Sixteen
Jack was good but not good enough for Juilliard. He auditioned after high school and didn't get in, but what he found strange— and in retrospect this should have been a warning sign, he thought— was that he was almost relieved. In the September after high school he packed up his car and drove north to South Carolina. His roommate at Holloway College was good enough for Juilliard, but he saw New York City as an inevitability and wanted to stay in the South a little longer. Jack's roommate was from the suburbs of Miami. He was going to play every major city on the continent no matter where he studied, because he actually was that impressive. Jack liked him, though he was prone to grandeur in his drunker moments.
"My name is Liam Deval," he would say, raising a glass of beer or introducing himself to someone in a bar, or sometimes, when he didn't know anyone else was around, quietly to his reflection in the men' s-room mirror, "and I am going to be famous."
When he did this at bars everyone would laugh and buy him another drink because his delivery was hilarious. Everyone knew he wasn't really kidding, but it didn't matter because he was the best guitarist any of them had ever heard. "The only real difference between me and Django Reinhardt," he said once when very drunk, "is that Django did it first."
"Well, yes," Jack said. "Exactly."
Deval only laughed. Just as they both understood that Deval was going to be a star, they understood that Jack's days were numbered.
Jack had been on his way out almost from the moment of arrival. He couldn't have said how he knew this. He couldn't even have explained what exactly was wrong. He had been touched lightly by synesthesia; mostly it was a small matter of sounds being attached to colors— the impression of red left by car horns, for example, the dandelion-yellow sounds of his parents' doorbell— but music was brilliance, music was light moving through the air every time he heard it.
Playing with the quartet, switching back and forth between piano and saxophone, practicing for endless hours with Gavin and Sasha and Daniel, traveling to competitions— in short, all the things he loved— none of these things seemed to relate in any way to the sudden grind of Holloway College, the evenings when he played piano alone in a small white practice room and got lonelier and lonelier by the hour, the clinics, the harshness of teachers. Music had always been bright and now it was dimming. He knew his teachers only wanted him to be the best pianist he could possibly be but they all knew he was missing something, whatever it is that carries a musician over the gap from merely proficient to outright spectacular, and sometimes he wanted to pack up his car and drive back to Florida when he thought about the things they'd said to him.
The pills helped. He could float a little. In the weeks leading up to the winter break he started to take them more frequently. His skill was unlessened but nothing seemed quite real.
"You seem more relaxed these days," Deval said. They were in their room at the end of another day. Deval was on the edge of his bed, listening to music. Jack had been toiling in a theory workbook earlier, but now he was staring into space.
"It doesn't have to be stressful," Jack said.
"I envy you. I'm more stressed than I thought I would be." They'd been here a few months and Deval's bravado was becoming a little threadbare. Holloway College wasn't Juilliard, but it also wasn't easy.
"You're good," Jack said. "You don't need to . . ." he was thinking "take Vicodin" but said "worry" instead.
"We're all good," Deval said. "Otherwise we wouldn't be here."
Jack wasn't sure anymore if he was good or not. He'd been confident of his talent in high school, but lately he was certain of nothing. The winter break arrived and on the long drive back to Sebastian he toyed with the idea of not returning to Holloway after the break, of perhaps enrolling in community college in January and getting a degree in something practical. Business management? Economics? Accounting? He wasn't really sure what the practical degrees were. He'd never wanted to do anything but music and now he didn't even want to do that.
It was disorienting, being back in Sebastian. Now that he'd left and seen another place it looked less familiar somehow, as if the town were forgetting him. That was the year when the streetlights turned from amber to blue. The blue ones apparently used less electricity and would save the city some money, but they cast the suburbs in a cold and foreign light. On his third or fourth day back Daniel and Sasha came over and passed an hour or two in Jack's parents' basement, where they'd brought their instruments and practiced sometimes in the days of the jazz quartet. Gavin hadn't come home. He was in a communications program at Columbia, full scholarship. No one was surprised that he'd cracked the Ivy League— his grades had always been better than anyone else's— but they were surprised that he'd stayed in New York for Christmas. They sat together in the basement, Jack and Sasha and Daniel with Gavin ostentatiously absent, and it seemed to Jack that their missing instruments were like ghosts. He'd been thinking a lot about ghosts lately, after a movie he'd seen, and the thought of a translucent ghost saxophone sitting next to him was oddly appealing.
