THE JUNIPER 3 by Trudy Lewis

No one even remembered our dad’s sad song until Tate brought it back on TikTok. The angst and the ecstasy. The emo vocals and the math rock chord progressions. The long and whining bridge between curt, accusatory verses.

My mother killed me

 My father ate me

My sister gathered up my bones

I’d heard it hundreds of times, of course. It was The Juniper 3’s anthem back in the aughts, before the drummer took up with the Sufis and Tate’s mom OD’d on oxycodone. The band only recorded one album, but they toured the Midwest for four years on the strength of cult favorites. For the last few months, they brought baby Tate along with them, leaving him in the motel with his teenage aunt while they banged it out at college music festivals or milked the instrumentals for hardcore fans in the clubs.

Maybe that’s why Tate was always vocalizing. I remember him rapping nursery rhymes when I was a toddler and beatboxing with his cheek next to mine, so that I could feel the rhythm pop and swell against my skin. 

By then, Dad had gone back to programming and married my mom. It didn’t take him long to realize that he needed a responsible woman to help with Tate, who was already becoming difficult, throwing tantrums and refusing to sleep. So Dad got on a dating app, one of the early versions, where the developers clearly hadn’t worked out the kinks. Of course, people can make bad life choices without any help from an algorithm. But the external validation only encourages them to ignore their mistakes.

I was thirteen before they admitted anything was wrong. Meanwhile, I had been noticing for years. Dad steered around her in the kitchen, so that they never touched. She flinched as he leaned across her to open the glove compartment. Mom set the alarm for five a.m. so she could get some quiet before going into the insurance office, and Dad stayed up making music until one. 

What did it measure anyway, that outmoded app? Sexual compatibility? Economic stability? Common interests?  She must have claimed to enjoy music, at some point. After all, she insisted I learn an instrument and bragged to anybody who’d listen when I made first chair flute. But ever since I could remember, she’d been shouting at Dad to keep the volume down. When I was little, he’d bring his guitar into the living room and pass out triangles and maracas so we could play along. By elementary school, he was down in the basement experimenting with his sound system every night. By middle school, he didn’t even eat dinner with us, just grabbed a plate and took it down to his studio.

But they were adults. The person in our house I felt sorry for was Tate. You couldn’t turn Tate down. He was always spilling over with sound, humming, beatboxing, pretending to speak French or German, whistling, cracking his knuckles, snapping his fingers and clicking his tongue. 

One day when he was nine or ten, he got detention for disrupting a school assembly and Mom asked if Dad thought the kid was on the spectrum. She certainly hoped so, because then maybe they could get some medication to even him out.

That was one of the few times I saw Dad explode at her, his voice cracking into sheer static and his thin, handsome face turning red as his goatee.

Because, of course, Tate’s mom had died of drugs.

I was thrilled to see him defending my brother for once. Usually, Dad wasn’t around when Mom punished Tate by making him go without his dinner and sit out in the mudroom in the dark. Once, she made him pee in the girl’s bathroom for getting into her make-up. Another time, when he had a meltdown in the electronics store, she left him there, driving halfway home before going back to pick him up. Even then, she sent me in to get him. 

 She was constantly asking why Tate couldn’t be more like me.

“See how Lena cleans her room without anyone asking?”

“Look how Lena sits still for the dentist.”

“Lena is so quiet that she gets an extra stick of gum.”

 I’ll never understand why Tate didn’t hate me for the preferential treatment. I know I hated myself, that pitiful zombie who followed along behind her mother without any will of her own. If he was a regular person, my brother would avoid and resent me. But, being Tate, he loved me more than anyone else I’d ever known. 

*

One afternoon just after my thirteenth birthday, we were sitting outside under the tulip tree when Mom drove up in her Escalade. Tate had been telling me about his confrontation with the gym teacher, punctuating the story with sound effects: the bouncing basketball, the squeaking bleachers, the banging lockers, the splashing in the pool. Sometimes it was hard to look at him when he talked. So I stared up through the branches instead, admiring the pink blossoms with mouths as wide as teacups and remembering how we pretended to drink out of them as kids. A plain brown bird perched next to one of them, singing a sad and piercing song. 

