“We talked on the phone. She wanted to get together, but she never got back in touch. She mentioned having some business to attend to while she waited for Hence. I’ve wondered a thousand times what she meant by ‘business.’ ” Jackie jumped to her feet. “I have something to show you.”
At the back of her apartment, she held aside a gauzy curtain to let me into her studio. Statues have always creeped me out, and hers were no exception: life-size stone figures lurking in the dark, like storybook characters frozen by an evil curse. I maneuvered through the room, careful not to brush against them.
In the room’s darkest corner, Jackie flipped a switch. There under the floodlights gleamed my mother in black marble, her arms raised in alarm, her blank eyes wide with what looked like fright, her long hair whipping behind her as though she were caught in a hurricane. At the knees, she melted into a black mass, like she was being swallowed by the earth or by a rising flood. It was more creepy than cool.
I caught Jackie’s eye. “You think something terrible happened to her.”
“I have no way of knowing,” she said. “I might be wrong. After she disappeared, she was the only thing I could sculpt for months. I had this recurring dream—she was banging on my door, asking for help. I would try to run to her, but I couldn’t get my legs to move.” Her tone of voice changed. “Nobody just disappears for fourteen years, Chelsea.”
“They do if they don’t want to be found. Maybe she wanted to start a completely new life. Maybe she got sick of waiting for Hence.” I touched the cold marble of my mother’s bare arm. I’d been wondering which was worse, a dead mother or a still-living one who had abandoned me without a backward glance, but Jackie’s stories had given me the answer. If she was alive somewhere, I would find a way to forgive her. “One of the detectives said Mom could still be hiding out in New York.” I explained about the letter she’d sent me when she’d been staying at The Underground.
But Jackie shook her head. “The place was all boarded up. She couldn’t have been staying there. I assumed she’d checked into a hotel. She called me from a pay phone on a street corner in Midtown.”
“But what if she found a way into The Underground?” The suspicion I’d dismissed two days ago was returning. “What if Hence met her there? Could he have…” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word murdered. “He had a motive, right? Jealousy. And he has such a nasty temper….”
“The police investigated him, but they cleared him pretty quickly,” Jackie said. “He was still in England, stranded at Heathrow, when Cathy got here. Some kind of bad weather had grounded all the flights for a few days. Also, a transit strike slowed him down, if memory serves. As soon as he got into town he called me, looking for her.”
“Could the police have gotten it wrong?” I asked. “Could Hence have—”
“He’s not my favorite person in the world, but I can’t imagine him hurting a hair on Catherine’s head.” Jackie shut her eyes, as if she was trying to look into the past. “He worshipped her.”
At least I could still stay at the club without having to fear for my life. “Were there other suspects?”
Jackie looked like she’d bitten into something sour. “Your father.”
“That’s insane.” My father was a lot of things—bumbling, hypocritical, distracted—but there was no way he was a murderer.
“He was cleared, of course,” Jackie assured me. “A lot of missing women turn out to be victims of domestic abuse, so the husband usually comes under suspicion. Especially if the marriage was rocky.”
Had the marriage been rocky? I suppose it must have been, given that my mother was in love with another man. Still, my dad didn’t have it in him to hurt anyone, much less kill them. “If he finds a stinkbug in the bathroom, he carries it out the front door.”
“Nobody who knew your father thought he was responsible for her disappearance,” Jackie said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you….”
“I asked you to tell me everything. I meant it.”
She threw her arms around me again. “You’re a brave girl,” she said. “Just like your mom.”
Her words—maybe the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me—sent a wave of warmth through my body. For a long time neither of us spoke, until an image popped into my head: the girl I’d seen, or maybe dreamed, scratching at the bedroom window, trying to get in. “What if she climbed up the fire escape and let herself in through the window in her bedroom? She could have been waiting in The Underground for Hence.”
Jackie let go. “Of course! That window of hers. She used to leave it unlocked so Hence could climb in. She kept a two-by-four hidden behind the club so he could trip the ladder.”
