Page 58

“Hey.” Jeff held his hands up. “I’m just a humble shroom salesman at the beginning of festival season. I don’t make up the bullshit, I just ride it.”
Brian seemed to be warming to Jefe Jeff. He nodded at Jeff’s Rushroom tent. “Don’t suppose you sell beer in there, too?”
“Regrettably, this is an alcohol-free festival.”
“Wait. So, you can blow hard drugs up your ass, but you can’t buy a Bud Light?”
This may have been the funniest thing Jefe Jeff had ever heard. “Ha! Right? I never thought of it that way.” He held out a fist, Brian shrugging to Kinnick before bumping it.
“Hold on a minute,” Jeff said. He went inside his tent and returned wearing reading glasses, staring at a concert bill and carrying two lanyards. “You don’t mean The Buffs, do you?” He pointed to one of the smaller names on the bill.
“Maybe?”
“I haven’t heard them play, but”—Jeff glanced at his tent—“the guide business is a little slow right now, and since The Buffs are playing on the Tonatiuh Stage in about”—he checked an expensive-looking silver watch—“forty minutes, come on, I’ll take you up there.”
***
Bethany sat up in her sleeping bag, breathless and cold. The awful prickly feeling was back, along with the shakes, the tightness in her chest, the twitching, and the sensation that she might, at any moment, rattle right out of her skin. What had she been thinking? Leaving the kids and running off to a music festival in the woods with her ex-boyfriend? Did she really thinkthiswould solve anything? Make her feel less anxious? Less depressed? It was like treating a burn by setting fire to it. She’d been having these panic attacks on and off since her mother died, more than a month ago. She’d lost her therapist when she’d quit her teaching job and her insurance went away, and now she wasn’t sure what to do. When the attacks came on, the anxiety was like this wall she couldn’t see around. And, as it turned out, panic attacks were not something you could just run away from by going off into the woods.
She put her head between her knees and tried to breathe. In deeply—hold. Out slowly. Hold. (Breathe in a square, Peggy used to say.) But then another wave of panic ran through her chest and arms.My God!She covered her mouth to keep from crying out.
“Hey, B.” Doug’s round face slid into the tent opening. “You get some sleep?”
Bethany looked up from between her knees, glad to have him here. “It’s happening again.” Her voice sounded weak and raspy to her own ears.
“Oh, B, I’m sorry.” He came a little farther into the tent, and reached out a hand, but didn’t get any closer. She still wasn’t used to seeing Doug like this; her once 125-pound, dreadlocked wispy blond boyfriend was a middle-aged 200-pound bald man now. Still those same kind eyes. “Maybe we should get you to a hospital.”
“No. I’ll be fine.” She checked her watch. “Aren’t you supposed to be onstage?”
“Pretty soon, yeah,” Doug said. “We just set up. I wanted to make sure you were okay before we went on.”
Amid all of this—her mom’s death, Shane’s new church, the trouble at home, the rattly feelings, the waves of panic, her lack of sleep and resulting questionable decision-making, this insane music festival—Bethany really appreciated how caring Doug had been with her. And how respectful.
Four days ago, sleepless and jacked up on coffee and adrenaline, she’d crouched next to Leah’s bed, waking her daughter at six thirty in the morning. Shane had left at dawn to go train for the coming holy war with his yahoo friends up at the Rampart, and Bethany whispered to Leah that she was going away for a few days, to Canada, to hear some songs she’d written played by her father’s band, and to not tell anyone. (“It’s not a lie if no one asks.”) There was a week’s worth of lunches in the refrigerator, and reading assignments in their desks, oh, and should Shane go after her, there was a note for Anna in Leah’s snow boot about where to take the kids. Then she kissed her daughter, told her to go back to sleep, left a short note for Shane (“I need some space. Please don’t come look for me.”), grabbed her passport and her packed duffel bag, and ran out the door, to where Doug was parked across the street, waiting in his father’s old 1972 Firebird, which he’d lovingly and half-assedly restored. She climbed in, and off they flew, toward the Canadian border. The ride was beautiful—warm spring day, windowshalf down, air rushing in, old cassette tapes playing Traffic and Violent Femmes on Doug’s car stereo. She felt an unburdening. They high-fived when they crossed the Canadian border, and high-fived again when they lost their phone signals for good. During the last part of the trip, she had put her hand out the car window, and let the rushing air move it like an airplane, the way she had when she was a kid.
That first night, they’d set up their tent near the other early settlers, in the area reserved for bands and their crews, and she’d continued to feel that open-car-window sense of freedom, pure elation. She smoked pot for the first time in a decade, out of a pipe shaped like a little Volkswagen Beetle—just a quick toke, to remind herself of the feel in her throat, and to send the signal that she wasn’t trapped by Shane’s reactionary rules anymore. She let the woman in the tent next door, a big gust of hippie life who called herself Mama Killa (“Goddess of the moon, my love,” Mama said), paint crescent moons on both of her cheeks, and she reveled in the other weirdos that gathered around the campfire Doug had built for them (although Bethany insisted on the “straight” marshmallows for her s’mores, not the far more popular marshmellowsthat had been soaked in liquified marijuana). It was a magical night, guitarists taking turns playing while the stars blazed insistently above them, and a cool mountain breeze sent them under-blanket, and she managed to keep her guilt at bay, cuddled with Doug on one side and fleshy Mama Killa on the other, all of them giggling as they watched the fire. That night, with their sleeping bags next to each other, she’d even let Doug kiss her a little bit—
And that’s when the first panic attack had set in.
What was she doing up here? This was not who she was anymore. How would she feel if Leah did something like this? She started weeping, gasping for breath.
Doug sat up. “Are you okay, B?”
She made him promise not to give her any more drugs.
“I didnotgive you drugs,” Doug protested. “You smoked on your own!”
“No, I know! I just... I can’t do that again. And this...” She gestured to their sleeping bags. “I don’t think I want to do this. I don’t... I don’t know.” She started crying. “I’m sorry, Doug, but— I just— I—” She didn’t finish.
He put his hand on her forehead. “B, you have nothing to be sorry for. And I would never pressure you into anything. I hope you know that.” Shedidknow that and she calmed down and eventually fell asleep, humming like a mantra the thing she’d been telling herself since she left:The kids are okay, the kids are okay. True to his word, since that first night, Doug had not so much as tried to kiss her. And he’d worked to keep drugsawayfrom her, no small feat at a festival where LSD, ketamine, ecstasy, and psilocybin were known as “the four food groups.”
Doug handed her a bottle of water now.
“Thanks,” she said. “You should go. I’ll be right behind you.”
“When you’re ready, walk up to that side-stage area again. Remember it from yesterday?”
“Yes.”