PRESENT DAY
Three days until Britt leaves. After a night with no sleep, staring at my phone, hoping miraculously Sara would see my message and reply, I know I need to choose. For real. Because once I do, I don’t want to go back: that’ll be my future.
All morning while I work the desk of the inn, organizing drawers to keep my fidgeting hands busy until I can leave and search more, I feel my grandmas’ eyes on me, waiting for me. I want the music, I love it; I want Britt, I want to be with her, but will that be enough in the end? I finally know that the music didn’t destroy my mother. I could make my own path, but after a lifetime hiding from it, how do I say I’m ready?
I still need to know her ending.
The indigo envelope beckons, and I open the bottom drawer of the desk, pulling harder when it sticks. Inside, buried beneath old invoices that I toss toward the shredder, a playbill pokes out, faded. It’s from a Sunset Cove rendition of Grease in 1989. How long has it been since these drawers were cleaned?
But as I pull it out and flip through it, a familiar face smiles at me, eyes on something other than the camera. David Summers. This was that summer, the summer they left for Nashville and New York, and he’s Danny Zuko. So they came back after. He and my mother came back from their Summer of Dreams, even if only for a while.
I shove the playbill away with the envelope and recite the lyrics of this clue to myself.
I’ve always been center stage, asked the limelight to bring me home,
When I saw you up there, your turn to shine, the undeniable star of the show,
I couldn’t help the awe on my lips or the way my hands applaud,
Our future seemed unending, for I loved everything I saw,
Who knew the beginning of us would end with a curtain call,
Who knew the lies between us would be broken by the truth,
And the night right here before us would be the final act of me and you?
* * *
The Sunrise Theater is at the edge of Sunset Cove with the waves crashing over the sandy shore just beyond it. Linnea told us years ago that this building used to be the beating heart of town. Now, all it’s got to show for itself is sea-stained siding and a door that creaks.
Britt and I duck inside, into the lobby with its worn floor and framed playbills stretching down the hall. From 1980 to 1989, David Summers stands center stage in all of them.
“Can I help you?”
The same guy who’s always here sits behind the front desk. He’s the kind of town legend that isn’t shared, that fades into the background to go unnoticed. Haunting the theater day in and day out with his gray hair and gray shirts that make him look like he had the life sucked out of him.
Yet, no one really questions this or the fact that productions are as rare as snow. This building is more fond memory than anything else, another monument to what the town was before.
“Which room was the 1989 mainstage production in?” I ask.
His lips purse, and he shuffles some papers around in the clutter of his desk. “Believe that was Grease in 3A. Down the hall. Last one at the end.”
“Can we check it out?”
He doesn’t meet my eyes—like I’m just another poster on these walls. “I have an appointment in an hour. You have until then.”
My love,
Isn’t there a magic to the spotlight?
That’s it—that’s all the contents of the indigo envelope say—and I reread it over and over. Britt’s sitting next to me in one of the patched-up red audience chairs, elbows on her knees, head in her hands, eyes flickering between me and the stage.
The theater is a relatively grand room with rows of seating, a tech booth in the back, and spotlights on a catwalk that’s anchored to the ceiling. The stage is bordered by red drapes, and a cyclorama stands in the back.
There’s not much to make of that one line, especially in the vastness of this room. I pace between the aisles, trailing my fingers across the seats filled with more forgotten history, more lost moments, more painted-over truths. My combat boots click with each step onstage, and I look out at Britt, not used to this perspective.
She’s looking at me too, considering, under a wide-brimmed sun hat.
And I need to tell her something, it’s filling me, haunting me, so I say, “Would you sing with me?” The words tremble, but they’re there.
Her eyes widen, but after a moment, she gets to her feet, heading to the stage to join me. She crosses this room with all its inactive spotlights and empty promises. Stopping next to me, she stills, and we both stare out at the crowd for a moment.
And I start to sing to her. I give her a song. Every lyric was shaped in her name, and it’s the first melody of mine she knows is hers.
Star-born wonders and racing hearts,
Your hand in mine and the blue, blue sky,
An adventure nowhere and ticket everywhere,
Tangled falsehoods keeping us alive,
You’ve got my destination in your heart,
One arm out the window and a hand on the wheel,
Baby I promise you and this almost-open-road
adventure,
I’d give everything to make us real.
She twirls toward me and takes the reins, continues the tune so effortlessly it has my brain spinning even worse than when her lips were on mine.
Mysteries and madness, in a summer that steals our fate,
Never did believe in destiny, but this one’s worth the wait,
I’d follow you if I could, I’d be right there, be right here,
If goodbye’s in our cards there’s one thing you need to hear,
If I could I’d tip the scales, if I could I’d buy the world,
For a chance with you, to make us real, to join the music of your world,
Make us real, oh oh oh,
Anything to make us real.
Britt stares at me, unwavering as my voice ebbs away. The words are on the tip of my tongue, and I just need to push them out. I need to say what I know to be true. But I stand in the center of that stage and look out at the empty audience.
It’s just another ghostly place with the lingering monuments of how this town used to be and what it was shaped into in its grief. Grief always shows—it uses the littlest things to make itself known. Like an empty theater and a heart of a town beating no more, covering its faded edges with new relics to act whole, and like a once blazing star, forever preserved but never spoken of in all her realities.
Standing up here, with only Britt Garcia near me, is just as fulfilling as that night in my mother’s tribute club. The stage, this girl feels like a new kind of home—like a long-awaited journey.
“Spotlight,” Britt says to herself in the silence, and then to me.
“What?” She’s so close. Say it.
“The song is ‘See You in the Spotlight.’ How could we possibly continue without one?” Her smile could get me to do anything—Fuck caution.
“So,” I say, and her gaze is testing me. “Let’s get one.”
“I like that plan.”
My stomach flutters.
We hop to the floor and make our way through the seats. The tech booth at the back is slightly newer than the rest of the place, but an old ladder with more dust than stability leads to the catwalk and the lights mounted there.
Taking it one rung at a time, a different vantage point is created. My fingers trail along the rail when we reach the top, and in my mind’s eye, this room is filled with people. I can visualize Britt and I standing there just as we were, singing with Lost Girls. I can picture us all visiting Sunset Cove, performing in Back to Me & You, crowding into a car, and driving with pitstops and laughter through the sunset, all the way to Music City. I can imagine me and Britt, on the steps of the Grand Ole Opry, walking the line of Music Row, at parties, forever in the melodies.
There are three spotlights up here that clearly haven’t been used in years. I was stage manager for a couple of school productions Britt starred in, so I have a basic understanding of this technology, and I turn each one on—one at a time, illuminating different parts of the stage with golden light. One, two . . .
On the third and final one, something slips beneath my hand as I brush dust from the surface. My palm smooths over a pack of papers, and I stop, pulling them off the light as best I can to reveal my mother’s second-to-last diary pages.