“So when she came back, she could have let herself into her bedroom.” The idea exhilarated me; at last I’d made a breakthrough, however small: I’d found a piece of information I could offer to Hence in exchange for his help.
But that was as far as we got before Jackie’s phone rang. “My gallery’s calling; I have to take this,” she told me, her hand over the receiver.
“I’ll go,” I said.
Before I left, Jackie scrawled her phone number on a piece of scrap paper. Call me if you need anything, she mouthed, her ear still pressed to her phone.
Oddly, when I let myself into The Underground, it was quiet and empty. I crept back downstairs to Cooper’s bedroom, and he was still gone. My note lay on his pillow, exactly where I’d left it.
Catherine
For a while, Hence and I met up at Jackie’s every day after school. Then, one afternoon, as he was slipping back into his jeans, he gave me a sheepish look. “I won’t be able to meet up tomorrow. Riptide’s rehearsing.”
I bent to kiss his forehead. “That’s okay.”
“This won’t be the only time. We’ll need to rehearse at least a few times a week from now on.”
“Got it,” I said. “I understand.”
Hence wrapped his arms around me and gave me a squeeze. “You’re amazing,” he said, and then he was gone.
I dressed slowly, giving myself a pep talk. Being in Riptide is a great thing for Hence. I’ll get more writing done now, and missing him will make my poems deeper, because poets are supposed to suffer. Aren’t they?
Dad was really excited for Hence and gladly cut back his hours at the club, but rehearsal time with the band quickly expanded to take up most of Hence’s new free time. Suck it up, I told myself whenever I felt a pang of longing. You don’t need to hang around your boyfriend constantly. Besides, this will make the time we do get to spend together even more special.
Still, on the afternoons when Hence was rehearsing, I couldn’t help wishing I could be there, too. I wasn’t about to suggest it, though; I knew from experience that guys in bands don’t like girlfriends at practice any more than they like them at auditions.
I’d heard Dad’s musician friends grouse endlessly on the subject. “Paulie insists on bringing his old lady to every rehearsal, and she’s a colossal pain,” I remembered Dave D’Amato saying about his bassist’s girlfriend at one of Dad’s late-night drinking-and-bullshit sessions. “She thinks she can make suggestions.” There had been true horror in his voice.
And Dave’s weaselly drummer, whose name I could never remember, actually chimed in, “I don’t mind if a guy brings his girl along, provided she’s hot and she brings us beers.”
Dave laughed. “We need a new rule. Hot girls welcome… but no Yokos.”
“They’re sexist pigs,” I told my dad the next day as we were clearing away the empties from the living room. “Why don’t you say something?”
“Dave’s an old friend. Besides, he’s essentially right. Bringing a girlfriend to practice is unprofessional.”
“Or a boyfriend.” I sniffed. “Girls are in bands, too.”
Dad chuckled. “Or a boyfriend.”
So I knew better than to ask Hence if I could sit in, which was why I was floored when he brought up the idea himself. “The guys said you could c
ome watch us rehearse tomorrow if you want.” We were cuddling under a blanket, and I was so happy to be in his arms that I hadn’t even been thinking about rehearsals.
“You asked them?” I was thrilled. “And they really don’t mind?”
“Stan and Andy weren’t so into the idea at first,” he admitted. “They had some bad experiences with the last lead guitarist’s girlfriend. But I said you’d be totally cool.”
I snuggled my face into his neck and inhaled deeply, breathing him in. “You’re the best boyfriend ever.” But then I pulled back. “They’re not going to want me to fetch their beers, are they? Because there’s no way.”
Hence laughed, a sound I heard so rarely that it never failed to bring me joy. “Nobody expects you to fetch beer. Or make sandwiches.” He cupped my face in his hands so I was looking straight into that gaze that melted me every time. “I want you there with me. And they want me to be happy, so they said yes.”
