I lived with a singer once, a number of years ago in that distant valley called youth. She had been the singer for a group called The Savage Blusterbox, and you can get the idea of the sort of music they made from that name. I was the roadie. I had no musical talent. I have no musical talent. Or even much interest. The band’s leader, Jorge, probably thought I took an interest in his music, if not music in general. This was one of many demonstrations of Jorge’s denseness. His stage name was Duneman. He told me it was based on some novel. I don’t know. I’d never heard of the book, and I’m not a big reader. Magazines, a biography now and then. Novels, not really. Jorge told me a few things about the book, the most important being that he’d never actually read it or even seen a copy.

Jorge talked a lot about his music when we were in the van driving to a show. I never said anything, since I never had anything to say on the subject. It wasn’t my style to fake it in order to impress him. Jorge, like the others I’d worked for, appreciated my qualifications. I was a good driver and I didn’t drink or do drugs. I understood wiring. I was big and had no trouble moving heavy sound equipment. This last was a big plus for Jorge since he was skinny and frail, and the other half of the Blusterbox was female.

I liked the roadie gig because I liked to travel and because there were usually girls around bands. Usually. As it turned out, Blusterbox was an exception. This lack of girls was a mystery. Jorge was a jerk, but he wasn’t a bad looking jerk, and so many women are suckers for the delicate, damaged, aesthete air that surrounded him. In spite of that, we rarely had any female company except Shannon, the singer. I had a hands-off policy with band members.

That summer, Jorge’s agent booked him in a string of clubs in the Northeast. We actually drove. It was a long, boring drive from California, but it finally got interesting in a little Pennsylvania town called Arkwright. First the van broke down. Then Jorge got arrested for possession of a few joints. Shannon and I stopped by the jail and listened to Jorge rant and rave. Then we went looking for a motel to get a couple of rooms. When we found a motel and counted our money, we decided that one room would be better, and the one room had one bed, and one thing led to another.

I had a good night’s sleep. Right before I woke up, I was dreaming I was on a sailboat, sailing down a runway at O’Hare field. The tower controller was talking in nonsense sing-song syllables. I needed to know if I could take off, and he wasn’t being helpful. Then the sailboat took off anyway, but I wasn’t in it. I was on the runway. Something large and scary was coming toward me, and the dream ended. Actually, I woke up, but I could still hear the nonsense syllables, so I thought I was still asleep. Here’s what they sounded like: Me-may-my-mo-moo. It was Shannon.

The syllables were a singing exercise. She ran through a series of these every morning. That one and one that sounded like a motorboat and some others. She was serious about singing. It was what she wanted to do in life, and she didn’t want to do it wearing heavy black makeup in front of a horde of drunk teenagers. I admired her determination and singleness of purpose, even though it made me look bad. As I listened to her that morning, I felt that she had to have talent. I was no judge, but I felt sure she did. I pictured her making it big, her name in lights, record contracts, whatever she dreamed of, and it all made me even more glad about what had happened between us the night before.

We hadn’t made any plans. Planning was for Jorge. We took a walk through town, then went out for breakfast. She said she’d go to the jail, and while she was gone, I got a job as a laborer on a construction site. That surprised her. It had surprised me too. First of all that I gotten the job. I wouldn’t have in California. I wouldn’t have been able to compete with the Hispanic workers lined up six deep at every corner. The bigger surprise was that the town had captivated me. I didn’t see myself as the Arkwright type. But I liked it. It was a college town, housing a branch of the state university. The population was proudly posted at the city limits as 33,452. The downtown was full of friendly locals and historical architecture. These attributes would usually register with me like nonsense syllables, but in Arkwright, I picked out some meaning and melody to the song.

Shannon talked about going back to stay with her parents in Orange County, but she didn’t sound like she meant it. I was hoping she wouldn’t leave. She began to take the bus out to the campus where she found people to sing with and sneaked into a couple of classes. I got the van fixed with my first paycheck, and we took weekend drives into the countryside. After two weeks in the motel, we rented an apartment above a store. At some point, Jorge got out of jail, claimed his van and left. We didn’t ask where he was going. I began to save for a car. Shannon got a part in a campus musical. Everything kept working out for us; we were lucky.

