by Amy Jones
“Shhh,” the woman said, without turning around. “Your brother’s still asleep.”
“He’ll sleep through anything,” Ava said. She opened a different drawer and pulled out a spoon. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
The woman smiled. “Thanks.” She seemed familiar, but Ava couldn’t quite place her.
Ava opened a cabinet and took down a mug. Scrolling through her hazy memory until, suddenly, she stopped on an image. “You’re the singer from that band.”
The woman raised an eyebrow. “Yes,” she said. “I am.”
Leaning against the counter, Ava rotated the mug around in her hand, trying to make her brain kick into gear. There was only one reason the woman would be here, in their kitchen, making coffee. “You slept with Val,” she said.
The corners of the woman’s mouth twitched into a fleeting smile. “Yes, that’s still true.” She picked up the coffee pot and motioned it toward Ava.
Ava held her mug out and the woman poured. It smelled strong, the way Ava liked it. “That’s great,” she said. “He seriously loves you.”
“So I hear.” The woman poured some coffee for herself and brought the mug to her lips, watching Ava. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked eventually.
“Of course I do,” Ava said. “I was at the show too.”
“Right.” The woman sipped her coffee thoughtfully. “My name’s Mags.”
“Ava.”
“I know.” She smiled. “What I mean is, do you remember anything about what happened last night?”
Ava took in a sharp breath. “Did I do something stupid?”
“No, you didn’t.” Mags paused for a long time. “No,” she repeated eventually. “You really didn’t.”
“I don’t know if I believe you,” Ava said. She stared down into her coffee cup, trying to see her reflection. But the liquid was flat, black, lifeless.
“You did tell me my boobs looked smaller in person.”
Ava’s eyes flicked up to Mags’s chest, and then her face. “They do,” she said. “It’s a camera trick. Like how they always take my photo with my head tilted to the right, because studies show left-cheek poses are supposed to make you seem emotional and expressive. Apparently, this is something I need help with.” She took a drink of her coffee. “Me and the Mona Lisa, I guess.”
Mags put her mug down. “Let’s see.” She moved to Ava’s left side, then her right. “Oh, I see it now,” she said. “It’s like you’re a completely different person. Sweet, kind, vulnerable.” She moved back to the right. “Stone-cold bitch.”
Ava moved her right cheek forward. “I guess I’ll have to walk into rooms like this from now on.”
“I know I, for one, would feel better if you did.” Mags picked up her mug again, peering at Ava over the rim. “This might sound weird for me to ask you, but…are you okay?”
“Yeah, of course,” Ava responded automatically. Then she paused, feeling her face flush. How long had it been since someone had sincerely asked her that? Mags at least deserved a real answer. “I mean, no. Probably not. But I’m not going to kill myself or anything.”
“I hope that’s true, Ava.” Mags drained her coffee and put the mug down on the counter. “Tell your brother I had to leave, okay? And you know what? Tilt your head whatever way you want.” She touched Ava’s cheek, briefly, before walking away down the hall, and for the rest of the morning Ava felt the delicate line her finger had traced hot on her skin, like a brand.
Flash: Good morning, Cincinnati, I’m Johnny Flash, and this is the Morning Mashup on CKBV, 102.3 on your FM dial. It is currently 8:15 am on February 12, for those of you who are keeping track, and this morning I’m here with Mags Kovach and Paul Van Ness from the band Align Above. Currently in the middle of a massive North American tour, the band is in town playing a sold-out show at the Harley tonight. Mags, Paul, welcome to CKBV.
Van Ness: Thanks for having us.
Kovach: Yeah, great to be here.
Flash: How’s the tour been going?
Van Ness: It’s been great. We’ve had such an amazing response around the country since our very first show in New York. It’s hard to believe it’s almost over.
Flash: And you’re headed to Europe next?
Van Ness: Yes, we wrap up this leg back home in Toronto next week, and then we head out again a few days later. It’s been such a whirlwind, it’s hard to even wrap our heads around it.
Flash: I bet it has. Your album Nothingview was released last November to almost instant critical and commercial success. How surprising was that for you?
Van Ness: Completely surprising. I mean, we believe in what we do, of course. But you never know how people will respond.
Flash: Well, you have definitely tapped into some key demographics. I know my wife bought a copy the day it dropped, and she hasn’t bought a CD in years. And my daughter has been playing it non-stop for the past three months.
Van Ness: That’s nice. Tell them thank you.
Flash: There’s obviously something in your music that people are really connecting with. Any idea what that might be, Mags?
Kovach: I guess…I mean, we love what we do. People can hear that, maybe. In the music.
Flash: Your voice has been described as a force of nature, and your live performances are…well, emotional isn’t even a strong enough word. What drives you?
Kovach: I think we just covered that, Jimmy.
Flash: It’s Johnny.
Kovach: Oh.
Flash: I know this is tough to talk about, but you recently lost your husband and bass player, Sam Cole, to cancer. That must be hard for you all, to perform without him.
Van Ness: Yes, of course. Sam was instrumental in putting this album together. All the bass tracks are his. We hear him in every song we play.
Kovach: You do?
Van Ness: Of course.
