“She ran a stop sign; killed instantly!” Maggie said on the phone.

Her voice distant, as though she were oceans away instead of the seventy miles or so that lie between Maggie and her daughter, Lea. Distant as it was whenever Maggie conjured up Rita. Where should she place her son’s once-lover, who also happened to be her daughter‘s rival? She was never sure, and so she tiptoed around Rita.

Whereas her son, Josh, stayed behind in Sandusky to nurse his wounds, Lea, his sister was blinded by tears and rushed away so quickly that she didn’t have time to reflect on where she was going, or what she was running from.

And now Maggie was having to bring her daughter back to that sad, humiliating time. She was reluctant even to call Lea, as if by telling her that David’s wife was dead, David and his destructive zenith would somehow reappear in their lives: Rita and David, like bolts of lightening illuminating the Kennedys’ dark corners where they often took refuge.

“The baby killed, too, ” Maggie added ruefully. She was hoping she’d block the fiery crosses she felt yet burning.

On the receiving end, Lea was in Toledo paying her dues, so to speak.

Dues that began in sixties, coffee houses in those days of flowing locks and gauze dresses. Riffs at lunches were afternoons of flower children nibbling vegetable sandwiches and drinking coffee with more foam than caffeine. Lea’s night gigs she launched in college mixers, campus clubs, and/or fraternity house parties.

‘Ah, those first hours on my own,’ Lea remembered. ’Frightening with no one in the audiences with whom I could connect.’

Her wings clipped too. A fragile songbird; Lea. Both her voice and her legs trembling on stage. Sometimes it was pencil beam lights that danced lightly over Lea and her songs. Other times wide, refulgent lights glared up at her; uncompromising lights from which she could not escape. Below, a sea of faces looked up at her with the eyes of strangers ... curious, restless, analyzing eyes, younger than the eyes that looked back at them. Lea was merely a pause in their interactive lives. Regardless, she kept going and expanded her territories to piano bars and niteries, to engagements and bar mitzvahs, to weddings and anniversaries. Even in those celebratory settings, Lea felt she was but an echo back and forth between the intimacies that did not include her.

In between gigs she held over in budget motels ... a quick cup of coffee and a hamburger before the first set, cigarettes and flirtations in between.

A few light romances grazed her in interludes both trivial and brief; flashes of those connections surfaced now and then. But it was only parts of faces that Lea recalled, ‘freckles across his nose; one with a mouth that pouted when he talked.’

Once she sang beside a saxophone player who had eyes like David’s, deep and searching, they were topped with eyebrows that mocked. He stood close to Lea when she sang, and though the sax’s notes were round and sure, Lea’s voice tripped over the lump in her throat.

Impressions hung only if they were gutsy. One guy confessed to being gay. Another loved to dance, a chunky guy so full of himself that he danced with three girls simultaneously. But the one who clung to Lea the longest and hung on to her heart with her pink and pearly hands, was the rosy-pink girl with her arms circled in gold bracelets. Clinking as they raced up and down her arms, she told Lea that she was getting ready to sail around the world. Her voice soft and frightened; her hair wispy blonde. Soft curls, not knowing which direction to take, drifted around her face in a confused halo. Perched on the edge of a bar stool as though ready to fly off at any moment, the girl seemed to be talking to the bar’s bottles; that’s where her eyes settled without focusing. Her words hesitant, her voice stilted. Overhead, lights bounced off the bottles on to her delicate features. Like a Matisse painting, green across a cheek, red an oval on her chin, and purple highlights falling across her gossamer hair. She seemed more apprehensive than excited about the journey she was about to undertake.

‘Had she then run off,’ Lea wondered. ‘Said “the hell with it,” and leapt from the pier to deep waters as she, Lea, did when she rushed off to uncertain tomorrows rather than stick around and wander through the maze of what might have been?

And the others in those beginning days? Where were they? They could have become part of Lea’s life if she let them in. But too broken to make connections, she drifted around them all like the cigarette smoke of the clubs where she sang. Sometimes, she took refuge in the tubes of trumpets that held her melody. More often, Lea felt as frozen as the ice cubes the bartenders continually dropped into glasses.

‘Oh, so lost was I in the fog of those long and lonely nights; a fog that lifted when the two am lights popped on. Then the romance of all of it was pummeled by neons that sharpened reality, and the faces held in darkness sharpened into harsh lines when the lights of last calls illuminated them. And those outrageous flirtations when I was on breaks between songs? At two am I realized that most of them were prompted by alcohol. And if they weren’t, I couldn’t muster up enough enthusiasm to pursue them.’

