I make a break for the stairs, and in my hurry to get gone, I plow right into Heather.
“What happened?” she asks as I stumble around her.
“What are you still doing here?”
“What do you think, stupid?”
I let it slide and charge for the stairs. I had no idea where they led, but up seemed way better than anywhere behind the stage. “Something weird is going on.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, chasing after me.
“The whole room went quiet when I asked about the guy in the fringed jacket.”
“So?”
“So when it goes from you asking questions to them asking questions, it’s time to leave.”
“Why? Why not just answer the questions?”
I can’t exactly tell her that my not answering questions comes from years of conditioning. Or that living somewhere illegally makes you jumpy. Especially around adults asking questions. So I just race ahead and tell her, “Because the vibe in the room went bad.”
“The vibe,” she says, like it’s the most ridiculous thing she’s ever heard.
“Yes!” We’re at the top of the stairs now, and since the only open avenue is a U-turn down a hallway, I zip around the handrail and keep moving. The music has switched from live and loud to canned and pretty quiet, so I can hear someone pounding up the stairs, shouting, “I think she went up here!”
I try a door labeled JAMES BROWN, but it’s locked. “Bail out anytime,” I tell Heather as I charge ahead. “I’m busted.”
But in this hallway there are no other doors, and there sure doesn’t seem to be any way for her to bail out.
Especially since there’s definitely someone with a flashlight coming up behind us.
So we just charge forward until we come to a quick little zigzag in the hallway, and once we’re through that, we find ourselves in a wide-open area with big square pillars and couches and a bar and people hanging around, laughing and drinking, checking out the outsider art that’s all over the pillars and walls or looking over the balcony at the stage.
I search around for my mom or a fringy maroon jacket as I try to disappear between people. Everyone’s wearing a VIP badge, but besides not having one of those, we’re obviously not old enough to be hanging out in the House of Blues bar balcony. Plus, there aren’t actually that many people—only a few dozen total—so vanishing in the crowd isn’t exactly an option.
Especially since I can see now that the guy following us is a Gorilla.
And he’s got a walkie-talkie.
“Bail out!” I tell Heather. “He’s after me, not you.”
She stays right behind me. “He knows I’m with you!”
“He can’t be two places at once, right? If you get the chance, bail!”
But she stays with me as I jet across the balcony and find myself again being only able to go down a dark hallway.
Well, unless I want to stand around and wait for the elevator doors in front of me to open, but the Gorilla’s coming, so who’s got time for that?
So down the hallway I charge, looking for anywhere to disappear. But it’s just like the other side—no doors at all! We’ve run in a giant U on the level above the stage, and I’m pretty sure if we don’t find a place to hide, we’ll wind up going down another set of stairs and be back near the loading dock door—back where we’d started!
But going in a giant U and disappearing somewhere downstairs is better than getting busted, so I keep charging ahead.
And then all of a sudden there’s a light coming toward us.
So yeah. We’re pinned between two beams of Gorilla light.
“Shoot!” I cry, but on our right there’s a door that says ETTA JAMES.
In my little mental map, it seems like we’re right across the stage from the James Brown door we’d tried earlier, so I’m sure this one will be locked, too. And even if it’s not, where could it possibly go? It’s hopeless. I know it’s hopeless. We’re just flailing fish in a big Gorilla net.
Still, with one last desperate wiggle, I try the door.
And it opens.
Without a word, I grab Heather and whoosh us both inside, then turn around quick and lock the door. And when I turn back, what I see is Heather with her eyes popped and her jaw dropped. And since Heather never shows much more expression than a sneer, I know she must be seeing something really gnarly, so I actually jump to get away from the corner where she’s staring.
The room we’re in is small—about the size of a big walk-in closet—and dark except for light coming in through a sort of balcony opening, which looks like it leads to stage lights ahead and death below.
And I’m in such a state that what flashes through my mind is that whatever’s in the corner must be vicious or deadly or horrendously ugly for Heather to be looking so scared. Like maybe a decaying corpse hung from the ceiling, or a rabid serpent with foamy fangs and beady black eyes about to strike, or a—
And then I turn and see the monster myself.
A monster with buggy eyes and glistening teeth.
A monster that speaks.
“Samantha? Samantha, what are you doing here?”
Apparently the Gorilla Force has a key to the Etta James room, because two guys in red shirts and the guy with the drumsticks from Darren Cole’s greenroom all barge in.
