Chasing Kane

by Andrea Randall

  “Come on,” I encouraged with one last squeeze of her hand before pulling it away.

  Nessa stared a few seconds more, then cleared her throat, looking around as if she just dropped back to earth. I didn’t know what she was holding back, but I bet if I watched her play for long enough I could get some idea.

  “Fine,” she spoke, sounding more like herself and less lost as she had before. “But you can’t look at me.”

  I screwed up my face incredulously. “What?! That’s half the story. Watching someone perform.”

  “You didn’t ask to watch me,” she corrected, reaching into a storage cabinet above her, pulling down a worn nylon-covered hard case. “You asked to hear.”

  “Ah,” I corrected, smiling. “You said I’d never heard you. I said show me.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest, leaning back quite proud of myself.

  She shrugged, reaching to put the violin back into storage. “Fine,” she said flatly.

  I lunged forward, my hands waving in surrender. “No, no! Fine. Sorry. I’ll … I’ll turn around.”

  “Relax, legs. I’ll just move to behind you. Your beanpoles won’t fit backward at that table.”

  I sighed a breath of relief that I’d get to hear something that was clearly closer to her than she let on.

  “Guys!” she called to the rest of her band through a cheap pocket door between the kitchen and the rest of the bus. “I’m playing for a few minutes. Deal.”

  Muffled sounds of consent sprang from the back of the bus.

  “I’m just going to warm up a sec.”

  Lacing my fingers behind my head, I splayed my elbows out and leaned back. “Take your time.”

  After a brief pause, she struck her bow against the strings and drew out long, low notes. Each one two-seconds long, or more, before changing to another. After ten seconds she picked up the pace, offering one note per second, still a slow pace, but fine for warming up. Every ten or fifteen seconds, though, she upped the tempo, and the notes became more familiar. She wasn’t warming up with scales, as is traditional—though I sometimes skipped those too.

  She was using Bach’s “Partita” number… two—no—three. In E major. She was using a lovely Bach sonata as her warm up. At a moderate tempo, she hit all the notes and held on lovingly to some at the ends of measures or lines. I closed my eyes. If they were open, I’d be searching for her. Before long she held onto a high note, and it was clear to me that she was changing songs, or warm-ups, or whatever it was she was doing.

  She started slow again, but closer on pace with the “Sonata No. 1 in G minor” I easily identified. Bach sonatas are lovely and intricate, whether playing for a crowd or using as a warm up. Within ten seconds, Nessa was working the sonata at its presto tempo, flawlessly fingering the complicated collections of notes. Keeping my eyes closed, I leaned forward and placed my elbows on the table and rested my head on my hands. I took a deep breath. I wanted to turn around. I wanted to join her. But, she asked that I listen. So, listen I would.

  “Okay,” she finally said as if she hadn’t already played marvelously for four minutes. “Here goes. No looking.”

  I put up my hands. “Not gonna.”

  She chuckled softly before taking a deep breath, and striking her strings once more.

  Immediately, I wanted to cry.

  Chopin’s “Nocturne” never did anything less than put a lump in my throat. A mournful love song. A goodbye. A plea at best, but a gut-wrenching tale of broken lovers nonetheless. Chopin dedicated the song to his dear friend, and his friend’s wife—who had a messy situation of their own. Regardless of the original intentions of the piece, it had always been one I played on a rainy day when I needed some self-inflicted brooding.

  But on this occasion, I knew I was hearing something more than notes she’d memorized. As the strings wailed under the gentle touch of her bow, I could wait no longer—I turned around. Before me stood a tall and swaying Nessa. Her eyes closed, squeezed so tightly shut I could barely see her eyelashes. Whatever tension she was holding in her face, she released through the instrument.

  I didn’t know her story, and didn’t know if I ever would. She came from far less money than I did, and had what seemed to be much fewer opportunities and less professional experience, but you couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. It never did with those born with an instrument sewn to their soul.

