Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
In the morning, my mom drives us back to the venue, where we board the bus free of paparazzi.
Grayson’s bags are already gone. I fill Indy in on the fistfight—and Monopoly, and my existential Dana Scully crisis—but company line is that Grayson left of his own accord after losing the Rolling Stone piece.
While Tom surely told Jen everything, it’s clear none of the other bandmates seem to know what really happened, though the tie-dye-looking bruise across Tom’s nose is enough for me to assume everyone has a rough idea and is just being polite.
Either way, after a few hours nobody else brings Grayson up, and he doesn’t return for the last six days of the tour.
When we arrive in Santa Fe, Jen’s called in a favor and set Tom up in a local studio to go over the set list with a round-faced, gap-toothed keyboardist named Gabriel.
I stop by around five a.m. with Lionel to bring Tom some tea and keep them company, and find that even though Gabriel looks like a middle school teacher the cool kids would bully, he’s actually a certified badass who plays the keys like folk-rock Elton John.
Gabriel requires a fair bit of rehearsal.
That, paired with the stretch of long-haul bus rides through the baking desert, mean Tom and I spend less time together this last week than we have almost all tour.
If I could go back to the weeks when I was too scared to let him in, and kick myself in the head for all the minutes I wasted not picking his brain and holding his hand, I absolutely would. Past-me has it coming, that bitch.
By the time we reach Los Angeles, I can’t seem to fathom where the time has gone. The thought hits me like a lightning bolt of anxiety as our bus crawls past the palm trees in Beverly Hills.
Our final show is tonight—the tour is over.
In twenty-four hours, I’ll be back in Cherry Grove. It’s possible—likely, even—that I’ll never see any of these people again. Not Indy, not Molly, not even Lionel.
That I might never see Tom again.
Tom, whom I have fallen stupidly, gut-wrenchingly, head over heels in love with. Worst-case scenario has arrived, and she’s a doozy.
“Does the AC on this bus go up any higher?” Molly asks. “My skin is cooking.”
It’s early August, and apparently in LA that means the end times. Fire and brimstone might actually be preferable to a tour bus stuck in bumper-to-bumper midday traffic on Santa Monica Boulevard with ineffective air-conditioning.
I’ve tied my hair up in the kind of ugly topknot you construct to keep as few hairs as possible from touching any exposed skin.
I’m in Tom’s boxers and a sports bra, which two months ago you wouldn’t have caught me in before my own ex-boyfriend, and now I’m bared half-naked before veritable strangers.
But, that’s the thing. They aren’t strangers.
These people have become my family. Perhaps a strange, extended family, with a gruff, toothpick-chewing mom and a fastidious, overwhelmed cousin in Skechers, but a family nonetheless.
Even our evil aunt, Jen, and her razor-sharp haircut is the kind of family you might avoid on Thanksgiving but would begrudgingly save in a zombie apocalypse.
“Chin up, Molls,” Pete says, fanning her with one of Indy’s adult coloring books. “We’ll be there in less than thirty. Then we’re home free.”
His phrasing sours my stomach. “What will you guys do after tonight?”
Pete shrugs. “Find another gig. I’m talking to a buddy about some eighties hair metal band’s revival tour. Could be badass.”
I look to Molly. Her eyeliner is melting in the corners of her eyes. “This pay’ll last me while I work on my EP in Nashville. Might visit my abuela in San Miguel de Allende.”
“So you two won’t…”
I don’t finish the thought. But they get it, and look at each other before shaking their heads.
“Not till Halloran writes another album,” Molly says.
Pete smirks. “If I’m not wifed up by then. Couple of Pete Juniors on the way.”
Molly examines her nails. “You won’t be.”
The sad part is, it’s possible. Pete could end up married in a year.
What had Tom said all those nights ago? Life gets in the way…
I get back to town months later and find the girl’s married.
That could be me. In Cherry Grove. With some guy who doesn’t quote Homer or Yeats, or sing like he’s channeling the entire history of the blues, or make me laugh so hard I snort.
All our memories from the last eight weeks slam into me like a semi. Each one dappled in summer sun through Central Park’s trees. Smelling of the sea, lemon-colored, and doused in stage fog. Heat and humor and a melody I’ll never be able to shake from my mind.
I’m not the woman I was when I first stepped onto this bus.
And suddenly I’m going to weep. It hits me so hard I stand up and Pete gives me a you okay? look.
“Little lightheaded,” I say, though I’m obviously welling up.
I need to find Tom. I don’t give two shits anymore about running away from love. Every reason I told myself to break it off before it breaks you—they all feel made up to me now. Like when you realize there’s no monster under your bed and all those years it was just a damn sweater.
It’s terrifying, and my heart is so high up my throat I could chew on it, but I get to Tom’s suite and knock hard.
I’m going to tell him everything. How I feel, and how I don’t know what on earth to do with those feelings, and that he doesn’t even have to feel them, too, but please, God, I can’t imagine never seeing him again after tomorrow and if he’d just give me a little more time maybe he’d fall in love with me, too, and then who knows what we’d do but at least we’d be in this mess together.
When he doesn’t answer and I’m not sure if the moisture on my face is sweat or tears I knock so hard I know I’ve woken anyone that was sleeping in their bunks.
Tom swings the door open, eyes wide. “Clem. What’s the matter?”
