But whether the accident was real or not, it had raised an interesting point: the studio was overcrowded. Tomorrow he would give the interns the week off. And compensate them well for cleaning his house. The place he was currently avoiding.
He reached for Absalom, his Gibson, and lay back on the control room sofa. Eyes closed, he held his baby against his chest and strummed, letting his mind wander as the muscle memory in his fingers created music.
It seemed he was stuck in a repeating pattern of dysfunction, dating and marrying into crazy like a repeat offender who’d never heard of three strikes. Had he learned nothing from a string of failed relationships with batshit musicians and an ex-wife who was borderline? When Marianne told him she was manic-depressive, he actually smiled—yes, smiled—and thought, Darlin’, that’s nothing. My ex has borderline personality disorder.
A fucking loony tune, the ex had been as hypnotic offstage as on for their too-brief pre-tie-the-knot fling. He fell for her hook, line, and sinker, which proved how shallow he was back then. Famous, gorgeous, and experimental in the sack met his criteria in those days. Spoiled little rich kid who saw what he wanted and went for it.
His friends told him to leave her the first time she tried to kill him. (Admittedly, her attempt wasn’t serious. Pretty pathetic, in fact.) But he stuck it out for another two years, and the only thing he learned during that time was how to dodge missiles. He didn’t fight to get her help; he didn’t attempt to understand. Why? Because her highly publicized antics were good for his career. In and out of rehab and catfights, she was weekly-gossip-column fodder. And when she announced her affair, he packed up, walked out, and filed for divorce. His mother, who never quit anything—even marriage to an arrogant drunk—told him Montgomerys didn’t get divorced. His sisters were smart enough to work around that by never getting married. And that had been his amended life plan until he’d met Marianne.
His whole life he’d been surrounded by successful people behaving like self-absorbed jerks. Marianne was more temperamental than half of them put together, and yet manic-depression never held her back. She had strong radar for bullshit and terrific feel for people’s potential. And from the beginning, she glimpsed something in him no one else had: what she called his humanity. For the first time in his life, he liked who he was—the person he’d become with Marianne. And he didn’t want to go under again. Be just another asshole. Be Dumber.
Hmm. That was an interesting riff.
He sat up and played it a few more times. Tried to expand it by moving to different chords. His hands slid up and down the guitar neck, experimenting. Then he started humming to get a sense of a vocal melody. He smiled. A song was creeping out. Right here in the dark of an empty recording studio.
He laid Absalom down carefully on the sofa and walked into tracking room A, flicking on light switches. Touching the drum kit was a really bad idea. It was mic’d, it was in tune, and it was ready for recording. But for the first time in forty-eight hours he was thinking about music, not just the state of his marriage.
Drums were the backbone, the foundation of the sound. You could record guitars anywhere, but not drums, and this room was one of the best he’d ever worked in. It had become his cathedral. Marianne knew exactly what she was doing when she bought this old building with a nice decay—the time sound takes to diminish to silence, like a fading echo.
Darius sat on the drum throne. Jade had been trying to convince him to back off and give up the stage to some guy from Marianne’s past, but there was only one way to do that—if he started thinking about the sweet spot in the studio for recording drums. If he thought about the decay of the natural room reverb.
He disliked acoustically dead spaces—hermetically sealed rooms. As did Marianne. And now that her previous history had started reverberating through their lives, maybe he should accept that he couldn’t eliminate those pulses of the past. They might even be necessary. After all, recording drums was about considering the individual sources that together created one cohesive sound. Could be it was even time to come clean with Marianne about the true horror of his first marriage: his mismarriage. Tell her what a crap husband he used to be. Tell her he’d resolved to get it right with her.
Darius picked up the sticks and started to bash the newly tuned heads on the drums. Over and over, harder and louder, till his vision blurred. Then he peeled off his T-shirt, used it to mop sweat from his face and chest, tossed it down and started playing again. Playing like he hadn’t played since his punk days. Stomping, hitting harder and harder. His arms flailed, his hands ached, fresh blisters throbbed . . . And then the hi-hat split. And a drumstick splintered and took out one of the carefully placed mics. Fuck.
