Chapter 3
By the third morning Jude had learned the sounds of the house.
He woke to them before he opened his eyes, the way he used to wake to his mother’s kitchen.
Pipes knocking somewhere below him. A screen door.
Two low voices on the porch and the smell of coffee climbing the stairs, and under all of it the river, which never fully stopped, a wide grey hush at the edge of everything.
For three mornings he had lain in the borrowed bed and listened to a house that did not have Rand in it, and for three mornings the not-having had felt less like peace and more like standing in a room where the floor might still be there or might not, and he had not yet worked up the nerve to put his weight down.
He got up. He made the bed, corners tight, the way he left any bed in a place he was not sure he was allowed to stay.
Downstairs the kitchen was full. It was always full; that was what he could not get used to.
There was always someone in it. Marcus at the head of the table with reading glasses pushed up into his grey hair and a stack of paper in front of him that he turned facedown when Jude came in, not fast, not hiding, just a man who kept other people’s business off the table at breakfast. Ghost at the counter doing something to the coffee maker that involved a screwdriver.
Jack at the end of the table cleaning something with a rag, unhurried, the quietest man in the house.
They all looked up when Jude came in, and not one of them looked at him the way the band looked at him.
“Morning,” Marcus said. “There’s eggs. Sit before Ghost takes the last of the coffee hostage.”
“It’s not hostage,” Ghost said. “It’s maintenance.”
“It’s been maintenance for twenty minutes.”
Jude sat. Someone put a plate in front of him.
He had stopped tracking who, because in this house food arrived in front of him the way weather arrived, without his having to earn it or ask, and the first morning that had nearly undone him worse than anything Rand had ever said.
He ate. He had learned, in three days, that they wanted him to eat more than they wanted him to talk, and that was a mercy he did not have a word for.
Trip came in from the yard. Jude had his name now, had most of their names, had spent two days quietly sorting the crew into a map he could hold.
Trip set a basket of tomatoes on the counter and kissed the top of Ghost’s head on his way past, and nobody in the kitchen treated it as anything.
Jude had noticed that the first day too.
Nobody here treated anybody’s anything as anything.
There were men in this house who slept in the same bed and men who had killed people, probably, and it all ran on the same easy current, and Jude kept waiting for the catch.
He was twenty-four and he kept waiting for the catch. He knew where he had learned that. He did not enjoy knowing it.
Nate came down last.
Jude felt the kitchen reorganize itself around it the way a room does when the person it has been half-waiting for finally arrives, and he hated that he was the one half-waiting.
Nate had a t-shirt on and his hair was wet and he looked, in the morning, younger and less guarded than he let himself look at night.
He got coffee. He took the chair across from Jude, not beside him, which Jude had also noticed.
Nate kept a careful distance, always, a foot of air he did not close.
He said, “You sleep?”
“Some.”
“More than yesterday?”
“Some more than yesterday.”
“That’s the answer I’m looking for,” Nate said, and the corner of his mouth tipped up, barely, the way it did when he was pleased and trying not to show it, and Jude looked at his eggs.
This was the danger. Not the clubhouse, not Rand, not the men who had probably killed people. The danger was a wet-haired man across a kitchen table at nine in the morning asking whether Jude had slept, and meaning it, and Jude’s whole chest going warm and traitorous about it.
Jude had been in love with Nate since he was sixteen years old.
He was very clear-eyed about it. He had carried it so long it had stopped being a secret and turned into a feature of the landscape, a hill he no longer noticed climbing.
He had been a kid with a stutter and a brother who got arrested and a crush on the brother’s enormous patient best friend, and he had understood even then that it was a closed door, and he had made his peace with the door the way he made his peace with everything, by writing it into songs where nobody would know who they were about.
Nate was straight. Nate had girlfriends, a parade of them over the years, kind women who never lasted, and Nate was Easton’s best friend, which made Jude a kid brother in perpetuity, a role he had aged into and never out of.
Jude knew all of it. Knowing it had never once changed the temperature of his chest when Nate walked into a room.
He finished the eggs. He drank the coffee Ghost had held hostage and then released.
