Chapter 26 Vin
Chapter 26
VIN
I don’t feel the prick, but I feel the heat. It spreads across my skin, a light tingling creeping down my forehead.
“That okay?” Rose asks.
“I think? It’s not painful,” I say as she wipes an alcohol pad across my temples.
“Good,” Rose says. “I have a few more left.”
I’m lying on my back on the warm bed, trying to remain as still as possible. There’s slight pressure next to my eyebrow.
“I want to add a few more to your arm. I’m glad that’s been working.”
“Uh-huh,” I say.
“Make sure you’re breathing,” Rose reminds me.
I slowly take in a stream of air through my nose.
“You’re very tense,” Rose says. “Can you unfist your hand, please?”
“I was just getting used to doing this in my arm. Not sure how I feel about the needles in my face. Leo admitted to me that he was terrified of this at first.” I stare at the white ceiling while Rose moves around me. “That surprised me.”
“Did it? Why?” she asks.
“He’s always been the one not terrified of anything,” I explain. “Not of reviews or shows, or about not getting enough practice in. When we started playing as the Chao Brothers, he never had any doubts.”
“And you did?”
“When we first started, I guess I wasn’t sure what people expected from us or if we would be a one-hit wonder. Would people want to keep hearing us play rock songs? When we had toured earlier, audiences wanted to hear classical music. That I could do. I didn’t realize that there would be such a big audience for the kind of music we play now. I worried it wouldn’t be sustainable.”
“I take it you think Leo had no worries?” Rose says.
“When something scares him, he actively runs toward it. I prefer knowing what I’m getting into.”
“It’s what makes you both great musicians in your own way. And for what it’s worth, onstage you’re both fearless. Or so it seems.” She focuses on my forearm. There’s more pressure as she places another needle into a specific spot.
I nod against the small pillow. “I appreciate that. Sorry, I’ll be quiet now. I feel like I should be meditating or something.”
“This is your time,” Rose says. “There’s no wrong or right way to do this. If you’d like to keep talking, please continue.”
I tap a slow rhythm out on the sheet. “Oh, okay. Uh. Yeah, I don’t know. Leo would be so relaxed before shows. I envied that. He’d be incredible, and he didn’t have to go through all the excess stress over nothing,” I tell her. “There’s no guarantee for how long this will last for us. We still need to go through the contract. Honestly, I don’t think he wants to keep going. After the breakup and being here, he’s different. Not in a bad way. I guess for the first time he’s… I think he’s scared. If that’s even the right word.”
“What would he be scared of?” Rose asks.
I clench my jaw. In my heightened state of awareness, I feel each muscle tighten. “Working so much that he never actually lives.” I wait a beat to see if Rose will respond, but she doesn’t. I fill the silence and add, “I never thought I’d be fearful of that, but I’m starting to think that maybe I am.”
Rose takes in a sharp breath. “I didn’t have this realization until it was too late,” she says. “When my wife left, the first feeling I experienced wasn’t sadness. It was anger.”
“At the curse?” I venture a guess.
“At myself. Toward the curse I felt annoyance, I suppose. I knew we wouldn’t have our entire lives, of course,” she says, “but it wasn’t until she was gone that it struck me that I wasn’t fully there for the time we did have.”
“Even though you knew you and your wife wouldn’t be together forever, can I ask why you still married her?” I ask. “Weren’t you afraid of being heartbroken?”
Rose uncaps a bottle of essential oil. “Every day,” she admits. “Which is why I practically married my work. I spent more time at the firm than I did at home, and I was great at what I did. I convinced a lot of people to get prenups.” She squeezes a dropper, and oil rises up the tube. “To others, the curse probably sounds dramatic. Extreme. At points in my life, I thought it was, too, even though I had grown up with it. We talked about it as easily as a parent might check in about how school was that day. You hear stories, you’re part of this group.” A look of disappointment appears on Rose’s face. “Then things happen, and, well, sometimes it’s easier to believe in something than to think something’s wrong with you.”
“I know that well.” I turn my head to follow Rose as she circles the acupuncture bed. She drops oil onto a smooth rock, and the room fills with the scent of lavender. I never thought this scent would calm me.