The silence was awkward. He thought of these people as his closest friends, but it seemed that without music there wasn't much to talk about. He was seized by a mad desire to confide in them— I miss everything about high school and I'm not the musician I thought I was, I don't know what I'm doing anymore, jazz has always been my life but now it's slipping away from me and my talent isn't going to be enough— but he couldn't imagine how to begin.
"Do you still play?" he asked Daniel, to fill the silence.
"Haven't touched the bass since that last concert," Daniel said. Jack smiled at this. The last concert, on the back of the truck behind the school, was one of his favorite memories. The heat and the music, a final perfect evening, dancers trampling the grass. He missed the quartet with an unexpected force. It had been a nice thing, all of them playing together.
"I wish Gavin were around," he said.
Daniel made a dismissive noise. "Convenient that he's not here."
"What do you mean?"
"You know what?" Daniel said. "I wouldn't come back here and show my face either. His girlfriend disappears, and he runs off to New York?"
"Disappears? I heard she moved to Georgia to live with her aunt." Jack looked at Sasha. "That's what you told me."
Daniel muttered something inaudible. Sasha shot him a look.
"Anyway," Sasha said, in a let' s-change-the-subject way.
Daniel didn't say anything. There was something altered about him. He seemed more pensive than he had been, his voice strained.
"Let's face it," Sasha said, "I don't think Gavin's parents would notice if he came home for Christmas or not."
"Are they really that bad?" Jack was interested. He'd heard rumors.
"I heard that when Gavin was in the hospital last spring with heat exhaustion, the night after the prom, his sister Eileen was the only one by his bedside. And she goes to school like three hours away. Eileen drove out as soon as she heard and their parents weren't even at the hospital."
"It could be worse," Daniel said. "People have families that are worse than that." Daniel was taking a year off before college. He said he'd mostly been in Salt Lake City since the end of high school, working construction with his uncle and staying with friends, but when pressed for details about his time in Utah he said he didn't want to talk about it.
"What's with you?" Jack asked.
"Nothing," Daniel said. "I just think maybe people shouldn't run off to New York when their girlfriends are . . . look, never mind. Whatever."
"But she wasn't even in Florida anymore. She'd left. She'd gone to live with her—"
"Can we drop it?" Daniel said.
Sasha looked away. They knew something, and Jack was excluded. He went out that night without them, drove alone through the wide streets until he reached the Lemon Club, a run-down jazz bar in a strip mall on the edge of town. The bartender— an older man with a permanent sneer who usually glared at Jack like he was daring him to order a drink, just daring him— barely glanced up when Jack entered.
Jack had gone to the club one or two nights a week in high school,
but he'd never come in alone before. He listened to a fairly decent trio from Denver and then— because neither Sasha nor Daniel had called him— went back again the next night with his little sister Bridget. It had dawned on him that he didn't know Bridget very well anymore, she'd somehow slipped away and eluded him, and he thought maybe music would help. It did. She was enraptured by the fifteen-year-old jazz violin prodigy they'd gone to hear and seemed happy to be out with him.
"Jack." He looked up and the Band teacher who'd supervised the Lola Quartet was standing by their table. Jack hadn't seen him come in.
"Hello, Mr. Winters," he said. He was unsure of the etiquette, postgraduation. Should he have called him Steven? Mr. Winters was talking about Holloway College, the excellence of the program in which Jack was enrolled, how he hoped Jack was taking full advantage of the opportunities before him. A note of wistfulness in his voice.
"I'm proud of you," Mr. Winters said, and Jack managed a smile. His midyear review hadn't gone well. His teachers had noted a spaciness, an inattentiveness in general, an overall lack of improvement. It hadn't occurred to him that flunking out of music school would mean disappointing Mr. Winters, but he saw now that of course it would. Jack called Sasha and Daniel the next night and left messages, but neither of them called back. He returned to Holloway a few days early.
Th e d r i v e from Sebastian to Holloway College took him a little more than ten hours. Jack drove slowly, in no particular rush, stopping every so often to stretch his legs. A part of him wanted to remain suspended between school and home forever. He hadn't played piano at all over the break, and the thought of the hours he needed to spend in the practice rooms made him tired.
