by Solace Ames
“Is this a real story?”
“Mostly. The general was real, and the Americans executed him for war crimes.” I launched into the tangled tale of Yamashita’s gold, and Xiomara listened as if her life depended on it.
It was better than the alternative. Better than thinking of a pale body dragged out to sea. Out of sight, out of sound, vanishing forever.
* * *
At three in the morning, exhausted and cold, we left for our beds by mutual agreement. Xiomara made me promise that if she went to sleep, I would too. No point in waiting up all night.
Back when I was poor I’d picked up the habit of spending any downtime sleeping, not worrying. I’d even sleep on the bus, my bag clenched in my arms, chin down over it, so that if anyone tried to steal it, I’d spring awake and headbutt the motherfucker like a jack-in-the-box. Luckily for them and me, no one had ever tried.
So I slept. But I slept with the phone next to my pillow.
He’d stray back in the morning. Both of them would.
I didn’t have good dreams that night, alone in the big bed.
I sent ten thousand dollars to my mother over the wire, but the wires got crossed, and the money got lost somewhere. I had to find it. I ran out of the mansion, through dark streets, through all the chain hotels and crash pads and rented rooms that drifted to the foreground of my memory. It’s under the couch, someone whispered in my ear. Emanuel hid it under the couch. But no, he wouldn’t do that to me, and the money wasn’t tangible anyway, just digits in binary code stored in a computer cloud, so I tried to reach up to the clouds, rip it out and rain it down over the Philippines. I couldn’t do it, not even in a dream, so everyone who saw me laughed at the crazy, crazy woman waving her hands in the air, while my mother was crying somewhere across the ocean...
I woke up covered in sweat, the sheets twisted around me.
Still alone.
I grabbed the phone first thing. There was a text from Emanuel. Miles recovered. Has decided to cancel reunion.
“What the fuck?”
“Hey, Amy,” a very alive Miles said. He’d just strolled right into the bedroom, and he hadn’t yet rinsed off from the beach. Clumps of sand fell from the pockets of his shorts and hit the floor with a soft spattering sound.
I was relieved. I was also angry. I made a kind of growling noise to express my confusion. “You’re getting sand everywhere.”
Miles retreated to the doorframe, so at least he was only dripping in the hallway. “This might seem like bad news. I mean, about me leaving. But I think it’s the right decision for everyone.” He looked as sunny as I’d ever seen him, a broad smile plastered across his stupidly handsome face.
“Where’s Emanuel?”
“He’s on the phone handling some kind of emergency.”
“Could this possibly be the emergency of you canceling the reunion?”
“I guess so.” Miles smiled as he ran his fingers through salt-spiky hair. “Yeah, that’s probably it.”
“Go take a shower in your own bathroom. I need some coffee for this shit.” I slumped back down into the sheets and dragged a pillow over my head.
When I peeked out from under the pillow, Miles was gone.
I showered and dressed quickly, trying to keep my mind blank. There wasn’t enough information to act on yet. Was he serious?
He couldn’t be serious. He wanted this. We all wanted this—Avert, reborn from the ashes.
I hurried downstairs, taking the steps two at a time.
Screaming noises and muffled thumps came from Juan Carlos’s room by the foot of the stairs.
“Is everyone all right?” I yelled at the door.
A second later, the door slammed open and Juan Carlos’s girlfriend Eliska stormed out, preceded by her heavily pregnant stomach. “No,” she said. “No, I am not all right.” She cursed in her native language, flipped around, ordered Juan Carlos out of the room and slammed the door behind him. I had a feeling there was going to be a lot of door slamming today.
“Miles, eh?” Juan Carlos said to me, his voice thin and close to breaking. “Miles. Motherfucker. Mo-ther-fuck-er.”
“I’m sorry. This must be rough on you guys.”
He shook his head and turned to face the wall.
Xiomara sat in the small indoor kitchen, sipping coffee like this was a normal morning. I sat down beside her. She poured me a cup. “I never really went to sleep last night,” she confessed. “So I was there when they got back. Emanuel and Fausto already cursed him out, but they did it quietly, so they wouldn’t wake you up.”
“Why’s he leaving?”
“He’s going to move back East, get a regular job—doing what, I have no idea—and get his kid out of foster care.”
“A lot of people here are depending on him. Do you think Emanuel can change his mind?” I wondered if I could change his mind. The future where we went on tour was so strong and vivid, it wasn’t slipping away, wasn’t disappearing. It simply coexisted with a different incompatible future now, and the doubling effect sent my stomach wobbling. I put down my coffee after the first sip.
“It’s not my business anymore,” Xiomara said, and rubbed at her eyes. “Not that it ever was. Thank you for staying up with me last night. I’m okay now.”
Something was wrong with her. She wasn’t okay. I was a little hurt she had to lie to me, but more sad than hurt. “I’ll go look for Emanuel, then.”
“Yeah, you do that.” Her lips twisted harshly as she stared down into her coffee.
I almost reached out and touched her on the shoulder. I really wanted to. It wasn’t right that we had this wall between us now.
Instead, I left without a word.
