Sometime After Midnight

by L. Philips

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Nate

  Cameron carefully opens the back of the display case that houses Paradise’s Grammy Awards. He removes a few, setting them on top of the case, so that he can pull up on the velvet false bottom. The purple material gives way, coming up easily, and sure enough, there they are. Two CDs. Just two. I don’t know what I was expecting. Fifteen, maybe. A whole year’s worth of work, Richard had said, and it fit on two CDs.

  Cameron hands them to me. I look down at the iridescent discs. My father’s signature is on both of them and a lump the size of a golf ball forms in my throat.

  I clear it out. “Do you want to draw up that contract? What is it called? A gag order?”

  Cameron smiles at me like I’m an adorable puppy. “I think that’s something different. I think you mean a confidentiality agreement, and no. I’m not drawing up any contract, Nate.”

  “But your father—”

  “Who cares about my father?” Cameron says, looking straight into my eyes. “I trust you.”

  “And if I leak them, or lose them, or don’t give them back?”

  “You won’t. But if you do, I suppose you’ll have to answer to Richard Pierce on your own because I’m going to flee the country as fast as I can.” Cameron chuckles at himself. “Kidding. But please don’t leak them. And I can’t imagine you’d lose something so important. You don’t seem like the type. As far as keeping them? Well, I think they should be yours anyway. So, in all seriousness, I’ll deal with my father on that one.”

  I look at him, and the only thing I can say is thank you. He nods and pulls me into a hug. I lay my head on his chest, breathing in his scent. He always smells manly—no, gentlemanly. Not just musk and spice, but clean and sophisticated. It’s a far subtler and gentler scent than manly.

  “I don’t suppose I can hope that you letting me hug you means we’re okay?”

  I keep my face planted against him and say, muffled, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Everything is so . . . There’s so much to process. I know you need an answer about a guitarist—”

  “Nate, I couldn’t care less about a guitarist right now. I’m afraid I’ve lost you.”

  I nod against him and pull away slowly. Then I do the hard thing. “I’m going to need some time, Cameron. I hope you can understand that. There’s just so much to think about. Too much. And I keep thinking about my dad . . . how he smiled before he jumped . . . and the voices . . . I didn’t know about any of it, Cameron. How could I not know?”

  “Hey, hey, shhh, it’s okay,” Cameron says, and reaches for me again, and I, needing the comfort, needing him, let him. He strokes his fingers through my hair. It occurs to me that it’s something a mother would do, not that I have much experience with mothers. But it’s very comforting. I feel my heart rate slow, the panic ebbing, the meltdown backing away.

  “Well,” Cameron says, and his voice is strained. It’s somehow comforting too, that he feels so much of this himself. “When you’re ready to talk, if you want me, I’m here. Or if you just want to sit and write music for hours. Or if you just want to sit in silence. I’m here for you, Nate. Hell, even if you don’t want to be with me anymore but still just want someone to talk to, I can do that, too.”

  “You have no idea what it means to have someone who would say that to me,” I admit to him, burrowing further into his broad chest. “Thank you.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. I really care about you. I want to be there.” I pick my head up and look at him. His handsome face is blurred by tears. He tries smiling and fails. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to pile on. You have enough to think about. And I’ll give you the time you need.”

  “That means a lot to me too.” I squeeze his hand, then let go of him, picking up my father’s recordings. “Cameron, if you really trust me with the masters . . .”

  “I do.”

  “Will you let me take them home? Listen to them there?”

  I can see the hurt in his eyes. “You want to be alone when you listen to them.”

  “Yes,” I say. “But it’s not what you think. I just . . . I don’t know. It’s silly, but I just want to spend some time with him. My dad. That and I just don’t know how I’ll react.”

  “The collapse?”

  “Maybe. Maybe just a whole lot of ugly crying.”

