Pickup Notes

by Jane Lebak

  Defective.

  Had he heard Harrison’s half-baked question about dating again? Had he heard my answer?

  While I waited for the kettle, I strained to hear cello vibrations through the ceiling. I could catch urgent conversation from Harrison and Shreya in the next room. Nothing from Josh.

  In the dining room, the sun gleamed on the tabletop. Did the china in the curio cabinet ever see something as normal as lunch? Did apologies taste better in fragile tea-cups?

  The kettle shrieked, and in the next second, so did Shreya. “Joey! Get over here!”

  I dropped the kettle back onto the burner and rushed to the entryway. Josh stood with his duffle bag over his shoulder and his cello case against the wall.

  Shreya yanked me by the arm. “Talk to him! Stop him!”

  Josh dumped his bag by the front door, his mouth tight, his hat low.

  I tried to touch him, but he jerked away.

  Harrison said, “And how exactly are you leaving? You plan on walking to New York?”

  He pulled on his jacket. No answer. Of course not. Why open his mouth and sound defective?

  Harrison put his hand on Josh’s wrist, and Josh pushed him back.

  “You can’t get anywhere from here. This isn’t the city. Get your ass inside and quit the dramatics.”

  Josh’s eyes narrowed. “Amtrak. Car service. I have a phone.”

  Harrison was breathing hard. “If you leave, don’t bother coming back.”

  “Harrison!” I got right in his face. “No!”

  Josh zipped the jacket all the way to his neck. “Why would you want me to c-come back? I’m defective.”

  My ears rang. “Josh, don’t. He didn’t mean it that way!”

  “Not good with dogs, either.”

  My voice cracked. “Please. We can work this out. Give it a chance!”

  “I did.” Josh looked outside. “I’m done.”

  I stepped right next to him. “I’m going with you.”

  Josh looked me in the eyes. “No.” And he left.

  Shreya followed him out the door.

  I made my way to the steps and sat on the lowest, face in my hands.

  Harrison watched at the entrance. Then, “What happened last night?”

  I lowered my forehead so I leaned on my knees. Oh my God. Just like that, it was over. Seventeen years of friendship, done.

  I whispered, “Go apologize before he’s gone.”

  “Car’s here already.” Harrison narrowed his eyes. “I don’t beg people to stay.”

  Shreya returned alone. I looked her in the eyes, and for a moment, all our voices were silenced.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Harrison and Shreya talked at the kitchen table. I wanted them to shut up, and at the same time, I hungered to hear it over and over. My hands shook, so I pressed an empty mug in my palms. I’d never made Josh’s tea.

  The post-mortem felt like ants crawling all over me, but they reconstructed his timeline. Shreya confirmed he went to find us on the dock but returned before we did. She’d asked him why, and he’d said it was too cold. Absolutely he overheard Harrison.

  During the vivisection, Harrison’s eyes bored into me. I could feel it even when I wasn’t looking. I shrunk. It never ends well.

  I went upstairs. Let them keep looping the past.

  At Josh’s blue bedroom, I stepped into the still-life: the dormered windows, the motes in the sunlight, the unmade bed, the towel cast across the closet door. He should have walked in any minute now. He wouldn’t. Harrison and I had pushed him to where he was waiting for “just one more thing.” And this morning, we’d handed it to him on a sterling silver platter.

  Curling on the bed, I hugged his pillow. It should have smelled like him, but we’d wash the sheets and even that bit would be gone. Gone.

  Mrs. Galen.

  Mr. Galen.

  I powered on my cell phone and texted Josh. Only, “I’m sorry.”

  I texted his father next. “Josh is going home. Let me know when he gets in.”

  I powered down the phone. I told myself it was to save the battery, but in reality, I didn’t want to hear the silence of Josh never calling me again.

  After lunch, we opted to drive back.

  In the SUV, Harrison played four symphonies in a row. The same discussion had circled for hours, but the facts hadn’t changed. We had a dozen event bookings, five in June alone. We had a festival in ten days. We had no cellist.

