Chapter 26
CASSIE
“Mail for you,” Nora says, and I look up over the piano in my music room, bracing myself for a stack of fan mail.
I’ve been expecting it, considering I’ve been away for nearly three months, and I’m only back here for a show tonight, then a week’s rest until we do our final performances in Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and Mexico City.
I haven’t opened any mail in months, much less replied to any, which I used to love to do, especially to letters from young girls who found their escape, their comfort in music, like I once did.
Because I don’t know if I want to use the music to escape anymore. I don’t think I want to escape anymore, full stop.
But Nora is not carrying a stack of envelopes. She has just one item in her hands. A postcard.
She hands it over and then gives me a cryptic smile before walking out of the room.
A glossy photo of gabled houses along a canal stare back at me. Amsterdam. A postcard from Amsterdam.
I flip it over, a smile already on my face. There is a line of capitalised handwriting and next to it a sketch of a bed, sheets in disarray.
Your scent likes to linger on my sheets. P
After checking that Nora has completely left the room, I clutch the postcard against my chest and hug it close. A tear squeezes out of my eye, and I wipe it away immediately. But it doesn’t stop another coming.
It shouldn’t be this hard.
Not knowing when I’ll see her. Not knowing if I’ll ever see her in the same way again. Not knowing what she’s thinking, what she’s doing, how she’s feeling.
Not that I’ve ever really known how Pia feels, but that last time we were together, in Amsterdam three weeks ago, I felt like something was breaking free inside her. I felt like she was shedding a skin or lifting a facade or just letting me a little closer…
And now it feels like I’m destined to go backwards.
Not that I regret my decision to not create another fake relationship as a cover so I can keep seeing Pia.
Not for a second.
I’m done with Kevin and Haven and everyone else deciding what my story is. I’m not prepared to be a pawn in their sordid scandals, just to sell more records. I’m fed up with my fate being decided by other people, other powers.
It’s one thing to not be able to have the thing I want, but it’s quite another to then be told what I should want or pretend to want instead.
With Pia’s postcard held tight in my hand, I head upstairs to my bedroom.
I tuck it in the back of the book that lies on my bedside table – a copy of A Photographic Guide to American Sign Language – and I then move it to my bed so I can pack it in my bag for the show tonight.
I’m preoccupied as I throw clothes, toiletries and some make-up in there too, but I make sure I have clean underwear and my toothbrush and dental floss.
I think I might be the most boring rockstar on the planet.
In theory, I could come back here after tonight’s performance at the Hollywood Bowl, but I know I’ll be exhausted.
I need a good night’s sleep as I have an appointment with Dr Knudsen, an educational psychologist who once worked with Sandhya Naidoo, a pioneer of dyslexia research and the author of Specific Dyslexia, a book I discovered in a bookshop in Austin, Texas, a few weeks ago, the same bookshop where I bought the sign language book.
It’s not an easy book to read – unlike the ASL book, which is mostly pictures – but Nora has been reading sections to me as I make dinner or have hair and make-up done.
After just a few chapters, I knew I had to find a doctor who knew more.
It took Nora precisely three phone calls and forty-five minutes to make the appointment, and seeing as it’s at lunchtime tomorrow in downtown LA, staying at the hotel will mean I can have an extra thirty minutes of sleep.
“Nora!” I call out as I carry my bag downstairs. “Can you call Heather to come pick me up?”
“Of course,” she calls from the office, and I dump my bag by the front door before heading to the bathroom to freshen up.
The shrill ring of my phone stops me in my tracks.
Pia.
Of course, I think it’s her, hope it’s her.
She’s in Rome today, tonight, whatever. It can’t be showtime yet. Maybe it’s her. Maybe she found a way, because if anyone can, if anyone wanted to, it’s her.
“Cassie!” Nora calls out. My heart rate picks up pace.
“I’ll take it in my bedroom,” I say, racing up the stairs.
“I’ve got it,” I say to Nora when I pick up the handset next to my bed. I wait for the click of her putting the phone down before I speak again. “Hello?”
“Cass,” Stephan slurs.
“What do you want?” I demand, not knowing if the nausea I feel is disappointment that it’s not Pia or disappointment that it’s him. Both – I know it’s both.
I’ve not spoken to him since he spoke to the photographers outside his hotel last week. Since he told them that he’s going to propose to me, the foolish waste of space.
“I need … I need to see you,” he says, and he hiccups. Is he crying?
“Stephan…” I clutch the phone a little tighter. “What’s going on?”
He sniffs. “It’s all so fucked up,” he says.
“What is?”
“Melissa … Vik…The band. I fucked it. I fucked it all up.”
I bite back the urge to agree with him enthusiastically. But it’s not the time. He doesn’t sound … right.
“Where are you, Stephan?”
“Chateau Marmont.”
“Are you alone?”
Another long sniff. “Yeah, George was here, but he’s gone now. Like everyone else. Everyone leaves me eventually.” He’s mumbling, barely coherent. And definitely crying.
“Stephan, you need to sober up,” I sigh as I sit down on the bed. “We’re on stage in less than six hours.”
“I can’t do it…” he says. “I can’t go on stage. It’s all over, Cass. It’s all over.”
