Nobody's Hero

by Melanie Harvey

  Rick slammed the car into reverse and gritted his teeth. He ignored the paper all the way to Garfield Heights, found a spot a block from Kale’s house and shut off the engine.

  The page hadn’t flown out the window on the freeway, so he’d just have to kill him. Jesse wouldn’t answer his phone, or he’d call to warn him of his impending death right now. Instead, he snatched the paper and cursed him as he slammed his door.

  He read as he walked, stopping under a streetlight to finish just before he reached the house. He looked up to see Kale watching him from the front step, smoking a Black and Mild.

  “So it’s true,” Kale said. “Word is you’re living here.”

  “Sleeping anyway,” Rick said, refolding the paper as Kale held out his free hand. He shook it, first time since he’d shown up a week ago. Kale was out the door even before Kiara woke up, sound asleep before Rick was home.

  “I thought that lump on the couch looked familiar.” Kale grinned as Rick joined him on the steps. “Trisha giving you a hard time?”

  Rick scraped the paper across the step to sweep off the tobacco Kale had spilled. “She did my laundry.”

  Kale lifted his eyebrows, and Rick shrugged. He didn’t understand it either. He rested his elbows on his knees and glanced at the printout in his hand. Finding his clothes folded on the couch had been a shock to everything he believed about the normal order of the universe, but it was a mild ripple on the Richter scale compared to what he was thinking now.

  Kale hit the cigar. “How’s the record coming?”

  “I like it. Whatever that’s worth.”

  Kale chuckled, and Rick studied him. He’d known him as long as he’d known Terrance, but their lives had been on different trajectories for years. History was the only thing they had in common anymore.

  He flicked the paper in his hand. Maybe it wasn’t.

  Kale tucked the white tip of the cigar between his teeth when Rick held out the page. He watched the rims spin on a passing car while Kale read it.

  It was just a tabloid. Last Rick heard — yesterday, thanks to Jesse’s inability to keep his mouth shut — they were letting up on her. He’d been glad. Yesterday.

  “Bad twist,” Kale said, confirming that even he was following the drama.

  Rick took back the paper, refolded it, tapped the corner against his palm, and considered the man next to him. The one he thought he had so little in common with anymore.

  “What would you do?” he asked. “If this was Trisha?”

  Kale took a pull of smoke. He studied the cigar in his hand before he spoke.

  “I wouldn’t know what to do. I guess I’d be trying to think of something, though.”

  Something to protect her. He could hear it, he could see it in his face. Kale’s answer wasn’t surprising. Rick folded the paper into eighths, then sixteenths, then two more folds until the damage was buried in a thick wad and the rectangle wouldn’t bend again.

  What was surprising was how badly he wanted to do the same. Even today.

  “So.” Kale blew out a long stream of sweet smelling smoke. “You finna do something?”

  Rick nodded. He had the thread of an idea running, he just needed to play with it long enough to see how bad it might tangle up. He needed more information first.

  He got Jesse’s voicemail. “Start printing everything you’ve got, and cue up what you TiVo-ed. I’m a be at your door in half an hour, so you better answer it.”

  He needed to see if he could undo the knots without breaking anything important.

  He needed to know if he could manage it without getting sucked in again.

  Rick lit up her number, then caught himself. He looked at Kale. “Can I borrow your phone?”

  * * *

  Francine Coffman wordlessly questioned Carolyn’s picked-over plate when she rose to clear the table.

  “It was delicious,” Carolyn said. “I’m sorry, my stomach isn’t feeling …stress.”

  She started to help her parents clear the table, but her mother waved them off. “Why don’t you go relax? I can take care of this.”

  Dale kissed her before he turned to Carolyn. “How about a movie?”

  “As long as it’s straight comedy. Or lots of murder and mayhem.” And with no romantic subplots. But safely inside her parents’ house, she could barely keep her eyes open. “I’d really just like to go to bed, if that’s all right.”

