THE CAUSE OF EVERYTHING by Nicholas Lepre
They came to the gray colonial on Spring Street with the light on in the highest window, and the only sounds Kenna could hear were the Grand Am and crickets in the pitch-black distance. She slowed down. The house was surrounded by dark clouds, violet and burgundy.
Brandon looked at the route map for special instructions and when he couldn’t find any he asked her what they were doing. Kenna pointed to the window and told him about the light, how it was on every morning, how it had to mean something. It was the one constant all summer.
“Probably someone who can’t sleep.”
He shrugged and threw the paper in the uneven walkway.
She wondered if she belonged in that house, if the light was on for her to see, maybe. When Kenna was fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, she stayed awake all night writing songs on her white Ibanez. She played it unplugged so that she wouldn’t wake her mother, so that only she could hear the whisper of the nickel-wound strings. She liked to imagine someone was doing the same in the colonial, making up chords and biting their calluses, writing out tabs in a spiral notebook.
Her mother told her she could have been a hostess at a nice restaurant if she smiled more. It would have been a better summer job; she would have made more money. But Kenna chose the paper route in East Greenwich. She chose the strange hours and solitude, the lower pay and the black night. Some mornings she idled in front of the house for a few minutes and stared at the window, hoping for any glimpse of movement. If she lingered too long her Grand Am would start to overheat and she would have to turn the heat all the way up, open all of the vents and drive around the block four or five times to cool it down.
“Don’t you wonder about anything?” Kenna asked. “Can’t you be a little curious?”
He stared vacantly at the blue plastic dashboard and the empty blacktop in front of them.
“Just look up at the window. It’s wide open,” Kenna said. “Anything could be happening in there. There are a million possibilities. Think of one.”
Nothing she could say would explain it. He asked how much longer the route was and put his hand on her shoulder. It was his last early morning with her before he drove back to Pennsylvania.
“It means something. Things have meaning.”
He yawned and looked at the window again and scratched his head. He didn’t have any questions – he either disagreed or didn’t care – and this was the way things had been since the semester ended; she would share an idea, she would talk about starting a new band or the two of them taking a semester abroad together, and Brandon would nod along and wait for her to finish talking until he changed the subject. He was dumb or bored or he didn’t care about her, and it pissed her off that she hadn’t seen it from the outset. They met in a freshman year biology class at a state college Kenna never wanted to go to, and they mostly talked about what they did that day and what they would do next.
They delivered the next street in silence. Kenna pointed to the houses and Brandon threw the papers out his window.
There were things she never spoke about to him: her father leaving when she was seven, what she wanted to be and do, the number of times she thought about dying, about how she would die and what would become of her. She wanted to be successful, to live in a big city, to create something permanent. Brandon knew about the band she started in high school and how she wrote so many songs and played shows all over, but he never knew what it meant. That it was a way to get out. She was between bands and trying to figure out the future, trying to decide what to be and how to be it.
* * *
All week, Brandon slept in the car while Kenna bagged the papers. She was the youngest person delivering in Kent County. The others were in their fifties or older. One of the old women had a battery-operated radio at her bagging counter and played the same oldies station every morning. It was so early that the DJs spoke in hushed voices between songs and asked for requests in a way that made Kenna think they felt lonely.
Some of the men looked at Kenna too long. They were her grandfather’s age and had long forgotten or forgone the decency of not being caught staring at a young woman. If Kenna caught them, she would ask if they’d had a good look. She would be as crass as possible to embarrass them. She called Winston a “geriatric piece of shit” one morning when he whistled at her as she bent down to lift her papers off the hand truck. He had white stubble on his head and face and wore two gold hoop earrings in his left ear.
