Hidden Tracks

by Zoe Lee

  But he played nice, saying calmly and lightly, “Well now, there ain’t a beautiful woman up here to help out with that particular song. So let’s let them finish out their set. In peace.”

  “I know it,” Gin yelled, not as strong as Xavier but clear as a bell, and Seth’s eyes shut.

  “You know everyone’s going to pester you about it,” the lead singer muttered bluntly.

  “Fuck,” Seth mumbled. “Fuck it.” He whirled back and said into the mic, “Okay, Gin.”

  Gin powered through the restaurant and up onto the stage, chirping, “What’s up? Can I borrow your Epiphone, dude?” The lead singer handed it to her with shaking hands. She flashed an all-teeth smile and came to stand opposite Seth at his mic. “Come on, kid,” she taunted him. “You want to stay here and play without us? Let’s play.”

  For a second, Gin was replaced with Hedda, her round face lit up with challenge, her hair a violent purple faux hawk, silver hoops and studs like a moon phase chart up each ear.

  Blinking away a slight sheen of moisture, Seth relaxed his grip on his guitar strap, put his hands into position, and sighed with another toss of his hair. “Well, y’all, by demand, me and Gin here are going to sing a very old song of—” He swallowed back ours. “Mine.”

  Gin slapped her hand on the back of Seth’s neck and knocked their foreheads together lightly. “You’re here with me,” she whispered earnestly. “Stay here with me, Seth. Make it yours—ours. Let me remind you what you are, where you deserve to be. Where we want you.”

  He grunted, borrowing a displeased sound from Aden’s impressive repertoire of nonverbal responses, and Gin let go so that they could each step back and get to the song.

  “Your long legs are bare, bent up to your nose,” Seth began.

  “Your long arms are wide, bracing you in the sand,” Gin responded.

  [Him] Your long legs are bare, bent up to your nose

  [Her] Your long arms are wide, bracing you in the sand

  [Him] There’s a road behind you that winds and twists forever

  [Her] There’s a journey ahead of you that’s behind lock and key

  [Him] Tonight we’re fireside

  [Her] Fire in our guts, fire in our eyes

  [Him] But it ain’t a conflagration, baby

  [Her] It’s a bonfire, sparks like dying stars overhead

  [Him] Sacrifices in the logs and losses in the clouds

  [Her] Shadows flicker, but I’ve never seen you clearer

  [Him] Smoke in my eyes, but I’ve never loved you dearer

  [Her] We’ve been here before, but it might be the last time

  [Him] I’m praying the sacrifice is worthy

  [Him] Tonight we’re fireside

  [Her] Fire in our guts, fire in our eyes

  [Him] But it ain’t a conflagration, baby

  [Her] It’s a bonfire, sparks like dying stars overhead

  [Him] Sacrifices in the logs and losses in the clouds

  With a choked-back sob, Seth got out the last word, tore off his guitar, shoved it at Gin with a harsh shriek of strings scratching each other, and ran from the stage, ran from it all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Astrid

  “Who the fuck do you think you are!” the woman who’d shouted at Xavier roared like a lioness, stalking across the floor and up onto the stage after Seth disappeared like a ghost.

  “H-hey, Leda,” one of the other musicians said, “now, why don’t you—”

  The mics went off with a screech.

  Then Seth’s sister gripped Gin’s wrist and dragged her over to the table where Astrid, the rest of Downbeat, Kayla, and Hank were sitting. Astrid sat frozen, all of her instincts coming from different places and urging her to do contrary things. It left her a mass of confusion and pressure, at a total loss. Everyone else at the table seemed to be in a similar state, even Kayla who usually had it together, their faces all tight with worry.

  Then a scream ripped through the night air like a lightning bolt, jagged and blinding and heart-stopping. Not a sharp note of pain or fear, but a sustained outpouring of grief.

  “You!” Leda cried raggedly. “I’ve never met y’all, but I hate you for this.”

  “I’m Xavier Talon—” he tried, standing up to face her squarely.

