The Miles Between Us (11 page)

“The last I knew, it took two people to make a baby. I’m no mathematician, but by my calculations, that means that at most, you’re only responsible for fifty percent of the blame.”

“You’re a sweet girl to say that.”

“I’m not sweet. I’m just brutally honest.”

They began walking uptown, in no hurry on this beautiful summer day when neither of them had any place to be or anything important to do. Here, in Lower Manhattan, the sidewalks weren’t as crowded as they were in Midtown. They passed block after block of office buildings and convenience stores and brownstone apartment buildings. Wandered the side streets, with no particular destination in mind, until she glanced at a cross street sign, recognized the name, and
realized they’d wandered into the West Village, and they were two blocks away from Wong’s. She wasn’t sure what drew her, but the pull was strong, as strong as the undertow that had nearly drowned her in last night’s dream. “Let’s go this way,” she said, and turned Emma’s stroller into the crosswalk. “There’s something I need to see.”

As she approached the corner where she’d spent so many hours waiting for the bus to take her to Midtown and the Hotel Montpelier, her hands grew sweaty and her heart rate accelerated. They turned the corner, and there it was, the big red and yellow WONG’S TEA HOUSE sign still hanging from the side of the building.

“I can’t believe it,” she said, moving automatically in the direction of the building. “They’re still in business.” To what miracle should she attribute this mixed blessing? Casey paused across the street and stared                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    at the restaurant, heedless of the fact that she was blocking the sidewalk with Emma’s stroller. Beyond the red neon “open” sign in the window, she could see customers, heads bowed over noodle bowls. Out front, a burly young man was unloading produce from a yellow truck. He hoisted a case of cabbage onto a dolly, wheeled it down the ramp to the street, then wrestled the dolly up over the curb and began rolling it in the direction of the front door.

With a wild mix of emotions churning inside her, Casey took a deep breath and raised her gaze to the second floor. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, but the sky didn’t fall. Lightning didn’t strike her dead. She continued to breathe, without any fatal repercussions. The apartment windows were dirty and bare. No curtains. No sign of life. Had the housing authority finally shut Freddy down? Was he between tenants? Or had he rented to some crackhead who didn’t give a damn about curtains or privacy or any of the niceties of life? Not that anybody who cared about the niceties of life was likely to rent from Freddy Wong.

“You’re staring,” Paige said. “Why?”

Casey wet her lips and said, “We used to live here.”

“We?”

“Your father and Danny and I. This is where we lived. In the second-floor apartment over the restaurant.”

“You lived in that dump?”

“We were poor.”

“I’ll say.” Paige silently gazed at the building. Then eyed her and said, “Are you okay?”

Lost in the past, she dragged her gaze away from the building’s façade. “I’m fine,” she said. “Why?”

“You just turned as white as the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

“I’
m just remembering.”

“Maybe we should get out of here. It’s kind of creepy. Unless you want to get lunch.”

“At Wong’s?” she said with raised eyebrows.

Paige shrugged. “Whatever. I just figured it’s lunchtime, and we’re here. How bad can it be?”

“You don’t even want to know. I spent two years living upstairs over that place, and I wouldn’t eat at Wong’s if you held a gun to my head.”

Rob

The recording session wasn’t going well.

Phoenix
had dragged in a half-hour late, trailed by Luther and arm in arm with a couple of the less unattractive female members of his posse. Not that any of them were particularly attractive; it was more a matter of levels of skankiness. His blue eyes, those eyes that famously made prepubescent girls swoon, were bloodshot. With his face as pale as a cod’s belly, and his customarily flawless hair looking like he’d combed it with an egg beater, the kid smelled like a combination of alcohol and tawdry perfume.

Rob eyed him long and hard, gave Luther an inquisitive look, and raised his eyebrows
. “Mere employee,” Luther reminded him. “Not responsible for a certain person’s behavior.”

The kid extricated himself from the hold of the two girls and, his attitude clearly as sour as his breath, spat out, “Let’s get on with this, then,” and slammed through the door into the sound
studio.

“You know,” Rob said
to Luther, “there was a time in my life, after my second divorce, when my two favorite activities were drinking and whoring. But I didn’t do it at seventeen. And I never, ever did it when I had to work the next morning.”

“Point taken,” Luther said
. “What might you suggest I do about it?”

“W
here the hell are his parents?”

