A Thousand Doors

by J. T. Ellison

  That’s what the song, the “big hit,” is about—the choices I’ve made that have slammed me into the middle of the wrong life. The song’s title, “Ruins,” says it all, with the chorus a four-line lament of how the ruins and remains of my love story are the only things left worth singing about.

  Damn, people do love a sad song. All the songs I’ve penned with my Gibson over my shoulder and a beer by my side, with friends chiming in with lyrics and ideas about love and life and living for the day? Well, those have been all fine and good or a few concerts. But this sad song shot to the top. Obviously, a few people understood the horror of realizing that the good stuff might have already happened, and mostly missed in the chaos of living too fast with too much.

  The audience won’t see me as I look now in my sweatpants and white T-shirt sporting the logo of my last (failed) album. They will see me in a long red dress, my hair curled and piled and sprayed. My eyes will be so thick with silver makeup and black lashes that it will feel like I’d attached wings to my eyelids. But for now, I face the looming decision of whether to sing the second song, the one that might destroy me.

  I stare out over the empty pews. Would he even come to hear me? Would he bother with that?

  Red is more famous than I am by a thousand light-years, a star so bright that no matter how I polish my own meager celestial light, I will never compete. But I hadn’t wanted to compete; I’d only wanted to find my own place in the country music world, to have my songs resonate with those who loved them, not with his beer-drinking pickup-truck song buddies (as fun and lucrative and dance-worthy as those songs were and are).

  Red Shea. He was wrapped up in a package so astoundingly like my imagination that I’d started to believe in all the gurus who professed the belief that we manifest our futures. I had loved him immediately. But I’m not the only one. Every girl or woman who spies him on an album cover or onstage or grinning from below his cowboy hat loves him. The day we met is as etched as the initials on my childhood kitchen table where I sat up one night and used Dad’s pocketknife, the one I’d pilfered from Mom’s dresser drawer.

  The fund-raising concert had been for a conservation company that provided tours for young children, and Red had been the headliner. I’d been the opening singer for the opening band: the one who plays while no one pays any mind. I was the background white noise to keep the crowd from getting restless before the whiskey flooded their veins and Red jumped up with a holler. The after-party had been at his house, a sprawling timber-and-brick estate on ten acres outside Nashville. I’d stood by the kitchen island, and it was an island, a slab of black slate so large a king-size bed wouldn’t cover it.

  “You did a great job tonight, Missy,” he said as he approached me, his outline seeming to not so much move through the empty space between us but shove the emptiness aside. His cowboy hat was gone, and a baseball cap for the Atlanta Braves had taken its place.

  “Oh, my name isn’t Missy. It’s Mia.”

  He threw back his head as if someone had grabbed his hair and pulled with great force, and a bellow erupted. “Of course it is. I was just being formal.”

  “Oh. Oh, I get it. Sorry.” I cringed, and I would have backed away in embarrassment but for the slab of slate digging into my spine.

  “Did you make up that name because it sounds like the perfect country music stage name?” He came closer and I smelled the tobacco tucked into his cheek.

  “Nope. It’s my given name. Who I am.”

  “Now there’s a good song title.” He sidled up next to me and set his beer on the slate.

  “Who I am?”

  “No. My given name. I like that.”

  “Well, you’re more than welcome to it,” I said even as I started to think that he wasn’t more than welcome to it; that it was my words he’d taken straight out of my mouth.

  We stood there for another hour, talking like that, so easily and warmly, our ideas bouncing back and forth like we’d been practicing word volleys for all of our known lives. I left at daybreak and knew it would be the last time I spoke to Red Shea in a way that any girl would pay for.

  But it wasn’t. I hadn’t even arrived home, blurry-eyed and stumbling into my bed that was smaller than his kitchen island, when he’d texted and asked if I’d please join him for dinner the following day, “which is already today,” he wrote.

  I waited to answer; I didn’t want to seem too ready and eager. I waited about two minutes.

  For two years, from that first dinner until three months ago, we weren’t apart for more than a few hours. My heart was as full as hearts get when love finds its way inside and crowds out everything else, when desire fills up the crevices and corners and small areas inside that you’d thought arid and dry. We weren’t a combo name, RedMia or something damn stupid like that, but my name, previously unknown, was linked with his in the same breath, and my songs started to find airtime. I didn’t care who knew he loved me; I honestly didn’t, as long as I knew he loved me, which I did.

  Maybe love, when consumed too quickly and too eagerly, is emptied out or used up, wasted in haste. Red and I might have devoured what little love we were allotted during this lifetime in that short time, where others might have been able to make it last for decades. Maybe we are, as couples, apportioned only so much love, and we decide how fast to use it up. Or maybe I wasn’t good enough for him, and it was natural and inevitable that he would fall for someone else.

  After an all-night party with his buddies, he came to me in our bed, the sheets wrinkled with my solo sleep, to tell me about his new love. At least I didn’t have to read about it in the rags around town. But I’d set myself up. If you’re going to take the publicity for the love, you have to take it for the loss. You can’t have it only one way. I can’t ask for privacy now when we never asked for it when they followed our love story from the get–go.