Flash: And no doubt this contributes to the emotional quality of your performance, Mags.
Kovach: No doubt.
Flash: It’s probably what people are responding to. That grief.
Kovach: People are buying the album and coming to the shows because they want to hear me be sad?
Flash: [laughs] It’s kind of our natural instinct, isn’t it? As humans? To seek out that raw emotion to remind us that we’re all human, that we’re all connected by something larger…
Kovach: To stare at a train wreck, you mean.
Van Ness: That’s not—
Flash: I’m just saying, it probably hasn’t hurt your ticket sales…
Kovach: Fuck you, Jimmy. This interview is over.
Mags
February 2015
“The Worst Place to Be”
“Five minutes,” Emiko said, sticking her head in the door of Mags’s dressing room.
“Okay,” Mags said without looking at her.
She was sitting in front of the mirror, watching the edges of her face wobble under the light, her features fading and then reappearing as if the mirror were a giant Etch A Sketch that someone kept shaking and then redrawing. It was probably that pill Paul had given her an hour earlier, or the one that Emiko had given her, or maybe a cumulative high from all the pills she had been taking since starting the tour, all the alcohol she had pumped into her system. Trying to find the perfect balance. This one keeps you up, this one brings you down. This one helps you remember all the things you need to remember. This one helps you forget all the things you want to forget.
Three months into their North American tour, and they were in Boston or Pittsburgh or Baltimore—hell, they could have been in Cleveland for all Mags knew—about to play another sold-out show, the eighteenth or twentieth or twenty-fifth in a row. The same faceless mass night after night, the same non-descript green rooms, the same lights blinding her as she stepped out onto the stage. She had started drinking that morning before the sun had even come up, sunk down in a seat in the back of their tour bus with a six-pack of Old Milwaukee, watching the world outs
ide change from deepest night to the orangey glow of dawn before switching from beer to bourbon. She had even done a few lines of coke in the bathroom right before their call, procured from a squirrely looking guy she found backstage who she assumed worked for the venue but could just as easily have been trying to steal their equipment.
But she still felt like the balance was off tonight. She swam through the halls of the venue to wait in the wings, unable to feel the tips of her fingers, unable to focus on the faces of the people around her. She wondered what the temperature was outside. What night of the week it was. Whether Valentine’s Day had happened yet. Whether this haze she was in was from all the drugs, or something else. Whether it even mattered. Whether any of this mattered.
Next to her was Josh, the kid who Paul and Zac and Emiko had hired to replace Sam as their bassist. They had auditioned him without Mags because she hadn’t wanted any part of it. Also, she’d been drunk and had forgotten it was happening. He had avoided her for most of the tour. He was, after all, replacing her husband.
“Sounds like a good crowd out there tonight,” she said, a feeble attempt at small talk, her tongue thick in her mouth. “Looks like it’s at capacity.”
“Yeah,” said Josh nervously. “It’s sold out.”
She pulled back the curtain and peered out at the audience, but it was all a blur, eyes glowing from inside an amorphous black fog. “That’s bonkers. Who knew they liked us so much in…where are we, anyway?”
Josh looked at her like she had three heads. “Toronto. We’ve got two shows here, tonight and tomorrow night.”
The word smashed into her gut like a cannonball, momentarily stealing her breath. They were in Toronto. She was home.
“Let’s go,” Paul said, coming up behind her.
“We’re in Toronto!” she said, an edge of desperation in her voice that she hadn’t expected. “Paul, we’re in Toronto.”
“I know,” he said, not unkindly. But still, he gave her a little shove. “And they’re waiting for us.”
She stepped out onto the stage. Immediately she felt that power surging through her, that electric shock of adrenaline that hit her like a taser at the beginning of every show, building up from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. She walked up to the mic, each step sending reverberations through her body, her hand connecting with the mic stand, her palm curling around the familiar cold metal as if it were being called home. Even though the lights were off, she could feel the energy coming off the crowd, the tension rippling against her skin.
She took a deep breath. The noise grew to a deafening roar. I am not going to cry. I am not going to cry. I am not going to cry.
The lights hit her. And she burst into tears.
* * *
The first time it happened was in Boston, the second show of the tour, following the kickoff in New York. Mags had felt a strange ache in her body, one that at the time she attributed to the abuse she had been putting herself through, all the sleepless nights, the intoxicants, the general heaviness of her bones. But ever since that night on the balcony with Ava, she could feel something inside her coming apart, as though the threads that held her together had been slowly and quietly undone by the sight of this other woman’s grief.
When she stepped onstage in Boston, her voice broke almost immediately, a lump forming in the back of her throat that she didn’t recognize until she opened her mouth again and a sob came out. She reached up and touched her face and was surprised to find that her cheeks were wet with tears. She was standing onstage in front of three thousand screaming fans and she was crying.
She managed to get through the song, then whispered to Paul that she needed a break, they should do an instrumental. He stared at her strangely—they never played instrumentals this early in the set—but nodded. Backstage, she ran to the bathroom, splashed water on her face, looked at herself in the mirror—her bloodshot eyes, her swollen skin. It was a sad song, she thought, a song about Sam, although she had sung it plenty of times before without any incident.
