by Katie Porter
“How long will you two be staying?”
My shoulders tense in a hard cramp. Answering this is more complicated than it ought to be. Dad hasn’t given me a timeframe for this trip. We don’t have return tickets. He won’t answer direct questions. I’ve asked them. “As long as he wants.”
“It’s kind of you to drop everything and travel with him,” Alec says. Underneath I hear what he’s assuming, that I’m a typical rich man’s daughter, the kind with no career but plenty of time to traipse across the world.
The shitty part is that he’s right. I have a degree—a degree from the San Francisco Art Institute—and I’d give anything to have a career in art fraud investigations, but I am my father’s keeper. I bear that burden alone. He’s been sick for years.
The bedroom door swings open and Dad’s night nurse is there. Frank is a short, stocky black man with a smile that’s barely dimmed by having been up all night. “Morning, Harlow,” he says to me.
“How was he last night?” None of the alarms went off and no one called for me, so it was obviously uneventful. But I can’t stop myself from asking.
“Good, good,” Frank says. “Mr. Tate is ready for breakfast.”
“I’ll get his porridge.”
Frank offers me a nod before returning into Dad’s room.
“Porridge?” Alec’s voice is an echo of mine. I can’t tell if he’s judging or remembering.
I lift both eyebrows. “Would you like to make it?”
Then I see something that few people probably ever do. I see Alec Davies in a moment of uncertainty.
“Yes,” he says at last. “May I?”
Chapter Three
Alec
NO ONE FROM MY CHILDHOOD would recognize my life as it is now, but I haven’t forgotten how to make porridge. It’s hasn’t even been that long since I last made it for myself. I can pull it together no matter the hour and no matter how little sleep I’ve had, able to draw on the most basic skills. But I don’t like to. I don’t like to think of the small council block where I grew up. The gelatinous mass makes me think of my sister, which isn’t a bad memory to have at all. She liked porridge best of everything, more fool her. I never understood why she’d prefer it over our mother’s scones.
I stand in the anonymous hotel suite’s kitchen, stirring a little pot. I’m completely aware of the woman who watches me. Harlow Tate. The most defensive woman I’ve ever seen in pajamas.
I met her pregnant mother. More than twenty-five years ago, I met Claudette and shook her hand and congratulated her on marriage to Silas, ignoring the fact that her stomach was rounded past the point of moon-heaviness. Apparently that child would grow into this wary-eyed creature sitting at a small table, holding a fork, ready to use her words as weapons.
Her hair is blonde, but not the golden blonde that says California. There’s no carefully applied bleach and rich dye. Hers is a smudged, smeary kind of blonde, where a flicker of shadow would steal its vibrancy and leave it a muted brown.
Now she’s sitting by the window and studying me, as if watching my cuffs for vials of arsenic, and I take in her true coloring. Her skin is golden, her eyes deep brown. I’m glad they’re brown. Nothing flashy. She’s edgy and cagey enough. An exotic color would be begging for even more trouble.
I finish cooking the porridge and dish it out. The only juice I find in the under-counter fridge is grape, so I pour a small amount into a short crystal glass. Claridge’s takes care of their guests, but I’m surprised that Silas would be willing to stay in a hotel. He’d previously been highly dismissive of most material things and signs of success.
He’d been highly dismissive of a lot of things.
Including me.
Including The Skies.
I walk across the hotel room carrying a tray of porridge and juice, and surprisingly, it’s both the easiest and hardest thing I’ve ever done. Foot in front of foot. Balance a tray and don’t drop it. Move inch by inch closer to the mistakes of my past. The simple hotel room door is... everything.
I knock. A voice from inside calls for me to enter, but it’s not Silas.
I open the door and find the nurse. An ID tag hangs from the lanyard around his neck. His name is Frank. He stands at the side of the bed, between me and my old foe, old brother, old competitor.
Frank smiles. “Hello. Is breakfast ready?”
