The Most Mysterious Song

"The pin," she said, nodding. "Right. Uhm."

***

June just lay on her back, panting and staring up at the ceiling. Her hair was matted to her face everywhere, and she was drenched in the scent of Daria. It lived in her nose. Daria went into the bathroom for a minute, and when she came back she was holding something in her mouth and trying to light the end of it.

June had been pushed into trying weed once, at a graduation party several months earlier, but hadn't enjoyed the experience all that much. That had smelled and tasted like a damp basement, even if the feeling afterwards had been pretty chill. Whatever Daria had lit was different, but close enough that she immediately knew what it was.

Daria climbed into bed beside her, and offered her the joint.

***

"So, that night me and Daria were talking while lying on a bed--"

"I thought these were bunk beds," Ava said. "Aren't they usually pretty narrow?"

"Stop interrupting," June said. Ava's raised eyebrows were a sign that she'd snapped a bit too harshly, likely because she knew she waswithholding some details from her not-really-old-enough-to-hear-all-this daughter. She added, "Sorry. Yeah, I know. It was kinda cramped."

***

It wasn't. The two of them laid out spreadeagle, with only a rickety ceiling fan above them keeping the air moving within the room. Daria rolled her head to the side, staring at her, and it made June smile to have the other girl's attention. She liked that a lot.

"I keep wanting to say to you," Daria said. When June rolled over to face her, expecting more, though, the other girl was staring just past the tip of her nose in thought.

"Say what?"

Daria smiled and, after a few seconds, shook her head. "English not very good."

"Are you kidding me? It's miles better than my Greek. I can barely get through half your alphabet! I think it's amazing you can speak other languages like that. I took some French in high school, and it wasn't until I got all the way over here that I realized a lot of it didn't stick."

"Is different here. Drive an hour, and you hit different culture. Peoples."

"What is Greece like?"

"For me," Daria said, smirking, "or for tourist?"

"Both," she replied eagerly. "I want to know everything."

"Food is better there."

"I've never had Greek."

"You have eaten Greek," Daria said, smiling impishly.

"You know what I mean!" June laughed, and took the joint back. "Is there someplace in town you could take me that has good Greek?"

"Maybe."

"What else?" she said, after taking another hit and passing the joint back. "Tell me more about Greece."

Daria licked her lips slowly, holding the joint and staring into the distance. "Family is... unavoidable."

"Because they're everywhere?" June asked. Daria didn't respond right away, and so June continued, saying, "How big is your family?"

"Seven brothers," she said, after inhaling. "One sister. All younger." She blew out the rest of her lungful after finishing, and blinked a few times.

"That's...huge."

Daria gave her a disbelieving look.

"I've only got two sisters. Both older."

"I would like older sister," Daria said, eyes drifting off into the distance.

June scoffed, which she tried to mask by clearing her throat. "They're not all they're cracked up to be."

Daria shrugged, and added, "Still."

June really wanted to ask about Konstantin, but enough of her bravery had slipped away that she didn't know how to broach the subject without intruding too heavily on Daria's personal life. This was hard, because she very much wanted to be a part of Daria's personal life, but she didn't know how to say that.

Instead, because she paused, Daria said, "Tell me about America."

"Oh wow, okay. I don't know where to start."

Daria warmed to the subject, smiling excitedly. "Do you have pickup truck?"

"No! My dad drives a Volvo and my mom has a station wagon."

"Two cars!" The joint hung from Daria's lips as she rolled over onto her side, head propped up on her palm.

"It's different there," June said. "Everything is so far away from everything else. It's stupid, really, once you see how close everything is here, but... ugh. You have to have cars. It's too far to walk, like, anywhere."

Earlier, when they'd been wrapped around each other, she'd tried to reach for Daria's nipples and couldn't because of the way they were hanging to the side. Now, with a little more room and the Greek girl in basically the same position, June's eyes were drawn to the way they moved. Her nipples were slightly oblong, the left a little bigger than the right, but dark. Much darker than her own. She very much wanted to keep touching Daria, and unravel all of her complex mysteries, but she thought that if they started again she might not be able to follow through on her plans.