“I didn’t want to admit it to myself, but I loved my wife more than anything, and that terrified me,” Rose shares. “When she left, for reasons not unlike Leo and his ex-girlfriend, it felt like I had been proven right. I went straight back to work, and my first thought was, ‘Good. Work will never leave me.’” She gives her head a firm shake. “I hated myself for thinking that. Ultimately, I felt so badly about all that time I lost with her that I quit the job that took me away from her. My sisters and I started the inn a few years later so that we could give our heartbreak purpose. At first it felt like punishment, and then it felt like the thing that saved me.”
“I’m sorry, Rose,” I say. “It sounds like you were trying to protect yourself. Just like Chryssy has been trying to do. It really is an intergenerational game of telephone.”
Rose’s eyes slide over to me, her eyebrows furrowed.
“Is protecting ourselves really so bad if we’re sparing ourselves from pain?” Rose asks. “A box held the so-called truth to our history, but the truth feels more subjective these days. Why add more stories into the mix and confuse things further?” Her eyes go distant as she says this.
“Do you feel any relief at all about what we’ve learned?” I ask.
Rose straightens her shoulders. “It doesn’t matter what I feel. Change is hard for people.”
“It is,” I agree, shrugging against the bed. “Yet here I am, letting you poke me with needles. And who knows what else will happen with Leo?”
“You think we should tell my family about the Curse Box,” Rose says, watching me.
“They’ll all be here for the product launch tomorrow, right?”
Rose nods.
I think on this. “Honestly, I don’t know. Keeping secrets is exhausting, but you also can’t rush people when they’re not ready,” I say. “The truth is probably always better.” I contemplate my own situation. “If Leo is done with the Chao Brothers, I’d rather know and deal with the pain than keep him from living the life he wants or having a choice in what he does.”
“Why tell them when they can’t do anything about it?” she poses. “The Hua women aren’t used to having choices.”
“Aren’t they? It’s like the inn was your second ending,” I say. “You played through the first ending, but now you’re living your second with different notes. One that you chose.”
“Mister Wise Guy,” Rose mumbles.
I grin. “What did you put in these needles? Does acupuncture always make people this insightful? Leo was quoting Lao Tzu the other day.”
Rose lifts her eyebrows. Her version of smiling. “My technique gets the best results,” she says. “Maybe Leo’s about to find his second ending, too. As are you.”
“I don’t want to stop playing music,” I say for the first time out loud. Maybe, in the back of my mind, the question was outstanding, saved for later. But later is now. It’s a relief to think it, in the middle of being vulnerable and exposed. It’s not just who I am, but who I want to be.
I want the music. I don’t want the strings attached.
Rose taps a needle into my ankle, warmth zinging in the area. “Who says you have to?”
“For a while, I questioned whether I could do this without Leo,” I reveal. “The reality is I probably could do it, but I wouldn’t want to. It’s always been the two of us, and that’s what I’ve enjoyed about it.”
If Leo no longer wants to play, it would be a huge shift. We’d get past it, but I don’t know what that would look like for me.
I sink deeper into the bed, my restricted thoughts starting to flow through me. It would take time to figure out, but what’s the hurry?
“You’ve played solo before,” Rose says as I look up at her. “What would it mean if you did it again?”
I turn my head back to face the ceiling. I’d keep going, but I’m on a path I don’t want to be on. I don’t want my brand.
“I don’t have a good answer for that,” I tell her.
“Then what’s a bad answer?”
I rub the calluses of my fingertips with my thumbs. “I guess the bad answer is that I’d stop playing completely.”
“I’d agree with that,” Rose says. “I speak as a newly inducted Chao-breaker, but please don’t stop. Though if you started playing without Leo, I guess we’d become… Vinheads.”
I huff out a laugh at this. “I’m not sure I could handle my own fan club.”
“I think you can handle a lot more than you think,” Rose says. “What are the songs you hear in your heart? Play those.” She spritzes the air with lavender essential oil. “I’m going to let you rest for half an hour. Try to relax. Breathe. And don’t even think about running out like last time. I don’t want to stand guard, but I will if I must.”
“So, I’m trapped in here. That’s a comforting thought,” I mumble.
She clears her throat, and I promise her I won’t leave.
The door clicks shut as she quietly exits the room.
I look around for something to distract me. I read each and every book title that lines the shelves. My glance darts over to the row of essential oils, and I read those labels, too. Citrus, more lavender, bergamot. Linen curtains graze the leaves of a thriving money tree sitting in the windowsill.
