Chapter 13 #3
Gabe told me he was happy not to speak to Maggie or ever see her again.
He’d live his life and she would live hers, and never the two would intertwine.
Except that Nashville wasn’t cutting it.
The longer Gabe stayed, the more obvious it became that Tennessee wasn’t the place for him.
The people he worked with kept giving all his songs to guys with bass voices and strong Southern accents.
He had some friends making music in Los Angeles who kept egging him on to join them, and the opportunity was more inviting by the hour.
His family was all back in Sacramento. His sister, Janine, was pregnant with her second. Nashville was lonely.
When he moved out to LA, Gabe wanted to make a real go of recording his own music, saving his best stuff for himself. This meant he wanted that song. He was obsessed with it, fixated. He believed the song would get his band a major deal, would finally be the song that would hit.
“Must be some song,” I said.
“The best one I’ve ever written,” said Gabe. I felt my stomach drop. I zipped my track jacket farther up my neck.
“So you used me to get it. You were waiting there that first day when I crashed into your car.”
“No,” Gabe said. He put both hands on my shoulders and turned me so we were looking each other in the eye.
“That’s not what happened. That day I was there dropping off some flowers.
I should have told you what was going on, that I was trying to get Maggie to answer my calls.
I should have told you we had history. But I was never using you. ”
“Hard to believe it,” I said. Gabe twisted his mouth. “And if you were going for blackmail, getting involved with me only messed things up for you.”
“What do you mean?” Gabe asked.
“Well, now Maggie’s got stuff on you too.
From when you came by the house when they were in Mexico.
Maggie has footage of us in the pool together.
” As I spoke, I realized that Gabe might interpret this as something I’d kept from him; how in truth it was something I’d kept from him, just as he had kept Maggie from me.
But it wasn’t the same. I had been trying to protect him, or at least save him from the stress of a situation he couldn’t control. He had flat out used me and lied to me.
“I don’t think so,” Gabe said.
“What?”
“I’m pretty sure that there’s no footage. Didn’t you turn off all the cameras?”
“She knows, though. She knows you were there.”
“Yeah,” Gabe said. “Because I told her.”
Once I’d given Gabe the house codes, he knew how to get to Maggie.
She could ignore his emails and his calls, the flowers, even the letters from his lawyer, but she couldn’t ignore his physical presence in her house.
She’d have to talk to him, settle the matter of the song once and for all.
While I left for Thanksgiving in Philadelphia, Gabe stayed in Los Angeles.
Honeymoon Stage filming was on pause, so it was easy to wait until the cars were all out of the driveway and the equipment was gone and he could get Maggie alone.
I pictured him approaching her. She’d be in a bathing suit by the pool, reading a magazine.
The sun would hit just right, and she’d look up and see him walking toward her, tall and handsome, dimples carved into each cheek.
She’d think, What was I ever doing letting this guy go?
She’d look up at him, push her sunglasses down her nose, smile.
It would be easy to forgive him. Gabe was easy to love.
“We’re friends,” Gabe said. “We’re old friends, and she’s struggling. I should have told you, and I’m sorry.”
Maggie was struggling? Jason was struggling.
He’d almost certainly killed Sally Ann—his pre–Honeymoon Stage exploits confirmed it for me—and the addiction issues he regularly denied were now more than just rumor.
But Maggie seemed oblivious to all of it.
She was sad, of course, that Sally Ann had died.
Her record was selling. Her show was a hit.
“That doesn’t excuse things,” I said. Gabe had been with her multiple times without telling me. The footage from Coyote Cam was dated 12/8/02. The photos of them in the tabloids had come out this past month.
“I know,” said Gabe. We’d reached the crest of the trail.
Angeles National Forest stretched out in front of us, peaks and valleys, clouds thin streaks of cream across the dishwater-gray sky.
Beautiful, I supposed, but treacherous. We were going to have to walk all the way back to the cars.
“I know it sounds wrong,” Gabe said. “I know you probably won’t believe me.
But there’s nothing romantic between me and Maggie.
If you want to hate me because there’s intimacy, yes, it’s there, I can’t deny that. But there’s nothing romantic.”
I didn’t want to hate Gabe. In what world would I want to hate Gabe?
I wanted to take everything he’d said at face value, to go back to what we’d had before I’d seen the two of them embracing on camera.
There was a song they’d written together, probably a love song—I could deal with that.
They had a history. But he had lied to me about it, and I hadn’t, for even an instant, sensed that something was wrong.
How could I ever trust him again or trust myself when I was with him? Gabe had ruined us completely. I started to cry.
“I love you, Cassidy.” He took my hand, squeezing it desperately. “I want this.”
I couldn’t do it.
“I still need space,” I said. Then I removed my hand from his and started walking as fast as I could back the way we had come, making it clear that I didn’t want Gabe to come with me. And Gabe didn’t follow.