"I have a surprise," she said.

Daria took a long drag, drawing the joint down to nearly nothing, before turning to June, and June could see it right there on her face that she hadn't really listened at first. The surprise took a few seconds to play out on her features. "Surprise? For me?"

***

June took a breath, and got up to pour herself a cup of coffee. Two things had occurred to her as she relived the previous part of the story, and they were hitting her hard. The first was that, somewhere along the way, she had misremembered their night in the hotel. In the flurry afterwards, and the giant mess that followed, June had thought they smoked weed first. She'd chalked up a lot of what had happened in that hotel room towe got high and fooled around, not realizing that the smoking hadn't happened until afterwards, when they were both already in bed naked.

Some amount of...dismissal had happened. A writing off. Her intoxicated European fling. It was a convenient lie that let her move on from it with a little less anguish, and now that she was thinking it through she found that the anguish had been accruing interest over the years. She hadn't made the decisions she made because she was high. Those were things she wanted. Daria was someone she'd wanted while of sound mind and body.

The second thing that occurred to her was that Daria had been trying to tell her something, but that she'd been too self-centered to notice it. This revelation hit much harder, and was the reason she tried to buy herself time before continuing the story. She popped the mug into the microwave and stood in front of it as the timer counted down from 2:00.

She could reconcile with the idea that she'd too easily cast aside her feelings in that moment. She could not go back and pay more attention, or give Daria another chance to express whatever had been at her lips. She couldn't undo her casual ignorance.

That hurt.

***

The tram dropped them off one block from the studio just after two in the morning, and the girls hurried through the darkened streets. Upon arrival, June led them around the back, and squealed with joy when she found that the tape she'd put over the door latch of a rear exit was still in place, allowing them to sneak in.

"I want to record something with you," June said, as they fumbled along the walls looking for a light switch. She knocked over a cymbal stand before she found it, and the two of them descended into a fit of giggling.

"By ourself?"

She nodded, and pointed at the engineering room. "I sat in there all day and watched Konstantin and Esteban talk over you."

"No," Daria said, waving her hands in front of her. "That is just--"

"They didn't want to record that other one you wrote at all. They kept putting it off to focus on their own parts."

Daria's hand drifted to her satchel. "The one I show you?"

"Yeah!"

She shook her head, face going mostly blank. "Not finished. Is not finished."

At this, June eagerly skipped over to a Yamaha DX-7 keyboard in the corner, and stretched her fingers wide over the keys. "I've had some piano lessons. I heard what you played for me, and I think I can add something."

"Can you..." She slapped her hands in the air. "Drums?"

At this, June blushed. "I was actually thinking we could just use one of Esteban's unused drum takes. He did like 8 full takes for that third song, and a couple of them were really good. That other guy? Mmmmm--"

"Marcus?"

"Yeah. He wanted something different after the fifth take, so the first handful of them are unlike the others. I was thinking we could..." She ran over and opened the door to the booth, pointing at the big rolls of magnetic tape. "We could find one of those, and use it?"

"Do you know how to do all this?" Daria asked, gesturing around the room.

"I had a lot of time on my hands today," she said. "That's part two of the surprise. I think I know which buttons to push." She blushed and added, "Whenever I wasn't watching you, I was watching what he did. Which tracks go to which tapes."

It took an hour to find the drum track June had in mind and most of another hour to get a blank tape loaded for mixing, but from there things progressed much more quickly. Daria needed three takes to play the rhythm guitar lines for her song, and only one for the bass. Then she and Daria took about a half hour to cobble together a few simple synth lines and another half hour messing around with the keyboards settings trying out different tones. Eventually, though, they had what they wanted. Like a lot of things in the past twelve hours, they figured it out together.

Daria was doing her fifth take on the vocals when June, back in the booth, heard a heavy door clunk shut from the front of the building. On the one hand, the night had flown by, and on the other hand someone had arrived on site at six in the morning. June panicked; she had thought they had hours yet before anyone arrived. For all of her letting go, and all of her big brained ideas of freedom on a different continent, June froze at the first sign of consequences.

