Secret Sins: (A Standalone) (11 page)

Our lips were going to touch on “injunctive.” I was on my toes, leaning up, my hands feeling the tightness at his waist.

But when thunder ripped through the air and rain suddenly pattered on the windows, I jumped too far back for him to reach.

“Crap,” I said.

Without a word, we scrambled to the two boxes we’d put outside. He put them into the trunk of his Audi rental, and we scrambled inside.

“Where are you staying?” I asked. “I mean… just…”

“They have me in a condo in Century City.”

The firm had apartments for visiting clients. They must use them for visiting attorneys as well.

“That’s across town from the office,” I stated the obvious. For clients, Century City made sense. For an employee, it was stupid.

“I get the real Los Angeles experience, traffic and all.” He started the car. “Where are you headed?”

“I live in Culver, but my car is downtown, and I have a family thing tonight in Malibu.”

“That’s a mess,” he said.

“I can get a cab Downtown.”

At rush hour, then I had to head west. I’d get to dinner with everyone after ten, and I wouldn’t see my brother. He was having trouble at school, and though it wasn’t my job to correct it, I was the only one he listened to.

Mostly, I didn’t want to get a cab downtown. I wasn’t done with Drew.

I spoke before I thought it out. “Are the partners taking you to dinner tonight?”

“That was last night.”

“Come to dinner at my family’s place then. You can ogle the size of it. We have a great cook, and I have seven siblings to play with. If you like kids, that is.”

“I love kids.”

Of course he did.

1982 – Five weeks after the night of the Quaalude

The pregnancy test was in my bag, a big square lump on a heavier lug of books. I didn’t usually carry all my things. We usually bought a separate set of textbooks for home, so all I had to carry were my notebooks. But I had to hide that stupid test. The nannies and housekeepers had started looking suspicious of my comings and goings, and I never knew when one of them was going to innocently (or not so innocently) slip or snoop.

The band had gone to Nashville to meet with a producer. Two weeks. Perfect. I was supposed to get my period in that time.

But I didn’t.

On the day the boys were set to return from Nashville, I got a beep from the Palihood house number. I went up there with my backpack and without a plan. I didn’t know what to tell them. I couldn’t even take the test until the next morning, so what did I expect? What did I want? Should I even tell them I was all of nine days late for my period? I mean, so what? I’d been late before. My schedule was all screwed up. What was the point of worrying them into thinking I was going to ask them for anything besides the number of an abortion clinic?

The side door was unlocked, and I walked in unannounced as always. I thought of putting my bag by the door, but the elephant in the room had been zipped into it, so I kept it slung over my shoulder.

I was about to walk into the kitchen because the beer and cigarettes were there, but I felt a vibration in the floor. Standing still, I listened. Birds. The freeway. The ticking of the clock. Men talking behind walls. And music.

I went to the side of the house I’d only seen down to the studs.

The studio was sheetrocked and painted. Floors down. Gold record and band photos hanging in the hall. The window to the isolation booth sealed and egg-carton-shaped soundproofing on the walls.

Strat stood in front of the mic, copper-gold hair tied at the base of his neck, unleashing a note I couldn’t hear. The door to the adjacent engineering room was ajar. I peered inside. Indy sat at the control panel while a goateed guy I’d seen around untangled some wires.

“Dude,” Indy said into the mic, looking at Strat through the window.

“Dude,” Strat said into his own mic. “Really?”

“Warm as the girl in the middle,” Indy replied joyfully.

My heart twisted once, sharply. I reprimanded myself. It was a metaphor, for Chrissakes. I told myself I didn’t care. I had no feelings on the matter one way or the other. I liked Indy and he was fun, but only until he wasn’t.

I didn’t need to be special to him.

How much longer are you going to tell yourself that
?

I opened the door before I could answer myself.

Indy turned. Then the engineer. The man whose baby I could have been carrying jutted his chin toward me in greeting then turned back to the egg-carton-lined room.

“Give me the next verse, Stratty.” He jotted something in a notebook, not even looking at me when he said, “Close the door, Cin.”

