Mirrored (Follow Your Bliss series Book 4)

by Riordan Hall, Deirdre

  She turned away from the window, her face open in agreement, as if daring him to try to wrench away the pain she’d carried or wash it out to sea altogether. “The strangest thing of all,” she gestured around at nothing in particular, “adults, parents, my mom and dad, they’re just people. They have flaws and heartache. They make mistakes and do messed up shit. They leave sons, die too soon, they—” her face crumbled.

  Alex rocked her in time to the waves crashing outside until he heard her sniffle. “It might sound corny, trite even, but they say, that ‘In order to see the rainbow, you have to endure the rain.’ And damn it all if it isn’t pouring.”

  After breakfast in their room, Brighton and Alex dashed into the street, bulky raindrops splashing their legs. They jumped into the car.

  “So much for the top down or a bike ride.” He maneuvered through quaint streets, past shops, and into a residential area just one lane in from the beach. He pulled up in front of a single story, alabaster cottage with vines growing up one side and a prim hedge.

  “I haven’t been here in a long time,” Brighton said, apparently recognizing her surroundings.

  Alex took her hand when they knocked on the wooden door. A label on the post box said, Constance Holmes. Through the door, he heard slow shuffling. A stooped woman with red-grey hair answered. She struggled to look up at them, her arthritic bones unyielding.

  “Can I help you?” the old woman said.

  “Hi, Granny, it’s Brighton,” she said.

  “Brighton? My Bri? You’re so big. Your mother had sent photos, but my, you’re a real woman now.”

  Brighton laughed, her eyes shining. “I suppose.”

  After tea and a chat, Alex asked if she’d take them to see El.

  Brighton blanched.

  Constance smiled widely. “Well of course, I hadn’t made it out yet this week. I used to go a couple times a week, but I can’t drive; they took my permit, you see, these fingers don’t work well anymore. Now, a neighbor drives so she can visit her husband, and I see El once a week. Let me go to the garden, gather some flowers, and we’ll be on our way. This’ll be such a treat.”

  Alex wasn’t expecting such exuberance at the suggestion of visiting the gravesite, nor did he anticipate the dour look cemented on Brighton’s face.

  The rain had let up. Brighton had to cram between Alex, her granny, and the gearshift. He was glad that she at least got in the car.

  “So you haven’t told me about your mother. I used to hear from her about once a month, and then it trickled to every few months. I suppose she’s busy. Did she ever marry again?”

  Alex felt Brighton flinch. “She’s okay. Yeah, busy. Her company is international, doing really well.”

  “Did she settle back down? I don’t suppose she had any other children; she was a bit older when she had you. Though I suppose that was for the best, she and your dad got all their excitement out of their systems.”

  “No, uh, she’s single.”

  “That’s a shame. I hoped she’d find love again. Though, it’s possible Eliezer robbed the love from the hearts of every other man who’d laid eyes on her, just so he could have her to himself. I imagined he made some kind of pact with a sea witch when he moved me here. He said it was good for my arthritis, the salt air, but I think there was some other devilry going on.”

  The old woman’s laugh made her sound young again. “I’m kidding. They were good kids. And how about you both? Planning to get married? Your grandfather and I said our vows when I was twenty-one, now—Oh look, we’re here,” she said, interrupting herself.

  Brighton took her time getting out of the MG, because she was canned in there or because of trepidation, Alex wasn’t sure.

  Constance doddered down the grass path between gravestones. They were on a hill overlooking the water when she finally stopped in front of a large marble stone, etched with an angel and a fox. Constance handed Brighton the flowers and took her hand. Alex hung back, but the ocean breeze carried their words to his ears.

  “You were only a whisker higher than that headstone the last time you were here. Then again, he had to get a tall one so he could see to the ocean. He misses us every day, especially you. I’m sure of that. There you go. Let’s place those right down there.”

  Brighton set the flowers down, crumbling to her knees. Alex rushed over. Constance laughed. “Now girl, don’t go dragging me down with you. I’m liable not to get up.”

  Alex pulled Brighton into his arms.