So that’s how I came to be curled up in an armchair in a bone-cold warehouse in the Meatpacking District. Though I wore my warmest down coat, I was still freezing; if there was a next time, I thought, I’d really have to sneak a quilt out in my backpack, and maybe a thermos of hot coffee. With fingers that felt brittle as icicles, I scribbled nonstop in my journal. Just being there, listening to Riptide practice, made me hungry to create something. Though I’d considered myself a writer ever since I could hold a pencil, I couldn’t help wishing I knew how to dance or play an instrument—anything that would let me use my whole body to express myself, the way Hence was doing. He was a more physical guitar player than I had expected, pogoing, windmilling, sliding across the floor on his knees. The quiet, hesitant Hence I knew was nothing like this wildman swinging his prized Telecaster around like he might smash it, Pete Townshend–style, just for the thrill.
Of course I’d seen more than my share of rehearsals and sound checks at the club, to the point where even when a band was good I could feel pretty blasé about it. But it was different with Riptide, and not just because I was biased (though, admittedly, I was). Plenty of bands spoiled catchy hooks with lyrics so dumb they made my teeth ache. Others coupled lyrics that were clever or deep with music that moped along, monotonous and grating. But Riptide had the music and the lyrics. Not to mention the most gorgeous and talented front man in the history of rock and roll. In my humble opinion.
And while I was pretty sure Hence’s bandmates would consider it an intrusion or a distraction, I couldn’t help wishing I’d brought my camera so I could capture them in action. They weren’t bad guys, as musicians go. I decided right away that I liked Ruben—the bassist—the best. He was the friendliest, with a smile that took up his whole face, and he won points for his fearless fashion sense; that day he had on a purple crushed-velvet jumpsuit and a furry red top hat. He was the one who ran upstairs to bring down an armchair for me to sit in, a comfy but musty one the guys had found by the side of the road on trash day. I felt bad making him go to all that trouble, but he brushed away my protests.
Stan, the drummer, was skinny, with a black pompadour and a crooked nose. Andy, the rhythm guitarist, had curly, sandy-colored hair; a round, impish face; and a to-die-for Cockney accent. At first I couldn’t help wondering if maybe they’d agreed to let me sit in because of who my dad is, but after observing them in action, I finally decided that Hence had been right: They honestly were delighted to have him in the band, and he’d made them see that we were a package deal. “Your boyfriend’s got pipes,” Andy said to me before the band got down to business. “It’s a huge relief to have somebody in Riptide who can actually sing.”
It was true: Hence’s voice could flow like silk one minute and rasp like sandpaper the next—whatever a song called for. That afternoon he was wearing a shirt I’d bought for him, a crisp, electric-blue button-down, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows, untucked over jeans. Each time I looked up from my journal and caught sight of him—slender, dark, and intense—the blood rushed to my head and I reeled with the pleasure of it all. Riptide’s front man. My secret boyfriend.
One night in November, when Quentin was out with his friends and Dad was preoccupied with that night’s show, Hence climbed the fire escape to my window. We’d talked the plan out for days and decided the elevator was too noisy. Even the stairs at the rear of the building were out, because Dad and the workers used them. Not that our plan wasn’t still risky, since any passerby could look up to see Hence climbing through the window.
“I’ll be careful,” he’d promised. “I’ll wait till the music’s loud and nobody’s looking.” We agreed that the risk was worth it, especially now that Hence’s free afternoons were so few. Besides, this way I could fall asleep in his arms, his breath warm in my hair, his scent seeping into my pillowcase. Best of all, we would wake up together, albeit not in that luxurious way I imagined us someday being able to. I was careful to set my alarm for four AM, when I knew Dad would be sound asleep, and Hence slipped back out the window and down the fire escape without a hitch. It was so easy we wondered why we hadn’t tried it sooner.
After Hence reached the street safely, I snuggled under the covers, reliving how it had felt to fall asleep beside him, my head tucked under his chin while he absently drummed out a rhythm on my hip and hummed in my ear. It was the song he had started writing last week, the one about me. He hadn’t worked out all of the lyrics yet, but there was a line about being tangled in my midnight hair, and a bit about how he wanted to kidnap me from school and take me to St. Mark’s Place and walk through the streets holding hands. My favorite part was about how he wanted us to kiss in a rainstorm, daring lightning to strike.
