MARCH 1991
In Los Angeles, the coast stretched for miles, eventually disappearing into a smog that lent everything a vintage Hollywood glow, like a smear of Vaseline on a camera’s lens. It never seemed to rain in California. Jane and Elijah found that sunny apartment, the one Jane had dreamed of. It was in Venice Beach, above a batik fabric store. They bought a bed with a cheap, uncomfortable mattress—but Jane covered it with pillows from Walgreens, the softest cotton sheets she could find, and a colorful spread with a mandala detail from the store downstairs. It was perfect.
“Are you happy?” Elijah asked her.
She smiled at him. “Is it even possible to be sad here? But, are you? I know it’s still hard… you must think about your parents.”
A sharp shake of his head. “I’m good. Really.”
In the months since his parents’ deaths, Jane and Elijah had scattered their ashes into the ocean inlet off the deck of the Olympia cabin—but the ashes had only turned to sludge in the water and sank. Jane had kept one of Alice’s necklaces, a little gold circle on a chain. And she kept that tube of her lipstick, carried it with her everywhere. Elijah took some records and Alice’s copy of The Prophet. Neither of them took anything that had belonged to Moses. They sold the cabin and the house. Elijah asked Jane to choose where they would go, and she said they should start with Los Angeles. They packed all their instruments and not much else. When his friends came to the door as they were packing everything up, Elijah didn’t answer. Jane wondered if they would ever see any of them again.
One day, they locked up their Venice Beach apartment and headed for the sand, fingers linked, like always. They were on the lookout for bars and restaurants that had open mic nights or were hiring musicians. They stopped when they saw a place called the Sand Dollar. “I read about this café in the paper,” Jane said. “A few bands have been discovered here.”
Inside, the manager told them they could put their names on a list and come back that night for open mic. Later, Jane could tell Elijah was nervous. She didn’t want to say, Play the way you did that night at the Central, because they almost never talked about that night. “Pretend we’re in your basement, that it’s just us,” she said instead.
They began with “Dark Shine,” but Elijah started off on the wrong key. Jane knew it and tried to overcompensate, and they sounded messy, amateurish. Then Elijah stopped playing and turned to Jane. “Let’s just start over,” he said, his mouth away from the mic but his words audible in the small café. Jane could have cried. Their first time playing at a bar in LA, and they were embarrassing themselves.
She took a breath, gritted her teeth, and bent over her bass as Elijah began the song again. It went better this time, but still, the audience was unmoved, barely paying them any attention, chatting and eating. Jane caught his eye, tried to telepath to him that he needed to play the song. He had given her the chords and the lyrics, but they had never played it again. Still, even though she had only heard it once, she knew it was great. But they hadn’t named it, so she had no way to ask him to play it.
Instead, they played two others, “Watching Us” and “Six of Cups.” It wasn’t enough to get more than a smattering of claps as they left the stage.
They went back the next week and tried again. This time, Jane heard someone in the audience murmur, “I saw these two last week, booooring,” just before they were about to begin “Dark Shine.” She could tell Elijah had also heard. He stopped, cleared his throat, stared down at his guitar. After a few beats of silence, he held his mouth too close to the mic and Jane wondered if the confident, wildly talented stage persona she had glimpsed had been just a one-night thing. Maybe he wasn’t really a performer. Maybe the shock and grief had just brought it out in him.
“This, uh… this next song kind of means a lot to me,” he said. No one in the audience was even looking at the stage, though.
The intro is too long, Jane thought as she strummed her bass along with him, playing the chords she had now memorized, to support his guitar melody. She wasn’t remembering it right, maybe. Everything that night at the Central had been so sad, so heightened. This wasn’t the same. It could never be. She had just imagined it being such a transcendent song.
When Elijah started to sing, a few people put down their forks. Glasses and bottles paused in front of mouths. There’s noise all around me, / I just want to sing. / Did you close your eyes, Mama? / Could you see everything?
The words were heartrending to Jane because she knew what they meant. But somehow every person in the room seemed to understand how meaningful these words were too; Jane saw it in their faces. Do you know it all now / have the answer we seek? / I think you’d tell me / that, baby, it’s not so bleak…
By the time the chorus arrived, Elijah had every single person in the room in the palm of his hand. We’re all gonna die… They were rapt. He had done it again. Every song they played after that was met with loud applause.
