Some Kind of Miracle (3 page)

In Marty’s bathroom, the bright yellow bikini undershorts still near the sink where he’d kicked them, Dahlia washed her hands, passed back through the bedroom, Marty’s snores now rattling through the whole space, and down the hall to the kitchen.

“Snoring away?” Victor asked her.

“A regular Texas chain-saw massacre,” she joked. He laughed, then handed her the check on her way out the back door. The back frigging door. The service entrance for people who weren’t big enough hotshots to use the front.

Out in the driveway, she climbed into her beat-up Toyota van and closed the door, then sat for a while looking at Marty’s palatial Bel Air home. The sun was beginning to set, and as it glanced off the huge front windows, it made the whole house look as if it glowed. She had to sell her songs. She had to get out of her own pitiful little life. She started the van and had a surge of wanting to drive back and forth over the perfect lawn shrieking, “Buy my song!” But instead she drove quietly into the night, determined to make it happen.

D
ahlia pushed the play button, and the tape lurched, stopped, and stuck for an instant, looking as if it might split. Then the two plastic wheels began to creak and turn, and the first thing that came out of the speaker was a loud blast of static. The tape had been in a mildewed cardboard box for twenty-five years, on which the twelve-year-old Dahlia had written in pencil:
ME AND SUNNY SINGING “STAY BY MY SIDE" AND “GIRLS ARE BETTER
.”

Where in the hell would she find a studio that would have the equipment to let her listen to this thing and then transfer it to a CD? Why hadn’t she and Sunny ever made a lead sheet for the song? Maybe they had and she didn’t remember. Well, there was certainly no shot that this old fossil of a tape recorder was ever going to be able to deliver whatever had once been on that tape.

The minute she got home from Marty’s, she’d dragged a ladder into the storage room and pulled the big, heavy machine down from the dusty shelf and cleaned it up enough so that she would be able to pry the lid off. As she dusted it and hauled it into the kitchen, she had to laugh at the fact that she was such a pack rat she’d never been able to part with even something as obsolete as this machine. Somehow she had talked herself into the idea that one day she might need it. And here was the day!

But now it looked as if there were no shot that the big dinosaur was going to work. Another loud buzz of static made her wince, convincing her she was never going to hear the tape. Just as she was about to push the stop button, she was startled when the next sound she heard was her own voice at age twelve.

“Move it over,” she heard herself say, and she knew that at that moment she must have been climbing onto the piano bench next to her cousin in preparation to sing. Now the sound was clear enough for her to hear the scraping noise the piano bench made on Aunt Ruthie’s floor as Sunny pushed it back to welcome her. A jolt ran through Dahlia’s whole body when Sunny’s voice filled the air. A voice she hadn’t heard in twenty-five years.

“Ooookay,” Sunny said. “Here goes nothing.” That was what she used to say when she was about to perform one of their songs. Dahlia felt as if she could close her eyes and be transported back to that day. Her father had bought the tape recorder and brought it over to Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Max’s to show it off. It was on a night when all of the relatives were there,
and they stood around it and looked at it as if it had just landed from outer space. Even Arthur the dog sniffed it and walked away.

The clarity of the sound was eerie now, and as the plastic wheels squeaked around, Dahlia watched them, remembering how funny it was that everyone got very quiet and nobody wanted to say anything into it. Not even Sunny. So finally Louie, nasty little creep that he was, kicked Arthur the dog, making poor Arthur yelp, so the first tape they made was of that sound and the sound of Louie laughing in the background.

Now Dahlia could hear Sunny noodling on the keys, trying out the melody with her right hand and saying aloud to herself, “Let’s see if I can get this one under my fingers.” Then there she was, playing the intro in that bouncy style of hers and segueing into the wonderful melody she’d composed. After a few bars, Dahlia heard her own voice from more than twenty-five years earlier, chiming in with the words about a friend who swears to be there no matter how, no matter when. And Sunny joined her in close harmony. Hearing the two of them delivering their song together in those long-ago days made Dahlia need to lean against the kitchen counter as the memories swept over her.

