“Why don’t you invite them over for dinner before you play?” Denise said. “A free meal is always a perk for starving musicians, especially when they’re male.”
“That’s a great idea. I’ll do that. Good night.” Shan closed the bathroom door. She ran a bath as hot as she could stand it and stripped off her ruined clothes, searching for a place to put them. The bathroom was big and cavelike, with heavy black fabric over the window and a countertop cluttered with equipment and vats of chemicals. Denise was a photographer and used the bathroom as a darkroom, so space was tight. Shan closed the lid of the toilet, set her things on top of it, and climbed into the big claw-foot tub.
She wished she could afford to live alone. Both her roommates were fine, nice people really, but she just couldn’t get the hang of the female bonding thing they were so into. Both Denise and Oda Solomon, their third roommate, seemed to view their living arrangement as some sort of substitute family, but Shan had worked too hard to escape her own family to surrender herself into the clutches of another one.
She leaned her head back, rubbing a cake of sandalwood soap between her hands. She closed her eyes, inhaling the bright, woodsy fragrance that rose through the steam. It reminded her of her mother, like it always did. That was why she used it.
Abby O’Hara, who always smelled of sandalwood, had died when Shan was twelve. At the time it had seemed sudden, but now she understood that her mother had been sick for a long time.
The illness didn’t make her mother didn’t look any different, not at first. She was slim and pretty, with the same dark curls and big green eyes as her daughter. She still went to work every day at North Adams State, the western Massachusetts college where she taught piano and voice.
Abby sang like a nightingale, played the guitar as well as the piano, and loved music more than anything in the world. Shan’s earliest memories were like a mixed tape of the music her mother made on her petite Takamine guitar and the records she played on their battered stereo.
Shan loved to sing, too, and from an early age she hummed and crooned almost constantly. As she grew, she trilled rock songs like “Rave On” and “All You Need Is Love” the way other children chanted “The Wheels on the Bus.” She used her toy tambourine to tap out reggae rhythms like the ones she heard on her mother’s Bob Marley records. She listened to rock, bluegrass, gospel, and jazz, but mostly the folk music that was her mother’s passion, especially her idols, Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. Abby loved them so much she named her Takamine after them. She had a couple of other guitars, a basic no-name classical and a beautiful Fullerton twelve-string, but always preferred the smaller, sweeter-sounding Joanie.
Abby began teaching Shan to play the piano when she was just five years old. She took to it so quickly that she surprised even her mother, who was used to teaching the musically inclined. By the time she was eight, Shan was playing Mozart from memory and making up her own songs.
At ten, she taught herself to play the guitar. She still remembered the look of amazement on her mother’s face the day she found her with the classical, playing “Blackbird.”
That night after she went to bed, Shan could hear her parents arguing.
“Gary, do you know how difficult that song is?” her mother asked. “I’ve never even given her a guitar lesson. And her voice,” she added, “her pitch—it’s unbelievable.”
“Forget it, Abby,” her father said. “You know we don’t have that kind of money.”
“But she’s gifted,” her mother persisted. “She can hit notes that even I can’t sing. LeBarron is the best music school in Berkshire County. That’s where she belongs.”
“That school costs a fortune,” her father said. “Can’t you teach her to sing?”
“Not yet. She’s too young to study voice, but she still needs training. We owe it to her.”
“We owe her food, and clothes, and a roof over her head,” her father said, his voice rising. “That’s what we’re spending our money on, not lessons at some hoity-toity music school!”
When her father started to yell, Shan stopped listening, putting her head under the covers so she wouldn’t hear. Her father scared her when he yelled. He had a nasty temper, especially when he drank, which he did a lot. Shan was very young when she learned to give him a wide berth at those times, and even more on the mornings after. That was when he was most irritable and if Shan did something to make him mad, he would spank her, spankings that hurt for days.
Sometimes Shan noticed her mother moving slowly, like it hurt, and she thought maybe he spanked her, too. Whenever that happened, her father acted all loving toward Abby and things would go back to normal—at least until the next time.