  Cameron nods, raises his hand like he wants to pull me back to him but thinks better of it, then nods again. “I get it. But, Nate, I still think of us as partners, and I’m going to keep thinking that until you tell me to stop. So if you want to be alone for that, I get it. But don’t be alone because you don’t think I can handle it. I want to be there for you.”

  “Thank you,” I say to him, and can’t quite bring myself to look into his eyes. On top of everything else today, the scare with the photographer and the invasion of privacy, the difficult conversation with Richard and the new revelations about my father, my heart is breaking in a hundred smaller ways, and one of them is the thought of hurting Cameron. The other ninety-nine are the things I’ll miss about him if I can’t move past this and just be with him.

  I try to smile at him. “For what it’s worth, when your dad tries to murder you for not making me sign a contract, I will use all the karate moves I know to kick his ass.”

  Cameron tries to smile too. “And exactly how many karate moves do you know?”

  “Well, I don’t know any at the moment. But I’ll start practicing.”

  He laughs then, and it’s genuine. Then his smile falters, and he shakes his head at me. “Promise you’ll call. I’m sorry to be such a clingy idiot about this, but it’s not just our relationship I’m worried about. I’m worried about you, and listening to those recordings alone, and finding all this stuff out today. So even if you’re calling to tell me the worst, please just call. I need to know you’re okay.”

  I swallow the hard ball that’s risen in my throat. “I’ve never had someone be so concerned for me before. Well, Victor, but . . . you know. It’s not exactly a regular occurrence in my life. I don’t know what to say. Or do, even.”

  “Just get used to it,” Cameron says. “I care about you, and I tend to worry a lot about things I care about.”

  I raise a brow and do my best to keep my voice light. Teasing. “Worrying is okay. Just promise me you’re not one of those Edward Cullen, borderline stalker types. You do have the auburn hair, after all. And you kind of sparkle.”

  Cameron is happy to play along, and I’m so glad we’re flirting again, I could kiss him. He gestures to the opulence around us. “Please. I’m really more of a Christian Grey, don’t you think? I mean, I don’t have a helicopter, but still. Look at this house.”

  As I’m chuckling at that, another voice joins mine, echoing through the long hallways of Cameron’s mansion and bouncing off the expensive antique vases. It’s Victor, and he’s making a maniacal sort of “woohoo” sound like a complete idiot, and I can only guess it has something to do with Tess. Poor Tess, who has been left alone with my obsessed, awkward, lovable, hilarious, mob-boss-wannabe friend.

  Cameron and I give each other a look before dashing out to the balcony overlooking the foyer, where Victor’s whoops are coming from below. Cameron and I lean over the railing to catch a glimpse, and I cannot believe what I’m seeing. Victor and Tess are chasing each other around with Nerf guns, darting behind pillars and chairs and tables, taking shots at each other and then scrambling for the ammo left on the floor. Victor nails Tess with a dart to the thigh and lets out the “woohoo” sound again, celebrating like Rocky, arms raised over his head. Tess takes the opportunity to shoot him right in his considerable gut. The entire time they lob insults at each other like grenades.

  “Have they lost their ever-loving minds?” I say, laughing at the chaos. “They could break something. There are vases everywhere. And sculptures!”

  “And not a s
ingle one we can’t afford to replace,” Cameron says, eyebrow raised haughtily. “I know you want to get home, but I don’t think we can allow these two to have all the fun. And we’d clearly be a better team.”

  And even though it’s unspoken, I can sense the underlying meaning of his suggestion. Perhaps he’s starting to know me better than I know myself, because as much as I’m dying to get home and listen to my dad’s music, there’s a bigger part of me that’s scared. That’s not ready yet. Because there was a word that Richard kept using on the phone about my dad’s work that unsettled me as much as the story itself: “unlistenable.” What if the music on these CDs is awful? What if all that suffering my dad went through was for something undeserving of the sacrifice?

  So I let myself give in to that fear, indulgent and cowardly as it might be. And I let myself put off the hard thing for a little while longer.

  I smile at Cameron, so grateful, I can feel it down to my toes. “Where do you stash your guns?”