 The jerky motion of Mom’s vehicle let me know something was wrong. My throat closed, and I thought about the anti-anxiety pills I was supposed to be taking. I’d skipped a couple of days because they were making me dizzy, and now I felt a full-fledged panic attack coming on.

She pulled the car up too close, nearly veering into the yard, and emerged like a storybook pop-up, with her long neck, bright make-up, curly hair, and ruffled blouse. Even her smell was dangerous, a perfume so strong that it singed the hairs inside my nose.

“Get in the house, both of you. We’re not going to give the neighbors a free show.”

She herded us up the front steps, kicked the shoes out of the doorway, and slammed the front door behind her. I stayed as far away as possible without appearing to retreat, because I knew from experience that would only make things worse. Tate, of course, went right into the path of danger, taking her canvas tote from her and setting a hand on her arm.

“Bad day at the office?” he asked. “Trouble at the low-cal, no foul, farm insurance saloon?” 

“You could say that. I found out my stepson is making a fool of himself on social media, letting his freak flag fly out over the internet for everyone to see.”

Tate blushed, bringing his new sideburns into focus. Although he’d always been a brunette, his facial hair was going to be as red as Dad’s. 

“Yeah, it was just an experiment.” Tate said. “I wanted to see if I could drum up some interest in Dad’s old band. You’d be surprised how many people remember. And then some younger kids just like the bebop bipitty of the down and dirty beat.” He began demonstrating, pursing his lips and blasting out a series of verbal farts that shook the windowpanes and ruffled Mom’s hair. 

She turned away, waving her hand in front of her face, and swung the sharpened blade of her profile toward me. “Lena, did you know about this?”

I couldn’t deny it. After all, I was the one who had filmed the video of Tate mugging for the camera in Dad’s studio, wearing his mom’s old blue fright wig and a vampire cape. 

“It was just a goof.” I said. “We did it last week when we had early dismissal.”

Tate’s rendition was nothing like my father’s. It was speeded up and syncopated until it was nearly unrecognizable. My brother punctuated his lines with a flurry of clicks and whistles, his cheeks puffing out, then deflating with a loud pop over his cheekbones. His phrasing was so erratic you could only make out a few of the words. Mother. Father. Sister. Kill. Eat. Bones.

“And what about your father?”  

“I was going to surprise the old duder once I got up to a million views.”

“Which should happen, like tomorrow, if it keeps on blowing up,” I said, bragging on my brother even though I ought to know better by now.

Tate tugged on the string of his sweatshirt. “It’s supposed to be a birthday present for his fortieth, you know, to show he’s not completely and irrevocably irrelevant.”

Mom rolled her eyes and pulled a miniature bottle of hand sanitizer out of her purse. “You need to take it down,” she said, pouring a clear puddle into her palm. “Take it down or I’ll cut up your learner’s permit and never let you drive the car again.” She rubbed her hands together, as if she had the problem solved.

“Don’t you even want to see it first?” I asked.

“Believe me, I’ve already got an earful from my colleagues. Take it down and your father never has to know.”

*

But I couldn’t let that happen. Not when Tate was so invested the project. I waited until Mom was asleep, then walked down the orange-carpeted stairs to the basement, feeling the shag catch between my bare toes. I smelled pot smoke and popcorn. I saw a flicker of fluorescents, heard the blunt attack of the guitar. My father was singing in his angry young man’s voice. The sound was much more confident than his speech, and for a minute, I wondered what my life would be like if I’d been raised by a singing father instead of a silent one.

He must have known what I was thinking, because he inserted my name into the music: Lena, Marlena, Marla, Marlene! The sound enveloped my body and warmed my ribs, until I could almost believe he was a regular father and not just a sad, defeated hipster who had given up all pretense of parental responsibility.

