Lost Angeles (13 page)

“My good friend Lourdes has agreed to sing again tonight, this time a duet.” Another bout of screaming, another couple of moments until they settle. I turn toward Fuzzy Bunny and offer up a smile that’s gotten me shot on more than one occasion. She’s wide-eyed, pupils still eating up her irises, skin flushed and glistening, cheeks a high pink. When one of the stagehands drops a guitar over my head, she looks at it with no little envy, and I make a mental note to send her two, or three, or maybe just one of each
.
“It’s called ‘Blue-Eyed Girl.’ Want you all to sing along with the hook. My girl Lore will show you how it’s done.”

The speakers crackle to life, notes ricocheting off the walls as the crowd explodes. She holds the mic between us, and I pluck out the first set of chords before letting them have it with everything in my lungs.

Storms slam into glass and scatter it across your floor,

Back away, but every curve is asking for a little more.

The words rip along the edges as I lean into them with everything I’ve got. There’s no half-assing this song: it’s all or nothing every time I sing it, and that goes double now that I am singing it at her. To her.

You’re the one who cuts me down,

Blue-eyed girl, your eyes are knives,

Run your blades across this town,

We’ll make them bleed, beg for their lives.

Lore keeps her eyes locked on me through the entire verse. Coming up on the chorus, there’s no time for her to dither, no space for her to falter because the music just doesn’t allow for it. She hits me with a tiny smile, like we’re conspiring. Sharing a secret. Well, fuck, maybe we are. Maybe we’re sharing
all
the secrets. She certainly seems to have every single word I’ve ever written memorized when she opens up with that glorious voice and blows me away.

You want to be the one in control, control… baby,

You want to be the one to tear… it… down.

You want to be the one, be the one with the pieces, baby,

And I’ll be the one to bleed.

The sound system catches her lyrical sparks, and just like that, the fire’s lit. It chases us through the rest of song. She knows it, has it memorized, is able to add flourishes like spurts of gasoline tossed onto the flames. I catch her gaze on me for the half-seconds between words, noting the exact moments when she takes over the melody, when she loses herself in the music, when she’s the kind of fearless that she desperately wants to be. I give her those moments, and then I throttle her words with my own, screeching down on her harmonies like a semi with the brakes cut, willing and able to run her over if she doesn’t speed up, move over, get out of my way. Sometimes she does, and sometimes she deliberately taps on the brakes, forcing me to back off.

Those are the moments I grin at her. Those are the moments I show her my teeth.

Before I’ve had a chance to process it all, we come to a crashing finish, and we’re left there in the spotlight to stare each other down. Suddenly, there’s a sense of need, a feeling of desperate
wanting
that bubbles up from some buried place. When the music fades away, I make a slashing motion with my hand, silencing the next song, cutting through it until some asshole in the booth turns it off. The whole place goes deathly still, like a blanket thrown over a fire.

Exorcise the demons.

Slowly, I step back, lift the guitar from my shoulders, and hand it off to some skinny kid who stares at it like it’s the Holy Grail. When I reach a hand out, someone else puts a microphone into it. Lore shoots me a puzzled look, because she probably knows my set like the back of her pretty hand.

And she knows
this
too, even if she’s the only person in the universe who remembers it.

I raise the mic to my mouth and give Lore the only thing that can properly convey all the emotions that her eyes and her lips and her music have ripped out of me.

Angel on high,

I pulled you from the heavens,

And dragged you down, down, down,

Into my special brand of hell…

My voice cuts through the reverence, echoes through the silence, reverberates from the floors and ceilings and balconies. Three notes in, Lore stiffens, already knowing the lyrics but needing another second to recognize the melody as the one I’d played her on this very stage, both of us with guitars in hand. We’re standing here in front of LA’s elite, piecing together my past… and hers.

And the audience gets it. They realize they’re witnessing
something
, even if they don’t know exactly what it is. Especially when I close my eyes and let it out, let it
go.

Angel girl, the stars weep to see,

What you’ve become since falling,

But I just can’t seem to let you go,

And maybe that’s just as well…

It’s softer, sadder, more gentle. It’s
my
song, the way that I sang it. No better or worse. Not right or wrong. Just
different.

Here beside me,

Tucked beneath me,

Surrounded by me,

Oh, baby can’t you see?

Lore’s sweet soprano picks up the refrain, and she sings my pain the way I sang it, the way I felt it twenty years ago, on a night just like this.

You burn ever-bright,

My every wrong set right,

You show me there’s still light,

You are the light,

And I want to walk with you…

In your light.

Not a single whisper from any of the hundreds of club-goers standing perfectly still in the darkness. I can’t see them anymore, because it’s just me and her and both our voices in perfect harmony. It hurts. It burns in a way I can’t describe except maybe like being stabbed in the gut and having my innards ripped out of me.

Bleeding out.

The way Elizabeth did. The way I should have, too, the night when Roman intervened and gave me eternity.

This song, Lore’s voice, the memories that Benicio—
fucking Benicio
—pulled out of me.

Let ’em go.