  * * *

  ***

  Later, much later, after an epic Nerf gun fight around the Pierce’s Beverly Hills mansion, Victor drives me home. I let him ramble to me about how beautiful Tess is and how she’s just “real, you know? Like an actual human being,” my father’s masters clutched tightly in my hands the whole way.

  By some miracle, Tonya isn’t home when I get there. There’s no note, not that I expected one, so I have no idea where she is. Maybe she has a boyfriend. Maybe she moonlights as a roller-skating waitress at the nearby drive-in diner. God only knows. On a normal night, I probably wouldn’t even realize she’s gone, and it hits me particularly hard tonight how little I know her.

  She came to my father’s defense, right before he slipped away and took his own life. How much had she known about his sickness? About the trouble he was in with Paradise? If things were different between us, would she have comforted me about the photographer tonight? About how heartsick I am about Cameron?

  I shut my bedroom door. Then I open up my laptop. I need to hear my father in crisp, clear sound, volume high, but without anyone else knowing. The only way to do that is with good headphones, and my best headphones are the earbuds that came with my phone. It only takes a few minutes to import the tracks and get them transferred to my cell, and then there’s nothing left to do but listen. I can’t put it off any longer.

  I turn off my lights and lie down in my bed. Before I push play, I try as much as I can to clear the thoughts in my head. Wondering about Tonya, about who’s to blame for the fact that we’re still strangers. Wondering about my dad, the voices, the smile. About Richard Pierce, about the obvious way he doesn’t let himself feel anything. About Cameron, how he feels everything alongside me, how he’s so wonderful, if we can make this work. I push it all away, and finally, when there’s silence, I press play.

  For the next two and a half hours I do nothing but listen, start to finish, noting every chord change, every riff, every vocal line, every word. For the next two and a half hours, my dad is alive again, in the room with me, jamming, giving me a master class.

  As for the music . . .

  When I was little, maybe four or five years old, Dad took me to a rehearsal with him. I don’t know why. Maybe Grandma had something else to do. He and the band he was playing with at the time rehearsed in a bar with a tiny little stage, and while they were playing together, I got up on the stage and danced. They all thought it was a riot. But at some point I tripped over a cord and fell, headfirst, onto the concrete floor below. I remember feeling something warm running down my face, the taste of copper filling my mouth, my dad’s friends freaking out that a little kid was hurt. Somehow they managed to get me to a hospital, and Dad and I went back into a room in the ER where a nurse examined me and said I’d need stitches. The cut was just below my hairline, and it’s hardly noticeable today, but there’s a scar there. At the time, however, even the nurses couldn’t get the bleeding to stop. I heard one of them saying something about a vein right there that I must have busted open. They applied pressure for what seemed like hours, to the point that the pressure started hurting more than the cut itself, and the knot forming underneath it. I remember the stitching too, the red drops falling onto my lap or running into my eyes, a nurse futilely trying to mop me up.

  In the bed next to me, separated by only a curtain, someone was screaming in agony. It must have been bad. A traffic accident or something. Something very painful. I never saw the person. I just heard them scream, over and over, and sometimes sob, or call out for someone who wasn’t answering. Their screams made me feel more frightened than the sight of my own blood.

  That’s what listening to Dad’s music is like. I’m five years old again, listening to someone in agony, unable to help. I can’t help because I’m bleeding myself. I’m bleeding because the music is so hard to hear, so painful, but also . . . hopeless.

  Richard was right. No one was going to listen to this. No one was going to love it. It would have disappointed my father’s fans. It certainly wasn’t going to earn him new ones. It meanders too much. It doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. It zigs when it should zag. It changes key just when you get used to the tune. It goes from slow to fast to slow again, without a segue. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, and people don’t like the unexpected in music. They like patterns. It’s comforting to know how the tune will end, what notes will come next. Worst of all, some of the songs have more than one melody, layered on top of each other, conflicting and uneasy. Even if you could follow one melody, the others throw you off the scent. So people were going to hate it, because they couldn’t possibly understand it. No one could see it for what it was.

