We held each other a long time. When he finally spoke, his tone had changed yet again. “Are you really going back to school, then?”
“That’s the plan,” I said. “I can apply to schools in Manhattan.”
Again he released me, refusing to meet my eyes. “That’s the only reason you’re here in New York? To go back to college?”
“It’s one of the reasons.” I clasped my hands behind my back. “Would that be such a bad thing?”
“Not for you, I guess.” He frowned. “You’ll make new friends, and you won’t have time for a has-been like me.”
“Right. Because of course I’ll be the most popular girl on campus.” I tried to keep my tone light. “Don’t you want me nearby?”
Nico retreated to his chair and sat silently for a while, opened his lips as if to speak, then closed them again. Suddenly I felt embarrassed. I had assumed he would be as thrilled to see me as I was to see him; I’d been so sure we would go back to being as close as we ever were. But his face grew somber, and I realized I might have gotten it wrong. Caught off guard, he’d been happy to see me, but once he’d recovered his equilibrium, he might hold my long absence against me. What I had done could be unforgivable: I had worried him and wounded his pride. Contrite, I approached his chair and sat down on the floor beside him, resting my head on his knee. He didn’t pull away.
“I’m here because I want to be with you,” I said. “That’s the real reason.”
“Yes, but why? Why would you want to?” The question startled me into momentary silence, so he answered it himself. “You feel sorry for me.”
I bit my lip. “I’m sorry about Bibi… and about your arm.”
He flinched. “So I’m right. You
do
feel sorry for me. And now I’ll be your project, like Maddy was. Is that your plan? You’ll visit me in your spare time?”
“If that’s what you want from me, I’ll visit in my spare time.” I was hurt.
“Sure. Why not? Why shouldn’t you go back to school and have a normal life like anyone else?” His tone was bitter. “Sooner or later you’ll meet some art student. Someone with an actual future. You’ll marry him and leave me again.”
“I don’t care about being married.”
“You
should
care. If I were the man I used to be, I’d make you
care. But like this” — with his right hand he gestured to the one resting in his lap — “I can’t play guitar anymore, and that’s all I was ever good for.”
He was silent again. If he’d been anyone else, I might have pitied him. Instead, I exhaled with relief. His last words gave me some insight into why he was holding back. They told me he didn’t resent me for leaving him.
“It’s about time you rejoined the living and started taking care of yourself.” I got to my feet and ran my fingers through his shaggy hair. “Time for a trim. And what about this?” I slid a finger down his rough cheek. “Don’t you have a razor in this place?”
“Am I repulsive, Jane?”
“Very, Nico.” I kissed the top of his head. “But then you always were.”
He chuckled, and I combed his hair as best I could with my fingers. Then I carefully touched his limp arm. “Louisa tells me you aren’t doing your physical therapy. That’s got to change.”
“Aren’t you disgusted by me?” He drew back his long bangs to reveal the raised flesh of his scar. It wasn’t terrible-looking, but my stomach lurched to think of the pain he must have felt.
“Scars are sexy,” I told him. “It makes you look dangerous.” I took his face in my hands and kissed the tip of his nose. “Now, enough of this moping around. Let’s go out in the fresh air. Do you have a terrace? A balcony? A nearby park?”
“There’s a roof garden.”
“Show me where it is.”
At the top of another winding staircase, sliding doors led out to a terrace hidden to the world by a lush wall of potted trees. I
gestured toward a pair of lounge chairs beneath a cheerful striped umbrella. “You wait here. I’m going to make you lunch.”
“I never eat lunch anymore.”
“But today you will. We’ll eat together.”
There wasn’t much in the refrigerator, but I did find bread and cold cuts. I made a plateful of sandwiches and gave one to Louisa before taking the rest up to Nico. We stretched out side by side on the lounge chairs. I had so many questions for him. First and foremost, where was Maddy? She was living with her mother in Paris, this time with an au pair Nico had hired to keep her safe in case Celine proved as neglectful as she had before. The au pair called Nico every few days, putting Maddy on the phone. “I didn’t want Maddy to see me this way,” he said. “I didn’t want to scare her.” He seemed to think he had turned into some kind of monster. I took his broken hand in both of mine, brought it up to my lips and kissed it, hoping to dispel the despair that had passed across his face like a storm cloud.
