Lady Sings the Blues

by Sarah Zolton Arthur

  I turn, capturing her in my arms, trying to shield her from the sight. Although she sags into me, she refuses to look away.

  “I’m not a whore,” she whispers against my shoulder.

  “Let’s go inside, darlin’.”

  “I’m not a whore, Mark,” she says again. As if she thinks I would believe—come on Elise, how could you think that of me?

  “I know, darlin’. I know.”

  She lets me lead her back inside. Within minutes the police have arrived.

  Tommy Doyle takes our statements. We’ve been friends for years, graduated together. Upon seeing him, shit, I’d been worried he’d spill my secret. But Tommy was a good friend then and continues to prove himself a good friend now.

  Elise sits on the sofa wrapped with the blanket from last night around her shoulders, shaking with the weight of everything which has gone down the past couple of days.

  “Was sorry to hear about your dad, Miss Elise.” Tommy squats down next to her, placing his hand along the ridge of her shoulder. “This was the last thing you needed.”

  “So you don’t hate me?”

  God, I hate how beaten down she sounds.

  “Girl, we partied together in high school. I could never hate you.”

  “Seems you and Mark are the only ones who don’t.” For a woman who used to show such a strong spirit, she hangs her head low, so fuckin’ defeated.

  And it guts me. I’m lettin’ her down again.

  Tommy shoots me a confused glance, ‘Mark?’ I shake my head slightly. Just enough to keep him from asking the question I see he wants to ask and at the same time telling him without words, ‘We’ll talk later.’

  “You know,” Elise continues. “They want me out of town so badly, how am I supposed to leave when they’ve trashed my car? I can’t drive home with a smashed windshield or…or…” She takes in a gulping breath and the tears I’ve been waiting on finally show. “Slashed tires.” She actually finishes her thought.

  “Wasn’t very smart.” I offer. Not much else to say.

  “Vandalism’s never smart,” says Tommy. And he pats her shoulder this time. He stands then. “Well, I think I got everything I need. Anymore trouble girl, you call me. Got it? You still got friends here. I’m one of ‘em. Which.” He pauses. “Call Maryanne. She’s worried sick about you.”

  “Maryanne?” Elise murmurs.

  “Maryanne. Buckley. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten your best girlfriend already?”

  “No, no. I haven’t forgotten Maryanne. I just…how is she?”

  “Good, I hope.” A smile plays across his face. “And she’s a Doyle now.”

  “You married Maryanne?”

  “Almost three years now. I’ll tell her to stop by as you wouldn’t have her number, come to think of it.”

  “Tommy, do you think it’s safe for her to be seen with me? Mark’s already taking such a risk.”

  “Sweetheart, let me tell you somethin’. I love bein’ married. I love goin’ to bed at night and wakin’ up in the mornin’ next to her. So if I plan on stayin’ married, which I do, there’s no way on God’s green earth that I’m keepin’ Maryanne Buckley Doyle from comin’ to see her long lost best friend.”

  Tommy pushes up but bends to kiss Elise’s forehead and walks toward me. “Mark,” he says. “You and me. Beers at Blues while those two catch up.”

  He wasn’t asking. And proving himself today, he’s owed an explanation. So I nod.

  “I’m off by six,” he says. “We’ll be there by eight.” And then he leaves out the door.

  “Maryanne married Tommy Doyle,” she says. “I never saw it coming. She always wanted Beau. Always.”

  “But Beau never wanted her, darlin’. Tommy, however, did. And he’s a good man.”

  She blinks at me as if registering what I’ve said and repeats it. “Good man.”

  That’s it. I feel her shutting down. I refuse to let that happen. “Up. Get dressed. You and me are gettin’ away for the day.”

  “What about the bar?”

  “Peaty’ll take the mornin’ shift. You’re more important.”

  “But… I don’t have a car.”

  “Good thing I have a truck, then.”

  ***

  She stands at the mouth of the cave seeming to contemplate the darkness. Her back to me, hair flowing past her shoulders, a silhouette I’ve dreamed about just about every night for the past seven years. The cave is beautiful, but nothing in nature can compare to Elise Manning.

