Reverb (12 page)

In a way it does, then shame consumes her. Despite his suffering, she needs to know he had feelings for her. She wants to hold him, have him hold her. Surrender into him. Protect him. Forgive him. And she isn’t going to let him see her cry.

“Julia, you need to listen to me now. Look at me.”

She does. He leans against the butcher block slouched on one hip. He stares at her, but it feels like into her. “Stop crying.” He leans forward and brushes the tears from her cheek with the side of his thumb.

With his touch comes that sudden rush of pleasure, and she grabs his hand before he pulls away. She holds her breath. He grips her hand and pulls her to him and hugs her against him, their bodies pressed into each other. She can feel him breathe, his heart beating. “You are intoxicating,” he whispers. “Every time I got wrapped up in you—with you—it was all consuming. So I pulled back. I never let myself really be with you. Not all the way. Not like I should have. And I am profoundly sorry.”

She leans into him, surrenders to his words, to the feel of him, his arms around her, and cries.

“I have to play this as it lays now, Julia. I’m in way over my head and there is no way in hell I’m going to let you drown with me.”

“Then let me help you.”

“You can’t. Gotta just let it go. Don’t blow away what you have with Stephen. Don’t measure what you’ve got with what you imagine we had.”

The rush hits her and it feels as if she’s sucking in water in search of air. She pushes him off and backs away from him until she’s up against the counter behind her. “
Imagine
? Don’t make me crazy, James.” She glares at him. “Don’t stand there and tell me I imagined the most profound connection I’ve ever felt to anyone in my life.”

He leans back against the butcher block, crosses his legs and buries his hands in his pockets. “Makes no difference now, Julia.”

“
It does to me
. God, how can you be so
blank
? The times you crawled outside of your head and into mine, your perceptions were virtually flawless. For
six years
I counted on you for direction, guidance. I went to medical school because of
you
. I am a psychiatrist because of
you
! I felt closer to you than any man, or woman I have ever known.”

“Why is any of this important now?”

“Let’s just say I need a reality check. I need to know that I didn’t spend all those years lying to myself about what we shared.”

He inhales as if to speak, pauses, then his eyes narrow but he keeps them on hers. “Okay, Jules. Here’s some reality I gleaned over the last thirteen months of dead time. I was making it with music
way
before my parents died. A year into living with Edward, and it became my Savior. I was just abandoned, left rotting in hell because I never developed anything with anyone real, not even with you. We could have spent the rest of our lives together and you never would have gotten what you needed from me.
And you knew that
, which is why you tried to lay it on the line that last night we were together.” He pauses, studying her. “Why do you do this to yourself? Why do you remember only the best of what we had instead of what actually was?”

She looks away, shamed. “Because the times you plugged into me, with that same focus you gave to your music, those moments were...electric.” She looks back into his eyes, searching. “I know they were for you too.
I know it.
I kept thinking that if I just gave it enough time, you’d learn to trust me. You’d figure out that love wasn’t going to consume you, but complete you.”

He stares at her, then shrugs and spreads his hands in surrender. “It’s the past, Julia, and we have no future. I’m a wanted felon. For murder, drug trafficking, escaping from lawful custody. Any contact between us only compromises your position, and your safety. I have nothing that I can offer you now. Nothing. Do you understand me?” He stares at her then looks away toward the kitchen door.

She feels him separate, pull away from her, wall up. And though there is tenderness in his eyes, the Grand Canyon is between them. A part of her brain is screaming, like an addict going through withdrawal, and she wants to grab one of the pans hanging above the butcher block and hit him in the head with it.

“What are you going to do, James? Where are you going from here?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve been in the States too long though, longer than I’d anticipated. For a while at least, I think I’m going to have to keep moving around.”

“How manageable is that? I mean, look at you. Are you really that far gone? It must be obvious, even to you at this point your current course is not sustainable.”

“But I’m about to change it with a lot of money.” He flashes a cocky grin, his tiger eyes shrouded by his thick lashes. “Julia, I’m sorry for what I put you through, for the years we were together, and the last thirteen months that we were not.” He stays fixed on her. “You’ve started something good with Stephen. Stick with it. Make it what you want. He’ll go there with you—for the long run. I’m sorry it isn’t me—that it wasn’t me, and won’t ever be.”

Tears spill down her face again and she can’t stop them. She looks away. The son of a bitch has already separated. He’s closed the lid of the box to which she belongs and shelved it, even though she stands right in front of him.

“I’m going to talk with Stephen for a bit, and then I’m leaving. And now you know why. I hope it helps you, Jules.”

She watches her tears fall onto the clay tile floor. She feels him watching her. She refuses to look at him. The lump in her throat is so choking, she cannot speak.

“Blink, Julia.” He partially whispers. “Shut your eyes, and when you open them, don’t look back.” He stays fixed on her another second then picks up his mug from the butcher block, crosses in front of her, and leaves the kitchen without looking back.

She can barely breathe as she sinks back against the counter. Tears blur her vision. Sunlight strikes the hanging brass pots and bounce golden rays around the room. She squints to dim the brightness, and focuses on the blue of the bay out the kitchen windows. The Deco towers of the Golden Gate are lit blazing red from the rising sun.

Blink of an eye and he’ll be gone. She feels ambivalent about trying to stop him. She’s afraid for him. Whatever happened has clearly traumatized him, but she knows she can’t convince him to get help. He won’t listen to her. Back to the cat and mouse game with James. It’s exhausting, and demeaning.

