Chapter 20
“What the hell, Sicily?” I was across the room in an instant, whipping the paper out of her hands. “What part of don’t did you not understand?”
“Sorry.” She scrabbled to gather all the bits and pieces from where she sat. “I’m sorry. I just—”
“And get my boots off your feet,” I said.
She’d been singing one of my own song fragments.
All my songs were fragments, of course, just soft-furred baby critters still nuzzled up against me for survival.
They couldn’t walk on their skinny, shaking legs yet!
But this one, the one I’d taken from her hands, was my most recent failure.
The melody still hung out in the air, defenseless.
“Sorry.” Sicily pulled off one boot by the heel. “We wear the same size. I wasn’t stretching them out or anything.”
“That’s actually not the point,” I said, grabbing up the other sticky notes and mouth-wiped cocktail napkins from around her. I smoothed them, poor orphans, into a neat pile. “I assumed the blanket don’t would cover not snooping into my private things and not putting my clothes on your body.”
I’d been stuffing pieces of potential songs into the Frye boots like a savings account, a private one, and now I had nowhere to stow them. I held them to me helplessly. A Post-it fluttered to the ground. It wasn’t a lyric or musical notation but a phone number—and I didn’t remember whose.
“I’ve just always wanted…” Sicily said.
I felt myself stiffen. I wasn’t ready for this slumber party.
“Do you call them cowboy boots?” she asked. “I bet they were expensive.”
“They were secondhand,” I said. “As all of my stuff is.”
“Wow,” she said. “Anticonsumerism.”
“Anti spending money I don’t have,” I said.
But it was probably more than that. I wore other people’s clothes and lived in other people’s homes and sang other people’s songs. I put on other people’s lives. It was easier than living my own.
“Those aren’t secondhand, though,” she said.
She had slipped out of the second boot, and now put them side by side near me, retrieved the fallen Post-it, and put it on the upturned crate next to my mattress.
She stood, bashful now, in mismatched socks.
“The songs, I mean. You wrote them, right? That’s my number, in case you ever … you know. Feel like texting?”
“I don’t have a phone right now,” I said. “And don’t be impressed by that. It’s just my poverty.” I gazed down at the stack of my song notes, my scrawl completely indecipherable—or so I had thought. “You were singing one of the songs. You can read music?”
“I took piano for, like, ever,” she said. “I liked that one.”
“It isn’t finished.”
“Duh,” she said. “It could use some words.”
It had some lyrics—about the dogs and how wiggly they were. They were very wiggly.
“Are any of them finished, though?” Sicily said.
I took my stash of songs to my bed and put them under my pillow, then sat on the edge of my mattress and swapped out my red show boots for the Fryes, now that they weren’t being used as a piggy bank. They were warmer.
“Sorry,” Sicily said. She replaced her own boots—the silly suede ones with bows at the back—and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I shouldn’t have … you know. Are you mad at me?”
I sighed. “I’ll get over it if you stop asking me about it.”
“Okay,” she said. “You look … upset. Like you’ve been crying?”
I didn’t want to talk about it. The two streams of my life did not need to cross.
Two lives, kept separate. That’s what Marisa had said she’d done, and I hated that I understood, finally, what she’d meant.
“You play piano,” I said, to shake Marisa from my thoughts. “That’s cool.”
“Except I couldn’t do the recitals,” Sicily said.
“Oh, right,” I said. “Your stage fright.”
She looked like she wanted to say something.
“What?” I asked.
“It’s more than stage fright,” she said. “I have … all-the-time fright. Like, anxiety?”
“Oh.”
“Like, I get sweaty and heart-racy and I can’t breathe,” she said. “And I feel like—like I’ll die.”
“Like, when you meet a guy you think is hot or what?”
“No, just … sometimes,” she said. The round toes of her silly boots nudged at each other.
“Anytime. I don’t know. Like when I’m in a crowd or when I’m alone.
Or when something important is happening that could, like, ruin the outcome of my entire life?
Big tests at school and stuff. I’m having a little trouble with …
everything. College, especially. My grades are not great?
And now … Mom.” She put her chin on her knees, balling herself up.
Marisa was still missing, then, and here the kid was trying to take a break from thinking about it, being here.
“I kinda wish I could start over,” Sicily said. “Or just … stop for a minute, figure it all out.”
“I don’t have a lot of advice to give,” I said. “I haven’t figured out a thing.”
Her miserable little face looked back at me.
