Sound Effects

by L. J. Greene

  Once I discovered music though, I found a way to benefit from my sleeplessness. Left alone with my thoughts in the dark, I would focus on a troublesome chord progression or lyric, and actually found that much of my best work was done in those solitary, uninterrupted hours. So much so that I routinely kept a journal and pencil by my bedside to make notes on things I didn’t want to forget by morning. Even now, I carried a small pad with me at all times for that very purpose.

  But this particular morning, I had more than just a few notes in my head and was propelled out of bed by that familiar urgency to write. I fixed a pot of coffee and settled down in the living room with my Gibson to put down a melody that could only be composed for her. Melody. The coincidence was just too brilliant.

  I had no idea how much of the morning had passed–that often happened when I was writing–and was brought back to awareness by the sound of my mobile vibrating on the table.

  “Hey, pickle.”

  “Jamie, I’m 19. Why do you still insist on calling me that?”

  I smiled at the sound of my sister’s voice. “Because it bugs you, naturally.”

  “I hate you,” she responded casually, and I laughed.

  “What’s up?”

  Cara let out a deep breath into the receiver. “I was just wondering if you’ve talked to Mum lately? I think Da may be drinking again.”

  An immediate constraint fell over our conversation. Cara and I were the two youngest of seven kids, and as long as we could both remember, Da’s drinking and Mum’s excuses for it had been a primary source of the dysfunction in our family. Da himself was another.

  “How do you know? Did she say that?”

  “Not directly. But I called her last night and I could just tell by the way she sounded.”

  I wedged the phone between my ear and shoulder and pinched the bridge of my nose. It was not the news I wanted. We’d been down this path too many times to count with Mum, always with the same result. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want it.

  “Last time, I practically begged her to leave him and I gave her every penny I had.”

  “I know you did,” she said quietly. “But will you call her again? I worry.”

  I nodded into the phone. “Yeah, I will.”

  We fell silent, both knowing exactly how that call would go. People, of course, lived with all kinds of realities; ours was that we’d been born to a brutal man and a damaged woman, and we had to accept the fact that tragedy and chaos would be in our lives as long as our parents were.

  With two free hands, I fingered a few of the strings on my guitar and was rewarded by the lovely notes of the song I was composing. It calmed my agitation almost immediately. Writing always had that effect on me.

  “Hey, by the way, did you get the email I sent you?”

  “Don’t know. Which one?”

  “I invited you to join a website called MySpace. It’s kind of like Friendster, but new. Everyone I know is getting on it.”

  “Never heard of it,” I said absentmindedly, as I continued to work out the bridge.

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  “I am. I’m just wondering why I’d want to join a website with a bunch of teenage girls.”

  “I’m telling you–this is a great way to get some exposure for the band. You can’t believe what it’s done for the Arctic Monkeys.”

  Whoever the fuck that was.

  “You can post music and concert dates, and you can even answer questions from fans. This could be great a thing for Cadence. Maybe you could expand your following in other areas.”

  “That’s called touring, pickle,” I said wryly.

  She groaned loudly. “You can’t tour everywhere, Jamie. Just think about MySpace, okay?”

  I heard a soft knock on my door and hauled my arse up from the couch to answer it. Danny stood on the doorstep looking like shite warmed over. I stepped aside to let him pass.

  “I gotta go. How’s summer school, by the way?”

  “Good. Fine.”

  “You keeping your grades up?”

  Danny’s attention turned to me and he lifted a brow in stern interest. With two overbearing fools looking over her shoulder, you had to feel a bit sorry for her.

  “Yes,” she answered, and I could picture a well-orchestrated eye roll to go along with the exasperation I heard in her voice. I passed her annoyed reassurance along to Danny with a nod.

  “Good. You need money?”

  “No, I’m fine. Thanks, anyway.”

  “I’ll phone you up if there’s anything to say on Mum.”

  I hung up and tossed my Nokia on the couch beside me. Danny was sprawled over the brown leather recliner with his eyes closed, arms crossed over his chest.