  I hadn’t seen it coming.

  Most don’t.

  The songs came quickly in the pain. Lyric and melody were the only things I could feel or hear in the days and months following the breakup. The grief, like panic, flooded over me in waves, drowning me and then letting me go, tossing me to the hard shoreline of loneliness. Anxiety grabbed me and then squeezed the air from my lungs and my body before slinking off like the coward it was and is. But the songs? They were an anchor and ballast; they were a vessel that held all the pain.

  It was the song, “Ruins,” that shot to the top. But I would trade the song, give it back to the muse, forever remain the opening act for the opening act not to feel the pain that birthed that ballad.

  Instead of turning to another man, I turned to my guitar.

  ————

  I found my first guitar on the day my father died. I was twelve years old and the world held its breath, threatening to never take another. I walked in that molasses of loss, my mother drunk enough to sleep through most of the grief and madness, except when she wasn’t and I bore the brunt of her grief and anger, equally mixed and equally volatile. In those times, I’d run from the house filled with casseroles and vodka and unwashed dishes, which were piled in the sink, across countertops, and covered in ants.

  I found myself at Shari’s house, weeping in my best friend’s all-pink bedroom with a SuperTeen Leonardo DiCaprio poster staring down at me, when her brother walked in with a guitar slung over his shoulder like he was a fifteen-year-old Johnny Cash. He sat next to me, denting the side of the lime-green beanbag chair where I was curled into a ball, and I fell in love. Not with him. Not even close. But with the Gibson he held as close as a lover.

  When someone or something saves your life, you quite possibly value it more than you should. You value it enough to sacrifice everything else in your life for it. You value it enough to place the blinders of love on either side of your eyes and set your gaze forward with the object in front of you like a talisman. I wrote my first song that night, a song ab
out my dad and the undoing of the world and the bleakness of not having a hero in your corner any longer. Shari’s brother, his name long lost to me now, wrote the music as the lyrics flowed from me like the geyser only anguish can unleash.

  That next week I pawned everything I could find in my mother’s house to scrape together enough to buy my own Gibson at the same pawnshop where I took the things she never missed, or thought were stolen by one of the many men she later brought home.

  Four hundred and thirty songs. That is how many I’ve written in the days that led to this night where I stand stunned on the Ryman stage. But not one of them have I ever been afraid to sing.

  Until now.

  “Yo, Mia, we need your final song list.” A voice echoes across the stage, flowing down into the front row, where the dignitaries will sit tonight. And where Red will sit if he wants to, if he decides to come.

  “I know,” I answer the voice, which I know is Bill Kennedy, but I can’t see him from behind the boxes where he stands calling out to me. “I’m deciding right now.”

  “What’s to decide?” He comes into the light, joins me in the neon puddle. His baseball cap is slung low on his forehead and emblazoned with the Nashville Predators logo, and otherwise he’s immaculately dressed. He’s my manager, the one I’d obtained when Red “gave” him to me. I thought he’d run when Red did, but Bill explained that that’s not his way of doing business. He was with me because of my talent, not because Red referred him. But still I wait for the notice, every day thinking he’ll tell me it’s time for him to move on to someone who isn’t as erratic and squirrely as I’ve been the past three months.

  “Bill.” I face him. “Here’s what’s to decide—if I sing that song or not. The other song, the one after ‘Ruins.’ Red asked me not to sing it. No, actually he demanded that I don’t sing it.”

  “And why is that, Mia?” Bill lifts his ball cap and runs his hands through his thick, dark hair.

  “Because he knows everyone will know it’s about him, and it doesn’t paint him in the nicest way. That’s why.”

  “Well, maybe he should have thought about that when he did what he did. If he wanted nicer songs written about him, then he should’ve been nicer.”

  The spotlight swings to the left as the lighting crew checks the range of movement. Bill and I stand in the dusty dimness.

  “Mia.” He takes a breath and reaches his hand forward, almost touching me but then withdrawing. It’s a tender movement, one I’ve seen before many times over the past months. He wants to help; everyone does but no one knows how. “You sing what you want to sing. You sing what you feel led to sing. This is the Ryman. This is your chance. For once, this isn’t about Red. It’s about you.”

  “But he begged me.” My throat clogs with that cottony feeling as if it is closing up, as if my voice will be stopped just as it tries to exit. The therapist I’ve found, she said it was panic and pain that only felt like cotton, and when I cried, or sang or spoke, it would dissipate. Good to know, but not helpful in the moment.

  “And?” he asks.

  I hear Bill’s point even though he hasn’t said it. I’d embarrassingly begged Red to let me stay, but instead he’d moved me to a lovely little cottage in the Twelfth Street district and he’d moved the new love into his house, a woman ten years younger than me, twenty years younger than him, and as adorable as a babysitter might be if we’d had a family, which thank God we hadn’t. He’d talked me out of that. We were all we needed, he’d said. Until he needed her.

