PRESENT DAY
“You girls were up there a while,” Linnea says when Britt and I return downstairs.
What was left of the crowd has mostly cleared, but a few still linger at tables. They have snacks and drinks under the thrum of my mother’s songs playing on loop from Sunset Cove’s only station. They sit in beach clothes and bathing suits and ripped jeans. They don’t realize what just took place above their heads.
“Thanks for letting us look,” I say, standing in this room at the same time I’m sitting in Centennial Park with Sara Ellis and Tori Rose as they wrote Fate’s Travelers’ first hit. I’m soaking in the rain as she danced with David. I’m watching Patrick Rose shut the door while, here, I watched Britt’s gaze spark when Sara and my mother wove lyrics and music together. There are more questions, there are more answers, and Tori Rose was so sure.
Each page makes it clearer she was meant to leave, clearer she couldn’t find what she needed here. This town gives and takes so much, but the way she paints the spotlight and the dream? It glows.
“Sure thing,” Linnea says and smiles, bringing me back to the present. She erases a couple numbers on her sudoku, and a confession is on the tip of my tongue. I don’t know why, but I want to tell her what we found over her diner, to see if someone else shares this threatening pulse between their rib cage at my mother’s courage.
I haven’t even told my grandmas, and Edie couldn’t have cared less, but Linnea is open and sitting there, and I know she’ll keep my secrets and my mother’s too. A part of me needs someone besides me and Britt in this town to believe that Tori Rose was not just her time in the limelight, but she was also more than her forced fall from grace.
Mom must have trusted her, to have spent all that time in the attic painting that window. Linnea resurrected the karaoke machine. She got that little piece of her back. As I replay what Sara said to my mother, I want to share the music. That’s what this is all about, no?, the first words come out in a whisper.
“Linnea, do you want to know what we were looking for?” The secrets fill me to the brim, and they cut me open on their way to my lips.
“More songs, right?”
“No. Not quite.”
Britt’s eyes widen, and she pokes my hip.
I turn to her, nod. I’m ready, I hope that says.
“All right, hit me.” Linnea leans forward across the counter, and I think she’s ready too.
I begin with grad night, with the gift, and I let Linnea in on the hunt, on these days of chasing the reasons for my mother’s dreams and wondering why I’m not more like her in that way, wanting my own to follow—but I leave that last part out.
“She . . .” When I finish, Linnea’s eyes are even mistier than during “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”—not their usual bright amber. “She had that up there all along? That’s . . . oh, God, when she asked to go to the attic, I thought she was looking for something. I didn’t realize she was saying goodbye.” Tears slip down her cheeks, and my chest tightens.
Wrapping her arms around my shoulders, even with the counter between us, Linnea pulls me close, like she would when I was little and hung out here after school as my grandmas finished up work and met me for dinner. She pulls me close like she did both me and Britt the night of our last song in public together, swaying me from side to side.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have . . .” I start as a sob shakes her body.
“No.” She pulls back, gripping my arms so I meet her eyes, which are blazing. “Thank you for sharing this with me.”
Britt’s halfway through a blueberry muffin behind us, sitting at the counter and folding the wrapper. Her eyes shout something to me that I can’t decipher, endless ambition in her irises, everything she wants to prove, and mine hide my wonderings about the neon lights of Music City and an adventure with this girl. If I didn’t have the story to face, if I was just me and she was just her and we were just us, I wonder what it would be like to sit beneath the leaves of Centennial Park together.
The seat beside Britt is empty, and I slip into it, leveling my gaze with Linnea, who’s still wiping at her eyes and catching glances.
“So how many clues are left?” she asks.
“Four.” This will be the first real goodbye I’ll have to say to my mom, the first time I lose my own memories of her. We’re halfway through the entries. I’m not ready for that farewell, not ready for her absence to hit harder than it ever has, so I know that the next clues must be everything. But I also know I need them fast, in these next few days. I need my answer.
Britt squeezes my knee, under the counter, and I exhale.
“What did she say in the diary?” Linnea asks.
I continue, “She told me about her journey, about why she left this town and where she went. She’s still telling me how she got there, what she’s doing, and about her rise to fame.” I glance at where the old karaoke machine sits on the stage, where it should be. “She mentioned that machine.”
Linnea sniffs, wipes her eyes on the hem of her apron. “I just couldn’t listen to it anymore after her. I didn’t let anyone perform on that stage for years after she passed, because it was hers. She was a hurricane, that girl. And when you asked about her the other day, about how she . . . I wanted to give you a piece of her music and life. I should’ve done it sooner. But it was too hard.”
“I get that,” I whisper. “It’s impossible to forget her here.” I glance at Britt, hoping to convey a little bit about why I’m here, why I still need to stay. “There are memories living in this town from Back to Me & You to record stores that say Hey, she was here. But it’s hard too, because she’s everywhere. I’ve never known how to really know her for everything she was. I’ve never known how to leave the little pieces of her I have or the people who need to hold on to those stories without saying them.”
“The magic of small towns,” Britt says, and there’s the slightest bitterness to it.
“Truly.” The pause is too much. “How close were you two?” I glance back at Linnea, because I’ve never asked, and she never told me, but she clearly knows more than she lets on.
Linnea sighs. “Your mother was born here, lived in the town for twelve years, and then left for a while with her moms. When they got on their feet and were ready, they came back and bought the inn. The first time she was here, that girl would come and raise chaos. I was in junior high at the time and working with my pops. I used to be her babysitter. She’d weave in and out of my space, singing wherever she went. She had this ridiculous pink harmonica she wouldn’t part with. She slept with it like a security blanket, and then she got her first guitar and she would come and ask to play me all her songs.” She’s getting teary again.
Britt hands her a napkin—this torn-up look on her face that destroys me. Neither of us has seen Linnea Rodgers cry before.
Linnea waves this off, holding tight to Britt’s hand. “I’m okay. I just try not to relive it too often. It was when we were older, after her first few tours and her band split up and she came back for a visit, that we got really close. She missed her moms, but she was dead set on getting back to the road. She never did find herself comfortable here. Never wanted to stay. We talked a lot back then. She told me about life in Music City and how she’d found her place. I told her . . .” Linnea trails off, and I’m about to reach out, to tell her despite how I want to know, she doesn’t have to finish if it’s hard, if it hurts too much. “She was the only one I told about the life I wanted. With a family. Kids, before I found out I couldn’t have any. Adoption process was hell with all the getting my hopes up and getting crushed. She asked what I’d name my kid if I had one, and we dreamed together.”
She never did find herself comfortable here. Never wanted to stay. Is that my answer? But how can it be? Why would she show me around the magic of this town, show me the pain in her wake, if she didn’t want it to keep me?
Britt’s fingers drum against the counter, always the one to keep her head, to push forward, to search for what people refused to say. “What would you name your kid?”
Linnea’s expression is the kind someone gets when they’re recalling the best of times before the worst of times. In this moment, here at the counter of the Horizon where I’ve been frequenting my entire life, she says one word and it shatters my world: “Mia.”