Wait for me, p.1
Wait for Me, page 1
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For Louise DeSalvo, who will always be the greatest of all time to me
What Happened to Elle Harlow?
August 27, 1991, Nashville Noir
This December marks the eighteenth anniversary of famed country-folk singer Elle Harlow’s strange disappearance in 1973, just after her first and final performance at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee. Eyewitnesses outside the concert hall claim they saw her drive east in her Studebaker, bound for her next concert in Sunset Park, Pennsylvania.
Those witnesses were the last to see her alive.
She never arrived for the show. After that night, she was never seen again. Her Studebaker was never found, nor was the custom 1970s pink-and-white guitar she always traveled with. Her final album, Wounds from a Lover, remains the bestselling female folk record to date.
The album’s message about the rapture and the regret of falling for someone—about love and ghosts in the eerie Appalachian hills—ignited a generation of singer-songwriters to follow. But Elle Harlow had a dark side. As much as she’s remembered for her creative genius, she’s also known for her mercurial moods, her vengeance, and her violence.
Now almost two decades have passed and recollections are fading from those in attendance at Elle Harlow’s last concert. Some think she put on the show of her lifetime; others say she ran offstage. Some swear she took her guitar with her; others claim she left with nothing, not even her shoes.
Is she dead? Why did she disappear? Theories are rife with claims of foul play. Her fans believe she left clues in the lyrics of her final songs—but the more time passes, the less likely it seems Elle Harlow will ever be found.
She was only twenty-two years old.
Missing
A farmer swore he saw it first, while rocking on his front porch.
His wife flickered behind the screen door, about to tell him to get his third can of Rolling Rock his own damn self, when the house began to shiver. One windowpane broke, then a second. Then a third.
Not a mile away, at the edge of the forest, a boy tossing a flat football through a tire swing heard a great peal of thunder. A murder of crows flew south from the hemlocks and did not return until morning. They knew what one woman on the run had learned almost twenty years earlier: Once you fell into Lenora’s woods, you didn’t come out.
It was a warm Sunday night, late August, a lavender sunset yawning beyond the farmer’s fields. And then, just as he popped the tab of his beer—
I’ve never seen smoke like that before, the farmer said. Like God dragged a cigarette across the sky.
No, other witnesses claimed. It looked like a brush fire caught in the clouds.
You’re wrong, still others said. The heavens tore in two.
Some, closer to the point of impact, never saw it at all. Instead they heard an otherworldly groan, then felt the earth trembling beneath them. A stench like dead bodies rose from the dirt. Observers grasped for an explanation they’d already seen—an earthquake, perhaps. Another dynamite truck got lit. An old oil tank, living on borrowed time, had finally blown.
Every testimony was wrong, in part. The meteor whirled into view at sunset, shooting straight across the northern pocket of Appalachia toward a small, overlooked town called Lenora. It struck the earth thirty seconds after it appeared. A minute later, everyone in the river valley heard its roar.
No two recollections of the event are alike because facts never tell the whole story.
Can something be missing if it isn’t lost? The answer is yes, because the thing that disappears will never tell you where it’s gone.
Part I
The Last Night of the World
(1991)
Knowing what you would say
Ain’t the same as hearing you say it
All this music you left with me
Ain’t the same as hearing you play it
—“SING IT SLOW,” THE MERRY ALBUM
Shut Out the Light
Ever since she was born, Marijohn Shaw could hear the dark sing to her.
It was an unusual truth, as darkness didn’t have a voice. Yet she’d always loved the inky pitch of things like nightfall and dreamless sleep—the mystery of it, the privacy, the music. Eighteen years ago, she’d slipped into the world with a swirl of dark hair and even darker thoughts. Her earliest memory wasn’t sight but sound—a crooning in the dimness, low and certain, like the whisper of a beloved ghost she’d known forever.
Marijohn was not someone who got frightened by things she couldn’t see. The ghost was a comfort because its voice had always sounded like the words to her father’s favorite song. They went like this—
There’s three ways to fall in love with an outlaw
The first is quick and dirty
A flash of heat on a cold night
These were the lyrics to Elle Harlow’s most famous ballad.
On the day the meteor struck, those words hounded the rusty loudspeaker outside Shaw’s gas station along a forgotten stretch of highway in western Pennsylvania. The sound was an echo of the air that held it, hypnotic and hot. The music had that simple paradox Marijohn looked for in any song she loved—part savior, part sin.
She hung up the gas pump’s nozzle for the last time that afternoon, the metal clicking like a gun. She’d just pumped a full tank into a Jeep Cherokee, bone white, the body propped up so regally on its monster tires that the undercarriage reached her hips. The musk of gasoline bit the skin around her eyes.
That scent, sultry and smoked, smelled just like home to her.
It was 1991—the year of Pearl Jam and Keanu Reeves, Desert Storm and apartheid—and Marijohn had no idea what was coming for her. She didn’t realize how young she was, how guarded and bold and stallion-hearted. What she did know was that tonight was a night for last chances, and she was itching to take them.