He’s right about her and Steve. They are good together, in a quiet way. Stephen makes her feel valued, safe. She and James should have been as short-lived as her singing career. She knew who he was, how he was from the beginning. In seven years, she probably should have figured out she couldn’t change him. They really were through a year ago, the night she laid it on the line. And again she flashes on James focused on the monitors of streaming music at his house in Zuma that last time they were together…

It was well after midnight when Julia got to the beach house. Her tension spiked when he didn’t acknowledge her as she opened the door to his recording studio.

James sat in front of his computer, making notations on waveforms of music streaming by on the monitors. His right ear was covered by a headphone, which was beating out the percussion, while he listened with his exposed ear to the melody, if you could call it that, which filled the studio.

She moved beyond the threshold and he finally noticed her and gave her a quick smile. His attention never really left the multiple screens, nor did he take his hands off the electronic piano or computer keyboards. She went and stood behind him and rubbed his shoulders. He relaxed with her touch, turned his head back towards her slightly and she saw him smile, then she lost him again to the computer. The music was loud, hard, electric, with a lot of digital starkness. It was clean though, and she liked it. Julia liked mostly everything James crafted.

“Who’s this for?”

“The Zone. Lead track for their debut album. What do you think?”

From punk to popular, Bach and beyond, James was a master musician. “Your brilliance never ceases to amaze me, my love.”

He laughed. “And I thought you were only with me because I’m beautiful.”

“Well, it’s true. You do make a good arm piece.” She bent down and kissed his neck then leaned her chin on his shoulder as she slid her arms down his chest. “You’re very impressive at all the fancy parties, that is if we actually went to any parties, or really anywhere for that matter. Why don’t you knock this off for the night and come upstairs?” She slides her hands a little further down to accentuate her point.

“Give me another twenty minutes and I’ll meet you up there.” He took both her hands in his, kissed them, squeezed them and released them, then focused his attention back on the computer. She straightened, sighed loudly enough for him to hear her, and looked back only once as she left the studio. He was lost inside the waveforms, totally absorbed, and did not look at her.

Julia went upstairs and took a shower. She’d just come off evening rotation, dealing with all the homeless psychotics and crashing junkies the cops dropped on the hospital doorstep. She was tired. The second year of residency seemed even harder than the first. The hours were just as brutal, but dealing with the anger and violence of the patients was becoming exhausting.

She lay down in bed after showering and fell asleep, woke at 4:20a.m. and James was not in bed with her. She knew he’d still be in the studio, and she fought the urge to go downstairs and confront him. But the longer she lay there trying to fall back asleep, the more agitated she got. He’d been using speed to sustain working endless hours, letting music consume him. Again.

He’d gone through periods like this a few other times where he’d use for a couple of months to get through some project and then not touch anything. Julia never considered him having a “drug problem,” since he walked away from it for extended periods without repercussions or change in behavior.

Didn’t know why it was bugging her so much that particular night. Maybe, while she lay there counting the number of months he’d been using, the final figure was too high. Maybe, when she counted the number of times they’d actually made love in the past few months, the number was too low. A half-hour into lying there, she couldn’t contain her anxiety any longer and went down to the studio to talk to him.

Of course, he was still awake, still at his computer staring at the waveforms streaming by on the monitor.

“Hi.” He gave her a guilty grin, and she realized that he’d never come up that evening to find her sleeping.

She took a cleansing breath to keep her anger in check. “Hi. I think we need to talk.” She sat down on the old leather couch.

“Uh oh.” He pressed some keys on the computer. The music froze on the screen, and silence created a vacuum in the room as he swung in his chair around to face her. His eyes were wide and red rimmed, their forest green accentuated by the darkness that surrounded them. His full lips were chapped and red. He sat slouched, his lean muscular body relaxed, hands clasped against his flat stomach. He stared at her waiting for her to continue.

“I think it’s time you stopped using speed.”

He laughed. “Jules, aren’t you working the Dependency unit right now?”

“Don’t patronize me, James. You’re taking it too far out there. You’re doing it almost every day now. You hardly eat. You need Ambient to sleep. You’re hurting yourself. Do you get that? Do you care?”

He cocked his head and flashed a condescending grin. “Come on. You know this is temporary, and I can pull it back anytime. What’s this really about Julia?”

“Let’s go to Maui for a week or two over winter break. Or we can take a drive to Yellowstone, or fly to Italy. Get you out of the loop you’re in, away from the Industry for a while.”

“Music is not the issue.”

“It never is for you, James. You’ve been using consistently since mid-summer. It’s almost the end of October.”

“Epic wants the Zone’s release by the holidays. That makes it really tight. We’re right on the edge here, Jules.”

“You’ve been over the edge since way before the Zone. What is going on with you, James? Before the Zone, it was the remix for Caravan. Before them it was…God, I don’t even remember, but something that was consuming all of your time. You’ve been involved in one project or another for most of the year, working eighteen, twenty hour days with no breaks in between, except for that week in Bali back in January. We used to have
some
time together, a life outside our careers. What happened to that?”

“You got involved, and so did I. And that’s okay. It’s not a bad thing. You’ve given yourself some substantial goals and it’s going to take sacrifice to get there. I’m proud of you. I’ve a lot of respect for what you’re doing.”

“You’re doing it again.”

“What?”

“You’re making the conversation about me and taking it off of you.”

He spread his hands in surrender and laughed. “Okay, Jules. You’re afraid I’m abusing speed. And that’s fair. I probably am
right now
. But the real issue here isn’t about me using, or abusing, whatever you want to call it. What you’re looking for is an emotional commitment from me that you don’t feel I’m investing. Isn’t that right?”