Or maybe not. The roaring anger had stilled. Vanished. Sitting here, on the drum throne, he would make a pledge to do what Marianne and Jade were asking of him. He would back off and try to be the husband Marianne needed him to be, and if he wasn’t going to lose his mind in the process, he had to concentrate on making music. If not his own, then that of Media Rage. He would push them to create fire. But first he needed to replace a broken cymbal, sleep for a few hours, and then get the drum tech out to tune the kit he’d wrecked.
TEN
GABRIEL
The air smelled of endless midsummer nights. Pigeons cooed and sheep bleated; in the adjacent allotments, someone sneezed. A microlight drifted across the pale, cloudless sky; above, a jet stenciled a white vapor trail. If you were struggling to make sense of death, then surely you could find answers in this place of solitude surrounded by the melody of the English countryside. He was particularly partial to the large stone angel over the grave of Miss Ursula Finch, beloved sister and aunt, who had died in her sleep in 1915, aged eighty-two.
Gabriel closed his eyes and gave quick thanks for the beauty of the day and the small miracle the youth group had achieved. The grass had been clipped to perfection around the graves, and the foot-high weeds along the stone wall were trimmed to ground level. If you hadn’t been here in thirty years, it was a good day to visit.
As they passed through the gate, a magpie hopped in front of them. Marianne stopped and leaned against Gabriel. “Which one?” she whispered.
Of course, she hadn’t seen the grave since it was freshly dug and she lay on top of it to die. When he found her she had black Bedfordshire soil under her fingernails and in her mouth. Before losing consciousness, she had tried to claw her way underground to join Simon.
“I’ll show you and then leave you be,” he said, but waited to follow her lead.
“Is it the one covered in roses?” She began moving, pulling him with her.
“Indeed. Mum chose them, but they’re not quite as low maintenance as she led me to believe. They fight back.” He pointed at a latticework of scratches on his free arm. From beyond the grave, Simon could still inflict pain.
“Do you think about him often?” she said.
“No.” It was an honest answer, because everything to do with Simon was colored by that final conversation, the violence of those last minutes of his life. Truthfully, it was easier to not remember.
“Time doesn’t erase the missing,” Marianne said.
Was she talking about Simon or her baby?
“But our scars become the map to our present.” He supposed that was true. Would he be married to his job if Simon had survived? He’d certainly planned for this future, but he’d also planned for Marianne to live it with him.
“Is that what I am, a scar?” she said.
A jackdaw laughed.
Yes, a bloody big one. “You’re someone who left my life, and now you’re back. And I’m grateful for that.”
“I’m surrounded by death. I bring death. Simon’s was the first, but I—”
“Marianne”—he stopped by his brother’s grave—“you bear no responsibility for my brother’s death.”
She kissed her fingers and then placed her palm flat against the headstone, which was pitted with age and stained with mold.
Porous Italian marble might not have been the best choice for the English climate. Following his mother’s wishes, there was no mention of the baby. At the time, Gabriel hadn’t understood, but now it made sense. A year after the ground had settled enough for the headstone to be put in place, the inquest was concluded and his mother had been fighting to control what remained of Simon’s legacy.
“Why then, Gabriel? Why did they die if not because of me?”
“I don’t know why you lost your baby, but Simon died because he was angry and he’d been drinking. Because he made terrible decisions. We all did that summer.”
“You didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. But none of it matters anymore.” Or so he had told himself for the last thirty years. “This is our history and that’s all it is: history. Over and done with. And we did what we were supposed to do. We moved on.”
“Predestination?”
“No, life. Life trumps tragedy, Marianne.”
She sank onto her knees in the wet grass. The dew had been heavy that morning, but Marianne seemed not to notice. “Don’t you ever tire of being the optimist?”
“I have to find the good in the bad.” Otherwise I too would lose my mind.