The sense of limbo was increased by the landscape he traveled through. He pulled off the interstate into towns that all looked the same to him. He tried to find things to differentiate them, some kind of proof that he was passing through parts of three different states, but there was almost nothing. Only the names of the towns varied, and the towns were like envelopes with all the contents the same. The same gas stations, the same restaurants, the same chain stores with the same logos shining out into the deepening twilight. It was a relief to him at the end of the day to make the last exit off the interstate, to drive along the narrow roads that led up to the college, to turn the corner on the sweeping drive and see the white buildings and lights of Holloway rising up at the top of the hill. At least, he thought, this wasn't a place that could easily be mistaken for somewhere else.
He parked the car and walked up the long pathway to the hall where he lived. The security guard nodded at him when he flashed his identity card. He saw no one else. It was still only the day after Christmas, the building deserted, almost everyone home with their families.
There was a baby crying when Jack stepped off the elevator on the fourth floor. He stood still in the hall for a moment, listening. The presence of a baby in Lewins Hall seemed so impossible that he wondered fleetingly if he might be listening to a ghost: could a baby have died here? Maybe a hundred years ago? The idea of a baby ghost was interesting. The building seemed like the kind of place that would lend itself to hauntings. The crying subsided. Silence descended over the halls. The corridor was so quiet now that it was possible to entertain notions of being the last man on earth as he walked past closed doors, but when he opened the door to their room Deval was there, sitting on Jack's bed with a baby in his arms. He'd forgotten that Deval was staying at school through the holidays. The child, who had a wisp of dark hair and a face red from screaming, was drifting off into a fitful sleep.
"Congratulations?" Jack said.
" Thank you. It's a girl."
" Whose is it?"
"A friend of yours came by," Deval said. "She brought a baby."
"I don't think I have any friends with babies."
"Oh," Deval said, "I think you do. Unless she's some kind of con artist and she's just using us for our shower facilities."
Jack dropped his bag on the floor and sank into an armchair they'd rescued from a dumpster together a month or two earlier. "What's my friend's name?"
"Anna. She's in the shower."
"Anna?" The only Anna he knew was Gavin's lost girlfriend. He was having a hard time imagining the chain of events that would result in her appearing in his dorm room in South Carolina with a baby. "Anna Montgomery?"
"I think so," Deval said. "I can't remember her last name, but it was something like that." He was smiling at the sleeping baby. "I got the baby to stop crying," he said. "I think I should get a medal or something."
"She just came today?"
"An hour ago. You mind if she spends the night? I already told her it was okay."
"I don't mind," Jack said. The door opened just then. It was Anna, but an Anna greatly changed. She looked older, far more tired, and she'd cut off all her hair; it was dark with water but he could see that she'd dyed it blond.
"Jack," she said. She still sounded the same.
"Anna. What are you doing here?"
She smiled instead of answering him. "Is it okay if I stay the night?"
"It's fine with me," he said. Anna reached for the baby. Jack didn't
know much about babies, but it seemed to him that this one was very small. "How old is it?" he asked.
"She," Anna said softly. "Not 'it.' " She was gazing at the baby's closed eyes. "Her name's Chloe. She's three weeks old."
"That's young," Jack said. " Where are you going with it? I mean her. Sorry. I didn't know you had a baby."
"I'm on my way to Virginia," she said. "My sister has a friend there who I can stay with for a while."
"But I just saw your sister over the break," Jack said. "She didn't say anything about . . . weren't you with an aunt? I heard you'd gone to live with your aunt in Georgia." He'd also heard a crazy rumor that she'd had a baby and it had been stillborn, but he decided not to bring this up.
"I've been in Utah," Anna said.
"Utah? Why Utah?"
"Long story," Anna said, in a tone that made it clear she didn't want to tell it.
