I cover my face with my hands, so ashamed of what I’ve done, and the fact that my bandmates had to hear it from a fucking attorney instead of from me.
“I’m sorry,” I wheeze, struggling for my last shred of composure.
Strong arms pull me up off the floor and propel me to the couch. But before I sit, I pull out my phone and hand it to Tyler. “I have to call Willa. It’s dead. Could you plug it in?”
Not only has this one night from four years ago come back to ruin me, but I’ve also ruined the best thing in my present life. I promised Willa I’d be there for her, over and over, and I failed.
“What are we going to do next?” A woman’s timid voice lifts my head. The babysitter. She’s seated across the living room, wrapped in yet another stupid cardigan, looking like a character on a nineteen-fifties rerun.
“We, nothing,” I throw back at her. Two sleepless nights and a day in jail have pushed me to the brittle edge and I’m starting to crack.
“You’re staying here until your hearing,” Gavin says. “We all will for a couple of days at least. I told you that when Kristina decided to rain shit down on the band we’d be ready for her. We’re a united front.”
I look to him, kind of stunned, feeling some weird kind of payback now that our roles are reversed. When his muse died of an overdose and he went AWOL—fleeing all the way to Africa and Australia—I was the one keeping the band together, managing us around difficult questions from the media and our record label.
But now Gavin’s taken charge, and it’s kind of a relief to watch him work in lockstep with Ravi, debating album release plans for Wilderness and how the stadium tour would be affected if I actually went to trial.
Once Tyler’s got a hot cup of coffee in my hands and his own, I ask him to fill in the details when I was locked up. “What happened during the concert?”
“Ravi worked fast, got Ryan on a charter flight. She actually ran out of the car from the airport and we went on ten minutes later.”
“How was she?” I’d meant to say “How was it?” as in, the concert, but what I really want to know is how Tattoo Thief played, how they performed and how the crowd responded, with only three-quarters of us onstage.
Tyler drops his voice, looking around the living room for the babysitter, but she’s fled to somewhere else in the house. “Ryan was actually really … great. I mean, I saw her handle everything we threw at her in recording, but that’s different. In a studio, you don’t have thousands of screaming fans and lighting effects and a platform setup that spreads us all out and makes visual cues hard, but she held her own.”
I nod, feeling worse than when I got here.
But Tyler continues, “I barely had to work for the cues, and the transitions she’s got cold. Ryan said she’s been working on our stuff since before we went to LA to record with Ravi the first time. I guess when Jayce was thinking of going solo, Ravi started working his contacts to put together a new band for him with Viper Records.”
I snort. “I just don’t see a mousy little babysitter being a good fit for a rock band.”
I hear a snort from behind the couch where I’m sitting. “You’d rather I dress like a rocker?” Her timid voice from earlier is gone, replaced by a hard-edged alto.
I twist around to see her. She’s standing, arms crossed and hip jutting, equal parts hurt and pissed.
“Couldn’t hurt,” I toss over my shoulder. “Fans are going to wonder if it’s take-your-nerdy-cousin-to-work day.”
Her face falls and she messes with the fabric of her retro dress. “They got you out of jail and you’re still being a jerk? I guess what they said about you is true.”
That stings, especially because the people in Tyler’s mom’s house are all I have left in the world. So I lash out at her. “Bitch.”
“Back atcha, sweetheart.”
Tyler holds up his hands in a desperate time-out signal. “Stop. Stop bickering like little kids.” He turns to me. “You will not be rude to Ryan no matter how much you dislike the fact that she filled in for you. Now apologize.”
I roll my eyes and drink my coffee.
Ryan tilts her jaw up, defiant. “I’m sorry you were being a little bitch.”
“Ryan.” Tyler’s tone is warning. “You will treat Dave like the family he is to me. You don’t have to like him, but you have to be polite.”
She looks contrite. “Sorry. Really. I guess this isn’t your best moment. It’s not mine, either.” She holds out my phone. “I was actually coming over here to be nice before you insulted me. Your phone was plugged in on the kitchen counter and I guess it’s charged, because it started going off like crazy.”
I take it with actual gratitude, trying unsuccessfully to cover a yawn that’s my lack of sleep catching up to me.
Shit. Dozens of new texts. Bunch of voicemails, too. I feel my heart sink as I see Willa’s number on many of them. “Is there somewhere I can take this?” I ask Tyler.
“Sure. Since we don’t know how long you’ve got to stay, we put you in the guest room. I’m staying in my room, and Ryan and the guys are staying back at the hotel.”
I thank Tyler and follow the narrow hall back to my room. Its small, with brass-trimmed mirrored closet doors from the 1970s, a bed and dresser. Nothing else would fit.
I collapse on the bed and hit play on the first message. Then the next. As I work through them, Willa’s tone evolves from warm and playful to nervous and uncertain, anxious and angry, and finally bewildered and hurt.
It’s the hurt in her voice that does it, snapping a stinging pain in my eyes. The feeling of being so very alone, and almost resigned to the fact that my support was something she couldn’t—or shouldn’t—have expected.
I’ve let her down.
