by Greg Rucka
“Go to your room,” Steven told me. He was smiling.
So was Joan.
“Why?”
“Go to your room and see.”
Stupid games, I thought. Stupid people. Don’t know anything about me. Don’t know who I am or what I want and don’t even care.
Making it as clear as possible with body language that I was doing them a big favor, I went to my room.
The guitar was on the bed, resting in an open case.
“Yours,” Joan said. “Do whatever you want with it.”
Steven added, “We’ll be downstairs.”
They left us alone.
It was a used Taylor acoustic, scratches on its body, gouges in the wood around the pick guard. The steel strings seemed to float just above the mahogany neck.
I sat down beside it on the bed and just stared at it, trying to figure out if I wanted to be bought this easily. It wasn’t as sophisticated a thought as that, of course, but that’s the only way I can think of it now.
The Taylor won out in the end.
I picked it up, held it the way I had seen Steven holding his guitar. I put my index finger on a string, it was the sixth string, the low E, and I struck the note.
I went downstairs with the guitar held in both hands, by the neck, and found Joan and Steven in the piano room, sitting side by side on the bench. Steven was smoking a cigarette and singing softly along to what his wife was playing, and then she saw me and let the notes trail off, and his voice followed.
I pushed the guitar out in front of me, toward them, and said, “Show me how.”
Joan laughed, and Steven got up and went to get his acoustic, and we settled on the couch, and he started to teach. It was just after nine when he began, and he knew what I was after; he didn’t talk about chords or sevenths or octaves or diatonic scales. He explained only the barest facts that I needed, just enough to get me playing notes that combined to make music that I could recognize. He showed me everything he was doing on his guitar, never touching me or mine, letting me mimic him. I was clumsy and awkward and my fingers kept slipping. My back ached from this strange new posture, the muscles in my neck throbbed because of the way I was craning my head, trying to watch both of my hands at once. The steel strings dug channels into my fingertips. My left hand, my fretting hand, cramped up.
“Stop,” Steven said. “Take a break.”
So for five minutes I stopped, massaging my hand, amazed at the blood on my fingertips, blood on the strings.
“It hurts,” I told Steven.
“Your fingers’ll get used to it,” he said.
I picked up the Taylor again, and he made me review everything I’d learned so far, and it still didn’t seem like I was learning anything at all. It just seemed like we were playing with the guitars, having fun with each other.
Joan came back and announced that it was past one, and that she was going to go to bed.
“You go on up, hon,” he said. “Mim and I are going to work at this a little longer.”
“Don’t stay up too much later,” she told us.
“We won’t,” I said.
We were up until dawn.
CHAPTER 11
After Tommy left, I spent the day getting my life, and myself, back in order. Just checking through the now over a hundred voice mails took most of an hour, and almost every message was like the first had been, reporters wanting a story, demanding a comment. Near the end there were separate calls from Click and Graham, each wanting to confirm that I’d made it home safely. It bought them some grace, but not much.
There were two messages from Mikel, each left Wednesday, one in the morning and one that evening, check-in calls, much like Click’s and Graham’s. He left his mobile and asked me to call him back, and I didn’t. It was clear to me that he’d told Tommy where I was, maybe even had told him it was safe to visit, and I was pretty fucking angry at my big brother.
I rewarded myself with a late lunch of cold Chinese food, another beer, and a trip down to my music room. The nice thing about playing in the basement was that I could play volume. I fed the Gibson through the VOX AC-30 and wailed on that for a while. It’s a great unit, classic tube design, and it plays soft pretty well, but when you crank it up you get a lovely, shimmery sustain on the notes, as if the amp is breathing. I wasn’t playing anything in particular, just noodling. I switched to one of my Strats after a while, trying to emulate some of the Knopfler I’d heard the night before, but my left just doesn’t have the strength his does, and I can never get the same pop from the strings.
