My arm dropped off the table. “Excuse me?”
“Let’s dance.”
I’m sorry, did he think that was a logical statement to make?
Behind him, a few couples already sprinkled the pavement in front of the stage.
I pulled in my chair. “You, my friend, have lost your mind.”
“And you’re being a party pooper.” With his arm still outstretched, he looked at me with eyes as deep and clear as the sky above us. “C’mon, Em, have a little faith in yourself. It’s not going to kill you to let your hair down.”
He shifted his weight to one side. “Okay, I admit, it might be a little awkward to picture me as Jaycee right now. So, how about you settle for having me as your stand-in best friend for the night?”
Gloating over his inescapable negotiation, he lugged me up from my chair.
I dragged my feet. “I’m a terrible dancer. I’m going to embarrass us both.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll lead. Sounds like the band’s playing a slow one now, anyway. Those are the easiest to dance to.”
Holding my hand, he led me out to the open area where the other couples were swaying, and spun me around until I smiled.
“There she is. See? You can do it.” He twirled me again. My eyes squeezed shut as he swept me into a dancing frame. “You’re meant to live with your eyes wide open, Emma.”
He tilted my chin up, a soft inhale the only thing standing between us. “If you always keep your eyes closed,” he whispered, “you’ll miss the life right in front of you that’s waiting to be lived.”
I rested my chin over my hand on his shoulder, words so much harder to grasp. “You don’t have to stand in for Jaycee, you know. You’re already a good friend.”
He leaned back. “For the record?”
My eyes rolled skyward. “Yeah, for the record.”
“Good.” He lowered my hands to my sides. “Wait here.”
“Wait, what?” But he was already gone, leaving me in the middle of the crowd. Alone.
I rubbed my arms, the evening breeze taking A. J.’s place as my dance partner. A minute later, the music stopped. A spotlight streamed through the fog rising from the street and covered me in a blanket of light. I froze. Along with everyone else on the dance floor.
“Hi everyone,” A. J. said from behind the microphone. “Sorry for the interruption. Since it’s Christmas, my friend has a gift to share with all of you. She’s still learning to recognize her talent, so how about we give her a little encouragement to welcome her to the stage.”
Amidst a simultaneous release of claps and cheers, a middle-aged woman dressed in a full-length wool coat nudged me forward. “You can do it.”
The ground slid under my feet all the way to the front of the stage, where A. J. pulled me onto the platform. He positioned me in front of the microphone stand and strapped a guitar over my body. The pic slipped out of my clammy fingers.
“You got this,” another woman from my fellow dancers-turned-audience hollered.
Across the floor, gaze after gaze fastened on me, awaiting a song. My pulse raced until the memory of Riley’s words settled over me. “You don’t even realize how you view the world, do you? Like an artist. You should trust that more.”
Trust. I filled my lungs with air and my heart with his assurance and let my fingers feel the strings. One chord. Then another.
Something flickered inside me. Something warm. Something I’d lost. “Joy, Em. I’m talking about joy.” It filled my eyes, my hands, my mind, overwhelming me with a truth I couldn’t bury no matter how hard I tried. My heart wouldn’t let me live without joy.
The gentleman playing the bass joined me, followed by the other band members jumping in one at a time. Before long, the couples resumed their dancing, and the scene returned to the way it had been a few minutes earlier. Except that I was on the stage, and A. J. was in the middle of the crowd. Smiling at me.
Applause filled the transition as the band eased into their regular set.
I took A. J.’s hand and stared him down, my glare deepening with each step off the platform. “I can’t believe you. Did you plan this?”
“Maybe.”
“I think I might hate you.”
He scrunched his lips and shook his head. “Not possible.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yep.” He twirled me around and back into a dancing frame. “I just helped you face one of your fears. Learn to live a little. Believe in yourself. You know, those little things friends help each other do.”
I shoved him. “The kind of friend who’ll always be here to take care of me, right?”