I play her next message, and at first there’s just silence on the line. Then her voice, cold and crackling. “I just saw the news. What you did. And I can’t believe … I never wanted to think that you’d be like them. Someone who could just let him die. Like you hit a garbage can. Like he was street trash.”
Her voice is muffled by a sob, and then the message ends.
There are no more.
The enormity of what I’ve done has been hammering me since my arrest, since four years ago when I woke up in bed with Kristina and she whispered what happened the night before. Since she made it our little secret, and in my cowardly complicity, I let it be.
I ran away, rather than facing the music.
But now that Willa knows, now that her hurt has shredded me like I’ve not only abandoned her, but killed someone who could have been her, I am beyond despicable.
The one cell in my body with any fight left drives me to dial her number. I’ll just beg, lay it out there and pray that she can find a way to forgive me.
That cell shrivels up and dies when I hear her phone ring.
And ring.
And ring.
She’s done with me.
And I’m. Just. Done.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
There are so many ways to break a heart, and nothing powerful enough to mend it.
I’m working on autopilot, streaking a canvas with threatening dark blues and grays, then dripping turps down the edge to create a desperate sky. Over that, I layer building stencils, not a right angle to be found. The towers twist up toward the sky, dotted with little panes of sallow yellow light.
It’s called Darkest Night. And it’s about the only thing I can feel. I have to work again.
It’s my anchor in this chaos, the feeling of being swept off my moorings by a tsunami of feeling for Dave, only to be dashed on the rocks when I learned the truth about what he’d done.
He never told me. How could he, when I’d stupidly revealed so much of myself to him? He must have known that the man might as well have been my kin, part of my camp, or even me.
He must have known that act was unforgivable.
And so I work, a fresh deadline hanging over my head. Patricia Alton called me yesterday an
d asked—no, demanded—a new canvas to swap out for my centerpiece in the gallery.
Some hotshot buyer wanted the original centerpiece so badly that he refused to wait. He doubled the price and walked out with it.
Just like that.
And just like that, my bank account will grow by five figures.
He wasn’t the only buyer. My show wasn’t supposed to be big, but something clicked between the Atlantic Arts article and Patricia’s promo.
All night at the gallery opening, it seemed like people kept streaming in the door, but no one was leaving. Servers handed out glasses of white wine until it was gone and I stepped carefully through the crowd in my new shoes and swishy dress, following in praying mantis Patricia’s wake.
I shook hands and smiled, answered inane questions and a few good ones, and every few minutes I looked over my shoulder for Dave.
He had to be there. He promised.
But I was alone.
In a matter of hours, the buzz grew to a frenzy and I saw the polished receptionist who told me the gallery had no public restrooms trying to officiate between two arguing buyers.
When Patricia wasn’t at my side, she flew between the buying desk and the exhibits themselves, sticking a red dot on each title card.
Sold. A red dot means sold.
My show sold every single piece.
And I went from an unknown, to the subject of one magazine article, to the girl who The New York Times’s art critic called “the Parking Lot Picasso.”
There should have been fireworks. A freaking celebration or something more than Thomas tipping some whisky into my coffee when I went by the shop after the show. “You did good, Willa. Real good.”
There should have been Dave to share this moment with. But like I said, there are so many ways to break a heart. And he’s broken mine.
***
I push up the rolled sleeves of my button down and wipe sweat off my forehead with the back of my hand, grimacing when I feel the familiar texture of paint smearing across it.
I’m probably a disaster, my hair newly magenta and extra-spiky, but I spend a lot more time staring at canvases than a mirror.
Patricia’s cracking the whip for more “product,” as she calls it. I have to replace the centerpiece the buyer took, then work like hell to resupply the gallery with salable paintings before the show closes at the end of the month.
I stretch, rolling my shoulders, out of touch with time. It might be five or six in the morning with the sky just lightening. Traffic noise is picking up on the street.
A sharp knock on my door catches me mid-stretch and I automatically hunch, a protective posture, before I command my legs to stand and propel me to the door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me. Willa, please. Let me in.”
“Go away.” I say it with as much harsh anger as I can muster, but I’m shattered inside.
“Let me … at least let me talk to you.”
“Go away. I don’t want talk. I don’t want to see you ever again.” My voice cracks with the pain of saying the last couple words.
There’s quiet from the other side of the door, but no footsteps indicating he’s gone. And a strange addition hits me, trying to parse how Dave can be on the other side of my door when the news report says he’s supposed to be at least five or six hours’ drive away, under house arrest in Pittsburgh pending arraignment.
My fingers hover over one of the locks Dave installed, the need to know warring with my instinct guard myself against this man’s betrayal.
I need to know how and why. How he could do such a thing, and why he’d run from it for so long.
My hands click one lock open, and from the other side of the door I hear Dave’s breath hitch. “Please,” he whispers, and it sinks into the fissures of my heart.
Another turn, another click, and my heart guides my hands to open this door while my brain screams to run, run away from this horror.
I’m always running. Shifting from one place to another to find a place that’s just mine, a place where I can stand against the wretched tide.
Run.
Stay.