The cut on my palm opened again, and I shut everything down and went upstairs to change the bandage, and that’s when I saw it had grown dark.
I also saw that my front door was wide open.
It wasn’t like I went straight to panic, but I sure as hell accelerated to nervous. The alarm was off, had been throughout the day, ever since Tommy’s visit, and I gave myself a mental kick for not having reset it.
I froze, straining to listen. Vague traffic sounds from the street, and the echo of the notes in my head, and now my heartbeat. But I didn’t hear anything from the house, didn’t hear anyone moving around upstairs.
Had I locked it? I couldn’t remember if I’d locked it after Tommy had left. If I hadn’t locked it, it was just possible that the door could have opened on its own.
No, it wasn’t.
I slid forward and shut the door slowly, turning the knob so it wouldn’t click when the latch struck, and looking over my shoulder the whole time, thinking that if it was the stalker, I didn’t want him coming at me by surprise. But I didn’t see him, I didn’t hear him.
I suppose a different woman would have headed to the kitchen for the biggest knife in the rack, gotten herself all set to go hunting, geared herself up to reclaim her home or some bullshit. Someone maybe a few inches taller than me and a few pounds heavier, or who had taken lots of classes in self-defense or martial arts. A different woman would have assessed this situation, would have decided to be sure if her home had been invaded, and then would have gone on to kick ass and take names.
That woman sure as hell wasn’t me, and it didn’t look like she was going to drop by for a visit, either.
I had no illusions; if it was the stalker, he had a gun. There wasn’t anything in my knife rack to beat that. Even if there was, I wouldn’t have the first clue how to use it. And somehow, I didn’t think plugging in the Tele and blasting some diatonics would save my skin.
But if I could trap him inside while I was getting outside, that wouldn’t hurt.
The alarm had a thirty-second exit delay once it was armed. After that, the motion sensors in the hallways would be active, and anyone moving inside would trigger the system. Anyone trying to get in or out would trigger the alarm. At which point the Scanalert people would call the cops.
So if there really was someone lurking around my bedroom and rifling through my lingerie, I could trap him. If he stayed put for those thirty seconds, I’d own his sicko ass.
And thirty seconds, that was enough time for me to get the hell out of Dodge.
I put my thumb on the “arm” button and held my breath for the three seconds it took before the tone chimed and the countdown beeps started. As soon as they did, I bolted. My coat was on the kitchen chair, my keys were on the counter, and I grabbed each without breaking stride, then flew out the back door, slamming it behind me, making straight for my Jeep and keeping time in my head.
At eighteen beeps I was behind the wheel, and by twenty-seven I was screeching out of the driveway onto the street, and when I reached thirty and the alarm was armed, my headlights were splashing across the front of my house, over the fence and trees and the door, and I saw no one, I saw nothing.
“Got you, motherfucker,” I said.
Then I saw him, pounding at an angle across my neighbor’s yard, heading away from me in a desperate run. He was in the puddle of my headlights for barely an instant, and it wasn’t long enough to be sur
e, but I thought it was the same guy, the same stalker, and I floored it down the street, trying to catch him. So what if he had a gun? As long as he kept heading away from me, I could run the bastard down.
His lead was enough that he beat me to the corner and he flew across the street without hesitating, and my lights caught him again, and again I thought it was the same guy, the same stalker, but he’d shaved his head, now, the long hair gone. I tore into the intersection after him, and there was a horn, shrill and to my right, and I slammed my brakes to keep from colliding with a blue Honda. I hit the horn and screamed some pretty crude outrage, trying to get around the Honda, but there was a Lexus SUV behind me now, and I couldn’t go that way, either, couldn’t do anything but watch as my stalker raced over a lawn, pulled himself over a fence, and disappeared into the darkness of a neighbor’s backyard.
Just like that.