The manager of the café came to them after their set. “We have a slot open on Sunday nights. Do you have enough material to fill an hour?”
“Absolutely,” Jane said, and raced back to their apartment to write more songs while Elijah fell into bed, exhausted.
Later she went to check on him. “Are you alright?” she whispered. He didn’t answer.
“Elijah, does the song have a name?” He still didn’t speak. His breath was slow and even; he was sleeping.
She went back to the living room and wrote “My Life or Yours” in a notebook.
On their fourth Sunday at the Sand Dollar, Jane noticed it was more crowded than usual. On the fifth Sunday, people were being turned away at the door—and a tall woman approached after their set and gave them her card. Petra Lakaois, Talent Manager, it read in bold black font.
“Do you see that man sitting by the window?” she asked them. Jane and Elijah nodded. “He’s a Columbia Records scout. And that man over there? He’s from Virgin.”
“Why are they here?” Elijah asked.
“Why do you think? Everyone’s talking about the Lightning Bottles, the guy with the voice of… a fallen angel, I think they’re saying—and his beautiful, guitar-playing wife.”
Elijah laughed, ran his hand through his hair self-consciously, glanced at Jane, didn’t correct Petra about the wife part. Jane felt glad. She was more than just a girlfriend. “You’re kidding, right?” he said.
“What kind of joke would that be?” Petra had a frank way of speaking that Jane found appealing. “And it’s not just your voice. You’re both great musicians, and your songs are terrific. Especially the one with that chorus.” She hums it, then sings, We’re all gonna die… “What’s it called?”
“We’re calling it ‘My Life or Yours,’ ” Jane said, glancing at Elijah.
“You two seem like you were born to play together. It’s something very special.”
Jane thought of all those months in Seattle, feeling like she was waiting for her real life to begin. And now, it was all starting to happen.
“You’re going to get offers, and if you don’t have someone who works for you, you could end up signing a bad deal. It happens way too much in this business.”
“Offers,” Jane repeated. “You mean for a recording deal?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Petra said. “Gerry over there, the guy from Virgin, he’s going to tell you that guy sitting with him—his name is Brad Tarner-Dudley—wants to rep you.”
“Tarner-Dudley reps a lot of bands,” Elijah said, his eyes now wide. “I know that name, I’ve heard of him.”
“He does. But he’s a real dickhead.”
Elijah laughed. “You don’t sugarcoat stuff, do you?”
“Never.” Jane liked Petra already. She could tell Elijah did too. “You can trust me.” Like her words, her gaze was direct. “And that’s important.”
“Who else do you manage?” Jane asked.
She named a few other bands, and Elijah nodded appreciatively when she mentioned a dream pop trio he was a fan of. “I want this. I’ve been looking for someone like you two to prioritize. I see how great you could be, and I also see how much you love playing—how much you love playing together. It’s really beautiful. A band like yours needs to be built carefully.”
“We want to do this forever,” Jane said, trying to catch Elijah’s eye.
“Exactly. And for that to happen, you’ll need to make the right choices.”
The man Petra had identified as being from Virgin had approached and was waiting behind Petra, clearing his throat and looking impatient. They arranged to meet her for lunch the next day.
“I can’t… really believe any of that just happened,” Elijah said later as they walked back to their Venice Beach apartment with their guitars slung across their backs. “Two scouts approached us. Two managers.”
“Are you happy?” She thought of the way Kim always used to talk about scouts and industry people who never materialized. “I can’t tell.”
He rubbed his hand across the stubble on his chin. He was still Seattle-pale, even in LA. He stopped walking and looked down at her. “It’s just… that song, Jane. It takes a lot out of me to sing. It makes me feel pretty terrible. And I’m afraid I’m stuck with it.”
She looked at him closely. “The chorus,” she said. “Where did that come from? It scares me a little. It makes me think maybe you want to do drugs.”
“See, that’s why I don’t like it.” There was frustration in his voice. “That was the worst night. I wanted a lot of things—and I had lost so much. And doesn’t it bother you, Jane, that no one ever talks about the other songs?”