Open.
I slide the third lock’s chain and twist the knob, finding a haunted, haggard skeleton on the other side. Dave’s braced against my doorframe, his shoulders heaving, his eyes sunken and pleading.
“Thank you.” His voice is a prayer answered.
I pull open the door but step back, wary. “How did you get here?” It’s the simplest question, the least important, but the only one my brain can send to my lips.
“I drove all night. Borrowed Tyler’s mom’s car.”
“Borrowed?”
His chin drops, guilty. “Kind of took.”
“Stole?”
“I’ll bring it back. I couldn’t leave you like this.” He steps closer to me and I shrink back, unwilling to let him close the chasm between us. “I couldn’t let you think that I’d abandon you.”
“Like you abandoned that homeless man? Maybe hitting him didn’t kill him. He could have been alive. He could have been hurt and bleeding and if you’d gone back for him, you could have saved his life with a phone call.” My words tumble out, all the what-ifs from media speculation coming back.
“I was drunk. Blackout drunk, I don’t even remember that night,” Dave cries, anguish tearing his words from his throat. “I didn’t even know we’d hit him until the next day.”
My heart stops. “We?”
“Kristina and me. We drove home from a bar, we’d been partying hard that night. It was after a show, that much I remember. And then the next morning, she told me. How I’d hit him and kept on driving.”
I turn away from him, racing to the bathroom as bile rushes up my throat. Street trash is what Kristina had called me. And street trash is how Dave treated this nameless man, of no more value than a shoe left lying beside the road.
I stay in the bathroom for several long minutes, wishing he’d just disappear. How could I have loved this man, and let him love me?
I open the door and Dave’s still rooted to the spot by the door, defeat written across his face, his body slumped and broken.
Now that I know, I can never un-know it.
A love can be smashed beyond repair.
“Get out. Go back to Pittsburgh.” I yank open my front door. “Go to hell.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
I slip in through the back door to avoid the media still camped on Tyler’s mom’s lawn. A circle of angry faces around the kitchen table accosts me.
“Where the hell were you?” Jayce demands.
“Considering it’s my bail money, I deserve an answer.” Gavin shakes his head, like I’ve disappointed him. “Where?”
I open my mouth and then shut it. I drove like a madman back from New York, knowing that the clock was ticking and my absence would be noticed before I could get back. I turned off my phone.
When I passed a police cruiser on the side of the road doing over eighty, I felt like the wind was knocked from my chest as adrenaline pounded on my temples.
But lights and sirens never pursued me, even though I checked my rear-view mirror a thousand times.
“Do you get how much shit you’re in? You can’t just disappear.” Gavin smacks his hand on the kitchen table and I flinch.
“I had to see her.” My quiet admission sends a shockwave around the table.
“See. Who?” Jayce demands, but Gavin already knows without me saying.
“You what? You fuckwit! You unbelievably stupid, rash, arrogant bastard!” Gavin jumps up from the table and pins me to the wall. I cringe, ready for him to hit me, but the blow never comes.
“Settle down, Gav.” Tyler’s mom Cheryl’s voice slices through the mess and Tyler pulls Gavin off of me. Jayce just seethes, still seated.
Cheryl walks around Tyler, pushing him back toward his seat at the kitchen table. She places a gentle hand on Gavin’s shoulder. “Take a seat. Fighting isn’t going to do D
ave a bit of good.”
She looks me up and down, her hands on her hips, in full Mom/referee mode. “Ty, get Dave a cup of coffee. Looks like he needs it. Dave, take my seat.” She points me to where she’d been sitting with the band.
I gratefully follow her instructions, then promptly burn my tongue on the black sludge Cheryl and Tyler call coffee.
It’s far stronger than I feel.
Cheryl points to her front window, where the blinds are drawn against cameras’ prying eyes. “Out there, there are dozens of people waiting to tear you up. But I imagine you’ve done that to yourself already.”
I give her a small nod.
“So we’re not going to be like that. In here, we’re a team. You’re a band. I remember when you gave these pep talks, Dave, when you guys were trying to go in four different directions. Ty brought the band together, but you held it together.”
Cheryl pulls an empty chair over and sits so her eyes are level with mine. “You did that with strong will and smarts. And no matter how many ways you’ve messed up in the past, no matter how high a price you’ll have to pay, you’re going to get through this with the same tools. Strong will and smarts.”
I rake my fingers through my hair, wishing it could be true. “There’s nothing left,” I mutter. “Nothing I can do. Kristina went to the police. They’ve got the bar tab. They know I drove drunk that night.”
There’s a long silence.
“Then you pay the price,” Cheryl says.
Gavin adds, “But you don’t go down without taking Kristina with you.”
***
Even though I swear up and down that I won’t leave Cheryl’s house again, the band doesn’t trust me. They take turns babysitting me all afternoon.
My lawyer shows up at dusk and offers no good news. He’s got a dozen new details that the police uncovered now that they know where to look.
The Explorer I sold before we moved to New York has been located. It doesn’t have its original front bumper, and there are no service records to show when that bumper was replaced.
Say it Louder Page 18