He’s not alone in there. Gabriel is sitting on his bed with his keyboard, and Jen has her glasses on and her hair in the cute version of my utility topknot. She’s peering over her laptop and her phone at the same time.
“Need something, Clementine?” She looks vaguely irritated. “We’re trying to get this right before sound check.”
I suck in a big breath like a child between tantrum wails. Tom looks marvelous with his hair pulled back and his glasses on. His gaze is so affectionate, so at ease, my hysteria abates a little. “I just wanted to say hi,” I lie. “Bored.”
He nods as if he knows that wasn’t it. “I can take a little break.”
“Not really,” Jen says to her computer.
Gabriel just shrugs at me.
“Not necessary,” I say. “But could we hang out tonight, after the show?”
Tom leans against the doorframe, a slight grin catching his lips. “Where else do you suppose I’d be?”
There’s a big end-of-tour party tonight at the most exclusive spot in LA, and per Lionel, there isn’t an outfit on this bus that could make me fit in. He said this lovingly, but it still stung, like most Lionel-isms.
“The party?”
“I dunno if you’ve noticed this, but I’m not much for parties. I’m planning to stay in this bus and read. Or hide out in a guest bedroom with a drunk woman with a bruised elbow hoping she’ll retch on me. Either works.”
My laugh feels like releasing a band that’s been tightening around my chest all day. Reaching on my tippy toes I press a single kiss to his scruffy cheek. “Perfect. I’ll get nice and wasted.”
—
Cara Brennan is spellbindingly beautiful.
She looks like the good witch from an old English fairy tale.
Hair as white as the moon. Thin, delicate features.
Dainty tattoos that make everyone else’s look like a blind four-year-old did them.
She’s walking through life with a level of pretty privelege models strive for.
“It’s so nice to meet you,” she says with the same lyrical lilt Conor and Tom have, but higher pitched, like Tinker Bell. “Tommy speaks quite highly of you.”
“Great,” I say. It kind of hurts to look at her. “I mean, thank you.”
Sound check only makes matters worse, because she takes all that cheery, high-cheekboned, wood-nymph beauty and delivers just soul-crushing music. If I’m ever in the mood to wallow in some small-town bus stop over the unavoidable ennui of the human condition, I’ll be sure to play her stuff.
After a few songs we take a break for Conor to help Gabriel with the “Heart of Darkness” bridge, and I wander to the edge of the stage to take in the view. Tom props an elbow on my head as if I’m a low street post, a cute thing he’s taken to doing given our height discrepancy.
He looks achingly handsome in his John Lennon sunglasses and trademark jean jacket.
His presence makes me feel more rational, and I take a breath to ground myself—we’re going to talk tonight and it’s all going to be okay.
The air is still warm, but not stifling up here, and it’s scented with fresh-cut grass and orange poppies that dot the surrounding mountains.
The Hollywood Bowl is one hell of a historic venue—an outdoor amphitheater built like a conch shell into the hills.
Surrounded by rising peaks on all sides, it is somehow both intimate and stadium-sized, with an immaculate view of the late afternoon sky.
Though it’s gin-clear, not a cloud to be seen, the vivid blue is already melting gradually into a dusk of soft summer pink. It’s vivid, it’s stunning, it’s—
“It’s you.”
I turn up to him, and Tom is pointing at the watercolor sky. The impact of his simple words make my eyes burn. He sees that view and to him, it’s the embodiment of me .
I shake my head at him in awe, trying and failing to say anything as poignant. I’m aware of every graceful rustle of his curled hair in the breeze.
“You stop by the dressing rooms?”
I had, and found Claritin—over-the-counter allergy medication—waiting for me alongside his preferred boxes of tea. I take a deep inhale of pollenated summer air through my nose. No sneezing. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I’m more of a Zyrtec girl.”
Tom bursts out laughing. It’s the best sound I know. I want that on my desert-island album. “I’ll fix the rider for you.”
“I’m kidding. It was perfect and so thoughtful.” I press my face into his side.
“Barry’s and Claritin. The pair of us.”
It’s what I’d thought, too. A rider—the list of anything an artist wants that gets sent to every venue on the tour—usually means famous folks get their dressing room stocked with fine bottles of wine and bonbons imported from a specific boutique in Paris.
What I doubt most musicians ask for is Barry’s tea and a pack of Claritin.
Like together Tom and I make up one congested old woman.
The rest of sound check goes off without a hitch. When Conor strums the opening chords of “If Not for My Baby,” I make my way to the front of the stage, only to see Cara doing the same.
Of course.
That’s why she’s here: to sing their song together. I retreat back to my spot beside Molly and am grateful when nobody points out my mistake.
Cara doesn’t sing her first note, though, and I wonder, with childlike hope, if she’s about to offer it to me.
But life isn’t a musical, and I kick myself for falling in love and becoming one of those dopes who has thoughts like that.
Here, kid , I picture her saying . You guys should sing it. It was made for you. Despicably stupid.
“I think we’ve an audience,” Cara says into the mic, so the teen girls already lining up with signs outside the gates can hear. “Shall we wait until tonight, Halloran? No practice?”
Tom shrugs. “I still remember if you do.”
Cara’s eyes—the kind that give you the chills when she affixes them on you—glitter at him. “What’s that expression? You never forget your first?”
I grip my mic and swallow acid.