I nod. My voice has fled. Without it, what instrument have I to depend on? I take a deep breath and swan dive into the past. “I understand that porridge is common, but it’ll have to do.”
“Fucking porridge,” mutters Silas. It sounds like an automatic response. I don’t think he knows who I am. “No one’s asked me what I want. I’d bloody well like a Stella and a fag, but the doctors say no. As if I’m not already dying.”
“You may be dying,” I say, “but maybe they want you to die slowly and drain you of every penny first.”
That catches his attention. He struggles forward, leaning around Frank.
Silas Tate is a ghost. He’s a dead man already lying in a coffin. It’s just that everyone has forgotten to bury him.
His hair used to be nearly black, like mine, and shoulder length. I knew he’d cut it after moving to the States—the press followed him for a time, but not for long—but now he’s stark grey. Not a healthy white, but a sickly, etiolated grey. It’s an absence of color, really. Strands cling to his skull, which looks too large on his emaciated body.
“Alec.” He coughs out my name. “Alec fucking Davies, you prick. Bugger all if that ain’t you.”
I wish I could hurl invectives at him, but he’s too sick to be himself. I’d be cursing at a skeleton.
The usual Claridge’s furniture has been switched out for a hospital bed. The head of it is cranked up so that Silas is half reclining. The sides have railings, raised so that he can’t get out without assistance.
My brother and enemy and nemesis has been relegated to a child’s crib.
“Silas. How’ve you been?”
“So, you came,” he says tightly. “I honestly can’t believe you came.”
“Sure I did, mate. Sure I did.”
I put the tray of food down on the bed’s small table, then lean in to hug the man. He feels as small as he looks. Hugging him is like hugging twisted wire. I don’t think he has any muscles left to lose. I haven’t made a lot of inquiries about his condition, but I don’t know that I have to. If I wanted, I could lift this man in one arm. No matter what his ailment, he is unsound.
He taps my back in what is likely supposed to be a solid smack, but it comes across more like a toddler’s cuddles. “Harlow said she’d get you, but I told her she was mad. That there was no way. She said she had a secret weapon.”
My heart stutters. The air in my lungs becomes the chalk and flint of the cliffs of Dover. Unyielding, pocked with dark nodes. “Yes. A secret weapon.”
She tasted exactly as a woman should, all over my tongue, before she left her mix of coquette and saturnine markings all over my papers. The combination of her... The complexity...
“I’d have visited no matter what.” I need it to be true in order to make what I did last night alright, but I also know it to be true, because I’ve dreamed about reconciling with Silas, just as I’ve dreamed about The Skies coming back together. What we would each say. Where we could begin again.
None of the scenarios I created began with the cusp of his mortality. Death is a dark beast.
“We can handle this,” Silas says to Frank.
“I’ll be right outside.” The gentleman in scrubs pats the railing of the bed. “You know where to find me.”
“Not like I can get far,” Silas replies dryly.
Frank leaves, shutting the door behind him. I grab a chair from across the room and bring it alongside the bed. “You’ll have to excuse me. I don’t know the customs. Should I give you the spoon or should I assist you to some level?”
“The custom,” Silas says, half a joke and half a sneer. “Y
ou haven’t changed a bit, have you, Alec? You grew up in the estates and blocks, poor as me. Such airs you’ve given yourself. Always so many airs. Give me the spoon but hold the bowl close to me.”
He takes the spoon with a shaky hand. I cup the bowl beneath his chin. He takes one slow, agonizing scoop and manages to stutter it toward his mouth. Then another. A dollop of goo falls to his shirt. I don’t look.
“What are your intentions while in England?” I ask.
“My intentions?” He looks at me. “You say that as if I mean to marry your daughter and make her my queen.”
“I have no daughters to give you.”
Once upon a time, I might have created a daughter out of coal, if only to have one to give him. This man was the one I respected above all others, the man I thought The Skies needed most. I’d have promised him anything the fairytales demanded. Then he became an ogre.
And then he left us.
We made two more albums, but it all still fell apart after thirteen years.