I closed it quietly and gently placed my bag on the couch behind the board as if a sleeping monster were inside it.

Strat wore a white T-shirt and black jeans with a chain that made a U from his front belt loop to his back pocket. It swayed with him as he sang. His voice was magic. It had been too long since I’d heard him.

“I need to talk to you guys,” I said.

“I think we need to kill the preamp,” Goatee said.

Indy moved a lever so slightly it could have been nothing at all. A low-level version of Strat’s voice filled the room as he hummed to himself near the mic.

“No,” Indy said, not even looking at me. “Make it work. We’re not cheaping out on vocals.”

“Sure, but…” a pentameter of technical terms I didn’t understand followed.

Indy parried with another jumble of engineering nonsense, and Goatee thrust with his own as he counted a bunch of bills he’d pulled from his front pocket. My request for an audience had been denied apparently.

In the booth, Strat jotted notes, tapped his foot, and hummed verses.

I’d never felt like an outsider with them before, but I’d never seen them working either. It was a bad time. I’d come back after I did the test. Or not. But either way, I was doing what I had to with or without their permission.

I picked up my bag. When the handles got taut from the weight, I had to exert a little more energy to pull the whole thing up, and I wished I could lean on someone. I wished I hadn’t always been so far removed, so cold, so non-demonstrative. I wished I was used to emotions because I was having them and I couldn’t define them. They were moving through me so quickly I couldn’t define them, much less cope with them.

I slung the bag over my shoulder and saw myself in the glass’s reflection. I was translucent. Overlaid onto Strat’s indifference.

I hated this. Needy. Childish. Whining. Grasping. Desperate. I saw myself from the outside. Out of control. Floundering. Hungry for validation. A few synonyms for “it’s going to be all right” wouldn’t cure me of the problem. Not even a little. So why did I want them so badly?

When I opened the door, Indy spun in his chair. “Didn’t you want something?”

“It can wait.”

I left, saving myself from myself. I could handle emptiness. I could handle solitude and isolation. This rush of neediness was going to kill me. If either one of them had started patting my head and saying he was going to help me/be there for me/whatever you want, baby, I would have told him to fuck off.

So when I heard Indy’s voice behind me, I was tempted to just keep walking down the hall. But the needy part won. I turned to at least tell him, “No worries. I’m good.” His posture, half in and half out of the engineering room, told me that would have been a welcome dismissal.

But I couldn’t. That hot bubbling mess inside me wouldn’t be silenced.

“You all right?” he asked.

I think I’m pregnant.

I’m sick in the morning.

“I’m fine. Welcome back.”

“Thanks.” He leaned back into the engineering room, and I took the opportunity to walk a few more steps down the hall, rescued and abandoned at the same time. “You coming back tonight?”

“Why?” I didn’t turn around, keeping him at my back.

“Why?”

I didn’t know how to answer. Didn’t know how to move or think. I only knew how to blurt out my problems.

Something inside me feels like turned soil.

And I’m late.

And I knew how to shut myself up. I barely knew how to breathe without feeling the tension between breath and words.

“Yeah,” I said. “Why?”

“Because we’re back, and people are coming over. What’s the problem, Cin?”

He wanted an honest fucking answer. He knew my fucking name, but he wouldn’t even fucking use it.

Cin.

Cin, my ass. My fucking left tit. Taking my stupid stunt of a fake name and throwing it at me like a bucket of ice.

“You’re working. We’ll talk later.”

If I’d been able to just walk away, things might have been different, but we were young. I had to offer him one chance to give me what I needed. But no, that wasn’t to be. Indiana Andrew McCaffrey had to stake out his territory.

“Maybe.” He waved at me dismissively, and with that, the potential to have my needs met went down the shitter.

“What do you mean maybe?”

“People come over, and it gets hard to talk. So it’s cool.”

I threw myself down the hall toward him, the weight of my bag pushing me forward, finger extended. “It’s cool?”

He shrugged and looked back into the engineering room as if he was dying to get back in there. I’d never felt so alone in my entire life.