  Despite my own desires, I forced myself to turn back around. I didn’t want to blow Nessa’s trust if she saw me staring at her when she’d asked me not to.

  Not if I hoped for a shot in hell to get her to play like that for me again. Or in public. She was far too good to leave her violin on the bus when she stepped on any stage. I didn’t need to hear her play any more to be assured of that.

  At the close of the piece my eyes were full with tears. I missed Georgia just as badly as I did when I dropped her off at the airport this morning. I breathed. It would be a few days until my road equilibrium returned and I wasn’t looking for her every time I turned around. “Nocturne” always made me think of Georgia. It made me miss her and love her and need her. Also, even though I didn’t know the details, it made me feel for Nessa. For the reasons behind her emotion in that song.

  “Okay. Done,” she said without much fanfare. “Happy?”

  Speechless, I turned around and tried to hide the emotion in my eyes with a smile. She caught me in my act, meeting my eyes and immediately looking down.

  “Yeah,” I said, exhaling. “Hell. Yes.”

  Standing, I faced her and put my hands on her shoulders. “Why? Why don’t you play this? Like on stage?”

  She rolled her eyes. “And be compared to you for the whole tour? Please. I’ve followed your career since you were in college, Regan. It’s a tough act to follow.”

  My eyes bulged out. “Excuse me?”

  She waved her hand is if this was run-of-the mill. “Everyone who has a clue about the classical music scene for the under-forty crowd knows you.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe people in the scene …”

  “No,” she cut me off. “You turned out that little album your senior year in college—Dublin Nights or some cliché-as-shit title. Right before you left to teach around the world.” She winked, then continued. “People passed that hand to hand, and all of us in or around the scene made sure it got to any bar with a whiff of Irish—even if they were only Irish on St. Paddy’s Day.”

  I swallowed hard, feeling heat spread across my face. “I knew bars on the cape played it … But then I was out of the country for nearly two years.”

  She grinned. “It went a lot further than your precious peninsula.”

  “Stalker issues aside,” I shook my head, wholly uncomfortable with this kind of attention, “you’re amazing. And,” I caught her wrist as she turned away, facing her back to me, “if you’ve followed me for as long as you say, then you’d know I don’t dole out compliments that easily.”

  She laughed and I dropped my hand. “Yeah, you are kind of a snob, aren’t you?”

  I shrugged, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “Music will never survive if we all settle for mediocrity.”

  Nessa swallowed hard, sliding by me in the narrow space to place her violin in its case and tuck it safely away in the cargo hold above the table. She bent down, reaching into the mini fridge, and came up with a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream in her hand and a comical grin on her mouth.

  “You’re Irish, right?”

  I slid back into my seat, sliding my mug toward her. “Even if I wasn’t …”

  Fifteen

  Regan

  Our dinner stop consisted of a roadside diner in one of the most middle-of-nowhere places I’d ever seen besides the back roads of New Hampshire. There was something in the parking lot that claimed to be a food truck, chucking burritos, but I stayed with steak and eggs. And a couple of waffles.

  As soon as we’d gotten off the busses, Nessa nabbed Clara when she departed Moniker’s bus, which was we
ird since she’d started this leg of the trip on my bus. In CJ’s bed. She didn’t look as pissed as I’d have thought for someone in her apparent position, but I tried not to think much more about it. Nessa escorted her into the diner and into a booth far in the corner for what I assumed would be CJ-related girl talk.

  Mine and Nessa’s conversation on the bus in the hours before stopping for dinner stayed far away from the violin or this tour. She asked me about teaching music from Indonesia and Ireland, and I was brutally honest in an effort to get some information from her, too. And, I had nothing to hide. But, no dice. When the questioning shifted to her, and I asked how she got hooked up with The Brewers, she wasn’t rude, but she kind of breezed through the whole story.

  She’d been singing with a band at a local bar in Phoenix, where she’s from, and an old friend from high school swept her away to San Francisco to be starving artists in the music community. She did, however, speak with wild light in her eyes about her time in San Francisco, and promised stories in more detail over drinks. I could only imagine.

