“Man, you sound just like me sometimes.”
“Scary.”
“Yes—and wonderful. I don’t connect with most people, Anna. It’s hard for me to keep friends because betrayal is right around the corner most the damn time. If I say something too revealing, I can usually count on it winding up in a tabloid or posted on Facebook the minute I have a disagreement with whatever wretch I confided in. People pretty much suck and I pretty much stay away from them when I’m off the road.”
“It isn’t all people, John. You’re just in a line of business that tends to attract some real—uh—”
“I know. I know,” he interrupted quietly. “But I’ve been around it so long that I’ve forgotten what good people look like. I’ve never been around many of them, you know.”
They fell silent, and a breeze from the open window touched her face. She reached up and switched off all the lights around her but one.
“John? You’re the only one who can decide if your life works for you or not,” she said.
“Is your life working for you?” he asked. “How do you know? How do you know when you’ve reached the limit and all there is to love about a thing has been used up?”
The million dollar question.
“Look, John Leaven, I need to go slide in beside Regan and get some shut-eye, too,” she said. “I’ve had kind of a hard day.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“Interesting that I’ve had a bad day?”
“No, no. Sweet dreams, Anna Anderson.”
Then he was gone. Again. Probably for the last time, for all she knew.
Didn’t he ever learn how to say hello and goodbye? She stared at the phone and put it into sleep mode.
FIVE.
September
And so Michael Anderson, CMPM, went to Brazil, leaving a text for his wife as he boarded the plane, then disembarked in a location that apparently had no coverage despite the top-notch international roaming service on their cell phone plan.
Regan was sure to come back from the circus hopped up on cotton candy and roasted peanuts at the hands of her aunt and cousin. The pressures of the day weren’t what they had been just a month earlier, and boredom threatened to creep in. Boredom! She’d never let herself be bored in her life. Just as Anna had adjusted to running a million miles an hour, she now had to readjust her pace.
She hit the gym for a workout and left feeling elated, picked up the mail and headed home. This was like a staycation, if she just brought herself to look at it that way.
She tossed the mail on the counter, and casually ripped open the envelopes with a steel letter opener fashioned like a medieval dagger. The entire house would have had those little gothic touches if Michael hadn’t insisted the modern look would have wider appeal if they ever resold. Modern didn’t appeal to her. Anything that included phrases like “ye olde” and “fleur de lis” did.
“Stones, sconces, leather and tapestries,” she said aloud.
The check for the coffee job had come in with the stack of mail, and the newest shampoo scents were waiting for her in a styrofoam box, hiding even the brand from prying postal eyes. As far as she could tell, her nose had led her to a quietly executed subindustry, which she could bring straight into her home. No tire-squealing baby sitters required.
The insurance statement had come in for their annual physicals, hers very average, complete with all the lovely gynecological exams—his just as intrusive with the prostate-specific antigen and digital rectal exam. “Nice,” she said. Then she frowned. There was a total on the bottom uncovered by insurance for additional lab tests and injections. She’d have to call the hospital about that one. As usual, they’d coded and billed wrong.
“Unknown caller” came up on her phone, and as always, she answered.
“Hello, Anna. I know it’s a strange time to call, but I was thinking of you.”
“It’s the middle of the day. How is that strange?”
“It’s strange for me. We don’t have a show tonight, so I’m killing time. We’re in Denver tomorrow, Las Vegas the next night.”
She closed her eyes and absorbed him for a minute. That beautiful timbre in his voice soaked into her.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Just sitting here listening to you talk,” she said.
“I can hear the smile in your voice.”
“Same here.” She dropped the mistaken insurance statement into the garbage can and laughed.
“Do you think we can be friends, Anna?”
“I don’t see how. I shouldn’t even keep talking to you. I suspect we’re crossing some sort of adulterous telephonic line in doing it.”
“Mm,” he rumbled into the phone. “An emotional affair? You know, you don’t have to keep picking up the phone when I call.”
“Actually,” she said, “I do. It comes up as a blocked number, just like my grandmother’s and mother’s and Jess’s phones.”
“Jess?”
“My sister. Her daughter was the girl I had with me at the meet and greet, remember?”
“Right.”
She closed her eyes. One word spoken in just some exact tone out of that man’s mouth and she melted inside like an idiot. Even worse, she could paint a mental picture of him when he spoke it, and the effect was even stronger.
“If I texted you my number, would you call me next time?” he asked.
“No.”
“Would you miss me if I stopped calling you?”
Oh, God, yes.
“I would. I would miss you quite a bit.”
“You’re as lonely as I am,” he whispered. “Do you have any idea how long it takes me sitting here staring at the phone before I have the guts to push the buttons?”
She inhaled. “Tell me how the band got started, John. Tell me your story.”
“You’re excellent at deflecting,” he murmured. “About a dozen psychiatrists taught me that word—deflecting.”
“Yes, I am.” She wanted to ask about the psychiatrists and thought better of it.
