Chapter Twenty-Six
NICKY
Present
Nicky caught a glimpse of Lucy as the doors to the main elevator closed on her and a trio of white-haired ladies with canes. One of them was handing Lucy a package of tissues.
Jesus. She’s crying.
His mind stuttered back to work, helped along by the frigid, ozone-dosed casino air crackling against the sweat he’d worked up on stage. He spun around and darted at a run toward the Penthouse Tower lobby, hoping that he could remember how to find it in the maze that was the Lusso Resort.
After a few turns, he got lucky. He stumbled on a hallway he recognized, then blasted through a set of wooden doors. Nicky yanked his keycard from his pocket and sent prayers of thanks to a god he didn’t believe in when the doors to the exclusive penthouse elevator opened on the first try.
When Nicky reached the fortieth floor, it was deserted. Not a soul in sight. He eyed the long passage, wondering if Lucy had already made it to her suite, or if the gambling grannies had managed to slow down the regular elevator on its forty-floor trip.
He looked back and forth from the main elevator doors, to the hall, and back again. Unsure of himself. Unsure of damn near everything, if he was being honest.
The light over the elevator lit up, a soft ding striking in time with his rapid heart rate. When the doors opened, he took his first breath in what felt like forever. Lucy was there, staring at her hands as they worked over a mangled ball of tissues.
She gasped when she looked up. ‘How did you—?’
‘Private elevator,’ he replied.
She stepped out into the hallway, right past him. ‘Nicky, I just can’t right now. Okay?’
‘Talk to me,’ he pleaded to her back.
‘Not right now.’
‘If not now, when? When , Lucy?’ he demanded, jogging to catch up.
He scrambled in ahead of her.
She tried dodging him, looking down at her feet.
He tried again. ‘What is this about? Why are you crying?’
Nicky knew . Really, he did. But he needed her to say it.
‘I can’t,’ she said, walking by.
Nicky raced to the door of his suite and opened it.
When she reached him, he demanded, ‘Get in. We’re doing this now .’
Lucy looked away, down the hall toward her own room. Then – thank fuck – huffed loudly, and walked through his door.
When the lock snicked home, he threw the security latch and the deadbolt for good measure.
Nicky followed Lucy into the living room. He watched her pace in front of the picture windows and their vibrant view of the desert sky. She was an avenging angel, up in the clouds, working herself into a frenzy, if the color in her cheeks was any indication.
‘This isn’t about “Little Wing,” is it?’ he asked calmly. ‘It’s about “The Breathing Room.”’
‘Of course, it is! Of course!’ she railed.
Fucking finally.
She continued, ‘It’s always about “The Breathing Room”!’ She stepped closer to him, her eyes blazing with fire and red-rimmed from crying. ‘You want to know why I don’t think “The Breathing Room” is one of the greatest rock love songs of all time? Do you?’
‘I really do.’
Lucy’s blue eyes locked on his, silently commanding him to him to pay close attention. ‘Because to me it’s not a love song. It’s a fucking tragedy.’
Nicky actually staggered back a step, like he’d been punched. She knocked the wind right out of him.
Lucy went on, her face reddening with anger, ‘Of course, I knew it was about me. I was there. How could I not know? I was there , Nicky. And you made all these promises. Lit up all these fucking fantasies. And then you were gone. Just – poof – vanished. Leaving me with all this stupid useless hope. Like you’d cracked open a treasure chest and then just buried it again with no map. ’
Nicky tried, ‘I’m—’
‘No,’ Lucy commanded. ‘You want to hear it? Let me get it out.’
Nicky bit his tongue – literally – to keep himself from interrupting.
‘When you didn’t show up that day. When I had to walk to work on the Boardwalk, I was convinced that you were dead.
I was absolutely sure you’d crashed on the highway and were in a morgue somewhere.
Then, when your obituary didn’t appear in the papers I kept buying every morning, I wished you were dead.
Because if you were dead, it would mean that it wasn’t me.
That you didn’t just lie to me. Or use me.
Or simply not care enough to come back or call me or something .
’ She inhaled and sighed. ‘Because I cared so much.’
Nicky pleaded, ‘Lucy—’
‘Let me finish!’ she snapped. ‘And then, once I’d finally gotten over it – after waiting and wishing and wondering – there was this fucking song on the radio.
And I had to rewrite and question all the things I thought about you.