She didn’t think of herself as someone with courage. But her best friend Lazarus was leaving town in the morning—and she was hell-bent on confessing she was in love with him before he did.
Marijohn’s father, Abe, watched her from his perch inside the station, mouthing along to the words of “Third Outlaw” just as he’d done every damn day that she could remember.
The second way is a slow smolder
Like a cigarette you can’t quit
All glory, all pain
The song itself was an open wound. It didn’t rhyme. The tune haunted any ear that heard it. By then, Elle Harlow had been missing for seventeen years, eight months, and thirteen days—almost longer than Marijohn had been alive. She knew how long Elle had been missing because her father kept track on a chalkboard behind the register. His tallies looked like the cigarettes Elle sang about, lined up but never once lit.
The Shaw family’s blue-and-white gas station played little else but Elle Harlow songs, just shy of an hour from I-79 and buried in the hemlocks. They had only one pump, which customers weren’t allowed to touch. They weren’t self-service, and they weren’t easy to find—unless you knew what you were looking for.
“You’d get more business if you changed that idiot sign,” Mr. Jeep Cherokee observed.
He wasn’t wrong. The whitewashed marquee planted in the dirt by the road boasted more than just gas. THE LAST PLACE ELLE HARLOW WAS SEEN, it hailed, the block letters placed as an act of worship by Abe’s hands so long ago that the final letter tilted far right, as if it were running away.
Abe swore this station in the middle of nowhere was the last place Elle Harlow had been before she disappeared. Problem was, no one believed him.
Not even his daughter.
“I’ll be damned,” Marijohn replied. “Our mighty deliverer has come in a Jeep Cherokee.”
The driver spat brown juice at her feet. “Your old man is a kook.”
“There are worse things to be.”
Marijohn was used to this: the drive-by, pitying dismissals of her and her father. Since 1973, Abe had sworn he was the final person to see Elle alive when she stopped to gas up her Studebaker. She was barefoot, so the story went. Abe begged Elle to sign the pump, and she never showed up for her set that night—or any night after.
The old gas pump still stood at the same station, supposed proof of Abe’s story—except it wasn’t. The route from Nashville to Sunset Park didn’t go through Lenora, and Elle’s signature didn’t have her telltale heart for the double l in her name.
“That’s one shitty copycat autograph if you ask me,” the man said.
Marijohn ran her fingers across the cursive loops, their color slowly fading. The inscription next to Elle’s autograph said:
Try to heal everything, and you’ll heal nothing at all.
Mr. Jeep Cherokee caught her looking. “See what I mean?” he said.
She did.
The words proved that the “Elle” who fooled her father had been a fake. “Heal Nothing” wasn’t her song. Abe knew this. Marijohn knew this. Even Mr. Jeep Cherokee’s wad of chew knew this. But Abe was the sort of person who could hold two conflicting truths without needing them to reconcile. The kind of person who cheered for the Pirates from the sovereignty o f his couch, certain they’d still win the season opener when they were down by seven against the Expos in the bottom of the ninth.
They didn’t.
Marijohn gawked at the man, who was gawking at her. The sign stood before them, sad and eternal, and she couldn’t stop herself.
“Can I run something by you?” she asked.
Mr. Jeep Cherokee sniffed. Leaned his elbow out the window.
“I have a theory that this gas station marquee is the grim reaper,” Marijohn said.
The man’s elbow retreated inside his truck.
“Hear me out,” Marijohn pressed. “It’s not a grim reaper for people—but for time. Every few days I go up the ladder and change the price, because the cost of gas hasn’t really gone up or down until the sign announces it. Everything else in the world can fall to shit, but you can count on gas prices fluttering for the rest of eternity, like the sign itself will still be breathing without a heartbeat, long after you and I are dead.”
“Honey.” The Cherokee’s driver drew down the bill of his hat. “You’ve been sniffing too much gasoline.”
He tossed a twenty out the window, not wanting to look her way as she twisted the gas cap back into place. He was uncomfortable—she could sense it in the way he forced the pads of his fingers into the meat of his forehead.
“It bothers you,” she said softly. “Thinking about death.”
The spray of blood vessels on the end of his nose twitched. He finally squinted at her, as if she were an eye chart he couldn’t quite make out. “You must be real fun at parties.”
Marijohn leaned for the squeegee to swipe the dead bugs off his windshield. “If I’m ever invited to one, I’ll let you know.”
He used the bill of his ball cap to wave her off. “You should be out, seizing the day and shit,” he said. “Ain’t you got dreams bigger than pumping gas?”
She had dreams, plenty. But she couldn’t tell him what she really wanted was to find the source of that dark voice in her head.
He fumbled for the cigarette lighter below his dashboard just as Marijohn pinched his receipt between her fingers, far enough away that he’d have to look at her before snatching it.
“Been a real pleasure,” she said, just as the scythe of Elle’s voice sliced through the speakers.
“I hate this got-damn song,” the driver called as he peeled out of the lot.
Marijohn bent, fetched the twenty, and tucked it into the back pocket of her Levi’s. It was nearing five o’clock, and the sun held strong beyond the tree line, plump and round.