“Fine. Okay. It wasn’t good,” he began, knowing he’d pushed as close to her as she’d allow. “I was a teenager with no home life to be proud of. I slept on sofas, woke up face-down in an alley a time or two. That’s when the drinking started. It numbed the pain.”
“From what?”
“From everything. From the abuse of one parent. From the neglect of the other. From the teenage angst and ennui that piled up on top of that and complicated things. I was terrified of everything. There was this big world ahead of me and I had no means to even buy my next meal if I went out into it alone. So that’s when I hooked up with Alexander. He had a couple guitars in his basement, and we started to play. His uncle owned a bar—a really popular one at that. Alex had learned from the musicians there.”
“You taught yourself to play?”
“No, no. Alex did. He was a natural, a genius with just about any instrument that fell into his hands. He couldn’t sing to save his life, though, and I could—somewhat.”
“So you started playing in that bar, am I right?”
“No. Alex died that winter.”
She hadn’t expected that, and stood there wordless with the phone in her hand. “I’m sorry.”
“He jumped in front of a train one sunset. I woke up after the funeral. I was in his basement with a bunch of Chinese takeout cartons around the floor. I stank of bourbon. Reeked, actually. To this day, I have no memory of how I got back to his place or what happened the night before. But anyway, his parents told me it was time I left, that there was nothing for me in their home now. They said Alex would have wanted me to have some things. That’s how I ended up with his van and both guitars.”
“Where did you go?”
“To my parents’ place,” he said. “Where my dad gave me an ultimatum. I could stay if I went back to school and never played again. I tried, I really did. I went back to school for a couple weeks, got in a first-fight with an upperclassm
an and lost, wound up with stitches, and then living in the van.”
“Homeless?”
“Yes. Homeless. Family-less. Friendless.”
“So how did you survive?”
He laughed. “That, beautiful lady, is the story I’ll save for the next conversation.”
“Way to leave a teaser.” She inhaled. “I can’t imagine how you must have felt. I’ve never lost anyone that way.”
“I felt for the longest time that I should have seen it coming. I was his best friend, the one person in the world who should have known. I mean, I knew he’d been unhappy, but I didn’t think—”
“If you had, you would have done something,” she said. “There’s no doubt. We do the best we can with what we know at the time, John. It’s all anybody can do.”
“I know it. But why can’t we have a sense when someone is getting ready to leave this world? We could step in.”
She could. She could sense when they were coming in, too. Suddenly the image of identical twin boys came into her head. And Jess, poor Jess, had no idea yet …
“Here’s the thing—” He sighed deeply. “You’re bottled up so tightly … I want to know how to uncork you.”
“That’s just dirty.”
He laughed, loudly, brightly. Happiness came through the line as it so rarely did with John Leaven. “I want to know the things that make you tick. Do I make you tick?”
“Are you flirting with me?”
“If you have to ask, I’m doing a shitty job of it.”
“Oh, John. It’s just that I’m a deeply private person. It’s hard for me to open up to someone I’ve met once, and to tell the truth, Regan and I are having a hard time lately. Work has gotten in the way of so much.”
“I found you on LinkedIn, by the way,” he said. “Impressive resume. You’ve done things, lived places. You should be proud.”
“I’m not proud, John. I’m just me.”
“Anna, I’m going to text my number to you. It’s permanent now. I’m not giving it out to hardly anyone. It’s not even a Tracfone. Please, just think about me being there if you need me.”
When they hung up, she thought after a long moment, Now why would it matter that it wasn’t a Tracfone?
Thirty seconds later, the text he promised came through.
•
He settled back into the black leather sofa that wrapped around the living area in the bus, gently turned off his phone, and put it in into his shirt pocket. The phone was warm against his chest, the leather cool against his back. The band had slept in a hotel complete with pool and jacuzzi the night before, and had just checked out for the bus a few minutes ago.
The bus this time around was the best Leaven had ever had on a tour. He could turn around in the bathroom. There were two twin beds side by side in the back, and two bunks that hung against the side wall opposite the closet and rows of drawers on the other side. The vehicle was huge.
He could see the guys just outside, fending off a photographer and a handful of groupies who’d scouted out the bus and waited for a sign of life aboard, hoping to get laid, living with no more depth than that. He watched the most aggressive girl through narrowed eyes. She was tall, blond, model-thin and utterly vapid. She tossed her hair back repeatedly over her bare shoulders. Lowered her lashes. Laughed at absolutely nothing—he knew this because William just wasn’t that funny. Long on looks and short on character, she was the ugliest thing he’d seen all day. They were all perfectly ugly.
“Nothing but predators,” he said aloud.
As if on cue, William turned and looked over his shoulder, raising his eyebrows at John. The windows were so tinted that at best, William probably just guessed where to spot his faint silhouette in one. Then he laughed and turned back around. They ran interference for him most of the time by now, Zach the only member of the band remaining who still entertained the idea that sex and drugs somehow should always, always, always go with rock and roll.
William’s wife waited for him at home in North Dakota, a grounding force if ever there was.
