The Songbird Sisters

by Rachael Herron

  “Why?”

  Taft shook his head. “I can’t keep up with you.”

  She slowed her speech insultingly. “I told you I. Left. The. Business. What more is there to say?”

  Lana couldn’t intend to walk away, not now. “Hang on, just look at the comments. They’re barely interested in me.”

  Lana raised an eyebrow so high it almost met her scalp.

  “Okay,” he clarified, “they’re leaving comments about me, but most of them are about you.”

  “Do they have any idea who I am?”

  “Most of them, no. But they’re learning. People are leaving comments about which of the Darling Songbird albums is their favorite, and others are linking to your solo stuff. Is your phone on?”

  She frowned and dug it out of a pocket in the baggy sweatpants. She squinted at the screen. “Holy crap.”

  “You’ve been blowing up, too.”

  She scrolled. Then she scrolled some more. She didn’t look up at him.

  That was fine. He could wait.

  Taft raised his gaze to the waves tumbling in to shore – the biggest ones hit with a thump that he could feel in his heels. Then the waves got sucked right into the next one, refolding themselves over and over again. If this was the surf here on a clear, fine day, it would be spectacular during a storm.

  Almost as spectacular as stormy Lana was, right now. She was still sparking anger – he could feel it coming off her skin. Her tempest was glorious.

  And he was responsible for it. God, he was such a dick for telling Adele that Lana had written “Blame Me.”

  Lana was still scrolling on her phone.

  “Good stuff?” he finally asked.

  “My agent. My ex-agent, I mean.”

  “Bet he’s begging for you to come back.”

  She frowned. “Yeah.”

  “Media?”

  “My inbox is full.”

  “People want more from you.”

  Lana looked up at him, her features tight with what looked like anguish. “But …”

  “But what?” He moved in, putting his hand against the side of her face – he couldn’t stand not touching her one more damn second. Her skin was cold and damp from the ocean’s spray. “How could this possibly be a bad thing?”

  She gazed at him, a question he couldn’t decipher in her eyes. “Taft.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Her words were a push, but her body was pulling him in to her – or maybe that was her, doing the leaning. She let her head fall forward and her forehead rested on his chest.

  Without thinking, he kissed the top of her head. Her sand-powdered dark hair was softer than it looked.

  Just like she was.

  She made her hands into fists and gripped the front of his sweatshirt.

  Taft gently cupped the base of her neck. Whatever she needed, he would get for her. Whatever she wanted, he would figure it out. I love you swam through his mind, but it was too early. Today had held too much already. Maybe tomorrow, when they finished working for the day. Maybe she’d let him take her out on a real date, one with cloth napkins and candlelight and music. One that ended with her in his arms, one that ended with him whispering those words in her ear, the words he wanted to keep telling her forever.

  Lana spoke into his sweatshirt, so quietly he couldn’t quite catch the words.

  “What’s that, Birdie?”

  She drew back and looked up into his eyes. She was so close he could drop his mouth to hers with no effort, but he didn’t. Something stopped him.

  “Tell him to take it down,” she said.

  His brain stalled, and for a second he had no idea what she meant. “The video?”

  She let go of his sweatshirt, and he felt a chill run through his body that had nothing to do with the wind. “Tell him to take it down.”

  “Lana. He said with the rate it’s being shared, it’ll hit a million views by tonight. You can’t buy that kind of exposure.”

  “That’s the problem. I know that. I would have bought it if it were possible, if I ever could have afforded more than a nice poster and an email sent to my list for each of my gigs. I tried my whole career to catch the eye of the public. Over and over, I was told I was very nice, I was very talented, and to go away.”

  “Now they want you, though.”

  Lana nodded. “The irony isn’t lost on me, don’t worry. But now I’m telling them to go away.”

  She touched his cheek, her fingertips feathering his cheekbone, her thumb running along his jawline. A shiver went down his back. “Lana –”

  “I’m telling you to go away, too.”

  At their feet, Emily Dickinson whined.

  “Come on,” Lana said to the dog. She turned, walking away without looking back.

  Carefully, as if she’d been thinking about it for a while, the little dog lifted her leg – Taft didn’t even know girl dogs did that – and peed on his boot. He jumped backward and swore.

  Emily Dickinson trotted off quickly to catch up to Lana, leaving Taft standing alone with one soggy boot and a heart more sodden than anything in the whole ocean.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Lana ran away to hide.

  She felt awful and stupid for doing it, but she couldn’t bear it. Until the video got taken down, she had to avoid everything to do with Taft Hill and his goddamned sharing.

  He’d shared her secret with her sisters, and she didn’t think she could let it go. She ached to forgive him – to find one reason she could. But that kind of reason didn’t exist.

  Then he’d gone and shared their private song with the world (or his manager had, same thing) and that might be even worse. The world that had rejected her now wanted her back. Not because of anything she’d done. Because of him.

  Lana had left the beach and walked straight toward the hotel, but luckily, she’d caught sight of the media van parked in front. Its antenna was up, springing out of the van’s roof like an ugly metal mushroom, and a blonde reporter was speaking into a mic from the Golden Spike’s front porch.

