Catherine (18 page)

Had the marriage been rocky? I suppose it must have been, given that my mother was
in love with another man. Still, my dad didn’t have it in him to hurt anyone, much
less kill them. “If he finds a stinkbug in the bathroom, he carries it out the front
door.”

“Nobody who knew your father thought he was responsible for her disappearance,” Jackie
said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you….”

“I asked you to tell me everything. I meant it.”

She threw her arms around me again. “You’re a brave girl,” she said. “Just like your
mom.”

Her words—maybe the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me—sent a wave of warmth
through my body. For a long time neither of us spoke, until an image popped into my
head: the girl I’d seen, or maybe dreamed, scratching at the bedroom window, trying
to get in. “What if she climbed up the fire escape and let herself in through the
window in her bedroom? She could have been waiting in The Underground for Hence.”

Jackie let go. “Of course! That window of hers. She used to leave it unlocked so Hence
could climb in. She kept a two-by-four hidden behind the club so he could trip the
ladder.”

“So when she came back, she could have let herself into her bedroom.” The idea exhilarated
me; at last I’d made a breakthrough, however small: I’d found a piece of information
I could offer to Hence in exchange for his help.

But that was as far as we got before Jackie’s phone rang. “My gallery’s calling; I
have to take this,” she told me, her hand over the receiver.

“I’ll go,” I said.

Before I left, Jackie scrawled her phone number on a piece of scrap paper.
Call me if you need anything
, she mouthed, her ear still pressed to her phone.

Oddly, when I let myself into The Underground, it was quiet and empty. I crept back
downstairs to Cooper’s bedroom, and he was still gone. My note lay on his pillow,
exactly where I’d left it.

For a while, Hence and I met up at Jackie’s every day after school. Then, one afternoon,
as he was slipping back into his jeans, he gave me a sheepish look. “I won’t be able
to meet up tomorrow. Riptide’s rehearsing.”

I bent to kiss his forehead. “That’s okay.”

“This won’t be the only time. We’ll need to rehearse at least a few times a week from
now on.”

“Got it,” I said. “I understand.”

Hence wrapped his arms around me and gave me a squeeze. “You’re amazing,” he said,
and then he was gone.

I dressed slowly, giving myself a pep talk.
Being in Riptide is a great thing for Hence. I’ll get more writing done now, and missing
him will make my poems deeper, because poets are supposed to suffer. Aren’t they?

Dad was really excited for Hence and gladly cut back his hours at the club, but rehearsal
time with the band quickly expanded to take up most of Hence’s new free time.
Suck it up
, I told myself whenever I felt a pang of longing.
You don’t need to hang around your boyfriend constantly. Besides, this will make the
time we do get to spend together even more special.

Still, on the afternoons when Hence was rehearsing, I couldn’t help wishing I could
be there, too. I wasn’t about to suggest it, though; I knew from experience that guys
in bands don’t like girlfriends at practice any more than they like them at auditions.

I’d heard Dad’s musician friends grouse endlessly on the subject. “Paulie insists
on bringing his old lady to every rehearsal, and she’s a colossal pain,” I remembered
Dave D’Amato saying about his bassist’s girlfriend at one of Dad’s late-night drinking-and-bullshit
sessions. “She thinks she can
make suggestions
.” There had been true horror in his voice.

And Dave’s weaselly drummer, whose name I could never remember, actually chimed in,
“I don’t mind if a guy brings his girl along, provided she’s hot and she brings us
beers.”

Dave laughed. “We need a new rule. Hot girls welcome… but no Yokos.”

“They’re sexist pigs,” I told my dad the next day as we were clearing away the empties
from the living room. “Why don’t you say something?”

“Dave’s an old friend. Besides, he’s essentially right. Bringing a girlfriend to practice
is unprofessional.”

“Or a boyfriend.” I sniffed. “Girls are in bands, too.”

Dad chuckled. “Or a boyfriend.”

