Chapter 19 Mari
Nineteen
Mari
It was strange how easily I was able to separate Ryan in my professional life from Ryan as my friend.
I think that bothered her too. There were times she’d come down a floor to the Madcap administrative offices to talk with me, and I would be like, I can’t take a break, I’m in the middle of something, I’m literally trying to sell your image, and you need to give me a second.
I don’t know why she asked me to come work for her team. Maybe she thought it would be different. Maybe she wanted to help me jump-start my career. But sometimes I wondered if she just wanted another friend on the inside to talk to.
It was also—I don’t know. It created kind of a tough dynamic. I mean, she was the star. She was Ryan—everyone referred to her by first name only. Ryan liked this. Ryan didn’t like that. Ryan wants a Diet Coke, can someone run it up to her? She was above all of us, literally. She was other.
And I was working a really cool job, way cooler and better paying than anything my old UCLA friends had snagged, but it was still a job. I did my taxes. I filled my car with gas at the station on Washington Boulevard. I separated my whites and colors for laundry.
Ryan had someone to do all that stuff for her. She didn’t in the early days, but she’d begun her career so young that now, being so prolific felt normal to her. And sometimes I think she forgot we were living different lives.
Anyway, she learned to leave me alone when I was at work and to spend time with me when she normally would have outside those hours. Except one day when she came down and sat in the cubicle next to me and pulled a chair over.
I pulled myself out of whatever I’d been looking at—probably invoices for social ads. I booked a lot of those—and I said, “Yeah?”
“I want to go home,” she said.
“What,” I said. “Like the song? The one you wrote about Justin?”
She shook her head. “What do you think about a tribute to Hamilton? What if we shot something there?”
It took me a second to figure out what she was talking about. She had so many high-level conversations, and I was always in the weeds. “Is this a Serge conversation you’re trying to have with me?”
“Stop being corporate, Mari,” she said, snapping her fingers. “I need you to be just regular Mari right now. My friend.”
“Sorry,” I said. “What do you have in mind?”
“I had this weird dream last night,” Ryan said, and she wasn’t looking at me anymore. “I went home to Hamilton, and nobody knew who I was. I mean, not even my parents. Not Frank. Not you. Have I changed that much?”
I said, “Well, you’ve changed. But you’re supposed to. When’s the last time you even talked to Frank?”
It came out more accusatory than I meant it, but she was the one who’d brought it up. “Maybe a year or two ago. He called me to congratulate me on the AMA win.”
“That was about five years ago, Ryan.”
She stared at me. “No.”
“Yes.”
“When’s the last time you talked to Frank?” she asked. “He’s still—?”
I had to laugh. I said, “He’s not that old, Ryan. I think I sent him an email last year on his birthday.”
Ryan shook her head and said, “Shit.”
I didn’t tell her about how Frank still asked how Ryan was doing after all these years or that he’d mentioned to me that he listened to her every song.
“You’ve been busy,” I said. “He understands.”
“It’s not an excuse,” she said. “That settles it. We’re going.”
Jasmine
It was late summer—when Ryan, Wilder, and I were having coffee up on the rooftop again, during one of our little low-stakes hangouts that had replaced our studio sessions—that she got her creative momentum back.
She and Wilder seemed to have gotten over whatever issues they’d had and were sitting on the wicker couch across from me again. I once joked to Skip that those two would make a good pair, but he said, “Don’t you dare speak that into existence. We can’t lose that guitarist.” Ha. So I dropped it.
Ryan had a look on her face like she had a secret, and she gave me a small smile as she set her phone on the table.
“So . . . I’ve been working on a little something,” she said, and tapped the screen.
Her voice sang out a little tinny through the iPhone speakers, just her and the banjo.
Wake me when you’re lonely / Don’t pace the floor alone / Keep me like a secret, baby / I’m waiting by the phone.
And there was another: Someday will you take me / To that house up on the hill?
I grinned at her. “Sounds like we’re back.”
A third song started playing automatically. Just a whisper in the night / That’s how all of this went down . . . but Ryan picked up the phone and winked.
“That one’s not ready yet,” she said. “That’s for the next album.”
It was a recording of what would eventually be “Hear Me Now.”
Serge
I was surprised when it was Ryan who called a meeting with me, not Skip. In fact, looking back, I am not sure he even knew about that meeting—she told me he’d gotten busy and she wanted to get started talking about the next project, but I didn’t really connect with the others about it until later.
But she was always a step ahead. So I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise.
She wanted it to be what I would call an “autobiographical allegory.” No clear through line of a plot with this one, but a cacophony of imagery and symbolism that was representative of her life and career up to this point.
Hamilton would be featured significantly, and she asked whether I’d be willing to make a trip with her and the others to do some early location scouting.
“It will be a big project,” I said. “But you came to the right person.”
We left for Massachusetts soon after that meeting.
Frank
Mari orchestrated the whole thing. It was a beautiful moment. Oh, it was beautiful.
She invited me out to coffee to get me out of the studio.
There we were, at Halligan’s on Bay Road once again like no time had passed.
I couldn’t believe Mari was back in town!