I drove aimlessly for twenty minutes, then found myself on Hawthorne, turning onto one of the side streets. It was just past ten when I pulled up outside the only place that had ever made me feel truly safe. There was a gentle glow from the north side of the ground floor, from one of the music rooms. It made things easier, but it made things harder. If the house had been dark, I probably would have just stayed in the car for a few minutes, then turned around and gone to a hotel, if not home.
I climbed out of the Jeep and cut across the lawn, then up the steps to the door. The porch had been redone while I was away; the last time I’d been by, it’d been the same rotting and sagging boards that had been in place for one hundred years. Now there was new cedar planking, and a new railing to match. The porch swing was still where I remembered it, though, and a puddle of rainwater sat beneath it, a couple of leaves sodden in the water.
There was piano audible through the door, and I listened for a second. Beethoven, and while I couldn’t name the piece, it was Joan on the keys, and she was playing the way she did when she played for herself, and not an audience or a student. I pulled back the screen door and rang the bell, and the music stopped abruptly.
The door opened a fraction, then wider when she saw it was me, and Joan stood there, looking tired and a lot older than the last time I’d seen her.
“Miriam. This is a surprise.”
I stepped into the hall. “I’m sorry it’s so late.”
“It’s all right, of course it’s all right. I didn’t even know you were back in town.”
“I got back early.”
“You must have done. Last time I talked to Mikel, he said you’d be on the road until June. I thought if I saw you at the holidays, I’d be lucky.” She closed the door and put a hand on my shoulder, already leading to the kitchen. “I’ve got some coffee, from Peet’s. The kind you like, but it’s decaf, if you want some.”
“No trouble?”
“It’s already made, honey. If it was trouble, I wouldn’t offer.”
That was a lie. If it was trouble, she’d have done it anyway.
Joan poured us two mugs, then put sugar and milk in mine before handing it over. I took a sip as she watched.
“Good?”
“Just perfect,” I said.
“Good,” Joan said again, but softly. She moved her mug from the counter to the kitchen table and took a seat, watching me.
The kitchen felt the same, looked the same, but for some cosmetic changes. There were still fliers stuck to the corkboard with thumbtacks, the poster for her Chicago recital in 1972. There was the framed picture of her and Steven and Chet Atkins still hanging by the door, and another, only a couple years old, of the two of them standing with Benny Green. There was a new one, too, not really a picture, but a framed one-page article on Steven and me from Guitar Player magazine, the “Pickups” column. It was maybe two years old, now, just after Scandal.
Joan saw me looking at it, didn’t say anything. Her hair was a little more silver than the last time I’d seen her, eclipsing the brown, and it was shorter, only to her shoulders, when she’d used to wear it halfway down her back, in a braid. She was wearing casual clothes, baggy corduroys and a wool sweater, but the sleeves had been rolled back, to keep out of the way of her playing. She was wearing her glasses, not her contacts.
“You cut your hair,” I said, as I moved to join her at the table.
“After the funeral. Why didn’t you come home, Miriam?”
I didn’t know how to give her the honest answer, so I gave her the one I’d used before, over the phone, when I told her I wouldn’t be back for the memorial. I said, “We were shooting a video. I couldn’t get out of it.”
If Joan’s look had been disapproving, the look she’d given me when I was sixteen and had stayed out past curfew, it would have been easier. But now, it was like she couldn’t be bothered, and she nodded her head, maybe not believing me, but maybe not caring. She withdrew her hands, sighing.
Then she reached back and turned my palm up. “What happened?”
“Nothing, I cut it on the tour. Broken glass backstage, I picked it up and there you go. Cut myself. It got reopened somehow, I haven’t had time to change the bandage.”
“It’s not too deep, is it?” Concern made her look even older, even more tired. “That’s not why you’re back, because of your hand?”
“I’m . . . I needed some time off. Van and Click are still touring, they’re going to finish out the schedule.”
“I’m getting the first-aid kit.”
“It’s not a deal, Joan.”