He pressed his cheek to my temple, his mouth just above my ear. “Always,” he whispered. He set my hand on his chest and placed his fingers over mine. The gentle strength in his touch against my lower back drew me closer.
My body tensed, my rigid pose the exact opposite of his patient laugh.
He swayed softly while singing to the instrumental music. “Have yourself a merry little Christmas. Let your heart be light. From now on, our troubles will be out of sight. . . . Merry Christmas, Emma.”
He twirled me one more time across our imaginary dance floor on the enchanted street corner.
I laid my head on his shoulder. A well of emotion collected on the front of his leather coat under my cheek. Maybe part of finding faith in myself meant finding faith in friendship again.
The sounds, the lights, the feeling of gliding to the music stayed with me the entire ride home. The warmth from the heater and the splendor of a treasured night nearly lulled me to sleep in A. J.’s passenger seat.
“Need me to carry you inside?”
“Think I can manage.” I unbuckled my seatbelt. “I had fun tonight. Really. Can’t believe I’m saying this, but thanks for pushing me to live a little. I needed it.” I squeezed his hand. “And thanks for being a good friend to me. Again.”
I reached for my door handle, but he caught my hand before I could open it.
“Emma . . .” The vulnerability in his brown eyes smoldered with the unspoken words etched in his torn expression. His shoulders rose and fell with the same heightened energy holding us both in place.
The silence throbbed, stealing my voice. I dropped my gaze to my lap.
A. J.’s fingers drifted from mine and found the steering wheel again. “Good night,” he said quietly.
My heart constricted. “Merry Christmas, A. J. . . . Thank you. For everything.” I hesitated a second longer before running to my apartment.
A. J.’s tires didn’t pull away until I turned my key in the deadbolt. Somewhere between one door and the other, I’d lost the warmth he’d stirred tonight. Even my fleece pajamas couldn’t stave off the chill.
I crawled into my flannel sheets, bundled the covers under my arms, and waited for sleep to take over. Life was easier to live with my eyes closed.
My phone rang from my desk an hour later. Flinching, I almost tore the sheet off the mattress. My alarm clock blinked into view. “And you complain about me calling late?”
“Nothing a little Starbucks can’t cure,” Austin said with far too much animation for the late hour. “You’re not up?”
“Considering it’s the middle of the night, that would be a negative.”
“Well, considering I’m on my way to pick you up, maybe you should reconsider.”
My body folded in half at ninety degrees. “What? You’re driving through the night. Are you crazy?”
“I like to think of it as being sensible. There’s less traffic on the roads now. And . . . I have a surprise for you.”
“A surprise.” One that couldn’t wait until the morning? “Should I be excited or nervous?”
“That depends. Are you crazy or sensible?”
“Think we both know the answer to that one.”
Austin laughed. “Glad you can finally admit it. But don’t worry. It’s just an early Christmas present. One you’re gonna love,” he said in a singsong voice.
I balled my pillow in my arms, waiting. “You just gonna leave me hanging, or what?”
“Think we both know the answer to that one.”
chapter twenty-six
Fingerprints
Forty-two Madison Street. My childhood home. Where I’d found my identity. And lost it the night I lost Dad.
Even in winter, the old Monterey style house clung to its familiar sea salt scent the same way nostalgia dusted the family pictures that had been up since I was a little girl. The rustic oak floorboards in the hallway creaked in their usual places, and the grandfather clock in the living room chimed its routine song.
It didn’t make sense for a place steeped in memories to feel unknown. But maybe it wasn’t my childhood home that had changed—maybe it was me.
At least there was still one place stringing together my connection with a past I almost no longer recognized. The one place I could always run to, even now.
Hand on the trim, I hovered in the open doorway. With one tentative step forward, I crossed into Dad’s study and outside the rules governing time and motion. Everything paused in response to the way his favorite room held my heart.