  “You think I give a fuck? What did you do?” she cried, and this time her voice split, showing how much she loved her brother, showing her worry beneath the anger.

  “I just wanted him to sing my favorite song of his,” Xavier repiled, his voice heavy with defeat and regret. “God, it sounds so fucking stupid, but I forgot he wrote it with Hedda—”

  “You bastard!”

  Astrid’s mouth fell open in shock when Tristan cut into the knot of people and shoved Xavier back, sending him crashing into Trentham’s bulk. His face was blazing with fury, his eyes sunken in and his bones sharp out to make him fearsome. “How could you, Xavier?”

  “Tristan?” Xavier asked in surprise.

  “Come on, y’all,” a man said, coming up to stand protectively at Leda’s back. “Let’s everyone go outside to talk.” No one moved until his big hands hooked around Leda’s hips and began pulling her along with him. “Come on, baby,” he went on, and Astrid realized he must be Leda’s husband. “Not here. Everyone’s staring and Seth wouldn’t like it.”

  They moved, and everyone else stayed frozen along with Astrid until the whole group had pushed through the swinging doors into the back of the restaurant silently.

  For a second, there was nothing but the wind rustling in through the open front doors.

  And then, from the stage, the band started playing ‘Friends in Low Places’.

  It was as if the utterly inappropriate song choice snapped everyone else out of their frozen tableau; suddenly they were all gossiping away or singing along or eating again.

  Astrid was… still frozen, still at a loss.

  As a journalist, she was like a bloodhound, knowing she had the scent of something big. So far, she hadn’t learned anything substantial about Seth Riveau as a man and she just knew with every pound of her instincts that there was something under his calm, deflective surface. But as a woman who was pulled towards Seth, who had been to bed with him and found something worthwhile in his arms, the idea of chasing them made her ache. Her throat was tight and nausea churned in her empty stomach, even though she had no context for the pain. Whatever Xavier and Gin had dug up, however unintentionally, had hurt him.

  Had been hurting him.

  She pivoted on her shoes and began determinately for the exit, towards the wind.

  But by the time she reached it, a man was there, surly, hands propped on his hips.

  “Hello, ma’am,” he said, in the same deliberately obsequious way that Seth had the first time they’d met. Something about him was so like Seth that she sighed in resignation before he went on, “I’m Seth’s brother Aden. Where the hell do you think you’re going?”

  “You really don’t want a journalist here for this, Mr. Riveau,” she told him crisply.

  He gave a truly epic scowl and scoffed, “Do I look like an idiot to you? Let’s go.”

  “No, thank you,” she retorted quietly. “All of you can argue over why he’s hurt and has run off—which I know nothing about, since he’s given me nothing of his heart,” she went on, quoting him bitterly. “But I’m going to see if I can find him. He shouldn’t be alone.”

  Aden had the grace to wince, but his blunt, rough words surprised her all the same, so like Seth’s calm directness, but so irritable. “We all know where he is, and we all know that he wants to be alone. Everyone alive who matters to Seth, except for our parents, are here on our property right now. If he walked out, it’s because he doesn’t want to be here.”

  “Then you’ve just proved my point,” she retorted with sharp dignity. “I don’t know who he is or what he wants. So I’m leaving. I don’t belong here at all.”

  “Oh, you belong here plenty,” Aden muttered,
but then he shook his head and walked around her, insulting her by almost clipping her shoulder with his as he left.

  She shuddered as if her body were trying to slough off all of the emotions that had raged against it in the last couple of hours, and went outside and ordered a ride.

  Once she was at The Orchid, she slunk through the lobby, feeling like everyone was staring at her as if they knew where she’d been, that she’d been at the table that had caused such a problem with Seth. She felt like they held her partially to blame for it.

  In her room, she stopped near the window, peering out through the curtains at Maybelle, with its pretty buildings and the green square with a cute gazebo, the trees lit up in patches by the old-fashioned street lamps. The moon hung fat and heavy above them, lighting up puffs of clouds so that they were that deep, almost washed-out gray-indigo.