Daria appeared at her side before her runaway catastrophizing could get very far.

"Go," Daria said. "Out the back. I'll meet you at the room."

June, sure that someone was coming closer by the second, hissed, "What are you going to tell them?"

Daria's confident smile conveyed a plan, and that was enough for her.

***

"And... that was it."

Ava blinked several times, and leaned forward a little bit more with every second. "What do you meanthat was it?"

"I mean," June said, shrugging, "that was it. I turned and ran. I got one look at her, through the booth window, and she was smiling at me, and that was the last I ever saw her."

"What?!"

"I went back to the... the room." She fumbled here, not knowing how to fib around the fact that there had been two rooms. "I waited, and I waited, and..." She shrugged. "Then I went back to the studio, and she was gone. I wentback to the hostel, and her stuff was gone. Everyone's stuff was gone. They'd packed up and left. All of them."

"You just... missed them?"

June nodded, and tried to hide her pain with a smile.

She'd spent four hours at the hotel room pacing back and forth, only fleeing the building when housekeeping was nearing the room she'd been cooped up in. No sign of Daria at the studio, and everything was cleared out at the hostel. June's one bag was still there, in a locker, but there was no note. No sign of where they went.

"I asked at the desk, and the lady there was really not interested in telling me what time other people were coming and going. She wasnot that helpful."

"So what did you do?"

June licked her lips. "I stayed at that hostel for two more days, and I spent every minute of them camped out at the studio, or at the little place across the street that sold these little sausage and beef roll things." A soft, defeated shrug. "She never showed. They didn't either. The people at the studio weren't really surprised. The one guy that had been helping them, the uh... engineer or whatever? He thought they'd broken up on the way out the door the night before. Ruined Gods had another day of studio time booked, but they didn't use it."

"I don't understand," Ava said, staring down at the table. "Who finished the song?"

"That's why I was so surprised," June said, excited that they'd moved on away from talking so much about Daria. There had been a sharp pain building in her chest in the retelling, and it was a relief to talk about something else. "We didn't have a finished song. All the parts were there, but it needed to be... I think it's either mixed or mastered? Where you take all the tracks and put them together? I don't know."

"Someone at the studio must have thought it was one of her band's songs, and put it together for them," Ava said, thoughtfully. "Right? I mean, you said they didn't come back?"

"Maybe? I don't know. What we left in that studio was not finished."

Ava picked up her phone, and started sliding her finger up and down. Scrolling through something. "There's a couple recording studios near the radio station that played Blame the Wind where they think it might have come from, and one of them had a partnership with a music school. They'd do demos for some of the students."

"Could be," June said, shrugging. "Someone mixed all the tapes, but realized that the one we did had Daria singing and not Konstantin? I mean, we didn't sound like Ruined Gods did."

Ava's eyes were getting wild. "So they took this random track that was in the wrong place, they don't know how it got there, they think it's just misplaced, and it gets put in with some other demos?"

"Listen," June said, "It was a weird trip just for me to get there, and it would be completely in keeping with the rest of that summer for the song to have had a weird trip after that. And, you know, this is all... we're just guessing. We have no idea. I never knew the names of any of those people at the studio. It's not like we can ask them, but... that wasour song. Me and Daria. Those are my lyrics."

June stared at her coffee mug, wishing there was something stronger to drink. She didn't keep alcohol in the house, so she just sipped the rest of the dark elixir and set the mug down.

"Andthen, once I gave up and tried to leave Berlin, I noticed I had lost my passport. That was a big hassle. I needed to go to the embassy to apply for a new one, and they gave me serious shit for losing the old one. So I ended up flying home from Berlin because I only got this temporary one and besides I was pretty much done with Europe at that point."

She glanced at Ava, thinking of how much to reveal, and said dryly, "When I got home, Grandpa wasn't happy that I'd lost the passport. That's putting itvery mildly. He almost didn't let me go to college, but the semester was beginning, and he caved, and I went... and met Noah's father, and... before Christmas break I found out I was pregnant. Hank promised to provide for me and the baby, so I dropped out and we got married, and... life swept me along. I honestly hadn't thought about the whole trip in a long, long time."

