Cherry
Alaska, 2024
Okay,”
said Cassie.
“So, they’re called boygenius, but they’re actually girls?”
“Correct.”
had shown up at Cassie’s treehouse that morning, her third in Alaska, with a bag full of pastries from Two Sisters, a bakery in Homer that she’d spotted the night before.
She’d shown up at five minutes after nine, and already there’d been a line out the door.
had waited, and had eventually been able to fill a bag with iced cinnamon buns, maple butter cookies, savory Danishes filled with butternut squash and goat cheese, and BLTs on fresh-baked rolls.
It had all cost more than sixty dollars.
On her way to Cassie’s treehouse, told herself it was an investment, a necessary outlay of funds that would yield dividends in the future.
When she knocked, her aunt had ignored her, but had been ready for that.
She’d torn a piece of bacon from one of the sandwiches and bent down, holding it to the bottom of the door so Wesley would be able to smell it.
She heard him whining, then the sound of his nails, scrabbling at the door, followed by Cassie’s displeased mutter.
“Wesley! Cut it out!”
Luckily, Wesley, who had started to think of as an ally, hadn’t stopped, and eventually Cassie had been forced to yield.
When the door had finally opened, revealing her aunt, in all of her scowling, plaid-shirted glory, was waiting, a box of pastry in one hand, a cappuccino in the other, a smile on her face.
“I come in peace,”
she’d said.
“That’s a lie,”
Cassie had grumbled ...
but she’d opened the door wider and hadn’t stopped from coming inside.
“I brought breakfast.”
Cassie was still frowning, but saw that there was a second folding chair set up near the metal-legged table.
She looked around the kitchen, which didn’t take long—there was a single cupboard, a toaster oven, and a single-burner hot plate.
She gathered plates (there seemed to be only two in the entire house) and set out the treats, letting Cassie have first dibs after she and her aunt both reached for the same pastry, a savory goat-cheese-filled croissant.
Cassie took a bite.
She cleared her throat.
“I’m glad I got to meet you.
But I’m not going to perform with you.”
“Oh, no worries, no worries,”
said.
“I’m in Alaska for another few days, so I figured we could just hang out.
Get to know each other.”
She had picked up her phone.
“I also need to shoot some footage of you turning me down.”
Cassie looked worried, and perplexed, and a little bemused.
“You need video of me telling you no?”
“Yeah.
If I decide to keep trying, the producers will probably splice it into the video package.”
“I don’t want to be on camera,”
Cassie said, her voice curt.
“I don’t want people knowing I’m here.”
She pressed her lips together, rolling them in, then out.
“And ‘if’ you keep trying? Are you—you’re not sure?”
shrugged.
She kept her face placid as, with the sound of a mousetrap snapping, she thought, Gotcha! Ignoring Cassie’s question, she said, “I won’t show you on camera.
No one will know where you are, I promise.
Look, I’ll put my phone in selfie mode, so people will hear both of us, but they’ll just see me.”
Before Cassie could object, did as she’d promised, propping the phone up on a mug she’d fetched from the cupboard and starting to record.
“Hey there, everyone in TV land.
This is Rohrbach, and I’ve traveled a long way to find a singer who has chosen to remain anonymous, and who has declined to work with me.”
She looked at Cassie, who’d fled the three steps required to get to the other end of the house.
“Hey, Anonymous Singer, are you interested in coming to Los Angeles and being my mentor?”
Say no, she mouthed, leaning away from the camera.
“No,”
Cassie said.
Her voice was almost inaudible from her spot in the farthest corner of the room.
popped back on-screen.
“There you have it,”
she said, and ended the recording.
She nodded at her aunt. “Thanks.”
Cassie came back to the table.
She didn’t sit.
“When do you go back?”
“My ticket’s in three days.”
Cassie frowned.
“Don’t you want to get back sooner, so you can work with April?”
had told her aunt the name of the mentor she’d been assigned.
Cassie—big surprise—had never heard of her.
waved her hand, feigning nonchalance.