  It wasn’t too hard to guess why they were there – a video being shared that fast was news in today’s market. Lana thanked the past version of herself that had attached her master-room key to her car key. She had her phone with its debit-card holder – she didn’t need anything else. The reporter kept her eyes on the camera – she didn’t notice Lana opening her car door as quietly as she could, not even thirty feet away.

  She’d just take a drive. A long one.

  Heading north out of town, she suddenly felt the urge to cry, which pissed her off so much she mashed the accelerator to the floor. She hit seventy on the highway.

  Fish and chips. That’s what she needed. From the old stand twenty miles up the road, she wanted to order a bag of chips, heavy with grease, and fresh petrale sole, crispy and hot and wrapped in newspaper. She’d sit on one of the benches that lined the cliff and drench everything in vinegar. She’d dip the pieces in tartar sauce, and she’d enjoy a seaside meal.

  Just like the other tourists.

  She wouldn’t think about Taft, the tourist who did things to her heart and body that she didn’t want to understand.

  Or her sisters, worried about her too many years too late.

  At the turn-off, though, nothing stood but a permanent wooden outhouse and a sign outlining the rules for dogs and horses on the beach.

  The fish-and-chip stand was gone.

  Wait, she must be remembering its location wrong. The stand had to be there. It had always been there, ever since she was a girl. It didn’t even have a real name, not that anyone knew, anyway. It was run by the old lady with the purple hair, who’d taken it over when her husband had died.

  God, the old lady would be ancient now. Maybe dead.

  Lana drove to a split, where Highway One met a smaller highway that ran east, and then she knew she hadn’t missed it. She hadn’t misremembered its location.

  The fish-and-
chip place was gone.

  So was her dream.

  I am the kind of woman who loses her shit when she can’t eat what she wants.

  Lana needed to chill out. It wasn’t like there weren’t a million other places to get good fish on the coast, up to and including the Darling Bay Café.

  But it was different. Everything had changed, everything had left her behind.

  At the next turn-off, Lana leaned her head against her steering wheel, trying and failing to swallow the lump in her throat that threatened to choke her. Beside her, Emily Dickinson whined.

  “Cooped up too long? Let’s go walk. Can’t get down to the beach here, but we can walk along the edge of the cliff. Would you like that? Sometimes you see hang-gliders around these parts.”

  As if the dog cared, as if she spoke English. All the pup cared about was that Lana fed her in the morning and at night and petted her in between. Simple creature.

  Lucky.

  She dug out a bottle of water from the back and poured some into a can that had once held peanuts. Emily Dickinson lapped it up. “What about food, though, huh? You ate this morning, but I didn’t.” She’d been planning on getting breakfast at the café when she was done with her yoga. Then she’d been going to try to figure out how angry she was at Taft.

  Well, whatever she’d been thinking she might be, she was angrier now.

  And sadder.

  She was so much sadder than she’d thought she would be. Her heart ached like she’d folded it wrong, like she’d tried to stuff it into a suitcase already too full of broken glass.

  Lana found another unopened can of peanuts behind the driver’s seat – thank God for road food. She and Emily Dickinson walked the path that wound its way through the ice plant and bush lupines to the cliff’s edge.

  Far below, the water roiled on the rocks. It was good to see the waves breaking themselves against the tide pools. The way they rushed forward and then smacked against the continent’s edge felt familiar in her very bones. If you threw yourself at something hard enough for long enough, you finally wore it down.

  That’s what she used to think, anyway.

  She’d come to Darling Bay with one agenda: to leave music and start her new life as a hotelier. If her sisters got in the way or presented any kind of a problem, she’d imagined herself like that wave – throwing itself against the shore until she carved out enough space for herself. She had the money. She had the time. And she had no other ideas.

  Lana looked down at the dog. “What kind of marine animal would you be, huh? If I’m a wave, what are you?”

  Emily Dickinson grinned and gave a sharp bark.

  I’m not a wave. Who was she kidding? She didn’t have the entire force of an ocean behind anything she did.

  No, she was more like a mollusk, alone and powerless except for sucking.

  When they were kids, she and Molly had liked to pry the mussels from the tide pools. They’d read that Native Americans had used them for food and had eaten them raw, and once they’d dared each other to suck out the slimy insides. Molly had started to do it, but then she’d chickened out. Lana, never one to back away from a challenge, had. And it had been disgusting.

  Emily Dickinson peed on a manzanita bush, then trotted to the edge to look down.

  “Away from there, you. The last thing I need is you falling.” Is this how crazy pet owners got started? Thinking their animals knew what they were saying? “Come here.” She snapped her fingers. Emily Dickinson came willingly, happy to take a peanut as reward.

  Lana put her hands on her hips. She looked west over the ocean. The water looked so far down, flat from up here. The depths were more brown than blue today, and the whitecaps were few. The roar was still there – a constant that she’d missed every day she’d ever been away from the coast.

  She wanted to cry.

  She drove her fingernails into her palms to prevent herself from giving in.

