by J. A. Huss
I leave the window down because it’s getting hot. I feel sticky from old sweat. I get out and follow Chancer into his offices.
He waves me into a room as the front desk people, and the full room of patients, eye me with curiosity. “So, lose your temper?” Chancer says, setting his briefcase down and snapping on a pair of gloves. He palpitates my throat while I think that question over.
I decide, “Probably,” is a safe, and likely true, answer.
“You need to stop doing that,” he replies. “Say ‘ah.’” He looks down my throat, nods for me to close my trap, and then takes his gloves off and throws them into the trash can. “Rock, you’re fine. It’s a slight abrasion, probably from all that yelling.”
“What do you know about my yelling?”
He picks up a phone on the wall and presses a few buttons. “Yeah, this is Dr. Chancer downstairs. I have Rock in my office.” He pauses. Then, “Mmm-hmm.” He looks at me and smiles. “Sure, sure.”
What the fuck is he doing?
Chancer smiles at me, but he’s listening to the person on the other end of that line. He chuckles. “Yeah, yeah. OK. I’ll send him up.” He puts the phone receiver back in place on the wall and picks up his briefcase. “Go upstairs and talk to Margie, Rock. She’s the best person to help you today.”
Chancer opens the exam room door and walks out, leaving me sitting there.
I let out a big breath and get down from the table, feeling pretty stupid for showing up here again. What the fuck did I do now?
I walk past everyone in the waiting room and front desk and push my way into the little vestibule area where the stairs meet the front door. I’m heading straight through them when someone calls my name from above.
“RK. Do not walk out on me. I just ditched my eight o’clock to accommodate you.”
I turn around and look up. This must be—“Margie?”
“Get up here. I heard all about this weekend and today is your come-to-Jesus moment, Rowan Kyle. And it’s about time. These little Rock Hunts are over.”
Then she turns away and walks out of my line of sight.
I follow her, more out of dumbfounded curiosity than anything else. A door swings closed to an office down the hallway and I stop to read the plaque. Dr. Margie Sanderson, PhD, LP. Dammit. The counselor Chancer told me about last week.
The door swings open again and Margie peeks her head out. “Get in here, Mr. Saber. I’m not in a good mood today so I have very little patience for your bullshit.”
The door closes again.
I pull on the handle and walk inside to a minimalist waiting room. Two uncomfortable-looking chairs, a window, no reception, a door that leads into another office. Margie is in there, already sitting at her desk, shuffling through a thick file folder of papers. “Sit,” she barks at me, pointing to one of two chairs in front of her desk.
I look warily around, decide I’m happy she didn’t ask me to lie on the couch, and take a seat.
“Rock climbing, huh?” Margie says, still looking at the papers in the folder.
“What?”
She peeks at me over her thin-wire-framed glasses. “The outfit, Rowan Kyle.” She points a pen at my clothes.
I glance down and realize I look like a model in a Patagonia catalog. Oak-brown rock pants, trail shirt, and multicolored climbing shoes on my feet. “Yeah…”
“Well, after TJ and Missy called me on Saturday morning—”
“Missy?” I laugh. “Are you kidding me? She told you she thinks she’s Missy?”
“Rock,” Margie says, this time taking her wire-framed glasses off and holding them by the temple. “We went over this years ago. Melanie is the Vetti twin who died. Missy is the Vetti twin who lived. I’m not rehashing, I’m not going to coddle you, and I’m done playing games. So repeat after me. Melanie Vetti died five years ago on prom night.”
I just stare at her.
“Say it.”
I shake my head. “You guys have gone crazy.”
“No, Rowan Kyle, you have gone crazy. And frankly, I’m surprised you lasted this long living in that delusional world of yours. We’re getting to the bottom of this, and we’re going to start that process today. But in order to do that, I need you to accept the facts, RK. Melissa Vetti did not go to prom with you that night five years ago. Melanie Vetti did. We talked about this before you took off to Hollywood and turned yourself into a rock star. But how fitting, right?”