“And what good came out of Simon’s death? None. It destroyed our lives.”
“No, it changed their direction. We were all running too fast that July. You could feel the tension between us, gathering like a thunderstorm. But two of us survived.”
“It wasn’t my choice to survive.” She looked up at him. “It was you, wasn’t it, who saved me?”
He nodded. “All those skills I learned in lifesaving classes. You don’t remember?”
“Sorry, no. Electroconvulsive therapy gave me little-old-lady brain overnight. Although I do have a fuzzy memory of screaming curses at you when you came to visit me in the hospital.”
“Your mother was quite shocked by your language.” He smiled. “Marianne, let’s not punish each other. I refuse to regret saving your life. If I had to relive that night, I would do nothing differently.”
She picked up a fallen rose petal and turned it over in her hand. “I always admired your certainty, your belief that you were doing the right thing. Never a hint of regret.”
She had no idea, nor would he enlighten her. The details of that time were no longer relevant. To her, to him, to anyone. Besides, she hadn’t come back for him; she’d come back for everything that was buried in the cemetery.
“I’ll wait by the gate. Take as long as you need.” He started walking away.
Hooves clattered on the road. Two girls on chestnut ponies passed the cemetery, falling and rising to an elegant trot. And thunderflies, those tiny pests that could drive a man to the brink, settled on his arms and began crawling over his skin.
“Gabriel?”
“Yes?” He stopped, and started scratching.
“Thank you. For taking me in; for not making this difficult.”
He nodded. But as he positioned himself across from the entrance to the cemetery, the past he had just dismissed as irrelevant clobbered him in the gut. Marianne’s mind might have erased chunks of their history, but he remembered every detail with sickening clarity, including Marianne lying unconscious and bleeding on Simon’s grave. If Marianne had died that night, there would have been no way forward for him. He could not have survived. And he would have had no one to blame but himself, because his anger, which had spread around that car like anthrax, had been the catalyst for Simon’s death. Marianne was not responsible for the crash—he was.
ELEVEN
MARIANNE
Sunday, and they had a scheduled activity! Not a nothing day like yesterday. Yay!
They were going on a picnic with cucumber sandwiches, fondant fancies—would Gabriel remember she liked the pink ones?—and an old tartan blanket. Add a thermos of orange squash and they could have been characters in an Enid Blyton novel. And it was warm, like a Carolina spring day.
Sun streamed through the frosted glass on either side of the front door. Perfect, everything was perfect. Except Gabriel was taking way too long to get his cute ass downstairs. She swung back and forth, one hand on each banister. For better or worse, she’d rewoven their lives together; and in forty-eight hours they’d reverted to childhood roles—him lagging behind, her urging him to move faster.
“Gabriel,” she whined. “Aren’t you ready yet?”
“I most certainly am.” He appeared behind her. How had he gotten downstairs without her noticing? She grinned. Perpetually barefoot, he moved around the rectory like a ghost. He was carrying hiking boots, and in his jeans and T-shirt, with a sweatshirt knotted around his waist, he could have been a grad student.
“Excellent, I see the wellies fit,” he said.
After breakfast he’d foraged in his garden shed to find the Wellington boots of some former girlfriend. Bizarre to think of Gabriel with a dating life. Was there a current girlfriend skulking around? He’d told her he was single, had been for years, but she’d caught him texting late the night before with that smile. Some things about Gabriel were impossible to forget.
She held up a leg. “Yup, but they were full of cobwebs. I’m super glad you don’t have black widows in Bedfordshire. You still not a spider fan?”
“I call Phyllis next door when I find one in the bathtub.” Gabriel gave a mock shiver.
Yup. They’d done the time warp. “So are we finally ready?”
“Not quite,” he said.
The doorbell rang, which it did a lot. A constant stream of people dropped by to see Gabriel, and she’d become adept at hiding in the kitchen. Still, news had circulated that the vicar was shacked up with a wanton woman, or so Gabriel had told her after he’d donned his dog collar to walk down to the village shop earlier that day. Apparently Sunday late morning was prime time for gossip gathering. Although how anyone knew she was in the rectory was a mystery, since she hadn’t left the house. She started to retreat, but he touched her arm.