So I knew better than to ask Hence if I could sit in, which was why I was floored
when he brought up the idea himself. “The guys said you could come watch us rehearse
tomorrow if you want.” We were cuddling under a blanket, and I was so happy to be
in his arms that I hadn’t even been thinking about rehearsals.

“You asked them?” I was thrilled. “And they really don’t mind?”

“Stan and Andy weren’t so into the idea at first,” he admitted. “They had some bad
experiences with the last lead guitarist’s girlfriend. But I said you’d be totally
cool.”

I snuggled my face into his neck and inhaled deeply, breathing him in. “You’re the
best boyfriend ever.” But then I pulled back. “They’re not going to want me to fetch
their beers, are they? Because there’s no way.”

Hence laughed, a sound I heard so rarely that it never failed to bring me joy. “Nobody
expects you to fetch beer. Or make sandwiches.” He cupped my face in his hands so
I was looking straight into that gaze that melted me every time. “I want you there
with me. And they want me to be happy, so they said yes.”

So that’s how I came to be curled up in an armchair in a bone-cold warehouse in the
Meatpacking District. Though I wore my warmest down coat, I was still freezing; if
there was a next time, I thought, I’d really have to sneak a quilt out in my backpack,
and maybe a thermos of hot coffee. With fingers that felt brittle as icicles, I scribbled
nonstop in my journal. Just being there, listening to Riptide practice, made me hungry
to create something. Though I’d considered myself a writer ever since I could hold
a pencil, I couldn’t help wishing I knew how to dance or play an
instrument—anything that would let me use my whole body to express myself, the way
Hence was doing. He was a more physical guitar player than I had expected, pogoing,
windmilling, sliding across the floor on his knees. The quiet, hesitant Hence I knew
was nothing like this wildman swinging his prized Telecaster around like he might
smash it, Pete Townshend–style, just for the thrill.

Of course I’d seen more than my share of rehearsals and sound checks at the club,
to the point where even when a band was good I could feel pretty blasé about it. But
it was different with Riptide, and not just because I was biased (though, admittedly,
I was). Plenty of bands spoiled catchy hooks with lyrics so dumb they made my teeth
ache. Others coupled lyrics that were clever or deep with music that moped along,
monotonous and grating. But Riptide had the music
and
the lyrics. Not to mention the most gorgeous and talented front man in the history
of rock and roll. In my humble opinion.

And while I was pretty sure Hence’s bandmates would consider it an intrusion or a
distraction, I couldn’t help wishing I’d brought my camera so I could capture them
in action. They weren’t bad guys, as musicians go. I decided right away that I liked
Ruben—the bassist—the best. He was the friendliest, with a smile that took up his
whole face, and he won points for his fearless fashion sense; that day he had on a
purple crushed-velvet jumpsuit and a furry red top hat. He was the one who ran upstairs
to bring down an armchair for me to sit in, a comfy but musty one the guys had found
by the side of the road on trash day. I felt bad making him go to all that trouble,
but he brushed away my protests.

Stan, the drummer, was skinny, with a black pompadour and a crooked nose. Andy, the
rhythm guitarist, had curly, sandy-colored hair; a round, impish face; and a to-die-for
Cockney accent. At first I couldn’t help wondering if maybe they’d agreed to let me
sit in because of who my dad is, but after observing them in action, I finally decided
that Hence had been right: They honestly were delighted to have him in the band, and
he’d made them see that we were a package deal. “Your boyfriend’s got pipes,” Andy
said to me before the band got down to business. “It’s a huge relief to have somebody
in Riptide who can actually sing.”

It was true: Hence’s voice could flow like silk one minute and rasp like sandpaper
the next—whatever a song called for. That afternoon he was wearing a shirt I’d bought
for him, a crisp, electric-blue button-down, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows,
untucked over jeans. Each time I looked up from my journal and caught sight of him—slender,
dark, and intense—the blood rushed to my head and I reeled with the pleasure of it
all. Riptide’s front man. My secret boyfriend.