I slowly move my neck back to see what I can find in the room behind me. A small shelf with boxes of acupuncture needles. Alcohol wipes. An infrared heat lamp.
Soft spa music trickles out of a purple boom box that looks like it was made in the eighties. I tap my fingers along the bed and puff out my cheeks in an exhale.
Somewhere behind me, a clock ticks, ticks, ticks. Has it been thirty minutes yet?
I stare at the white ceiling until I’m so restless that I attempt to close my eyes, shifting in the bed to find the most comfortable position.
At first, my mind wanders, skipping around from thought to thought.
Leo makes an appearance as the outcome of the Chao Brothers looms. Then come my parents and their new lives without each other. A nagging guilt of potentially turning down gobs of money comes creeping in. I wonder if, in the end, my heartbreaker reputation will continue to precede me.
My thoughts turn to Chryssy. We’re out in the Plotting Shed, and she’s a miniature version of herself, trapped inside the Curse Box. She slides her hands along the sides, trying to find a way out but can’t.
In the silence of the room, I can both feel and hear my heartbeat quicken. This is the opposite of what Rose instructed me to do. I’m definitely not breathing through this.
I think that’s the end of it. That I’ll be stuck here for twenty-seven more minutes trying to keep my body and mind still and to not fight every urge to get up and move and do anything but this. But then the thoughts come back in full force, morphing into something else completely. Something more peaceful.
It happens the way I hear a song just by looking at the notes. The way I can hear it before I play so I know how I want to approach it. I’m back with Chryssy, and we’re hand in hand walking along the beach, trudging through mud. We’re not clamming, just being. It’s a Yin Night, and she’s showing me her favorite movies. They’re not so tragic anymore. I’m playing my favorite music for her. She tells me her preferred Billy Joel songs, and I play those for her, too. I hear her musical laugh so vividly that, for a second, I think she’s inside the room.
Years pass in seconds. Glimpses of an entire lifetime where we don’t once break up. We never end. I wish she could see what I do. It’s not perfect, but it is real.
I’m warmer than before, my body lightly buzzing with energetics or heat or whatever it is that these needles are doing to me. The corners of my mouth tug upward, just a little. My fingers unfurl, the back of my knuckles brushing the cotton sheets. My feet turn outward. The bed under me is so soft I could melt into it.
And then I do what I haven’t been able to in years.
I relax.
The door clicks open, startling me awake.
“It’s been thirty minutes already?” I ask groggily.
“Not quite,” the voice says, but it doesn’t belong to Rose.
It’s Leo’s.
“How’d you get past the guard?” I ask, watching him cross the small room.
Leo sits in a floral-patterned chair in the corner, facing me. I tilt my head to see him from where I lay.
“I wanted to talk to you and figured this was the best way,” he says. “You can’t run away.”
“Didn’t you hear what happened last time? You can’t trap me.” I shrug as best I can. “You here to talk about Mom and Dad?”
I may have shared how I feel with the group, but I haven’t with Leo. Somehow, we’ve managed to avoid talking about it since we got back.
Leo sighs. “Two breakups in one year. I imagined them growing old together, being grandparents together. But they seem okay, don’t they?”
“Mom will travel. Dad might take up curling, learn a new language, pick up a violin again. Sounds like they want to go to their own auditions. Metaphorically, of course,” I say. “And after being apart for a while, who knows?”
Leo smirks. “Always the romantic,” he says. “After Aubrey, holding out hope like that felt impossible. But maybe you’re right.”
I grunt. “You said her name.”
“Huh. Yeah,” Leo says, rubbing his chin. “I guess I did. I never thought I’d get to this point.” He leans forward on his knees, clasping his hands together. “I read the contract.”
I let a long silence pass. “And?”
“And I think it warrants a bigger discussion,” he says, his tone serious.
Where I’m typically the serious one, I find myself trying to lighten my own mood for what I think is coming. To delay the inevitable.
“You want to have that conversation now ?” I ask, gesturing toward myself.
“I found that during acupuncture, my mind was clearest,” Leo says. “I was totally relaxed, and I couldn’t do anything else. My mind was present. That’s where I need you for this conversation. Feeling good and present.”
