Sweet Forty-Two (12 page)

“Ooooh, man, this place!” CJ slapped his hand off the roof of my car as we stood in front of the recording studio.

“You haven’t seen the inside yet, you freak.” I closed my door and headed for the brick building with a faded
Blue Seed Studios
sign.

“You don’t always have to see things to know how awesome they are.” As he stood and looked at the door in reverence, I wondered if he ever knew the depth in some of the things he said. “Do Ember’s parents
own
this studio?”

I nodded. I swiped my badge in the key reader to the left of the door, and with one click we were granted access to the place where I’d be spending eighty-five percent of my time for the next few months. I’d only been in here once before, when Ember gave me my key card and the grand tour, so everything still felt new. Even though I’d been in several recording studios all over the world, walking down the halls of this one felt like my first day at the conservatory.

Fresh. New. Full of promise.

Despite the three month hide-and-seek from myself in Ireland following her funeral, I held hope that working on this album with my friends in a new place could bring me a sense of closure in Rae’s death. She would have been so excited for me. Despite being a student at UNH, with a few semesters left, I’m certain that if she were still alive and Bo presented me with this opportunity, she’d have told me to take it.

She always lit everything with positivity from the inside. Even when she’d spent a few hours one night filling me in on all the Bo and Ember Saga details in the middle of their bizarre breakup, she held on to the floating dandelion seeds of hope.

“
They
’
re meant to be together. I don
’
t know how long it will take, or what it will take to get there. But ... they
’
ll get there.
” She told me that one night in the sand under the stars. The Big Dipper was right over us, and I remember that because I’d looked up at the black sky and wished the constellation would scoop us up and hold us in that moment forever.

“Woo!”

I’d been wandering down the hallway mentally in the past, but CJ’s cheer summoned me back. He respectfully turned the handle to the studio and let himself in.

Not surprisingly, a few members of the Six were around.

“Hey, Natalie. This is my cousin, CJ.” I spoke to the ethereal blonde who was tightening the skin across the top of a large African drum.

She stood, and while I knew she was probably fifty years old, she looked like she could get away with telling people she was thirty-eight or younger.

“Nice to meet you, CJ. Please, call me Journey.”

CJ shook her hand, biting his lip to surely prevent the insidious laughter I knew was brewing. “Sure thing. Nice to meet you.”

I turned to the other woman in the room. “You’re still Magnolia, right?”

Both women came apart in soft, amused giggles. “Yes,” Magnolia answered. “Please, call me Mags. Don’t worry about Journey. She was just baptized under the seventh sun last week. Not everyone is used to the new name, yet.”

Mags, with short chestnut hair and wide set brown eyes, continued playing with the strings of her mandolin as
Journey
returned to her drum. CJ slowly turned his head in my direction, stupefied, and mouthed, “
Seventh sun?
” to me. I shrugged, miming to him to keep quiet.

That was all the reintroduction to Blue Seed studios that I needed. Now, all we needed was the return of Raven and Ashby, who were Ember’s parents, and their friends, Michael and Solstice Shaw.

“Hey there! Nice to see you again.” Sunshine seeped through the room. Not a person with that name, just to clarify, but the feeling that came when Willow Shaw spoke.

She was the daughter of Michael and Solstice, and had been childhood friends with Ember before Ember and her parents moved to Connecticut for Ember to attend high school.

“Hi, I’m just showing my cousin around the studio, if you don’t mind.” I held out my arm for a side hug as she casually conquered my personal space.

Something else I’d have to get used to over the next few months.

“No worries. Actually, I’m glad you’re here. My dad rewired for the new microphones last night, and we need to check some pitches. Can you get your vio-fiddle-whatever-you-call-it and play for a few minutes?”

She seemed to be nervous as she tucked a strand of her sandy brown hair behind her ear. Her hair was long and wavy, like Ember’s, and they had nearly identical jade coloring in their eyes. Guess growing up counterculture made you look like sisters. Her skin, though, was pure caramel. Her mother was black, from Haiti, and her father was white. I briefly wondered if, like the bartenders at E’s, she ever felt the need to dress in a certain way to get attention. Likely not...