  She turns to me. “The last time I came here was with Beau.” Her back faces me again. “Spring of senior year Logan and I had a huge fight. It was right before, well everything. I needed to get away and like always, Beau came to my rescue. We came here instead of Mammoth because all the tourists go to Mammoth.”

  That’s all she says, reaching her hand back to me, I take it and we begin our descent into Carter caves. The deeper we travel the darker our world becomes. The colder our world becomes.

  Elise, on her own, moves from holding my hand to pressing herself at my side where I’m able to slide my arm around her waist. She presses her face to my chest briefly before moving us along again. She moved on her own. She did.

  And it’s at this point when we’re at the deepest, darkest spot in the cave, when we’re completely without light. When I can’t see her face, but can only feel her, she says, “You keep coming to my rescue. Just like him.” Then she pauses and I think she’s finished so I give her a reassuring squeeze. But she’s not finished and what she says floors me. “Don’t leave me like he did.”

  I can hear water dripping. I can hear her breathing. What I can’t hear are my own breaths. I think I’ve stopped altogether. The only way I know I’m still alive is from the feel of my heart pounding out of control against my ribcage. Two days. I’ve had her back in my life for only two short days, and she feels it again, this thing between us. She feels it again, already.

  After taking a beat to find my words, I pull her until she’s flush against me, front to front, and have her locked securely with both arms around her.

  This is it. Here in the dark, I feel safe to tell her how she’s never getting’ rid of me. How it’s always been her and always will be her. Only, she don’t let me get it out.

  “I’m here for the week. I need your strength until I go home. Please be my strength.”

  Then she pushes up on her tiptoes using her finger to swipe over my face to find my lips in the darkness, and brushes a kiss over my lips. It’s soft and relatively quick, but not remotely satisfying for me. I have to find a way to convince her to stay.

  The urge to talk becomes obsolete after that kiss. She’s mine. And maybe if I can get the rest of Thornbriar to know it, she’ll know it and want to stay. Elise belongs in Thornbriar. And what Thornbriar don’t know, they get in my way, try to come between me and her again, they will not like the end result.

  If we could only return to living as cave dwellers. Because being here in this spot with Elise, it feels like we’re the only two people left in the world. Yet as has been known to happen, we’re interrupted by the world descending down on us.

  Chatter of other cave dwellers bounce off the cavern walls. Like I said, unwelcome interruptions.

  I run my hand down her shoulder, then her arm ‘til my fingers lace with hers and pull her along next to me. As we walk, the light from outside begins to filter in around us giving peeks of stone and stalagmites.

  She sucks in a long, filled with awe kind of breath when we hit the cave opening. We step outside into a lush wooded area complete with a deep, clear pond, which only became a pond thanks to a fallen tree and beaver damn. It’s not quiet here like in the caves, but full of nature sounds, peaceful nature sounds.

  With the temperature difference between the caves and the outside it’s like steppin’ out of a refrigerator right into a damn oven, but the smile on Elise’s face never wavers. So neither does mine.

  We leave just at the right time.
More people have shown up crowding the parking lot and ticket window. And the distinct rumble of engines rip through the chatter of people and squawking of birds. Definitely time to go. I usher her by the arm up into my truck. Once I’m in, we take off without looking back.

  5.

  Elise

  “Elise fuckin’ Manning! Where the hell you been girl?”

  At the sound of her shrill voice the entire bar turns to look at the figure shadowed against the backdrop of streetlamps pouring into the room as she stands, filling the doorway.

  And when I’ve only managed to stand halfway from my stool, I get tackled by that shadowed figure who moves surprisingly fast for such a little thing.

  We both fall to the sticky floor. As she squeezes the breath from me, men’s laughter fills the space around us.

  “Okay baby,” Tommy Doyle says through his laugh. “Don’t kill her before the reunion even starts.” Then she’s plucked off me as seconds later I’m peeled off the linoleum and pressed into Mark’s arms.

