Page 48

THE WIND BATTERED the side of the building.

Dad, Uncle Rick, and my brother each grabbed a flashlight and headed for the generator.

The kids shrieked and ran to Todd and his wife, inconsolable.

The dogs hunkered down behind the bar as Gigi soothed them with scoops of peanut butter. I went about lighting the candles.

Mitch came back a few minutes later with bad news. “Gonna be a few for the generator. Dad forgot to replace the blown gasket from last year.”

Todd said, “We should be fine,” even as his youngest burrowed her head into the side of his torso.

Another clap of thunder rumbled the building.

Mom cracked her knuckles. “Well, I for one don’t want to listen to that all night.”

“We could turn on the radio,” Gigi suggested.

“We need it to listen to weather reports,” I said. “Our phones? Mom, where are you going?”

She crossed the venue and dipped through the door beside the stage. She pulled open the curtains to reveal the Steinway and sat down at the bench. She played the two notes to the Jaws theme, and then asked, “Any suggestions?”

Mitch shouted, “‘Wonderwall’!”

“Anything else?”

Mitch wilted. “Aw.”

Dad poked his head out between the backstage curtains. “How about some Elton John?”

“And that is why I love you,” Mom replied. “For your impeccable taste in music.”

“And here I thought you loved me for my good looks.”

She laughed as her hands fell across the keys, and the beginning of “Tiny Dancer” formed at the tips of her fingers.

I hadn’t heard Mom play in … years . Mitch knew music and I knew theory, but Mom had the kind of rare talent that didn’t need either.

She could play anything by ear. It was a talent I wished I had.

Songs just came to life in her hands. They sounded bright and bold, scaring away the howling of the hurricane winds.

In the corner of the bar, the radio began to stutter and then died.

There were some more batteries in the office, so I quietly slid off my barstool and left to go find them.

The lobby was so dark now, my candle wasn’t enough and I had to use my phone flashlight to see anything.

The light snagged on the photo of Roman Fell.

I hoped Sasha had made it inland. I hope he escaped the storm.

Don’t worry, he’s fine , I told myself, though it didn’t help. Maybe he was halfway to Raleigh by now. Maybe he could have even caught the last flight out before the hurricane grounded everything.

Maybe …

I shuffled through the office for batteries, but when I pulled open the top drawer, I found that photo of Mom onstage with that other woman.

Beneath it were a few other photos from the box—the ones she wanted to keep, I guessed.

I hadn’t really looked all that closely at it the first time I saw it, but on the back in Mom’s loopy script was the date it was taken—June 17, 1988.

The night of the first Roman Fell concert here at the Rev—the night my parents met.

An old friend, Mom had said. I studied the woman, with her pixie-short red hair and blue eyes. Familiar blue eyes.

It couldn’t be …

A melody drifted through the Revelry. It drew me from my thoughts with a sort of nostalgic whiplash. I knew that song.

The one that, once upon a time, had played in my and Sasha’s heads.

My heart squeezed. Sasha?

I quickly closed the drawer and hurried out of the box office—

Finally, I wasn’t the one running away; I was running toward something.

Like a storm on the horizon, eventually everything arrived.

The front door slammed open.

The wind must have been strong. I rushed to push the door closed against the pouring rain. But as I approached, someone stepped into the doorway, their shadow blocking what little light came in.

I held my candle higher. The warm glow of it, the closer I got, chased away the gray darkness. And there was Sasha, dripping wet from head to toe. Rivulets of rain ran down his face and dripped off his edges, pooling on the tiles beneath him.

You’re here , I thought, and then remembered. “You—you’re here. I thought …”

“The bridge is flooded,” he supplied. “I can’t leave.”

But if he had just arrived, then …

His eyebrows furrowed as he finally heard the song, too.

We exchanged the same look. No one else could know the song, could they?

We chased after it, into the venue. Now that I really listened, it was in the wrong key, and slower than the tempo we had set.

It was our song, but slightly warped, like a phrase through a game of telephone.

We opened the door from the lobby and stepped inside. Mom was still at the piano onstage.

Her fingers found the notes like they were old friends. The song was only half-finished, though, the melody only as far as it had gone in our heads.

I came up to the edge of the stage. “Mom?”

My voice startled her, and she glanced down. Smiled, lifting her fingers from the keys. “Do you have a request? That isn’t ‘Wonderwall’?” she added with a pointed look back at the bar. “Oh, who’s this?”

“Sebastian,” he introduced himself. Gigi came up and handed him a towel to dry off before he tracked water through the whole building.

Mom’s eyes went wide. “Oh.” It was like she wasn’t sure if he was a ghost or an apparition. “Roman’s son,” she added, a little slower. “I … did I know you were here?”

“He’s the musician who flew here to work with me,” I supplied. “Who I’ve been with for the past two weeks.”

“Oh, right, right.” She nodded, trying to sound unbothered. She told Sebastian, “I take it you also didn’t make it inland before the storm. I’m glad you’re here, though. There’s no safer place.”

“Thank you,” he replied, patting himself dry. “I—I’m sorry. That song you were playing …”

“We heard you from the lobby,” I explained.

“It’s nothing.” She waved her hand dismissively. “A song an old friend and I used to toy with, but we never finished it. I guess it was just on the tip of my brain tonight—I couldn’t think of what else to play.”

