Chapter 55
I caught sight of the blazing eyes of the redheaded beer girl on the wall and turned my back to her.
I was letting her down, just as I had let down everyone else. Alex, Oona. Sicily. Even Marisa, somehow.
Myself. There was a person out there ahead of me, someone I was supposed to become.
I had things I still wanted up there in the light.
All those songs I wanted to write. All the stages I hoped to play.
Maybe one of those golden gramophone statuettes with my name on it on a mantel someday, gold records framed on the walls.
Instead, I was here, stuck in a hole, crying a little bit, feeling sorry for myself.
But, except for the part about being in a literal hole, hadn’t that been true for a while now? A work in progress, except I hadn’t made any.
Dahlia McPhee, look at yourself.
I sat back in the dust and sniffled into the sleeve of my sweater. Alex’s sweater.
I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what some people possessed that kept their hope burning bright. Not gold records, not acclaim. Even the songs they wrote were just placeholders for the real stuff. And I had it, too. I just hadn’t ever found the right words. But did it matter which words you used?
Sing anyway. I guess I got what Sachin had meant now.
I loved Alex. He was my home. Not the bar, not the stage. Not the building. He could sell it if he wanted. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered, except—
I had meant to tell him all this time. Not just sweep the floors like it was some secret code. Even though, yeah, he spoke the code. He’d taught me the code. I’d meant to say the actual words. I loved him.
I had to tell him. And tell him—and mean it—that I wanted him and Oona to be happy. I didn’t get marriage, exactly, had never really seen it up close. Maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention.
I guess I understood family, though. Family made itself out of whatever materials it found. Out of scraps, if necessary. Out of strays.
But I’d never said the words. And why? Because it cost me too much? Because if I poured myself out, I’d be somehow depleted? I didn’t feel wrung out when I thought about what Alex meant to me. I felt full, brimming. I had it to give. There was more to me.
Surely, there had to be more.
I hadn’t meant to put it all off for some moment in the future, to keep all my songs to myself. I had meant to be something here, now. Someone.
Someone drinking hot chocolate by the fire, eating burgers with the band.
Listening to the thump of boot heels against the floor of McPhee’s, singing songs I loved and songs I’d written.
I wanted all that. Maybe I did want Alex to keep McPhee’s open, because I wanted song circles on Sunday morning and writing sessions in the corner booth, my community crowded around the tables shoved together, pint glasses filled, raised, and emptied as we swapped stories and songs late into the night.
Live, laugh, love, and see this dumb life to its natural end.
Then someday far, far in the future, if I lived it whole and full, I’d be willing to close my eyes and call this world quits, an old lady in peacock blue and sequins.
Give me the funeral of a Viking, my candle lighting the north branch channel of the Chicago River as a chorus of friends and grandchildren wailed Patsy Cline from the shore, the sweetest damn thing you ever heard.
That’s how you went out. Fighting. Not bricked up in this tomb. Not waiting for someone to aim a gun down a pit. Not waiting to hear which of my friends made it out, and which of them …
Not stuck.
Not trapped, helpless, rabbit pulse rising.
The redhead blazed at me from the wall. She hadn’t raised me to give up without a brawl.
I turned away from the light, peering back into the dark of the speakeasy, but there was nothing to drag over. Just a broken chair that wouldn’t hold me.
My nerves jangled as I struck off back the way I’d come, scraping along old floors and knocking into debris all the way to the slot of light from the storeroom bathroom, high, high above. Would Quin still be there? What if—
I could feel my breath getting short and I imagined Jim and Ned, the door, Quin, the guns—
My heart gave a hard thump at what I might have heard, with three guns in play.
Had Quin taken charge? Or had he bled out in the storeroom, no help to anyone?
I spun in place, my boot brushing up against something that scraped away with a metallic rasp.
The walls were closer, the air dustier.
I couldn’t catch my—
A pinpoint of memory: the thin-aired stratosphere of the scuttle space. I’d been far out on a limb just like this, lungs collapsing, the walls pressing in.
How? How had I come back from that?
I could do all my animal noises. I dug for Marisa’s voice in the scuttle space, for—
Sunshine. For the familiar tune to sing me home.
I focused there. On my breath, in. On my breath, out, pushing away thoughts as they occurred, Alex, Sicily, the bright blood at Quin’s cuff, until I had recaptured my runaway breath and could fill my chest with a tuneless hum.
When I came back to myself, I was sitting on the cold bottom step under the opening we’d climbed through, the wood cold through my leggings. I could feel my sore throat, smell mold, taste dust in the air. I was thirsty.
I wiped at my eyes with the back of my wrist and brought in a big, shaky breath. Here, now.
Seemed like something else ran in the family, didn’t it?
Next to my boot lay the towel bar Quin had dropped as a sounding rod from the opening. I picked it up and cradled it in the crook of my arm, the scepter of a beauty queen. A weapon, if necessary. It was something. What else did I have?
I stood up. The stairs we’d used to climb out of the opening ran against the wall, up into shadow. Stairs to where? Did it make sense to build a staircase that didn’t go anywhere? Had Pascal tried?
I scrambled up the steps, heels on wood, going quickly, starting to hope—
My boot shot through the crumbling wood of a broken tread.
I saw the dark void rising up to swallow me and then I was clinging to the broken stair, looking down into blackness, my life split in two. One of us lay here gasping on the stairs, near miss, and the other, small, lay below, reaching up from the dark.
I clutched at the stairs, catching my breath. The black void of my nightmares had always been a metaphor, man. And now it was a real place. Was that good news? Or a bummer?
Worse, now that I had climbed the stairs, I could see that the staircase led, Escher-style, up to the ceiling. A dead end.
What was the point of all this? House of Horrors wasn’t actually a bad name for this joint. Edith Maxwell could have the place.
But no, I would wipe the smile off that bitch’s smug face. I would see Ned in jail for what he’d done to Joey. And Silent Jim—
If he’d laid a hand on Alex, this cowgirl would see him to hell herself.
I picked myself up gingerly and poked the towel rod at the ceiling. Was that a little bit of give? I could feel a stretch in it, a warp to thin wood. A hesitant answer to my question.
I was aware of my breath blowing against the ceiling as I swept my hand along searching for the thinnest fault line, an edge—
Johnny Cash.
Making sure of my footing, I jammed the sharp edge of the towel bar into the narrow fissure, wedging it as deeply as I could, my hands sweaty on the metal and the taste of dust in my mouth. I leveraged my weight until the wood spoke real words to me: complaining, cracking, splitting.
A hinge I couldn’t see groaned painfully and the barrier above me flung wide. I heard a thud, and pages of slick paper rained down around me and slid past me on the stairs.
I hauled myself out on hands and knees, shaking. Into darkness. Again.
Was it progress?
I felt for the trapdoor and closed it gently—before I fell through it or someone followed me up.
A trapdoor, a basement I had never seen. I’d believed I’d explored every inch of this place over the years. But McPhee’s had secrets. Secrets I had once known, then forgotten.
I stretched my hands out, found a wall, and stood, but not cautiously enough. The crown of my head found the edge of a low ceiling.
I felt something against my cheek and swiped at it wildly. But it was only a thin string. When I pulled on it, I was rewarded with the light of a naked bulb showing the underside of a staircase. Below my feet, a carpet of outdated McPhee’s Tavern menus.
I scuffed at the pile of them with my boot. Below the square toe of my boot was a big, black X.