  Confusion, guilt, and an ache for Seth made her heart surge inside of her ribs painfully, weighed down by opposing impulses to leave Seth’s secrets lie and to figure it out on her own. She wondered what it meant that Leda hadn’t known Xavier, but Tristan did. She wondered why Aden had said you belong here plenty. She wondered a lot of things.

  Knowing it wasn’t fair, she flipped open her laptop and typed in the search bar Seth Riveau and Hedda, and then wished she hadn’t, because in the top results, she found it.

  Tragisher Autounfall.

  She didn’t need to translate the page to understand, like a slap to the face, what it meant. But she read it anyway: Hedda Becker, Berlin-born, 27, musician with an opera company in Berlin, had died in a single-car crash on an icy road about eight years ago.

  Going back to the search results, she clicked again, and again, and again, like a fool.

  Seth and Hedda had been a duo, two songwriters with two guitars, sometimes a guitar and a piano, or sometimes a guitar and a fiddle. There were just enough videos for Astrid to get a strong sense of them together. There had been love, clear and powerful, and such energy and spirit in the love songs and the raucous songs about adventures and mistakes.

  But Seth was much more talented than she had been, no matter how much spirit Hedda had possessed, and it hurt Astrid to see because she knew viscerally that Seth would never see it, or never recognize it. Hedda’s voice had been small and innocent, which they’d used to their benefit, but it hadn’t been enough to match Seth’s stellar range and quality. She was technically excellent at the instruments, as she should have been given that she had gone to Juilliard too, which must have been how they’d met, but there wasn’t enough passion in it.

  From her own journey, Astrid understood how brutal the choice must have been for Hedda. To chose to give up on her dream with Seth to move home and take a steady job.

  From her glimpses into Seth, she knew it must have devastated him.

  Although it was all there in a simple internet search, she was disgusted with herself, so she slapped the laptop shut again, feeling like the worst sort of slimy. voyeuristic journalist.

  She took a cold shower, hunched in around her belly button with her arms strapped against it, her hair hanging in icy, dripping hanks around her face and shoulders.

  When she felt better—or had rationalized her behavior, she honestly wasn’t sure—she turned off the water, dried off, and started the tedious process of brushing her snarled hair.

  Suddenly her cell rang, making her jump about half a foot into the air.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, darling,” Barley said cheerily. “I was scrolling Twitter to entertain myself and saw a few photos that caught you in the background of Downbeat hanging out in Virginia. How’s it going? It looked like they were having fun. You looked like you were having fun.”

  Astrid was quiet, trying to truly understand from Seth’s perspective what she’d just learned about his life before Downbeat. “What would you do,” she began slowly,“if Van couldn’t write or play with you anymore? If he got sick or really hurt—”

  “What? Why? What did you hear—” he yelled back, sharp and desperate.

  Hastily, she interrupted, “Theoretically!”

  “Jesus Christ, Astrid!” he blasted across the cell connection. “You stopped my fucking heart for a second…. And shouldn’t that answer your question? I’d be devastated, you know that, you shouldn’t have to even ask. He’s the other half of my creativity, to get too damn sentimental about it.” He huffed like the melodramatic man he was, but then he sucked in a breath and whistled long and sharp. “Is that what happened to your man, then?”

  Astrid almost shot back that Seth wasn’t hers, but it just sounded so nice that the denial stuck in her throat. So she cleared it and then replied quietly, “Yeah.”

  “That’s… No wonder he didn’t last with Downbeat. They played together so well, even then when the sound was immature and rough,” he mused. “It must have hurt like a son of a bitch. If I found out I could create just as well with some other new person as I do with Van, I would be kind of… lost. Maybe even scared. I’d go back to my roots too, babe.”

  With that, Astrid was able to see Maybelle in a whole new light.