  Dale nodded, and Carolyn accepted hugs from both of them before she went upstairs. She knew the discussion would start flying the moment she reached the second floor. She couldn’t stop them from worrying about her, but she hated that they did. She hated that they’d had to change the phone number they’d had for twenty years, hated that the drapes drawn to the darkness tonight would be drawn against the light tomorrow. The first thing she’d seen on her parents’ front lawn was a “No Trespassing” sign. At her insistence, Dale finally admitted that a few reporters had greeted his arrival home from work last Friday. Every day since then they’d dwindled, but tomorrow would surely bring more.

  Her suitcases were in her old bedroom where her childhood remained in the artwork, paintings matted and framed as if they were more than the work of a grade-school girl.

  She collapsed across the bed and reached for her purse. She had to call Ashley and find out what, if anything, was the plan. She retrieved the voicemail and sighed with relief when Ashley’s brisk voice told her to get some rest, she’d call her tomorrow. No worries.

  Carolyn dropped the phone onto the carpet and stretched out on the down comforter. She wasn’t worried anymore. She was still dying. She hadn’t called Eve because she knew the sight of her sister would do her in.

  The phone rang, a plain electronic telephone instead of her ringtone, and she leaned over the bed as if looking at it would explain the anomaly. The silver clamshell had landed with the display window face up.

  No ID.

  Her hand shook as she grabbed it, but her “Hello” returned only silence.

  He wouldn’t know, he wasn’t listening. She almost closed the phone, but repeated the greeting once more, less desperately this time.

  “You know, you ain’t allowed to do that.”

  Carolyn closed her eyes. It didn’t matter that the words made no sense. They came from him. “I’m not allowed to do what?”

  “I wrote that song,” Rick said. “You can’t just use it without asking.”

  She smiled and it felt real for the first time in over a week. “So if I’d just been more respectful of copyright law, all this trouble wouldn’t have come my way?”

  He didn’t laugh, and she almost explained the joke, but that was inane. A mere mortal might have missed the irony in light of the music-sampling history of hip-hop.

  But Rick didn’t laugh. “Barbie figure out how to deal with this yet?”

  “Her name is Ashley,” Carolyn said. “And I don’t know. I came home.”

  He didn’t respond, so she added, “I’m supposed to call her tomorrow.”

  She thought she’d lost the connection until she heard background noise. Crickets first, then a car starting in the distance.

  “Rick?”

  “You might want to call her tonight,” he said. “I’m having a press conference tomorrow. Last minute, so I could get lucky and nobody’ll show, but I doubt it. Guess Louis promised Zeus, too. Then there’s you and all this shit blowing up again.”

  Carolyn opened her mouth, but he didn’t give her a chance to speak.

  “Thought I’d warn you, because I’m sure if they going ask about anything, it ain’t going be about recording contracts.”

  Recording contracts. A press conference. His matter-of-fact appraisal of the situation felt more distant through the clear connection. He didn’t sound angry, though, so she measured her next question. “What are you going to say?”

  “Don’t know yet. But since you’re home, I guess you’re welcome to come to the circus.”

  The words made perfect sen
se to her heart, which pounded at the thought of seeing him.

  Rick suggested it like he didn’t care one way or the other.

  Carolyn bit her lip for a second. “I’ll need to call Ashley.”

  “Probably better. You got a pen? I’ll give you directions and Louis’s number. She might want to talk to him.”

  She reached for her purse and tried again. “So my people are calling your people?”

  “Did you find a pen yet?”

  The directions were easy, straight up 77 to a meeting room at the Holiday Inn.

  “A half hour, if that,” he said. “You don’t need to let me know what you decide — ”

  “Rick, wait. What’s — ”

  “Louis’ll tell me if you’re coming, I mean. Supposed to start at eleven. If you do come, and you show up too early for some reason, hang a left off the ramp and make a right at the first light. Studio’s down some on the left.”