She slept that night in Jack's bed. Jack slept on the floor. The baby slept on the floor too, lying on her back on the seat cushion from the armchair. The baby kept waking up crying. Toward morning Jack drifted off to the sounds of Anna singing the baby to sleep, a lullaby about a night bus out of Salt Lake City, and when he woke he was alone and the room was filled with sunlight. It was almost noon. He showered and set off in search of breakfast. In the dining hall he sat alone with a sandwich in a sea of plastic chairs and then wandered the campus looking for someone to talk to, anyone, but the only people he saw were security guards and the maintenance crew and they all seemed busy. Later he ran into three other students whom he knew— two violinists and a singer, from places too far away or from families too poor to travel home for the winter break— and he sat with them for a while in the cafeteria. The singer, Bernadette, was talking about George Gershwin's "Summertime." She thought it was about death. Her argument seemed solid to him and the conversation was interesting but all his thoughts were of Anna. Sixteen or seventeen years old with her impossibly young infant, traveling by means unknown up the coast to Virginia. The dorm room was still empty when he returned there in the late afternoon. Could Deval have gone with her to Virginia? It was the only explanation he could think of.
De v a l w a s still gone when Jack woke in the morning. He ate alone in the cafeteria again and wandered the campus without finding anyone to talk to, but Bernadette called him in the late afternoon. "It's me," she said, as if they'd ever spoken on the phone before, and then added, "Bernadette."
"The Summertime girl," he said, and caught himself wondering how she'd obtained his number.
She giggled. "You must think I'm incredibly morbid," she said. "But listen, I'm having a party tonight."
"A party? Seriously? Is there anyone left on campus?"
"That's why I'm having it," she said. "We should all stick together. It's cold."
It was nice to think of not being alone for another long evening, so when night fell he put on a clean shirt and left the dorm. It was an unusually cold night, the coldest he'd ever seen. There was a light frost and the grass sparkled underfoot. Jack wasn't sure that he'd encountered frost outside a freezer before. He knew what it was but couldn't stop staring at it, stooped down once to touch it. The sparkling turned to cold water on his fingertips. Jack stood for a moment in the middle of the Commons, looking up at the stars. He'd meant to practice today but hadn't. It had been two weeks since he'd played the piano and nothing about the thought of sitting down at a keyboard was appealing to him. He closed his eyes for a moment. He had a feeling of slippage, of pieces coming apart around him. He opened his eyes quickly and he was still on the Commons, the air cold on his face. There was movement around one of the girls' dormitory buildings at the far end of campus, an impression of voices, he hurried on and in a few minutes he was safely among other people, fifteen or twenty students in the suite where Bernadette and her roommates lived. He hadn't thought there were this many people on campus.
"You came!" Bernadette said. She was flushed and lovely, already a little drunk, wearing a miniskirt that he couldn't help but notice was short even by miniskirt standards. "I'm so glad you're here."
"I'm glad I'm here too," he said. "What's this we're listening to?" She was pressing a plastic cup of beer into his hands.
"The Klezmatics," she said. "I don't love them, except this one song. Can you hear it? It's klezmer, but it's also jazz."
"I don't know that much about klezmer," he said. It was nice to be in a conversation with someone instead of alone in the dorm room, and he didn't want the moment to end. She had hair that caught the light, dark curls falling over her shoulders.
"Then stay a while and keep listening," Bernadette said. "Another drink?"
She floated away from him. He didn't know anyone else here but they all seemed to know each other. Jack stayed as long as possible in the warmth and the brightness, trying to find a conversation, until sometime near midnight he glanced across the room and Bernadette was kissing someone else, a cellist whose name he could never remember. He drifted outside and over the sparkling grass to Lewins Hall, drunk, the stars wheeling. He hoped Deval might be back from wherever he'd gone, but the room was dark and still. He slept with his bedside lamp on, a t-shirt thrown over it to blunt the light, and woke hungover to the smell of scorched fabric.
F o u r d a y s later Deval came into the room one morning while Jack was getting dressed, waved instead of saying hello, lay down on top of his bed, and closed his eyes.
" Where were you?"
"I drove her to Virginia," Deval said. "Then I hung around for a few days."
" Where in Virginia?"
"Somewhere in the middle. Place called Carrollsburg." He kicked off his shoes. "Have you ever seen her tattoo?" He gestured vaguely at his shoulder without sitting up.
"I could've taken her."
"It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. You were asleep."
"So you saw where she's living?"
"It's an okay place," Deval said. " Quiet little house in a small town. Nowhere anyone would look for her. She's got the whole basement to herself. I think it'll be okay."
"You know what's weird? The last time I saw her, she had all this long dark hair, and now it's short and blond. It's like she was in disguise."