Where was Oona? She’d be all over this anxiety stuff, full of advice and links and best products to try. She could be very mother-ish.
“Okay, so … what’s keeping you from taking a break to figure things out?” I asked. “A gap year or whatever they call it.”
“If I took a semester off school,” Sicily said, “my parents would have synchronized strokes.”
“Marisa being such a type A personality, historically,” I said.
“It’s weird that you call her that,” Sicily said.
“For the record, I have called her much, much worse.” I stood up. “Come on. I guess.”
STILL MORE THAN THREE HOURS before opening, McPhee’s was dark and quiet. I got the lights on, pulled a soda for Sicily, and suggested the corner booth so she’d be out of my way. I needed to sweep the floors and think.
When I came back from the storeroom with the broom, she was still standing at the bar.
“This is your job?” she said. “No offense.”
“Just helping out, uh, the owner,” I said. “My job is…” I jutted my chin toward the stage.
Sicily walked over and stepped up onto the stage, then turned and looked out at all the empty tables. I could almost feel her skinny legs knocking together at the knees. “This is the only way I could do this,” she said, her voice high. “The room empty and no spotlight. You’d have to leave.”
“It’s the only thing I can imagine doing,” I said sadly. It all seemed pretty impossible at the moment, figuring out a way to keep going.
She walked over to the piano, lifted the fallboard over the keys, and plunked a couple of notes. “Why aren’t any of your songs finished?”
“It’s complicated,” I said.
She spread her fingers on the keys and played a chord, then another. That little bitch was working on my song.
“If you love it…” she said.
“It’s … hard, okay? Not like ditch-digging or coal-mining or whatever but …
writing my own songs costs me something I don’t always have.
I want them to be good, not just okay. Good.
The best. I want someone to hear one of my songs and say that’s my favorite.
You know? Like, that song saved my life—and mean it.
That song reminded me of the best time of my life or that song got me through the toughest time—” I swallowed hard.
“There are so many good songs, and I don’t know if mine are,” I said.
“If they’re good. Or if they’re the right kind of songs, or if I’m the right kind of singer. ”
Sicily lifted her head, as though she’d heard a note she recognized.
There was pounding at the back door. I handed her the broom and went to get it.
Yeah, don’t worry. I used the peephole.
It was Kyler, the delivery guy from the beer distributor. I opened the door.
“Oh, good, you’re already in,” Kyler said, turning to his cart and wheeling it backward with a thunk over the raised threshold.
Bottles rattled dangerously in their cases.
“We just got in some things Alex said he wanted for the holidays so I thought I’d drop them by while I was in your radius. Took a chance.”
I held the door for him, then went ahead and opened the fire door to the pub, but something was niggling deep in my brain and I wasn’t sure what it was.
Sicily was standing down at the end of the hallway. Kyler pulled up when he saw her. “Hey, there,” he said.
“Um,” she said. “Hi. There.”
“Kyler, this is my, uh, sister,” I said. “Apparently.”
“Sisters are the best,” he said, grinning big. “I’ve got two. What’s your name?”
“Sicily,” she said in a strangled voice, her peaches-and-cream complexion going full tomato. I was staring at her, wondering what it was I couldn’t quite remember.
“My favorite island,” Kyler said. “You ever seen The Godfather? Part Two?”
Then I had it. Sicily had already been eyeballing Kyler, in the security video from the day Marisa was here and then, poof, gone.
“Ky,” I said. “Why didn’t you use the front door?”
“What do you mean?” he said. He rolled his cart to the door of the storeroom and paused. “I always use the alley. That’s what she’s for.”
Sicily and I looked at each other. Right.
“But the other day—” Sicily started.
“Oh, this week? That’s the thing,” he said. “Wednesday, there was a truck hotboxing the alley. Couldn’t get in or out, so I had to improvise. Alex’s not pissed at me, is he?”
The truck in the alley.
I reassured him no one was upset with him. “Do you remember what kind of truck it was? Anything at all?”
He screwed up his face. “Standard city driver type of ride. P and D, white.” He looked at Sicily.
“Pickup and delivery,” he said, a bit importantly, then turned back to me.
“No company logo that I saw. Probably a twenty-footer. Oh, and they had a janky spare slapped on the front driver side. They’re definitely gonna throw off their suspension. ”
Sicily looked at me. “Is it important? Do you think they know where Mom is?”
“No,” I said.
But the timing was interesting. If I was right about the comings and goings of the alley that night, the drivers of that truck might know something about how Joey had ended up dead.