I sat at it.
I wasn’t always a rock star. It wasn’t synthesizer lessons I’d asked my parents for.
I played a little fragment of Bach. Intentionally slow and stilted and soft, like a creepy clown or a joke involving Bach.
The piano was incredibly tuned. It practically played itself.
“Come now, Cole,” Magdalene purred, leaning on the piano. She rolled her eyes toward the cameras. “We’re all alone here. Surely you don’t have nerves.”
I smiled at her — the Cole St. Clair smile — and trilled out another snatch of messy Bach, fast but proficient, and then I crashed into the chords of “Spacebar.”
Magdalene grinned wildly, recognizing them at once. She pulled the glass from her lips and sang the chorus as I got to it: “Hit it, hit it, hit it!”
Each time she repeated “hit it,” she ratcheted up the scale.
Man, she had a set of pipes. And she’d gotten better since we’d first recorded that track, too. She tapped out a beat on the edge of the piano as I tripped and plummeted through the refrain of “Spacebar,” trying to translate the synth chords into a piano bit on the fly. It had been a million years since I’d played it.
But it was still catchy.
Whoever had written this song had known what they were doing.
My reflection smiled cunningly at me from the sheen of the open piano lid.
Magdalene kept singing.
And oh — oh, it was good to be playing again. To hear someone else riffing off your tune, to throw a bit of an improvisation back at them, to come back again and again to those same crashing four chords that, for two glorious weeks, America had sung over and over until they were dreaming them.
Then we’d sold the rights to a car commercial and moved on to something else.
Magdalene screamed up the last bit of the scale at the same time that I crashed down to the very bass range of the Steinway, and when the last ringing note died, she got herself another drink.
I wondered if she was supposed to be the disaster at the sidelines.
I heard slow clapping. Jeremy and Leyla had arrived, as had “the boys” — the sound techs. The oldest of the techs was the one clapping. An assistant had been filming us with his phone.
He asked, “Can I put that on the Internet?”
Magdalene said callously, “Why not? He’s written something better for later, anyway.” Then she turned to me. I was still a bit destroyed by hurling myself onto the shores of the tune. She put a small hand on my cheek. “Ah, Cole. I forgot what talent sounded like.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
· isabel ·
I could say that I had never missed a CNA class before and that I was making an exception for Cole, but I’d be lying. I had always considered class to be a negotiable concept. The only thing that mattered was the grade. Ever since I hit high school, I constantly skated that fine, dangerous line between knowing all of the material and getting in trouble for failing to participate.
Still, so far the only time I’d cut CNA class had been on my dead brother, Jack’s, birthday, but I hadn’t really been thinking about that when I cut. I was just thinking that sitting in someone else’s high school for another six hours was going to make me violently and physically ill.
I cut this time for another birthday: Cole’s. I didn’t want to surprise him until he’d actually had time to get some work done, though, so I found myself with a beautiful stretch of day with nothing to fill it. Ordinarily, these huge swaths of time would invest me with anxiety and hatred of the planet, but today, the hours seemed benevolent. I decided to pick up Sofia from her erhu lesson and make her buy some sexy boots before I drove myself to Long Beach and Cole.
I couldn’t tell what this thing was inside me. Was it a good mood? It seemed like it could be.
But when I headed down the stairs of the House of Ruin, prison keys jingling merrily with the melody of escape, I saw my father standing in the foyer. He looked tidy and powerful, a barely sheathed knife in a gray suit.
I hesitated. That was my mistake. My father had been bred and trained to sense weakness. His eyes were on me in a second.
father: Isabel.
isabel: Father.
father: Don’t use that tone with me.
isabel: This is my voice.
father: You know exactly what I’m talking about.
I contemplated if I could go back to my room and rappel out the window. Physically, I could. Practically, it would stain my skirt. The point was to look excellent for Cole later. Hopefully, this wouldn’t last long.
Down below, my father gazed up at me. His eyes looked hectic, like they did when he was working on big cases.
father: We need to talk to you.
isabel: I’m on my way out.
father: This isn’t optional.
isabel: I encourage you to plunder the definition of the word optional as I leave.
father: Isabel — please just — please just come down.
This is important.
His voice had gone strange. I came down.
I felt an unpleasant jitter inside me, like when I’d heard the news about Jack.
I followed him into the kitchen. Because it was day, all the lights were turned off, but the sun was high enough overhead that it didn’t make it in the windows. It made the room seem cool and hostile. My mother was already arranged inside, leaning against the counter with her arms crossed. She had dressed herself in contempt. Not her best look, but better than tears.
My good mood felt like an endangered species.
I tried to imagine what could possibly put those expressions on my parents’ faces.
I thought I knew. I just didn’t want to —
“We’ve decided to get a divorce,” my mother said.
There it was.
All of the suggestion and postulation and threatening and, finally, there it was.
“Of course you are,” I said.
“Isabel,” my mother chastised.
My father looked up sharply. He hadn’t heard what I’d said because he had been busy cutting the throat of my good mood on the center island. Luckily, the granite had been chosen to provide a wipe-clean surface for blood, orange juice, and disappointment.
I tried to think of how it would change things. I didn’t know if it would really make things worse. Or better. Or different.
Mostly I thought of how it meant now when I went away to college, I’d have to visit two separate houses if I wanted to see both parents. And I thought of how if Jack somehow magically returned, he wouldn’t recognize his family, because it had disintegrated.
And I thought of how statistically pointless love was and how unsurprising this all was in the relative scheme of things.
“Are you crying?” my mother asked.
“No,” I replied. “Why would I be crying?”
“Lauren said that Sofia cried a lot when she found out about her and Paolo.”
Both my father and I looked at my mother.