She wrote those lyrics the morning of the day Sunny was forced to stay locked in her room for being out too late with a boy the night before. Dahlia knew Sunny would be depressed and unhappy with the punishment, and she wanted to cheer Sunny up, so she crept into Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Max’s house and
slid the sheet of paper with the song lyrics under her cousin’s door, then slipped away. Now she remembered hearing from her mother later that day, when Aunt Ruthie told Sunny she wouldn’t allow her to see that boy anymore, Sunny opened the china closet, took her mother’s best china out piece by piece, and, screaming obscenities, threw each dish at the wall until she had broken the entire set.

The next morning while Dahlia was eating breakfast, the phone rang, and when she answered it, there was no voice on the other end, just Sunny at the piano playing the perfect tune she had composed for Dahlia’s words. After school Dahlia rushed over to Sunny’s to hear it again. She loved sitting next to Sunny on the bench of the Steinway baby grand that Aunt Ruthie originally bought for Louie because she wanted him to play on TV like Liberace. Even though Louie never touched the shiny black piano except to take one disastrous lesson, Sunny fell instantly and desperately in love with it. Magically, from the first time she sat in front of the keyboard and her little fingers touched the keys, somehow, with no lessons, no music books, perfect tunes came out.

As time went along, the tunes became sophisticated and melodic. Tunes she made up in that other world into which she disappeared, tunes that stayed with anyone who heard them, so people found themselves humming them every day for weeks. Tunes that, as a teenager, Sunny created with the urgency of someone who was playing to save her own life, because she was. Later the others all learned that from the time she
turned thirteen, terrible demons had filled her head, and the music was her only defense against them.

“It’s a fight to the finish,” she confessed to Dahlia. “I’m never sure if the music will block out my voices or if the voices will win and overpower the music.” Songs became Sunny’s life. She never stopped talking about them—how they were written, who wrote them—and she obsessed about how much she admired her favorite songwriters.

“Leiber and Stoller, Dahl. Listen to their songs. Every one of them can be sung by anybody after the first time they hear it. They write songs that feel as if they’ve been living inside you all along and they just brought them out. Direct, sexy, coming-at-you songs that make you want to move, make you
need
to move. ‘Searchin’.’ What a tune. You have to rock out when you hear it. When the Beatles were trying to get jobs, they auditioned with it. They wanted to get gigs, and their audition song was ‘Searchin’.’ What does that tell you? ‘Little Egypt.’ Put it on and then don’t dance? It’s impossible. I want to write songs like that.”

And, amazingly, she did. Sunny’s music had that unforgettable drive, a freewheeling, irreverent, low-down heat, backed by memorable tunes. Of course, Dahlia’s lyrics were okay, too, but not extraordinary like those melodies Sunny found somewhere in the far reaches of her overactive, complicated brain. And throughout all those years, very few people ever heard them, except for Dahlia and a few family members and friends, because finally, much too early on in her life, Sunny’s demons won the battle and got the
better of her. And soon she was spending more time inside the lockup wards of hospitals than anywhere else.

Now, through the living room window, Dahlia saw the lights of Seth’s Jeep approaching as he pulled it into the carport next to her van, and after a minute she watched him come through the door carrying a grocery bag. God, he was delicious-looking, she thought. She loved his thick, warm-brown hair, that boyishly handsome face, and the big brown eyes that lit up when he saw her.

“Whatcha up to?” he asked, seeing how excited she was watching the wobbly plastic wheels move in reverse as she rewound the tape.

“You won’t believe this,” she said. “Listen to this song my cousin Sunny and I wrote when we were teenagers.”

“You mean during the Civil War?” he joked. Seth loved to tease her about their seven-year age difference, kidded her all the time about being the older woman. As he wrapped an arm around her, she could smell the fresh baguette that jutted out of the top of the bag.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Stopped to see Lolly for an hour and give her a bath.” Lolly was Seth’s four-year-old daughter from a marriage that had gone bad when he found his wife in bed with the pediatrician. The wife was now the ex-wife, and she and the pediatrician and Lolly were all living together, and Seth’s visits to his daughter were painful and awkward.

“I’m gonna sell this song to Marty Melman and
take you to Hawaii with my first big check,” Dahlia said, standing on her tiptoes to kiss his sweet face.

“Better transfer it to a CD before that old clunker machine eats the tape.” Seth winced at the loud blast of static.

Then the sound was clear again. “Here goes nothing,” Seth heard Sunny say, and he laughed when he heard the two girls’ voices singing their song in close harmony. Dahlia was taken by surprise by the wave of sadness that passed through her chest as she heard the song this time. Once she and Sunny promised, swore to each other in the passionate way young girls do, that they would sing the song at each other’s weddings. Vowed to perform the song they had written to honor what would be their lifelong friendship. And now it had been so many years, and she didn’t even know where Sunny was or how she was.