  “Enjoyable evening?”

  “No complaints.”

  I noticed that the shirt he was wearing was misbuttoned near the top, resulting in one tail hanging dramatically longer than the other.

  “There’s coffee.”

  He grunted a vague form of acknowledgement, but didn’t stir, and I went back to tinkering with the bridge. It needed to be something like…

  “Fuck you, by the way,” Danny said lazily, with his eyes still shut.

  “What?” I knew what.

  “You know exactly what.”

  I set the Gibson aside and ran my hands through my hair. Danny and I had been best mates since my family moved to America when I was nine, and he was far more of a brother to me than any of the five I’d been born to. We’d been through a lot together, and it was a dick move on my part to steal his date. He deserved an explanation.

  Here’s the real truth of it: I knew Danny had invited a girl he’d met, and by the way he was acting about it, I could tell he liked her. But I’d known the bloke nearly my entire life and he had a particular type: blatantly sexy, fun-loving, and casual. He wasn’t looking for anything serious, and he rarely involved himself with anyone you’d consider serious. There were a dozen girls in my yard that day who easily fit that description. Never in a million years would I have expected his date to be the reserved, angelic-looking beauty I saw through my window.

  I happened to be standing in the kitchen with a bunch of my mates, who were slagging the shit out of me for my obsession with a song I was writing. In honesty, I was barely listening; I couldn’t take my eyes off that incredibly lovely girl.

  Compared with everyone else, she was a classic. Perfectly symmetrical features, separated by the blade of a nose, and natural in a way that would likely drive other women mad with jealousy. Grey-green eyes, maybe–hard to tell at a distance–with dark, shoulder-length hair and strawberry lips. I could easily imagine this girl in a prim dress with a cardigan, and yet here she was in black jeans and a–Jesus–it was a Cure t-shirt.

  But it wasn’t even the t-shirt that made me want to know her. She was standing beside a small side table, and on it was a potted succulent that someone had knocked over, spilling out the dirt and pebbles.

  I watched her set the pot upright and the plant inside it. Still, she didn’t seem satisfied. As though she couldn’t resist the impulse, she began scooping up the dirt with her hands, and pressing it back into the pot. She glanced around a time or two, but no one seemed to notice her.

  And so on she went, carefully straightening each branch and gently propping up the broken ones.

  It’s a revealing thing, actually–what we do when we think no one is watching. It made me wonder about her. I realized I was smiling when I saw her arrange the remaining pebbles into a little happy face on the table. And then she wiped her dirty hands on the legs of her jeans.

  That was quite simply it. The moment I knew I could wait no longer to speak to her. I didn’t know whom she’d come with, or why she was there, but none of that mattered. From here forward, I was determined she would be staying only for me.

  “Do you remember when we were eleven and we climbed the fence where the old water tower used to be?” I finally asked Danny by way of an explanat
ion for my behavior.

  He smiled dimly. “I remember we found those banana slugs by the reservoir, and you put one down the back of my shirt. Fuck you for that, too, by the way.”

  I laughed. “And you retaliated by putting one down the front of my shorts.”

  He opened one eye in my direction and leaned forward a bit in his chair. “I did you a favor. There wasn’t much else to fill the space.”

  I grinned at him. “The Irish curse, do you mean?” I asked, holding up my small finger. “Well, I’ll have to say no to that. As I recall, the poor little fella was nearly crushed to death by my massive tumescence.”

  “And as I recall, the banana slug was the only massive thing in your shorts.”

  He rested his head back in exhaustion, scrubbing a hand over his stubbled face. He’d left the party with two women, and looked to be paying the price for it.

  Still, I wanted to say what was on my mind. In all of the years we’d been friends, I couldn’t remember ever competing for a girl. This was a new thing between us, and it left me with an unpleasant feeling in my chest.

  “Are you going somewhere with this story, Callahan, or can I sleep through it?”

  I ignored his petulance.

