrote about in “Something in the Way.” Some people say he exaggerated all that and lots of other stories of his past, but he was a storyteller. That’s what they do. He had a thing for thrift stores.

  His first serious girlfriend, Tracy Marander, heard about him as the kid who drew cartoons of the rock group Kiss on the side of the Melvins’ van, “the Melvan,” as it was known. The Melvins were a punk rock group that Kurt idolized after hearing them play at a grocery store parking lot or something.