Chapter Eleven #2
But sold out? Henry couldn’t wrap his head around it. As far as he knew, Jackson hadn’t toured in a decade, maybe more. Who were all these people who had bought tickets to see the former pop idol in Paris, of all places?
Melanie had suggested, when he’d called her in a panic, that he try a website called StubHub, but the only resale tickets available there were in the nosebleed section.
He wasn’t going to bring the love of his life to a concert and stick her up in the rafters, now, was he?
He needed her close to the stage, close to the speakers, in a situation that felt as nonthreatening as possible, if this had any chance at all of working.
And for that, he realized, he would need Jackson Quick’s help.
It was a ridiculous thought, of course. But the fact was, Jackson had become famous using the song Henry had written for Celeste—and over the course of the next few years, the rock star had recorded another dozen of Henry’s newer songs.
So maybe, just maybe, if Henry could explain things, Jackson might find it in his heart to help Henry out.
Before Henry could second-guess himself, he had hailed a cab and asked the driver to take him to La Défense. Thirty-five minutes later, he found himself standing in an empty parking lot outside of a huge, silent stadium. The driver zoomed away before Henry could ask him to wait.
Henry stared up at the arena, already realizing he had made a mistake.
The concert wasn’t for another three days.
What would make him think that Jackson Quick was hanging out inside the venue right now?
Henry could kick himself for not thinking this through.
Still, he was here now. Maybe there was someone inside who could reach Jackson.
He trudged up to the front of the arena, but the ticket windows were all closed.
There appeared to be no one around, but Henry wasn’t going to give up that easily.
He walked to the first door on his right and tried it.
Locked. That figured. On to the next. That one was locked, too.
Henry continued around the building, patiently trying every door, until finally, under a sign for GATE 33, he pulled a handle and was stunned when the door swung open.
He slipped inside and through the dimly lit corridors until he emerged into the cavernous arena, filled with thousands of empty seats and a stage at the far end.
To his relief, the place wasn’t entirely deserted; there were workers loading in equipment, and already, there was a big sign above the stage that read JACKSON QUICK: THE WORLD OF LIGHT TOUR.
He made his way toward the stage, earning some strange looks from workers, but no one stopped him.
He walked backstage like he belonged there, and peeked his head into every room that looked like it might house a rock star, but he came up empty.
He was just about to give up and head home when a man tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey, buddy, can I help you?” a deep voice asked in English, in a tone that sounded more confrontational than helpful.
Henry turned and found himself face-to-face with a man in his sixties with silver hair and expensive-looking clothes. So not a part of the load-in crew, then. “Yes, I’m looking for Jackson Quick,” he said, trying to sound confident.
The man stared at him. “Little old to be a groupie, aren’t you?”
Henry glared at the man. “I’m not a groupie.”
“Which is exactly what a groupie would say,” the man pointed out. “What is it you want with Jackson?”
“I need to talk to him about a song.”
The man raised an eyebrow, waiting for Henry to go on.
“I’m a songwriter,” Henry clarified after a pause.
The man guffawed. “Hate to break it to you, boss, but he’s not looking for any new material right now.”
This bothered Henry more than anything else. “Well, he should be. Talented kid like him? But I digress. No, I’m actually the writer of ‘City of Light.’ ”
The man’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You wrote ‘City of Light’?”
“I did,” Henry confirmed. “And you are?”
The man’s eyes narrowed as if he was trying to puzzle Henry out. “I’m Jackson’s manager, Cash James.”
Henry exhaled in relief. “Mr. James. Nice to meet you. I’m Henry McGee.”
“You have some ID, Mr. McGee?”
Henry pulled out his wallet and showed Cash his driver’s license, which Cash studied for a moment before handing it back.
“Ninety-nine years young, huh?” Cash said, sounding impressed. “Okay, say I believe you’re the same Henry McGee who wrote the song. What do you want with Jackson?”