“It’s normal,” Emiko said afterward, when their regular set was over and Mags collapsed in the dressing room, her face red and swollen, listening as the crowd outside chanted for an encore. She had barely made it through, her voice breaking during every second song, the tears flowing freely as she stood onstage, going through the motions of performing. “Your husband just died. You’re going to cry sometimes.”
“This…I don’t know. It was different.” She hadn’t cried much in the months after Sam’s death, but when she did, it was like a passing thunderstorm, furious and sudden, abating just as quickly. Still, she had been holding it together. She had been functioning. And aside from that one night in New York, she hadn’t done anything she regretted. At least, not yet. But trying to sing with a broken heart was like trying to run with a broken leg. It wasn’t that she felt sad so much as she felt a physical pain. “It comes on like an explosion, and I don’t know how to make it stop.”
“It’s been a rough few months. And now everything is happening quickly for you and the band. It’s natural for you to feel overwhelmed, after everything.”
A rough few months. Mags wanted to rip the perfect sleek ponytail off Emiko’s perfectly oval head. Instead, she gritted her teeth and said, “I just want to make it stop.”
“We’ll find you something.” Emiko rummaged through her purse, pulling out bottles and plastic bags and dumping them all out on the table in front of her. “Pick one.”
Mags poked a baggie with her finger. “I don’t know what any of these are.”
“It doesn’t matter. Any of them will work.” When Mags continued to hesitate, Emiko snatched a bottle, shaking out two pills and handing them to Mags. “Come on now, eat up. You’ve got to get back out there for the encore.”
“I hate you,” Mags said, picking the pills out of Emiko’s palm and swallowing them. “I hate you and this band and everything to do with this stupid industry. The only thing I don’t hate about it is me.”
Emiko smiled. “And that’s why people love you.”
And so Mags went back out, and she performed better than she ever had before. She was wild, passionate, wailing, spilling her whole heart onto the stage and then leaving it there as if she had a never-ending supply. And even in her inebriated state she could tell the audience was eating it up, laughing as she swung the mic stand like a sword, cheering as she gave the finger to the security guard who stopped her when she tried to stage-dive into the crowd. But Mags knew it was an act. It was just Mags pretending to be Mags, putting on a mask, going through the motions.
Minutes later, Mags stumbled back into the wings. She closed her eyes, letting the noise of the crowd wash over her, reminding herself that this was the only thing she’d ever wanted.
Except she had wanted Sam too. And what did one matter, without the other?
After that night, the tears didn’t stop. For the rest of the tour, Emiko kept feeding her pills—enough to keep her floating above her grief, the pain present but bearable, the tears a permanent salty slick on her cheeks. And afterward, when she came down from the pills, she would start to drink. She told herself it was to help her sleep, to eradicate those dreams that woke her in a panic every morning—where was she? what was she doing? where was Sam?—the alcohol instantly dissolving those walls in her head that kept things organized, grief leaking out everywhere, messy and beautiful and strange. She’d wake in the afternoon dry-mouthed and embarrassed, more determined than ever to move forward, live her life, make things happen. But that would only last until she had to talk to someone, until she had to be Mags Kovach, and then the whole cycle would start all over again. Eventually, Mags had retreated so far into herself that she felt like she was looking at the world from the bottom of a deep, dark hole.
“Maybe I should take some time off,” she’d said to Emiko, after a particularly brutal show in Philadelphia, where she had fallen off the stage and kicked one of the security guys in the shin when he trie
d to help her back up. “Cancel the rest of the tour dates. We can do that, can’t we?”
“Oh, honey, no,” Emiko said. “If we hold off now, that’s it, the band’s finished. Do you think that’s what Sam would have wanted? Do you think he’d want everything he worked so hard for to just disintegrate because he was gone? I know you’re tired, but don’t you want to do this for him?”
Maybe she was right, but Mags was in no shape to argue. So they stayed on the road, and she kept doing everything she could to forget that she was alone. She was no longer the Mags who needed to be in charge. So much easier to let the pills be in charge.
But when the radio host in Cincinnati had suggested that people were coming to her shows just to see the mess she’d become, she had responded by walking out of the room, locking herself in the bathroom and chugging back whiskey from her flask as Emiko banged on the door. And when, right before their show in Chicago, Emiko had sent her a link to a story on a popular online music site titled “Music and Love Aligning: The Heartbreak of Mags Kovach,” she had trashed the green room, pushing over the catering table and dumping piles of cut fruit and vegetables onto the floor. She told herself it didn’t matter what she did. But then she’d see her tear-streaked face on the front page of a paper or splashed all over the internet, and Mags would remember that people were watching her now, waiting to see what she’d do next. She was setting herself on fire and everyone was just watching, cameras out, waiting to see how hot she would burn.
* * *
Home. Her key in the door, fitting with such a familiar scrape that it was almost like being transported back in time. As though she would open the door and Sam would be there, sprawled out on the couch watching a movie or coming out of the bathroom wearing a towel or saying “Hey baby, I’m in here” from whatever room he was in. She pulled the key out, stared at it for a minute. Considered turning around, walking back down the hall, getting in a cab, and never coming back.