  Harrison wanted one of our backups to play the festival. Shreya wanted to cancel. I wanted them to shut up, but when they asked, I said, “We have to play it. No matter what it takes.”

  Harrison decided to drop us off at the head of the 1 line in the Bronx so we could take the subway into the city. He’d go back north for dinner with his parents and spend the night.

  Shreya, so damn practical, said, “What do you want to do about practice tomorrow?”

  Harrison said, “We should take a day off.”

  I shook my head. “We need our equilibrium back, and fast.”

  Shreya frowned. “Another day will give Josh time to cool down. Then I’ll call him and let him know he’s still welcome.”

  “He’s not.” Harrison pulled up at Van Cortlandt Park and set the car in neutral. “I don’t put up with that pretty-princess crap. Flouncing out the door isn’t a perpetual ticket to getting your way.”

  “He has the right to change his mind.”

  “I have the right not to change mine.”

  I shook my head. “I know, I know, you never forgive anyone. You’ll have to call our backups. Alex is the best able to catch up in time for the festival.”

  Shreya stayed slumped in her seat. “You can call anyone you like. I’m taking tomorrow off.”

  “No.” I looked right at her. “We need to keep playing. I don’t care what else happens.”

  Five minutes later, Shreya and I sat in an otherwise-empty train car at the first stop, and I tucked my duffle bag between the seat and my legs to divert the heat from the blowers.

  She stared at the platform. “Just so you know, the oldest trick in the book is crying in the shower. And if you scream into a pillow, no one can hear.”

  I blew at my bangs. “Even if they did, who’d care?”

  Just get home. Get into my crappy little apartment and take the world’s longest shower. Curl up in bed with whatever book happened to be on my nightstand, maybe even one of Viv’s paperbacks. Crawl into my nest and make the world go away.

  Shreya kept up her thousand-mile stare.

  I muttered, “Hooray. I save some vacation time.”

  She said, “Yeah, there’s probably still time for me to get back on the schedule.”

  I frowned. “You need to get on your parents’ schedule?”

  “What?” Then her eyes widened. “No, I’m assistant manager at a grocery store. I help my parents in the morning, but after practices, you can usually find me making a schedule or overriding mistakes on the registers.”

  I blinked. “Oh. I didn’t realize.”

  We returned to silence, and when it lasted a long time, I traced a toe over the scuffed floor. “Is this a total fucking nightmare for you? Seeing it happen twice?”

  “At least it’s not my fault.”

  I stiffened. “You’re saying it’s mine?”

  “No, I mean last time, it was my fault. Kind of.”

  Silence for a minute.

  Finally I said, “What did you do?”

  She wove her fingers together. “Remember the tall guy on the cover, the guitarist?” When I nodded, she said, “We were dating, and I got pregnant.” She flipped the handle of her violin case toward her, away from her, toward her again, a rhythmic tok against the hum of the idling train. “He didn’t want the baby, and I kind of did.”

  Why was she telling me this not twenty-four hours after she’d called me a snake?

  And then I remembered my mother at the kitchen table after Viv revealed her pregnancy. With Josh out,
maybe Shreya wanted to shore up an ally, payment due in confidences?

  Not sure what she expected, I said, “Did your parents make you get rid of it?”

  “Right before I planned to tell them, I started bleeding.” She closed her eyes. “Like a period times fifteen. But we had a gig. I was passing out, but Trevor told me to wear black and play through.”

  My eyes went huge.

  “Between songs I staggered off stage and curled up on the stock room floor. I think the club manager called a cab. Somehow I ended up in the ER at NYU.”

  I said, “You lost the baby?”

  Biting her lip, she nodded. “I didn’t know yet. When they asked if I had a religious affiliation, I realized we were so close to St. Francis Church, so I asked them to call Deacon Cullity, the guy who gave me the violin, and for whatever reason, he came.”

  She stopped flipping the handle to trace her finger along the seam of the case. At that point, the inbound train rolled into the station, and our doors slid shut.