“Well, the woman I wrote that song for is here in Paris. She has dementia. And I’m hoping…
I’m hoping if I can bring her to the concert on Friday, maybe, maybe, the music will bring back the memories.
Maybe… maybe Jackson Quick can even say something from the stage.
” It was more than he’d intended to ask, but he had to take his shot.
Cash whistled, low and slow. “That’s very romantic, Henry. But I’m afraid Jackson Quick isn’t in the business of taking requests.”
“Please,” Henry said. “I’ve been separated from Celeste for eighty years.
I just found out she survived the war.” When the manager didn’t say anything, Henry added, “Without Celeste, I never would have written that song. And if I recall correctly, that’s the song that kicked off Jackson Quick’s career. ”
Cash stared at him for a long time, and Henry could tell that the manager was evaluating him. “That’s some story,” he said at last. “Fine. I’ll call Jackson. But the final decision is up to him.”
“Thank you,” Henry said as Cash pulled out his phone. “Thank you very much.”
“Let’s see what Jackson says,” Cash said as he jabbed at the phone with a meaty finger. “Don’t thank me yet.”
After the Musée d’Orsay, Julia fell right asleep, exhausted from all the walking she and Piper had done that morning.
But she slept fitfully, dreaming that she was inside the Van Gogh painting of the church, the one with the stars over the Rh?ne River, and that darkness was falling, erasing all the infinite pinpricks of light.
She woke with a start and grabbed her phone to check the time, assuming she’d slept until late afternoon and that Piper would be back soon, if she wasn’t already.
But instead, she was startled to realize that she had dozed for less than forty minutes.
She closed her eyes, hoping she’d be able to drift back to sleep, but the blackness of her dream returned and jarred her awake once more, her pulse racing.
She sat up and took a drink of the water beside her bed. Piper had left a glass there for her before departing. How thoughtful her daughter was. Goodness, she was tired of being a burden on Piper, sick of being sick.
She thought for a moment about texting Piper to let her know that she was awake, but Piper was off somewhere with that cute waiter, and she didn’t want to interrupt her.
Besides, there was someplace Julia wanted to go that she wouldn’t drag Piper to, because it wasn’t worth Piper’s time.
When Julia had lived here for a summer when she was twenty-two, she and her roommate, a New Yorker named Ellen, had frequented a pub not far from the hotel where Julia and Piper were staying now.
It had been a trendy hangout for young American and British students from the nearby Sorbonne, and also a popular pickup spot where young French men could be assured of finding wide-eyed English-speaking girls who were charmed by their French accents and chivalry.
Julia herself had been charmed more than once—she remembered making out in the corner with a young French advertising executive named Guillaume and going on a picnic with a French computer programmer named Anton—but she suspected she was generally a disappointment to the guys who’d come here in those days, because she’d had a firm no-sleeping-with-randoms rule.
She’d just graduated college, and she was the only one among her friends who was still a virgin.
Ellen had urged her to sleep with a French guy as soon as possible, just to see what the fuss was all about, but Julia had been determined to save herself for someone special.
And then, she’d gone home at the end of the summer and met an attorney named Ryan, and he’d been her first, and she’d been in love with him, and she had married him on a beautiful spring day when she was twenty-five, and Piper had come along just over a year later.
By the time she realized that she and Ryan weren’t all that compatible after all—that he hated to read and that he disliked being outdoors and that he loved his daughter but didn’t think he was necessarily obligated to play a role in parenting her and preferred to work late and go to ball games with his coworkers—she had already made her bed, as her mother reminded her, and now she had to lie in it.
And lie in it she had, until Piper was ten, and Julia had finally made the difficult choice to leave a man she still cared about but had little in common with, a man who would never put his family first, or even second or third.
He wasn’t a bad person. But he wasn’t the right person for her, and she didn’t want Piper growing up thinking that a marriage was supposed to be about settling.
That, she realized, was why she wanted to go back to the pub that had once meant so much to her. It represented the last time in her life that she was simply herself, before she’d met Ryan and her world had begun to narrow.