by Holly Rayner
I was too dazed to answer. I hadn’t been expecting this generous an offer any more than a random woman on the street expects to be handed a winning lottery ticket. Life had just taken a sudden, sharp turn for the better and my mind was still reeling from the implications. “I have no idea.”
“There’s a lot you could do with two hundred thousand.”
“I know. Believe me, I know. You know what this means? It means freedom. It means I can write the kind of music I want to write. It means I could put out my own record, if I wanted to—become an independent artist. And I have enough of a platform, enough of a following, that I could do it. All I needed was the money.”
Ginger flashed a shy smile. She looked, if anything, even more thrilled than I was. “So, what are you going to tell him?”
“Well, as my agent, what do you think? Advise me.”
“My professional advice,” said Ginger, “is that you would be a fool not to accept the offer.”
“Mrs. Tessmacher, I think, for once, we’re both in agreement. I was thinking the same thing. And you know what else?”
“Tell me.”
“I think we should go out to dinner tonight and celebrate. My treat.”
“Yes, please!” Beaming, Ginger threw her slender arms around me, then assumed her Mrs. Tessmacher character as she added, “Forgoing my usual ten percent, I’ll take it.”
Once we had sufficiently recovered our composure, we left the kitchen and returned to the sitting room where Umar sat admiring an antique snow globe. He hastened to return it to its place on the mantle as we resumed our seats.
“So? Thoughts? You were both gone a long time.”
“We wanted to be thorough,” said Ginger in a formal tone. “But having discussed the offer from every angle, we’re prepared to accept. Two hundred thousand dollars for a private concert in Sabah.” Despite her professional demeanor, there was a note of quiet giddiness in her voice, as if she still couldn’t quite believe she was saying those words.
The same surreal feeling suffused the rest of the meeting. After Umar had risen and shaken my hand, after the deal was completed, we stood around awkwardly in front of the fireplace. Part of me wanted to get out of there before I accidentally slipped and said something that gave away the deception. Another part of me just wanted to hang back and bask in the moment.
“Well, I suppose I had better get going,” said Umar, reaching for his hat. It was sort of adorable how relieved he looked at having not embarrassed himself.
“When does your flight leave?” asked Ginger.
“Early evening, but my cab is already on its way. I like getting to the airport a couple hours early just in case. I tell Kalilah the way you survive in the business world is by being prepared for any emergency.”
“Solid advice,” I said. “I can’t wait to meet her.”
“She’s going to be thrilled, I can tell you.” He began heading for the door. I got the distinct impression he was afraid of imposing for too long.
“It’s a shame you couldn’t have stayed longer,” I told him as we followed him out. “I’d love to have shown you around Woodfell.” I couldn’t believe he had taken a twelve-hour flight just to meet with me for an hour and then get back on a plane to go home.
“Maybe next time,” said Umar. His suit looked oddly bright in the glare of the noonday sun. “Kalilah would love to see this place.”
It seemed like the sort of empty remark a person might make at the end of a conversation—like saying, “Sure, I’d love to get coffee next time!” No one ever meant it when they said that. And yet he seemed sincere somehow. I didn’t doubt that Umar would love to bring his daughter on a vacation to Woodfell, Ohio, the one place I was trying to get away from. He seemed oddly drawn to this town and I wished I knew why; he’d be amazed to learn that there were a million other towns just like it.
“Well, we’d love to have you,” I said, but I didn’t mean it. If he ever came back, he would find out that I wasn’t the person I had been pretending to be all morning, and that was the last thing I needed.
Chapter 7
Shannon
I spent the next two weeks in a sort of prolonged trance, working day shifts at the local diner, Breakfast Bros, and dreaming of what I was going to do with all that money. Somehow, the prospect of the paycheck awaiting me at the end of the trip made my day-to-day troubles more bearable.
There was an incident toward the end of that first week when an old woman walked into the diner and started removing our pictures from the wall and carrying them out to her car. When I confronted her about it, she grabbed a pile of lightly sautéed onions off of someone’s plate and threw them in my face. It was the sort of incident that would have sent me into a rage any other week. Instead, I calmly wiped the onion off my face and went to fetch the manager. By that point, the old lady had taken the pictures and sped off, but everyone present in the diner vouched for me and the man whose onions had been stolen said I behaved with a professionalism he had seldom seen in the service industry. I didn’t even cry until after my shift had ended and I was alone in my car.
“On the bright side,” Ginger said when I told her the story, “at least you only have to work there for another week. Have you turned in your two weeks’ notice?”
I shook my head, mopping my eyes with the back of my hand. “I haven’t mentioned it yet. In a way, it almost seems too good to be true, you know? How many service workers can say they’re quitting their job because they were suddenly handed a bag full of money?”
“Well, not many service workers are wickedly talented and famous musicians,” she pointed out.
“Would a singer who was really talented and famous really be waiting tables at a local diner?” I asked sadly.
“Everyone has to start somewhere.” She reached out and began stroking my hair. “Herman Melville worked as a customs agent while he was writing Moby-Dick. Pretty much any great musician you can name started out waiting tables or plucking chickens or cabaret dancing.”