Finally, security arrived and herded the photog outside the closed parking lot along with the skank.
The click of the door made him turn around. “See that one?” William asked, then bent low to peer into the fridge. “Man, this thing is stocked. Remember when we couldn’t afford a bologna sandwich?”
“Yeah, yeah. I remember. And I saw her.”
William grabbed a soda. “That one chick had apparently been sitting on the bumper for two hours waiting for us.”
“Which of us?”
“Oh, I suspect any one of us would have done.” He took a swig. “D’you get hold of your mysterious Anna?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s no good, man. She’s married.”
“I know. We’re just talking.”
“It’s not just talking when you throw away all Zach’s groupie phones.”
John patted his pocket. “You have an extra razor somewhere?”
“Yeah, man. They put some shaving kits up in the top cabinet.”
He stood and stretched. “Cool. Might need the scissors again, too.” He hummed all the way into the bathroom.
•
Anna had run her fingertips along the surface of the phone, over the numbers in that text about a hundred times over the course of a week.
A few more times than that, she’d dialed her husband’s number and come up empty. The thing didn’t even kick in to voicemail.
In the mail for the next two days, bills began to show up, paid mostly by the insurance company. Some had balances, but that didn’t matter—they weren’t Michael’s no matter what the hospital said. They’d checked his information again, then again after that. It all matched. So now the prospect of identity theft entered the picture, and Anna found herself changing every debit and credit card they had.
All the while, Michael’s employer alternated between ignoring her messages and pretending all was fine. It wasn’t. They wouldn’t confirm where he was exactly. Or what he was doing. They told her to wait and he’d call when he could, which only raised the red inside her to a glass-shattering temperature. He could have called if he’d wanted. He could have called at any point in time, and wasn’t. Regan knew it. She knew it.
She set the phone down and clenched her fists until her long nails marked her palms.
As if on cue, words sent to light the darkness came as John Leaven’s second text message lit up the screen.
Assignment: Google my name. Click images. Seriously.
She texted one word back: Okay.
“Mommy!”
She tucked the phone into her pocket and walked outside. “What, honey bug?”
“I look like a bumble bee!”
Regan flapped her arms and sloshed around her wading pool in her little yellow swimsuit. One thing about being three—everything looked cute.
“Yes, you do.”
“Is Daddy coming home yesterweek?”
“Yesterweek?”
She nodded her head. “Or two weeks day?”
“I don’t know.”
Her perfect eyebrows drew together over those luminous eyes, those infinite lashes. “He’ll call soon, I think.”
“He loves you, you know. I do, too.”
Regan nodded. “Yes. I know. It’s okay, Mommy. Everything is okay.” Then the sandbox beckoned—where every grain would stick to those wet legs, and it didn’t matter one bit.
Anna sat down in the swing. Something in the texture of the air itself had shifted subtly over the past day or two, something that said summer was dying and fall was coming to life. Whatever else was dying with the season, she could only guess, but the faintest tingle of change crept through her. A prescience she pushed back into the recesses of her mind.
Under Google images, John Leaven’s name brought up photographs by the score, too many to absorb, most so foreign she barely connected them to the man in the plaid shirt with that infinite wall of sadness between hi
m and the world.
Then a rush of realization hit in the middle of the photos, and tingling erupted across her skin, raising the hair at the back of her neck.
She was ready for him when the phone rang this time, and this time with the number showing as his, her excuses would become forever futile once she answered. And yet she did—she answered.
“Hello, John.”
“Hello, Anna.”
“So what am I supposed to see?” she asked.
“Me, I guess.”
“To tell you the truth, when you were younger, you didn’t look anything like you do now.”
“It’s the long hair, isn’t it. It was a lot shorter at the meet and greet.”
She laughed. “I hate it.”
“Really? It was sort of my trademark.”
“Talent is a better trademark.”
“Ouch,” he said. “So what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she lied. “I’d rather talk about your hair.”
He hesitated. “You can tell me if it’ll help. I can feel it coming through the phone at me, whatever it is that isn’t wrong.”
She closed her eyes and let that part of his accent that was most like a Scottish brogue roll into her.
“I’ll talk about you,” she said at last. “I’ll talk about myself. I’ll even talk about Regan. But there are some things it wouldn’t be appropriate to talk about.”
“Are you kidding?” he pressed. He’d never pursued when she’d dodged before. “You mean like your marriage, I assume.”
“Yes, I mean like that.”
“Fine. Anna, I need to know what you felt when you met me. When you saw me that first time under the tent.”
She watched Regan pack sand into a red plastic turret mold, meticulously crafting her castle.
“The thing is, John, I met you before and I just now put it together with those stupid long-haired pictures online. I’m completely freaked out at the moment.”
“I’m completely confused, is what I am.”
“Seven years ago. Before Michael. Before Regan. I was at this festival with a friend I’d known since high school. Okay? She needed the rest room and the only one was clear on the other side of this field. We were walking by and this guy put up a chair and card table, then sat down to sign autographs.”
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