“Ay-BRAY-mig a fafen!” they roared.
They jerked and danced like marionettes, grimacing as their bodies contorted. A wave of them collapsed to the floor, where they arched their backs and convulsed and clawed at the hardwood. The Reverend writhed in front of the altar, tumbling in place as if caught in an invisible clothes dryer.
His mouth yawning wide, Deacon did not sing. Instead, he gaped in alarm as more and more of the Family fell to thrash across the floor like fish yanked from water. This wasn’t normal worship. This looked like pain, not ecstasy.
For a terrifying moment, he believed they were dying.
15
LOVE
Deacon awoke on a couch and bolted upright. Outside the large windows, the sun rose over Santa Barbara and the mountains. Beth’s condo, he remembered. He checked his watch and discovered he’d slept sixteen hours, a record even for him. Despite the long rest, he remained exhausted by dreams of worship.
“Ay-bray-mig a fafen,” he whispered and shuddered. “Damn.”
Slowly, the dreams released him from their syrupy grip, oozing back into the past. He visited the bathroom then returned. “Beth? Are you here?”
After living among musicians for the past ten years, he found the condo opulent but sterile. Bright and white and clean, as if Beth lived in a high-end modern furniture catalog. The only thing out of place was this scruffy musician.
She’d left his clothes freshly laundered and folded in a neat stack on the couch armrest. His phone vibrated, and he ignored it. He pulled on his T-shirt and jeans and padded barefoot into the kitchen.
“She does love me.” There was hot coffee in the pot.
Deacon poured out a cup. The mug left a ring on the counter, which he decided to leave as a calling card. Love, the Guy Who Makes a Mess Out of Everything.
Maybe he’d go home. Figure things out with the band or find a new one if that’s what it took to keep rocking his way.
Or maybe not. He was messed up. Stuck in an endless groove. Just because he’d made that work for him didn’t mean he was any less messed up. He was tired of scratching the old itch until it bled, no matter how comforting it felt.
Beth could help him find a different way to live with the past. Putting it all on her was unfair, but he saw no other way.
At the foot of the stairs, he called again, “Beth?”
“I’m up here, Deek.”
Deacon carried his mug up the exposed staircase and into the nearest room, which turned out to be her bedroom. Even here, everything was perfect. Uncluttered dressers, calming art on the walls. The bed appeared never slept in.
The room connected to an en suite bathroom, where she leaned over the sink in pajamas, applying makeup.
“Hey,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m getting ready for work.”
Deacon’s eyes caressed the slope of her back, then drank in the sight of her dabbing mascara around her eye. In the music world, he’d seen it all when it came to women, every brand of sex appeal expertly advertised, but it was the minor, mundane things that slew him. A beautiful woman in her jammies brushing her hair, putting on makeup, stepping into a pair of jeans.
He gazed at her with a fierce, longing ache and thought, I should have put the necklace on you. Kissed you just like in the movies.
Her big brown eyes gazed back at him from the mirror. “What’s wrong?”
“We should get married.”
Beth shook with one of her belly laughs. “I thought you came to apologize for something.”
“I didn’t already?” Deacon couldn’t remember. His arrival in Santa Barbara was a blur.
“All you’ve done since you showed up is snore on my couch.”
“How about dinner tonight? I’ll apologize properly.”
She put on a finishing touch and stepped back to check her appearance. “For what?” Then held up her hand. “I know for what. It was a long time ago. I’m long over it. What’s really bothering you?”
“God, you’re good at this.” Though he wasn’t sure she was over it.
“What is it, Deek?”
He shrugged. “I’m tired of being me the way I’m being me.”
Her eyes probed his as she made her educated guesses. “I can’t save you.”
“I don’t want to relive the past. I just want to fix what I can from it. Clean my slate, so to speak. Like they do in the twelve-step programs. I’ve been thinking about some big changes in my life. Okay?”
Beth smiled. “All right.”
“Now that we’ve got all that out of the way, how about dinner tonight?”
“It’s a date. Now move aside so I can get dressed for work.”
She’d always known how to give him something while making him want more.
Dr. Klein smiled at the circle of children. “Who wants to go first?”
Notebooks in their laps, the survivors sat facing him on their folding chairs. At their last group therapy session, the psychiatrist gave them homework.
Nobody raised a hand.
He said, “Did everybody write a poem expressing something they’re feeling?”
Deacon nodded along with his friends.
“Okay. We were going to read one and talk about it for an hour, but let’s shelve that idea for now. Today, let’s just read all the poems and see what happens. How does that sound?”
Another nod.
“Fantastic. Dave, you’re usually the shy one, so I’m going to see if you’re feeling brave—”
“David,” the boy said.
“Excuse me?”
“My name is David. Not Dave.”
“All right. David. How about you start us off?”
“I chose a tercet for mine.” He read aloud:
Everything I learned from you,
The good and the bad, the glad and the sad,
Turned out to be untrue.