  I said, “Weren’t you worried he’d hate you because you weren’t married?”

  She shrugged. “He stayed with me during the ultrasound. They found a ten-week pregnancy with no heartbeat. He asked permission to pray for me, and I said sure. They wheeled me back to the ER for a transfusion, and while I was waiting for a D&C, the baby came out.”

  I wanted to vomit. “Oh my God.”

  Her mouth quivered. “It hurt like the Incredible Hulk punched me in the stomach, and it was just this tiny thing, the size of a rosin cake. I didn’t think I’d see it. Deacon Cullity rang for the nurse and then asked if I wanted the baby baptized. He was crying too. I don’t think he knew what to do. So I said sure. I mean, I had to do something for it.”

  I put my hand on hers as the train lurched into motion. A life never lived. A song never started, only the pickup notes.

  “I called Trevor to get me. And he yelled that I’d screwed up the whole gig. And that—” Her voice cracked. “—that was the real end. Even if he never wanted the kid, he didn’t— He was just—”

  The doors opened and closed at the next stop, but no one entered. As we lurched into motion, I said, “And later you became Catholic?”

  She forced a chuckle. “I figured, since we baptized the baby, I should find out where it went. I stuck around.” Then she looked to me. “But maybe Josh felt like that, like you killed his baby and told him he didn’t matter. Then Harrison did his dominance display, and Josh just couldn’t suck it up anymore.” She clenched her hands. “But I don’t know. Maybe with all these secrets, we were doomed from the start.”

  The instant I reached home, it was all wrong. Lights blazed in my apartment, and cardboard boxes lay strewn near the trash cans. I steeled myself for mayhem because clearly my mother or my sister had been through my apartment, taking my milk and opening my mail and hunting for my viola.

  Which was on my shoulder.

  Oh. That was sobering like a cold shower. With another look at the lights, I hid my viola behind a trash can, noting as I did that the stray’s bowls had been knocked aside. What was going on?

  Carrying only my duffle bag, I hiked up the steps to my apartment, where I found my sister leaving with a cardboard box.

  “What are you doing here?” she exclaimed.

  I yanked the box from her hands to find my books. “These are mine! This is my apartment!”

  She tossed her head. “You’ve been evicted.”

  I thrust the box back at her and stormed downstairs to my grandparents’ kitchen. I banged open the door and rushed up against the kitchen table. “What are you doing? Why are you letting her pillage my apartment?”

  Grandma and Grandpa both looked up. Grandma looked uneasy. “But Joey, you weren’t paying the rent.”

  “What are you talking about? I have never, not once, missed a rent payment!”

  Three thoughts crashed into one another all at the same time. At my back, my sister entered Grandma’s apartment. In my head, I pieced together why all spring my sister had been hanging around come rent day. And in front of me, my Grandmother said, “But I haven’t gotten a check since January.”

  I whirled toward my sister. “You fucking thief!”

  She smirked. “Prove it.”

  “Your signature is going to be on those checks!” I knew every one of those checks had cleared the bank because when every penny counts, you count them. “You want to explain to the police how you stole from your grandmother?”

  My grandmother said, “Girls?”

  I turned to her. “Why didn’t you say anything? I live right upstairs!”

  Grandma said, “I told your mother to ask you why you weren’t paying.”

  “And it’s ‘Lived,’” said my sister. “I’m moved in. Possession is nine tenths of the law.”

  My grandmother said, “Joey, please don’t be mad at her. Think of your sister.”

  My pulse beat a staccato, and if I’d tried to speak, I’d have started screaming because I couldn’t believe—except I could believe every word. This was my life right here.

  My eyes stung, and my throat closed up.

  “You can’t be so selfish,” Grandma said. “I need a tenant who pays on time.”

  You had that. You fucking had a tenant who paid the rent on time, and I don’t for a minute think my sister will unless she gets Mom to do it, and you’re telling me not to get upset because she’s family, but why am I not family?

  “But you still have a home,” Grandma said, “You can go back and live with your mother.”