“This is an intervention,” I mumble, holding a hand up. “Before you say anything, I want you to know that I support you. If you want to leave, not play music anymore, live your life, I care first and foremost about your happiness. And your health. I know I said all those things about the contract, but you were right. There’s more to life than achieving. We’ll contractually still need to do the tour, but after that you’re on your own. I know I can be a lot.”
A warm buzz zips through me. Getting all that out feels like a release.
“You’ve always been like that,” Leo says. “For as long as I can recall, you’ve always been so mature. Much more mature than me, your older brother. I remember one time after you locked yourself away practicing all day, I had to kick open your door and insist you come outside to take a break.”
I groan at the memory. “Mom was not happy about your theatrics. I didn’t have a door for the rest of the year.”
“Technically it was my room, too. I did learn something that day, though,” Leo says.
“Silver fringe door curtains make for horrible acoustics?” I ask.
“Okay, I learned two things.” Leo shifts in his seat. “I also learned something from you, Vin. I didn’t go back outside. I stayed in and practiced with you. That was the first time we played together. I thought, well shit, if you, a prodigy, needed to practice that much, then what did it mean for me? You taught me diligence and the value of hard work, just by observing you. I carry that lesson with me every day.”
This is a nice moment. Too bad it’s going to be followed up with what Leo’s here to do.
“Thanks, man,” I say, gritting my teeth. “Now get it over with. Break up the band.”
Leo laughs. “I didn’t come here to break up with you, Vin. I needed rest, not retirement.”
“Hold on,” I say, frowning. “You still want to be a Chao Brother?”
“I’ll always be a Chao Brother. It’s literally my name.”
“But you want to… keep playing?” I ask.
“There were a few moments when I wanted to throw it all away,” Leo admits. “But, with a few modifications, I think what we do can be fun again. And despite everything I’m about to say, I’m excited for this tour and to reconnect with Chaobreakers. To hang out with you for a bit.”
“That’ll be nice,” I affirm.
“But now, let me be your older brother for a change,” he says. “We need to take care of ourselves. The way we were living is unsustainable. I have different desires now than I did when we first started. So yes, I want to keep playing, but our lifestyle and schedule can’t go on the way they have. I need balance. I want there to be time to enjoy what we’ve accomplished, as well as what we’re working on. I haven’t felt that in a long time, even before the breakup.”
I agree with him. “I want that, too. There’s time to work toward our goals. It’s not all going to happen immediately,” I say. “But also… I want to start incorporating more of the music we fell in love with.”
“Classical?”
“More of a mash-up style,” I say. “Vivaldi meets Billy Joel.”
Leo’s forehead crinkles in surprise. “I think we can have a lot of fun with that. One day maybe we can even tour with a classical orchestra.”
I point at him. “Exactly.”
“This is going to be better for both of us,” he says, leaning back against the seat.
I return my gaze to the ceiling. A sigh escapes me, yet I’m still not fully relieved.
“There’s something else,” I say, feeling more clearheaded than ever. “You may not be breaking up with me, but I think—I think we need to break up with our label.”
I wait for Leo to say something. I envision the different paths, readying my defense. We could negotiate, try to get even more money for having to put up with a calculated brand. We could threaten to walk away and let them counter against themselves. Or we could walk away for real and start new. Rebuild our reputation and redefine what we play.
It’s a big move, but our label hasn’t grown with us. We can end on good terms, with respect, even. Over the years, we’ve all benefited. But now, they’re the only ones who will benefit while we lose touch with who we are. While we lose balance. It’s not a true partnership if we don’t feel like we’re being accurately represented.
Doing this won’t mean our reputation will be automatically restored. It does mean we’re one step closer to reclaiming it, though. And I won’t just have Leo in this with me. I’ll also have Chryssy.
I can be labeled, but it doesn’t have to define me.
“It’s time to move on,” I say. “And musicians evolve all the time. They pivot and try on new lives, sometimes from album to album. It keeps things interesting. Yo-Yo did a bluegrass album. No more being heartbreakers. No more secret relationships.” I recall what Chryssy said about me being like a bonsai tree. “People can’t put us in small pots anymore.”
“Okay” is all Leo says.
I sit up. “That’s it? Okay?”
“No more small pots,” Leo says, giving me a satisfied smile.
He takes out his phone, and we make the call.