He sat at the bar in his day-glo T-shirt and hiking sandals, head bent over his guitar so I could see his bald spot, an icy, white thumbprint in the lava flow of red. Behind him, a huge poster showed The Juniper 3 at the height of its fame: Dad skinny, in horn rims and a paisley button-down, the drummer rocking a fedora, Tate’s mother ripped as an apocalyptic warrior in her leather vest and shredded tights.

“What’s up?” he asked, gesturing for me to speak over the music.

“It’s Tate,” I said. “He did something amazing. And now Mom wants him to throw it away.”  

“What was it, this spectacular thing your brother did?”

I handed him my phone.

Dad’s face went white and his hands slid off the guitar.

He pulled it close, then blinked and adjusted the volume. There was Tate, puffing and blowing, clicking and tic-ing, bringing out the banger side of Dad’s mumblecore song.

“That’s it, all right. Though I don’t know if I’d recognize it if you hadn’t pointed it out to me.”

“It’s heading for a million views.”

“Which translates to what, about twenty bucks and fifteen minutes of fame?”

I shrugged. “Who knows? Anyway, Tate did it for you. For your birthday.”

He replayed the video, slapping his leg in time to the beat. “I never knew he had any interest in that old tune.”

“Mom’s telling him he has to take it down.”

He rubbed at the screen, like he was trying to wipe away a smudge.

“His mom always thought he’d grow up to be a musician. I mean his biological mother, Krista.”

Krista. The bass player with the shaved head and the arms bigger than Dad’s.

“She was deliberately trying to get pregnant, you know. It wasn’t an accident, like your mom always assumes. Krista went to a psychic who said it might be now or never. Why she consulted a psychic and not a doctor, I’ll never know. Then after five months, she finally missed her period and we knew that Tate was on his way.” 

I blushed, thinking of three months earlier, when I found the first clot of blood in my underpants and had to borrow a pad from my frenemy Blair Simpson who was applying eyeliner in the girls’ bathroom. But I felt a kind of pride too, knowing that Dad wasn’t too embarrassed to discuss the female anatomy with me.

Dad started the video again. “I guess I’ll have to talk to Mom.”

*

Sometimes, I envied Tate because he had another mother, even if she was dead. At least there was a reason he got treated like a stepchild. Though Mom favored me, her attention could be dangerous, and her praise sometimes felt like a curse. She monitored my weight, my schoolwork, and my medication. She made a chart where I was supposed to record my flute practice. She was always nagging me about me getting a solo in the band concert or raising my grades. Tate, on the other hand, she could ignore for days, until he did something disruptive.

But the TikTok really got under her skin—maybe because it was so public. Now there was no way to hide the eccentricities of her adopted son, who, though he had never been diagnosed with any particular condition, was clearly some kind of genetic anomaly. When I came home from school the next day, she was already there.

“I got off early for good behavior,” she said, switching out her sunglasses and snapping them into her purse. “I thought we could go out for ice cream.”

“What about Tate?” 

“Just us girls. So we don’t have to talk over the noise.” 

She hadn’t been so chatty when I got my period, only tossed me some pads and told me I better stay away from the boys. 

But now her voice was low and sweet, melting as quickly as soft serve.

“Did Dad say anything to you?” I asked.

“Your Dad has bent my ear with fish stories and fairytales, most of which I attempt to ignore.”

She drove me downtown to the Sweet Spot where she ordered a cup of mango sorbet for herself and chocolate marshmallow on a waffle cone for me. We ate our treats outside, watching little kids smudge their faces and dogs beg for the tail ends of their cones.

“Should we get something for Dad and Tate?”

“They already eat enough sweets, don’t you think?  Besides, I wanted to talk with you about the TikTok.”

“Tate didn’t take it down?” I asked, even though I knew he hadn’t because I checked the app multiple times a day.