“Yeah, Reeg, go get your fiddle-dee-doo, and I’ll show Willow, here, how this painfully forsaken drum set sounds. Does
no one
play this?” CJ stared at the abandoned set in horror.

Willow toyed with the ends of her hair. “They’re not really using that for this album but, um ... you can try it out...”

My brain tried like hell to beg her cheeks not to turn red during her exchange with CJ.

They did.

There was nothing more I could do.

“Be right back.” I attempted a look of warning to CJ, but he ignored me as he drew his sticks from his back pocket and sat on the stool, ready to strike.

The set, and Willow in due time I was sure, if he wasn’t scheduled to leave in a few days. Who was I kidding? That was plenty of time for him.

A few minutes later I was set up in front of the mic, with headphones on, and a mic hanging twelve inches from my strings. Journey and Mags were seated on the couch in the corner of the recording room, while CJ asked Willow questions I knew damn well he knew the answers to in the sound booth.

“Okay,” I interrupted Willow’s hair-tossing giggle with a clearing of my throat, “do you want me to play anything specific or...”

“Just whatever comes out. Give me some low and high notes. Anytime.”

I closed my eyes, taking a deep inhale that filled me with thoughts of Rae and our last few days together. Sun, grass, kissing under the Weeping Willow, and her smile. A heavenly smile seen, now, only by God and in the moments I let it slip into my memory.

I let my bow fall across the strings on my exhale in any manner they chose. They chose Chopin’s
Nocturne.
I kept my eyes closed for a few seconds until my shoulders found their sway. Until my fingers stopped shaking. I hated my hands for making me play this. The melody alone sounded like I imagine fingernails sound when they dig into the dirt surrounding the grave of a loved one.

So painful, one would be wise to pray the notes into nothingness. So evocative of feeling altogether, you beseech their continuance.

Opening my eyes when I was certain the pain had no place else to go, I found CJ looking smug as Willow wiped tears from her eyes, adjusting slides on the soundboard. Journey and Mags held hands on the couch, Mags’s head on Journey’s shoulder.

I wasn’t sure if they were a couple, or if the song simply made them want to cling to each other as the vulnerability of life bled through the connection of my bow and strings.

As I pulled the bow away from its lover, and the notes drifted into the nothingness in which Rae resided, I let myself feel it. Not all at once, as I was in the company of relative strangers, apart from CJ, but I had to acknowledge it was there.

The hole.

I’d heard Bo describe it on more than one occasion as a “Rachel-sized hole,” and I’d brushed it off, half-joking that she was so tiny it’d be like a pinhole. I was wrong. Jagged walls of memories and touches and hope shot up around me, leaving me in a crevasse so steep on both sides I just had to sit. Sit and be in it.

I was still standing, of course, having learned to somewhat control my physical responses to emotion. That didn’t keep their eyes off of me.

“Regan...” Willow’s mouth pinched shut at the end of her sentence.

“Never leave us. Ever.” Journey wiped under her eyes as she accosted me with a patchouli-scented hug.

I smiled, squeezing back. Squeezing away encroaching feelings of emotional nudity. I needed to feel this. More. And often, if I was going to be able to let go of it.

What I knew for sure was I was in no place to go around kissing anyone else. Or almost kissing.

“I won’t leave the group, if that’s what I’m in, but I do have to leave now. Just for the night. I’ll be back in the morning. You coming, Ceej?” I slid off my headphones and set them back on their hook.

CJ met me in the recording room. “Where are we going? We just got here.”

“I’ve got to track down Georgia.”

“Whatever.” CJ pouted as he slid a hand across the small of Willow’s back. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Or in a little bit, if you’d like to stop by E’s in South Park,” he spoke into her ear.”

“I’ll be there,” she whispered just as I was about to roll my eyes.

I couldn’t babysit CJ or his potential submissives tonight. Tonight, I had to apologize to Georgia.

The clocks were all stuck at different times, so it seemed. The start of my shift had been hours ago, but it seemed like I’d just gotten there and had been there for days all at once. I couldn’t even tell myself I wanted to go home and rest. There was no rest. Not while my mother was there.

Thankfully, it was football season, so Monday nights at the bar rivaled the crowd size of a summer Saturday night. Hungry and thirsty sports fans would prevent me from staring at the unmoving clocks.