I found Emanuel in the living room, his face clenched and grim underneath dark sunglasses. I waved and then ducked away so I wouldn’t interrupt his phone conversation, but he put down the phone, took off his sunglasses and beckoned to me. He didn’t look half so grim anymore. I hoped it was because I truly made him happy. That was the simplest explanation, right?
He took my hand and kissed my forehead.
I didn’t know what to ask him first. When I looked out the window, the sight of the caretaker leading Gabriel to the pool for his playtime was a welcome distraction. The way his slinky spotted body twisted and splashed in the sun hypnotized me, drawing magic calming patterns.
Drawing everything together just as we were falling apart.
I never thought I’d feel this lonely in a house so full of people. Last night, all of us had lived together, and this morning we had lines cut between us.
Please don’t let that happen to Emanuel and me.
“Do you want me to get him back for you?” I asked.
“I don’t know if you can.”
“Is that a challenge?”
“No.” His hand was warm in mine, but he didn’t look toward me, and his tone was flat and remote. “Don’t waste your time with Miles. You deserve more.”
The word deserve led down a dangerous path. At the end of that path, I could hear Emanuel deciding I didn’t deserve whatever life let me stay with him. I had to close that path, and show him I needed him but I wasn’t too needy. Jesus fucking Christ, what a terrifying tightrope.
“Whatever happens, I want to be with you,” I said with hardly a breath between the words. “I can take or leave being rich and famous. That’s not important to me. Traveling would be nice. I’d like to see my family soon. I can go back to work camming if I need to. I don’t like that, but I don’t hate it either—it’s better than working in a salon or an office. I’m not high maintenance.”
“I don’t like that term. It reduces you.”
“I’ll try not to use it anymore.” It was a cold answer, but he was right. I was his girlfriend, not a stupid Italian sports car. �
��Are you going to make Miles leave now?”
His sigh was halfway to a growl. “I wish I could. The reason—” His curse in Spanish caught me by surprise with its violence. He stroked my wrist a second later to calm me down, or perhaps calm himself down. “I have to respect his reason.”
“Does he think he can really get his daughter back, like as a sole custodian?”
“He’s not that delusional. The plan is still for her to go to his parents—he’ll be living with them.” He turned to me suddenly, and twin images of my distorted face appeared in his sunglass lenses. I looked terrified. “I promised you something I can no longer deliver. I’m sorry. And I’m very, very angry. I won’t make him leave before our time here is up, but he’s been warned to keep his distance until then.”
Time was running out and summer’s end was coming soon. Too soon. It felt like a knife pressed against my throat. “Where are you going? Can I go with you?” I was already begging. I didn’t have much pride anymore, but what I had left revolted. My whole body tightened and I watched my face go impassive in his glasses, lips tightened into a flat line.
He took a deep breath.
God, I wished I could see his eyes. Maybe that would make this easier. This agonizing wait.
“Yes,” he said.
Only yes. No pet names of likely love, no more promises, and no mention of time.
For now, yes would have to be enough.
“Good,” I said, and smiled.
He squeezed my hand.
I couldn’t stand looking at my reflections anymore, so I turned away. Outside and through the window, Gabriel batted at a ball, ran in circles and made the chainsaw-whine noise. He seemed less joyful now than manic, irritated, trapped by the white concrete walls of the emptied pool.
Chapter Fifteen
In one of the recovery books I’d read for my sober companion role, they’d talked about liminal states. The word came from the Latin for threshold, and handling liminal states was a big deal everywhere all over the world, with rituals designed to smooth the passage. The book went on applying the concept to addicts moving into new lives of sobriety, but I could see how it was so much bigger, and how I’d grown up liminal, between countries, between cultures, between the saved and the damned.
The word sounded so much more high-toned than weird or exotic or in-between. I was a liminal girl who’d fallen into a life that only kept getting more liminal.
Our time here was coming to a close, after all. Everyone seemed to be withdrawing in preparation. El Tigre and Fausto flew to Costa Rica on family business. Xiomara spent most of her time by herself in the studio. Miles avoided Emanuel and ran up and down the beach, grimly conditioning himself for a return to manual labor. The one steady job he’d ever held was as a pool cleaner, he told me, but there weren’t many pools where he was going, a town near Pittsburgh but with even more guttural German consonants in its name.
We still talked, sometimes. I was angry at him on behalf of Emanuel and the others, but I wasn’t really angry on my own. Miles would probably fail miserably at his goal, but his daughter would grow up knowing an attempt was made. Whereas my own dad just threw up his hands and moved on to a new, less problematic family.
Juan Carlos and Eliska fought and brooded. They had nowhere to go.
Emanuel worked constantly. He had phone calls, videoconferences, meetings I sometimes drove him to. Announcing that the Avert reunion was off would trigger a series of disastrous financial events, so he needed to cushion the blow. Clearing the night flight song for the horror thriller soundtrack would help, and so would figuring out a home for the most completed songs, so they could be out there earning money, hopefully.
He showed me a simplified version of his finances, and it was scary. Money flew in and out of his accounts like ping-pong. Scary ping-pong. A lot of it went to Venezuela and Costa Rica, where family had moved. He paid for private school in New York City for his two daughters, and that was the scariest of all. The amount could probably buy an entire school in the rural Philippines, ten times over.
