Write My Name Across the Sky

by O'Neal, Barbara

  “Maybe.” She laughs. “How’s your world?”

  “My sister is in town, and I stopped by to say hello.”

  “Really.”

  “Well, kind of.” An ice pick stabs through the top of my skull down through my neck, and I wince, slapping my hand to my neck in defense. “Whoa. Sorry about that. I did stop in to see Gloria about some things, and Willow was there. Also—” Another stab, this one so sharp it feels like broken glass.

  “You okay?”

  I blink hard. “Fine. Have you talked to Asher at all?”

  She nods, and there’s something hesitant in the gesture.

  “What?” I ask, my heart freezing. “Is he getting married too?”

  “No, no. I don’t even know if he’s dating. He hasn’t said. But he’s up for an Origins Award. Didn’t he tell you?”

  A sudden sting of tears fills my eyes, and embarrassed, I look away. “No. I saw him at a party for a new app, and he didn’t say a word.”

  “I hate this, for both of you. I’m mad at him for being so stubborn, and I’m mad at you for letting it go. You guys have been friends for decades! And I don’t like either one of you being so alone. You need to fix it!”

  “It’s not up to me,” I say, plucking at the edge of my sweater sleeve. I haven’t told her everything that happened, out of respect for my longer relationship with Asher. She only knows that we had a falling-out after her wedding, now just over a year ago. “He wants to keep his distance, so fine. Let him.”

  “You’re cutting off your nose to spite your face,” she says, one of the proverbs she loves. She has a million of them, which I suppose will be great tools for motherhood. “He’s your best friend.”

  “No, you are my best friend.”

  “He was there first.”

  True. We met in third grade and bonded immediately over our geekhood, which led to creating a very successful video game ten years later, one of the first with a devout following of girls. The main character, Aline Alice Bright, was our dual creation, and she made us both quite wealthy.

  And now I’ve fucked up both the friendship and my part of the business. My headache slams harder.

  Tina says, “I wish you’d tell me what really happened.”

  “I know. I just can’t . . . betray him.” What happened to us is private, a thing just between us, so intimate that it would just be wrong to share it with another person, even Tina. A stab of pain goes through my eye. “I hate to say it, love, but this headache is killing me.”

  “No worries. I just heard Nuri come in. Text me and tell me how you are tomorrow, okay? I’ll worry about you.”

  “Promise!” I kiss my fingers and wave them at her, and she does the same. Holding the phone, I fall sideways on the couch.

  Asher. It was sex, the thing that ruined everything. After thirty years of being strictly friends, we slept together during the highly romantic week of Tina’s wedding in Hudson. I still have no idea why we tumbled over the line, except that maybe both of us were tired of being the single friend at the dance.

  It was also . . . something else. I close my eyes, rubbing my forehead, and remember that moment.

  Asher wore red, along with the other groomsmen, and it set off his pale skin and dark eyes. I’d seen him in formal wear before, of course, but he’d been volunteering at Big Brothers, playing a lot of basketball with the kids, and he’d taken on a sheen of health, maybe a little muscle, his cheekbones tan from being in the sunshine. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, which I like, actually, but it made his whole face more . . . accessible. Right before the declaration of “You are now man and wife,” I glanced over, and he was looking at me. He smiled, very slightly, and I thought, How have I never realized how hot he is? The recognition swept away my lingering broken heart, along with anything to do with anyone but Asher. And me. Me and Asher.

  Even now, I can feel that recognition in my belly, my thighs, as if the chemistry between us had suddenly switched on.

  I close my eyes against my headache, trying to make myself get up and take some ibuprofen. Instead, I fall asleep, thinking of three days of happiness that ruined absolutely everything.

  Chapter Twelve

  Willow

  After feeling so horrified over the music teacher / tour guide offer, I’ve put out the word to my local friends that I’m up for any kind of short gig. I need time to finish the piece for the contest, but I also need an influx of cash, and the more I’m out there, the more chances I’ll have to find something satisfying.