  Constance stroked her hair. “Go on now, let it out. Let your tears water the ground around you, leave them here to grow fondly into grass or daisies. It’s alright to be sad…”

  Chapter Twelve

  When Brighton’s tears dried in salty streaks on her cheeks, she got to her feet. Constance reached her withered arms up, planting them on her granddaughter’s forearms.

  “Now, you listen to me, Brighton Phoenix Holmes, it is okay to be sad, but I can see the weight of grief that you’ve been carrying around bowing your shoulders. If you’re not careful, you’re going to end up gazing at the ground instead of the stars, like me. You’re too young, too pretty, and too much my son to let that happen. It’s time to let it go. Now Alexis, if you please, I need a nap,” she said, motioning to the car.

  After saying goodbye to Brighton’s granny and borrowing the keys for Windover, Alex let the top of the MG down, and they set off, winding along the coast.

  “That was brave,” Alex said after a time.

  “She’s brave. She handles it so gracefully. Her own son, she outlived him, that’s tragic.”

  “Your story is too.”

  “Yeah, but—Yeah.”

  “You should keep in touch with her. I wish I had more family. There are a few disapproving aunts, uncles, and cousins peppered around the countryside. A distant relation took my dad to court once, claiming some stake in his wealth. His sister is mad about a gold watch that belonged to their father. Nope, it’s just him and me.”

  Brighton took his hand in hers. “And me I hope.”

  Alex smiled as broadly as the shore lining the sea as he turned to a wrought iron gate, creeping with flowering vines. He reached out the window to a keypad. “Phoenix, huh?” he said.

  “What? My middle name?”

  “Fitting.”

  “Why? Do you really expect I’ll rise from the ashes or do you assume my parents conceived me in Arizona and in true rock and roll fashion didn’t want to forget?”

  “No, it just happens to be the passcode for this gate. Your grandmother told me.”

  “Oh.”

  The MG motored into the circular driveway as if it belonged there in a time long past when men wore three-piece suits and women were demure. A fountain dribbled in the middle. The lawn was manicured and the flowers in bloom. The only thing that betrayed the estate’s vacancy were the dusty sheets covering everything inside.

  “Welcome home,” Alex said.

  “It’s coming back to me,” she said, alighting on the foot of the stairs and shaking a board loose just below the first riser. She started laughing when she uncovered a plastic pony, a pack of crayons, and a cache of guitar picks. Her face relaxed. “This is home,” she said, looking around.

  Alex sat down beside her, taking the pick she wore around her neck into his fingers.

  “How’d you know?” she asked, looking down at the coordinates and then into his eyes.

  “Lucky guess.” He kissed her lightly. “Want to go exploring? I promise I won’t chase you with snappy crabs or insist you say pah-tay-toh.”

  She nodded, and they set forth, exploring each room in the house. Brighton shared an anecdote about nearly every one of them as they tiptoed from the depths of her memory. Just then, they heard a crackling noise.

  “What was that?” Brighton asked.

  “It sounded like a radio or an intercom.”

  “Good to know it still works.”

  Alex strode to the window. The same black car that had pu
lled over in front of them on the highway peeled away.

  “What do they want?”

  Alex narrowed his eyes at another car farther down the road. As the taillights faded, Alex was sure bumper stickers covered the boot, most notably a black and white one spelling, The Gracks.

  “Who was that?”

  “No one,” Alex said. “Nothing. Better to ignore it.”

  As the afternoon rolled on, they left the manor for a surf. Alex had the peculiar feeling that eyes and lenses recorded his every move. The day had turned sunny and bright, reflecting off the waves like gems. He reclined on his surfboard, letting the salt wash away his worries. After Brighton caught one wave, she sat in the sand, watching him or the seagulls or thinking about her mother, he wasn’t sure.