“Fitting?” My mind is spinning. Nothing is fitting right now.
“A rock star?” Margie says, like that explains it all.
I shake my head.
“Missy is upset. TJ is mad as hell. Gretchen, who I should not have let lead this intervention, is blaming herself for your erratic behavior. And it’s not fair, RK. It’s not fair that you’ve got the whole town twisted up again. Missy Vetti is alive and you need to come to terms with that.”
I swallow hard, not even wincing at the pain in my throat.
“Do you remember rock climbing yesterday?”
I look down at my shoes. “I don’t even know where these clothes came from. I’m not a rock climber.”
“Well”—Margie sighs impatiently—“you had better knock that shit off then. If you don’t want to fall off the side of a mountain, that is.”
“I don’t understand what’s happening.”
“You have selective dissociative amnesia.”
I actually laugh. Like loud. “Get the fuck out of here. I don’t have amnesia.”
Margie leans back in her chair. It makes a sickening squeaking sound that grinds around in my brain. She chews on the tip of her glasses. “Then how do you explain your blackouts?”
“I got drunk.”
“You got drunk?” She laughs. “OK, you got drunk. Did you drive drunk down to the Patagonia in Boulder to shop for gear too? Which by the way, violates the terms of your release. Then drive back up into the mountains, climb Route 3 in the Upper Herd basin, fuck around all day with strangers who posted selfies on Facebook—tagging you, I might add. Which gives a very poor public appearance when Mo, Elias, and Ian have been dead less than three months. Jayce assured me she could keep you under control, but that’s a topic for another day. And then you drove back to the clinic parking lot to sleep before an unscheduled appointment with Chancer.” She shoots me a half-serious sneer. “I don’t think you were drunk, RK. Do you feel hungover?”
I don’t, actually. No. Not one bit.
“The only thing you black out from, Rowan Kyle, is the memory of Melanie Vetti’s death. And we need to get to the bottom of this, do you understand me?”
Chapter Twelve
I’m living the dream. That’s how the song starts. Four minutes, sixteen seconds. Piano-driven, soft drums, slow rhythm, acoustic guitar most of the time, but we have a rock-and-roll version as well.
I wrote this song while I was on the bus from Denver to LA. In one of those fifty-cent essay notebooks that have that godawful black and white design on them and that huge-ass crease down the middle of the book where the manufacturer practically stapled the pages together so it never lies flat when you set it down. It only bulges open.
I had thick tan rubber bands around it for that reason.
Am I living the dream? Or is the dream living me?
That’s what that song is about.
I guess I have my answer.
Two hours later I pull into my driveway. TJ’s car is there. Gretchen’s piece-of-shit hybrid is there. And Missy Vetti opens the door before I even get up the walkway.
I stop and look at her. Really, really look at her. She bites her lip and shrugs. “I told you so many times, but you never believed me.”
“How could you let this happen?”
“I’m sorry, RK. There is a very logical explanation for everything, but you wouldn’t listen to me. You refused to listen to me.”
“Why did I take Melanie to prom?” I have searched and searched my memory for the past two hours for this answ
er. I asked Margie over and over again, but she said this needed to be worked out in person with Missy. That she was the only one who could convince me of the truth I refused to see.
“You didn’t,” Missy says. “At least you thought you didn’t. You thought you took me, which explains why it was so confusing, RK. It’s normal, OK?”
“Normal?” I look down at the rock shoes I don’t remember buying. There are so many cuts on my hands from whatever I was doing yesterday, I can’t count them. One of my fingernails is ripped open past the quick, dried blood caked on it. Presumably from trying to haul my body up and over rocks I have no business climbing. “There is nothing normal about losing time, Mel—” I look her in the eyes and try out her new name. “Missy.”
It hits me then. The pain is raw and open. My chest feels like it might split in two. I look down at my feet and shake my head.
“You OK, RK?” TJ says, standing behind Missy.