Ava wasn't listening. She was tapping away on her phone, brow furrowed in concentration in a gesture that was so similar to her older brother, even though they had different fathers. June leaned back in her chair.

"At the time, I was so anxious about your grandparents, and thehold they had on my life. It's funny, because... I can see all the things that got between me and Hank, they were all there right from the beginning, but... I told myself that it would work. I mean, it wasn't like I could've returned home with Noah. Dad would have gone through the roof, and... for a few years? Things were pretty good. Not perfect, but..."

She trailed off, looking at her daughter and seeing all the signs of having been tuned out completely. June smiled tightly, and nodded.

Her father had come around eventually, and she had always attributed that to Noah being a boy. Dad had always wanted a son, and after raising three daughters he couldn't pass on the opportunity of raising a boy no matter how cross he was with his offspring. She didn't want to point that out to Ava. In his later years her father had mellowed out, and was a passable grandfather to Ava, if not nearly so involved as he had been for her older son.

For the first time in her life, June let it come to her how she had been the victim of her own life, her own choices, how she'd been wrapped up in the consequences of her actions. She had run away so resolutely, thrown herself into motherhood and family life so completely, that she had never stopped to look back and think about what she'd had with Daria. What it meant. What it could have meant.

Maybe, with a more supportive family, she could have had space to explore her sexuality. Maybe she could have completed her studies on the first go, without solving her life by falling into the trap of... but then she wouldn't have had Noah, and most likely her life would have taken her to a place where she wouldn't have had Ava either. She didn't really want to imagine life without her kids.

"Okay, listen to this," Ava said and reached for the Bluetooth speaker. "This is the better version of the song."

"What do you mean, a better version?"

"The only known recordings are from the radio, right? This is the clearer one."

June nodded, remembering the days of recording songs from the radio onto cassettes. The speaker pinged when it connected, and then a slightly crackling and humming noise filled the air.

At the first sound of Daria's voice, every hair on June's forearms stood up. There was no doubt; it was Daria, even as distorted and unclear as the recording was. And that! That was June herself, on the keyboard.

The memory came alive with the sound. The gloom of the studio, their slightly stoned and sleep-deprived intensity, how they stopped to giggle and sometimes kiss. She had been so happy. She was so sure they had all the time in the world, that they would go back to the hotel, and make love again, and sleep in each other's arms, and wake up together, and record more songs together, and--

"Mom? Are you crying?"

"What?" June swept her cheeks. "I... I guess I am." She blinked, but the tears kept coming. "That's us," she said with a thick voice. "That's us, there's no doubt. Somebody made us sound good, but... yeah."

***

"Mom?" came a voice from behind her.

June whirled, a terrific and broad smile breaking over her lips as she quickly wiped her hands on her jeans. "Noah! I didn't hear you knock!"

"I let myself in," he said, as she wrapped her arms around her oldest. "How're you doing?"

"Good," she said, emphatically, as she always did. "I'm good! How's your father?"

Noah half-grimaced, half-smiled, and said, "He and Kim are fine. I haven't heard too much from them in the last couple weeks, but I think everything is fine. His house sold, finally, so they're getting everything ready."

"Good for him." She turned back to the stove, and slid the spatula under the fish filet.

"I'll be glad when he's out of my hair."

She looked back over her shoulder for a moment, smirking. "Don't talk like that, he's your father."

"You know what I mean," he replied, grabbing one of the kitchen chairs and flipping it around to sit facing her. "He doesn't understand that between this project and Uma and the baby I'm tapped."

"Have you told him how busy you are?"

"He just uses that as an excuse to regurgitate that...You have to show up for family speech."

June found herself making a sound halfway between a groan and a growl. "I can hearhis dad, even now, giving us the same spiel."

"Well, they changed their plans again. Now they're looking at a place down in Evansville."

"All that way down 14?"

"Yeah. That's too far to be making trips every other day, helping him move and get settled. He's just gonna have to pay someone."