Her father never did agree about the music lessons, but by the time she was eleven Shan was attending the LeBarron Academy in Williamstown. She flourished there, although she didn’t do quite as well in her regular classes. She was always dreaming up new songs instead of listening to her teachers, writing down lyrics instead of taking notes.
One night after Shan had been attending LeBarron for about a year, her mother fainted during dinner. At the hospital, a doctor came and talked to them, using scary words like cancer, chemo, and late stage. It wasn’t long after that Abby began to change. Her body, always slender, became gaunt. Her skin took on an odd translucency and her curly hair vanished overnight. She sang less, saying that it hurt her throat, so Shan sang while Abby played Joanie.
Eventually Abby had trouble holding on to the pick, so Shan played and sang. She took Joanie and sat at the foot of her mother’s bed for hours, performing her entire repertoire over and over, especially the folk songs her mother loved. Her father cut back his hours at the paper mill to spend more time at home. He cooked for his wife, bathed her, even helped her to the toilet. The family revolved around Abby, although Shan and her father never said much to each other. He’d never said all that much to his daughter to begin with, but Shan could remember when her singing could make him smile. Those days he never smiled.
Shan wasn’t smiling, either. She was too scared to smile. Her mother was slipping away, right in front of her eyes. Each day there seemed to be a little less of her.
Not just physically, although Abby had shrunk to a bare seventy pounds. Her spirit seemed to be departing, too, her essence wasting away. She rarely opened her eyes and hardly ever spoke. The only thing that roused her was the music. Shan played longer, sang louder, trying to drown out the death knell that haunted their house.
One night Abby woke up and couldn’t breathe. Another trip to the emergency room, more scary words, and the next day she was gone.
Even now Shan couldn’t remember much about the first days after her mother’s death. The funeral was like a dream, fuzzy and surreal as a heroin buzz. Afterward, her father dropped Shan off at home, then went down the street to the tavern.
Shan thought she would go crazy, that first night. Her mother was dead—she had no mother. Those two facts reverberated through her head in a sonorous, 3/4 rhythm. She couldn’t understand how the world could have changed so much in just a few days.
She cried for hours. Each time she thought she was finished, the 3/4 rhythm would begin anew and her eyes would fill again. She’d never known she could cry so much. Her eyes hurt, her nose stung, even her chest ached from the force of her sobs.
Sometime around midnight, she heard the front door open, then her father’s heavy footsteps climbing the stairs. Shan was still crying, but the footsteps continued down the hall to the bedroom he shared with her mother. Just his, now.
Shan’s eyes were swollen nearly shut and she’d cried herself into a bloody nose, but she still couldn’t stop. Then she thought of something she thought might help her sleep.
Shan slipped out of bed and crept down the hall. When she opened the door to her father’s bedroom, she saw Joanie leaning against the wall. Quietly, she crossed the room and reached for it.
“Leave it.”
Shan jumped and turned. Her fa
ther’s eyes were wide open and staring at her.
Shan backtracked to the door and ran down the hall, jumping back into her own bed, shaking. A moment later her father appeared in the doorway. For a few minutes he stood there, eyes red and bloodshot, a cigarette now hanging from the corner of his mouth.
Then he said, “Your mother is dead.”
It was like hearing it for the first time. Shan’s face broke and she was crying again.
“She was sick for a long time,” he said. “Longer than you knew. Longer than I knew. She hid it from me. You know why?” He took a couple of steps toward her. “Because of your fucking music school. She didn’t go to the doctor because there wasn’t enough money to pay him and still get you your goddamned piano lessons.” Now he was standing right over her bed, staring down at her. “It’s your fault,” he said tonelessly. “You killed your mother, Shan.”
Shan remembered when she’d first started her classes at LeBarron, how her mother had said she would do anything, just anything to get her into that school. She began to cry harder.
“You’d better shut up,” he said, “before I give you something more to fucking cry about.”
With a tiny, mewling sound Shan lowered her face, trying to control her sobs.