I was so glad to see her, told her how much her folks missed her, how quiet it had been around Hamilton since Ryan had left, and then her. Asked after her harp practice.
She laughed and said, “Still shooting for half an hour a day, Frank, scout’s honor.”
I told her I was still the same old same old. Mari was the one with this glittering new life on the Gold Coast, not me.
“That’s good you’re working with Ryan,” I said. “She needs you in her corner. I hope she’s doing okay out there.”
“I hope so too,” Mari said.
“You don’t know?” I asked. “You should know better than anyone.”
She sighed and said, “I know. But she’s changed a lot. She had a dream about this place the other week, and it rattled her a little. I think remembering her roots is making her realize how far she’s come.”
I winked at her. “You’ve changed too.”
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to her, but she sort of frowned and said, “I guess I have.”
I could have sat there catching up all day with Mari and been content. But when she said, “Can we swing back to the studio?” I knew she had something up her sleeve.
When I walked back into my shop, it had been transformed.
There was space cleared, a little stage set up at one end of the barn, lights hung, and a group of chairs set out. And in the middle of it all was Ryan.
I don’t even know what kind of exclamation came out of my mouth, but she came up and gave me a hug—it was so good to see her.
She had become so tall. And she did seem different, in a way.
Like Alice in Wonderland when she has those snacks and becomes too big for her surroundings.
I wondered if Hamilton felt too tight on her now, like it’d shrunk around her.
But when she smiled, she was the same old Ryan.
“I’m here to make up for all the times I said I’d call you back but didn’t . . . or missed your birthday . . . or lost track of time,” she said. “Can I play something I wrote just for you?”
I’m not ashamed to admit I got choked up. “You’ve already taken over my studio, so you can do whatever you want,” I said.
She played a whole little concert for me and for the others who were there—Mari, her songwriting partner Jasmine, someone named Sarge, I think? And that young guitarist of hers was there too. He was a handsome young man, and I raised my eyebrows at Ryan when she introduced us.
She gave me a look. So I knew they must have been together.
None of my business, though!
Mari
I let Frank believe that we were there just for him—I didn’t tell him about the location scouting or the music video or any of that stuff. He needed his moment with Ryan, and he got it. She played her exclusive show, and we spent the rest of the night with him talking and catching up.
I was watching Ryan closely the whole time we were in Hamilton. We stayed with the rest of the crew in a hotel over in Hathorne—that’s Hamilton for you, no hotels—but she and I took a walk down Bay Road like we used to as dusk came on and the others went to pick up dinner.
“Is it like you imagined it?” I asked her.
“It’s nice and quiet,” she said.
I’d forgotten how much I missed it. I missed seasons; I missed the smell of pine trees and that faint sea air you could feel even fourteen miles inland. The empty street was a far cry from downtown LA.
But I imagine Ryan meant the solitude too.
We’d been lucky in keeping this visit under wraps, and I’d struck a deal with our local outlets that they would get exclusive content as long as they waited to publish until after we were gone.
It felt strange, in fact, to walk down the street without worrying about someone coming after us.
“I never thought I’d be back,” she said. “At one point, I thought I’d want to settle down here. But after I’d been in LA long enough, I guess I sort of . . . forgot about it. I remember growing up here like it was a different lifetime.”
“I do too,” I told her, and the second I said it, I was surprised to realize that I meant it.
“Sometimes I wish we’d never done it,” she said suddenly, stopping short.
“Left Hamilton?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “What have we become?”
It’s strange, but I knew what she meant. Standing there on Bay Road, it was like I was seeing Ryan again for the first time in a long time. The Ryan I used to know.
The path she had chosen for herself, the fans she had amassed, the media—it had built her up into something almost inhuman, more than human.
She wasn’t just a cog but a full machine of her own creation, chugging along at full speed, unable to stop her own momentum.
It was the billboard in Chinatown. It was the merchandise we churned out through marketing.
It was the snap assumptions people made when they read any headline about her, misleading or not.
“Would you have been happier if we hadn’t left?” I asked after a moment.
“That’s the problem.” Ryan sighed. “I know that I wouldn’t have been.”
I wrapped my arm around her shoulders, shorter than her though I was. “Then you’re right where you should be,” I said.
When we got back to Frank’s shop and said goodbye, we all split up in separate cars to drive to Hathorne.
Listen, I thought Ryan was going to ride with me, but she got lost in the shuffle. And I didn’t know exactly where she was when I got a text from her that said Stopped to pick something up soon after the rest of us had arrived at the hotel.
The rest of us, that is, except Wilder.
I do know, however, that Ryan didn’t show up until an hour later, and when she got back to our shared room, it looked like she had been crying.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
She rubbed her eyes and said, “Yes. It’s this stupid town. I can’t handle myself here.”
“Was it Wilder?” I asked, and when she started to protest, I said, “Ryan, come on. What is the point of being so secretive and dramatic? You obviously drove together. Just spit it the hell out.”
And—listen. I can say this now. It’s in the past. Okay?
But yes. Ryan did say, “Fine! Fine. Maybe there was something between us, okay? But now it’s done. So we all might as well forget it.”
I left it at that.