  He’s all crooked smile. Tommy smiles. Then I look to Maryanne. She’s even prettier now then she was in high school, if that’s possible, because Maryanne Buckley was a freaking knockout in high school. Small, thin, but curved in all the right places. Porcelain skin still flawless. Chocolate brown hair with natural highlights swept over her shoulder in a long, awesome braid, a braid like Elsa from Frozen, if Elsa had chocolate brown hair.

  Marriage looks good on her. Of course Tommy Doyle being her husband, it doesn’t surprise me. He was always, always so nice to us when we were being pains in the asses of the seniors while Maryanne and I were still juniors. And he was hardly hard to look at then, or now. Now even more so with that fit ‘I’m a badass cop’ physique he’s got going on.

  Still despite how good she looks, Maryanne is Maryanne. Which means she goes from hollering redneck to crying just that fast. Since I have this rule where no one cries alone in my company, as her pretty brown eyes tear up and spill, so do mine.

  “Oh shit,” I whisper. “My mascara. I’m gonna look like a raccoon.”

  Mark presses a kiss to my jaw. He’s a touchy-feely guy. And, I don’t know, maybe it’s because I deprived myself from human contact for so long, but I don’t mind it. Being here, surrounded by Mark and my old friends, reminds me of how it felt so many years ago, when I first arrived in Thornbriar. Reminds me of what made me want to stay.

  Maryanne certainly doesn’t mind Mark’s PDA, smiling, but turns up the pressure on her waterworks. “Holy shit!” she cries. “You two really are together…after all this time.”

  Tommy, still holding Maryanne, kisses her cheek and says something in her ear for just the two of them to know. She nods then speaks to Mark. “We need drinks.”

  “Toby,” Mark calls out to the bartender working tonight, every bit as bearded and tattooed as Mark, but with big, black gauges in his ears. They look like small drain stoppers, not the open ones. His hair is so brown it’s almost black and his eyes, they’re equally as dark. Must be a job requirement to be a bartender, to be so ridiculously handsome.

  Toby walks over to us. “What can I get you pretty ladies tonight?” Mark throws a slightly playful, mostly menacing look to his bartender. “Anything they want. They both have rides home so let ‘em have fun.”

  “You got it, Bossman.”

  “My car was trashed this morning by vandals who want me out of town,” I tell him for whatever reason. “What do you suggest to take away that sting?”

  “Whiskey Sour it is.” He grabs a bottle of Maker’s Mark from behind him.

  “Make it two,” Maryanne tells him.

  Maryanne and I pull up stools at the bar to sit. I’m rewarded by a kiss from the “bossman” while she’s rewarded by a scorcher from Tommy before the men head to the opposite side of the bar. The last I see of him before Maryanne snags my attention is the two of them racking up at the pool table.

  Toby knows his way around a Whiskey Sour, for sure. I’m just happy to be enjoying a drink with an actual friend but apparently she’s done waiting on me to pony up the information.

  “I’m serious,” she says looking me directly in the eyes so I can see how serious she is. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “I left.” And I say it with a shrug.

  “You left? That’s all you’ve got for me? We were best friends. You called layin’ all that shit in my lap. Then Logan. And you just disappear from my life without a trace. I lost my whole world. You, Logan, and Beau in one fell swoop.”

  “I’m sorry.” I really am. We were a Manning, Hollister clusterfuck, but over the past five years I neglected to take into account how many other people we brought down along with us.

  “You’re sorry?” Her tone hardens as she takes a huge swig of whiskey sour. “I barely survived. If it hadn’t been for Tommy, don’t think I would have.”

  “The shit with Logan—the whole town turning on me. Then Beau turned his back on me. I was so lost. My whole world fell apart too, but I didn’t have Tommy to fall back on.” I want to cry but am so angry the tears, they won’t fall.

  “Did you give it up?” she asks.

  Now I can’t keep my voice under control.

  “Give it up?” I scream at my once best friend, not giving two shits that the entirety of the place sits in engaged silence listening to my freak out. And here I am giving them the gossip. “I didn’t give it up. I lost it. The stress…The stress…” Anger finally ebbs replaced by the crushing sadness I’ve been avoiding for years. “I lost my baby.” And I fall back, not onto the stool but into Mark’s arms. I didn’t even hear him come over.