Earlier that morning, she thought about her father while she bagged the day’s papers. She rarely thought of him anymore. His leaving was always there, beneath everything else, an inexpugnable truth. But she didn’t consider him consciously as much as she did in middle school. Back then he meant everything. He was the reason her homework got halfway finished most days, the reason she was taller than all of the other girls and most of the boys, the reason she needed braces when she was thirteen, and the reason she couldn’t make friends the way it seemed everyone else could. He was the cause of everything. She could remember the sound of his voice then. The way he fought with her mother most nights. When he was angry, he was like a kettle full of boiling water; he had to expel all of the hot air before he’d stop screaming. It was the same thing night after night. He made her nervous and uncertain. She never knew what to say or how to act to keep him happy. One minute he would do anything for her and the next he was apoplectic and spiteful. As she grabbed paper after paper and folded them, it occurred to her that he was probably as old as Winston. He might have a stupid earring and work a dumb job, too. Or he might have other kids. Young ones that he cared about the way he never did her. Or he might be in the colonial, waiting for her to knock on the door to tell her everything she missed out on over the course of the last twelve years.
* * *
Even though they had been delivering papers for forty minutes, Brandon still looked like he was about to fall over. He was tired and hadn’t adjusted to Kenna’s sleep pattern. She was used to sleeping twice a day for three or four hours. She would sleep from eleven until two in the afternoon and then nine until one in the morning every day she had to deliver.
“What do you like about me?” Kenna asked as they drove down Brayton Street.
“What kind of question is that?” he asked and threw a paper that fell out of the plastic bag and landed in the wet grass. Kenna was surprised by how awful he was at throwing the papers. Earlier in the week, when things seemed salvageable, she would mess with him and drive away slowly while Brandon was picking up and re-bagging a wet paper. Today she kept her foot on the brake and sighed as he got out of the car.
“I liked a lot of things about you,” she said.
He looked at her like she had punched him in the stomach and she asked him the same question again. He didn’t mention her tense, but she had said it intentionally. He was boring; tall and handsome, but boring.
“I like a lot of things too,” Brandon said. “This is stupid, okay? See how you like it. What do you like about me?”
There was nothing she wanted to say. Nothing she felt like sharing with him, but they still had an hour of the paper route left and if they didn’t talk about anything, he would stay mad at her and be in a pissy mood the rest of the morning.
“Your jawline,” she said, and relented. “It’s strong. You have a nice chin. That’s one of the things I like.”
Brandon smiled the way a child does just before their ice cream slips off of the cone.
* * *
The best thing her father ever did was buy her the Ibanez GRX20. Kenna was turning thirteen and wanted a guitar. At that point, he still came around a few times a year. He smoked cigarettes in his old Miata next to the bus stop at the top of the street. He would ask what she needed or give her a hundred dollar bill and tell her to keep it a secret from her mother. He knew when Suzanne was working and never went near the house then.
But the guitar was a surprise. Kenna said she needed one, had to have one. She wasn’t cool and playing guitar might help. Just to be able to say she could.
“I got you something, baby,” he said as he pulled the trunk release lever in the glove compartment. “Take a look.”
It wasn’t in a case. It was just lying on top of the spare, white paint and silver inlay, black pickups and four knobs. He hopped out of the car and rubbed his hands together before he took it out of the trunk for her.
“Don’t ever say I didn’t spoil you rotten.”
Kenna began to cry and could not control herself.
* * *
“Do you ever get bored of everything?”
Brandon made a face and Kenna explained what she meant. She didn’t mean it to be dramatic, it was just how she felt. There was no way of knowing what would happen or where they might be in the future, but nothing about it seemed fun. They would work jobs and maybe buy a house or houses and pay bills and get old and die eventually. It seemed horrible. He laughed, and she told him she was serious.
“There’s a lot of good stuff too. Come on,” he said, “don’t be like that.”
They were getting to the end of the route and zigzagging up and down the hilly side streets that intersect with Main. Brandon started talking about breakfast, and Kenna told him to stop being such a glutton.
“Is this about that house? Are you still mad about the house? Fine. Maybe it’s some middle school kid on summer vacation who jerks off all night. Okay? Are you happy? I want some waffles. I’m starving.”
* * *
“What’s the matter, baby?” her father said. He was wearing a white button-down dress shirt with blue stripes. He put an unsure arm around her shoulder and mussed Kenna’s hair. His breath smelled sweet and warm. “Bad day at school? Boy problems? You can tell your old man. It’s not your mother, is it? I can’t help you with that. Girl things? Already? You’re only twelve.”