Maybe you didn’t lie to me. Maybe I wasn’t just some notch on your bedpost. But by then you were this rock star on the cover of magazines, selling out Madison Square Garden. ’
‘You could have reached out—’
Lucy tutted, frenzied. ‘I didn’t even have a proper email account until two years after the song came out.
It was the damn dark ages. What was I going to do?
Write you a fan letter? Mail it to “Nicky Broome, Rock Star, Care of Hollywood, USA”?
Stand outside the stage door somewhere and say, “Remember me?”’
‘I don’t know. I—’
‘No, you don’t know. You don’t .’ Her voice got quieter, sadder.
Nicky wanted to reach out to her, to hold her, but she backed away from him, crossed her arms over her chest and stared out the window.
She groaned, ‘“The Breathing Room” was always there.’ Lucy turned to him, arms still covering herself.
‘I was on my honeymoon with Brandon, in this backward town in Spain that didn’t even have a gas station.
We were walking through the town square, bright sunshine, a fountain.
It was beautiful. Serene. There was a kid, maybe fifteen years old, playing a beat-up old classical guitar, busking. You know what he played?’
‘I can guess,’ Nicky whispered.
‘Yeah,’ she retorted, turning back to him. ‘The fucking “Breathing Room.” When Chloe hit fourteen, guess what song she became obsessed with when she and her friends would sit around painting their nails and talking about boys?’
‘“The Breathing Room,”’ Nicky repeated softly.
‘Yep. That was a whole new and exciting form of torture, let me tell you. She played it over and over at top volume for weeks. And don’t get me started on the grocery store.
Or Muzak versions in the goddamn dentist’s chair.
And every time I hear it, it’s like this gaping hole gets reopened.
The good sometimes, but mostly just the pain of it. What we could have been.’
Lucy shook her head, resumed pacing in front of the window.
‘If you had just been some guy who promised me things and left, I would have gotten over it. It would have passed. It did pass. Mostly. I was over it. It would have been just this humiliating old memory from when I was eighteen and na?ve. Like a bunch of other cringe-inducing mistakes I’ve made over the years.
Big deal. But instead, the song opened up this …
this old memory of hope. It made everything unfinished .
Like you’d actually felt all the things I’d felt.
Like I wasn’t na?ve or crazy. But you were also still so fucking far away. ’
Lucy ran her hands through her hair, tried to steady herself.
When she spoke again it was with more calm.
‘There was this epic reminder of it all. With a life of its own. The song colored everything. You were gone, but you weren’t.
’ She stood stock-still before him. ‘It’s been decades, but it’s also only been days , because on the way to Vegas the guy next to me in the security line at the airport was humming along to “The Breathing Room” on his AirPods. Do you understand?’
Nicky collapsed into the nearest chair and tried to stop the throbbing in his brain by rubbing a hand over his forehead.
Of all the many thousands of ways he’d envisioned Lucy’s possible reaction to the song, most involved some form of indifference.
He felt stupid now admitting, even to himself, that he’d never considered anything like what she’d just described.
He sighed. ‘Yeah, I understand.’
The least he could do now was fill in the rest of the picture. He didn’t dare hope that it would lead to forgiveness, but she deserved the truth.
He began, ‘The fucked-up irony of the whole thing is that I only had the guts to leave because of you.’
Lucy slumped into the chair on the other side of the coffee table. He had her full attention now.
He inhaled a deep breath, gathering the strength to continue. He ran a hand through his hair, stalling for time while he tried to get his thoughts in order. If only he could grab his notebook and write it all down first. No time for that, though.
He began, ‘I went back to Dover. When I left you that morning. I was gonna pack up what I could fit in the Jeep and come back down to Rehoboth. But while I was there, I got into it with my dad. He’d been pushing college and the life-or-death importance of getting my shit together.’
Nicky could picture it, as vivid as the sunlight streaming in through the hotel window. God, how many hotel rooms had he been in since that day?
He went on, ‘All year long I’d been lying to him.
Told him I’d applied to UD and a couple others.
But I just couldn’t. Every time I thought about it, it just felt …
wrong . Like trying to walk backwards on my hands or something.
Like, how was I supposed to go four years like that? Maybe more? Maybe my whole life?’
When he paused, Lucy asked, ‘You told him?’