“When?” I asked, but I knew it was a pointless question as soon as I asked it. A divorce wasn’t like a wedding or a birthday party. You didn’t set a date and buy flowers. I thought about the photographs that used to adorn the entire entry wall back in our home in Minnesota. An assortment of wedding and honeymoon photos. My genetic material was quite attractive, and they were a striking couple in every photo. I’d like to say that even in those early images you could see the seeds of discord, but I’d be lying. They were beautiful, unposed photos of two beautiful young people in love with each other. They were in love before they got married and in love at the wedding and in love when they had baby Jack and baby Isabel.
But not anymore.
My father said, “Do you want to talk about it?”
“We are talking about it.”
My mother shot my father a look as if this must be obvious.
“What about Christmas?” I asked. It was a stupid question.
A child’s question. I was immediately angry at myself for asking it. “Never mind. I answered my own question.”
My mother said, “Oh, honey, I don’t know. That’s months from now,” which made me wonder if I’d even said the never mind part out loud. I thought about it and I was pretty sure I remembered the action of forming the words.
I wondered if I should retrieve the body of my good mood for a proper burial, or if I should just leave it here in the House of Ruin.
My mother wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. I noticed it just then. My father wasn’t, either. I felt like laughing. A really hideous, cold laugh. Instead, I sneered a little. My face had to do something.
“What do you need from us?” my mother asked. She asked it with the exact cadence in her voice that meant she had been told by her therapist, Dr. Carrotnose, to ask me that. Divorceby-numbers.
“Your genetic matter,” I replied. My skin felt sort of hummy.
“And I already got that. So thanks. Congrats on your impending breakup. Well, making it official. I’m out.”
“This is unacceptable,” my father announced. He was right, but there was nothing really left to do but accept it.
“Isabel —” my mother said, but I was already gone.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
· cole ·
That day, the acoustic version of “Spacebar” wound its way through the Internet as we wound our way through “Air Kisses,” the track I’d decided to attempt to record that day.
I had to redo the lyrics on the spot — they were better with a female vocalist, anyway, but some of it was meant for me when I wrote it, and I didn’t want to hear Magdalene singing about Isabel, even if only I knew that’s what it was. While the others broke for lunch, I sat with headphones on, ducked over the Korg, writing a brandnew bridge. I recorded and rerecorded
my pulsing synth heartbeat. I made Leyla record and rerecord and rerecord her drum part, which she did without complaint or brilliance. Jeremy observed silently through the first few hours and then, in hour four, wrote a bass riff that made us all quiet. After that, Magdalene strutted into the booth and caressed the microphone and belted a vocal track that made us all loud.
She was very drunk.
Two years ago, I would’ve been, too.
What’s the way, Baby?
Then, while two of Magdalene’s boys worked on mixing the refrain, she opened up one of the massive doors so that we wouldn’t all die from carbon monoxide poisoning, and we drove her beautiful cars around in circles in the warehouse and then in the chain-link fenced parking lot.
The sun had gotten high and then gotten low somehow as we worked. A whole day vanished into a microphone. Dust buffed up into the air in big, choking clouds, all of it orange and violet in the sunset, everything beautiful and industrial and apocalyptic with the warehouses and the sky blue cars.
Maybe this was the only point of the episode. Enviable and beautiful excess, good music and pretty people.
As I got into car number four or five — a Nissan GT-R, or something flat and mouth-shaped like that — Magdalene climbed into the passenger seat beside me.
“Take it down the road and back. See what it can do!” she shouted, pointing down the perfectly straight road that ran in front of her warehouse. “We’ll be back in two minutes, boys!”
Then she turned to me and said, “Punch it, kid.”
I didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t the Saturn, and that was great.
I let it charge to the edge of the lot. Just before we squealed out onto the long, straight road to the airport, Magdalene ripped off her mic and threw it out the window. In the rearview mirror, I watched it roll into the gravel and become invisible.
“Vandalism,” I remarked uneasily. “Baby won’t be pleased.”
As the speedometer climbed and the warehouse disappeared in a fresh cloud of dust, she said, all messy and sexy, “Are you enjoying your cage?”
The engine howled. In the rearview mirror, I saw that the cameramen had stepped out into the road to film our short escape. “What cage?”
“The one they watch you prowl around in. I have something for you,” she said. “Once we get out of view.”
I screwed a gear shift. What the hell did I know about driving?
And what the hell was this car anyway? We were already going eight thousand miles an hour, and I was pretty sure we were only in third gear and had very little marked road left. “If you’re talking about substances, my dear, I am clean.”
The road dead-ended in a massive parking lot. Before I could hit the brake, Magdalene leaned over and snatched up the parking brake. The car immediately spun. For a single moment, we were weightless. It was life and death and stopping and going at the same time. The car sailed sideways, the steering wheel meaningless, but there was nothing for it to run into.
Chaos without consequence.
Magdalene released the brake. With a jerk, the car finished its spin. We faced back the way we came. Dust rolled by us in herds.
“I am the greatest,” Magdalene observed. “Cole, you have never been clean.”
“I’m not using,” I said as the windshield cleared. “Give me some credit.”
“You’re an addict,” she said. “You’d be an addict if no one ever invented a drug. I saw you before you started using. You aren’t any different now.”
The car was so loud, even idling. “I’m sober now.”
“You were sober back then, too. Maybe the world thinks you loved heroin, but I know what your real addiction is.”
I looked at her. She looked at me. I wanted her to say music, but she wasn’t going to. We’d started this as the same thing: ambitious teens with no idea of what to do once the ceiling was removed from the world.
She asked, “Have you seen those big black-and-white monkeys at the zoo? They sit around all day picking their butts hoo hoo hoo, until a crowd comes along. And then they pick up all the toys in their cage and start throwing them and clowning around. They do it for the laughs. They do it because there are people watching. It’s not even about the toys. It’s only about the crowd.”