Suddenly, blinding pain against her leg. She screamed, jerked her head up—
And saw the bright ember of her father’s cigarette coming toward her again.
Shan sat up in the tub, wide awake. She flexed her legs, her knees emerging from the tepid bathwater to expose the round, white blemish that was a permanent inscription from that night. It was the first of many scars she would receive at the hands of her father.
He never got over his wife’s death and he never stopped blaming his daughter for it, either. For weeks he’d barely speak to her then, out of the blue, he’d fly into a rage over some small infraction. Once he threw her into a wall for setting the beer she’d fetched on top of his newspaper.
Shan’s life developed a routine. She tried to stay out of her father’s way, which wasn’t hard, since he was rarely at home. After school she hung out with a few other kids like herself, losers whose parents didn’t care what they did. Sometimes one of them had pot or beer purloined from a parent or older sibling, so they’d hole up at somebody’s house, get buzzed, and listen to music until it was time to go home for dinner.
At home, keeping the house clean and doing the laundry had become Shan’s responsibility. She did the chores, fixed herself a can of soup or Chef Boyardee for supper, then played guitar and sang, working on her music until it was time to go to bed.
And so she got by, for a long time. For more than two years, in fact.
Then one afternoon she came home and fell asleep on the couch instead of doing the laundry. Her father was working the night shift then and when he got dressed, he found he had no clean socks and hit her so hard he knocked out two of her teeth. Shan waited until he went to work and within half an hour she was gone, taking only a backpack and her mother’s guitars. She could only carry two, so she took Joanie and the twelve-string. She’d long since graduated to steel strings so she never played the classical anymore, but to leave it behind still wrenched.
Shan lived on the streets for over a year, eventually hitchhiking to New York, where she met Jorge. He was only one of many street people she encountered there, but he offered his couch one night when the temperature dipped below freezing. She took to coming by on subzero nights. He never seemed to mind and there were always people there, since he was a dealer.
It was only natural to partake of whatever drug was being passed around. Shan sampled them all, enjoyed the different highs, but she was especially captivated by the brown rock Jorge referred to as the big H. She loved the way it made her feel, how all the sorrow and tension she carried inside her simply dissolved, just floated off. She hadn’t even realized how sad she was, how scared and confused and lonely, until the H took the feelings away.
She couldn’t wait to do it again, but she was vaguely uneasy. “Doesn’t this make us junkies?” she asked Jorge.
“Hell no,” he said as he chased the black, smoldering blob of heroin around the foil with a tin cylinder. “Junkies are those sorry scags who shoot it.”
What he said made sense. The antidrug propaganda at her North Adams high school had depicted an emaciated wreck with a needle in his arm. There was no needle so she was okay, or so she thought, until the night she found Jorge’s place deserted and curled up inside the vestibule to wait for him.
When he finally showed up almost twenty-four hours later, she was a sweating, retching mess. He took one look at her and shook his head, but let her follow him inside.
“I can’t keep feeding you dope,” he said, loading up the foil. “This ain’t a charity ward.”
His words made little impression. Her eyes were glued to the foil. When he applied the flame she reached for it, but he held it away. “What are ya, deaf? No more freebies, I said.”
“But you know I don’t have any money,” she said, with an edge of desperation.
When she tore her gaze from the foil, she found him watching her with a predatory gleam. “I think we can work something out,” he whispered.
It wasn’t terrible, and it wasn’t as if it was her first time. There’d been a few guys since she left home, starting with Greg, the fellow runaway who’d taken her virginity one night when they were both sleeping under the same bridge. She’d hung out with him for a few days, then never saw him again.
And Jorge was gentle with her. Afterward he held her and told her he would take care of her. Then he did, by giving her the heavenly release that came from the slim trail of smoke.
It was the first of many nights she’d spend in his bed. He wasn’t a bad guy, really, and before long she was living there. At times he seemed to really care about her, stroking her hair and calling her querida, then piling up the H on the foil and holding the flame for her.