When she drove past the long rectangles of motels squatting on the outskirts of mid-west towns, melancholia set in. ‘It was then that I remembered waking up in rooms of Spanish décor with wrought iron lamps, and bullfights depicted on the walls. And in those long nights there lurked in the deafening silences, the loneliness that suffocated me. Where am I, I wondered when I awoke. In heart-pounding panic, I struggled to know.’

Somewhere between the high-level bridge and downtown Toledo, Lea bid adieu to Mark and the Marksmen; a final farewell to her one-time group. Passé they were like Arthur Murray and hula-hoops. She left them for good, even as she remembered with nostalgia, how excited she was when first she signed their contract. Way back then The Marksmen were, in Lea’s star-struck eyes, bigger than anything or anybody. Well, almost. More mondo than senior prom and finals, and more central than Rita. However, not as essential as David. No one was that important!

A mystery of which Lea remained in awe. ‘How did the combination of David and I supersede time and space? When it was finished, I figured only the residuals would remain. But what stayed with me was that moment in time when ‘we’ ended. It was and is a moment that yet shudders in shock; a grief that reappears without warning. I cannot put a name on it, that sinking feeling of finality that brings me down without warning.’

But in the lean years The Marksmen loomed large; of that there was no doubt.

Moreover, Lea figured that they would be going somewhere other than where they ended up; in motel bars on Saturday nights. They faded away in petty bickering, and what is left after years of close interfusion, which leads no place except to other motel bars on other Saturday nights.

Thereafter, Lea changed groups, some innovative, some smooth, others forte and tinny - whoever was in the area and available. Through Sam’s connections and a hectic regimen she held herself to, Lea was spared many, weary auditions. Summer auditions were rare: summers were easy and laid back; she showed up and she sang. Tryouts were winter fare.

‘A tic-tock clock ringing too early after singing until two am in a club an hour away. And awakening with tears in my eyes to feel sad ghosts coiled in my stomach. Oh, so quickly did I land on my feet; wash and dress. Suitcase in hand, I scrambled for a lobby where sat the ubiquitous coffee pot. With paper cup steaming, out the door I flew. A hollow slam. To my car where I sat shivering in the early morning cold. Not sure which direction to go, but going anyway past sleepy winter farms, heading towards the lights of gas stations, and past houses awakening. Pulling up to a dark hall; inside I went only to wait while the musicians warmed up in off-keys that jangled my early morning nerves.

Sam, my agent, and Josh came to see me regularly until Josh was drafted. Hence, it was just Sam, and he at irregular intervals. He was off chasing the many possibilities popping up throughout the states. Music was spreading its notes in new and wondrous forms, and Sam was out and about flagging them down. In Midwest basements he found promising high-school rockers with guitars and crew cuts. He flew off to his old haunt, San Francisco to scout out acid rockers. And he hung out for a few in The Village to scavenge for folk hopefuls. Rock was inching itself up from high school dances into college clubs; folk was just catching on.’

Lea fretted: Sam reassured her. “Jazz and blues are still a slice of the music scene; hang on to what you do best.“

She wound her way back home periodically; she didn’t stay long though. Rye Beach and Lea had become strangers to each other. The lake, as seen from distant shores, moved in currents that took away old friends and moved peers. Behind every rock an empty space; spaces among spaces. Moreover, Lea was afraid of the joy in Maggie’s face. She did not need her mother as much as Maggie needed her. Lea managed to turn off those yesterdays, like knobs on the stations of her life; a habit that began when she and David were finished. She moved on without David, and knew him only in yearnings. She continued on without either Maggie or Josh, and without Danny too. Her father’s illnesses became Danny’s steady companions when more than thirty years of alcoholism took their toll.

No sooner had Lea unpacked at the Kennedy’ cottage in Rye Beach, than she was itching to go. That was a part of herself that Lea did not want to examine; it was far too raw, and scary too.

“Rumor has it, honey,” Maggie continued, confidingly troubled. “That Rita and David had a stormy exchange before the accident occurred; Rita was in such a turmoil, she failed to stop at that fateful corner.”

After a pause so brief, it was blasphemous, Lea shot back, “When’s the funeral?”

Struck dumb, Maggie gasped and it was a while before she could find her voice.