“Like I said, I’m not sure I’m going to do the show after all.”
Cassie looked just as surprised as hoped she would.
“I thought this was your dream.”
“Well, even being on one of those shows doesn’t mean you get to be a working musician.
Or that anyone’s going to pay for your music.
It’s just exposure.
I guess I’ve been thinking, you know, what’s the point?”
Those were all of Zoe’s lines, practically verbatim—shows won’t get you anywhere.
Why even try?
Cassie, she noted with satisfaction, looked bewildered and guilty.
She’d probably expected to renew her assault, to beg and to threaten.
She hadn’t expected this meek acquiescence, or for to quietly accept defeat.
But had realized that pleading and guilt-tripping hadn’t worked.
She’d decided that maybe this would.
“I thought about it last night,”
continued, “and if you don’t want to perform—”
“I can’t,”
Cassie interrupted.
“It’s not that I don’t want to; it’s that I can’t.”
flipped her hand.
“Can’t.
Won’t.
Whichever.
It’s fine.
And it’s none of my business.
I don’t have any right to force you to do something that makes you uncomfortable.”
She smiled a gentle, benevolent smile, and hoped it looked sincere.
“I don’t have a lot of family, you know.
That’s why I thought I could just hang out with you a little, before I have to go.”
At the words hang out, she saw, or thought she saw, Cassie’s back stiffen, her posture become defensive.
Quickly, reached for her phone.
“Want to hear some of my music?”
she asked.
Cassie shrugged, then nodded.
“Do you have Bluetooth speakers?”
Of course Cassie did not, and so had played her music on her phone, scrolling through her SoundCloud and starting from the first song she’d recorded to the most recent.
The sound was shitty, her voice, coming through the phone’s speaker, was thin and tinny and small, but Cassie had either been genuinely impressed or she’d been polite enough to fake it for the duration of three of ’s original songs.
“Hey, so listen,”
said, moving on to the next step of the plan.
“I know we’re never going to perform together, but, before I go, do you think . . .”
She kept her expression soft, her body still and voice gentle, as she asked, “Would you sing a song with me? Just, here, with no one listening?”
She gestured toward the tiny treehouse, and Wesley, whose ears swiveled.
She sent up a fast, silent prayer to the gods of music and held her breath as Cassie’s shoulders hunched forward, her lips pressed into a straight line.
hurried to keep talking.
“It would mean a lot to me.
It would be fun.
It would be something I could take with me when I go.”
And, for a wonder, Cassie wasn’t immediately saying No or I can’t or You should go.
Cassie, instead, seemed to be actually thinking about it.
“One song,”
she finally said.
felt like there were fireworks going off in her chest.
She wanted to jump in the air, cheering, but she kept her face calm and her voice steady.
“Oh, that’s awesome! Wait here!”
She hurried out the door and raced down the stairs, out into the brief span of daylight, car keys in hand.
Her guitar was in the trunk, along with a cheap keyboard that she’d borrowed from a friend of a friend of her new buddy Aline, the clerk at the Land’s End Resort, who’d been willing to help her.
The plastic keyboard had sixty-four keys, instead of eighty-eight keys, and there was Magic Marker and what looked like glitter decorating some of its upper octave, but it had the benefit of being available, nearby, and free.
trotted back up the stairs, carrying both instruments.
“I brought this, just in case you want to play,”
she said, showing her aunt what she’d gotten.
“Where can I plug it in?”
Cassie, she saw, was staring at the keyboard, gaping at it like ...
well.
knew that like she’d seen a ghost was a cliché, but it was accurate.
Her aunt’s face had gone pale, and her eyes looked enormous as she pointed.
“Where did you get that?”
“I borrowed it,”
said. “Why?”
Cassie seemed to collect herself.
She shook her head.
“I had one just like that.
When I was—”
She stopped, then started again.
“A long, long time ago.”
filed that away for future consideration.
She opened her guitar case.
Her mind was whirling, racing through the Griffin Sisters catalogue—or would that be too much, too soon? Should she start with something else?