“No. It’s a really good song,” she said with a shrug. “It is, and you know it. And I’ll be there, every time you sing it. No matter what, I’ll be beside you.”
His eyes were still troubled, but he nodded. “Maybe it’ll be okay.”
“This isn’t Seattle,” she said. “We’re long gone from there. We’re different here. Better off—safer. I promise.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “Things are getting exciting for us, and I’m ruining it. We should be celebrating.” He leaned down and kissed her, then grabbed her hand and pulled her toward a liquor store on the corner.
Inside, he selected a bottle of champagne from a shelf; he had turned twenty-one in March. “To toast our impending record deal—because when something really great happens, you have to toast with champagne. Or it’s bad luck.”
Jane laughed. She’d never had champagne before—and they hadn’t had any alcohol to drink since what happened with his parents. But this was different. Not Seattle, she reminded herself. He popped the bottle open on the street, and they drank the champagne as they walked back toward the beach, their apartment. The bubbles went straight to her head and seemed to intensify her happiness. They were almost home when he dropped the empty bottle into a trash basket, picked her up by the waist, and swung her around while she laughed even more, lightly drunk and very happy.
“This isn’t Seattle!” he shouted, while passersby stared, some smiling, some perhaps sensing a special thing about these two.
He put her down, and they sidestepped a woman on the boardwalk ahead of them. She smelled sharp, of alcohol and maybe urine, and was muttering to herself about an audition. Her feet were bare and dirty, and her eyes were hollow and sad. Jane felt a shiver of something dark as she looked at her—some kind of recognition. But nothing bad was ever going to happen to them, Jane told herself, looking away from the woman. Because the worst had already happened. Their future was bright.
Within a month of Jane and Elijah meeting Petra at the Sand Dollar and signing her as their manager, the Lightning Bottles received three recording offers: from Columbia, Virgin, and Geffen. They settled on Columbia because the executives were the most flexible on creative control, which was so important to Elijah it worried Jane a little. If he had creative control, could he cut “My Life or Yours”?
Petra set to work negotiating a deal she said would protect them the most. She lowered the initial advance on royalties amount, explaining, “I know taking less money seems counterintuitive, but it’s risky to get too much up front from a record company in case your first album underperforms and they simply drop you to recoup their costs.” She also negotiated a fifty/fifty deal on any secondary income and foreign deals—and then the Lightning Bottles were offered separate, smaller deals from Columbia Records affiliates in the UK and Sony in Germany.
Once the deal terms were finalized, it was time to choose a producer for their debut album.
“You’re going to be one of the jewels in the Columbia Records crown, once your album is recorded and released,” Alan Brosnahan, the president of Columbia Records, told them during a meeting. He had sterling-silver hair and eyes to match. His lips were thin and his smile was always tight and quick, as if he had a dozen other things he needed to be doing. But at that moment he sat at the head of a boardroom table they were growing familiar with and stretched his arms behind his head, totally relaxed as he gazed at Jane and Elijah like they were prized livestock he had just acquired. It made Jane uncomfortable. She wanted to get this part over with so they could get into the studio, where she hoped she’d feel more at home. “So, let’s get to work picking the best producer we can find. They’re all waiting for you in the lobby.”
That day, the Lightning Bottles met Bob Rock, William Orbit, Steve Albini, Nigel Godrich, Butch Vig. At one point, Elijah asked if they’d be meeting with any female record producers, and Alan cleared his throat and said, “None that are available at the moment, no.” They were told by these producers that their sound was polished and groundbreaking, transformative and transcendent. Absolutely unique. There was a lot of talk about the indie scene, which, technically, the Lightning Bottles had never been a part of. It didn’t matter. They personified it, somehow. They were exactly what everyone in 1991 wanted. In the end, they chose Hamlet Garvin to produce their debut. Garvin had worked on some of their favorite albums. “Plus, he seemed like a down-to-earth guy, didn’t he?” Elijah asked. “We can be ourselves around him. Right?”