My only petty joy is that his career went nowhere without us either. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a national charity hoping The Skies might do a comeback gig for their benefit. The Skies is looking at a comeback and Silas Tate is not invited, ill health or not.
I turn away from the abhorrent enjoyment I take in that. This man is dying. This man is not who deserves to be punished for our recklessness twenty-five years ago.
“What makes you come back now?” I ask. Maybe it’s his health. Maybe he knows about The Skies’ recent invitation on behalf of the Juvenile Breath Council, the pet charity of the newest royal duchess.
The Skies aren’t back together. Not in a way that would be... comfortable. But I picked up the phone two weeks ago and rang Nicholas, and—miracle of miracles—he actually answered. Lee and I have been to dinner. He’s willing to entertain the idea of a temporary reunion, but only if all members participate. Ian... Ian’s my easy mark.
We haven’t made up. Not yet. The charity gig is only a tiny glimmer on the horizon.
I miss Silas like I miss my father, but I also hate him like I hated my father. The two men were always alike. I only realized too late. That’s what drew me to Silas. That’s why I’d worked so hard for his approval.
“It was past time to visit,” he says in a voice that’s weary with the sands of time, a voice that’s almost at the end of its years. “I’ve lived in California a long time. Haven’t ever brought Harlow back to the UK. It needed to happen.”
I can’t leave him here, in this bed. In this anonymous room. Regret eats at me like a rat, gnawing my toes. Will he venture through the crowded lobby to sightsee with his daughter? It seems ridiculous.
“You should have asked me to come back,” Silas says, and for a wild moment I can’t orient myself in time. Does he mean now, with The Skies reunion? Does he mean immediately after he left with his new, pregnant wife in tow? The memories of those days are painted with screams and fights about the audacity of a lyricist to overwrite his magnum opus, then an irrational fall into madness that claimed him and maybe me too.
Maybe he means some other time in between.
“Why did you want me back?” I put the bowl down on the table. It’s still two-thirds full, but he’s not even pretending to eat anymore.
“So I could tell you where to get off.” He crows on a laugh that dies into a coughing wheeze. “I was looking forward to that. I was planning and rehearsing. You robbed me of the chance.”
“My apologies.” In a way, I mean it. This man... He’s gaunt. He’s a living specter. It seems almost churlish to deny his most parsimonious joy.
“Had a speech,” Silas says, but his words are slurring. His deep-set eyelids are drooping.
I’m concerned for a moment, but the machinery serenely keeping watch marches on. Everything is green and calm. This must be what sleep looks like on Silas now—something close to death.
Outside this room waits his daughter. Harlow. The damaged, wounded bird I hadn’t been able to resist. She carries an Amazon’s shield and doesn’t notice that she has her heart pinned on her sleeve. The contradiction in her is everything I should stay away from.
And everything I want.
Chapter Four
Harlow
ALEC DAVIES MADE OATMEAL for Silas Tate. He did it the old-fashioned way, with a pot on the hob. There are journalists who would die for this information, even now, years after Dad left The Skies. Maybe especially because it’s been so long.
Alec took his coat off and folded the sleeves of his shirt before cooking. I retreated to my table, pretending to eat my breakfast. After he spooned the oatmeal into the gilt-trimmed bowl and dribbled some down the edge, he wiped the edge with a kitchen towel. That’s the particularity I’m still thinking about as I let my own breakfast get cold.
I push my plate away. No point in pretending. English fry-ups are not something that get better as they cool. The beans have congealed and the roasted tomato is limp and pale orange.
I watch the door, holding my breath. I half expect to see Alec emerge with oatmeal in his hair and purple juice down his perfect white shirt. It doesn’t happen and I get lightheaded. Maybe this is actually working. Maybe Dad won’t die angry and bitter and full of all the regrets that I can’t sew up for him.
Frank putters around, getting his gear together. We have some small talk that I barely notice because most of me is in that room from which I can hear nothing. Not a thing, goddamn it.
“You okay, Miss Tate?”