"Yeah, about that." Deval sat up. "She's got a complicated life," he said. "She asked me to tell you— well, to ask you, I guess— look, she doesn't want you to tell anyone you saw her. Seriously, no one. It's really important, okay?"
"Okay."
"When I say important, I mean this is like the most important thing anyone's ever going to ask of you."
"Okay, I get it. I won't tell anyone."
"Thanks." Deval lay back down on his bed.
Dj a n g o R e i n h a r d t was a prodigy at thirteen playing the cafés of Paris. A burn victim at eighteen when he came home from a gig and knocked over a candle in the caravan where he lived with his young wife. The materials for the celluloid-and-paper flowers she made to supplement their income were highly flammable, and the caravan flashed quickly into flame. A small miracle at twenty, when he emerged from a long convalescence after the fire that ruined half his left hand and revealed an improbable new technique: he worked the frets with two fingers and made his own substitutions for the standard major and minor chords. The miracle was that he played better after the fire than before. He carried the fire with him through all the days of his life, in his two curled fingers and in the way he used a match to hold the bridge of his battered guitar up to the proper height.
"A match," Deval said. "Of all the things he could have used."
Deval's mother had given him a biography of Django Reinhardt as a high school graduation present, and he liked to read his favorite sections aloud in the dorm room at night. Jack appreciated the distraction.
Django Reinhardt was always good, but he was at his best with Stéphane Grappelli. They met as members of a fourteen-piece orchestra that played uninspired music for tea dances, Grappelli on violin and Reinhardt on guitar, until one day Grappelli broke a string. He played a few notes of a jazz melody, trying to get his violin in tune, and Reinhardt echoed him on guitar. A bass player and a rhythm guitarist jumped in, and this was the beginning of the Quintette du Hot Club de France. They played together with enormous success. Reinhardt hadn't spent much time in school as a child; Grappelli taught him how to read. Reinhardt went on a shaky American tour without him, dabbling in electric, traveling unsteadily with unfamiliar guitars, but only when he returned to Grappelli did he sound like himself again.
"Why are you telling me so much about Grappelli?" Jack asked. "I thought you wanted to be Reinhardt."
"Because this is what I keep wondering." Deval was sitting up on his bed, bright-eyed in the lamplight. The Quintette du Hot Club de France playing on his stereo, the underwater sound of old recordings. "I can play the guitar and maybe I'll be really good someday, Jack, but who will be there with me? Who will be my Grappelli?"
De c e m b e r s h i f t e d into a colorless January. Jack didn't want to be at music school, he knew he was taking too many pills, he knew the little baby with the wisp of dark hair was probably Gavin's and he couldn't imagine why he wasn't supposed to tell anyone about it, but Deval had repeated three or four times that Jack should tell no one he'd seen Anna or the child. He hinted that Anna was in some kind of trouble. He made it sound as though lives were at stake, but still he managed to appear perfectly serene as he moved through his days. Skipping half his classes, spending hours in the practice rooms, reading about gypsy jazz and listening to scratchy recordings of the Quintette du Hot Club de France in the evenings. He was making long phone calls to Virginia at night.
"I can't tell you how much I envy you," Jack told him once, near the end, when they'd walked down the hill into town to get drunk. It was almost two a.m. Anna had been gone for three or four weeks. Jack and Liam were slumped in a booth in the back corner of a half-deserted Irish bar they'd discovered where the beer was cheap and no one cared what they put on the jukebox, and Jack had been happy earlier but now he was sinking into the morose kind of drunk that lends itself to regrettable statements.
"Yeah, I can see why," Deval said. "I'm in love with an underage girl who lives in hiding in a different state with a fucking baby, school bores me half to death but my mother will kill me if I don't get a degree, and I've got a class in six hours. What's not to envy?"
"You've got the music," Jack said. The idea of having the music or not having the music was something he'd never had an easy time explaining but Deval smiled, Deval seemed to understand, and Jack felt such gratitude at being understood in that moment that he let Deval choose the next three songs on the jukebox.
At t h e beginning of February, Jack left Lewins Hall en route to the practice rooms and a man he didn't recognize fell into step beside him.
"Jack, right?"
"Yes?"