  By the time we had arrived at the diner, I knew conversation about or around Nessa and her violin was to cease. For the time being, anyway.

  Halfway through my steak that actually wasn’t half bad for the looks of the diner, CJ plunked down in the seat across from me.

  Without really looking at him, I started with, “Just … one of the other band members? Seriously? You could have your choice of any woman at any concert—married or not, unfortunately—and you choose one who we’ll be shacking up with for the next several months?”

  He was silent. So silent, I lifted my eyes from my plate to see him staring into space, and his hands in fists under his chin as his nostrils flared.

  “Ceej?

  His empty eyes met mine for a second before he stood and barged out of the diner and into the parking lot. Instinctively, I followed him, asking a passing waitress to box up my food and hold it at the counter. Nessa caught my eyes as I left, and all I could do was shrug.

  “CJ,” I called after him.

  “Not now Regan,” he answered with his back to me, holding up his hand. He made his way to a set of benches that sat on the edge of a thick, dark forest.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, unaffected by his attitude.

  “I said drop it,” he snapped.

  “No you didn’t.” I plunked down next to him. “What the hell?”

  “Georgia get home okay?” He changed the conversation one hundred eighty degrees. “Not that I even care,” he added. This was his roundabout way of asking me if she was still pissed at him, or to tell me his side of their fight.

  “Obviously you care, fucker. And, yes, she’s home. I got a text from her a while ago that she was back at work.”

  She was probably up to her eyeballs in hysterical mother’s-of-the-bride by now, trying to change the filling choices for the cakes or cupcakes at the last minute. I don’t know how Georgia had the patience for that. No one came up on stage in the middle of my performances and told me to adjust a note.

  “Did she tell you about our fight?” he asked, almost accusingly.

  “Does it matter?” I sighed, shaking my head. “If she didn’t, you would have.”

  He shrugged.

  I added, “She didn’t tell me any details, though.”

  CJ looked out into the twilight, clearing his throat. “Frankie’s not stupid. She knew I had a girl on the side when we first got together.” It was a jarring change of subject, but I walked through the conversation with him, anyway.

  I winced. “You did?”

  He looked down, shaking his head. “I wasn’t fucking her. We barely hung out. I made out with her a few times, but that didn’t last long.”

  I shrugged. “So what was it?”

  “I just … kept her in my contacts, you know? We’d text once in a while …”

  A heavy sigh was the only response I could muster.

  “It almost broke me and Frankie up before we had a chance to get off the ground. We were looking at pictures on my phone one day from a show I’d done, and a text came in from that girl. Only the first line came up but, like I said, Frankie’s no fool.”

  “But you said that’s when you first got together?”

  CJ leaned forward pressing his elbows into his knees. “I didn’t go out of my way to be a good guy to her.”

  “What do you mean?” I was uncomfortable hearing the strain in his voice. Not quite on the edge of tears, but certainly circling regret.

  He shrugged. “I never sent her flowers at work. I only offered to make dinner once in a while, but we went out a lot …” He lifted his head, looking into the vacant space a few feet in front of his face. “I didn’t search old bookstores for her favorite authors or take her to poetry readings. I just kind of said, ‘This is my life, come along if you want in.’ I didn’t try to make a life with her.”

  “Because your dad did all those things with your mom and it was a lie.” It was harsh, but factual.

  He only stared.

  “You know your parents loved each other in high school, right? And even after? When they had you—”

  “I know,” he cut in sharply. “But he just fucking romanced my mom nonstop so she wouldn’t see that he was starting a whole new life outside her peripheral vision. She had no reason to think he was doing anything wrong. He showed up everywhere he was supposed to, showered her with attention and gifts, was hands on with me …”

  “I remember,” I admitted, feeling a lump in the back of my throat.