  “I was just thinking about when we climbed up that gigantic oak tree. Remember?”

  “I remember you jumping up and down on your branch like a fucking monkey. And all of the sudden I heard a crack. And then you fell.”

  “And then I fell,” I agreed. “Like a shit ton of bricks. Do you know that I still wake up in the night reliving that fall?”

  Danny snorted with sardonic amusement.

  “Everything just gave way under my feet. I remember having no control over what was happening. Putting my hands out to try to grab on to something–anything, really. But there was nothing I could do. It just happened so fast, and it knocked the wind clear out of me.”

  The recollection came vividly behind my eyes as I sat staring at my closest friend, who was motionless on the recliner.

  “When I finally realized I was on the ground, I was breathless. And stunned.”

  “And alive, despite being an idiot.”

  “Yes. Very much alive despite being an idiot.”

  There must have been something in my voice because Danny opened his eyes and I could see the understanding slowly begin to wash over his expression. He studied me for several beats.

  “So, it’s like that, is it?”

  I let out a heavy breath I didn’t realize I was holding, and a vision of Melody, smiling in front of the keyboard, graced my memory again.

  “Genuinely, my brother. It’s just like that.”

  Chapter 4

  Mel

  JAMIE ARRIVED AT MY APARTMENT with a beautiful bouquet of hydrangeas, and a stubborn resolve not to divulge anything more of our plans than ‘dinner outdoors.’

  We made one brief stop to pick up Chinese, and then we headed west towards the water. When we pulled into the parking lot at Fort Point, I have to say, the surprise was worth it.

  “Have you been here?” he asked.

  “No, actually, I haven’t.”

  Jamie smiled broadly. “I’m very pleased to hear it. This is my favorite place in the city. I come here often for inspiration.”

  I could imagine why. Fort Point is the site of a 19th century military base that protected the city from roughly the time of the Gold Rush through World War II. The three-story brick building sits directly beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. In fact, in the early 1930s, the bridge was constructed literally over the top of Fort Point. As such, it boasts one of the most stunningly beautiful views of the Golden Gate Bridge available anywhere in the city.

  “Look at the towers on the bridge,” he pointed out as we stood watching the light fade from the evening sky. “The architects understood the importance of scale as a design element. Do you see how the lights on the towers are dim at the top? The idea was that they appear to the human eye to soar beyond the range of illumination. I’ve always been fascinated by the effect.”

  “I never noticed that,” I admitted in genuine amazement.

  I turned to study his face as he highlighted various architectural details of the bridge, and outlined its long and storied past. He was particularly captivated by the tales of the men who built it–what they had achieved, and what they had sacrificed.

  And I’m not sure what I was expecting from Jamie, but he was anything but one-dimensional. I loved that he could be truly awed by things that most of us would barely notice–things like composition, and design, and symmetry. His view of the world was an artist’s view, and he seemed to be a student of everything he saw.

  “I bet you know more about this place than a lot of the people who work here,” I observed. And then I watched as innate modesty transformed his expression.

  “I’ve read a few things, is all. Come,” he said, gesturing to a set of blankets he’d laid out in the grass. “We’ve got the best seats in the house. And I have something for you.”

  Jamie was dressed appropriately for the cooler weather in nice black jeans and a black sweater that showcased his ridiculously fit frame. The all-black outfit was insanely sexy on him, and perfectly complemented his gorgeous auburn hair.

  I, on the other hand, was not dressed appropriately. Having had no idea what to plan for, I’d misguidedly selected a cocktail dress for our date. So I was particularly grateful when he pulled from his backpack, and helped me into, a thick brown zip-up hoodie, lined in a gray waffle fabric. The sweatshirt was enormous, reaching half way down my thighs and covering nearly my entire dress. It smelled earthy and masculine.

  “Dinner outdoors didn’t give me much to go on,” I teased, as he brought the ends of the zipper together. He was focused on his hands, but I watched his sexy lips curl up slightly at the corners.