I reserved us a place to live on Venice Beach, a little furnished apartment we could rent by the month, and visited it to make sure the acoustics were good for playing guitar and the walls were nice and thick. Finding good, inexpensive short-term housing was one of the few normal-world skills I had, so I was glad to be useful that way.
I asked if it would help to find a place for Juan Carlos and Eliska.
“I’ve already found them a shared apartment in Koreatown, free to them for the rest of the year. They’re leaving tomorrow. And I have a plan for a collaboration. I’ll put his name on the songwriting credits. He deserves it, even if he only plays and never wrote.”
“I bet he’s been through the fire with you guys.” I set my laptop aside on the outdoor kitchen table and got up to make us a new pot of coffee. I decided not to drink any more—my trackpad hand was shaking even though I wasn’t really nervous, so I knew it was time to back off on the Colombian.
“When I put the band together, he was the only bassist who would stay. El Tigre was rougher around the edges back then, and I suppose I was too. More demanding, more driven. Yes, I owe him.”
Emanuel’s amazing eyes were red at the corners from lack of sleep. He’d been skipping our morning swims so that he could talk to people on the East Coast as soon as possible. Through it all, I never felt neglected or unnecessary, only proud that I could be at his side and help him, even in my small ways. Or my private ways, like the time he spent on hold with a record label in Atlanta, when I kept him entertained with my mouth. God, that was fucking hot.
If this was the worst it got with us together? I could live this way, and like it.
Emanuel waved me away from the stove. “No more coffee, cariño. I’ll sleep in the afternoon and stay up all night. There’s an awards show after-party I need to attend. Will you come with me?”
“I’d love to. But can I see if Xiomara wants to go as well?” A few hours spent on outfit-planning and makeup would cheer her up, just like it did for me.
He blinked his reddened eyes and rubbed at his temple. “Put it to her, yes. But there’ll be people there...” He made a low growling sound of distaste. The idea of insults to Xiomara took him to the brink of fury.
“I don’t think anyone knows about her. I checked a lot of the gossip sites and fan groups. Some people thought she was Fausto’s girlfriend, other people had her down as a stylist or a backup singer. Nobody said she was trans. What’s the worst that could happen?” I stood behind him and rubbed the back of his shoulders with my thumbs in lazy circles, not sure if the massaging was doing any good, but he seemed to like it—he tipped his head back, closing his eyes so that I could see the ghosts of his eyelashes.
“I’ll agree, as long as she promises to stay close.”
When Xiomara wandered out of the studio around noon, I ambushed her by the dry fountain and begged her to come.
The dull, unfocused expression in her eyes brightened a little, even as she winced with obvious irritation. “I don’t like the idea of being chaperoned. But yeah, I’ll come. I thought I could pull out of this on my own, but it’s not working.”
“Pull out of what? Depression? Music helps. Are you playing music in there all day?”
“Sometimes,” she said, and slid her gaze away.
We went shopping for outfits together, and just like I thought, some of her animation came back. I told her a few porn stories on the lighter side. She talked about her friends from college and the ephemeral bands she’d played in. She didn’t talk at all about computer science or graduate school. Anything I asked along those lines got monosyllables in response.
“Your theme is space pirate princess,” she pronounced, after she’d found me an outfit of silvery leggings with black rubbery kneepads and a strappy, asymmetrical top.
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“I’d wear this a lot better if I had something like a waist. But it’s in budget.”
We got in a mock argument about fashion taste and ended up laughing and punching each other’s arms. I eventually gave her the thumbs-up on a structured purple minidress that complemented her hair in an interesting way. “Your theme is umm, grape fairy,” I told her.
“How you gonna do me like that?” She shook her fist at the ceiling. “I am not a grape, I am a human being!”
By the time we got home and went over makeup color schemes, she was almost back to normal in terms of emotional energy.
“Miles isn’t coming, is he?” she asked as we sorted through eye shadows.
“I didn’t ask. Do you want me to?”
She made a strangled noise and dropped a palette on the floor, where it shattered into an iridescent puff.
“Move over so I can scrape some of that back up,” I told her. “I’m okay being an unpaid doomed-relationship-with-Miles consultant, but that shit’s expensive.”
I was worried I’d gone too far drawing a boundary line, there. Good thing she didn’t get angry. “Sorry, Amy. There’s a gap between what I feel and what I know I should feel, and it’s driving me more than a little crazy. You know that mood when you want to rip your heart right out of your chest and bitch-slap the motherfucker?”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
But I didn’t, not on a deeper level. I was just saying that to sound sympathetic. My heart had led me to Emanuel, so we were on pretty good terms lately.
It turned out that yes, Miles was coming. Emanuel announced it flatly. When we heard the news we both shrugged. My shrug was real, though.
This would be the last party we’d all go to as a unit. A liminal party. Or maybe I was abusing the word, and terminal would be more appropriate, but no one wants to go to a terminal party. If there was drama, I was confident it would be the lighter kind, and we’d spin the raw stuff into happy memories after marking a passage into our new lives.
* * *