Everywhere you took me to,
Too cold, too hot, to gold and rot,
Is nothing I can’t undo.
“That’s very good,” said Dr. Klein.
“That’s all I have.”
“Your poem is perfect. I heard a lot of strength in those words. Thank you, David.” The psychiatrist then nodded to Deacon, who cleared his throat and read:
Make pain your friend
Is something they say,
Though love is better
In every way.
So make love your friend
But love, it can die,
So maybe pain’s truer
And love is the lie.
“Very powerful quatrain,” the psychiatrist said. “You’re right that love is a better friend than pain, but you have to trust it again.”
Or maybe they’re the same thing, Deacon thought.
Dr. Klein focused on Beth. She blushed and read:
Someone screams out in the dark,
And I think how silence is cool.
I cry out to you and hear no answer,
And I think that silence is cruel.
Screams in my ears, I look at your eyes,
And I learn how silence can fool.
“There’s so much we can talk about from these poems. Angela?”
She gave him a grin devoid of mirth. “I’ve got a limerick for you.”
“Let’s hear it.”
There once was a bunch of people
Who built a church with a steeple,
I told them, “Don’t blow it,”
But wouldn’t you know it,
They killed themselves. The end.
“Yes,” Dr. Klein said, as if she’d revealed something important despite her intention to do the opposite. “Thank you, Angela. Emily, your turn. What do you have?”
Emily read:
What if I tell you
To wait for me,
To be ready,
Because I am coming now.
You might be unhappy
If I don’t show up
But you then remember
>
That I said to wait for me,
That I said to get ready,
That I was coming now.
So if you love me,
Truly love me,
You’ll wait, you’ll be ready,
And it will always be now.
“Thank you, Emily,” Dr. Klein said, though he seemed unsettled by her poem. “Now, who wants to talk about what they wrote?”
Deacon gripped his notebook and thought about how satisfying it was to put his feelings on paper and speak them aloud. How much it hurt.
From then on, the two would forever be the same to him.
After Beth left, Deacon puttered around her condo while sipping her highbrow coffee. As in her bedroom, the art on the walls in the main living area was colorful and safe, with not a single personal photo to be found. Books about every manifestation of human madness and hurt lined extensive shelves. Delusion, addiction, trauma. Everything one needed to put Humpty Dumpty back together.
What he’d said at Emily’s funeral about people becoming psychologists to learn how to fix themselves rang true when looking around this place. Beth had taken physician, heal thyself to a new level. Her whole lifestyle spoke of it. It screamed, I’ve got my shit together, but it was still a scream.
With his singing, Deacon went straight to the scream.
If he was going to change, he didn’t want to become like her. He didn’t want a psychologist. He needed his friend.
The spine of a book caught his eye. Death in the Desert: The Family of the Living Spirit Cult by E. L. Carter. Grisly mutilation, suicide, murder, and a mysterious mass disappearance packaged as entertainment, though Deacon had to admit this sensationalist piece of drivel was the most complete account of the Family’s rise and fall he’d ever visited.
He remembered when Carter called him searching for insights, and only wanted to talk about the final night, which was all anyone wanted to hear about and why, long ago, he’d stopped telling people he’d grown up in the Family.
Deacon wondered if some poor soul had read the book and became inspired to follow in the Family’s suicidal footsteps. Wondered if old E. L. blamed himself for it. A sad thing, sharing a horror as a warning just to see it repeated.
Maybe Deacon would become inspired himself. Write a book instead of sing. Share a story that would shock and titillate America. He’d tell everyone that before the Family went to Red Peak, they’d given him the best years of his life, years rich with love and purpose and wonder and meaning.
He returned to his wandering and ended up back in the kitchen for more java. This time, he noticed the large wine rack filled with corked bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon. Beth had an extensive collection of expensive wines. Empty long-stemmed glasses dried in the dish rack. It seemed the esteemed Dr. Harris needed some good old-fashioned lubrication when psychology failed to see her through the day. Rather than alarming him, this discovery made him strangely happy. They were still the same. They didn’t need theory and lingo to understand each other.
His cell vibrated again, and this time he answered. “Yeah?”
“You don’t know how to answer your fucking phone?” Laurie yelled.
“I’m taking a break. I thought you understood that.”
“Drive your ass back to Crenshaw. We have work to do.”
“Break,” he repeated. “I can’t do anything right now anyway.”
Laurie sucked in her breath, which meant she was winding up to drill him a new hole, but hesitated.
“Wait,” she said. “You have no idea what’s going on, do you?”
Deacon poured his second mug of coffee. “Not a clue.”
“Dude, that interview you gave is blowing up the internet.”
“Everybody hates us, I get it.” He blew across the mug and slurped.
“Half of everybody hates us,” she corrected. “The other half are buying our songs online and watching our videos. Our social media is exploding.”
He set his coffee down in surprise. “Huh.”
“Frank got us a gig at Utopia.” She let out a frustrated sigh when he didn’t respond right away with an appropriate whoop. “Utopia, dude.”
