39. The Wake-Up Call
IAN
The next morning, I poured coffee for Nicky and me, and we joined Mal at the kitchenette table. Charlotte lay at the front of the bus next to Ken in the blaze of July sunshine through the windshield, chewing her boot contentedly.
“I am really interested to see what’s going to happen tonight,” Mal said, giving Nicky a brotherly nudge with his shoulder. “Will FedEx Guy show up? What happens if Fist refuses to let him in?”
“Huh,” Nicky grunted. “What if Bruce refuses to let me in?”
“This is the last concert before we close out the tour with the last two nights in New York,” I said. “Bruce won’t do anything now. We’re almost done. I’ll bet he calls off FedEx guy and ignores the entire situation.”
“That would be awesome.” She sighed and leaned into me. “Now tell me that Bianca is going to stand down too.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” I shrugged. “Three nights from now, she’s done with the MBA intern. And the pesky opening band too.”
“‘And I would have gotten away with it too.’” Mal grinned. “‘If it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!’”
Nicky snorted into her coffee and had to wipe a fine spray off the table in front of her. Archer, shambling in with morning hair, wanted to know what was so funny.
“Just applying a little Scooby Gang philosophy to the issue of the missing merch,” Mal said.
Archer plopped down next to him and pulled out his phone to check again for social media comments, emails, texts. “I want to be Daphne.”
Nicky banged the table with her fist. “Seriously? I think I get to be Daphne.”
“Well,” I said, “We’ve got Scooby. C’mere, Charlotte. Hey, baby. You ready for a walk?”
We were somewhere between Baltimore and D.C. Ken found a pretty wooded rest stop where the Southern humidity hadn’t yet made the air unbreathable. Nicky and I walked our horse-sized puppy across the grass while Charlotte sniffed eagerly for abandoned road food. I thought about the song that was revealing itself inside my head.
The verses, I was working on. But the bridge . . . yeah. I wanted a series of statements of just seven syllables each, building up the scale. Each line would refuse to resolve. The first one in C, the second in D, the third in my favorite (E-minor), until the fourth line with eight syllables, when the scale would resolve at last.
My history, before and after Nicky. Endless scales without resolution.
And then the relief. The completeness. The rightness of resolving that note, that scale, that life.
Charlotte met a terrier. Nicky and the terrier’s owner did a smiling dance to keep the pair of leashes untangled as the two mismatched dogs circled each other. Nicky looked up at me, laughing, with the sunlight on her face, filtered by the deep green trees overhead, and I had an out-of-body experience.
In which I saw her, laughing, on a playground with our child.
That flash—that tiny vision of one possible future—set up such a powerful yearning in me that I had to bite my lip to keep from sweeping her into a kiss. To bend her over my arm and make sure she knew that she was mine and I was hers.
That I loved her. Without reservation. Without sanity or consideration.
But this was not the moment to tell her. Not with people and trash and dog shit all around us. Telling Nicky I was in love with her deserved better than that. Certainly more privacy.
When? When could I tell her? On the bus with Archer and Mal? No. At the stadium in D.C.? No. Certainly not in the crowd and confusion of the VIP room.
I’d whisper it to her tonight in the darkness of our back-lounge sofa. I’d offer her my heart and trust that she’d give me hers in turn.
Charlotte and the terrier separated at last. Nicky smiled at me as she took my hand. “You okay? You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”
I inhaled. “I do. It’s a song. I think it’s going to be good.”
“Another song?” She was delighted. “Archer said he had an idea, and Mal has two new songs. That’s six songs already for the next album! Ian, that’s awesome! You guys are going to be huge. I know it!”
“We will with you running our promotions.”
She laughed as we boarded bus eight again and the doors hissed shut behind us. “All set, Ken. Thanks.” She turned back to me. “We’ve got to figure out how I can handle merchandise once the tour is over—Archer? Mal? What’s going on?”
I looked past her. The energy had definitely changed in the coach. “You guys okay?
They were both hunched over their phones, shoulders drawn. “Ian,” Archer said, “check your email.”
“What? Just tell me—what’s going on?”
I grabbed my laptop and handed Nicky hers. We crowded into the table, and I tried to peer at Archer’s phone as my laptop powered on.
“Check your own,” he said, hiding his phone from me. “See if you got one too.”
“Got one what?”
“Email,” Mal said, growling. “From Lyre Records.”
“Is it about the contract? Because we told Bruce we’d get back to him after we signed with Phil MacGregor.” I checked my inbox. There it was. “From the accounting department?” I verified.
“Yeah,” Archer replied woodenly.
“I don’t have one,” Nicky said. She looked over, and I tilted my laptop so she could see my screen. “What’s going on?”