One night in November, when Quentin was out with his friends and Dad was preoccupied
with that night’s show, Hence climbed the fire escape to my window. We’d talked the
plan out for days and decided the elevator was too noisy. Even the stairs at the rear
of the building were out, because Dad and the workers used them. Not that our plan
wasn’t still risky, since any passerby could look up to see Hence climbing through
the window.

“I’ll be careful,” he’d promised. “I’ll wait till the music’s loud and nobody’s looking.”
We agreed that the risk was worth it, especially now that Hence’s free afternoons
were so few. Besides, this way I could fall asleep in his arms, his breath warm in
my hair, his scent seeping into my pillowcase. Best of all, we would wake up together,
albeit not in that luxurious way I imagined us someday being able to. I was careful
to set my alarm for four
AM
, when I knew Dad would be sound asleep, and Hence slipped back out the window and
down the fire escape without a hitch. It was so easy we wondered why we hadn’t tried
it sooner.

After Hence reached the street safely, I snuggled under the covers, reliving how it
had felt to fall asleep beside him, my head tucked under his chin while he absently
drummed out a rhythm on my hip and hummed in my ear. It was the song he had started
writing last week, the one about me. He hadn’t worked out all of the lyrics yet, but
there was a line about being tangled in my midnight hair, and a bit about how he wanted
to kidnap me from school and take me to St. Mark’s Place and walk through the streets
holding hands. My favorite part was about how he wanted us to kiss in a rainstorm,
daring lightning to strike.

The last verse was giving him trouble, though. I wanted to offer to help him, but
it would have been supremely weird to cowrite a song about myself. Instead, I would
wait and see what he came up with on his own. By then, I’d showed him all of my poems—not
just the recent ones about him, but the old ones, too—and he really liked them. In
fact, more than once he said he wanted to pick one out and write music for it—a plan
that completely thrilled me. If he had been anyone else, I might have suspected
he was just being polite, but I don’t think Hence ever said a word to me that he didn’t
truly mean. Which is why I was so pleased by what he whispered just before he fell
asleep: “I’ve been thinking about us living together. After you graduate. Getting
a little apartment of our own.”

How could I sleep after that? I could imagine precisely what our apartment would look
like: cozy and just big enough for two, with sunshine streaming in the windows, lace
curtains, and a cat—I’d always wanted a Siamese, but Q was allergic—curled in the
middle of our bed. We’d have cut flowers—daffodils or wild irises—and stacks and stacks
of books in every room, and there would be music on the stereo every hour of the day,
and maybe even at night while we slept.

I could picture it all so clearly. Even so, I knew I might have to be flexible. If
lace curtains and daffodils sounded too girly to Hence, I would adjust. I wouldn’t
mind living in a more masculine apartment, either, with black walls and graffiti art
and a pinball machine against the wall, with floor pillows instead of furniture—something
as bohemian and original as Hence himself—as long as I got the cat and a desk to write
and study at and we were close to the T so I could get to my classes at Harvard. Maybe
we could even live right in Cambridge, with its shady trees, quirky bookstores and
restaurants, and the Brattle Theatre, where they showed the best independent films
and sold cappuccino in the lobby. Of all the places Dad had ever taken me, Cambridge—his
alma mater and my future college town—was the only place I’d ever wanted to move to.

I could have cuddled in bed dreaming about the future all the
next day, if I didn’t have to go to school. It was too soon for senioritis to kick
in, since I hadn’t yet started on my college applications. Apart from Harvard, I would
apply to Yale and Brown, and maybe Smith and Bryn Mawr, with SUNY Binghamton as my
safety school. My guidance counselor had scolded me when I’d told her I planned to
apply only to Harvard. “Even a straight-A student needs safety schools,” she’d said,
and as annoyed as I’d been, I realized she was probably right.