The man was in his twenties, blond, with pale eyes and a ring through his eyebrow. He was dressed in a way that seemed calculatedly forgettable— a gray sweatshirt, black shoes, jeans— but any chance of anonymity was ruined by his tattoo: an extravagantly detailed goldfish on the side of his neck, brilliant orange. Jack found it hard to look away. He hated needles. Tattoos made him queasy. His hand drifted to his own neck in sympathy.
"You seen Anna around?"
Jack stopped walking, so the man stopped walking too. "Anna . . . ?"
"Anna Montgomery, Jack. Anna from Florida. The girl with the baby." He was standing a little too close. Jack could smell his aftershave. There was nothing friendly in the man's blue-eyed stare. "The girl who visited you last month," he said.
"I heard she was in Utah."
"Oh, she was," the man said brightly. "She was in Utah, Jack, but that was before she came here. Do you mind telling me where she is? I really need to talk to her about something important."
"How do you know my name?"
"Where's Anna?"
"Look, I haven't seen her in almost a year. I knew her back in high school," Jack said.
"Right," the man said. "Back in Florida. You're both from Sebastian, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"And your family still lives there, right?"
Jack felt as if he'd brushed up against the edge of something cold, or as if a curtain had been pulled back for an instant and he'd glimpsed a flash of darkness and moving gears. He'd never been threatened before. He didn't know what to do. He stood blinking in the sunlight with the life of the campus continuing all around him, voices and laughter, the man's calm gaze, and his voice was unsteady when he could finally bring himself to speak. "What do you want?"
"I want Anna Montgomery," the man said. "But if you don't know where she is, I could go ask your family. You've got a little sister still in high school in Florida, right?"
"What? I . . ." There was no way to finish this sentence, so Jack didn't.
"Bridget," he said. "That's your little sister's name, isn't it?"
Jack was frozen.
" Maybe I'll go down there and talk to her," the man said. "I mean, who knows, maybe she'd know where Anna is. You know how these high school girls all talk about each other."
"I don't—"
"I can't say I'll be in a great mood when I get down there," the man said. "Do you know, I was just there? Trying to track down Anna's dropout sister, for almost a week. And it's not like it's all that easy for me to leave town for long periods, in my line of work."
Jack was afraid to ask what this line of work might be.
"So I think by the time I find Bridget," the man said, "I'll probably already be angry. Just for having to go back to Florida again."
"Anna went to Virginia." Jack heard his own voice and wanted to pull the words back through the air.
" Where in Virginia?"
"I don't know," Jack said, "she just said she was going to Virginia and that was it. I heard it was a small town but I don't know which one. That's all I know."
"The problem is, Jack," the man said, "Virginia's such a big place. Last thing I want to do is drive back down to Florida but it'd almost be worth my time to go back down there, talk to your sister, see if maybe she knows more than you do. Who knows, Jack, maybe Anna and Bridget talk to each other sometimes."
"They don't talk to each other. They don't know each other at all."
"I'll ask Bridget myself. Thanks anyway, Jack, I'll be seeing you."
"Carrollsburg," Jack said.
"Carrollsburg?" The man was smiling. "Now we're getting somewhere, Jack. You have an address for me?"
"I don't. I really don't. That's all I know."
"You sure, now? You don't think maybe I should ask Bridget, just in case?"
"I don't know more than that. Bridget doesn't know anything. She doesn't know anything."
"Well, thank you very much, Jack," the man said pleasantly. "You just saved me another trip to Florida."
He turned away. Jack's heart was pounding and he wanted to throw up on the grass. On his way to the building with the practice rooms it occurred to him that he should alert campus security, but when he looked back the man was nowhere to be seen, and what would he say anyway? A few weeks ago my roommate and I snuck a girl into our room and let her stay overnight in violation of the rules, and, oh yeah, she also had a baby with her, and now some guy wants to know . . . He needed to talk to Deval. He stepped through the doors into the cool shadows of Armstrong Hall and scanned the last few pages of the practice room sign-in book. L. Deval, room 17. He glanced over his shoulder, but through the glass doors behind him he saw only green grass and benignly milling students. The blond man was long gone.
Deval didn't look up when Jack opened the door to 17. He was playing in a style that he'd begun to adopt recently. It was jazz, but glissando shivers of gypsy melodies kept coming through. The effect was uneven.