“We okay?” the guy with the drumsticks asks my mom after he sizes things up.
My mother nods, but she’s still just staring at me, stunned.
Drumsticks asks, “That’s her?” and when my mom nods again, he points his sticks at Heather. “Her sister?”
“Oh, no,” my mother gasps. “Her friend.”
Normally, I would have corrected that, but at this point I’m too confused and shocked and just weirded out to even care. I mean, maybe I’d been tracking my mother all day, but actually finding her, and finding her in this oversized closet by herself?
It was so hard to wrap my head around.
And then I notice that this oversized closet has an open bottle of champagne and two glasses on a table by a couch.
Champagne?
My mother has some quick signaling exchange with Drumsticks, who tells the Gorillas, “It’s all cool up here. Sorry for the false alarm.”
One of the Gorillas says, “You want I should bring up skybox badges?”
Drumsticks looks at my mother. “They’ll be with you, right?”
My mother looks at me, then Heather, then me. “Uh …”
“Uh?” I snap. “Really? After everything we’ve been through to find you, all you can say is uh?”
“What I mean, Samantha, is that I’d like to speak with you privately. I just didn’t want to be rude to Heather.”
“Oh!” Heather says. “Don’t worry about me!” She turns to Drumsticks and the Gorillas and says, “Can you get me down in the pit?”
Drumsticks laughs. “The show doesn’t get moshers.”
“I don’t care! I just want to be down there!”
He laughs again. “Well, that I can arrange. Follow me.”
So they take off, and then it’s just me and my mother. I watch as she collapses onto the couch and heaves a big, heavy sigh.
Very un-Lady-Lana-like.
And so is her posture. She’s—gasp—slouched.
And her face is sagging.
Like she’s just too tired to pretend to be perfect anymore.
Finally she shakes her head a little and says, “I will never understand your grandmother.”
I almost blurt out, Grams? Why her? but it hits me that she thinks I know something I don’t. So I just bite my tongue and wait.
She cocks her head. “Where is she, anyway? Didn’t want to suffer through ‘that racket,’ am I right? So she sends two thirteen-year-old girls in alone? I can’t believe she brought you here.”
But instead of answering, I nod at the champagne glasses and turn it back on her with “Forget Grams. Where is he, huh?”
She takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. “None of this is his fault.” Her eyes flutter open and she says, “I’ve made so many mistakes. So many mistakes.”
I frown at her. “I think Warren would agree with that.”
She studies me. “It’s so strange to hear you call him Warren.”
“Well, I sure wasn’t going to call him Dad—not until I found out who my real dad was. But it looks like I won’t have to worry about calling him that anyway.” And even though the last thing I wanted was for her to marry Casey’s dad, all of a sudden I’m mad. “Warren’s a nice guy. How could you come here with him and just dump him? What is wrong with you? How can you just discard people?”
She gives me a pleading look. “I didn’t mean for this to happen! It’s been fourteen years since I’ve seen him! Fourteen and a half! I thought I was over him! I thought I was in love with Warren! I wanted to resolve things so I could move on! Warren offered to come along for moral support, and we were going to make a Valentine’s weekend out of it, but … but then I saw him and it all came flooding back and Warren could tell and … and … oh, Samantha I’ve wasted so much time. So much life!”
I was used to my mom and her dramatic explanations. Her woe-is-me rationalizations for being a self-absorbed diva. But something in my brain hitched.
It was like a locomotive thought had backed into a train car thought—c-clank—then started pulling forward.
Fourteen years, she’d said. Fourteen and a half.
Why did the half even matter?
The locomotive starts gaining steam and makes me a little weak at the knees.
The half did matter.
I sort of stagger to a chair by the balcony wall, and over the wall I can see the stage below me—the flaming-heart House of Blues backdrop, the dimmed stage lights, the drum kit and amps and monitors and microphones, all behind the closed stage curtain.
There’d been background music playing between bands, but now it’s off and musicians are taking their positions onstage. I recognize Drumsticks and two other guys from the greenroom, and there are a couple of guys in black T-shirts zipping around connecting cables and delivering water bottles.
And when the T-shirt guys are done doing their thing, Drumsticks clicks his sticks and the band starts playing. And without anyone announcing the band or anything, the curtain goes up.
The music is loud, and it’s shaking my chest, and the crowd is whooping and cheering and then goes wild when out onto the stage walks Darren Cole with a guitar strapped over what he’d been wearing all day.
A fringed maroon jacket.