TWO
CHAPTER
“This song is from my album, Shattered Glass. It’s called ‘The Lighthouse.’ I hope you like it.”
The audience at Le Chacal clapped and whistled their approval. Murmured conversations ended. A few clinks of ice in a glass and then the little jazz club went silent. Waiting.
Honestly, I didn’t give a shit if the audience liked the song or not. It just sounded like something I should say. I believed in it more than This song is from my album.
My album. Big fucking deal. Me and my album.
As if it were a tangible object—a packaged CD or even digital files—instead of twelve songs I scratched into a notebook and slapped against some music.
I sold my songs onstage and called it an album.
People paid a cover to get into the club, I got a cut.
Four different clubs, four nights a week.
And since I packed every house of those four clubs, it was good money.
Good enough to keep to a routine. I had a routine now.
I adjusted my guitar and nearly knocked over the mic stand.
The floor was spinning lazily beneath the stool I sat on, and the stage lights hurt.
Big fuzzy blobs of light to sear my eyes.
The audience beyond was a blur of faces.
I closed my eyes. I didn’t need to see anyway.
My fingers found the frets, my right hand strummed the strings, and a song came out.
Routine.
My body knew what to do and it seemed no matter how drunk I was, it would always remember.
Muscle memory, or maybe something more. Maybe when a song lives this deep in you, it becomes part of you.
I hit every note and sang every word of ‘The Lighthouse’ with no more thought than I paid to breathing.
Frets. Strings. Strum. Song. Breathe. Four nights a week. Wednesday through Saturday.
“It’s funny we have the same exact work schedule,” he said. “Wednesday through Saturday nights.”
“I requested those days.” I said. “They’re the best shifts.”
Jonah smiled. “They are.”
My chest constricted and tears burned behind my closed eyes. After six months, I should’ve been used to the way he snuck up on me. Little bits of conversation. Little slivers of memory.
Little moments.
Jonah .
I was crying now, but the audience loved it. They expected it. Tears were part of the act. La Fille Submergée, they called me. The Drowned Girl.
I cried just hard enough to enhance the song without disrupting it. At least, that’s what some chick in the bathroom at Bon Bon—my Saturday night gig—once told me. I made the tears and the sharp intakes of breath part of the experience.
She had an experience listening to me sing.
What a fucking abomination, I’d wanted to tell her. Jonah is dead and I’m turning it into an experience.
I finished the song and applause drowned my murmured thank you . I slipped off the stool and carefully picked my way across the stage, more than ready for my post-show cocktail.
“You sounded good tonight, sweets,” Big E said as I took my reserved seat at the corner.
The bartender had a short-cropped reddish-blond beard and a perfectly shaved head.
His real name was Mike Budny, but everyone called him Big Easy or Big E.
He reminded me of Hugo, the Pony Club bodyguard in Vegas: big and intimidating on the outside, but total mush inside.
“When are you going to invite one of your friends to listen to you play?” he asked. “Or family?”
Every night I worked Le Chacal, Big E tried to pry some personal information out of me. He openly worried about me, and never gave up trying to dig up some kind of hint about my past.
“The third degree again?” I squinted up at him. The lighted shelf of liquor bottles behind him pierced my eyes. “I should call you Sherlock.”
“You do call me Sherlock,” he said quietly. “You just never remember.”
I snorted a laugh and sipped my drink. “My family is busy,” I said, my words tripping over themselves. “And you’re my friend.” I gave him a watery, playful smile. “You always listen to me play. What more do I need?”
“A lot, sweets,” Big E replied somberly. “You need a lot. You need help.”
Help.
For all his prying and not-so-subtle intervention, he’d never said that word before. Since I’d moved out of Vegas and cut myself off from everyone, I hadn’t heard it before either.
I need help.
I sniffed and downed my whiskey, pushed the glass across the bar toward him. “If you want to help me, you’ll give me one more.”
“Last one,” Big E said, pouring a finger of whiskey into my glass. “I’m not giving up on you, Kacey.”
I raised my drink in a mock toast and took a sip. I clinked my teeth painfully on the edge of the glass, ruining the I’ve-got-my-shit-together-thank-you-very-much vibe I was trying to exude.
“Ow. Fuck.”
“You okay?” asked a voice on my left. A young, good-looking guy with tatted arms and slicked-back hair had slid onto the barstool beside me. “That sounded painful.”