“It’s”—I opened the attachment—“an anticipated invoice.” I looked up. “An invoice? Like, something we need to pay?”
Archer nodded. “Keep going,” Mal said.
Nicky was already scrolling down. “What the hell is—go back and read the message, Ian.”
But I’d seen what she was looking at, and I stopped her. “Hotel in Atlanta. Laundry services. Minibar. What the hell? Here it is for Charlotte, North Carolina, and New Orleans . . . and every stop on the—fuck me. What is this?”
“They’re charging you. For the concierge floor suites. For the room service. Go back and read the message, Ian, please.”
“It won’t help,” Archer said gloomily.
He was right. The only phrase that helped to explain was pursuant to your contract.
My mouth was dry. The bones of my shoulders were trying to expand outside my skin. There was paralysis in my hands, although not enough to stop me from flipping back to the “anticipated final invoice” to scroll down . . . and down . . . and down . . . to the final total.
My breath left me in a gasp. I deflated. “This is most of what they were going to pay us,” I said.
Archer leaned over. “You’re being billed less than me. Probably because Nicky made you do laundry with her.”
My mind got hung up on that one tiny, useless, stupid detail. “That’s right.” I turned to her. “You did. You made me do laundry with you.”
“Well, I didn’t make you,” she said, her hand bleeding heat into my forearm.
Laundry. Doing laundry was going to mean that Finn?—
I couldn’t sit still. I pushed against her until she let me out of the booth, and then I paced along the frustratingly small space. Down and back. Down and back. Down and back.
No art school for Finn. I’d used up the vast majority of my savings on our recording session and the video. Every time the band needed something—a website that could sell merchandise, an email service provider for the newsletter, new boots for Ian?—
Finn’s future was drying up. Blowing away. Shredded by the contract that?—
“You knew about this, didn’t you?” I turned to Nicky, blackness rising in my throat. “You knew they were charging us. That’s why you made me do laundry with you.”
“I didn’t know it was this bad,” she protested. “I mean, I knew your expenses were being tallied, but I didn’t review that part of your contract in depth. I just skimmed that part.” She looked at me, all dewy-eyed and innocent. The ice princess. “I was looking for marketing and promotions, not payments and expenses. Ian?—”
“You knew I needed that money for Finn. You knew that, Nicky!”
“Ian, come on! I had no idea it would be this extensive.”
“So, every night when you cozied up to me in another luxurious suite, you never thought to say something? Like maybe, ‘How about we share a double on one of the cheap floors?’ Fuck, Mal and Archer and I have shared one room before, and with our sound guy in there too! That’s what we think touring is all about!”
A red madness was oozing out of every cell in my body, rising in a desire to crush something. Make something hurt. Wash out the shame of failing Finn. Of proving my father right. And all that red madness was focused on Nicky.
Those wide eyes just made me angrier. How dare she look so sweet and defenseless? Every bottle of water I’d grabbed out of a minibar to wet her traitorous throat . . . fuck.
“Dude,” Archer said unhappily. “Maybe dial it back a little.”
I glared at him, and he backed down. Mal had his arm protectively around Nicky, and that only made my fury hotter. I clenched my fingers to stop myself from breaking something.
Mal saw and lowered his chin. His look went from concerned to threatening. Archer eased out of the booth and stood facing me.
I was not going to beat up any of them. I would not break up our band by unleashing the choking fury that lived in my throat. I turned to the front of the bus.
“Pull over, Ken.”
“Can you hold it? We’ll be at the stadium in forty-five minutes.”
“Pull over.”
I guess he heard something of the steel grit that was scouring my innards. “You okay, Ian?”
“Pull over.” If I said anything more, I would say too much.
He turned on his flashers and moved the bus to the shoulder. Cars all around us honked their anger, which was a type of music I understood. “You’re in the middle of the highway in Maryland. You get out now, you’re risking being run over.”
“I’ll risk more if I stay on.” I tried to turn back to say something but found I couldn’t face any of them. “Tell them I’m turning off my phone. They’ll have to cover for me at sound check. I’ll make it in time for the gig.” Then I stood on the steaming concrete, looking back up the stairs to his homely, concerned face. “Go,” I said.
“You’re serious?”
Nicky appeared at the head of the stairs. “Ian!”
“Go!” I banged on the door and then stepped back, trying to get out of her sight.
“Ian, no!”
But Ken must have understood. “The stadium’s that way,” he said, pointing. The doors hissed closed, and the bus began its slow rumble along the shoulder to get up to speed and slip back into traffic.
I put my head down and started walking, looking for anesthesia.