by A. E. Radley
WINTER HEARTS
ELIZA ANDREWS LILA BRUCE GISELLE FOX ANNE HAGAN JEA HAWKINS CARA MALONE TB MARKINSON SUSAN X MEAGHER A.E. RADLEY ADAN RAMIE EMMA STERNER-RADLEY EM STEVENS NATASHA WEST
CONTENTS
Her Holiday Song by Eliza Andrews
Easier Said Than Done (A Love Bites Christmas) by Lila Bruce
The Perfectly Imperfect Storm by Giselle Fox
A Sweetwater Christmas by Anne Hagan
Full Circle: A Must Love Chickens Christmas by Jea Hawkins
Christmas in Angel Valley by Cara Malone
A Christmas Miracle by TB Markinson
Family Matters by Susan X Meagher
Holly Hollydays by A.E. Radley
Drive Me Wild by Adan Ramie
Greengage Holiday Cheer by Emma Sterner-Radley
The Gift by Em Stevens
Stock Take by Natasha West
HER HOLIDAY SONG BY ELIZA ANDREWS
JUNE: “TURN THE PAGE,” BOB SEGER
HOPE CALDWELL
[ FIRST VERSE ]
There are three main things no one ever tells you about being a pop star, three things you only learn as you go and which sometimes make you wish you’d never picked up a guitar or sat down on a piano bench to begin with.
First: Once you make it big — and I mean really big — sell out stadiums, play the SuperBowl halftime show big — you will never have a moment to yourself ever again. Your life becomes a parade of people: managers, publicists, assistant publicists, make-up artists, assistant make-up artists, hair stylists, voice coaches, personal trainers, massage therapists, back-up singers, back-up dancers.
Morning, noon, night.
There’s a novelty to it at first, a kind of thrill when you realize that you’ve become someone who has an actual entourage. I didn’t even noticed it had happened to me until about five years ago when I was backstage in Detroit. There were two hours to go before a major concert, and the hallways buzzed like an irritated ant hill. Dancers crammed themselves into costumes, musicians checked and double-checked their instruments, singers pressed fingers in their ears and hummed to themselves with their eyes shut, and stage managers in headsets and carrying clipboards rushed around shouting orders and answering questions.
I froze in the middle of it all. Shocked.
They were there because of me, I realized. Because of my music. Music I had written. And recorded. And made famous. Music that an enormous quantity of people in the English-speaking world, along with quite a few in the non-English-speaking world, had heard at least once. Music that got played on radio stations and at baseball games, backyard barbecues, birthday parties, grocery stores.
That night in Detroit, after so many years of toil and failure and frustration, it finally dawned on me that I was living out my girlhood dreams. In less than one hundred and twenty minutes, I would walk out onto a stage surrounded by a crowd that sounded like an ocean, each wave beating out a single sound, a single syllable — my name.
“Hope Hope Hope Hope Hope…”
And when they saw me, when I stepped into the blinding beam of the spotlight and the ocean became a roiling black silhouette made out of the shapes of tens of thousands of indistinguishable faces, my name would splinter into a cacophony of cheers and shouts and whistles and airhorns, and I would spread my arms wide, like Jesus granting his benediction, and the ocean would carry me away.
But that brings me to the second thing no one ever tells you about being a pop star.
You can be surrounded by an entourage, you can have your name chanted by a crowd of fifty thousand, you can be as recognizable in Bangkok as you are in Los Angeles, but none of it stops you from feeling more alone than you ever have in your life.
The third thing they don’t tell you is that there’s no going back.
Knock, knock.
The door to the adjoining suite squeaked open. A round face appeared in its crevice.
“Hey,” Charles said, and the deep rumble of his voice was a comforting, familiar sound in this unfamiliar city. “You okay in here? I thought I heard something.”
The television screen lit the room with undulating white light, and for a moment, I was reminded of what the lake looked like back home when the moon was full and the sky was clear, the way the silver moonlight would bounce off the black surface of the water and cast everything with a magical glow.
I nodded. “Yeah. It’s fine. You probably just heard the television.”
And as if to underscore the point, Hollywood provided a deep space CGI explosion on the extra-large plasma screen TV hanging on the wall. I grabbed the remote and thumbed the volume down before the surround sound system could send the tumbler of bourbon sitting on the end table next to me rattling again.
“See?” I said to Charles.
His concerned expression softened, and he grinned at the TV set. “Outer space, huh? And here I was worried that your stalker had somehow gotten past me into your room.”
Affection surged in my heart for my burly bodyguard. Charles could be as overprotective as a mother hen sometimes. It made me want to jump up and hug him.
“Come watch with me, if you want,” I said. “Aliens invade and the President fakes a diplomatic mission so he can plant a nuke on their ship.”
“I think I saw that one,” Charles said. He held up a phone through the half-open doorway. “And I’m on the phone with Margie.”
“Oh,” I said. Then yelled, “Hey, Margie! I’ll have him home to you in a week, I promise!”