Eventually the song ends, the last few strains hanging in mid-air, a grand
a due amoroso,
a perfect
a prima vista
, an absolutely impeccable
improvisato
.

My mic hits the ground with a heavy thud that sends a sharp screech through the common. The world comes back, but nobody moves. Nobody so much as blinks, and I find myself stepping toward Lourdes with the sort of intent that I have no explanation for. She holds her ground, even when my hand wraps around her microphone, tugging it from her fingers and hurling it into the darkness. Then my hand seeks out hers, my fingers sliding into the spaces between her own.

“Come home with me.”

Her eyes search my face, looking for answers, but in the end she gives me the only thing I’m really looking for: a nod.

And a second chance.

It’s exactly the way I remember it and so familiar it makes my heart ache. Afternoon sunlight slants through the windows. Dust motes dance through that radiance. I breathe in old paper and vinyl, cork grease, plastic and the softly-lingering presence of hundreds of other scents: perfume, cologne, cigarettes, shampoo, hair spray, and
people.

Not just any people, but
family
. This place is my home away from home, and it has been since I was sixteen years old. I cut my teeth in the working world behind that pitted, wooden counter. Today, there’s a new cashier, younger than I was then, and only employed here to keep him from getting in trouble at home. He’s a good kid from a crap family.

I give him a cheerful wave as I pass by. “Hey, Joe.”

“Hey, Lo.” He smiles, blushes a bit, and ducks his head to take care of a customer.

There’s the jingle of the old-timey cash register. When I peek over my shoulder, Joe’s eyes follow me, his face drawn with concern because we’re play-acting at normal right now. We’re pretending that everything is okay. That he’s fine, that I’m fine, that everything is going to be all right.

We’re trying to get past the fact that I’ve been locked up in a psychiatric hospital for six months.

I turn away, because I can’t stand to see
that
look on his face. The look that wonders if I’m actually better or if he should hide the box-cutters. It’s an expression I’ve gotten pretty familiar with. Hell, I wasn’t even allowed to wear a bra until yesterday; a precaution, they said. Just in case.

I’m pretty sure all the precautions were for their peace of mind, not mine.

My feet eat up the space between the front door and the back rooms. The office door is open, and as I lean against the faded paint in the squared-off archway, I take a second to look at him.
Really
look at him. Like this place, he never changes. Brown hair, warm eyes, and a tall body that’s so lean, he still looks like a gangly teenager for all that his head is bowed, fingers working over an adding machine. I’ve known him forever, since we were kids together. The record store brought us closer; it was the thing that saved us both.

“Hey, Daniel.”

At the sound of my voice, he looks up, mouth ajar. Teeth click together a second later as he stands. With a pencil still gripped in one hand, he makes his way around the desk and toward me. “They let you out.”

“Yeah.” I give a slight nod and shove my hands in my pockets. “Apparently it was all about finding the right meds.”

And saying the right things.

“So, you’re better?” There’s doubt in his eyes, and tentative hope. “You can come home?”

Such a loaded question, and the shoe is on the other foot now. He’s looking at me the way he should have six months ago, when I was in the hospital on suicide watch, not eating or sleeping or even taking my medication. He’s staring at me with sweet longing, praying that he doesn’t have to
fear for me
anymore. He wants it all to go back to the way it was before. Before I disappeared. Before I came back. Before I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, remembering in dreams the things I couldn’t recall while awake. He wants to pretend, and I could let him, I suppose. But the pretending only goes so far.

I will always love Daniel in some little way.

Love him, yes. Stay with him…

“No,” I tell him, reaching out to touch his face. “I’m not coming home.”

I had a lawyer deal with the paperwork for my half of the record store, turning my share over to Daniel so that I could walk away. I can’t do this, no matter how familiar the dust motes are. I can’t be with him, no matter how comforting his smile is. This place still rings with the sound of my screams, still echoes with the desperation in my soul. Worst of all is the wind chimes.

He seems to know without knowing. May have known all along. “Where are you going?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I tell him. “I just came to say goodbye.”

Then he shakes his head. “What about the wedding? What about everything?”

It hurts, having him bring it up like that. “You would always wonder, Daniel. You would always look at me and see
crazy.
Always wonder when the other shoe would drop—”

“I wouldn’t—”

“You won’t have to,” I say. He goes quiet then, eyes averted. “The whole town looks at me like I’m nuts. I can’t stay here.”

“Who cares what they think?” he whispers.

“I do.” Those words finally silence the arguments, and in the crackling wake, I reach for his hand, open it, and press the tiny engagement ring into his palm. “I can’t go my whole life knowing that everyone
knows
.”

Because home or no home, it’s not the same as it was. Turning, I take a step, but a hand wraps around my elbow and tugs me back.

“You’re not walking away from this.”

The hand tightens on my arm, spinning me around until I’m facing him again. My breath hitches in my throat. A scream gathers in my chest. There is no Daniel, and everything around me goes dark.

There’s nothing left but
teeth.

I startle awake mid-scream, one hand pressed flat to a cool car window, the other reaching out toward the dash. Vertigo spins my world on its axis, and my heart leaps into my chest, but a moment later, everything settles back into place, the car racing evenly between the lines.