  Carolyn studied the dog that resembled a possum, painted by an eight-year-old whose mother’s voice had made her believe she was a genius. She glanced down at the directions, in case she showed up too early. Why did he even say that?

  Because he was asking her to. Relief coursed through her; Ashley said no cell phones. “I appreciate the warning.”

  Rick cleared his throat. “It’s only fair.”

  She smiled. “Isn’t this the music business? You said ‘fair’ — ”

  “I know what I said. Kale needs his phone back. I gotta go.”

  This time the silence in her ear was complete. She lowered the phone to see the display informing her that the call had ended. No ID.

  She took a deep breath and called Ashley.

  51: Time

  By ten twenty-six Saturday morning, Rick vowed that he would never let another human being hold him responsible for something so erratic as the passage of time.

  Even before he woke up this morning, he slept away thirty minutes worth in an instant, when Kiara’s internal alarm clock experienced its first ever power outage. Then he was pulled over on 480, which proved the theory that speeding really didn’t save time, and the cop let him off with a warning instead of a search, which never proved anything at all.

  At the studio, the clock sped up, spurred on by Louis and what felt like a hundred-strong team. Including Jackie, a member Terrance was thrilled to discover when he showed up with Jesse an hour — or more? — later. Rick wondered, only loud enough for Terrance to hear, since Jackie was in Cleveland and Tanya was in Cleveland, was he expected to keep them straight?

  Terrance wasn’t amused. Neither was Rick, really, but he felt like he was trying.

  He’d ducked into the CD library for some crap-free time, but Barbie tracked him down, contaminating the room with demands about what he planned to say.

  “I’m freestyling,” he’d said.

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Your beliefs ain’t my problem.”

  “I have a client to take care of.”

  “She ain’t my goddamn problem, either.”

  Not funny, and not true. She was his biggest goddamn problem, but at least the lie shut Barbie up. For a second.

  “You know I burned a bridge so that deal would go through.”

  “You know, I don’t put up with getting bitched at after I get fucked.”

  She looked like a corporate lawyer in a dark gray suit, reading glasses on her nose. But she laughed.

  “All right,” she’d said. “I guess I’ll have to trust you.”

  She left the library, and the narrow room couldn’t contain the anger stirred up by her wholly ignorant trust. He’d cut out back and stared into the creek swollen from spring rains. For a long fucking time. At least according to Louis and Zeus who found him out there, even though he wasn’t lost. Not long enough for Rick to cool off, but it was almost ten-thirty, and Rick told them that determining how much time passed was as possible as determining how fast you were driving inside a Maserati on the freeway.

  “That’s why they make speedometers,” Zeus had said, and he and Louis both held up wrists strapped with watches.

  The digits on the studio monitor clicked over. Ten twenty-seven. Terrance was supposed to intercept her if she showed, Jesse was supposed to make sure Terrance wasn’t intercepting Jackie instead. Rick was stuck in this empty studio, so goddamn quiet because of the non-parallel walls that he was sure he could hear his own heart beating.

  He’d read everything she said to the press, then threaded his idea through it all, untied the knots and tied them up again until he couldn’t see a single problem with it.

  Another minute ticked over on the monitor, and he shoved the chair back and started for the door. He’d fight this part out with Zeus, because goddamn it, if Executive Barbie was willing to trust him —

  The door swung in before he was halfway across the room. He was always too late. Even when he was early.

  Carolyn stood frozen in the doorway for what felt like an hour. Her voice on the phone last night had been impossible, in his ear like she was right next to him on Kale’s quiet street. He’d held onto the porch railing when she said she was home. He’d thought Jesse’s recorded video would prepare him, but it was always better live, and he’d never wished so badly that he’d made it out on time.

  “You’re turning it down?”

  He finally registered Terrance standing behind her, holding the door. Rick shot him a look appropriate to his betrayal.

  “She asked,” Terrance said. “Didn’t know we were keeping secrets now.”