  Whatever had happened after he left home for college, he had come back here, hurt, and needing to heal. If he’d come back here, that meant it had been good to him, his home, not just the place he’d grown up and survived until he was eighteen and could get out. For him, it was safe and full of the love and support he needed, not shadowed with bad memories. It was a place apart from the rest of his life, although he obviously performed in public at least occasionally. But singing covers wasn’t close to what he did when performing elsewhere.

  They’d invaded his safe haven, she and Downbeat.

  “Have I made a mistake coming here?” she asked.

  “You don’t make mistakes,” he murmured quietly. “Your whole life has been a marvelous journey and not a single one was a mistake. Don’t be afraid of anything, Astrid.”

  Her eyelids fell shut. “Sometimes I’m so very angry you couldn’t have been like this more when we were still together,” she sighed out, even though it wasn’t really the truth.

  “But I couldn’t have been,” he reminded her. “Next time, I’ll try my damnedest.”

  Shaking her head, she said, “I’m hanging up now, Barley.”

  While he chuckled, he ended the call first.

  Sleep was eons away, but she turned down the blankets and got in bed anyhow, determined to organize her thoughts and corral her feelings until she knew what to do.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Seth

  Seth Riveau had never had a breakdown before.

  But there was a small chance that he was having one now.

  He was in his attic studio, which was right above the two bedrooms he and his siblings had lived in their entire childhoods, and the deadbolt on the inside of the door was thrown. He was locked in with a half bathroom and a mini fridge, the curtains drawn shut tight.

  Currently it was sometime near dawn and the lights were off, only specks of LEDs on the buttons of his equipment and the glow in the dark stickers of the galaxy on the ceiling providing any light. He’d been staring into this imitation of an abyss for so many hours that he could see everything in smoky grayscale. It all loomed: the couch, bookcases stuffed with records, the drafting table strewn with his notebooks and staff paper that was blank or used, the benches of equipment and his laptop, the black cords connecting it all.

  Electricity flowed through the cords and everything they were plugged into, humming punctuated by rhythmic buzzing, itching along his skin like pinwheels pricking him. He’d tried having music on, to overlay it, but every song had reminded him of something else.

  Neil Young—dancing in the kitchen with his mom while making biscuits and gravy.

  The Raconteurs—train trips across Europe with Hedda, each of them with one earbud.

  The Civil Wars—lulling him to sleep after invigorating shows with Downbeat.

  A parade of memories that swamped him, dragg
ed at his limbs, taking him down.

  A chorus of voices singing along with the music, along with him too, making him smile, brimming with love and affection for the hearts that belonged to those voices.

  All of the good and all of the bad, pouring through him, tearing him in two.

  Now, in the near-silence and the near-darkness, he sat on the rough wood floor with his back to the couch, his knees drawn up to his chest and his arms wrapped around them.

  He knew that Xavier and Gin hadn’t meant to throw daggers into him by suggesting ‘Fireside’ or by performing it with him. He hadn’t known he was so fragile, that his heart was like tissue paper just waiting to be shredded. It wasn’t as though Hedda was a forbidden subject, although he realized she’d been brought up less and less as the years went by.

  For a second he wanted to call Tristan, because he was the only person from Maybelle who had ever met her. While Seth was at Juilliard with her, Tristan’s dad was living in New York. Whenever Tristan had come to visit, he’d tagged along with Seth, Hedda, Xavier, and whoever else was around at the time. When Seth had first moved back and Tristan was finishing up at MIT, they had drunk beer and sat on Tristan’s roof and talked about her.

  But he knew that the song request had only been part of it.

  It was just…

  It had just been too much the last month: playing with Downbeat at a massive festival, meeting Astrid, Xavier asking him to rejoin the band, everyone at Wild Harts, that song…

  The only thing missing last night had been a pair of ex-lovers. Imagining it made him snort bitterly. What he wouldn’t give to be nestled protectively between almost any of the couples he’d made love with over the years right now, sheltered and warm and shrouded in drowsy contentment and satisfied desires, needing nothing, unwound and vulnerable.

  Only…

  Only he didn’t really want that, not now that he’d met Astrid.

  Fuck, he couldn’t handle any of this right now.