She retrieved the metal box with its scratched white enamel paint and brought it back to the table, flipping it open and telling me to keep my hand still, then began unwrapping the old bandage. When my palm was revealed she used some cotton and antiseptic to clean the dried blood away. Her fingers were long and very strong, pianist’s fingers, with neatly trimmed nails. The second knuckle on almost every finger was slightly swollen, going arthritic. Steven used to massage her hands after she’d been playing for a while.
“Thanks,” I said.
She murmured that it was all right while she tore the wrapping on a fresh square of gauze. “Looks nasty.”
“It’s just a cut.”
“You should have someone look at it, honey. You don’t want it to turn into something that threatens your playing.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” I lied.
She used some strips of cloth tape to hold the gauze down. “You’re as bad as Steven was.”
I moved my look from her hands tending mine to her face, saw the bitterness. Steven had suffered from the sore throat for months before he’d been willing to see anyone about it, and even then, only because he’d started bringing up blood in the morning. By the time the cancer had been found, the only possible treatments for it had been devastating and, ultimately, futile ones. No one ever said so, at least not to me, but the feeling was that he’d just waited too long.
“I’ll go to a doctor tomorrow,” I said. “I promise.”
Joan closed the kit and said, “You’re a grown woman, you’ll do what you like. You’re home until June?”
I grinned. “That’s the plan.”
She didn’t buy it. “Who’s filling in for you?”
“Oliver Clay. You don’t know him, out of L.A. He’s good. He’s not me, of course, but he’s good.”
The joke didn’t even get a smirk. “Did you and Vanessa have another fight?”
I shook my head. “I just wanted to come home.”
She started to frown, then stopped it before it could take hold, deciding to let this matter drop, too, which wasn’t really like her. My coffee was getting cold, and it felt like it was cold in the house, too, as if the furnace wasn’t working.
“I heard ‘Queen of Swords,’ ” Joan said, after a moment. “You’re doing things with the instrument that Steven would have been thrilled to hear. It’s very accomplished playing.”
“He wouldn’t have thought it was too glib? I kept thinking he’d have told me I was being glib.”
“No, he would ha
ve been very proud of you. Steven was always very proud of you.”
Pressure came thundering hard behind my eyes, and my head began to ache, like I had a migraine. I wanted to say that I hadn’t come back for the funeral because I’d been angry and scared. I wanted to say that if I could do it again I would do it right, I would be there for her. That I would know how to say good-bye to the man who, as far as I was concerned, was my father, more than the man who’d given me my genes.
But I hadn’t, I’d chickened out and hidden in the Beverly Hilton behind all the bottles I could find.
Joan was looking at the clock on the stove, and getting to her feet, saying, “I’ve got to get to bed, sweetie. I’ve got to teach tomorrow, and I have to get up early.”
I started to nod, then blurted, “Can I stay? Just in the guest room or maybe up in my old room, please?”
She stopped, looking surprised. “Of course you can, hon, if that’s what you want.”
I nodded again, more vigorously, feeling shamefully young.
Joan came around to my side of the table, dropping down on her haunches and putting her hands on my arms. It created strange nostalgia, as if the moment now could have been a moment ten years ago, with me in pubescent misery and Joan offering all the maternal guidance she knew how to give. She put a hand on my cheek.
“Sweetie, what’s wrong?”
I tried to open my mouth and say something coherent, but there was just too much to say, all of a sudden, and none of it could come out. All I could do was shake my head and try to explain that I didn’t want to sleep in my house alone, and she told me that she understood, and that I was always welcome, and that I should always know that.
“You’re our little girl,” Joan told me.
The sting of guilt stayed with me to morning.
CHAPTER 12
When I came down in the morning, Joan was already up and preparing to head to work. She looked very proper for school—navy slacks and a cream blouse, the uniform of a woman ready to fill fresh young minds with the infinite possibilities of music. She pressed a mug of coffee into my hands, then went back to loading sheet music into her book bag.