“So that was Sunny the cousin in the lockup?” Seth asked her as he put away the groceries. Years ago, not long after she and Seth met, Dahlia had shown him old photos of herself as the skinny little tagalong of the beautiful older, magical, musical cousin who had taught her how to play the piano, who had told her the facts of life in more detail than she ever should have, who had been her songwriting partner and idol. Dahlia had wanted to explain to him how close they were before Sunny’s voices convinced her she was better off in the world of the insane with them and she had to be put away.

After that, Sunny’s once fun-loving parents had become morose, Dahlia’s parents tried hard to be solici
tous and sympathetic, and Dahlia was devastated, lost without the friend she’d relied on every day of her life. Somehow, over all those subsequent years, she’d never bothered to cultivate any other close friends, just stayed in the pattern she and Sunny had created. Every weekend she had gone to Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Max’s house to make music with Sunny, and after Sunny was put away, she continued to go to Aunt Ruthie and Uncle Max’s house and play the piano by herself for hours. The music was her only friend.

Everyone in her high school class knew that Dahlia was a loner. When she graduated and went to college for two years, she sat dreaming in every class, unless it had something to do with music. She was a late-in-life only child of parents whose years of hard work made them old before their time. Her soft-spoken father, who should never have become a salesman because he was not confident with people, knew he would never have enough money to pay for four years of college. That was probably why he didn’t argue with Dahlia when she told him she had decided to drop out and spend her days creating songs she would try to sell.

But nobody was buying. Everyone in the music business greeted her songs with lukewarm reactions. She made dozens of demo tapes and dozens of phone calls trying to get her songs to this artist or set up a meeting with that record company, but there was no interest. And when she did get a return call from an agent’s assistant or someone who was the assistant to the assistant at a record company, the critique was invariably the same: Her lyrics were solid, from the
heart, and moving. One record-company executive even used the word “poetic.” But they all let her know they thought her tunes were derivative, repetitive, and it seemed as if “dull” was the word they were dancing around but not uttering in order to spare her feelings.

“Ever think of working with someone else?” Howie Penn asked her one day, forever ago, when she cornered him as he was leaving his office at Artists Inc. The agency offices filled a four-story building in Beverly Hills, and Dahlia had waited for an hour in the parking lot, standing near what she knew was his car with the personalized plate
STRMAKR
so she could ask him what he thought of her songs.

When he finally came down, it was about six o’clock, and when she saw him heading toward the car, she panicked, afraid he’d think she was a stalker and call security. But she took a deep breath and convinced herself she was doing the right thing. He had some overprotective assistant who always said to Dahlia on the phone, “Oops, you just missed him.” But now, at last, she had him cornered, and he was actually talking to her as he leaned up against his Mercedes.

“What kind of someone else?” she asked while Howie clicked the remote in his hand to open the trunk of the glistening black convertible, then moseyed over and tossed his black leather briefcase inside.

“A composer. You need a composer. I mean, your words are cool, but your melodies are…” He screwed up his face, then extended his hand and moved it back and forth in a gesture that meant “not so hot.” Then he pushed a button on the remote that made the park
ing lights flash and unlocked the doors with a click, and he slid into the Mercedes CLK430 convertible. Dahlia could smell the new-car smell. It was her favorite car on the road.

She watched as Howie turned on the ignition and opened the windows, then reached up and released a handle, pushed a button. A lid opened in the back, and the top lifted and rolled slowly into the compartment revealed by the open lid.

“I
have
thought about finding a partner,” she said, realizing that now that the top was down, she only had seconds left until Howie Penn would be on his way out of the parking lot. “I mean, it crosses my mind now and then….” That was a lie. She’d always been sure she could write both the words
and
the music. She knew she played the piano well, she knew she had ideas for songs. What made her ideas good were the stories of the songs, and those came easily to her. But the truth was, she always struggled over how to make the story sing. She hated to admit to herself that she was the word person and not the music person as well.

“Let me give you the number of a guy I know who’s looking for a lyricist. Name’s Jamie Reiss. His tunes might be a little down-home for your lyrics. But he writes a nice melody and…”