At the onset of Lea fast-forwarding her life, she, herself, was stunned. ’How quickly I fell into such a cowardly mode of behavior. If Josh would have been near by, I would not have so quickly buried those painful incidents. I rushed forward and refused to look back. Josh rages or rejoices at anything even remotely affecting him. Just being with my impetuous brother would have forced me to do likewise.’

But she was traveling solo then. And by herself she mapped out routes for her solitary journeys. They began with one, irrevocable night in a coffeehouse in downtown Sandusky. Bruised black and blue with his eyes swollen, David was first in Lea’s trinity of goodbyes. What he told her held Lea in a state of disbelief, so profound it stopped the currents of time. Turning around, time headed off in new directions.

Next, it was Josh who stomped into the coffeehouse. Lea saw him coming through the haze of her sorrow, bloody and bruised. Directly behind Josh trailed Killy. Disheveled, with buttons ripped from his torn shirt, Killy seemed the last soldier in a decisive battle, as he tried without success to subdue an enraged Josh and comfort Lea.

Though paralyzed, somehow she managed to force from her mouth a half-sung, half-spoken song while trying to get past the shock of Rita being pregnant … Rita carrying David’s baby and not her brother’s even though Josh had been her steady for a long time.

But that was June, and this was youths’ eternity afterwards - November. After Maggie hung up, Lea canceled a weekend engagement at the Holiday Lodge; she decided she’d head to Sandusky. But even as she was making traveling arrangements and packing, she was stupefied. Rita being gone forever; impossible! Lea figured that Rita would and could defy anything in her path ... herself, Josh, David’s reluctance; surely untimely death.

Thus it was that Lea became acquainted with fate; they shook hands and knew they would be keeping in touch. ‘Never, ever again will I assume that I can get chummy with fate; that crack of doom. Fate, now there’s a fearsome creature! Fangs and talons hidden until it jumps out at us from nowhere. Fate; it cuts us down without the first clue.’

Old Thomas summoned his son, Killy back from Florida; he was in the Minors at the time. He figured that when spring rolled around, he’d be signed up as relief pitcher for the Tribe. From the farm in Florida, he flew into Cleveland; reluctantly, however. He dreaded situations he couldn’t nudge with an irreverent phrase or two. Then too Killy knew Josh would be on a downer; down too low to rehash old news with him, and too sad to plan for their futures. But Killy could not imagine that Josh would be so despondent that he couldn’t pick him up at the airport. Instead, Lea did before she and Killy swung by to pick up Josh from the diner working the grill. From the diner, the three of them drove directly to the wake with Josh and Lea hoping that Killy would be able to link them to David.

‘We feel so fragmented; but why?’ they marveled.

Later they deducted that it was Rita who separated them even as she connected them. A powerful force, Rita!

At the time that the Kennedys’ and Killy arrived at the funeral home, the line to pay respects rounded an entire block. Upper crust and old Sandusky mingled with the masses: all united to decry the dark intruder who ravaged what wasn’t his to take.

But where was David; Rita‘s husband? The rumor going around had him hiding away in a cottage at Cedar Point. That is where the three of them headed ... down single lane roads bordered by rocks and water. Icy waves slapped the shore and pummeled the roads they slipped and slid on. Killy drove while Josh sputtered the entire way there. But when they got to the cottage and David, he didn’t say much.

None of them could find words indignant enough to express the outrage of Rita and her child being killed outright. Rita meant something different to each of them; she was Josh‘s steady, David‘s wife, and Lea‘s rival for David. Therein lie the problem. If one of them expressed what would be missing from his or her life with Rita being gone, then anger would emerge from another. Thus, they trailed off to uneasy silences. David’s sad youth had shown him the effects of sorrow. But Killy, Josh, and Lea were too young to know mortality; they were just learning the language of life.

Because Killy had the least connection to Rita, it was he who moved to comfort David. Crouched in a corner with his legs wrapped in his arms, David wept while Killy consoled him. But their words were lost to the foreboding winds that howled down the chimney. In gusts and gales the winds told of the many ways and times that David had been cruel to Rita. He hadn’t wanted to marry her and when he did he was dark and angry. The long shadows that had been drifting around David for most of his life firmly attached themselves to him. Forever after, he would walk in shadows.