Nicky nodded. ‘I can’t tell you what that night at the beach meant to me, Lucy.
I tried in “The Breathing Room,” but there is really no way to describe how important it was to me.
It was an actual turning point, a pivot from where I was headed onto a totally different path.
It felt like you opened the windows and I could finally breathe.
Like I had this weight on my chest, like I was trapped and you lifted it all away.
I couldn’t hold it in anymore after that. So, I told him.’
Lucy’s eyes closed, and he watched a tear fall down her ruddy cheek.
‘My dad and I fought, right there at the back of my Jeep. Screaming, yelling … eventually punching.’ He could still feel the sensation of it.
Deep in his chest. Like his heart was breaking and being set free at the exact same time.
‘He kept repeating, even as he swung on me, “This is not acceptable! You will not throw your life away! This is not acceptable!”’ Nicky let out a gust of air and added, ‘I knew – I knew – that if I didn’t leave that day, that minute , my dad would just keep at me.
We’d keep having the same argument over and over.
He’d find me at the beach and eventually either his bullshit or his fists would wear me down and I’d give in. ’
Lucy wiped the tears from her face with the back of her hand. ‘Fight or flight,’ she whispered.
Nicky pleaded, ‘You have to believe me, I was planning to come back. Even after I was driving out West I was going to come back. Somewhere in Illinois. Or Iowa I found a payphone and spent hours trying to get your number at the beach. It was unlisted. I realized later it was because—’
Lucy huffed, hung her head in her hands. ‘Kim’s dad had played for the Eagles. None of their numbers were listed.’
‘Right,’ Nicky said. ‘So, I called your parents’ house in Dover. But I didn’t have a number for you to call me back. I just said, “Tell her Nicky called.”’
‘Jesus,’ Lucy breathed.
‘You never got the message, I guess?’
‘No.’
‘I had these teenage fantasies of snatching you up and bringing you back to Seattle with me.’
‘That’s where you went? Seattle?’
He chuckled. ‘I was a dumbass kid musician in the Nineties; where else would I go?’
She shot him a weak, watery smile, and it felt like hitting the damn lottery.
He said, ‘I met Gill at a fucking coffee house. In Seattle . So damn cliché, right? Ridiculous. Gill knew Vinny, and Vinny knew Hooper. And then it was on. We just clicked. Once we started performing it was like we were hitched to a freight train and I couldn’t get off.
Not even for a minute. We got a record deal and they scheduled a tour.
One album, then another.’ Nicky sighed, ‘By then, summer had long since passed. And then it was another summer. We were touring in a van, after the first album, before the second – the one that hit big?’
She nodded.
He continued, ‘I made them book Rehoboth and Dewey. Drove past the old house on Stockley a bunch of times.’
‘I wasn’t there,’ Lucy said.
‘I know.’ Nicky gazed at her, wanting her so badly that it was a physical thing, moving through his body along with his blood. Quietly, he asked, ‘Do you know how many Lucys were born the same year as you?’
Lucy’s eyebrows bunched at the non sequitur. ‘No.’
‘Three hundred and forty-four.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I wanted to know,’ he replied.
‘Know what , exactly?’
‘How hard it would be to find you.’
Lucy exhaled, her shoulders sagging.
‘Why didn’t you? Find me?’ she breathed. ‘You could have hired a private investigator or something.’
‘I could have, but I …’ He stopped, took a moment to try and understand the impulse himself. ‘I sort of wanted you … to want to be found. For you to find me , so I would know—’
Lucy’s eyes closed again.
He wanted them open, so he continued, ‘So a few years ago, I had this friend. The editor of a music magazine.’
Her eyes snapped open. Gasped, ‘No!’
Nicky stood up, crossed the room toward her. ‘I went to him with an idea. A crazy fucking stupid idea.’
‘Nicky—’
He dropped to his knees on the floor in front of her. Ran a single finger over her thigh. ‘I fronted a million dollars. Had a check drawn up and everything. A bunch of lawyers kept it in a safe. Waiting.’
‘ Nicky .’ The sound was a murmur, a sigh.
‘I just wanted you to answer me,’ he said, before pressing his lips to the back of her hand, still damp from tears.
‘The question mark,’ she rasped.
‘Did it mean anything to you, Lucy?’ he asked, holding her gaze. His chest tightened by steady increments as he waited for her answer.
She exhaled, ‘Everything.’