“His father’s dead
. His mum is…well, perhaps we shouldn’t discuss his mum. And, as you know, he’s soon to turn eighteen, which means that even if the woman cared—which she clearly doesn’t—the lad would be out of her reach.”

“
Ah, yes. The eighteenth birthday bash. I haven’t mentioned it to my wife yet. I’m afraid to.”

“One could hardly blame you for that
. If there was a way to avoid participating, that evening would find me sitting in my hotel room, with my feet up on an ottoman and a cup of tea in my hand.”

“You and me both, buddy
.”

“I don’t know what you two are yammering about,” said a disembodied voice, “but the sooner we get started, the sooner I can get back to the hotel and
take something for this hangover.” On the other side of the window, Phoenix stood with arms crossed, a scowl on his face.

“Sorry,” Rob said into the mic
. “You all set with your lyrics?”

Through dark glasses he hadn’t bothered to remove, the kid stared blankly at him
. “You take care of your little piece of this venture,” he said, “and I’ll take care of mine. It should work out nicely.”

Since he wasn’t sure how to respond to that comment,
he chose to ignore it.

Nine takes later, Rob
pulled off his headset and said, “Maybe we need a break.”

“Don’t need no break, mate
. I’ve got this.”

“You flubbed the lyrics nine times,
Phoenix. Maybe you need to sit down and take another look at the sheet music.”

“My
mouth’s as dry as the Sahara. What I need is a drink.”

“There
are vending machines just down the hall.”

Phoenix took off his headset and trudged back through the control room and out the door
. The two interchangeable groupies eyed each other, shrugged, and went back to contemplating their navels. Luther looked up from the
Wall Street Journal
, met Rob’s eyes, and raised an eyebrow.

“I’ll go,” Rob said.

He followed the narrow hallway to an alcove that held vending machines and a couple of folding chairs, arrived in time to see Phoenix pop the top on a Dr Pepper and upend the can. The kid swilled half of it, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed, before he stopped, belched, and wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

And saw Rob standing there
. “What?” he said.

Rob moved
loosely to one of the vending machines, dropped in a handful of quarters, and pushed a button. His drink fell with a muffled thud. He took it from the machine, popped the top, and was rewarded with a satisfying fizz. “You know,” he said, studying the bright red can in his hand, “I’m not the enemy. We’re on the same side here.” He took a long slug of Coke and added, “We both want this album to be the best it can possibly be.”

Phoenix eyed him
. Said, “Right,” and went back to his soda.

Rob
perched on the edge of a metal folding chair. Stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. “Okay,” he said. “
I
want this album to be the best it can possibly be. And you should, if not for creative reasons, then at least because it puts food on your table.”

“
Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. It puts food on your table, as well.”

“
I’m not pretending a goddamn thing. There’s not a hypocritical bone in my body. But the future of my career doesn’t depend on this record, Phee. And I’m not in any danger of running out of money.”

“
So you think I am? And don’t call me Phee.”

“Ju
st a word of caution, my friend. You may have a nice, fat bank account balance right now, but that money disappears damn fast, especially if you spend it on the wrong things. If your career’s down the toilet when it disappears, think of how screwed you’ll be.”

“What makes you think I spend it on the wrong
bloody things? What do you spend your money on?”

Groceries
. Diapers. Heating oil for a ten-room house, in Maine, in the winter. Sheep.
Goddamn sheep.

“
Nothing extravagant. That’s not the way we live. We’re not pretentious people. My daughter goes to public school. I drive a Ford Explorer. My wife drives a Volvo, mostly because it’s a tank, and I want to feel that my family’s safe on those icy Maine roads. Nice car, and not inexpensive, but still modest compared to, say, a Ferrari. Or a Lamborghini. Or a Rolls-Royce.” All of which, Luther had informed him, were among the kid’s recent purchases.

“Don’t be a judgmental ass
. I have a perfect right to spend my money any way I choose.”

“That you do, my friend
. And if you take care of them, those cars will appreciate in value. I understand your love of nice cars. I drove a Porsche for years. There’s nothing like the open road ahead, the top down, the wind in your hair—”

“A pretty bird tucked under your arm.”

It occurred to him then that he wasn’t really all that different from Phoenix. For a time, he’d had the fast car and the fast women, the booze, the parties. He halfheartedly tried to convince himself that his taste in women had been a little classier than Phee’s. But he was too honest to believe his own bullshit. For a time, he’d lost his way, and he’d been quite indiscriminate about who he slept with.