“What was your car doing here this morning?” Lissa couldn’t look me in the eyes, even as she arched her eyebrow.

“What were you doing noticing?” I knew before I finished the inquisition. Lissa’s car was left in the parking lot of E’s at least two nights a week, depending on where she decided to sleep.

“No need to get defensive, I just thought you always brought them back to your place. You weren’t drunk last night, either, right?”

“Nosey, much?” I snapped as I slammed the tray of fruit garnish on the bar, sending several orange slices to the floor.

“Sorry.” She rolled her eyes and her tone rang of an elementary schoolyard.

I sighed, discarding the victimized orange slices into the trash. “No, I’m sorry. It was a long night. I went home with CJ. Not
with
CJ, but we just caught up. Then I had to show Regan the apart—”

Shit
. Lissa hadn’t known I was showing the apartment to him. Or anyone.

“You. Slut.” She whipped my butt with a wet bar rag.

“Ow! What?”

“I saw the way you were lookin’ at him all weekend. Clever move, though, to have him pay you for ... that.” She wiggled her eyebrows and I realized exactly why she and CJ never made it out of the bar together. They’re too much alike.

“He needed a place, I needed a renter. Stat. That’s all. Besides, he’s CJ’s cousin, I couldn’t...”

It was a last-minute decision to ask him to take that apartment. Hanging on to it meant that I was still planning on encouraging my mother to move in there. For six months she and I had the same discussion. I had to honor her wish to live alone as long as she physically could, considering other wishes of hers were becoming harder to grant.

Regardless of having to root my heels in the floor as he leaned toward me lips-first earlier in the day, I still couldn’t. I needed normalcy. Consistency. Something about his eyes—no, that’s cliché—something about the way he moved as he played on stage told me he was safe. Passionate and disciplined. Intense, maybe, but it was harnessed. Released only on stage and, I assumed, in practice.

“Well save your
couldn
’
t speech
for another time. Here he comes.” Lissa’s lips curled up in guilty pleasure.

Walking toward me in a march-like manner was Regan, followed by an evidently irked CJ, whose shoulders were tense, like he’d just been turned down by a girl. I took a deep breath, and plastered on my “Welcome to E’s” smile.

“Hey, boys, what can I—”

“Can I talk to you for a minute? In the back or outside?” Regan’s hands hung at his sides, but I watched the rhythm of his thumbs rubbing against the pads of his fingers as he waited. He was nervous. If his hands hadn’t given him away, his voice would have. It bordered on overconfident. Overcompensation.

I looked to CJ, preemptively furious that he’d told Regan everything, and Regan was going to back out of the theoretical lease. CJ simply shrugged and pointed to the Guinness tap.

Looking at Regan as I handed CJ his beer, I drudged up some confidence of my own. “Sure, can you give me a few? This game’s almost over, then it’ll die down here for another hour or so until the next one starts.”

“Yeah, no problem.” He dropped onto the stool next to CJ and laced his fingers together, turning every other knuckle white.

On my way to deliver food to my table, I slid him a pint of Guinness without him asking. I needed him to mellow the hell down.

Fifteen minutes later the crowd at the bar started yelling in frustration.

“What the hell happened?” I asked Lissa as I came up the stairs from changing a keg.

“Damn Patriots game is delayed an hour. Snow. Where on earth gets 6 inches of snow in a couple of hours?” She gestured to the snow globe that encircled Gillette Stadium splashed across every TV screen in the bar.

“Great,” I groaned.

“What?” CJ and Regan spoke in unison in front of empty pint glasses.

“Game delay. Now the people who are staying to watch the game are either going to get disruptively drunk ... or just leave.” I heard my bank account plead for mercy.

Regan shrugged. “Want me to play something?”

“Thanks, Regan, but I don’t know if this crowd is really the fiddlin’ type.” I set a hand on my hip, delighting in the offense on his face.

CJ laughed, but set his sticks on the bar. “We could come up with something. Willow’s on her way, too. I think she sings, or plays something...”

Regan put a hand on CJ’s shoulder. “I’m surprised you got that much information out of her, given you spent most of your time in the sound booth staring at her breasts.”