To combat this dark night, they sat around pretty much grim and quiet, and drank Jack Daniels by turns of sips and slugs. Inadvertently, the four of them hovered close together. Shoulders bumping, they clutched hands. Their tremulous bodies sought refuge ... for far more powerful than their troubled pasts were the winds’ dirges and the shadows creeping up the walls. In time, Killy and Josh passed out. Shortly after, Lea and David staggered from the cottage to the lake, where they stood shivering in the icy sands of a sinister night. David wrapped his arms around Lea; for protection or for warmth, neither of them knew.

With face contorted, his hands flew from her shoulders. “Whomever, whatever these hands embrace will self-destruct,” he prophesied.

Turning on his heel, he ran along the water’s edge towards a dark unknown. And as he ran, he was leaving footprints embedded across Lea’s heart. Pummeled by winds and sleet while shivering on a lonely shoreline, Lea wondered what lie ahead for her, for all of them. She looked across the lake to distant horizons to try and find their ‘morrows. But all were shrouded in the snow and sleet of an icy darkness.

The next morning the alarm rang late. They awoke suddenly, painfully, and felt as

though a train had run over them. But where was David? None of them knew. Regardless, they had no time to look for him; only forty-five minutes before the bells of Rita’s requiem would be chiming. Hung over and filled with gloom, Lea voiced her premonitions in a tearful voice. But already Josh was sorry he had come. He demanded they leave and vacate soon they could get themselves together. They began by taking showers. Even the water hurt when it hit their alcohol-riddled bodies.

Numbly they shut the door on an inexplicable night, on David, and on a romantic past that came to end here. Somber and dark, the three of them drove down a road strangely quiet. Last night’s raging winds were stilled from their raucous revelry. Looking across the lake, Lea saw it as a glass sheet of reflection. But Killy’s gaze stretched out further to beyond the ice floats. There, he saw silver currents shimmering on a silver horizon. He saw too the moon as a lazy sliver that didn‘t care that it overslept. But Josh saw a frozen sun, white with no warmth. Josh‘s sun seemed as remote to him as that long-ago time when all of them connected.

They stumbled into church as the requiem was paving Rita’s path to eternity. A final foray to the cemetery; past regret, past sorrow they were traveling now. The sojourn to Rita’s resting-place was fathoms beyond the sweetness of their, young yesterdays. Up past a rim mounded in corn stubbles, Rita’s burial place waited on a crest that met the winds of heaven. Lines of cars parked discreetly amongst tombstones, and the saints frozen in marble serenity. Car lights splintered January’s, icy mist. A reflective quiet enveloped them.

But David was nowhere near the funeral tent that pointed to the skies of eternity. Instead he was hovering against the trunk of a majestic oak whose branches shadowed the new snow … falling, falling quietly, softly.

Lea saw his Indian-copper skin vanquished. ‘Stolen,’ she supposed. ’By one of

Danny’s Irish hobgoblins; he had a slew of them. Maybe a gnome who deigned to wrap himself in its bronzed glory for a long while; which is only a moment in the eternal tricks of fickle gods.’

Killy managed to squeeze inside the tent; Josh skirted the edge. Everyone else huddled inside to form refuge in the gloom. “Eternal rest grant unto her Oh Lord,”

sang out the priest’s plea.

“And let perpetual light shine upon her,” echoed back.

Though Lea stood close to David, Josh was too distraught to notice. The remorse that stalked David all night was getting ready to close in. Lea grabbed his hand; she held tight. As long as she was there, he couldn’t be spirited off. Once she let go, look what happened! This time she would hold him in her heart eternally.

It was time, and so they said goodbye. Rita was the golden part of their youth, bright like the sun that shone on their long ago, carefree days. Rita was before they knew; they had to leave her here, they had to go on. They hugged before they departed, and clung to each other tightly. Aware that the journeys they would be taking from here on would be traveled solo, they left, each to his or her own destination. Lingered a time that could not be calculated; a time suspended in the moments they dare never mention again. Eternities lie between the beginning of them, and the varied endings they would come to. Indecipherable time tangled them again with Rita; with each other.

Killy flew south to Florida; working hard to make the final cut. Lea drove back to Toledo. She returned to chambers of motel rooms, and the riffs and gigs moving her up. Josh back to the drudgery of the diner; lost without Lea and Killy. Maggie rode back with Josh. And Danny, always reverent when coming face to face with mortality, trudged back to his apartment, a postage-size room with bath, then above a theatre.

Moreover, David returned to a foreign, far-off place. that until then they never heard of; Vietnam.