“No, and now your Dad is backing him up. It’s all this ego he has around his college band. Sometimes, I think he’ll never get over it. I can’t imagine what people are saying about your brother’s performance. But I can’t see the comments because I don’t have an account.”

I could tell where this was going. I licked at a drip of chocolate that was sliding down the side of my cone and tried to buy some time.

“Lena, I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t think it was for your brother’s own good.” 

“Hmm,” I said, biting off a brittle piece of waffle.

“You know, it’s a thin line between admiration and sick curiosity. And I think we both know the kind of attention your brother tends to attract.”

I thought about the kids who’d piled up on his Insta, the lacrosse player who did an imitation of his stutter, the language arts teacher who made him stand at the front of the room and recite a tongue twister every time he talked out of turn in class.

“OK,” I said. “But only because I don’t want him to have to delete it.”

I texted her my password and she immediately got on the app.

I thought about the comments I’d seen. 

Sick vibes, Dude. Props to your old man 

When we saw The Juniper 3 in Milwaukee, they played for two hours and the bass player flashed her tits

This kid is hilarious 

Seriously, what kind of yodeling is this? It reminds me of those African throat-singers 

Just think about the kind of head this guy could give

“Well?” I asked.

“I’m reading.”

“Why do you hate The Juniper 3 so much anyway?”

“It nearly killed your father. And now it’s doing a good job on his son.”

*

By Dad’s birthday, Tate’s TikTok had hit a million views. A few followers contacted him, asking for signed memorabilia. A college radio station in Kansas asked if Tate and Dad would perform a father-son duo at their fall festival. A music industry scout wrote asking if Tate had any other songs. Even Dad’s drummer got in touch after a solid decade of silence, wondering if he’d like to play a set of old Juniper 3 numbers for a Sufi fundraiser.

There was no way anyone was taking the video down now. I bought a penny whistle for Tate, even though it was Dad’s birthday and not his. I thought maybe I could teach him the basics so he could add a legitimate instrument to his next video. We celebrated with dinner at a Japanese restaurant, where they threw pieces of meat and vegetables onto your plate like confetti. Mom got a shrimp stuck in her hair. 

Dad told us he was looking for a job where he could work remotely and spend more time on his music. Tate, who must have picked up on the permissive atmosphere, asked if he could quit school and finish his degree online. He’d never liked the academic gig much anyway and now that the bullies had started sucking up to him, it was even more obscene.

Mom didn’t relish the idea of everyone hanging around the house, making more messes for her to clean up. But she didn’t actually say no. Was I imagining it, or did I see her touch Dad’s leg under the table? For once, I could see why they were together, his tender voice and her raspy laughter, his deep dimples and her pixie face. 

*

Of course, the truce didn’t last for long. Dad’s new job turned out to involve a lot of travel in addition to the down time at home, and we saw less of him than usual. Tate’s TikTok started attracting negative attention when some activists claimed it mocked the disabled. And I was having more episodes, losing my balance while standing in the lunch line, my mouth so dry it began to affect my embouchure when I was playing my flute. I hadn’t entirely stopped taking my medication but, at this point, I couldn’t distinguish the symptoms from the side effects. I felt alienated from my friends, who didn’t want to talk about anything but Tate, begging me to put them in one of his videos. Meanwhile, Mom had started monitoring my social media accounts, demanding my passwords and editing my posts.

Tate wasn’t making much progress with his online courses. As far as I knew, he still hadn’t recorded another song. He never took out his Airpods and if I wanted to talk to him, I had to reach in and pull one off him, like breaking a wishbone.

“Hey. What’s up? Is anybody in there?”

“Hey, what’s going down, sister? Beep-bop you later on the B-B-B-B side.” 

I admit I understood Mom’s frustration, trying to communicate with a person who’d rather use his words to make music than actually tell you what he means.