“How the fuck did I get this way?” I ask them. “How the fuck?”
“Rock,” Gretchen says. “You just need time to put the pieces together, that’s all. You just need to go back and remember. We all told you it was Melanie, not Missy who died. But you had it in your head—”
“She fucking tricked me so many times.” I stare at Missy, daring her to break the facade and prove to everyone that this is just another one of Melanie’s lies.
“I know,” Missy says. “I realize it probably happened a lot more than I thought. And I know that’s why you didn’t believe me. But I swear to God, RK, I’m Missy. I’m alive. And I’m sorry that what happened that night fucked you up so bad.”
Anger floods through me. “What did you do? Why was Melanie in my car? Do you have any idea what she told me? Did you know? Did you tell her to say those things?”
“What things?” Jayce says, pushing her way past TJ and Gretchen. She walks up to me and throws her arms around my neck, so high up on her tiptoes she might actually be off the ground. “What things did she tell you, Rock? I don’t know anything about this shit, OK?” She sinks back down onto her heels and takes my face in both her hands. “I don’t have a history. I have no horse in this race. I don’t care which of those lying twin bitches is dead or alive. We just need to get to the bottom of it so we can move forward.” She stares at me, her eyes darting back and forth as she searches inside of me for understanding.
“Just…” I look at each of them as they plead with their eyes. “Just give me a day to figure this shit out, OK? Leave,” I say firmly. “Everyone leave. I don’t want to talk to any of you right now.”
I push past them all and go into the house. I see three purses on the side table next to the door and toss them outside just before I slam the door and set the alarm.
Leaving is the easy part, I sing the lyrics from another song in my head. Leaving is easy when you’ve got nothing left to lose.
I don’t bother to see if they leave. They won’t come back inside. I just go to the fridge and open it up, pulling out an orange and a beer that I take over to the counter. I cut the orange, pour the beer into a glass, and drop the fruit pieces in.
I like summer beer. It’s almost always a wheat beer. Light and sunny, like the days. I take my beer outside and sip it slowly on the back deck, wondering how the hell all the pieces of this puzzle fit together in my head.
Missy.
She’s alive? I’m still trying to wrap my mind around that one. I’ve dreamed about this miracle for five fucking years and now that it’s happened, I feel… nothing.
Not one thing. I am RK’s empty heart.
What the fuck is wrong with me?
I finish my beer pondering that, but I have no answers, none that make me feel better anyway. I’m crazy, that’s for sure. I lost my shit a while back and I have no idea where that happened.
Melanie was a cunt. A total cunt. That bitch tricked me into believing she was Missy so many times. I almost fucked her once. I almost fucked her once.
That hurts. Because I was saving myself for Missy. I never dated anyone but Missy. But Melanie was always there. Inserting herself into my life, my head. She tried to steal every milestone memory I only wanted to make with Missy. And she probably succeeded more times than I’d care to admit.
I almost fucked her.
I was a goddamned virgin the night I rolled into Hollywood. A sweet guy who always tried to do the right thing. Saving myself for the girl I wanted to marry. We had a hotel picked out for after prom. A nice cabin down in Frisco. Right on the lake because we were lake people. We understood mountain lakes and the towns that surrounded them.
But things got weird.
I gulp down my beer and go back inside. I’m sitting at the piano before I even have time to second-guess it, and then my fingertips find the keys and fly into the melody.
The music flows out and I close my eyes. I see it. Not the images from the song, although I see those too, but the notes. They dance in my mind as I find each combination of keys to make the sound I’m looking for.
This is that song I wrote for Missy. The one I played at her funeral. The nine-minute masterpiece that I never played in public again, but had to endure listening to over and over, because someone from the funeral recorded it and leaked it online.
I don’t want to see the images that go with the dozens of verses I’ve written to go with the music over the years. It’s all dark. It’s all wrong. So I see better times instead. I see myself. Lying down in a mountain meadow with Missy. Her head resting on my thigh as I play with her hair. She’s twisting the stem of an orange wildflower and then she places it between her teeth and smiles.