  So what Bill’s simple “And?” meant is “So what?” You begged him, and what the hell good did that do you? It didn’t change anything.

  I try another excuse. “He could sue me.”

  “No, he couldn’t.” Bill takes my hands in such a tender motion, in such a sweet way. He’s never touched me in any other way than a hug hello in a crowded room. We’ve shared buses and tight spaces and traveled and slept on a couch in a studio sound room, but never once has he taken my hands in his. “You must sing what is true for you. Why do you think that your songs have been roaring up the charts lately?”

  “Because you’re my manager and because I was part of the Red world where magic falls like pixie dust on anyone near him.”

  “No, Mia. No.” He still holds my hands, and now his fingers are wound tightly through mine. He pulls me closer so I see brown flecks in his green eyes, like freckles. I think how that might make a good lyric, the freckles of his eyes. And then I almost laugh. I can’t get out of my own way to even be close to someone who cares, already writing a song about a moment that hasn’t even passed.

  “It’s your lyrics. It’s your voice. It’s the way people feel as though they have been let into a world they understand but nobody has opened the door for them before. It’s because you have a talent that is now being recognized.”

  I should pull away. We are too close. But instead I relax into the closeness; I have flinched from human touch for so long.

  “I’m scared to death, Bill. His anger isn’t something I can deal with. It never has been. Maybe that’s been the problem all along—I’m too weak.”

  “You are far from weak, and that song is meant for every broken heart. Why would you keep it to yourself?”

  With that, someone calls his name, and he releases my hands and turns to the question that sounds far off but is only a few feet away. Then he’s gone and I’m again alone on the stage.

  For every broken heart, he said.

  Could that be true?

  The song had been wrought from the blazing fire of pain in an all-night writing session alone in the new house Red had bought for me as some kind of consolation prize. It was a house I hadn’t turned down because I needed a place to go and it was wonderful and warm and had a porch that spread across the front like a welcoming mat. I’d been bribed, consoled, and appeased. I’d accepted it because I’d needed it. “Consolation”—that’s the name of the song I’d written that night.

  So very many things he gave me were meant to be consoling—the apologies, the platitudes, the free house, the looks of pity and regret. But consolation was only found in the daily living, only found in the depths of one’s soul, only discovered in the surviving. Consolation could not be given by the one who had done the breaking; it could only be found inside the one who’d been broken.

  I wrote about that.

  Would I sing it tonight? The image of him arriving at my house with his warning returned.

  ————

  He strode to the front door, up the bluestone pathway, his blue pickup truck with the oversized tires parked at the curb. I saw him from the kitchen window and shut my eyes as if I could make him go away by pretending he wasn’t there at all. But his image was an afterburn behind my lids: his long stride, his sunglasses hiding his eyes and reflecting the afternoon rays. And of course, his truck with the girl in the passenger seat, the girl I’d never met but knew her face as well as one can when they’ve seen it in gossip magazines and country music rags around town. Sissy Muldoon. Her name as real as her red hair (which was to say not real at all). He’d left her in the car like a dog, with the window cracked. The doorbell rang like the chimes of a church tower clock.

  I opened my eyes and stood fast. I would ignore him. I would not answer. What the hell was he doing here anyway?

  With a click and snap, the lock released itself, and the creaking of the hinges told me Red had let himself in the house. Guess he’d kept a key when he’d given me mine. This was enough to set me in motion, to send me bursting into the foyer from the kitchen’s swinging door. “You can’t just walk in here.”

  He didn’t startle but stared at me as calmly as if I’d been there all along. Unflappable. Steady. Standing next to my red wool coat, which was hanging on a peg, my black Converse under the bench and my straw purse gaping open. “You’re right, darling. You’re right. I’m sorry. But
I knew you were home.”

  “And you can’t call me darling.”

  He smiled, and I knew what was coming. He was going to break out into song, which he did. “You don’t have to call me darling, darling…” He began to belt out the David Allen Coe song.

  “Not funny, Red. What are you doing here? What do you need?” I stood still as I could, tried not to fidget and run my hands through my hair, or tuck my T-shirt into my jeans in some pitiful attempt to appear prettier or more put together.

  He took off his baseball cap and set it next to my purse on the wooden bench, just as if he lived there, just as he’d done in the front entranceway to his house when we’d walk in. It sent a shiver of pain through my chest—the familiarity too awful and close. He ran his hand through his hair and lifted his gaze to mine. I didn’t flinch. I didn’t look away.

  “Well, I realized that I left my songbook, maybe in your guitar case? I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember where I put it, and, well…I need it. I’ve been texting and calling you…”

  “I blocked your number,” I lied. I saw every text and phone call that came through. I needed to know if and when he tried to contact me. I’d just opted out of answering.

  “I assumed. So damn sorry to just show up like this, but I need it.”

  “I don’t think it’s there, Red. I think you’re looking for a reason to see me.” I nodded toward the ajar front door to the view of his truck and his girlfriend leaning out the window. “Didn’t want to invite Sissy in?”

  “Don’t be cruel, it’s not your style.”