  I couldn’t breathe. I shoved past Viv into the hallway.

  Viv said, “Come back tomorrow to pack your other shit because I don’t want to keep climbing over it.”

  I grabbed one of Viv’s regency romances from my bag and hurled it at her head. I had the satisfaction of her ducking as it smashed into a shelf and knocked a metal bowl to the floor with a clang. I couldn’t hear anything else as I ran for the front door.

  I grabbed my viola from behind the trash cans. Beneath it I found a cockroach, four inches long and flat on its back, skinny legs in the air. I jolted back from the thing in disgust.

  I pivoted, only to find my stray cat with his head poking out between two bars of the stair rail. Hungry.

  “I’m sorry.” Blinking hard, I couldn’t manage more than a whisper. “I have nothing to give you.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  I had:

  one viola

  one bag with toiletries and clothing

  a cell phone with an hour’s charge

  ten dollars but no credit card and no ATM card

  If this had happened last week, I’d have fled to Josh’s. Even if Josh weren’t around, Ed would have taken me in. But now? Now I walked until I lost myself, as if anyone back home would have bothered pursuing.

  No, not back “home.” Back “there.”

  I stopped at a Wendy’s. Although I couldn’t eat, I needed a place to triage my life.

  The upshot: I could survive a couple of days. Owning nothing and living nowhere made it easier to walk away. But it was pretty damned hard to survive without money.

  The first thing I did, the very first, sitting with a rapidly-cooling cup of burnt coffee, was to spend some of my remaining battery calling my credit card company. Five minutes on hold never bothered me so much. I reported the card lost and they froze the account. Next I called the cell phone company and had them note the account to verify any changes by calling me back at my phone number. I then used the Wendy’s WiFi to access the Post Office website and hold mail delivery. I put a fraud alert on my SSN.

  I tried to freeze my checking account, but the bank was closed. I’d call again in the morning.

  Finally, my hands shaking, I checked voicemail. Five missed calls.

  Josh. Oh, God, let it be Josh.

  But no. All five were from my mother.

  First call: urging me to call her right back. Second call: call her right now, something was happening. On a
nd on they went. Actually, one was from my dad, telling me I was worrying my mother by not calling back, but that was effectively her anyhow. By the last, she was furious, demanding I call her right-this-instant-young-lady.

  Right. What was she going to do? Tell me to sleep in my old room now decorated with footballs and with chewing gum stuck to the closet door? No, probably I’d be on the couch. And then what? I’d get to listen to what a failure I am because, you know, successful people’s sisters don’t steal their checks and their apartments.

  I’d sooner die. That wasn’t hyperbole.

  I stared at my coffee, trying to imagine calling Shreya. And I couldn’t. Not that she wouldn’t have helped, but what she would say, her reaction. She said my parents were evil, but…were they? It’s not like I had no place to go. I didn’t want to go to my parents, but it wasn’t like they wanted me on the streets. Shreya would tell me, “I told you so.” Harrison had told me to cut them off, too, but how could I be that selfish? And… And who cared?, because it really didn’t matter now.

  Josh would have let me crash on his couch without pushing for a game plan. I’d have been okay. I needed okay.

  When it got good and dark, I walked to the subway, not thinking too hard about my next move. Viv had stolen my apartment. Time to pay it forward.

  One train-trip later, with the spare key clutched so tight it hurt my palm, I collapsed onto Harrison’s couch. Curled beneath a tasteful red and black throw I’d never seen unfolded, I covered my face in my hands and whispered, “Grandpa… Grandpa, I have nowhere to go.”

  Dawn. I awakened on Harrison’s couch with music cycling in my head. Only two measures, but in their murmur I detected the hint of a tune. I hummed them as I forced my limbs to unlock. Ten notes. My fingers imitated them, and I wondered where this orphan passage fit into the world and what song it called home.

  I struggled not to panic as I checked the clock. Six AM. Harrison shouldn’t return before nine. He had nothing waiting, so why cram into a train with a thousand commuters?