Shan endured the arrangement for about six months, until the night she found herself in bed with not only Jorge but another participant, a hollow-eyed girl named Chloe with a bad case of the shakes and blue-black road maps up both arms.
She’d gotten through it, gotten her fix, and gotten the hell out. She’d been trying to get clean ever since. This was her third unsuccessful attempt at turkeying, but she knew it wouldn’t be her last. Even through a heroin fog, she knew she had to find another way, before she turned into Chloe. She’d seen what was waiting at the bottom of the abyss.
Shan climbed out of the tub and toweled off, then put on sweats. It was nearly two-thirty, but she was still too keyed up to sleep. She remembered Denise’s suggestion of chamomile tea and went into the kitchen, stopping when she found it occupied. She suppressed a sigh. “Hi.”
“You’re up late,” Oda Solomon said. She was a meaty woman in her late twenties with dreads, coffee-colored skin, and eyes that seemed to see everything. She tended bar at the Grotto, which was how Shan had met her.
“I’m on my way to bed,” Shan said, “but I thought I’d fix myself a cup of tea first.”
“I was just brewing some.” Minutes later, Shan accepted a cup and went to her bedroom. Oda followed and sat down on the futon, mindless of the unfriendly look Shan shot at her.
“You had Dan wondering about you tonight,” Oda remarked.
“I ran into some trouble.”
“Mmm-hmm.” Unlike Denise, Oda never asked. She saw. She had a way of looking at Shan that made her feel as transparent as a pane of glass.
“I’m supposed to call him and reschedule,” Shan said, “but it’s probably pointless.”
“So why bother?” Oda’s eyes were fixed on her, deep brown and clear as rain.
“Well, they need someone now and I’m a quick study. I don’t think they’d want me permanently, but I could fill in until they find a replacement.”
“I don’t know. You should have heard Dan. He was raving you up to the other two guys.”
�
�So you met them?” Oda nodded. “What did you think of them?”
“I thought Dan’s friend Ty was a stone fox,” she admitted, wresting a laugh from Shan, “and he’s very nice. Struck me as straight shooter.”
“How about the other one? Quinn?” Dan swore he was a genius, but Denise couldn’t stand him. She’d confided to Shan that Quinn demonstrated every repulsive characteristic of the male persuasion. He was arrogant, she said, overbearing, and much too full of himself.
“Hard to say.” Oda looked thoughtful. “He’s a charmer. Good talker. Cute, too. Nice smile, but there’s something a little bit chilly about him. He keeps blinding you with that smile, though, so you don’t notice right away.”
“Dan says he’s brilliant. He thinks he’s the most talented musician he’s ever met.”
“If he is, then he’s sure to snap you right up. The Grotto’s jammed every time you play, Shan, and that says a lot about you.”
After Oda went to bed, Shan twisted her hair into a braid and thought about Oda’s words. The Grotto was known as an industry showcase and not without justification. The owner, Mike Shapiro, had a reputation as a music visionary. He was selective about who graced his historic stage, but he’d selected her and the prestige of the place helped her land other gigs. Now she was earning enough to support herself. She liked her roommates well enough, the apartment was comfortable, and she had enough money to live on. Her needs were simple; she could get by as long as she could afford guitar strings and food and the drugs that were a necessity, despite her repeated attempts to get clean.
Even with the tea Shan couldn’t sleep, so she reached for Joanie. She left the apartment quietly and climbed the stairs to the roof. It was a clear night and the stars winked down on her as she took a seat in the folding metal chair she kept up there.
She looked out over the SoHo rooftops as she began to play. The air was chilly and she recalled what it was like to live on these streets. She’d moved from neighborhood to neighborhood, sleeping on benches and in subway tunnels, foraging through supermarket Dumpsters for food, and begging for nickels and dimes. She’d never forget that first January on her own, huddling inside doorways with nothing but a denim jacket between her and the cold of the New York winter.
Rock Angel (Rock Angel Series Book 1) Page 3