Jane wondered if Hamlet only seemed down-to-earth because he told people to call him Ham and because he had crumbs in his beard. She was getting the sense that while in Seattle it had been important to act disaffected, like you cared less than you did; in LA, everyone acted like they cared more than they did. People became who you wanted them to be when they were in a room with you. But Jane didn’t want to press too hard on all this—she just wanted the process to keep moving forward, to start recording the album, and get to what she was sure was the good part. An album, a tour. The world hearing her songs and Elijah’s incredible voice singing them. The dream.
During another meeting, a few weeks later, this one with Alan, Ham, and a group of marketing executives, they were asked about their creative process.
Elijah grinned at this question. This grin was still new. The showman, the side of himself he showed to most of the people in this new world, was an act and she knew it. He was a chameleon, adapting here. And she found she didn’t mind. They had been warned a few times now about the perils of fame, but if they created personas, what would the danger be? Jane wasn’t sure what her persona would be yet, but thought maybe she would just be what she had always wanted: a serious musician who owed no one anything. “My girl’s the creative genius,” Elijah was saying. “I’m just the voice.”
As everyone in the room turned to stare at her, skeptical expressions on their faces, Jane felt her cheeks grow warm. “Well,” she found herself mumbling. “I mean, Elijah wrote ‘My Life or Yours.’ It’s our best song.”
“Jane, why would you say that? I couldn’t have written it without her,” Elijah said. “I never would have had the guts.”
Alan was watching them both closely. He tilted his head.
“Elijah, I wonder if you might want to keep that to yourself—that Jane writes most of the music, the lyrics? It’s impressive, of course.” But his smile was strained. “Except in the rock world there’s a sort of…” He trailed off. “I guess ‘machismo’ is the right word. This can’t be a surprise to you two, right? Guys aren’t gonna want to be screaming lyrics while headbanging in their pickup trucks to songs that were written by a woman.”
“We don’t care about those guys,” Elijah said, dismissive. “The headbanging-in-trucks guys are not our target audience.”
“Those guys buy a lot of albums,” Alan said, his tone light but his expression steel. “We do tend to like to cater to them.”
Elijah frowned. “We’re more serious than that,” he said.
“Yes, well, real serious artists guard their process,” Alan said. “Right, Ham?”
“Oh, sure,” Ham said, nodding sagely. He generally spoke directly to Elijah, rarely even looking Jane’s way. And suddenly Jane felt like the girl in the basement again. But she wasn’t, she reminded herself. This was her band, too. She forced herself to stop shrinking, pressed back her shoulders, sat up straight. Alan looked at her, but then away. No one else did. “You can say and do one thing, be one thing in the public eye, and let the background be completely different. And Alan is right—we don’t want there to be any issues straight out of the gate. But don’t sweat it right now, Elijah. We’ll figure it out. For now, let’s just make a great fuckin’ album, right?” He nudged Elijah with his shoulder, slapped him on the back. Jane felt like an observer, like she wasn’t even in the room.
That same week, their advance money came in and they went to dinner with Petra to celebrate. “Do we need, like, a financial adviser or something?” Jane asked her. Petra was starting to feel like the only person, other than Elijah, she could really talk to.
“Don’t forget you have to save some of that money to pay for the record,” Petra said. “And your video for your first single.”
“What if we don’t want to make a video?” Elijah asked, signaling the waiter for more champagne. Recently, every day seemed to hold a reason to celebrate, and they were drinking a lot of it. “I can’t imagine us on MTV along with Madonna and Michael Jackson, really. It seems a bit weird.”
“Alan will have other ideas,” Petra said. “Your creative control clause doesn’t mean you get to opt out of a video. Meanwhile, my advice is: caution. If you want a house, for example, rent, don’t buy.”
“We love where we live,” Jane said. “We don’t need a new place.”
“Maybe a cool car though,” Elijah said with a smile.
Jane laughed. “You don’t even drive.”
“I know, but how great would it be to be driven around in a convertible by the most beautiful woman in town?” He squeezed her thigh and pulled her close.
“Enjoy your new life,” Petra said. “But stay grounded, okay? You have each other. You’re luckier than most.” There was a note of caution in everything she said to them during those early days.