  I’m known for Celtic fiddle and electronica, but my training was broad enough that I can do almost anything. A friend is playing at a pub in Brooklyn and says there might be people there who know about work, but maybe it would just be nice to get out and play. She says she’ll give me fifty dollars, and it’s enough to get me moving.

  I wash my hair and let it dry at its wildest, then dress myself up in an oversize white peasant blouse and a silk patchwork skirt that I found at a Ren Faire a few years ago. Also my lucky boots, of course, which belonged to my mother and fit me like Cinderella’s slippers. The heels make an agreeably solid noise as I walk to the 81st Street station to catch the C train. It’s busy, and I’m lucky to find a seat. A plump middle-aged woman knits on one side of me, and a guy in leather from head to toe nods his head to his earphones. I hold my violin on my lap.

  It’s been months and months since I played in public. The album was released early last year to a great thudding silence, and for a few months I was embarrassed and didn’t want to show my face, and then things went downhill with David, who blamed me for the spectacular failure instead of all the dramas that were happening in the world right after that.

  David. My mouth twists as I think of him, but mainly because I’m annoyed with myself. He was too old for me, in his midforties when we met, and kind of corporate in his dress and attitudes. I knew that, going in, but it was thrilling to be admired so deeply, and he treated me beautifully until he didn’t, and he did have power, the power and resources to help me get my album made and out into the world. He invited me to live with him in his Malibu house, all glass and ocean views, and I walked right into the lion’s den under my own power.

  Because he was also controlling. At first it was subtle, but over time it became more and more overt. I found myself disappearing, unable to leap until the album came out, unable to break free until I found myself.

  In most families, growing up to get married and have a family is the norm, but neither my mother nor Gloria believed in marriage. I think Gloria had a grand love affair with a man she doesn’t talk about much, but she never married him, and although my mother briefly married Sam’s dad, that was the extent of her long-term relationships.

  I’ve also managed to keep myself unentangled. David was the anomaly—he just promised so much!

  And proved himself to be a total dick when my album didn’t thrive. We’d started having trouble by then anyway, as I found subtle ways to resist and reassert myself. When he threw my things out, I was as relieved as I was unsurprised.

  And yet here I am, riding the train to Brooklyn to play a gig with an old friend for pennies. Pennies I need.

  I toss my hair out of my face and watch the lights go by as the train emerges out of the dark into the evening. I am a musician. Musicians play.

  I miss it, playing for people. It’s one thing to play for myself, to let out the music that’s singing through me, to show up and hold my instrument, give it the respect of practice.

  But music is meant to be shared. It’s communication. The music itself taking life through an instrument or a voice, then reaching into the hearts and bodies of other people, and coming back. I never feel so alive as when I’m playing for people, with them. My heart lifts a little.

  My first memory is about music. My mother was writing a song at the piano, in a room that would have been a bedroom anywhere else but was a music room here. She kept all manner of musical things there, a piano and flutes and finger be
lls, a guitar and a violin, and even a set of conga drums she sometimes used to pound out rhythms. It was my favorite room in the house, and I knew it was hers too. When she was home, I hung around the edges of the room, hoping to catch her eye.

  The windows looked south, sunny during the day, full of sparkling lights at night. That afternoon, a bar of light fell through the glass, making an elongated yellow square on the floor and my mother’s hands. She sat at the piano, one hand working through a series of notes on the keyboard, over and over, while the other scribbled notes on a piece of paper propped up on the music rack. She hummed under her breath, Lala-laLA, mmalala. Paused, ran through a series of notes on the keys. Wrote something down, came back to the keys, singing under her breath.

  I sat in an oversize burgundy velvet chair that I thought of as the Grandmother because of the way she held me. I played with a doll but mostly watched my mother, listened to her running through the notes over and over. La-la-la-la-lala-la-LA! Never quite right. I climbed down and stood beside her, waiting while she ran through the sequence. Then I brought my finger down on the right key. “That one,” I said.