I wanted to know what had become of Lucia and Benjamin and the rest of the staff. He’d given them all severance pay and had set them free to find new jobs. Lucia was only a town away from Thornfield Park, running an antique shop in Old Saybrook. “She comes into the city and visits me from time to time,” he told me. “Says she’ll come back to work for me if I say the word. She loves the antiques but can’t stand the customers.”
Sitting beside him, listening to him speak, it all came back to me: how comfortable we had always been together; how easy conversation between us was. Even so, I detected a sadness and
anxiety in him that hadn’t been there before. The whole time we talked, he held my hand, as though worried I might decide to run away again. When he fell silent, I asked what he was thinking.
“I won’t be able to sleep tonight. What if you’re not here when I wake up?”
“I’ll be here, and I’ll bring you coffee just like this morning. I won’t always wait on you, though, so you’d better enjoy it while you can. Before long, you’ll be taking care of yourself, or you’ll have to hire some more servants to boss around. Like the old days.”
When evening approached, I told Louisa she could have the night off and asked her for directions to the nearest market. She gave me keys to the apartment and drew me a map. The store she sent me to turned out to be a mind-blowingly expensive gourmet emporium. I wandered the aisles as though I were in some kind of museum, gaping at the forty-dollar jars of truffles and the hundred different kinds of imported cheese. I bought fresh figs, plump raspberries, and the most expensive block of Parmesan I’d ever seen in my life, along with the more prosaic stuff — vegetables, milk, cereal, pasta. My time with the St. Johns had given me a small repertoire of decent meals to make, and I would surprise Nico with a home-cooked dinner. He sat beside me at the white granite island in the airy kitchen while I chopped garlic, basil, tomatoes, and mushrooms.
“Where did you learn to cook?” he asked when I started sautéing the garlic and mushrooms. “Is that what you’ve been doing with your time since you left me?”
I added basil and a handful of chopped tomatoes to the pan. “It’s one of the things I’ve been doing.”
“And were you cooking just for yourself or for others?”
“Others.” I paused for effect. “I shared an apartment with some people I happened to meet in New Haven.”
“Some people. Could you be more specific?”
“Some very nice people,” I said. “Smart, interesting, thoughtful people. They took me in when I was on the verge of being homeless.”
“Yalies, I suppose. Overprivileged Ivy Leaguers.” He wrinkled his nose.
I chose not to comment on the irony of a rock star calling others overprivileged. “Only one of them went to Yale, and they were far from rich. The apartment we lived in was pretty run-down.”
Nico said nothing for a while. “Were they all women?”
I couldn’t help myself; I laughed.
“Don’t tease me, Jane. Answer my question.” Now he was angry. His voice thundered the way it had on the day we’d met, when he’d almost run me over and had tried to blame me for walking beside the road.
“It’s good to see your fiery side again,” I said. “I’ll keep right on teasing you if that’s what it takes to bring the old Nico Rathburn back.”
“Don’t. Not on this subject. Anything else, but not this.”
I tossed some oregano into the pan and poured him a glass of sparkling water. “Here. If you must know, one was a man.”
And while the sauce simmered, I took a seat beside him at the table and launched into the tale of my travels, telling him how I had found myself in New Haven with hardly any cash and no job lined up. When I described my desperate search for a place to
sleep, Nico flinched as though he’d been hit. “Jane, what if you hadn’t met those people? What if you’d had to sleep on a park bench in the middle of New Haven? You could have frozen or been kidnapped by some psycho.” He grabbed my hand. “Imagine how I felt when I knew you were out in the world with no money. I couldn’t stop wondering where you would go or what you would do. After a while, I was sure you must be dead. You know I’m not religious, not even remotely, but I prayed every night that you were safe.”
I slipped from his grasp to stir the sauce. “Who knows? Maybe your prayers helped.” I recounted how the St. John family had given me a place to stay and how River had helped me find work.
“I’m grateful to this River person for taking such good care of you when I couldn’t.” Nico pulled a bar stool over to the counter beside me. “But tell me… did you like him?”