There was no breeze, still hot as hell, and Marijohn couldn’t help it. She was excited for tonight. She prided herself on the thick candy coating that protected her velvet heart, but that summer it had started to crack.
Inside, Marijohn was a bubble bath. A melted bonbon. A baby bird.
She walked toward the marquee, to the mailbox by the road. The lid had buckled a year ago when a pickup knocked into it, so she had to use both hands to pry it open. Three months back, Marijohn had run here every day while waiting for college acceptance letters. She’d gotten two, to major in music—but no scholarships, and Abe couldn’t afford for her to attend.
It’s all right, she’d sworn when her father peeked into their bank account and despaired. He got a particular look about him when he was bereft, as if he were being forced backward by an imaginary wind, and it took all his strength to remain upright. He pinched his eyes shut and tucked his chin into his shoulder, and Marijohn couldn’t stand it. She wanted to swallow that wind in her throat, will it to disappear.
I didn’t want to go anyway, she’d said.
It was true, and it wasn’t. Marijohn specialized in aching for the impossible. What she really wanted was to stop time itself, down to the second. To keep her favorite song from ending, to keep her father from aging, to keep Lazarus from leaving.
Marijohn hated that she always wanted so many things she knew she’d never get.
Now she fanned through the mail: bill, bill, grocery flyer, bill. And a tiny package from Kentucky, throned in packing tape, that made her excitement wilt.
“Shit,” she said.
Elle Harlow’s voice shot through the stillness as she walked back toward the station. Her voice scratched against the quiet—the words riding the eerie melody Elle strummed on her guitar.
To learn the third, she sang, you’ll have to wait.
A bell chimed when the glass door swung open, and Marijohn stepped inside the cramped shop. It smelled like rubber and vinyl, and a little bit like the macaroni salad they’d brought for lunch.
Abe looked up.
“Depressing the customers again?” he asked.
Marijohn grinned.
She set the pile of mail on the counter, and Abe tore open the package.
“Look at this.” He held up a rhinestone barrette. The gems were styled in the shape of a cat, its tail curling at the edge. “Came from that guy in Kentucky I talked to last week. It’s got to be Elle’s—it matches her first album cover. Don’t you think?”
Abe looked at Marijohn with such unsullied faith, oil-slick and sunburned, with a graying five-o’clock shadow and a jaw that could chisel the face of a rock. The jewelry glittered in his palm, looking like fresh snow against the grime that had settled into the lines on his hands.
Abe closed his beloved repair shop on only three occasions per year: to attend church on Christmas Eve, to man the french fry vat at Lenora’s annual “ox” roast that hadn’t served ox since 1967, and to celebrate Marijohn’s birthday on December 15. Her father was her first love and her favorite thing, tied up with fishing line and nostalgia.
He also got cheated, over and over.
“How much was this one?” Marijohn asked.
“Just forty-five.”
She felt the loss of that money like a fist around her neck. “Next time,” she said softly, “I’ll take the call.”
He was so fixed on the barrette she couldn’t be certain that he’d heard.
Marijohn loved her father so much that it made her hate anyone who dared swindle him. As the self-appointed curator of the country’s only Elle Harlow museum, situated next to his repair bay, her dad was a man who cared for hurting things, missing things, torn things—even when everyone called him a fool for it.
A few of his favorite relics—
A stray lyric—Jaclyn, in her iris fields—written on a bloodied linen napkin
A stuffed calico cat
A single turquoise earring
A tube of rose-pearl lipstick
A set of cowboy boots with golden toes
There was a reason no one was allowed to touch the pump out in the yard. It was the first item of Abe’s to become an artifact after she had disappeared. He was known to pay just about any price for something that might have belonged to Elle Harlow.
The song resolved on a hollow note, and Abe—handsome and muscled and blue-collar down to his blood—looked up at her.
“Been meaning to say,” he said.
Abe wasn’t known for his speeches. He had a quiet way, most of his sentiments boiling down to two words—love you—which he used on all occasions: when she’d changed her first flat, when he’d forgotten to apply for financial aid, when Marijohn went to sleep every night. Those words meant everything: I’m proud of you, I’m sorry, I’ll see you in the morning.
“Even though Laz is leaving tomorrow,” he said, “it don’t mean you ain’t still you.”
She looked away, taking the cold bottle of water her father had offered from the cooler and touching it to her forehead. The unruly wave of black hair on top of her head had been tamped down by sweat.
The record player in the corner skipped, and Abe rose from his seat to right it. He lifted the arm, the shush of the spinner filling the small space. When he set it down, “Shut Out the Light” began to play.
Marijohn turned the rhinestone clip over in her hand. It looked feeble and used. She pushed on the clasp and the metal bucked against her skin. Inside, a small golden sticker appeared with one word on it.
CLAIRE’S.
Her eyes flitted toward her father, who had his back to her as he eyed the pink-and-white pattern on Elle Harlow’s first album cover that hung on the wall. Swiftly, she pushed her thumbnail against the sticker. It wouldn’t budge. She dug again, but this time Abe saw her.