  She frowned, then played through it again, using first her notes, then mine. Mine were right, and I waited for her recognition.

  “How did you know that, Willow?”

  I shrugged.

  She scooted over and swept me up to sit beside her, a thrilling move. “Let’s try something, shall we?” She played a series of notes, and I heard the building tension, unfinished when she stopped. “What’s next?”

  I heard it in my head but didn’t know the places on the keys. I sang instead. “La la la.”

  She smiled. It was an expression we didn’t see from her very often, but I knew it was good. I knew it was for me, and I would have done anything to see it again.

  All these years later on the train, I can feel the pleasure of her approval, but what I felt more was the sound of the right note, the note she kept missing. She told the story over and over, the discovery of her prodigy.

  Not such a prodigy now, I think, but that’s the sad part of every prodigy’s story, isn’t it? Once you’re no longer eight years old, playing Verdi, you’re just another violinist. Which I’d made peace with until David stirred up my ambitions all over again.

  Or maybe that’s just a convenient excuse. I can’t blame my ambition on him. Like my mother, like my sister, even like Gloria—who inspired my mother’s song with her big career, her desire to stay unencumbered, and is still building fame at seventy-four—I’m driven. The family code is ambition, which is not the most comfortable quality if you’re female.

  At the pub, the crowd is substantial. I’ve never been here before, and it’s much better than I expected, a very big space with a raised corner dais that’s set up for the band. I ask the bartender, a round woman in her forties with snapping black eyes, for Paige, and she smiles. “She’s in the back over there.”

  “Willow,” I offer and shake her hand.

  “Willow Rose?” she echoes. “I know you! I loved your album.”

  “You did?” I laugh, astonished. “Yes! I’m so pleased that you know it.”

  “Girl, the day will come you’ll be so famous you’ll never play a little place like mine, mark my words. Let me buy you a drink.”

  “I hope you’re right. Just water with lemon for now, please.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  I lift the pint glass in a cheer. “Thanks.”

  Paige is bent over the table, scribbling, alone, when I find her. Her long auburn hair trails down her back and over her shoulders, and her attire is much like my own, a little hippie, a little Celtic, a lot Ren Faire. “Hey, you,” I say and touch her shoulder.

  “Willow!” She jumps up and hugs me, hard, rocking me back and forth. She smells of strawberry oil and green forest. “I have missed you so much.”

  I rock her back. “Me too.” We’ve been friends since ninth grade, when we walked into our violin class at the very famous high school, scared to death, and sat down side by side. My mother had always planned to send me there, and Gloria followed her wishes. It was a great fit.

  “Come sit with me,” she says.

  “Where’s the band?”

  She mimes smoking a joint.

  We spend a half hour catching up, trading gossip and newsy items about people we know. The Very Famous Actor we never say we know to anyone else, the woman who is conducting the Houston Symphony, the poet who killed himself, the guitarist who was arrested. “What about you?” I ask.

  “Eh, you know.” She shrugs, gestures around the bar. “Not exactly what I thought I’d be doing at thirty-five.”

  I look out at the crowd, think of my dreams of packed stadiums and me under the spotlight. It felt so close for a moment, and now it feels further away than ever.

  But if I give up now, the one sure thing is that it will never happen. To give us both a pep talk, I say, “The thing is, we’re still doing it. Making music. We always said we would never give up, and we haven’t.”

  “I guess. But why?” She shakes her head a little. “I’m just starting to get tired of it. Maybe I want the ordinary things, you know, like a family and breakfast and school days for the kids.”

  It startles me. I peer at her. “Really? Like . . . settling down?”

  “I know.” She pokes at a mark on the table, not meeting my eyes. “Sounds like selling out, right?” She looks at me. “But can you imagine doing this night after night in ten years? Twenty? What kind of life is that?”