  The horizon was crisp today, with no fog visible to blur it. How many miles was she seeing right now? Dozens? Hundreds? When she was a child, she’d thought if she just got high up enough (the big oak behind the Golden Spike or the water tower on the far edge of town) she’d be able to see Japan. It was just there – on the other side of the water. She inhaled – the air smelled of ozone and dirt and sand, and if she closed her eyes and imagined hard, she could almost smell the incense that burned in the Buddhist temples far across the water.

  She’d gone to Japan once, years before. Lana had loved everything about the country – the diminutiveness of some things, the cups, the plates, and the awkward tallness of others like the busses that were double-deckers but as narrow as a passenger car, and the dizzying skyscrapers.

  An American promoter had heard her sing one night. He’d told her he could make her into a star in Japan. She went with him to two shows of performers he’d been working with. It was true. They were enormously popular, and both said that he was the reason for it.

  Then he’d told her his terms. They involved lots of acceptable things, and one action that wasn’t – sleeping with him.

  She’d laughed in his face. I don’t need your help, asshole.

  She didn’t need anyone’s help.

  Lana always knew she’d make it to the top on her own terms. By her own actions. With her own art.

  Except she hadn’t. She’d failed.

  Screw this. The wind picked up, slapping at her cheeks. “Let’s go!” she called to the dog.

  Wait. Just a second ago, she’d been here, right here at Lana’s feet.

  “Emily Dickinson?”

  Just the wind answered her.

  Lana ran to the edge of the cliff.

  There, almost at the very bottom, was Emily Dickinson.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Emily Dickinson was alive. She was running, in fact, and appeared to have gone over the edge willingly. The cliff face sloped severely downward, at what looked like an eighty-degree angle. In seconds, the dog was on the rocky shore below, barking into tide pools and scampering over the wet boulders.

  No possible way existed for Lana to get down there. A mile south there was a steep staircase that led to the shore, but the tide looked high, and the way the land curved, she doubted if there was even a way to get to the rock pools. If Lana took one step over the edge, she’d tumble to her probable death. It wouldn’t be a painless one.

  “Emily Dickinson!” The wind carried away her puny breath.

  Adrenaline surged through her limbs, prickling her fingers and toes. The dog would have to scramble up on her own.

  As loudly as she could, Lana bellowed, “Emily Dickinson! Come back!” She gave a whistle, but she’d only had the dog for two days – how could she expect her to be trained?

  Emily Dickinson looked up. She was so small down there, barely a white speck. It had to be ninety feet down the cliff, at least. The face of it looked to be made of soft shale, and plants grew out of it all the way down, but there were no handholds, nothing that Lana could hang on to if she had to go down.

  Emily Dickinson started climbing toward her.

  “Yes! Come on, girl!”

  It took the dog long minutes – it felt like forever – to get even halfway up.

  Lana cheered and cajoled from the top. She knelt at the edge, which felt steadier than standing and leaning out into the wind. “Come on, you can do it!”

  The dog grinned up at her, trying her best. She slipped a little but regained her ground.

  At almost three-quarters of the way up, Emily Dickinson was panting hard, her small sides heaving.

  The dog got another ten feet up, scrabbling hard at the plants and vines. She was slowing. Was she wearing out?

  What should I do? Lana looked behind her, but there was no one on the cliff-top walk, no one on the road to help her. Lana took out a handful of peanuts and held them over the edge. “Treat! You can do it! I’ll give you so many treats! Keep climbing!”

  Emily Dickinson scratched and clawed at
the slope, but her back end kept sliding down. Her forelegs trembled with the effort. Another ten feet and Lana could almost reach her –

  Emily Dickinson slipped. She whined.

  Then she tumbled sideways and rolled – bounced and slipped – all the way down to the tide pools below.

  From so high above, Lana couldn’t tell if Emily Dickinson was breathing. She certainly wasn’t moving.

  Everything inside Lana’s body screamed at her to follow.

  She knew she couldn’t.

  She had to call for help.

  There was nothing else to do.

  She dialed 9-1-1, grateful for the signal that was weak but present. “Help!” she said breathlessly when the dispatcher answered. “She went off the edge of a cliff, and she’s fallen. I can’t get to her from where I am. I don’t know what to do!”

  The dispatcher stayed calm, asking for Lana’s exact location. “Help’s already on the way. Can you tell me about her condition? Is she awake?”

  “I can’t tell from this far away.”

  “Is she breathing?”

  Impatiently, Lana said, “I just told you, I can’t see from here.”

  “How old is she?”

  What did that matter?

  Oh, God.

  Lana realized her mistake. “She’s a dog. I think I forgot to say that.” She heard only silence in her ear. “Hello?”

  Still nothing.

  The call had been disconnected. Lana hit redial, intending to clarify the situation, which the dispatcher had probably gotten wrong and with very good reason, but whatever reception she’d had was gone, completely.

  She tried again. Two, three more times, but the signal didn’t come back.

  Lana raced to the road to try to flag someone down, but the highway was eerily silent, and she couldn’t bear to be out of sight of Emily Dickinson. She ran back.

  A thrumming rose in the distance, a noise that Lana knew she recognized but couldn’t quite place.

  She peered down. Far below, Emily Dickinson was still motionless.

  Lana’s breath was so tight in her chest she felt dizzy.

  The noise got louder, more of a thumping now.