“Stay.” He edged around her in the narrow hall. “I’d like you to meet an old friend. He’s joining us, but he’s discreet.”
“I don’t care if he’s royalty,” Marianne said. “I’m not up to meeting new people. I’m the crazy woman who ran away on a jet plane, remember?”
“Hugh’s different. You’ll like him. And I’m afraid I need his advice on a delicate matter.”
Gabriel opened the door wide and greeted a short man whose paunch was restrained by a too-small Doctor Who T-shirt and scarlet suspenders. The stranger looked part hobbit, part Albert Einstein, part stunted Santa. Plus he was wearing bifocals with the line. Hadn’t progressive lenses made those things obsolete?
“Lovely day for a walk. Hope you don’t mind but I brought Sybil. The old girl needs some exercise, and I thought she could rough up a few squirrels.” Hugh gestured to a midsized mutt sniffing around the postage-stamp-sized square of grass.
Gabriel sat on the doorstep and started lacing his boots. “Hugh, this is my old partner in crime, Marianne. She taught me to steal sweets. Marianne, Hugh.”
Sybil barked at a magpie, and Marianne flinched. It wasn’t too late to change her mind and stay behind. Shame, she’d been looking forward to the fondant fancies.
“Not a dog lover, my dear?” Hugh said.
She couldn’t help but smile. With his bulbous eyes and crazy hair, he could have been someone she’d met on a locked psych ward. “Not especially.”
“Sybil’s perfectly harmless. Deaf as a post and daft as a duck.” Leaning around Gabriel, Hugh swung his right arm in a wide arc and then zoomed in for an enthusiastic handshake. He clasped both hands around hers and held tight.
“Bill Collins’s dog chased us when we were children. We had to leap over a fence.” Gabriel pulled up his pant leg to reveal the faded scar. “But not before the blasted thing bit me.”
Because you pushed me over the fence, insisting I go first. Dear Gabriel. With him at her back, all things were possible.
�
��Did you really teach this honorable gentleman to steal sweets?” Hugh said.
“Not any old sweets,” she said. “Sherbet lemons.”
“And long before Dumbledore made them trendy.” Hugh handed Gabriel a box of cookies. “Milk chocolate digestives, can’t picnic without them. Who’s got the basket?”
“More of a rucksack, I’m afraid.” Gabriel squeezed past her to grab a backpack from the hall table.
“Standards have dropped. The thermos in there, too? None of that builders’ tea, I trust.”
Gabriel shut the door but didn’t lock it. “Lady Grey.”
“Good man.” Hugh reached up to pat Gabriel’s shoulder.
They walked toward the public bridle path at the end of Nell’s Lane, and Sybil lollopped ahead, nose to the ground, tail gyrating. As they cut across the edge of the field called Dead Woman, the men strode out in companionable silence. Where did that name come from, Dead Woman? Must remember to ask Gabriel. Marianne skipped off to inspect a clump of wildflowers and skipped back. Clips of faded memories returned. Did they pass the stream on this route, and if so, might she see a kingfisher?
Hopping over squished rabbit remains—gross—she glanced up at Gabriel and Hugh. Such a mismatched pair. Not of the same generation, not of the same anything. Short and stumpy meets tall and strapping. She held back a giggle.
Gabriel probably had boatloads of friends. An entire network. Marianne slowed to a stroll. She had no one outside her studio family. What was Jade doing? Fingers and toes crossed she was impressing the band. Media Rage had been set to record in Nashville until Marianne made sure their manager, an old fan of Darius’s, discovered his whereabouts. Media Rage was Jade’s ticket to the future and a world beyond Nightjar. Marianne wiped her eyes but failed to erase the image of Jade’s hand shoved under her armpit as she’d said quietly, “Ouch. That fucking hurt, Marianne.”
Echoes of Family Page 9