The last verse was giving him trouble, though. I wanted to offer to help him, but it would have been supremely weird to cowrite a song about myself. Instead, I would wait and see what he came up with on his own. By then, I’d showed him all of my poems—not just the recent ones about him, but the old ones, too—and he really liked them. In fact, more than once he said he wanted to pick one out and write music for it—a plan that completely thrilled me. If he had been anyone else, I might have suspected he was just being polite, but I don’t think Hence ever said a word to me that he didn’t truly mean. Which is why I was so pleased by what he whispered just before he fell asleep: “I’ve been thinking about us living together. After you graduate. Getting a little apartment of our own.”
How could I sleep after that? I could imagine precisely what our apartment would look like: cozy and just big enough for two, with sunshine streaming in the windows, lace curtains, and a cat—I’d always wanted a Siamese, but Q was allergic—curled in the middle of our bed. We’d have cut flowers—daffodils or wild irises—and stacks and stacks of books in every room, and there would be music on the stereo every hour of the day, and maybe even at night while we slept.
I could picture it all so clearly. Even so, I knew I might have to be flexible. If lace curtains and daffodils sounded too girly to Hence, I would adjust. I wouldn’t mind living in a more masculine apartment, either, with black walls and graffiti art and a pinball machine against the wall, with floor pillows instead of furniture—something as bohemian and original as Hence himself—as long as I got the cat and a desk to write and study at and we were close to the T so I could get to my classes at Harvard. Maybe we could even live right in Cambridge, with its shady trees, quirky bookstores and restaurants, and the Brattle Theatre, where they showed the best independent films and sold cappuccino in the lobby. Of all the places Dad had ever taken me, Cambridge—his alma mater and my future college town—was the only place I’d ever wanted to move to.
I could have cuddled in bed dreaming about the future all the next day, if I didn’t have to go to school. It was too soon for senioritis to kick in, since I hadn’t yet started on my college applications. Apart from Harvard, I would apply to Yale and Brown, and maybe Smith and Bryn Mawr, with SUNY Binghamton as my safety school. My guidance counselor had scolded me when I’d told her I planned to apply only
to Harvard. “Even a straight-A student needs safety schools,” she’d said, and as annoyed as I’d been, I realized she was probably right.
Though I hadn’t mentioned any of this to Hence yet, as I inhaled his scent on my pillow, a new and thrilling idea occurred to me: Maybe he could apply to Harvard, too? Or, failing that, some other nearby school—Emerson, or Berklee College of Music. Maybe I could even talk Dad into helping out with his tuition. That last part would be tricky; I wouldn’t want my father to suspect that Hence and I were a couple—at least not while we were still living under his roof. Even so, I felt pretty certain I could pull it off without arousing Dad’s suspicion. The best way to get Dad to do anything was to plant an idea in his head and let it grow there for a while, until he thought it was his own. Some night after dinner, when Dad was in a good mood, I would ask him whether he thought Hence would ever go to college. That would get him started on his own Harvard memories, and on how these days everyone needs a college education—a speech I’d heard a thousand times before. And I would mention how smart Hence was, and how he had next to nothing—no money, no family, and no chance at going to college.
The tricky part would be convincing Dad that I was casually interested in Hence’s well-being, that he had become a cause, like some little kid in Zambia or Appalachia who needed money for shoes or dental care. The last thing I wanted to do was let on how much Hence’s future mattered to me.
As certain as I was that Hence would be psyched about my plan to get him into college, something kept me from mentioning it to him, until the day I couldn’t help myself. We were headed home from rehearsal. The subway car was crowded, but we’d managed to score the last two seats, and even though a few passengers had groused about Hence’s amp and guitar case being in the way, he was in a great mood. Practice had gone well, and he was building a rapport with Andy, Stan, and Ruben. A gig at the Big Bang—Hence’s first as lead singer—had been scheduled for the following month. As clubs go, the Big Bang wasn’t quite as big a deal as The Underground, but almost.
Catherine Page 13