She’s wearing a black tank top that says Devil Child, the makeshift rock band we’d put together the summer after eleventh grade. We had one song and it was nonsense. Nothing but rock and roll. Nothing but fun. But my dad let us play Float’s on festival day and people loved it.
But my unfinished song isn’t a rock anthem. It’s an ode. A three-part epic that declares my love for a girl with an evil twin.
I am poetic when I want to be. I’m not all flannel shirts and biker boots. Not always just a bare chest with perfect abs and too-long hair. Not always a leather jacket with jangling zippers. No only silver rings on my fingers.
I’m more than that. And I wrote this song as a declaration of love and hate for a girl with two sides.
Melanie, the mastermind of lies and deceit.
And Melissa, the transcendence of love into pure light.
I don’t sing the dark lyrics out loud, there’s no way I can force the sadness out of my heart to manage that. But I hear them in my head. I sway with the music as my fingers pick out each part of my lyrical composition until I reach the end.
I open my eyes and look out the window.
Missy Vetti is standing less than three feet from me on the other side, tears running down her face, eyes red, face flushed, hands pressed up against the glass, begging me to let her back in. Begging me to go looking for the hidden past I refuse to see. Pleading with me to see her. To believe her. To hear her.
“RK,” she says on the other side of the window.
I say nothing.
“Please,” she says. “Please, just give me ten minutes. Every story has two sides. Please give me a chance to explain.”
I get up and walk out of the front room. I open the front door and she’s already there, wringing her hands and taking deep breaths. “I only have one question for you, Missy.”
“Anything,” she says through a sob. “I’ll tell you anything.”
So would Melanie. She would say anything to make me believe her. “Did you tell your sister to break up with me for you that night?”
Chapter Thirteen
Melissa’s face goes blank. Not a smile, not a frown. No denial or confirmation. Just blank.
“Because,” I continue, “a lot of that stuff Melanie said that night sounded like it came right out of your mouth. It was bits and pieces of conversations we started to have. Thin
gs we both knew we’d need to say eventually, but never had the nerve.”
“RK—”
A shake of my head is enough to stop her words. “I heard so many variations of it, Missy, I don’t need your explanation.”
She steels her gaze on me. “Well, I think I get to have one anyway.”
“I’m not so sure about that. I’m really not.”
“Do you remember that night?”
I shrug, taking in a deep breath. “Not the part about the lies.” I don’t. I don’t understand any of this. I don’t understand how this can be the girl I loved. The girl who visited me in my nightmares. The girl who died that night and then who didn’t. “Maybe I am sick. Maybe I have blocked things out. But whose fault is that?”
“I never lied to you, RK. That was Melanie.”
“Sure. Sure, I know that. But if what everyone is saying is true—”
“What do you mean if? You think I’m Melanie?” She snorts. “You need to come to terms with reality, RK. That’s why you’re here. That’s the only reason you’re back in Grand Lake.”
“If Melanie died, then how the fuck did she get in my car wearing your dress? Wearing your jewelry? How the fuck did she become my prom date? And more importantly, why the fuck didn’t I know? You got to have your say but I never get to have mine? Is that how this works?”
“Rock—”
“Don’t call me that,” I snap. “Do not. You don’t get to call me Rock. You know why?” I stare her down with the building rage. Rage is a weakness and I’ve got enough weaknesses going right now, so I ratchet my anger down about a dozen notches and force myself to be calm. “Because fans call me Rock and you’re not a fan, are you?”
She stays silent.
“You’ve never been a fan, have you? Never on my side. Never by my side. I thought you were, but if all this shit is true and I blocked out the days and weeks after the accident, and you—everyone—is insisting that I come to terms with reality, then that’s the coldest one, I think. The fact that you were never on my side. Because if you were Melanie would not have been in the car with me that night. Melanie would not have said those things to me. Make me question our love. Our plans.”