  That evening when they went back to the Pub for dinner, Milly rushed up to them with excitement. “You’ll never believe it, there was a reporter here, well, not like the old kind. She was young, seemed a bit loopy. I still don’t understand you young people and the holes you put in your faces, but she was asking all about the two of you. She told me her magazine is doing a feature on Bang Bang. She was especially curious about you, and how the children of two infamous rock stars found each other and if you were in love. I told her you were staying at the Inn around the corner, hope you don’t mind. I imagine she’ll leave you a note with the desk requesting a proper interview. Isn’t that exciting?”

  Alex caught the look Brighton shot; it was obvious Milly hadn’t registered he was also in a world-famous band, but more importantly, he hoped Brighton hadn’t picked up on his hunch about the identity of said loopy reporter.

  Chapter Thirteen

  After saying a temporary farewell to the coast, Alex and Brighton took the long ride north, to Scotland, to visit his father, Chaz. The strange sense Alex had that someone intimately involved with the band was tipping off the paparazzi chased him to the comfort of his father’s home.

  They pulled up to the imposing sandstone structure with spires and iron gates. Nimbus clouds pooled in the sky, greeting them with a proper Scottish hello as Alex pulled the MG into the long driveway on the outskirts of Glasgow.

  Chaz appeared from a side door, impervious to the buckets of rain dropping from the sky. “My boy,” he said, pulling his son in for a hug. “And Brighton. Don’t worry, I won’t remark on how big ya’ve gotten since I last saw ye.” He hugged her too.

  Her smile told Alex that she liked him already, not that they were strangers, but she’d noted it had been a half dozen years since he’d visited Claire in New York.

  “Och. I see you brought the MG. El and I easily put a-hundred and seventy-five kilometers on that baby. Good memories, even the time he boked in it before I could pull over. Horrible stench. How’d she run?” Chaz shook the rain out of his hair. “How silly of me. Brighton is getting drenched, and we’re having a spa. Let’s get inside. Ya get used to the rain after a time.”

  After bringing in their luggage, Chaz showed them into the kitchen where a woman fixed tea and sandwiches.

  “Salut! Comment vas-tu?” Alex asked Adrienne, the housekeeper. She smiled shyly. “So Da, how are things?”

  “I’ll tell ye, those louts are goin’ to hear from me if they keep calling after ye. Poor Adrienne here has been fielding calls all day every day. She’s all riled up, not used to the phone ringing anymore, I s’pose. She don’t understand ‘em either. I hear her hollerin’ in French. Time I get rid of the house phone anyway. No one ‘cept solicitors and yer crazy fans call here. Shite how they got the number.”

  “Who exactly has been calling?”

  “Photographers, magazine reporters. Cockney bird if I ever heard one, but trying to hide her accent. I’ve always been able to tell. Some of ‘em are ashamed, see?” he said to Brighton.

  “It all started up ‘bout last week. Driving me nuts. But then again the media these days are off their head. Enough of that havering. Tell me about yer travels. Adrienne, joindre à nous pour le thé,” he said in surprisingly good French.

  With fresh cups of tea in hand, Alex filled his dad in on their travails through London, then Brighton-by-the-Sea, and visiting Constance.

  “She’s a sweet ‘ole gal. Like a mother too me too. Now I s’pose Alex wants to show you around his home turf. I regret never buying up the estate next to Windover, but between El, Neil, and I we had a place to stay in every UK region, ‘cept Wales. Neil missed his chance on that one. His girl from Dodwy, said, ‘You’ve been married four times, I’ll not be number five,’” Chaz said in a high-pitched imitation of an aggrieved girlfriend.

  They all laughed.

  “If you head into the city, don’t stay out too late, you’ll give poor Adrienne a heart attack.” He put his hand gently on hers.

  “Gee Da; you seem awfully concerned about Adrienne these days.”

  The housekeeper pursed her lips, gazing into her cup of tea.

  If his father’s skin weren’t already ruddy, he’d swear he blushed.

  “She looks after me. Lord knows I need looking after. N'est-ce pas?”

  “I actually think we’ll stay in tonight. Enough excitement for one day, huh?” Alex said, turning to Brighton.

  She shrugged, but she looked tired as if she hadn’t been sleeping well or the previous night’s antics caught up to her.