“All teeth intact,” I muttered, sipping my drink.
“Good thing,” the guy said. “You have a beautiful smile.”
I snorted wetly. “Is that so?”
“I don’t know actually,” the guy replied. “The Drowned Girl doesn’t smile, but I’d like a shot at changing that.” He flashed his own winning smile and held out his hand. “I’m Jesse.”
“Kacey.” I shook his hand, then tried to take it back but he held it fast.
“Love your ink,” he said, inspecting the creeping, thorny vines that crept up the loose sleeve of my off-the-shoulder blouse.
“Don’t remember,” I said, giving over a lie and withdrawing my hand.
Big E watched us as he cleaned a glass with a white rag.
Guys hit on me on a semi-regular basis. They didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of going home with me, or even taking me out on a date, but I let them try.
Listening to their bad pick-up lines, or even their genuine attempts to get to know me reminded me of another time.
Another girl. The one who would’ve laughed and flirted and jumped into bed with a guy like Jesse.
The girl I’d been before Jonah.
Now, the hollowed-out wreck I’d become was repulsed by the idea of being touched by a man.
But sometimes they bought me drinks. And since Big E had been acting especially ridiculous about my cocktail quota lately, I sat up a little straighter and gave Jesse my version of a smile—a weak quirk of the lips.
I pretended to be interested in the ink that covered his nicely muscled forearms, and within minutes, I had a fresh drink in front of me and we were comparing tattoos.
I was drunk as shit, and being very, very careless.
I showed Jesse the tiny black stars smattered over my middle and ring finger. “This was my first. I got it in San Diego. Pacific Beach.” I flipped him the bird. “I chose that finger in particular. A big fuck you to my dad.”
“Nice.”
I traced the vines up my arm. “This one came from a place in San Diego too.”
“So, you do remember,” Jesse laughed.
“Honey, you buy another round, and I’ll remember anything you want me to.”
I would’ve cringed to be on the receiving end of such sloppy, fake flirtation, but such is the beauty of being drunk—it’s so much easier not to give a shit. The only beauty, actually. The one and only shining truth.
Jesse bought another round. I got drunker and we compared ink like soldiers comparing battle scars.
He lifted his dark blue T-shirt to reveal nicely sculpted chest and abs, though he could’ve been covered in moles and boils for all I cared.
He turned in his seat to show me the coppery Saints football helmet inked on his right shoulder blade.
“This was my first,” he said. “From Jake’s up on Canal Street.
” His eyes drifted blearily to my bare right collarbone bare.
“Show me another, Kacey,” he said, in what he probably thought was a seductive voice.
Hell, in another life, it would have sounded that way, and I’d have climbed onto his lap until Big E kicked us out for inappropriate PDA.
I played along and rubbed my chin on the bare skin of my shoulder. “I can’t,” I said. “Not without taking something off.”
Jesse’s blue eyes glazed over. “I can deal with that.”
“Mmm,” I said, closing my eyes against the spinning room. It wasn’t cool to lead him on like this. I should stop. I have nothing to give him.
“I have nothing,” I muttered, the words falling off the train of thought chugging sluggishly through my whiskey-soaked brain. “I was supposed to have one here.” I nudged my bare shoulder with my chin again. “But I never picked one out. I left before I got my tattoo from Teddy.”
His name made me flinch, and I kept talking to drown it in a sea of meaningless words. “I didn’t know what I wanted so I left it blank. I left with nothing. I have nothing. Because I left. I was supposed to stay but I left.”
The tears were welling in my eyes. Drowned Girl fame or not, crying in the middle of being hit-on is a big turn-off. Jesse rubbed his hand over his lips, none too sober himself and unsure how to proceed.
“Hey, it’s okay. So…” His smile was obscenely bright. “You like football?”
Big E leaned his bulk over the bar, looking more like a bouncer at a motorcycle club than a bartender at a jazzy dive. “She’s done, man,” he told Jesse. “You get me?”
Jesse nodded and slipped off the barstool with a sour expression. He’d blown $20 plying me with top shelf whiskey, but he didn’t argue with Big E. Not many people did.
The bartender turned his gaze to me, his features softening under his rust-colored beard. “Call you a cab, sweets?”
I nodded and whispered, “Thank you.”
Big E got the bar-back to cover him, and half-carried me and my guitar through the dim confines of Le Chacal to the curb outside. Our own Thursday night routine.