“Thirteen,” Kenna said as she wiped her cheeks.
“Twelve, thirteen. It’s all the same in the long run.”
She wanted to stop crying, she loved the guitar. It was the only thing she wanted for months and the afternoon felt stretched out and important in a way that most days didn’t. This was the beginning of something new, and she could feel the change inside her fingers and knees.
“What’s the matter? You don’t like it? Did you want a – what’s it called? Acoustic one? I did the best I could. I’m trying my best here.”
She tried to swallow all of it, to wipe her face with the sleeves of her purple sweater, to smile like she used to at Christmas when she was the only thing holding her parents together. But she couldn’t stop crying.
“No, it’s great. I love it. I love it.”
But he was already angry, and she knew there was nothing she could do to stop it.
“Don’t lie to me. Just say you hate it. I spent big money on this thing. Three hundred dollars. Do you know how many hours I had to work to buy this for you? You ungrateful little brat. Every day you’re more like her. And you’ll end up miserable the same way she did. Can’t even take a gift. It’s not good enough for your majesty, your royal fucking highness. I try to get you something nice and this is how you treat me? I’m your fucking father.”
“I’m sorry, Daddy.”
“Don’t call me Daddy, you manipulative little – you think that you can bat your little eyelashes at me and I’ll forget about everything, don’t you? I’m not stupid. Fine. I’ll give it away to someone who wants it.”
Kenna would not let go. He tried to pull it from her hands but she wouldn’t budge. It was the first time she ever fought back. He yanked it as hard as he could by the neck, and Kenna fell to the ground and curled up around the body. He kept yelling give it to me and it’s mine. One of the volume knobs broke off in the struggle.
“I won’t let go,” Kenna yelled. She must have screamed it a hundred times before he stopped trying to take it away from her. The underside of the body was scratched from the asphalt, and she had skinned elbows and shins, but the guitar belonged to her. He spit on the ground and yelled never again before he drove away with the trunk wide open. She was bloody and sore, but she had everything she needed. She was free.
* * *
When the route was done, instead of going to Audra’s and getting breakfast, Kenna decided to go back to the house. It was almost five-thirty and the sun was seeping through the horizon line. The light was still on. There was nothing to deliver, and no reason to be there, but she couldn’t look away. The light was beautiful. It was warmer than anything she had ever felt.
“Why are we here?”
“What if this is my one last chance? What if I belong here? What if this is on for me to see?”
Kenna got out of the car and walked toward the front door. She had to know what was inside, had to know why everything was the way it had always been. There was some hidden truth that she had waited all of her nineteen years for. As she walked up the cobblestone walkway to the front door, Brandon grabbed her from behind.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“Let me go,” she said, and struggled to break free of his arms.
“You don’t belong here. Come on.”
It would all go wrong if she didn’t know. It could all go so wrong.
“I need to know,” she said as she pushed him away. She wanted him to fight back, to pull her to the ground and tell her she was crazy. She wanted him to do a lot of things he would never do, and she knew that Brandon was wrong for her the same way everyone before him had been. She felt triumphant and foolish at the same time. She would tell him they were finished before he drove back home and she would not give him a reason. They would say their goodbyes after breakfast and that would be it. She would transfer to a school in New York in a semester, or maybe she would move there and forget about school. There would be a new band and more songs, there was always a new band. Everything would be clear as soon as she knew about the house.
But then, as she reached the door and lifted the brass knocker, she considered for the first time that she might be alone. There might not be anyone inside, or anyone worth seeing. It could simply be a forgotten bulb in an empty attic. No greater answers, no hidden truth. No plans for anyone. And for a moment she was distraught, but it passed. And suddenly she felt the way she did that afternoon when she was thirteen and holding on to the guitar at the bus stop. She could be anything and nothing could stop her.
Nicholas S. Lepre’s work has appeared in Threepenny Review and APIARY.