 After a couple of weeks, he stopped taking showers and wore the same gray hoodie every day, until it was covered with mustard and ketchup stains. He didn’t shave his beard when it came in red, just let tufts accumulate like random feathers on his lip and chin. It began to look like he might flunk out of high school. What was Mom going to do with him then? According to her, he was Dad’s responsibility. But according to Dad, Tate was nearly an adult who could make all major life decisions on his own.

One day, when I came home from band practice, I saw Tate sitting on the floor of the mudroom, his face hidden behind the coats.

“What’s up?” I said, sitting down next to him. “Is anything wrong?”

For the first time I could remember, he was completely still, so that I noticed how long his legs had gotten, stretched in front of him in his outgrown jeans, one leg ripped over the kneecap and the other covered in purple ink. 

Mom called from the kitchen, her voice animated with insider information. “Your brother is sulking because he got some negative comments on his Ticky-Tacky. Maybe you can cheer him up.”

I gave him a punch on the shoulder, and he still didn’t respond.

“Come on, Tate. Don’t let the haters get to you.”

What could be bad enough to make him go silent?

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through the comments, where I saw my own profile picture, a cartoon goldfinch, next to words I would never say. That I was the sister of this dimwit genius. That I was already struggling with depression and anxiety. That I begged him to take down the video so I didn’t have to quit school or die of shame.

I felt a stab in my stomach like the worst cramp I could imagine and my mouth went so dry I couldn’t feel my own tongue. But I didn’t need it anymore.  I had someone else speaking for me.

“Ask him when he’s going to stop pouting and clean out the mudroom,” Mom called. “If he’s giving up on his schoolwork, at least he could do something to pull his weight around the house.”

I shook Tate’s shoulder, but he didn’t respond.

“It wasn’t me who wrote that,” I whispered. “I promise. It was Mom.”

He slumped toward me, his weight shifting onto my shoulder, like he might consider forgiving me after all. 

“I gave her my password. I know it was clueless. But she just kept badgering me until I couldn’t hold out anymore.”

I breathed in the sour smells of lunch meat and marijuana, mustard and cereal, oily hair and stale sweat. I thought of all the times I couldn’t look at him because his face made me dizzy. I pulled harder at his shoulder, wishing that I could go back and stand up to my mother. Then he toppled over, the weight of his head in my lap. For a minute, I thought he was just goofing. Then I looked down and saw the broken veins marking up his face like red pixels, the spot of blood in his eyeball, the bungy cord wrapped around his neck. 

In some ways, it was the first good look I ever got at him and I didn’t recognize what I saw.

*

After the emergency workers left, Mom gave me a pill, and I fell into a sleep so deep I couldn’t find its edges. Then I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating into the school clothes I’d never managed to change out of. Lying there looking at my hands on the comforter, I almost convinced myself it was just a nightmare: the hateful TikTok comment, the silence in the mudroom, Tate’s head heavy and still on my lap. Then I felt my stomach split open, ripping like an outgrown one-piece bathing suit from groin to navel when I realized again it was true.

Even though it was two a.m., I could see the light under my door and hear Mom talking to my father in her dripping, soft-serve voice.

“Honey, you should try to sleep.”

“First Krista, then Tate. What is it that I do to people?”

“It would never have happened if we’d gotten him on medication.”

“I don’t know. Look at Lena. The pills don’t seem to be doing her much good.”

“He was disturbed, Babe. He was suffering. He was not equipped to live in this world.”

There was a long pause and my neck prickled as I imagined her touch on his shoulder, her hand in his hair. How many times had she comforted me like that, tenderizing me like meat before going in for the kill. 

“This TikTok incident was too much for him. I know you were flattered by the attention. But it’s a lot of pressure on a kid trying to kick-start a moribund career.”

His groan seemed to come up from beneath the house, trailing like a tree root though my intestines. It unearthed worms and mushrooms, tore through grass and spattered mud. This time, Dad wasn’t the musician, but only the instrument. And it was my mother who played him like a cheap penny whistle, putting her own spin on the tune.