That seemed impossible. “That’s it?”

“That’s it. Why?”

“Because …”

If I told her that it was the song that brought Sasha and me together—the one that started it all—I wasn’t sure how much she’d believe.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure how much I believed, the longer my brain sat quiet now.

I could almost convince myself that we had never had a connection at all, and that the inches between us didn’t feel like miles now that we were no longer in each other’s heads.

I glanced over at Sasha. His face tipped up to my mom on the stage.

He must have felt me looking, because his eyes snapped over to mine.

And I could still see a glimpse of it there.

Those moments, that intimacy, where I felt seen and comforted and warm.

I thought the emptiness between us might be unbridgeable.

That we’d never trust the very thing that bonded us. But I was wrong.

There had to be a reason my mom knew this song.

There had to be a reason that it was us the song had found.

“Because we wrote a song very similar to it,” Sasha filled in for me, his voice frank, “and I think I’d like to know if we plagiarized it.”

“ Plagiarized? ” I echoed, incredulous. I tugged him toward me so I could hiss, “We didn’t plagiarize!”

To which he replied in an equally low, albeit sharper voice, “If your mom knows it, then you had to, too. Maybe I only heard it because it echoed in your head.”

My cheeks burned with embarrassment. “It was in yours , too.”

Mom played the chorus melody again, thoughtful. “I doubt it, unless Ami copyrighted it after she left, but she wouldn’t have finished it without me,” she added, a little softer.

“You wrote it together?” I asked.

But at the same time, Sasha asked something far more startling—“Did you say Ami?”

Mom gave him a peculiar look. “Ami McKellen, yes. Why?”

His voice cracked as he said, “That’s my mom.”

Mom’s eyelids fluttered at the news. Her mouth twisted a little, as if she was unsure whether to frown or smile. “Sasha,” she stated. “Your mom called you Sasha.”

He looked surprised. “She … yes. She did.”

“Sasha,” she repeated again, sliding off the bench. She said the name like it was a spell against time, or maybe against sadness. “ Sasha .” A spell to bring someone home. “You’re Sasha. Hank— Hank! ” she cried, rising to her feet.

Dad poked his head out from between the curtains again. “Huh?”

“Ami’s,” she said, looking back to him while pointing at Sasha, who was beginning to look more and more baffled. “He’s Ami’s!” Then she sat down on the stage and reached out to grab his face so she could study it. “Let me get a better look at you. Oh yes. You have her eyes.”

“I do?” Sasha asked, his voice quiet. He shifted uncomfortably, because there were a lot of people in this room. My parents weren’t the kind of people who cared about privacy when it was some sort of joy.

Dad hurried up beside Mom and squatted down behind her. He nodded. “Spitting image.”

Mom brushed fallen curls out of Sasha’s face, and pulled him into one of her best hugs. It was like she melted him, from Sebastian Fell to Sasha, and he returned the hug just as tightly.

The night she had that episode a few weeks ago came to mind—she’d been inconsolable. Mom must have woken up from a nightmare about that accident, and she just couldn’t get her footing until Dad had calmed her down. How often, in all these years, had she dreamed of her friend?

I would be inconsolable if Gigi passed that suddenly. It’d be hard to talk about her at all.

Mom muttered something privately to Sasha, and his face pinched as if he was trying not to cry.

“Thank you,” he whispered. And he took a deep breath, wiping the back of his hand over his eyes. Steeling himself. Letting the emotions ground him. “So that song—it was yours and my mom’s?”

“We noodled with it while on the road. There’s little to do between tour stops, you know.

We could never get it right. Something was always missing.

I hadn’t thought about it in years. The last time I played …

was right before I had an argument with her.

We rarely talked after that, but whenever I did call she absolutely gushed about you each time.

She didn’t want to talk about anything else. ”

He said, “I wish she was here.”

Mom’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. “I know. But you’re built from all her good parts, I’m sure of it.”

He kept his eyes turned down. “Thank you.”

“You don’t believe me,” she said, tsking. His shoulders turned stiff. The tips of his ears went a little red from being called out. “Your mom had the same tell. I bet you also hum notes as you play them.”

“I don’t—”

“He does,” I confirmed. He shot me a look of betrayal. “We wrote a song together. It’s not like I didn’t notice.”

Mom smiled. “So you finished it? The song?”

We had, but I wished, more and more, that we hadn’t. I shifted a little awkwardly. “Yeah,” I said. “We did.”

The wind howled, seeping through the holes in the building wherever it could, making the foundation rattle. Thunder cracked again, so loud it made someone by the bar yelp in surprise.

Mom said, “Then I think I have a request for the next song. And you two should play it.”

Sasha and I exchanged a look. I let him take the lead, waiting for him to decide if he wanted to play with me.

Did he want to? Or let whatever it was between us die?

Playing piano together was a lot like a trust exercise.

You had to have faith in the other person to keep time with you.

I wished I could shove all my feelings into his head like I used to.

I wished I could crush our thoughts together and let him know how sorry I was, how much I wanted to play music with him, how I wanted so much more than that, how much I—I—

He tipped his head gently toward the piano as if to ask, Shall we?

Hope fluttered in my chest. Yes, let’s.