“We became friends. He’s a very good man. Noble, even. I know that’s an old-fashioned word, but it’s the best one I can think of. He cares more about people in need than about himself.”
“Sounds like a riot. Is he smart?”
“Very,” I said. “One of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Certainly the most driven. He’s studying to be a minister.”
“A minister? One of those Bible thumpers who think it’s their mission to convert everybody else?”
“I never saw him try to convert anyone.”
Nico fumed a moment or two. “Is he good-looking?”
“He’s about six feet tall with wavy blond hair, blue eyes, and chiseled features. Like a painting of Apollo. So yes, I’d say he’s good-looking.”
Nico looked down at his hands. “Did you really like this Mr. Perfect?”
I suppressed a smile. “You already asked me that.”
“After living with a noble Ivy League Greek god, what could you possibly want with self-centered, narcissistic me?” There was that note of self-pity in his voice again. “I’m such an idiot. Until this moment, I believed you still loved me even though you left me. And all this time you were living with somebody else. Why don’t you go back to him if he’s all you say?”
“You want me to leave?” I set the lid on the saucepan with more force than I’d intended. It clanged emphatically. “You really want me to go away?”
“Go find your boyfriend.” His voice was quiet, defeated, and I was suddenly sorry for teasing him.
“He’s not my boyfriend. I could never love him. I could never love anyone who isn’t you.”
“Is that the truth? You’re not just saying that to make me feel better?”
“Have I ever told you anything but the truth? You have nothing to be jealous about. I wanted to rile you up a little, to see that spark I’ve missed so much.” I nestled into him. “I thought I could shake you out of feeling sorry for yourself.” His dark hair fell into his eyes, and I brushed it back, my fingers caressing the scar on his forehead. On impulse, I kissed it, but he turned away, and I saw now that the sadness of the past months had taken its toll. My heart swelled.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’ve lost my spark. I’m not sure I can
ever get it back. It’s as if I don’t know who I am anymore. I’m just some guy who used to be Nico Rathburn.”
“You’re wrong.” I took his good hand in both of mine. “You’re still the guy who wrote all those wonderful songs so many people want to hear.”
Nico was quiet a long while. Then his mouth twitched. It was small and tentative, but it was a smile, and a mischievous one at that. “So… you do like my music after all?”
“I love your music. Your music is who you are.”
“Who I used to be.” Sadness crossed his face again. What could I do to lift his spirits and keep them that way for more than a few seconds at a time?
I thought a moment, and then it came to me. “You know, your fans are waiting for you to come out of hiding.”
“They’re going to be disappointed.”
“Louisa says if you’d only do your physical therapy you might get some of your mobility back. Maybe even most of it.”
“Most of it? What good is a guitarist with most of his mobility?”
“You can still sing, right? Then you can perform. And you can still write songs. You can bring someone else into the band to play lead guitar.”
“What band? They’ve all got their own projects.” As contrary as he was being, there was fresh energy in his voice and expression. “They’ve moved on.”
“They didn’t want to.” I was only guessing, but as I spoke the words I knew they had to be true. “The Rathburn Band was the
highlight of their lives. I’m sure they miss recording with you. And touring with you.”
“Dennis’s solo career hasn’t taken off like he hoped it would,” Nico conceded. “He might want to take over lead guitar.”
“He would do it if you asked him to,” I said. “I know they’d all come back. They’re your friends, Nico. I bet they’re just waiting for you to ask.”
“I see you’ve been thinking about this.” There it was — the sparkle in his eyes. “So tell me, Jane. What else do you have planned for me?”
He was right; I had been giving some thought to his future. I gestured toward the glass wall with its skyline view. “This apartment’s very glamorous and all. But don’t you miss Thornfield Park? Wouldn’t you like to rebuild it?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“Because you need a place where the band can gather to rehearse. A real home with plenty of bedrooms, where we can entertain our family and friends on holidays.”
“
Our
family?” Nico looked bemused. “I thought you didn’t have any family.”
“The band,” I said. “Yvonne and Kitty. Lucia. And Diana and Maria, the women I lived with in New Haven. They’re the closest thing I’ve ever had to real family. Besides you and Maddy, that is.”
“Maddy.” I heard regret in his voice. “She keeps asking when she can come home to live with me.”