  Something twists in my chest, resistance and terror. “I don’t know.” I think of the trickles of music swirling over my nerves when I played in the greenhouse this morning, the elusive notes I’ve been trying to track down. I think of mornings practicing, and evenings playing or listening to others play, and contrast that against the vision she’s described of busy mornings of packing lunches and gathering homework. It makes me want to weep. “I’m not ready to throw in the towel.”

  “But you had an album! That’s way more than I’ve had.”

  I roll my eyes. “An album that failed.”

  “No.” She leans forward to put both hands over my forearm. “No, Willow. No! It didn’t fail. It went out into the world and found listeners and became what it is.”

  The black hole of devastation I carry around with me, a black hole I barely admit even to myself, shrinks. A lot. “Thank you. It helps to remember that there’s more than one way to measure an artistic project.”

  “The money man always wants more money,” she says.

  “And they want artists who will make that money.” I take a breath, centering myself. “I don’t know that I’m ever going to be that person. I’m just too niche.”

  Paige glances to her right, and I see the guys coming in, all long haired, dressed in poet shirts and vests. One dark-brown man, styling himself after Hendrix with a big soft Afro tied back around his forehead and a silky purple shirt, lifts his chin. I can tell he fancies himself a lady-killer, and he has the pheromones for it, but I’m so not into men at the moment, not even for quick sex for the fun of it. That’s how all these things get started, and then everything falls apart.

  “That’s Josiah,” she says. “He’s not as terrible as he looks.”

  “Pass,” I say. “Pass on all of them.”

  And yet something nags me. Have we met somewhere? He seems familiar.

  She lifts one eyebrow. “Wait until you hear him talk. But never mind that.” She squeezes my arm tightly. “Hear me, Willow. The compositions and arrangements on Rosebud were amazing. It was a first album. You will find your audience. I know you will.”

  I have to look away to hide the sting of tears in my eyes. So embarrassing. “Thanks, my friend. And thanks for the gig.”

  “Are you kidding? I miss you like crazy when you’re gone.” She gestures toward the guys, and they fall into places around the table. “What d’you feel like playing tonight?”

  “Me?” I say. “I’
m here to follow along.”

  Josiah has taken the place at the end of the table. “I loved the arrangement you did of ‘The Devil’s Questions.’ Would you lead us in that?” His voice is the deepest possible bass, as resonant as an entire orchestra. I feel it moving along my skin, down my spine, as stirring as fingers. All the music centers in my body go on high alert.

  I glance at Paige. She has a ghost of a smile on her mouth.

  “Uh, sure,” I say. “I’d love it. Do you know the male part?”

  “I do.”

  And for a minute, I realize that he’s a little . . . dazzled . . . by my music. Not me. The music. It makes me sit a little straighter.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Gloria

  It’s quiet in the apartment with Willow gone. I’ve spent the day trying to get my affairs in order, and I’m exhausted. I spoke with Dani’s husband, Matthew, retired but still a master of the universe, and he sent me to a friend of his for counsel. We spoke over the phone, and he’s going to dig into the case and the background and get back to me in the morning. I did some research into various escape locations, too, but it just depressed me to imagine any of them. I’d be alone. Away from everyone and everything I love.

  I tried to take down the Renoir, but it proved to be too heavy. I had a rotator cuff injury a couple of years ago that means I can’t lift my left arm over my head. Maybe I’ll make up some reason for Willow to help me get it out of sight.

  Exhausted and anxious, I control my environment by changing into ancient silk pajamas, then carry my tablet into the parlor and pour two solid fingers of twelve-year-old scotch into a highball glass with ice. No soda or water. I learned to drink it straight and savor it one small sip at a time.

  My chair is waiting, and I settle with a sigh. Lamplight spills over my shoulder from an art deco lamp I found antiquing with Dani over a decade ago. She lives in a gorgeous old brownstone, and for years, we took trips to scavenge for lovely things for our homes.