I heard a faint, tinny laughter coming from Charles’s phone. It made me smile. I liked my bodyguard’s wife almost as much as I liked him. And once Charles had convinced her that I’m only interested in women and we weren’t ever going to have a Whitney Houston, Kevin Costner situation on our hands, she proved herself to be every bit as sweet and big-hearted as her husband.
“Have a good night, Hope,” Charles said, and the door to his part of the hotel room started to close.
“Charles?”
The door opened again and he gazed at me expectantly, waiting.
I hesitated. What I really wanted was someone to keep me company, to watch this stupid movie and make fun of it with me, but of course I couldn’t ask for that. Or I could, I supposed, but I didn’t want to be that pop star. The obnoxious, spoiled one who thinks that money and fame gives them the right to ask more from the people around them than they really should.
“Would you mind bringing me my guitar?” I said instead. “The old acoustic one with the stickers all over the case? I think they left it with some of the other luggage in your room.”
“Sure,” he said.
I muted the television set a few minutes later, sat forward in the overstuffed hotel chair with the guitar in my lap. On screen, the U.S. President was crawling through an air duct on the alien ship, communicating via headset with the Vice President back in Washington.
I strummed a chord, humming.
Just me and my guitar. It was like that, in the beginning. Before there were back-up dancers. Before there was Charles, before there were hotel suites with multiple rooms. In the beginning it was just me on a makeshift stage in a dingy coffeeshop just off campus, guitar in my lap.
I leaned forward like I was talking into a mic.
“My uncle taught me this song,” I said softly into the pretend microphone. “He and my aunt, my mom’s sister, they raised me, and my uncle was the one who taught me to play guitar.” I strummed another chord. “I don’t know what happens to a person after they die,” I said. “But Uncle Billy, wherever you are, this one’s for you.”
I started in on the old Bob Seger song as quietly as I could, not wanting to disturb Charles’s conversation with Margie in the other room.
Out there in the s
potlight you're a million miles away
Every ounce of energy you try to give away
As the sweat pours out your body like the music that you play
I thought of stadiums as I whispered-sang, stadiums filled with a roiling ocean of silhouettes, each one of them wanting something from me, each one of them hoping I would fill something inside of them that they hadn’t yet filled for themselves.
Later in the evening as you lie awake in bed
With the echoes from the amplifiers ringin’ in your head
You smoke the day's last cigarette, remembering what she said
I thought of the lake, walking distance from Uncle Billy and Aunt Tina’s house, and of dark summer nights lit only by the moon. I thought of the canoe, and the girl who sat in it, and how she pulled her paddle from the water, and how it thudded when she dropped it onto the canoe’s bottom.
I closed my eyes as I sang, remembering the way the canoe rocked as she leaned forward, cupped my face with gentle hands.
Ah, here I am, on a road again
There I am, up on the stage
Here I go, playing the star again
There I go, turn the page
Tears rolled down my cheeks as I reached the chorus. I didn’t know who I was crying for, exactly. For myself? For Uncle Billy?
For a girl. A girl in a canoe on a summer’s night in Georgia, cupping my face with gentle hands in the seconds before she kissed me for the first time.
“I love you,” her memory whispered into my ear.
There I go, turn the page
JULY: “32 FLAVORS,” ANI DIFRANCO
I tapped on the mic, waited for the crowd to calm down, waited for my breath to come back. I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my wrist. My makeup people had gone too heavy for this muggy summer evening, and melting foundation and mascara ran into my eyes.
“We love you, Hope!” someone in the audience shouted, and I laughed — a breathy, staticky sound that echoed back to me through the speakers despite the earplugs I had in.
“I love you, too,” I said, and the audience responded with a mixed wave of laughter and affectionate cooing. “No, but really.” I glanced to the side of the stage, caught one of the prop manager’s eyes and nodded. He hustled out with my old acoustic guitar, handed it to me. I strummed a couple of cords.
And I meant it — I did love them. The Nevada women’s music festival was my kind of gig, the kind of show I’d dreamed of playing when I was a kid, the kind of show that my record label wouldn’t usually let me play anymore because the small, grassroots organization couldn’t afford a big-ticket name like mine. But I’d insisted on this one. These were my people: Crunchy hipster granola girls with nose rings and shaved heads, tatted-up women my own age who remembered me from back in the days when I was nothing more than a YouTube channel and a coffee shop player with a handful of hardcore fans.
Playing this festival felt like getting back to my roots. Which was why I felt like I could get away with:
“I know you probably came expecting me to play all my big hits. And I did just give you one of them,” I told the crowd. A handful of them cheered. “But you know what nobody ever tells you about winning Grammies? You get so sick of playing your, like, four biggest songs that sometimes you wish you’d never written them in the first place.” Laughter. I strummed the guitar a few more times, almost as a reflex. “But some of you have probably followed me long enough that you remember me from before I was a pop star. ’Course, some of you weren’t even born before I was a pop star.” Some of them cheered, some of them laughed; I laughed with them. “Back in the day, I didn’t feel like my own songs were good enough to record — ”
“You’re a genius, Hope!” someone shouted.