It was a time, especially from the inside, when the industry felt like it was shape-shifting. There was a groundswell of alternative music that didn’t fit into any of the current musical molds. Independent artists were snapped up by the major labels as tastes moved from slickly packaged pop to something grittier. The consensus, Petra told them, was that the Lightning Bottles would ensure Columbia was ahead of the new, unconventional trend—even if it was a trend that was proving difficult to pin down. Geffen had Heaven Wretch, their friend Zack’s band, and there was a lot of buzz about them. Their album would be out soon, and Petra suggested the public’s reaction could serve as the harbinger of what might be to come for Jane and Elijah.
One night, after Jane and Elijah made love on their cheap, uncomfortable bed, they brought their mandala blanket down the boardwalk to the beach and watched the stars come out. Then they heard the sound of someone a few feet away, urinating on the sand. As the sharp smell reached their nostrils, Elijah said, “It might be nice to live in a beach house. And not have to walk to the beach? I mean, we have the money now from the advance. Even with what we need for the album and video, if we do one, and the money for Petra, we have enough. Plus what we have in the bank.” From my parents. He always left that unsaid. From the sales of the properties they had owned, from what they had left behind for their son. Jane had tried to encourage him to talk about his parents, for a while. But he never wanted to. “I know we love our place but…”
“But you’re right,” Jane said. “We’ll do what Petra advised—rent, not buy. Let’s start looking for a house.” She felt something brush against her consciousness then, a tingle of unease. There had been a time she had told herself the sunny apartment of her dreams with Elijah was all she wanted in the world. Now, her world felt like it was full of moving targets, her dreams becoming elusive now that she was living them.
A few days later, Petra introduced them to a real estate agent who took them to see a house in Malibu that had apparently once belonged to Joan Didion. They signed the lease on the spot and moved in their belongings—a few bags of clothes, some books and albums, their instruments.
When Jane went into the bedroom, she saw a piece of paper tacked to the wall beside the bed’s headboard. She saw that it was one of Elijah’s drawings, a title scrawled across the top. The Secret Adventures of Adam & the Rib. She laughed aloud at this—it was clever. It was how everyone treated her—what Kim had once called her, too. But it made her feel good that Elijah could make something beautiful out of it. It took the sting away. Someone saw her, knew her, loved her—and he was the only person who mattered right now. And anyway, soon they would have an album out and other people would see her too. She knew it.
In the drawing, they were lying in their new bed, talking.
“When our first record goes gold, we’ll buy this place,” the Adam character said. “When we play our first sold-out show at Madison Square Garden, we’ll stay at the Ritz. I’ll fill the tub with champagne for you.”
“No matter how rich and famous we get, we’ll keep the Impala, though.” Jane’s smile widened even more as she read this. They both loved the car they had just purchased, a vintage burnt-orange convertible that gave a rude cough when she started it. Elijah said it sounded like Tony Iommi at the beginning of Black Sabbath’s “Sweet Leaf,” that the car had its own personality. They were always driving off into sunsets together. Increasingly, Seattle felt as far away as another galaxy, another lifetime. This was what Jane had wanted, she reminded herself. She didn’t need to keep wanting more and more—even the heights of fame here in this drawing, they didn’t actually need all that. And Elijah’s drawing was a reminder of that—of who they had been back when they first found each other. They were still those people on that piece of paper. They always would be.
On their third week at Sunset Sound, as the album slowly took shape, Ham suggested hiring session musicians to expedite the process. “Given how excited Alan and the rest of the label are about the album, you want to get it out there. Before the next shiny toy comes along.”
“We like to record all our own instruments,” Jane said. “That’s how we’ve always done it. It’s important to us. And it won’t take that much extra time just to do it ourselves.”
Ham chuckled at this, like an indulgent parent. “Yeah, I’m sure it won’t take extra time to do all the work yourselves, honey. Right.” He turned away, and his linebacker frame blocked Elijah from Jane’s view as he spoke to him.
“I know a great drummer who could take some of the heat off you, Elijah, man. I know you think you can do it all, but you’re new at this. And newbies are always trying to be heroes. You’ll burn out. We need to keep you limber, preserve that voice. When you sing on this album, I want you to be at a hundred percent. A thousand. You’re the everything here. The golden ticket.”
“I’m not the golden ticket,” he said. “That’s dumb. Jane and I are a team, and we do all our own instrumentation. Give us a chance to do it the way we always have. Hold off on the session musicians for now.”