“What? Yes, yeah. I’m fine.” I half-turn away from Dad’s bedroom and make myself smile. “Sorry. Was I being rude?’
“I only had to tell you I’m going. Melinda is running late though. She’ll be here at ten.”
The clock over the mantle has barely ticked past eight. Two hours. “Yeah, that’s fine.”
“Have a nice day.” Frank heaves his big green backpack over his shoulder. “You should see something of the city today.”
“We’ll try.”
Frank says the same thing every day. I’m not sure what we’re doing in England. Dad insisted, but he wouldn’t explain. We don’t act like tourists. He has so little energy.
Sometimes, in the very deep dark of the night, when I’m alone with a pillow over my head, I can admit to myself that he might want to die in his home country. Maybe that’s the only point of this trip. Everything else is window dressing.
I circle around the room, but even my desperation can’t bring me to put my ear to the door. Now and then I can hear a quiet hum of voices. No shouting. That may not mean they’re happy. That may only mean Dad lacks the energy to shout vitriolic, poisonous things. Is Alec saying the same sort of thing in return?
He did twenty-five years ago. He sped around on coke, then floated away on heroin, then smashed what was left of his life against crack cocaine. The things he said in the recording studios were legendary.
He’s been sober for thirteen years now, but that doesn’t mean he’s become kind.
He’s in there for twenty-seven minutes. I count. When he comes out, his brows are lowered, two divots between them. The tightness of his expression makes his nose seem even sharper and a little upturned. “He’s asleep.”
I nod and cross my arms over my chest. Too late, I realize, I should have changed my clothes. I’m still in my button-down pajama shirt. I’m the trash version of him. “He usually sleeps again after breakfast.”
Alec’s turn to nod. He doesn’t run his fingers through his hair so much as swipe a chunk of it from his forehead. It immediately falls back into place.
He’s cruel for not telling me everything that happened in there. Doesn’t he understand I brought that man across countries and oceans? Doesn’t he understand how much it’s breaking me to watch him die? Or how much I crave his death, because the venom in his veins will finally stop flowing?
Please, God, tell me that Dad was as mean to Alec Davies as he’s always been to me.
“I want
to move him to my townhouse in Kensington,” Alec finally says.
“No. No way.” I shake my head hard enough to shake out my messy bun. “We can afford this suite. We don’t need your charity.”
His jaw is tight enough to polish diamonds. His eyes blaze. They positively blaze in a way that sets me on fire from my toes to my heart. I step back. “This doesn’t have to do with being on the dole,” he says.
“Then what is it?”
“Atonement.”
“Was he that apologetic? Full of old stories?” I sneer. “Don’t believe him. It’s probably the meds talking.”
His mouth bends in something that couldn’t be called a smile. “He wasn’t even a little apologetic. I didn’t expect him to be.”
“Where he goes, I go too.” Dad owes me this much. He’s hurt me and scarred me and turned a blind eye to every emotional injury he’s warred on me. Now, when he can’t help it, I won’t allow being left behind. Maybe one day I’ll be able to make sense of this trip.
“Naturally. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Risk is an appropriate word for this man, who’s turned so reticent in his middle age. Risk has been his whole life and I’m looking for it. “I don’t understand,” I say.
“It’s time.” He comes closer to me and I don’t back away. “It’s time for Silas to come home.”
“His home was never a Mayfair townhouse.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
He’s deep in memories that I don’t belong in. I’ve never been given access to those memories—the old days, the triumphant and the terrible. I’ve never been told them. I resent Alec for knowing things about my dad that I’ll never even know second- or third-hand.
“I go too,” I reply. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Me, my body. I’m the person who’s not leaving my dad’s side and I’m the person who wants to sleep with you.”
He’s back with me now. He knows I’m here. His body tenses, even when his hand comes up to cup my face. This is why I say such rude, coarse things, to break through. I could fall in love with the way his fingers touch me. I could make a million stories of princes and dragons from the back side of time. “I told you I’m not screwing you.”