  “How about I’ll show you around the house and then we’ll have some dinner.”

  “Adrienne’ll cook something good, ye can be sure of that,” Chaz added.

  Alex showed Brighton the myriad rooms, nooks, and secret passageways in the palatial home. It wasn’t quite as grand as Windover, but it had a lived-in, manly quality that he loved. Chaz had the place in London and if Alex didn’t stay there or with one of the guys in the band, he called the house in Glasgow home.

  In the great room that his dad used for entertaining, one wall was windows, another covered in an enormous mirror Alex called the narcissists’ downfall, and a third illustrated a painted mural of Glasgow. Brighton looked up at it or right through it as if memory or worry called her to another city entirely. But she was there, with him, and he wasn’t going to let her succumb to her fears.

  “As you can see my dad has a lot of hometown pride.” Alex pointed to the area Chaz grew up in saying it was just moldering tenements and block housing. “Here, this is Bearsden, that’s where I met Finn.” The name tasted bitter in his mouth.

  “Finnery,” Brighton said, laughing.

  “Not anymore,” he mumbled. “My dad bought a house there for his mum, my gran, after his father died. It was the farthest she’d go, but not very far at all. He didn’t want to leave her alone, in the flat she’d lived in since he was a baby. It really was no place for an older woman, especially when she was looking after me. My dad knew all too well what the kids in that neighborhood got up to. Gran griped about it, but he’d had enough of the street fights and squalor. There’s poetry and art in the flickering of neon signs, sooty trains, and lots filled with rubble. It’s inspiration to create a better life or just eff stuff up. But he was beyond slumming it once the royalty checks rolled in. Yanno?”

  Alex pointed out a few other areas on the map, but his mind wouldn’t leave the little place that marked where he’d met Finn; they’d been best mates. What really had gone wrong?

  After dinner that night, Alex took Brighton to the music room, sharing stories as she gazed at the photos and awards lining the walls. There were a fair number including photos of her father. His fingers ached to play a guitar and jam. He flipped on some low lights and took out one his favorite guitar in his dad’s collection, a Gibson Thunderbird.

  Brighton seemed hesitant to move from the spot, even as he turned circles around her singing the first nonsense that cleared the backwash of thoughts about Finn and Suzie. Music always did the job to get the grounds of unwanted thinking to stop percolating.

  He wondered if she feared what she could do with any of the guitars on the shelf. Her sonic-rock light was powerful.
“Come on, let’s jam,” he said encouragingly as a chord rang out, piercing the uncertainty on her face.

  She eyed a row of Fenders and picked one he didn’t recognize. She strapped up and plugged in. The next hours ignited in a fury of lead guitar parts, solos, clashing chords, and harmonies. After an impassioned roar of feedback, Alex clutched her by the shoulders and kissed her hard, realizing exactly why Finn had a problem with her, he was jealous, not because Brighton absorbed the better amount of his attention whether they were together or apart, but because she rocked harder than anyone he knew.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next morning, Alex remarked that even if the photographers followed them to Glasgow proper, he wouldn’t hide or be fearful in his own city.

  The pair strolled hand in hand down the sidewalk, still damp from the rain the night before. “I think we may see some sun today.” They passed shops and cafes and then turned down another street. “Remember when we were visiting the Hearst Castle and you asked, ‘Where do you live?’ What I think you meant to ask was where I call home. That was last summer’s quest, right?”

  Brighton nodded.

  “I’ve thought a lot about it, and I’m not into narrowly defining things. Most things anyway. I can’t live in a black and white world when it comes to who I am or defining home for that matter. It has variances and texture, sounds and smells, and is a place to sleep deeply or hunch over, in the midnight glow of a lamp, because the words won’t stop flowing, and I can’t get them down quickly enough. But it’s also people and music and the road between here and there.”

  They’d stopped on the sidewalk in front of a café bordered by bistro tables and customers with small dogs. Brighton looked at Alex intently as if he was about to reveal the secrets of alchemy, turning dust to gold in words that radiated H-O-M-E.