“What’s over?”
“Everything! I fucked it…I fucked up.”
“Stephan, I have to go. I don’t have—”
“Wait, Cassie, wait!” he barks.
“What, Stephan?” I ask with gritted teeth, wishing I’d already put the phone down.
“It’s…it’s…Melissa.”
An icy shiver snakes up my back. “What about Melissa?”
“She…” He openly sobs now before gaining control of his voice. “She lost the baby.”
The second I start knocking on his door, I am flooded with regret.
I shouldn’t be here. I should have called Kevin. Or George. Or someone else. It’s not up to me to save Stephan Greene. Not anymore.
But as the door swings open, I realise it’s too late to run away now.
He looks … a mess. His face is puffy and red. Tears and snot everywhere. He’s barely dressed – an open dress shirt and a pair of Y-fronts – and I can smell both today's and yesterday’s alcohol on him before I even step into the room.
“Thank God you’re here, Cass,” he says, and then pulls me inside.
I take hesitant steps into the lounge area of his suite. It’s half-trashed – chairs on their sides, a crack in the glass coffee table and bottles, liquid, stains, cigarette ash and stubs everywhere – and I can barely breathe from the smoke.
“We should call Kevin,” I say.
“No, no!” He shakes his head and waves his hands around. “He’ll ship me off to rehab again.”
“Rehab? Again?” I ask. This is the first I’ve heard of this.
“Just listen, Cass.” He grabs hold of my hand and pulls me through the open sliding doors to the bedroom, which is in a similar dishevelled state.
There’s something about being close to his unmade bed and another array of bottles scattered around various surfaces that has a cold sweat breaking out up my neck.
I’ve never felt like this with Stephan before.
I’ve never felt unsafe with him. Until now.
“Stephan, I’m going to go and get Kevin. And housekeeping and a big pot of coffee.” I try to insert lightness into my voice, but when I turn to leave, he grabs my arm again, and this time hurls me back into the room, my shins knocking against the bed.
“Stephan!” I exclaim. I take a steadying breath before turning around to face him.
He looks completely horrified and destroyed, like he’s the one who just got flung across a room.
“Oh, fuck, I’m sorry, Cass, I’m so sorry.
I keep fucking up. Everything is so … wrong.
So fucked up.” He slides down the wall and curls into a ball, sobs heaving out of his body.
For all the ways he repulses me in this state, I can’t say I wouldn’t be doing the same if I’d lost a child.
“What … what happened?” I ask as I inch slightly closer to him and sit on the end of the bed. “With Melissa? And the baby?”
He stops crying and looks up at me, blinking and confused. “What do you mean?”
“You said on the phone that Melissa lost the baby?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. That’s all a mess too. That bitch.”
“Wait,” I snap. “Did Melissa lose the baby?”
“Well, she may as well have,” he says before starting to crawl across the room towards a half-empty bottle of vodka. “My mum said she’s already had the baby. But she hasn’t told me, the bitch. And now she’s got some poxy restraining order against me. I’ll never see my own child.”
My back straightens, and I have the bitterest taste in my mouth. “You told me she lost the baby,” I spit. “Why would you say that?”
After a swift swig of vodka, he crawls back towards me and wraps his arms around my knees.
Looking up at me, his eyes are wide and restless.
His pupils are so dilated they’re almost completely black.
“To get you here. I needed you to just talk to me. Properly. All these shows. All this time on the road, and we barely speak. And the way you look at me … It’s like you hate me. What have I done to deserve that?”
I try to push his arms off me. “Let me go, Stephan.”
“I just want to try again. I’ll get sober.
I’ll go to rehab even. And I’ll stay this time.
Just as long as you promise me we can try again.
We’ll make more music together. You and me.
Like before. But better.” Spittle flies out of his mouth as he speaks.
I fight to wriggle out of his hold, but it’s useless.
“I don’t … I don’t want that,” I tell him.
“You do, Cassie, you do. It’s what you’ve always wanted,” he mumbles as he tightens his hold and squeezes around my calves. He rubs his head against my thighs, and I swear I could throw up.
“You…” I try in vain to get him off me. “You have no clue what I want. What I really want.”
He stills and looks up at me then. “Is it true?” he asks in a low, sinister hiss, like he just instantly sobered up.
“Is what true?” I freeze, startled by the ice in his stare.
“You and her. Pia Lindberg.” He spits out her name, like it’s poisonous, and I could hit him, thump him, kick him for that alone.
“Let me go, Stephan,” I say.
It’s a great surprise when he does what I ask, so much so I pause before I rush to stand.
He’s still on his knees, looking at me, waiting for my next move, but as soon as I start to walk towards the door, he moves too.
I make it three steps before there’s the vice of his hands around my ankle and I’m pulled down to the ground.
I land with a heavy thump, my eyes closing on impact.
I’m confident I’ve gotten my hands down, that I haven’t hit my head, but then I feel something warm and wet run down the side of my face.
Then there is a sharp, piercing pain drilling into the side of my head.
Groaning, I bring a hand up to my right eye, which I can’t open for some reason, but my fingers never make it to my face.
And it doesn’t matter if I can open my eye or not, because everything, everything inside and out goes black anyway.