Ham stood. “Whatever you say, boss.” But he gave Jane a hard look as he left the room—as if somehow it was her fault he hadn’t gotten what he wanted.
A few more weeks into the recording process, Elijah had an all-day doctor’s appointment—the label was giving them physicals, making sure they were in prime condition for whatever lay ahead—and Jane came into the studio on her own to rerecord a bass track she hadn’t been happy with from the day before. There was a little envelope in her guitar case, and she opened it to find a drawing from Elijah, of her sitting on a stool with her guitar, music notes flowing around her. You’re going to nail it. Love you, E. She tucked the paper into her pocket as Ham arrived, an irritated expression on his face already. She knew he’d been hoping to take the day off.
After the first time she rerecorded the track, he said, “Okay, are we good?”
“You didn’t even play it back.”
“That’s because it was fine when we did it yesterday.”
“I’d like to try it again, please. I’ll tell you when it’s right.”
After lunch, she arrived back in the recording room to find Ian Munroe, one of the label vice presidents, sitting with Ham at the controls. “Dark Shine” was playing—but it didn’t sound right to Jane.
“Is something the matter with the speaker?” she asked.
Ham turned up the volume and shushed her.
“Incredible,” Ian said when it was over. “Gritty. Real. I can see why everyone is so excited about this.”
“But that’s not how it sounded yesterday,” Jane interjected. “It’s all wrong.”
“It’s different, I know. I mixed it to sound that way,” Ham said, delivering his words in an exaggeratedly slow manner, as if speaking to someone he considered unintelligent. “There’s a lot of buzz right now about the Seattle sound, and we want to capitalize on that.”
“But we don’t want to have the ‘Seattle sound.’ We want to have our sound.”
“You’re from Seattle though, right?”
“Well, I’m not. I’m Canadian. And we’re not grunge,” Jane said. “We don’t even really understand what that is.”
Ham laughed at her. “Honey, you aren’t anyone.” Then he checked his watch. “Late lunch?” he said to Ian.
Jane waited hours for Ham to return. But eventually she knew he was done for the day. All she could do was give up and go home.
“Okay, go. Sell yourself to me.”
Jane couldn’t even remember whose party it was, whose Beverly Hills mansion they were at this time, or why she had thought it was so important to come here at all. It was June, and despite Ham’s doubt that they could record all the instruments themselves, the Lightning Bottles had finished recording their self-titled debut album. The album was in post-production now—and Alan, the label’s president, had explained their work was actually just beginning. It was now time for Jane and Elijah to get out and meet people in the industry. It was going to be fun, he insisted. But weeks later, all Jane felt was tired of it. She was holding out hope that they would meet interesting new people who would widen their circle. People to talk about music with and maybe even collaborate with in the future—only what it really felt like was her long nights waiting alone in a BBS chat room. No one interesting showed up.
“Excuse me?” she said to the man who had cornered her. He was wearing a leather motorcycle jacket with no shirt underneath. A surfboard with a shark bite out of it was tattooed across his chest. The only good thing about the conversation was that he had a bottle of champagne in his hand and kept refilling her glass. “Who are you?” she asked him.
His expression soured. “This is my house,” he said. “I’m Lynden Axworthy. Manager of Blip 99? The Quarterbacks? Jaymee Steele? And now, the Marvel Boys. Heard of them?”
She couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. “No clue. Nope.” She backed away, spotted Ham alone by an outdoor fountain, draining a tumbler.
“Hey, have you seen Elijah? Or Petra?”
He staggered to the side at the sound of her voice, then peered at her with bleary eyes. “Petra, huh?” He spit a piece of ice on the ground and she stepped back, repulsed as his spittle sprayed her arm. “You know she’s some sort of dyke, right?” He looked triumphant, as if he had just delivered information Jane didn’t already know.
In the platform combat boots she was wearing, Jane was at least an inch taller than Ham. She looked down at him and said, “Yeah, and she has an awesome girlfriend. People do a lot of things to hurt other people, and themselves. Petra choosing to be who she is and love who she loves isn’t hurting anyone. Now, excuse me, I just need to go find—”
“You’re a real bitch.” The hatred in his words stunned her into silence, froze her in place. “You know that, right? Everyone thinks so. You’re so fucking pushy.”