The home office looked exactly as it had before he died. He left a part of himself here, fingerprints I could feel. His mahogany desk, framed in shafts of moonlight. His collection of weathered books lining the walls. His scent lingering in the worn desk chair he refused to part with. Everything here, except the one thing I needed most. Him.
I picked up an old Polaroid of Dad and a little girl hidden in his burly arms with a smile to match the bright sun in the background. The girl he made me promise never to lose.
“Jaycee’s right. I’m not really living. Not the way you wanted me to. Riley opened my heart, and I can’t close it now. But it hurts, Dad. How do you keep singing when it hurts?” I sank into his empty chair, into the hollowness his protective arms used to fill, and tried to remember the sound of him playing. “Please, I can’t lose your music too.”
“Doesn’t seem right, does it?” Austin stood in the doorway, nodding toward the dust-covered guitar in the corner of the room. “How quiet it is in here.” He towed me up from the chair into a hug. I wiped my tears on my shoulder. He squished me tighter. “Ready for that surprise? C’mon.”
I couldn’t step foot into the kitchen without smiling at the lineup of childhood crafts mounted on the walls like decorative art pieces. Leave it to Mom to find a way of adding charm to a room that still resembled a 1970s’ tribute to posterity.
Austin spun in front of Mom’s high-back chair with two tickets fanned out in his hands.
My gaze bounced from him to Mom and back. “You got me tickets to the symphony?”
“Surprised?”
I flung my arms around him. “I haven’t been to the symphony since I was—”
“Sixteen. I remember. Pretty sure you didn’t stop talking about it for a month straight.”
“Yeah, well, it was a special night.” I lifted a hand to my necklace, the memory of Dad giving it to me soaring to my eyes.
Austin’s face creased as it had a moment ago in the study, but he recovered just as quickly. “We gotta have something fun to do over this break, right?” He ruffled the top of my hair.
I pushed him into the mustard-yellow fridge. He rubbed his shoulder and yelped more pitifully than the fifteen-year-old dishwasher cried to be put out of its misery. As if my small fist could possibly make a dent in his bicep.
“What makes you think I’m bringing you?”
He feigned a look of betrayal. “Oh, really? So, it’s like that. Too cool to hang out with your big brother?” He crouched in a wrestling stance and circled around me. “Okay, let’s see how cool you are.”
“Don’t you dare, Aust.” I swatted his arms away. “Mom—”
I barely got the words out before he had me off the ground with one swift hip flex.
Show-off.
“Austin James.” Mom scooted back from the table and lowered her reading glasses. “You know how I feel about you two roughhousing like that.”
Austin eased me down until my back touched the cold vinyl floor. “You better be thankful Mom was here.”
I grabbed his hand with both of mine and hopped up. “You and me, later, tough guy.”
He winked as he ruffled my hair again.
He pulled that stunt on purpose, didn’t he? Trying to distract me from the pain of missing Dad. We went through the same loss, but he’d always been the stronger one. Still was.
He snagged two rolls from a pan on the stovetop, and I folded my arms over the top of Mom’s chair. There with family, something flickered. The hope of a world where the pieces still fit together and music still played.
Austin nudged me with his shoulder while we walked along Geary Street to the car after the symphony. “So, what did you think?”
A city trolley dinged on its way past us. The murmur of passengers’ conversations trailing behind it drew my gaze up from the pavement and my thoughts back to the present.
“It was just like I remembered. Thanks for bringing me.”
He dipped his head toward mine. “So, then, you wanna tell me what’s bothering you?”
A breeze of briny air blowing off the San Francisco Bay carried a faint sound of music from the downtown pier. An echo of what was missing inside me.
“Hearing the symphony again got me thinking. All those instruments. The perfect blend of music. It’s moving and overwhelming all at once. You feel it in your heart. You know? Like there’s something in there calling you, but you don’t know how to get to it.”
“Slow down, Plato, we just came from a concert, not a theater audition.”