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you dare tell me you won’t make the time to talk to me. I’ve never asked you for a goddamn thing, you—”

“That’s fucking right.” His tone was a cinderblock wall, and I shriveled inside even as I kept my own wall high and hard. “Look, if you’re gonna turn crazy, you won’t be the fucking first.”

“What?”

“I’d be surprised. You didn’t seem like the type. But before we ‘talk,’ I’m going to pull out what we said the night we met. Feelings aren’t real, so we don’t bother. Right? You’re not getting crazy. Right?”

Crazy. The world and everyone in it was crazy. Because I had feelings. I didn’t know what they were or who they were even for. Maybe I had feelings for a way of life that was about to end.

“Look,” he said, rubbing his lower lip with his thumb. A little swipe of discomfort. “We’re really busy right now. There’s no time for this.”

Whatever my feelings were, Indy wasn’t going to help me sort them out, and fuck him. I didn’t need him or his help. He didn’t even know what to do with his own damned feelings.

“Better get back to work,” I sneered.

I took my crazy and went down the hall without looking back.

Fuck him seven ways to Sunday.

Fuck both of them.

1994

The Audi cut through the rain like a machete, and Drew drove as if he lived in a place where it rained more than two months out of the year. I felt safe. Again.

“I saw you in
Rolling Stone
,” I said as if I was just trying to make conversation. I flipped through a black wallet of CDs. Doubtless a small fraction of what he had at home.

“That was such a joke.”

“Too redemptive?”

“I did half the drugs they said I did.”

“That’s still a lot.”

He smiled. “Yeah. There was plenty. It was the eighties. What can I tell you? I was a wreck.
Sound Brothers
was making a ton of money, and I was wrecked over Strat.”

I slid a disc from the sleeve.
Kentucky Killer
. The album that turned me into a groupie and got them the deal that financed the studio. The one with the masters in the trunk of the car.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said.

He shrugged and looked in the rearview before changing lanes as if he needed something to do with his hands and mind. “Yeah, thanks. I just… I didn’t know. After you were gone, we started fighting. Bad shit. Fistfights. I don’t know what was wrong with him. Or me. Maybe it was me. I think about it a lot. Was it all really my fault? I mean, he blamed me for letting you go. He said he wouldn’t have. So I shut down. I didn’t even want to look at him. I got very involved with the studio. He had the business head, and I kept just wanting to do shit my way.”

“You made the studio a real success.”

“I never felt like that without him. Feels like I’m treading water most days. He said the studio should be passive. It should run itself while we made music, and I just kept getting more and more involved in the day-to-day. I could barely show up to our own sessions, and Gary had a kid, so he was checked out. Strat just lost it. Went back to Nashville.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“It wasn’t. He had a bad heart. Congenital aortic valve something. If he knew, he might have decided to take too much heroin instead of amphetamines.”

“Was that supposed to be funny?”

“Yeah.”

“It was.”

I’d mourned Strat’s death. He’d died from only a slight overdose of uppers. His heart couldn’t take it. I’d thought about that too deeply, reading too much into a heart that couldn’t stand the exertion. I sought out details about his demise to avoid the sadness. I told myself he was a jerk, that he didn’t matter, that he was in my distant past. But it did matter. A haze followed me, because he was indeed my past. I’d owned that life, that past, those stories that built me, and it all went and died while I wasn’t looking.

“He cared about you,” Drew said, glancing at me before he put his eyes back on the freeway. “We went to meet you on Santa Monica and Vine. And that neighborhood…” He shook his head. “Of all the corners to pick. We didn’t know if you’d been dragged into an alley and murdered.”

I shot out a laugh at how close to the truth he was. “I’m sorry I flaked.”

“You didn’t flake. We went to your house—”

I sat ramrod straight, eyes wide, adrenaline flooding my veins. “You did not.”

“Did. We got a lawyer to find out where you lived, and we got ten different kinds of runaround. Then a guy with a gun and a badge opened the door. He flashed an order of protection and made threats. We stopped coming around.”

“They never told me.”

Of course they hadn’t told me. I was indisposed and powerless.

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking at my open hands as if I was trying to set the past free. “I just couldn’t take it anymore. I…”