“That’s not true. I’m doing my job. The album is important.”
She made to turn away from him but he reached up and took her shoulder in his stubby fingers. His hand was warm, nauseatingly damp. “Elijah went into the pool house with the guys from the Waverunners and their groupies, sweetheart.” The Waverunners were a popular surf rock band. “You’re right about one thing, Jane Pyre.” The way he said her name made it sound as fake as it was. She pulled back, shrugged his hand away. “People do a shitload of things to hurt themselves, especially in this fuckin’ town. So you’d better keep a closer eye on the poor guy. We’re trying to release an album, and you’re right.” He made his voice high, as if trying to imitate her. “It’s important.”
Then he lurched away and Jane stood still, absorbing his cruel words, delivered with such casual ease. Everyone thinks you’re a real bitch. She hoped he was wrong about that, but she knew he was right about one thing: they were trying to release an album. And she had lost track of Elijah.
Her eyes swept her surroundings, looking for the pool house. She saw a long, low structure with lit-up windows and walked toward it, heart racing. You’d better keep a closer eye on the poor guy, Ham had said. This was part of her job—to take care of him. She had promised, the night his parents died. Sometimes it felt to her as if she had promised Alice herself.
She pushed open the pool house door, calling out his name. The lights were glaringly bright, and there was an acrid, chemical smell in the air. A young woman sitting on the couch was holding a blue glass pipe to her lips. She stared at Jane with wide eyes, her pupils like black holes.
Jane recoiled. “Have you seen Elijah Hart?”
Some of the members of the Waverunners were throwing a basketball at a wall-mounted net in one corner. Their eyes were as vacuous as the young woman’s. “Yeah, he was here, I think,” one of them said, frenetically dribbling the ball, throwing it to his bandmate, who threw it back fast, bounced up and down on his heels.
“He was, but he left,” said another guy. “Yeah. Yeah.” Then he laughed at nothing and Jane left, slamming the door behind her.
“Idiots,” she muttered. She finally found Elijah in a home theatere buried in the bowels of the house, watching a movie about deep-sea diving on the huge screen. His eyes were half-closed as he reclined, oblivious to Jane’s entrance. She stood still, watching him. Eventually, he turned his head and smiled to see her.
“Hey! There you are!” His words were slurred. “I was so bored I came down here. Just me and my friend Stoli here.” He lifted up a vodka bottle, took a swig. “Nashykh mam. I just learned that from some pretentious guy upstairs.” He waved a hand in the direction of the party. “It means ‘to our mothers.’ ”
“I was looking for you everywhere,” Jane said.
“I hate these parties,” he said. “All the posturing and fakery.”
“Ham told me you were in the pool house, with the guys from the Waverunners.”
“Yeah, for like a minute. Those guys are meth heads.” Elijah laughed, until he saw her face. “Jane. What’s wrong?”
“You’d never do that, would you?”
“Jesus, Jane, no. I would never do meth. Come on. Come here. Sit down with me.”
“I just want to go home. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
He looked at her more closely. “Did something happen?”
She hesitated. “Ham… he wasn’t all that nice.”
“What did he say to you?”
“It’s fine. I just want to forget it. But I want to leave.”
He stood. “Okay, sure, you don’t have to ask me twice. Let’s get out of here, go home and listen to music and make out.” He grinned, and despite her bleak mood, she smiled back.
But as they walked up the basement stairs and into the front entrance area of the house, Jane heard a familiar voice that made her freeze. Kim, John, and Ari, and their new drummer—a guy who went by the name of Git, for no discernable reason—were being ushered through the front door by a clearly excited Lynden.
“Shit,” Elijah muttered. “I heard they signed with Geffen, but…”
“They did?” This was news to Jane. “Where did you hear that? I just thought they had a manager now.” She gritted her teeth as Kim’s voice rang out. He had spotted them.
“Brother!” he called out. “Old buddy, old pal! The man with the voice of an angel!” He spoke in a breathy falsetto, laughed as if he had just told a hilarious joke. Then his gaze flicked over to Jane. “And the devil herself. The rib bone, still hanging around.”