He let the morning hold him, and he tried not to think about what he had decided in the dark last night, what he had to do today, because if he thought about it at the table he would lose his nerve, and he needed his nerve.
He had to go back to the condo.
He told Nate in the yard, because he could not have said it in the full kitchen.
“I need to get my stuff.”
Nate had been coiling a hose. He stopped. He didn’t say anything right away, which Jude had learned was Nate thinking, not Nate disapproving, though it took everything in Jude not to read it as disapproving and start apologizing in advance.
“Your stuff,” Nate said.
“From the condo. My laptop, my meds, the- I have a hard drive with all the demos on it, fifteen months of work, it’s not backed up anywhere else, I know that’s stupid.” The words came too fast. He made himself slow down. “And my passport. And clothes. I can’t keep wearing Ghost’s shirts.”
“Ghost doesn’t mind.”
“I mind.”
Nate looked at him. The yard was cold and bright and the river went by behind the chain-link, and Jude held still under the look the way he was learning to hold still, without performing.
“Okay,” Nate said. “I’ll drive you. We go when Rand’s not there. Kit can tell us the band’s rehearsal schedule, or I can have Ghost-”
“He’s at his grandmother’s till Thursday.
” Jude heard himself say it and felt the small sick drop of having the schedule memorized, of knowing to the hour when the condo would be empty because he had spent two years learning to move through his own home in the gaps between another person’s moods.
“LA. His grandfather’s having some thing with a label. He flew out Monday. The condo’s empty.”
Something moved across Nate’s face. Jude could not read it. It was gone before he could try.
“I’ll drive you,” Nate said again.
“You don’t have to come up. You can wait in the truck. It’ll take me twenty minutes.”
“I’ll drive you,” Nate said, a third time, in the voice that did not leave a gap to argue into, and Jude let it go, because he wanted Nate in the truck outside more than he wanted to admit, the way a kid wants the hall light left on.
The condo was on the eleventh floor of a building downtown that Rand’s grandfather paid for, and it was beautiful. Jude had hated it for a year and a half without once letting himself finish the thought.
Nate parked across the street. “Twenty minutes,” he said. “You’re not back in twenty-five, I’m coming up. You don’t have to do anything in there but grab the bag and walk out. You don’t owe the place a goodbye.”
“It’s just stuff.”
“It’s just stuff,” Nate agreed. “Twenty minutes.”
The lobby doorman knew him and said good evening, Mr. Davros, the way he always did, and Jude rode up alone in the mirrored elevator and did not look at himself in it.
He let himself in. The condo was dark and cold and smelled like Rand’s cologne and the orchids the cleaning service kept alive, and the city was enormous and glittering through the floor-to-ceiling glass.
Jude stood in the doorway of the beautiful empty place and felt his whole body want to apologize to it.
He moved fast. He had a duffel from the closet and he filled it fast and quiet, the way he did everything in this condo: laptop, the hard drive off the desk, the meds from the bathroom, a fistful of clothes he did not look at.
His passport was in the drawer of the nightstand on his side, the right side, the side by the window, and he was reaching for it when he heard the front door.
He knew the sound of that door. He knew the weight of how it opened. Two years of learning to read that door went still and cold in him at once, and the stutter woke up at the back of his mouth before he had a single word to use it on.
“Babe?” Rand’s voice, from the front of the condo. Warm. Surprised. “Jude? Holy shit.”
He was supposed to be in LA. He was supposed to be at his grandmother’s until Thursday.
Jude stood in the bedroom with the passport in his hand and the duffel half-zipped on the bed and heard Rand’s footsteps come down the hall, and he understood, with the flat clarity that sometimes surfaced underneath the panic, that he had memorized the wrong schedule, or the schedule had changed, or Rand had never gone at all, and that it did not matter which, because the empty condo had not been empty.
Rand filled the bedroom doorway. He looked at Jude. He looked at the duffel.
His face did several things very fast and landed, finally, on hurt.
“You’re leaving,” Rand said.
“I-” The word stuck. Jude felt it stick, the old jam, the consonant that would not come, and he saw Rand see it, and he hated that more than almost anything, that Rand got to watch him fail to talk. He breathed. He got it loose. “I’m getting my stuff. That’s all.”