*

Of course, Mom handled all the arrangements. She scheduled the funeral in the Presbyterian church where she and Dad got married and forbade any mention of suicide. She had to give Tate credit, at least, for choosing a method that left a presentable corpse. 

 I couldn’t stand the idea of people coming to gloat at his funeral, gratified that his one spectacular success had ended in the ultimate failure. Why was it that the other big life rituals—weddings, anniversaries, bar mitzvahs, birthdays—were by invitation only?  It’s only at the end they let the whole un-curated world in to gawk at your remains.

At Mom’s request, I prepared a flute solo to play in between the scripture reading and the eulogy. I’d been practicing Bach’s Partita in A Minor for months, getting ready for the state competition, but I never thought I would have to perform it under that kind of stress. Somehow, I made it to the front of the church in my black recital gown and waded into the opening bars of the Sarabande.

I looked from the audience members with their smug living faces to the still body in the casket, nothing like the real Tate. Then I locked eyes with Mom, who was dabbing a Kleenex over a face dry and perfect, makeup unsmeared. She knew I’d never tell anyone what she did to my brother. Because accusing her would incriminate me. 

I wandered through the Bach until I found the nodes of Dad’s song: the C and the A, the trill and the rest, the aching whole note and the treacherous bridge. I was on my way now, playing the song without lyrics, telling the story without words. The tune sprang free from the score and flew around the church, echoing off the rafters and lingering like a ghost over the pews.

Some of the kids from school recognized the music. They stood up and flashed peace signs or pounded their fists over their hearts.

And Dad, who had been drifting, came up to join me, filling in the sad, mad lyrics of the final verse.

*

Afterwards, Mom went into a flurry of redecorating. She cleaned out the mudroom, scrapped the living room furniture, and took all of Tate’s possessions to Goodwill. She finally had the quiet house she always wanted. Meanwhile, Dad flew to California to meet with the industry professionals who’d contacted him after Tate’s death.

As for me, I spent most of my time outside in the tulip tree. The blossoms were gone by then, but I could still make out their melon smell on my fingers. And when the branches moved above me, I thought I could hear Tate whispering: mother, father, sister. Sometimes, Krista joined him, harmonizing in her reedy alto. And if I was very still, I could even hear my father singing along in his angry young man’s voice.

After what had happened, I was afraid he’d never come back to us and that I’d be left alone with my mother, growing more and more inseparable from her. Even if he wasn’t much of a parent, at least Dad formed some buffer between us, and I missed his silent approval every time I passed the basement door.

Then, a week and a half later, he texted to say that he’d signed a music deal and was coming home to celebrate. Did we get the gifts he sent us? They should be arriving any day now: a necklace for me, a freezer for the mudroom, a designer purse for mom.  It was all Tate’s doing, bringing good things to his family even after he was gone. 

I was sitting in the tulip tree when Dad drove home from the airport and Mom ran out of the house to greet him, so excited that she hadn’t even bothered to put on a sunhat or slip into her shoes. Even the tree shook its branches, welcoming Dad home.

But I thought heard something else in the branches above me, a bird singing a familiar tune.

The mother and the father. The sister and the brother. The killing and the eating and the bloody bag of bones.

I reached in the pocket of my shorts for my phone so I could play Tate’s version, remembering how happy he’d been when he recorded it. My chest expanded and I felt a strange comfort in the the clicks and pops, the garbled lyrics and the explosive beats.

Then I looked down at Mom and made sure she heard it too. Her expression went flat, weighted down with memory. Did she even feel sorry for what she’d done to my brother?  Did she expect me to forgive her? Or did she believe that keeping the secret would bring us even closer, uniting us forever in a sinister sisterhood?

I gripped a tree branch and shook it as hard as I could. If I could bring the whole tree down on top of her, that’s what I’d do.

But I only managed to startle the poor bird, a bright Blue Jay who flew down in front of me, sailing past my mother and off into the woods.