Petra had materialized; she slid her arm into Jane’s.
“You all know one another, then,” said Lynden, shooting a judgmental little frown at Jane.
“They were just leaving,” Petra said.
Lynden was holding yet another bottle of champagne. As he popped the cork, some of it sprayed on Jane and she was reminded of Ham spitting out his ice. She just wanted to go home, take a long, hot shower, and never, ever go to one of these parties again. But Kim was still watching her. He laughed at her stricken expression, grabbed the champagne bottle, and held it up. “You’re not gonna stick around and celebrate with us? We just signed a deal with Geffen. We’re gonna be rock stars too. We’re selling out right along with you. Guess you two led the way.”
“Good for you guys,” Elijah said. “Congrats, Ari. John.” Ari and John nodded uncomfortably.
“Congrats to you guys too,” Ari said in a low voice.
“Okay, let’s go,” Petra said. “Are you two alright?” she asked when they were outside. “That seemed really tense. I guess there’s bad blood between you, being former bandmates and all. It didn’t end well?”
Elijah shrugged, but Jane knew he was rattled. “Just a lot of water under that particular bridge,” he said.
“Of course.” Petra glanced back at the house. “From now on I’ll make sure we know in advance if they’re going to be at any of the parties or events you go to, okay?”
“Sounds good, Petra.” Their car had arrived. When they were settled into the back, Jane realized Elijah had brought the bottle of vodka with him.
“Want some?” he asked her. She shook her head. He drank it in silence and looked out the window as they left Bel Air behind. His silence made her think of the way Moses had been when he drank.
The bottle was empty by the time they got back to Malibu—and Jane felt empty, too.
The next morning, Jane told Elijah what Ham had said to her at the party. He was hungover, tense and moody. But still, he picked up the phone immediately. “Elijah, no, what are you doing?”
“Fuck this. I’m calling Alan.”
“Please, don’t. We’re so close to being done with the album. Just leave it. I needed to tell you, that’s all.” What she had wanted was for him to say it was okay, that no one else thought she was who Ham had said she was—not to try to fix it. She knew, deep down, the problem Ham had named couldn’t really be fixed.
But Elijah already had Alan on the phone.
“You sure you can’t just grin and bear it, Jane?” Alan said, his voice crackling over the speakerphone. “The album is so close to being done.”
“That’s exactly what I sai—”
But Elijah interrupted her. “No. We’re done with him. I mean it, Alan.”
By the end of the call, they were getting a new producer to finish off the album—and Jane had the sense she had made a new enemy in Alan. She tried to shake it off, but even weeks after the scene with Ham and his subsequent firing, she couldn’t let go of the word he had called her. She could feel it like a tattoo. Bitch. So damning. It could become a brand so easily. All you had to do was defend yourself, defend someone you respected, hold back a smile, not laugh at the right joke. And with Kim in LA now too, she had a feeling her reputation was just going to get worse.
But when they found a new producer named Ricky Washington to help them finish the album, things began to look up again. Ricky had produced the Disintegration, one of their favorite bands, and had a reputation for coming into projects late and turning them around.
There was still a lot of talk about the “Seattle sound,” but Ricky agreed that they should shine in their own way. “I don’t want to add to you,” Ricky said as he mixed. “If anything, your sound needs to be stripped down more, so it can become as big as it should be. You don’t need any sound gimmicks—that voice of Elijah’s is going to do all the work for you.” He turned to Jane. “And your lyrics are stunning, all of them. Poetry. I know it’s not public knowledge that they’re yours—but they’re really good. Different. No macho bullshit.”
She glowed with pride at his compliment and stopped regretting the fallout with Ham. Everything was working out the way it needed to.
“Rumor has it you aren’t easy to work with, Jane,” Ricky said to her one afternoon in the studio, as they were nearing the album’s completion, mixing and finalizing the last song. His British accent softened the comment, yet it still sent a chill through Jane. “But I quite like you.”
Something twisted inside her at his words. Rumor has it. But she lifted her chin and smiled at him. “People like you are the only ones who matter to me, Ricky,” she said, and tried to convince herself this was really true—that she could choose who mattered most to her and build walls to keep all the others out.