  “Shh…” His consoling word feathers against my breaking heart. “Shh…” he says again.

  “I wasn’t a whore, Mark. I wasn’t. The baby was his. He might not have wanted it, but what his mom said, what his aunt said—Lenore and Margo hated me. But I swear…I swear I’m not a whore.”

  Some people have a higher tolerance before reaching their breaking point. Some have lower. I’d like to think since it’s been five years that I’m the former. Though, higher or lower, I’ve just about reached mine. He twists me in his arms to full-on hold me with his entire body, warming my soul with his care.

  “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you,” he whispers against my neck. “I should’ve been there. I promise I will never let you down again.”

  We keep holding on, tuning everyone else in the bar out, for who knows how long. The rest of the world building up and crumbling civilizations around us. Both of us content to remain so, at least in my mind.

  “Did you know the toothbrush was invented in Kentucky?” He asks, out of the blue, and a ninety degree turn from the last words he’d spoken.

  “What? No.” I shake my head, wiping away tears with the back of my hand.

  “If it were invented anywhere else, it’d be called a teethbrush.”

  Idiot. I laugh, loud and obtrusive, garnering head turns from people all around us. Mark chuckles around pulling a drink from his longneck. Tommy and Maryanne join in too, the laughing and the drinking.

  “Should’ve given you Whiskey Sours years ago,” Tommy says, then. “Glad to have the old Elise back.”

  “Are you, Sgt. Tommy Doyle of the Thornbriar Police Department, condoning underage drinking?”

  He shoves my shoulder. “Only when it keeps my wife and my best friend from hurtin’.”

  ***

  With all the heaviness behind us and three more Whiskey Sours down, Maryanne and I pivot on our stools barely able to keep ourselves from slipping off, to watch the men deep in a game of pool again.

  “I wish I’d been at your wedding.” I halfway slur.

  “Wish you’d been there, too. I had to ask Tommy’s sister Beth to be my maid of horror.”

  “Don’t you mean honor?”

  “Not with Beth.”

  “Oh man, I remember. She was a piece of work.”

  “You have no idea. She wanted us to have a ceremon
y right outta the puritan handbook. Should’ve seen her, I mean her entire face turned purple when I told her I didn’t want to wear white because I wasn’t a virgin. I kid you not, she fell to her knees and prayed for mine and Tommy’s immortal souls.”

  “How do I even respond?”

  “Well I’ll tell ya, she went from purple to red when I told her I would not be agreein’ to obey Tommy, either.”

  “Really? She got angry with you?”

  “Yeah. Because I told her I’d stop the ceremony then and there if she tried to get the minister to slip it in. And I wouldn’t go any further until he retracted it.”

  “That’s my girl.” We try to fist bump, totally missing. “Was Mark there? At your wedding?”

  “Sure. He…he was the best man.”

  “How? We never hung out with him in school, did we?”

  Maryanne’s hand finds my shoulder. “Listen,” she says. “What you need to know—” But her words fade, the sound of her voice drowned out by another. This one low, husky and soulful.

  We redirect our gazes to the small stage kitty-corner to the pool tables and the gorgeous black woman standing atop it.

  “Isn’t that Whitley Burgess?” I ask Maryanne.

  She only nods as Whitley begins to sing.

  “He said I love you…I said ‘I do’… I came home from work. What I found was you…

  “He said he was sorry…Never again. Stabbed in the back by my husband and closest friend…

  “I got the blues… I got those cheater man blues.

  “Never again? He got that right. I ain’t seen him since that very night.

  “My mama, she warned me. My daddy did too. And now I’m stuck nursing my cheater man blues…”

  She’s sad and glorious, and I could listen to her sing the rest of the night. The live band I’d been too distracted by my Whiskey Sours to notice setting up accompanies her bluesy riff after bluesy riff.

  Her song ends. Right when I think she’s about to start another, she steps off the stage allowing someone else to take her spot. When her applause dies down, the next woman begins to sing, although without nearly Whitley’s ability to carry a tune. But just because her voice sounds like fingernails scraping a chalkboard, doesn’t mean her words are any less heartfelt.