"Deval," Jack said.
"There's no piano in this one," Deval said, without looking up.
"Please," Jack said. Deval stopped playing. "Some guy just asked me where Anna is."
"What?" Deval set his guitar on the chair beside him, which left nowhere for Jack to sit, so he stood uncomfortably by the door like a kid in the principal's office.
"He came up to me while I was walking, said he knew she'd been here. He knew she'd gone to Virginia—"
"Did you tell him she'd gone to Virginia?"
"Of course not," Jack said. "I told him to get lost." He was shivering. "He was menacing, Liam. He threatened my sister. He had this look about him, this—"
"Yeah, some people aren't nice," Deval said. "Don't get hysterical. What exactly did he say?"
"He said he knew she'd been here after she was in Utah. He asked me where she was. What did she do in Utah, Liam?"
"She stole money from a meth dealer," Deval said. He was putting his guitar back in its case. "Listen, I'm going to go get her."
"You're leaving now? In the middle of the semester?"
"She doesn't drive. I'll call the dean's office from the road and tell them I've got a family emergency or something. Don't tell anything to anyone."
Deval didn't go back to the residence hall. He left the practice room and walked quickly to his car, threw his guitar in the backseat and drove away.
J a c k w a s thinking about a movie he'd seen once. He couldn't remember what it had been called, but it was set in the eighteenth century and there was a boat, and a sailor who'd been a disappointment to everyone had jumped overboard with a cannonball in his arms. When he closed his eyes Jack saw the sailor descending, pale in dark water with a cloud of bubbles rising silver around him, the weight of the cannonball carrying him down to some other place. "The truth is," the captain had said at the sailor's funeral, "we don't all turn into the men we had hoped to become." Or words to that effect. Jack wasn't sure he was remembering it exactly.
"It's true," Jack said to his reflection in a darkened window, in reply to the captain of the movie ship. "It's just the way it is." He had taken too many pills. It was four a.m. and Deval had been gone for a week. With every passing day he became more certain that Deval and Anna and the baby were dead. He knew he should call the police, but every day and every hour made the call less possible. The first question would be Why didn't you call sooner? and with each passing hour the question would be more pointed, and then what would he say? The truth is, Officer, I'm not the man I wanted to be. The truth is, I gave up a girl at the slightest threat and now everyone's in trouble and I think both Deval and the girl are probably dead by now and the fault's entirely mine and I've been thinking it might be better for everyone if I take this cannonball in my arms and leap into the ocean.
Jack waited a week, then two, but Deval didn't return. At the beginning of the third week a postcard arrived.
All's well. Not coming back. Got rid of phone.—LD
The card was postmarked Detroit. The relief that all was well— Deval must have arrived in Virginia in time— was supplanted almost immediately by a colossal loneliness. It seemed impossible that Deval wasn't coming back. His belongings waited untouched in their room, his books, his sheet music, his clothes strewn around the bed. Jack kept expecting someone to come and collect them, but no one did.
The pills weren't working the way they had before. Jack still floated but the blurred contours of the world made everything seem unreal in the manner of a bad dream. He spent a lot of time lying on his bed listening to music on headphones, Nina Simone, Django Reinhardt, Coltrane and Parker, all the emissaries of a kingdom that was slipping away from him. There was no pleasure in playing the music himself. Sometime during the fifth or sixth week he stopped going to classes.
After seven weeks he packed up his things in the middle of the day while everyone else was in class, loaded up his car and drove south.
J a c k d r o v e to the Lemon Club nearly a year after his return from South Carolina. The bartender glared at him the way he always had when Jack was in high school, and Jack laughed out loud. It seemed inconceivable that high school had been less than two years ago. He'd just turned twenty and felt vastly old. The fact that he was still underage was a joke.
He'd recently come out of rehab for the second time and he felt skinless, his bones exposed to the open air. His hands shook. Every light was too bright. He knew he could repair this awful fragility with a pill or two but that was the point, he'd promised his parents, he was wracked with guilt for how expensive he imagined rehab must be although they kept the numbers from him. "You don't want to drift through life all addled, Jack," his mother's voice as she served him dinner his first night home, breadcrumb-covered casserole in a blue dish from childhood, these impossibly moving small details that kept him perpetually tripped-up and on the edge of tears. In rehab he'd spent a lot of time watching videos and now his thoughts were a fog of old movies.