I popped him in the bicep. “It’s eerie how much you remind me of Trevor sometimes."
“Sorry. Wasn’t ready to switch over to Emma-mode.” He loosened up his neck, flexed his laced hands, and held out his arm for me to hold. “Ready now.”
“I’m serious, Aust. You don’t ever have questions about life? Like your place in it all?”
“Not when I have a melodramatic sister worrying enough for both of us.”
I elbowed him in the ribs.
He rubbed his side, laughing. “Dang, girl. You got a permit for those elbows? They could be some deadly weapons.”
“You’re hopeless. You know that?” I strode ahead of him, but he caught up, hopped in front of me, and walked backward.
“I’m kidding.” He pivoted to my side and circled his arm around mine. “Of course I have questions about life. We all do. But you can’t get caught up in trying to figure it all out.”
“Yeah, well, that’s easy to say when you have the perfect future lined up already.”
“Perfect?” He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Em, you can’t keep comparing your life to some expectation of the way you think things are supposed to be, or you’re gonna miss what Dad tried to teach us.”
“You don’t think I’m trying?” I stared down the stretch of sidewalk. My failures from this semester blurred into the ones from the last five years. “Sometimes I feel like I’m in that symphony, straining so hard to keep up, but my strings are broken. And everything inside me is screaming to run off the stage. But it’s like Dad’s there, holding me in place, begging me to keep playing.”
Waves lapped against the boats at the docks, and I could almost hear Dad whispering for me to trust him. I gripped Austin’s sleeve. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep disappointing him.”
“Is that what you think?”
A party of five stumbled through the double doors of the restaurant behind us, carryout bags dangling from their wrists and the flush of one too many drinks coloring their faces. A seafood-scented breeze wafted through the door and caught my nose at the same time Austin caught my hand and prodded me down the sidewalk away from the noise of the city’s nightlife.
He climbed up on a metal bench and rested his elbows on his knees. “You remember the summers when we’d beg Dad to
play his guitar from the deck ‘cause we thought the music lured lightning bugs to the backyard?”
The memory soothed and constricted at the same time. “We were so sure something magical happened when he played.”
“Maybe it did.” Austin shifted on the bench. “For the longest time, I wanted to play just like him. I’d practice for hours, but it never felt like enough. I couldn’t get his sound down. I got so angry one time, I chucked my guitar on the carpet. Of course, Dad had to be walking past my room right then.”
He shook his head. “He picked it up, played one of the songs he must’ve heard me practicing, then handed it back and asked me to play the same song.” A quiet laugh collected in white puffs against the cold air.
“I remember just staring at him. I mean, was he serious? He had to know he was about to prove my point on how different two renditions of the same song could sound. But then he gave me one of those looks—the ones that held some hidden meaning he was about to share with you.”
I raised a brow. “You mean, like the one you gave me a few seconds ago?”
“Something like that,” he said with another laugh. “But instead of some speech, he placed one hand over my fingers along the neck of the guitar and set my other hand over my chest. ‘The song comes from here,’ he said. ‘It’s supposed to sound different from mine. People are waiting for you to share your own song.’”
Austin rubbed his hands together and blew on them to keep them warm. “You know Dad. Never pushy, always patient enough to let us figure things out on our own. And something about his reassurance that day gave me the courage to stop trying to be someone other than myself.”
He stared at the sky, smiled as though sharing a private moment with Dad. He hopped off the bench and pulled me in front of him. “I’m not saying it’s easy, but you gotta stop looking outside yourself.” He placed my hand over my heart, the way Dad used to do. “It’s here. It’s always been here. Don’t be afraid to share what’s in your heart.”
A gust of wind rustled a plastic bag inside a city receptacle across from us, the sound chafing the silence. I wanted to believe him. Wanted to trust those promises. Believe I had a song of my own. One that’d give me the faith to live with my eyes open and see meaning instead of fear.
Eyes Unveiled Page 19