Until that fateful morning when he’d waltzed through the front door of Casey’s Malibu house, in search of breakfast
. Casey had taken a single look, a single sniff, and slammed the door behind him.

If you think you’re coming to my
house looking for a handout
, she’d said,
after rolling out of some skank’s bed, looking like yesterday’s garbage and smelling like a whorehouse, then you have another think coming, my friend.

And she’d
proceeded to ream him a new asshole.

Danny,
being nobody’s fool, had grabbed his car keys and his daughter, suddenly remembering an urgent errand he had in town. And he’d left them there to duke it out. The neighbors probably heard the screaming all the way to Sacramento. When it was over, she tossed him out on his ass, minus his breakfast, minus his dignity, minus his outer layer of skin.

“You can come back,” she said, “when you clean up your act.”

She’d probably saved his life. He’d been headed down a bad, dangerous road, a road not so very different from the one he saw Phoenix traveling now. His devastation had been total; there was nobody whose regard was more important to him than Casey Fiore, and he couldn’t imagine anything worse than being cut out of her life. He spent a couple of weeks licking his wounds, and then, infinitely smarter, he pulled himself up by the bootstraps and put his wrecked life back together.

Tough love
. Sometimes, it was the only way you could save someone from himself.

“You’re right,” he
told the kid. “I don’t have any right to judge. But I can tell you from experience that you should be careful. Think before you jump, because if you land the wrong way, the only one you’ll hurt—if you’re lucky, that is—is yourself.”

Phoenix didn’t bother holding back his yawn
. “Are we finished with today’s morality lesson?” he said. “Because if we are, we might consider getting back to recording. But don’t let me stop you if you’ve more to say. I find it quite entertaining.”

At that point, he gave up
. The kid was a lost cause. It wasn’t up to him to try to save the obnoxious brat. If Phoenix Hightower was determined to tank his career and his life, that was his business. It wasn’t Rob’s responsibility to give a damn, just because nobody else did.

It irritated
the hell out of him that he did give a damn.

This time around, on the tenth
take, the kid finally got through the entire song without making mincemeat out of the lyrics. Rob and Kyle exchanged high fives as the song wound to a close. The vocals sounded as good upon playback as they had originally. The kid actually had a strong voice. He was no Danny Fiore, but he could sing. And he was young enough so that, even hung over, his vocal ability wasn’t affected. Give him decade or two, and he’d find recording after a night of debauchery to be a little more of a challenge.

“Great job,” Rob said
. “Now, I’d like to try something different.”

“I can barely contain my enthusiasm.”

“Shut up and listen to me. I want to record you singing some background vocals that we can overdub. You singing over yourself. Sort of an echo, when you reach the chorus. At the part where it says ‘for you’ I want you to harmonize with yourself. ‘For you, for you, for you.’”

The kid looked at him blankly, still wearing the sunglasses
. “Oh, joy,” he said.

“As a matt
er of fact—” The wheels in his head began spinning at breakneck speed. “I think we could overdub you harmonizing all the way through. Give the damn thing a little meat. Because right now, it’s not much more than cotton candy.”

“I have no bloody
idea what you’re talking about.”

Irritation warred with e
nthusiasm. This would really make a difference, add a little richness, a little quality, to what amounted to nothing more than another forgettable pop song, indistinguishable from all the other forgettable pop songs the kids danced to.

Enthusiasm won
. “I’ll show you,” he said. “Trade places with me.”

So they traded places, and while
Phoenix sat silently in the producer’s chair, arms crossed and a bored expression on his face, Kyle ran the track and Rob sang the harmonies that had originated inside his head. When they were done, Kyle played back the recording. “See?” Rob said. “See what a difference it makes? Before, it was bland and colorless. Now it pops.”

On the other side of the window, Phoenix stared at him blankl
y through those irritating sunglasses. And then he took them off and hung them from the neck of his tee shirt. The kid leaned and said into the mic, “You’re a better flippin’ singer than I am, MacKenzie. What in bloody hell are you doing producing for me when you should be making your own records?”

Rob blinked, opened his mouth to respond
. Then closed it when he realized he had no idea how to answer.

Because he realized, for the first time
ever, that it was a damn good question.