  I knew this story all too well. I’d loved my uncle almost as much as my dad. CJ and I had the best early childhood. Our parents lived on the same street in a picturesque seaside town. A model American childhood for both of us. Loving families, involved dads, everything was perfect.

  Until it wasn’t. Almost overnight. It would be years before we realized the extent of CJ’s dad’s damage, and the second family that technically gave CJ step siblings and half siblings that he’s never met. Knowing the manipulation his dad laid on, I doubt if those kids even know CJ exists.

  My dad dove right in, sweeping up his brother’s mess and never treated CJ like anything less than a son. When we told people how we were related, we always just said our mom’s are sisters, because that was true. In law, sure, but also in heart, and then we didn’t ever have to talk about CJ’s dad unless he wanted to. Which was basically never. Until now, it seemed.

  “Frankie knows about Clara.”

  I leaned forward and buried my face in my hands. “That’s … bad.”

  “Georgia’s not gonna help me. She says she’s tired of my shit and it’s time I grow up.”

  “You talked to her already?” I was relieved and curious that she hadn’t roped me into the conversation already.

  “A lot of good it did,” CJ answered. “She’s staying out of it.”

  I nodded approvingly. “Seems appropriate.”

  “Maybe it’ll be good for me to be alone for a while.”

  “Have you talked to anyone besides Georgia about this?”

  CJ cracked a laugh. “No. Except you, but you’re not much help.”

  I huffed through my nose. “I don’t really know what you want from me, Ceej. I … I think you’ve gotta kind of cut the shit about your dad.”

  His head whipped toward me, rage in his eyes. “What the fuck did you just say?”

  I sighed, grinding my back teeth together. “My dad did a hell of a job taking care of you and your mom after your dad left, CJ. I was there, remember? Jesus Christ, just … focus on the positive examples you do have and stop wallowing in what you lost.”

  I stood, his ungrateful, victim attitude really started getting under my skin.

  “Oh it’s just so easy for you, isn’t it, Regan. From your perfect little family—”

  “You’re part of that family!” I snapped holding my hands out as he stood. “Jesus, you were so worried about pulling the wool over girls’ eyes that you just be
came a wandering dick and a womanizer. Honestly, I fail to see how that’s any better than what your dad did.”

  “Fuck you, Regan.” He had murder written across his face, but apparently decided not to get into it with me right there. Instead, he pushed past me and stormed toward the bus.

  “Hey!” I shouted, jogging after him.

  He turned around, his shoulders heaving under angry breaths. “What?”

  “Don’t be a dick just because you screwed up.” I pressed my index finger into his shoulder, leaning in close and lowering my voice. “Every fucking time I turn around you’re either moping, pissed off, or feeling up some girls ass in a bar. Feeling sorry for yourself? Change it.” I pressed harder before dropping my hand, my adrenaline starting to kick in.

  CJ ran his tongue across his teeth as he took a deep breath. “Don’t touch me again, Regan.”

  I lifted my chin. “Is that a threat?”

  “A warning,” he growled as a few members of the tour switched their attention to the scene in front of our bus. “My life is none of your fucking business.”

  “Then,” I spoke sharply, “leave me and my wife out of it.” I turned away, betting he wasn’t likely to hit me from behind—that wasn’t his style—and headed into the diner to retrieve my food.

  Apparently, we’d caused a minor scene, as all eyes were on me when I grabbed the loaded Styrofoam container off the counter and walked back to the bus.

  “So …” Nessa stepped in front of me just before I reached the bus door. “Anyone gonna die tonight?”

  “Not now, Nessa,” I snapped

  “Hey.” She touched my shoulder, her eyebrows pulled in as her look morphed from sarcasm to concern. “Chill, okay? If you need to crash somewhere else, you’re welcome on our bus.”

  “I’m not packing up just because he’s an asshole.”

  She dropped her hand. “The offer stands. Will you guys be okay to play when we reach Seattle?”

  I laughed dismissively. “I did a concert a month after my girlfriend died. I’m pretty sure I can handle my shit.”