We’d been there a year or more. Nothing much changed except that we got to know the town, the campus, the woodsy stretch of the Appalachians that surrounded us. Shannon kept singing and got other parts, both on campus and off, including a role in a frightful dinner theater show that was like a tough steak, expensive and impossible to swallow. We had settled in. I was getting restless.

We were young and healthy, and doctors never entered my mind, but it’s different for women. One day when I came home, she had a dark look around the eyes like she’d made up to sing for the Blusterbox. We went through the hell of waiting for test results, then found that our hell had only just begun.

We had no insurance, no savings. But more importantly, we had no experience of tragedy. I went with her to meet with the doctor. He tried to stay upbeat, but it was clear that the prognosis was poor. We walked home silently, wrapped in each other’s arms, our dark thoughts mirroring the dark mass inside her. The next day at the library, I found a book that told me clearly how small a chance she had.

What could I do? I had been planning to leave for several weeks. The original fire between us had turned cold and ashy, at least from my side. We didn’t fight and throw things, but nothing else happened either. Now I had to stay. I had to stand by her, stay with her, be there. I thought I could do that. I liked her, even if the flames had burned out. I could take her to the hospital, visit her there, bring flowers, be patient as she suffered. But the ultimate complication scared me. If she died, what would it do to me? Would I then be bound to her forever? Would her death make that burned-out fire irrelevant? I didn’t want to carry a dead girl’s memory with me through life. I didn’t want that ultimate loss to torment me with the lack of torment I felt, to constantly confront me with the guilty memory of the innocent truth that it was over between us; I didn’t really care. How would I make peace with that inner turmoil?

I never mentioned these doubts to her, of course. Our lives wended on. Normal was our watchword, oblivion our goal. I worked out sentences to use if she asked me to talk, but she didn’t want it that way. She mentioned her infirmity talking to herself, not to me. Not really talking, more like one of her singing exercises. She would croon softly, “My womb, my womb.” Then she would make a humming sound, then be silent, then start the sequence again. It terrified me when she did it. I knew those two words stood for a litany of losses that she felt. I preferred it when she was angry and would hold her head in her hands before shouting, “Goddamn uterus. Fucking female insides.” I could deal with that.

At first, we thought she was just not getting worse. Nothing else occurred to us. When we met with the doctor, he seemed uncomfortable with the news. The tumor had shrunk. He wasn’t trying to be upbeat this time, and it took both of us a few seconds to realize that it was good news. I wondered if he felt cheated. He told us not to expect miracles, but miracle was the word he used on our next visit when he explained that the tumor was no longer visible. A miracle. He cautioned us that no longer visible did not mean gone, annihilated. It was probably there. Just in hiding.

We celebrated at a bar. We were profoundly silly and laughed so loud we attracted attention. When Shannon noticed people staring, she began to sing. Entranced, the patrons applauded profusely and called again and again for encores.

Then we went our separate ways. She went to L.A. to look for work. I had learned that small towns agreed with me, so I moved to Eugene, Oregon. I struggled for a while. Eugene had a glut of unskilled and semi-skilled drifters like me. Eventually I moved into a job as an estimator and inspector for a painting firm. My white-collar relatives’ dismay was tempered by their relief that I was no longer in the entertainment business. In spite of their misgivings, it was a good job. The firm did high-end, specialty painting and paid good money. The Victorian-era houses we worked on fascinated me, as had the buildings in Arkwright.

I didn’t try to keep up with Shannon, but I didn’t have to. Facebook made its appearance, and for better or for worse, only a few clicks separated you from every aspect of your past. I found out she was singing with a group. I learned that she had her own group and was writing songs. I read that she was a rising star, but I discounted that, assuming the writer had succumbed to her Irish good looks. But it turned out to be true. Her name caught my eye one day in the local paper. She was on a national tour to publicize her first album. One of her stops was Eugene.

I could have tried to contact her, asked her to come by. But my wife is the jealous type. It wouldn’t have been a good idea. I didn’t even go to the concert.

When I saw her name in the entertainment section again, I wasn’t surprised until I read the article. Her cancer had returned with a vengeance. The diagnosis had preceded her death by only three months.

When I thought she was dying in Arkwright, it wasn’t grief I feared, but the lack of it: the long shadow her death would have cast over my life, deepened by the dark secret I held, the lie of my affection. But life is full of lies, and secrets can be had for a song. I know that now, and I keep my grief a secret when I think of her and the morning she broke into my dreams with her singing.

– William Brasse