“Thanks,” I said. “But you know, the truth is that everyone struggles with feeling good enough, even famous people.” I chuckled at my own joke, even though the laughter of the audience had mostly trickled away. I had their attention now; they knew I was trying to say something serious. “Anyway, back in the day when I was just starting out, I was too scared to play my own stuff, so all I played were cover songs at little bars and coffee shops in Athens, Georgia, where I was a freshman in college at the time. And the song I’m about to play for you now, it always made my set list. I guess it made me feel powerful at a time in my life when I thought I was powerless.”
I played the first few cords of the melody; the band behind me started in on the accompanying percussion. The women in the audience who recognized what I was about to play, the ones my own age and older, immediately went wild.
“It’s a song about being yourself,” I said. “A song about doing your own thing and feeling good about it, no matter what anybody else tells you.”
I closed my eyes and started to play, humming along to my guitar.
And the moment my eyes shut and the crowd disappeared, I was back there, playing The Old Coot in Athens, the uneven legs of my chair rocking back and forth as I worked the guitar. And I looked up, and there she was, the girl from the canoe, the ghost who always haunted my quiet moments. She sat in the front row, elbows propped on her knees, chin propped on her clasped hands. She smiled at me, giving me the encouragement she knew I needed.
“I love you,” her eyes said. “I believe in you.”
Squint your eyes and look closer
I’m not between you and your ambition
I am a poster girl with no poster
I am thirty-two flavors and then some
And I’m beyond your peripheral vision
So you might want to turn your head
’Cause some day you are gonna get hungry
And eat most of the words you just said
That night at The Old Coot, Julie didn’t yet know I was cheating on her. How could she have even expected it? We were in love — so, so in love. She couldn’t have expected it, because I hadn’t expected it.
I needed to tell her.
I couldn’t bear to tell her.
How do you tell your girlfriend — your high school sweetheart who’d held your hand as you both came stumbling out of the closet together — that you’d met someone? A male someone? And how did you tell her that, without really meaning to, without really thinking you were going to do it, you’d slept with him, not once but several times? How did you tell her that you thought you wanted to leave her, even though you still loved her?
How was it possible to love someone and still want to leave them?
And I’ve never tried to give my life meaning
By demeaning you
And I would like to state for the record
I did everything that I could do
Back at the Nevada women’s music festival, my eyes burned with tears when I finished the song to the sound of the audience’s enthusiastic clapping. They probably couldn’t see me cry from where they were, even the ones who’d pressed their way to the front of the crowd. My manager had insisted upon a buffer zone between them and the stage, because it was hard for Charles — or anyone else — to protect me up here on this makeshift platform, and I’d been getting death threats from my stalker again.
I would associate that song with Julie forever.
I sniffed wetly when I finished — and that they’d be able to hear, even if they couldn’t see the tears. I used the need to hand the acoustic guitar back to the stage manager as an excuse to turn my back to the audience and wipe the moisture off my cheeks.
“Thanks,” I told the audience with a big smile when I turned back around. “I’m glad you liked it. That was Ani DiFranco, of course, for those of you who didn’t know. My idol when I was eighteen years old. Now — are you ready for something from my new album?”
They went wild.
Of course they were ready. They could be patient with a single Ani cover, but this was why most of them were here, after all. For me.
It was laughable. If they knew who I really was, beneath the glitz and music awards and magazine covers, if
they’d known the way I broke the heart of the only girl I’d ever really loved, they wouldn’t shell out their hard-earned money to see me, to buy my music. They’d rip me down from their pedestal and throw me into the heap with the rest of their broken idols.
I drummed my fingers on my desk as the phone rang. I’d dialed the number on a whim, and now I realized I didn’t know what I would say if she actually picked up on the other end.
Three rings went by. I debated whether or not to leave a voicemail.
“Hello?”
“Oh — hi,” I stammered. “Julie?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Hope.”
There was a long pause. A very long pause.
“Julie?”
“I’m here,” she said. “I just… wasn’t really expecting to hear from you.”
I let out a nervous, high-pitched laugh. “I can’t imagine why you’re surprised,” I said sarcastically. “But, uh, how are you? How’s things?”
Ugh, I sounded like a freaking idiot. Worldwide music phenomenon reduced to mushy ineptitude by an old flame. A flame that hadn’t burned for half a decade.
“Things are… good,” Julie said. A beat passed. “Hope, why are you calling me?”
“I, um…”
I stood up from the desk and paced behind it, gazing out the big plate glass window that overlooked the infinity pool in the backyard. It was good to finally be home, to be in my own study, to be looking at my own backyard. Given my summer tour schedule, I’d spent so little time at home lately that it didn’t even feel like home. It felt like someone else’s big ol’ Southern California mansion. Its sheer size made me practically agoraphobic, so since I’d gotten back, I’d spent almost all my time in this study, at this desk, overlooking the pool while I tinkered with new songs.
While my mind kept going back, for some reason I didn’t understand yet, to Julie.
I couldn’t explain any of that to her, so I just said: “I know we haven’t talked in a few years. But you’ve been on my mind lately and… I don’t know, I just got to missing you. So I picked up the phone. Is that alright?”