“When I was in LA, I met so many aspiring artists who motivated themselves by telling those stories. I knew a guy who had spent ten years working at a fancy diner so he could save up enough money to build his own recording studio. Another guy wanted to be a professional filmmaker. It’s a little scary, realizing you’re not the only person in the world with dreams.”
I was breathing hard now, an ominous sign. When I tensed up like this, it was usually the prelude to a full-on panic attack. Sensing the danger, Ginger reached across and patted my arm. “Shannon, honey, there’s a difference between you and those people.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“You’ve already made it. I don’t know what your definition of success is, but I would say being offered two hundred thousand dollars for a private gig overseas certainly qualifies. I’d say you’re one of the lucky ones, but luck doesn’t really enter into it. You earned this.”
I wished that was true but I didn’t feel I had earned anything. I had acquired the gig through deception. If Umar had known the truth about me, he would never have offered me all that money. Instead, he would have given it to some other, more talented and glamorous singer who really deserved it. I was none of those things, I was only pretending, and he had bought the con. I felt like an impostor who had perpetrated a clever fraud. But the fraud had worked too well and now he and his daughter were expecting great things, and I would be exposed the moment I opened my mouth.
So, I did what I had always done in situations where I was panicking and unsure of myself. I practiced. Each night after I returned home from work I spent a few hours at the piano in my room or in the garage playing guitar. I had always had a fiercely perfectionist streak and it seemed to emerge most fully whenever I was feeling pressured. No matter that this would be just a kid’s birthday party and I would likely be playing to a roomful of pre-teens, I had to make this the best show I had ever done. I had to impress Umar. I had to prove to him that the money he had shelled out
for this concert had been money well spent. I didn’t want him going away feeling cheated at the end of the night. I wanted him to feel I had been worth every penny, or whatever the equivalent of pennies was in Sabah.
“Are you sure you’re not over-preparing?” Dad asked one night when I’d been in the garage until nearly midnight and was just getting ready to leave and head back to the apartment. “You’ve spent weeks rehearsing for a gig that probably won’t last more than an hour or two.”
“I don’t want to disappoint my fans,” I said as I returned the guitar to its case. At this hour, it was hard for me to conceal the irritation in my voice. It was late and I wanted a cup of tea and maybe a Danish from the fridge, and to be alone in my bed with a good book.
But Dad wasn’t going to let it go so easily. “He’s giving you the money no matter how well you perform. If I was in your position, I would just coast along for the next week, show up and play my set, and wait for him to hand me the check.”
“I wish I could be that lazy.” Retrieving a piece of coffee cake from the fridge, I turned my tired eyes toward him. “I just want my performance to be excellent. I want to earn that money.”
“Well, I admire your ambition, honey. Just don’t burn yourself out.”
He left for his room while I sat at the table eating the cake and waiting for my tea to brew. Maybe I had misunderstood the forces that were driving me. Growing up, I had assumed it was fame or money I was after. And though I found the thought of being wealthy and universally beloved enticing, it wasn’t what kept me locked away in the garage night after night. If I was given the choice between all the world’s riches and limitless talent, I would have chosen the second without a moment’s hesitation.
So maybe what I really wanted was to prove myself to Umar. Because if he loved my performance, then that would mean that I wasn’t a fraud. That I really had the talent I had been so desperately seeking, and, with the proper application of diligence and hard work, the chance to float a little way above the earth and touch greatness.
I put in enough work over the two weeks that when I finally flew out of Slater-McCall Airport on Tuesday night on a plane bound for New York City, I wasn’t panicking as much. It was like a test for which you had spent the entire night cramming: at a certain point, a feeling of serenity comes over you as you realize you’ve done everything you can.
The nice thing about transatlantic flights is that you can sleep through them if you’re tired enough, and I was exhausted. It felt like I was sleeping off all the accumulated worry and work and stress of the past two weeks, like maybe I needed to have my piano and guitar taken away and flown over the Atlantic until I passed out, the way parents will sometimes take their kids out for a drive until they fall asleep. I awoke briefly when we reached London, and then after a layover of about an hour, I was back in the air and sound asleep again. By the time we reached Londontown, Sabah, I had been in the air for about twelve hours total, though it felt like I had only just left Ohio.
I disembarked at Sabah-Heathrow airport at 3:10pm in the afternoon. Outside, it was raining lightly and a row of shiny beetle-black taxis stood waiting on the curb as we filed out. Having just woken up, I had a weird feeling of disorientation at the sight of all those idling cabs and that grey, gloomy sky. For a panicked moment, I thought maybe I had slept through my landing and been carried by the plane back to London, but then a sign on a passing kiosk reminded me that I was at Sabah-Heathrow, and a second later, a driver emerged from a long black limousine holding another sign with my name on it.
I let out a long sigh of relief: I had really done it. I had arrived. I was here. And the trip, in spite of my worst fears, hadn’t even been terribly difficult. All I had to do now was let this limo carry me to my destination and do the one thing I was good at.
Surely that wouldn’t be so hard…right?
