“I think it is dead,” Grace said.
“I think it’s one of those things to hide keys under,” I told her.
Grace hooked her fingers in my jean pocket. I was about to knock on the front door when I saw a tiny wooden plaque with permanent-marker lettering: STUDIO ENTRANCE AROUND BACK.
So we went around the back of the rambler, where cracked concrete stairs too wide to easily fit our steps led us to an exposed basement and a hand-lettered sign that said ANARCHY RECORDING, INC.
ENTRANCE HERE. Below it was a planter with some limp pansies that had been put out too early and battered by frost.
I turned to Grace. “ ‘Anarchy, Incorporated.’ That’s ironic.”
Grace gave me a withering look and rapped on the door. I wiped a suddenly clammy palm on my jeans.
The door opened, revealing another Labrador, this one very much alive, and a twenty-something girl with a red bandanna tied around her head. She was so interesting-looking and unpretty that she actually traveled through ugly to someplace on the other side that was almost as good as pretty: huge, beaked nose, sleepy-looking dark brown eyes, and sharp cheekbones. Her black hair was pulled up in a half a dozen interconnected braids coiled on top of her head, like a Mediterranean Princess Leia.
“Sam and Grace? Come on in.” Her voice was gorgeous and complicated, a smoker’s voice, though the smell pouring from inside was coffee, not cigarettes. Grace, suddenly motivated, stepped into the studio, following the scent of caffeine like a rat after the Pied Piper.
Once the door was shut behind us, it was no longer the basement of a shabby rambler but a hightech escape pod in some other universe. We faced a wall of mixing boards and computer monitors; the entire room was dark and muted by soundproofing; recessed lighting illuminated the keypads and a chic low black sofa. One of the walls was glass and looked into a dark, soundproofed room with an upright piano and an assortment of microphones in it.
“I’m Dmitra,” the girl with the braids said, reaching a hand out to shake. She looked unflinchingly at me at the same time that I lifted my gaze from her nose to her eyes, and just like that, we had made an unspoken pact: She would not stare at my yellow eyes because I would not stare at her nose. “Are you Sam or Grace?”
I smiled at her straight-faced delivery and shook her hand. “Sam Roth. Nice to meet you.”
Dmitra shook hands with Grace, who was making friends with the Labrador, and said, “What are we doing today, kids?”
Grace looked at me. I said, “Demo, I guess.”
“You guess? What sort of instrumentation are we looking at?”
I lifted the guitar case a few inches.
“Okay,” she said. “You done this before?”
“Nope.”
“A virgin. Sometimes just what you need,” Dmitra said.
She reminded me a little of Beck. Even though she was smiling and joking, I could tell that she was watching and judging and making decisions about me and Grace as she did. Beck did that, too: gave the impression of intimacy while he was really deciding whether or not you were worth his time.
“You’ll be in there, then,” she continued. “Do you want to get some coffee before we get started?”
Grace made a beeline for the kitchenette that Dmitra indicated. While she did, Dmitra asked me, “What do you listen to?”
I set my guitar case on the sofa and extracted my guitar. I tried not to sound too pretentious. “A lot of indie rock. The Shins, Elliott Smith, José González.
Damien Rice. Gutter Twins. Stuff like that.”
“Elliott Smith,” Dmitra repeated, as if I hadn’t said anything else. “I see.”
Grace reappeared with an ugly mug with a deer painted on it, as Dmitra did something with the computer that may or may not have been as useful as she was making it look. Finally, she directed me into the other room. She gave me an audience of microphones, one for my voice, one for my guitar, both leaning attentively toward me, and handed me a set of headphones.
“So we can talk to you,” she said, disappearing back into the other room. Grace lingered, her hand on the Labrador’s head beside her.
My fingers felt grimy and inadequate to the task ahead of them; the headphones smelled like they’d been worn by too many heads. From my perch on the chair, I looked plaintively up at Grace, who looked beautiful and peaked in the strange recessed lighting, like an edgy magazine model. I realized I hadn’t asked her how she was feeling that morning. If she was still sick. I remembered her losing her footing outside the car and taking care to make sure I didn’t see. I swallowed, my throat clinging to itself, and asked instead, “Can we get a dog?”
“We can,” Grace said, magnanimously. “But I will not walk it in the morning. Because I will be sleeping.”
“I never sleep,” I said. “I’ll do it.”
I jumped as Dmitra’s voice came through the headphones. “Would you just sing and play a little bit so that I can set up the levels?”
Grace leaned over and kissed the top of my head, careful not to spill her coffee into my lap. “Good luck.”
I sort of wanted her to stay here while I sang, to remind me of why I was here, but at the same time, it wouldn’t be the same to sing songs about missing her while looking at her, so I let her go.
• GRACE • I took my place on the sofa and tried to pretend that Dmitra didn’t intimidate me. She didn’t make small talk while she was rummaging on the mixing board, and I didn’t know if talking would bother her, so I just sat there and watched her work.
Honestly, I was glad for the break in the conversation, the opportunity to be silent. My head was beginning its same slow thrumming, the strange heat spreading through my body again. Talking through the headache made my teeth ache; the warmth of the dull pain gathered in my throat and in my nostrils. I dabbed a tissue on my nose, but it was dry.
Just keep it together for today , I told myself.
Today isn’t about you.
I would not ruin the day for Sam. So I sat on the sofa and ignored my body the best I could and listened.
Sam had turned his back so that he faced away from us while he tuned his guitar, his shoulders hunched around the instrument.
“Sing for me for a moment,” Dmitra said, and I saw him turn his head when he heard her voice in his headphones. He launched into some rapid fingerpicking piece that I’d never heard him play before, and began to sing. His very first note wavered, a hint of nerves, and then it was gone, disappearing into his voice, breathy and earnest. The song was this heart-breaking piece about loss and saying good-bye —I thought at first that it was about Beck, or even about me, and then I realized it was about Sam: One thousand ways to say good-bye One thousand ways to cry One thousand ways to hang your hat before you go outside I say good-bye good-bye good-bye I shout it out so loud
‘Cause the next time that I find my voice I might not remember how.
Hearing it coming out of speakers instead of Sam made it seem entirely different, like I had never heard him before. For some reason, my face just wanted to smile and smile. It felt wrong to be so proud of something that I had absolutely nothing to do with, but I couldn’t help myself. In front of the mixing board, Dmitra had gone still, her fingers poised over the top of sliders. Her head was cocked, listening, and then she said, without turning around to face me, “We might end up with something good today.”
I just kept smiling, because I’d known that all along.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
• ISABEL • At three in the afternoon, we had Kenny’s to ourselves.
It still smelled like the morning’s greasy breakfast offerings: cheap bacon, soggy hash browns, and a vague cigarette odor, despite the lack of a smoking section.
Across the booth from me, Cole slouched, his legs long enough that I kept accidentally hitting them with my feet. I didn’t think he looked like he belonged in this hick diner any more than I did. He looked like he’d been put together by a swank designer who knew what he was doing—his distinctive features were brutal and purposeful, sharp enough to hurt yourself on. The booth seemed soft and faded around him, almost comically old-fashioned and country in comparison, like someone had dropped him here for a tongue-in-cheek photo shoot. I was sort of fascinated by his hands —hard-looking hands, all steep angles and prominent veins running across the back of them. I watched the deft way that his fingers moved while he did mundane things like putting sugar in his coffee.
“You a musician?” I asked.
Cole looked at me from under his eyebrows; something about the question bothered him, but he was too good to reveal much. “Yeah,” he said.