  “Ah, that.” He paused, and hazel eyes lifted to mine. He was standing directly in front of me, and our proximity immediately brought back vivid images of his mouth on mine. My heart skipped a beat. “I can’t say why, but I expected you would wear jeans. And then when I saw you in this dress–” he shook his head, drinking in the merits of its plunging neckline and formfitting shape. His was the kind of appreciation I could feel deep in my core, and the want it created was nearly unbearable. “You just looked so damn lovely. I didn’t have it in me to ask you to change. Forgive me?” he added, with a glint of roguish charm.

  But it was those hazel eyes that did it to me, and the thoughts behind them that seemed to instinctively understand that I spent the majority of most days trying to make a male-dominated profession forget that I was a woman. I could hardly resist being prized as a woman by this very handsome and vital man.

  “Forgiven.”

  What else could I say? He was my siren.

  §

  From where we sat under warm blankets in the grassy area to the right of the fort, the bridge loomed 776 feet above us, a towering edifice painted in its trademark burnt orange. It was lit from below, rising out of the black waters of the San Francisco Bay and stretching majestically across to the Marin Headlands. To the east, I could see Alcatraz and Treasure Island, and beyond that, the Oakland skyline.

  “Tell me,” he said, as we dug into the boxes of food. “How did you come to study law?”

  “Well…I guess it was my father’s influence. He’s an attorney, as well. And he always used to say that a career in law was a sure bet because, come hell or high water, there would always be contracts.”

  Jamie smiled and reached for a dumpling. “That seems like sound advice. You’re close to your family, then?”

  “Yes, very. My parents and my brother, both.”

  “That’s lovely.” I adored the way he said that word. Lovely. With his soft Irish accent, it sounded like LOvely. Similarly, he said COuntry.

  “Do you enjoy what you do?”

  I scooped a helping of beef onto my plate as I thought about how to answer. I hated to admit that I was a law school graduat
e, just launching a career and still asking myself the same question. I had a talent for the law–I knew that–but that wasn’t really the same thing as enjoying it. Still, I wondered how many people actually have the luxury of drawing that distinction.

  “I think so,” I told him with more certainty than I felt. “I mean…I’m just starting out so–” I tilted my head back and forth– “so far so good. I think it’s the right path for me. My boss, Adam, told me that he hired me because he thinks I have a strong protective instinct, which he said is more lethal in a lawyer than a killer instinct. Like a mama bear, he says.”

  Jamie laughed. “I think, perhaps, he’s right. I think you’ll make a smashing lawyer.” Smashing. I added that to my list of favorite words that Jamie says.

  “Okay, lay it on me. Your best lawyer joke.”

  “What? I don’t have one,” he said, working his way through the kung pao chicken on his plate.

  I raised a brow. “Everybody has at least one.”

  He grinned at me, deciding. “Okay–what happens when you give a lawyer Viagra?”

  I shook my head in question.

  “He gets taller.” Jamie raised his eyebrows and made a goofy face, as if trying to draw out a laugh.

  “That’s not even funny,” I teased with a straight face. “In fact, it’s a pretty pathetic showing from someone who calls himself an entertainer.”

  “Really?”

  “Umm hmm. I think you can do better. In fact, I challenge you to do better than that.”

  “How much time do I have?”

  “Unlimited,” I said, around a mouthful of dumpling. “But you have to beat this one: Two attorneys walk out of a bar as a beautiful woman walks by. One attorney turns to his associate and says, ‘Man, would I like to fuck her.’ The other attorney thinks for a second and says, ‘Out of what?’”

  Jamie started to laugh. Hysterically. It may have been the very best sound in the entire world. I was happy just hearing it. In fact, I was a little disappointed when his body finally relaxed again. In the waning sun, I realized that I couldn’t see his features quite as clearly.

  Plus, the fog was beginning to roll in. That, in itself, is quite a thing to see from Fort Point. Long fingers of mist reached under the bridge, rising up and closing like a fist around the steel and cable.