Maybe not. As the cab made the twenty-minute journey to Central Londontown, I could feel the familiar flutter of nerves in my stomach. I guess that was to be expected, being in a strange country for the first time, about to enter the home of a person I had just met. We drove past breweries and ale yards, past brick-fronted houses and diners with outdoor patios, through Knightsbridge with its high-end department stores and gated homes and Kensington with its hospitals and delis, until finally the limo turned onto a narrow road lined with cedars and paused at the gates of a large domed house.
Even from a distance, it was easy to see why Umar hadn’t been over-awed by the Winslow House. That house was a joke compared to this one, with its double flight of marble stairs and slender Corinthian columns. On its west end, the estate was bordered by a narrow river and a shady grove of lime trees and tamarinds ending at a walled garden from the top of which I could see faintly a cluster of overhanging pomegranates.
Taken together, it had the look of an English country estate, the sort of house where a murder might occur in an Agatha Christie novel. I wondered whether it had been modeled on a home in London; if so, it was hard to imagine the original being much fancier than this. Even the finest house in Woodfell didn’t have a dome at the top, or a garden pond in the front yard with a bridge running over it.
In a way, I was glad I had met Umar in person before making the trip out here. Otherwise I’m not sure I would have had the courage to step out of the limousine and up the stairs to the front entrance. I’d performed in Vegas, I’d performed in LA, but this was a whole new level of intimidating. My stomach dropped as I crept up the steps with guitar and suitcase in hand, fingers crossed that I survived until the end of the night.
I had just reached the portico when the oak doors creaked open and Umar came striding out. He was wearing a tan jacket, gray slacks and a gray fedora, and extended his arms grandly in a gesture of welcome.
“You made it!” He motioned for my suitcase and I yielded it gladly. “How was your flight?”
“Not the worst flight I’ve ever had, but it’s a relief not to be in the air anymore. Where’s Kalilah?”
“She was upstairs in her room last I checked. Now, I told her we were having a special guest tonight, but I haven’t said who yet, so prepare yourself: the kids are about to be really excited.”
“Oh, a surprise! Can’t wait!”
He led me through the front entrance into a massive foyer with parquet flooring flanked on either side by expensive-looking busts. The hallway ahead of us was lined with impressionist paintings in gilt frames—images of windmills, wheat fields and cottages overlooking the sea—interspersed with the occasional old-fashioned gas light. In crossing the threshold, I felt like I had stepped through a portal into the world of one hundred and twenty years ago. We could have easily been wandering the halls of a sprawling English manor house in the year 1895—not at all what I had expected when I had agreed to perform a show in an obscure Middle Eastern country.
“You’re quiet,” Umar said when I hadn’t spoken in a while. We were ascending the stairs now and I couldn’t resist looking out over the bannister into the sitting room with its tiled floors and white marble bookcases.
“Sorry,” I said, “This is just really impressive. I’ve never been in a private residence that was this—I don’t even know what the word is—awe-inspiring.”
Umar laughed lightly. “I’m glad you approve. Kalilah thinks it’s big and spooky. She and her friends have sleepovers where they all gather in one of the guest rooms and tell scary stories. You can hear them screaming all over the house. Keeps me up at night, honestly.”
“I can’t imagine how it would feel to have grown up in a house like this.”
“You should tell Kalilah—she spends so much time on her tablet, I sometimes think we could have lived anywhere and it would have been the same for her. Anyway, you ought to feel proud of the house you have now. It’s impressive!”
It took me a moment to realize the house he was talking about. I had briefly forgotten that I was supposed to live in a century-old mansion in East Woodfell. “Yes, I worked really ha
rd for that,” I said without much conviction. “I had no idea how much work it would take to be able to afford and maintain a house like that.”
“Did you grow up rich?”
“No, not at all,” I said, a little surprised by the question. “I’m still not used to it. Some days I wake up and wonder where I am and how I got here. I keep thinking it’s all going to go away.”
“Same with me,” said Umar. “If it hadn’t been for a timely loan in my early twenties and some fortuitous investments…but I don’t want to bore you with that, not tonight. We’ll have plenty of time to chat tomorrow.”
I would be performing later that night and leaving shortly after sunrise the following morning. Having been in the country for about an hour, I was beginning to wish I had planned to stay longer. Umar could have shown me around, maybe even taken me out for lunch or dinner. I had done gigs in London and Glasgow, but never in a non-English-speaking country. There was something a little enticing about the prospect.
Next time, perhaps. If there ever was a next time.
Just as we reached the top of the stairs, a pair of elaborate double doors were flung open and a little girl in a blue smock dress, wearing a bright green ribbon in her hair, came running out. She paused at the threshold and stared hard at me as if sure she was seeing a hallucination.
“Dad?” she asked shyly.
“Hi, Kalilah!” I said brightly, lowering myself to her level.
Whatever doubts she had been feeling disappeared at the sound of my voice. She ran up and flung her tiny arms around me.
“Dad didn’t tell me you were coming,” she said in a very matter-of-fact tone, like one adult addressing another. She was certainly precocious: Umar had been right about that. “I was afraid it would be someone terrible, like when he hired that entertainer who only played kids’ songs about lobsters.”
“I thought it would be an educational experience,” said Umar. “You seemed really interested in crustaceans when we went to the aquarium.”