  Rick didn’t know what the hell he meant, and Terrance left anyway.

  Carolyn stayed. “Why aren’t you taking it?”

  He cleared his throat. “I have my reasons.”

  “I assumed that much. What are they?”

  He looked straight at her. “They’re personal.”

  If he’d have slapped her, the shock on her face might not have been as severe. Which was the problem — not that he knew what would work so well, but that she already proved that went both ways. The evidence was written in fuzzy lines of type sent over a fax machine.

  The answer to a hypothetical question. He couldn’t think about it. If he thought about it, he’d lose it. And he didn’t have control problems.

  Carolyn glanced around the studio. “The press is at the hotel, there’s nobody here — ”

  “No, there’s a shitload of people here, and the clock’s ticking. So before the circus starts, I need to clear something up.”

  “Clear what — wait. Rick, what’s going on? Why are you turning it down?”

  The impulse to just answer the damn question was harder to resist than the dealer on the corner the day after he’d gouged the words into his hands. But that was just a habit. Breakable. He turned to the monitor that held the sound waves of his song paused on the screen. “That’s none of your business.”

  “None of my — what?” He could hear the flash in her eyes. “Are you insane? Do you have any idea what I’ve been through?”

  He spun around. “What the fuck does that have to do with me?”

  Carolyn’s jaw dropped, he slammed his shut, and he knew why in all those years he’d hardly struggled to keep the bullshit with Mary to minimal levels when his pen hit the paper. He was just too goddamn indifferent to bother.

  He forced his anger down when she took a step toward him. The tap of her heel that should have echoed died in the silent room as she searched his face, his eyes. He knew what she was looking for. Anything.

  Time slowed to a traffic-jam crawl and the fight-or-flight impulse raced through him. Neither was acceptable, because either would prove that the strongest impulse of all was none of the above. Give me a ‘C.’

  He still wanted her. He could feel her, in the subway, in the back of the Lincoln, out behind Mykah’s, rigid in his arms, and never wanting anything more in his life.

  But she was just a habit.

  Her gold irises dimmed, she crossed her arms, and the se
cond hand ticked again.

  She exhaled slowly. “Clear up what?”

  Rick pulled up the explanation he’d memorized. “I ran into a problem last night with my producer. Artistic differences. Under normal circumstances, I’d hash it out with him some more, but in this case, another factor came into play.”

  “What factor?”

  “You. I’ve gone over it a hundred times, and Zeus wouldn’t know. I finally said he could win this one if you passed on it. I’d rather cover ‘Ice, Ice, Baby,’ but I do owe him one.”

  Carolyn frowned. Obviously that was hyperbole, but he knew it didn’t sound like he was joking. Nothing that drastic at stake, he was only required to deliver twelve sides for the album, and he had sixteen. Including this song. He gestured to the black leather couch on the wall where he’d left a pad and pen. She took a step closer to him, still with her arms crossed.

  Rick kept himself from mirroring her body language and pointed to the keys in the center of the mixing board. “Play, Stop, Fast Forward, Rewind. It still ain’t mixed right, but … ”

  He glanced over and knew he’d lost her. The technical variations on sound levels weren’t her problem. Or his at the moment. She’d leaned close to his shoulder so she could see. So close he could feel her heat.

  He held his hand over the board. “Don’t — please — don’t touch anything else.”

  Her eyes widened, and for a second he thought she was going to smile. She didn’t, but just the anticipation of it was too much. He took a step back and pointed at the pad and pen.

  “Anything or nothing. It’s your call.” He didn’t risk looking back. His hand was on the door when she spoke.

  “I don’t understand. This is your … business.”

  She didn’t say it sarcastically, but it tore his flesh anyway. He turned around slowly. “There seems to be some question about whether I’m capable of keeping my word.”

  Carolyn tilted her head, and she looked just like she had that night when he had only thought it. But then he did say it, she did hear him, and he couldn’t believe how sharp the knife felt that she didn’t remember.