"You're sure you're good to go out?" his father had asked. Jack had been home for three weeks and tonight was the first time he'd been out by himself. His parents had taken him to dinner and a movie a few times but since he'd been back he'd mostly spent his evenings watching TV with them. Law & Order episodes with their soothingly formal two-act structures, a glass of warm milk delivered by his mother and then the same routine since childhood, washing his face and brushing his teeth and closing his eyes under a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars and planets shining down from the ceiling of his childhood room. Bridget called sometimes. She was going to college in Colorado and had a cautious way of talking to him that he didn't like very much. By day he was working in a coffee shop in a mall, making lattes and cappuccinos behind a shining silver machine. A boring life on paper but he liked it, actually, the quiet of it, the peace. He played his saxophone in the backyard after work in the afternoons. He'd come home from music school and there it was in his room where he'd left it, a gleaming brass miracle leaning up against the bookcase. He hadn't played the piano in a year.
A jazz pianist from Des Moines was headlining. He'd heard of her back when he was in music school and it seemed a good reason to go out so he'd dressed carefully and combed his hair. He chose a table at the front in the hope that if the music was beautiful it might sweep him up, but the pianist didn't appear when he thought she would. Instead a man came onstage with a guitar and started fiddling with amplifiers.
"Excuse me," Jack said, to the fiftyish couple at the next table. He would've preferred not to bother them, but they seemed to have programs and he needed information. "Is there a warm-up act?"
" There is," the woman said. She was black, and he found the brilliance of her blue eye shadow mesmerizing against the dark of her skin. All the girls he'd dated had worn such subdued makeup. It would be nice, he thought, to be able to paint blue shimmering powder on yourself, and he realized that she was holding out the program for him, so he took it quickly and said, "Thanks very much."
"You're welcome." She was looking at him strangely. He had moments throughout the day when he thought everyone in the room was staring at him, and this was one of them. The program said the opening act was Deval & Morelli/Guitar (with Joe Stevenson/Bass, Arnie Jacobson/Percussion). He must have smiled, because the woman said, "Well, that seemed to make you happy," and he said, "Yes, it does," although he of course couldn't be certain that this was the same Deval. He was in the habit of looking for Deval's name in the news every morning. No day passed without Jack wondering if the man with the goldfish tattoo had found them.
But then the other guitarist came up on the stage and it was Liam Deval, it was actually him. At first he just introduced himself and Arthur Morelli without really looking into the audience, started in on the set with his eyes on the guitar. Halfway through the third piece Deval looked up and saw Jack, and for a moment he faltered. Morelli gave him a questioning glance. Deval recovered quickly, slipped back into " Minor Swing." His year hadn't been wasted. In music school he'd been good but now he was remarkable, his talent hardened and sharpened, a knife. He played with a heavy swing and made Django Reinhardt's chord substitutions. For the first time in a while Jack felt perfectly at peace. The music was radiant.
"Let me buy you a drink" was the first thing he said to Jack when the set was over. At the bar Jack ordered a ginger ale and sipped at it in silence while Deval settled up with the bartender.
"Hey now," Deval said, "are you okay?"
"I've been like this since I got out of rehab," Jack said. "I'm sorry. It's embarrassing. Nothing's wrong. I can't help it." He held a cocktail napkin to his eyes but the tears wouldn't stop coming.
"Rehab," Deval said. "Christ, I'm sorry, and here I am offering to buy you drinks."
"It's okay. It was only ever pills." Jack stared at the bar and with tremendous concentration forced his eyes to stop watering. "I'm fine."
"Pills." Deval seemed at a loss. "I should have realized, I should have noticed . . ."
"You left your things in the dorm room," Jack said.
"I didn't want things anymore," Deval said. "It was easier just to leave them. It's hard to explain."
"Why did you get rid of your phone?"
"We were so paranoid. We didn't know what he'd do, we thought maybe there might be some way to trace our calls." Deval sounded embarrassed. "We thought there might be a private detective involved, the way he found you in South Carolina so easily."
"Anna and the baby, are they . . . ?"
"I think I got to Virginia just in time," Deval said.