A premier LA venue. Capacity, five hundred. Long considered the launching pad of musical careers and dreams.
She seemed to expect him to say something, so he said, “That’s great.”
“Goddamn right it’s great. Frank is working deals like crazy. Playing up the Medford anniversary, how you’re the kid who lived to tell the tale and make music that comforts the afflicted, blah, blah, blah. Now he’s bragging how he can turn shit into gold. But get this. The band changed their mind about the album.”
“Wow,” he said.
They wanted to do it for all the wrong reasons, but still.
“That’s it? Wow? That’s great? You know, it wouldn’t kill you to be happy every once in a while.”
“The last time I was truly happy, I almost did get killed.”
“Poor you. When are you coming back?”
Perhaps God or the Devil did pull his life’s strings to watch the monkey dance. The tests always arrived when you wanted something. The rewards always showed up when you were ready to walk away. You prayed not to be led into temptation, but the temptations came anyway, designed just for you.
He thought about Beth and hesitated. “Later this week, probably.”
Laurie went quiet so long he wondered if she was still on the line.
“Hello?” he said.
“Where are you?”
“With an old friend. Another survivor.”
“The ‘we played so beautifully’ girl?” Referencing the song he’d written.
“Yes.”
“Just for inspiration, I hope.”
Laurie wasn’t jealous. The sex had been part of their working relationship and otherwise meant nothing to her. She lived to perform, and she performed because she could do nothing else. They were kindred spirits that way. She didn’t want Beth to interfere with his return to the band.
He said, “I have to do something before I come back. Something important.”
She exhaled through her nose like a kettle reaching the boiling point. “You know what I think is important? Getting everything you want. Eating that cake.”
“Wait for me. If getting everything is that important to you, you’ll do it.”
“You’ve got one day.” She meant it. Laurie made a steadfast ally but a savage and implacable enemy. “Then I’m coming for you.”
“It’ll take as long as it takes.” He ended the call.
The phone started to vibrate seconds later, but he ignored it.
Deacon would give the Devil his due. He’d return to Los Angeles, resume the album, perform at Utopia, go back to the cycle of pain and purge. First, he wanted to clear the air with Beth. Kill the silence between them once and for all, a silence now older than he’d been when his world had ended.
At Beth’s favorite restaurant at Stearns Wharf, the host seated them by the window, which offered stunning views of the harbor. Deacon barely noticed the natural beauty, instead focused on Beth in her sleeveless black dress.
After they ordered and the server poured her a glass of red wine, she relaxed. Then she told him about Emily’s package and David’s theory about the Wardites, wondering what he thought.
Deacon said, “I think it’s just like David to put it back in the box as soon as it came out.”
Beth sipped her wine. “What don’t you agree with?”
“Something happened out there. The things I saw…”
Or thought you saw, he told himself.
“Like what? What did you see?”
Deacon sighed. “Why bother? You’ll just come up with some educated way to say I’m crazy.”
“This is the problem. We all keep secrets from each other.”
“You want to hear it? Okay, here it is. I don’t think what happened at Red Peak was a bunch of people losing their shit. Something else was going on. I think Emily
understood it.”
“Trying to find meaning in tragedy is natural,” Beth said.
“There you go.” He tossed his hands.
“Sorry. Let’s say something did happen. Let’s even say it was supernatural. In the end, you’re still you. You still have to live with that and fix it.”
“I just feel like something was done to us. I’d like to know why.”
“Something was done to us,” Beth said. “There might be no why.”
“We’ll find out when we get there.”
“You still want to go back?”
Deacon nodded. “After my gig at Utopia, wildfires permitting. We’re going together, right?”
She poured the rest of her wine down her throat, as if steeling herself to give her answer. He watched her refill her glass. “Yes. I want to do it. I keep coming back to it as something I need to do.”
“I’m glad you want to go. I don’t want to do it alone.”
“As soon as the forest fires burn themselves out.”
Their meals arrived, and they ate while the harbor dimmed to black. Afterward, they walked out onto the pier, laughing at the kind of memories that didn’t scar. Wyatt saying, I’ll bet you could turn water into whining. Dr. Klein’s habit of idly combing his beard when he talked. The way old Mrs. Kowalski would shout Yes, Lord! during sermons. Their discovery of the ghost town. The time they spied on Angela and Josh making out at the stream.
At the end of the pier, they stopped to listen to the sea’s breathy roar. The wind carried its briny smell.
Beth leaned on the railing. “Deek?”
“Yeah?”
“Why did you kiss me? After the funeral?”
Deacon gazed into the darkness, imagining it stretched into eternity. “It was opposite day.”
“What does that mean?”
“When we were kids, I thought about kissing you all the time but never had the nerve to do it. The longing became an end in itself. I was dumb.”
“You said it yourself,” Beth responded. “We were kids.”
“When I saw you at Emily’s funeral, I did the opposite. Ever since we left the hospital, in fact, every day has been opposite day.”
The Children of Red Peak Page 20