She tuned her guitar and tried to look calm, running through possibilities: Show tunes? The Great American Songbook? A song about family, something in a minor key, with lyrics about wanting something or missing someone? Or would that be too on the nose? She should have had something ready, she realized, but she hadn’t wanted to jinx anything, or get too far ahead of herself.
cast her mind back, remembering that there were twenty years of songs her aunt wouldn’t have heard.
“Do you know ‘Sunny Came Home’?”
she asked.
Cassie nodded.
started to play, and started to sing: “Sunny came home to her favorite room / Sunny sat down in the kitchen . . .”
She’d thought that Cassie would start to sing with her, but, instead, her aunt started playing the keyboard, finding the key immediately, weaving the notes through ’s voice and her guitar.
sang the first verse and chorus by herself, then nodded at her aunt.
Cassie’s eyes were closed, her voice almost inaudible at first, getting louder, steadier, as she sang, “‘It’s time for a few small repairs,’ she said . . .”
could hardly breathe.
It felt like she’d been trying to start a fire and had finally managed to get the tiniest flicker of a flame going, and if she wasn’t super careful the spark would go out.
She made herself keep singing, trying not to stare at Cassie, thinking that maybe, if she worked very hard for the rest of her life, she’d be able to sound half as good.
knew that she could sing.
Certainly people had told her so—music teachers and bandmates, friends and social media fans.
But there was singing, and there was this: the thing Cassie could do.
Those things were related.
Cousins, maybe.
But to be able to open your mouth and produce a sound with so many dimensions and shades, with such richness; to possess a voice that could reach inside of you and pull out memories, a voice that could thrill you or soothe you or make you ache—what would it be like? And what, found herself thinking, would it have been like for her mother to grow up with Cassie as competition? To know that you had a book of matches, and your sister had a flamethrower?
It ruined our lives, Cassie had said.
We hurt people.
had spent the night thinking about the story she’d heard, what she knew, or thought she knew, dismantling the picture she’d constructed with the scraps of information she’d gleaned from her mother and the Internet, adding what Cassie had told her, trying to fit it all together.
Cassie loved Russell, but he’d married Zoe.
Why? And Cassie was convinced that she’d taken away the one thing Zoe had wanted, that she’d killed Russell, that she’d deprived Zoe of a husband and, now, of a father.
Was that true?
For the first time in a long time, wanted to call her mother.
To get her on the phone and ask her questions; to tell her what she’d learned in Alaska and hear what she had to say.
Meanwhile, here was Cassie, in the cold and the dark, alone with a dog in a house barely the size of a handicapped bathroom stall, and just about as comfortable.
You could have saved me, thought.
You could have helped me.
But in a day’s time, those ideas had lost their teeth.
Now what she saw was a victim.
A princess who’d shut herself in a tower.
wanted to rescue her aunt.
To bring her back to the comforts of family and home.
To have her not be lonely.
To have her sing again.
Wesley was staring up at her, his expression rapt and solemn.
Cassie was staring at her feet.
“So you can sing,”
said.
Cassie shifted her weight.
“Yes.
Here.
With you.
But in front of people . . .”
She shook her head, and appeared to be thinking.
“You know, if you don’t have to be in LA for another few days ...
if you didn’t change your ticket yet.
I mean, you don’t have to . . .”
felt her heartbeat quicken.
Wesley’s ears swiveled toward his mistress.
“One of the cabins hasn’t been rented for this week,”
Cassie said.
“You could move out of the hotel and stay.
For a few days.
If you want.”
Again, felt that percolating sensation, like she’d swallowed a Roman candle and it was fizzing inside of her, that feeling of wanting to jump and cheer and celebrate.
“That would be very nice,”
she said demurely.
“Come on,”
Cassie muttered.
“I’ll show you.”
“And we can sing some more!”
Cassie just grunted.
Which wasn’t a yes, thought, but it wasn’t a no either.
Baby steps, she thought.
She put her guitar down and followed her aunt out into the dark.