  But it’s not unlistenable. It’s genius.

  I listen to it all, over and over until I fall asleep out of pure exhaustion. When I wake again, the sun is up, making my room harshly bright. My father’s music still blares in my ears. Ripping my headphones away, I sit up and stare at the wood-paneled walls of my bedroom. It takes a minute to register that there are other noises in the house. Tonya is home, and she’s walking around in the kitchen.

  For some reason, I feel like I need to see her. Maybe even talk to her. I call out to her.

  My bedroom door opens. Tonya stands there, thin hair twisted back into a messy little bun, wearing a black Aerosmith tee, ripped-up jeans, and flip-flops. She looks like she hasn’t slept.

  “Where have you been?” I ask her.

  Her face twists momentarily. “Why the hell do you care? And I could ask the same of you. I go to the store to grab a pack of cigarettes and see your face plastered all over the covers of tabloids. With that Pierce brat. So much for auditions in San Francisco.”

  “I’m working with Cameron,” I tell her.

  “Looked like you were getting a lot of work done,” she mutters. “Your father is turning circles in his grave.”

  “Is he?” I say. I stand, hands balled into fists, adrenaline overtaking my good sense. “Or could he maybe be proud of me? I don’t know. Because I don’t know anything about him. You’ve never bothered to tell me.” My voice cracks and it makes Tonya flinch. “You didn’t even tell me how he died. I had to find out from some asshole at school.”

  Tonya’s face twists into an expression that is either rage or hurt, but I can’t tell which. “What was I supposed to do? Tell a nine-year-old his father wanted to die?”

  “Maybe,” I fire back. “I have to think hearing it from you would have been better than from the school bully in the lunch line.”

  “And now I’m sure you’ve heard all about it from your new boyfriend, Richie Pierce. Christ, Nathan, how can you even look at that boy?”

  That was the question from the moment I knew who Cameron was, the question in the back of my mind for the last few weeks, the question so important yesterday that I probably broke his heart. And because I can’t answer it for myself, let alone Tonya, I don’t try. I si
nk back down on the bed and shake my head miserably.

  “I don’t know,” I say, then repeat it. “I don’t know. Cameron is not who I thought he was. He’s not who anyone thought he was. He’s not like his dad at all. He writes these words . . . these gorgeous lyrics. Then he sings, and his voice . . . it’s like something from a different planet, it’s so beautiful. And he listens to me. He listens and he gets me, maybe more than I get myself. When we write together, we’re a perfect team. It’s like we each have half of a song, so we have to put it together to make it whole. He’s my voice. I’m his music. I mean, would Dad really hate that?”

  As I’m talking, thinking of Cameron, I almost forget that Tonya is there, listening. When she speaks, her voice startles me. “Cameron sounds like him. Before, I mean . . .”

  “Before the voices took over?” Tonya’s gaze snaps to mine, eyes wide with surprise. But then she nods, shoulders slumping, and I can’t help but think she seems relieved that I already know.

  “His voice could do anything. And when he had a guitar in his hands . . .” Tonya closes her eyes, and a smile drifts to her mouth like a soft breeze. “He could do anything. But he loved having someone to listen. To bounce ideas off of. He always wanted to know what I thought about what he was writing. Except at the end. He didn’t ask me at the end. He had others to talk to.”

  Tonya opens her eyes and looks right at me. For the briefest of moments, I see her eight years younger, full of life and energy and laughter, her hair thick and shiny, a little more meat on her tiny frame. I see her as Dad must have seen her.

  “Maybe I should have told you everything. I don’t know. I didn’t know what to do about anything then. You were only a kid. I was only a kid. I was barely old enough to drink legally, and suddenly I had a child to take care of. Everything was so . . . so messed up.” Tonya lifts a hand to her forehead, squeezing and pressing into her brow bones.

  “Tell me now,” I say, more like a question than a command.