Chapter 5
Six weeks went by, and nothing happened, which turned out to be its own kind of event.
She did not sign. Angela did not push. The lawyers on the other side answered everything in a day and agreed to everything and it was, Angela said, like fighting a man who kept handing you his sword.
The divorce sat in a drawer somewhere in Charlotte, complete and unsigned, the way a loaded thing sits.
Shane did not call. He did not come. In nine weeks he had sent exactly one text, in October, four words long: tell me if anything.
She had not answered it, and he had not sent another, and she was aware that this was the longest either of them had gone without speaking since she was eighteen years old.
November got cold early. She bought a coat two sizes up at a place on Haywood and told the woman it was for a friend, which was a strange lie to tell a stranger, and she thought about it later and could not explain it.
Fifteen weeks. Her body had made its announcement. Nobody in West Asheville looked twice at a woman in a big coat.
The appointment on Biltmore Avenue was the third week of November, at eleven in the morning, and she went to it alone.
She had thought about asking Jill to fly up. She had gotten as far as typing it and had not sent it, and she could not have told anybody why, except that a person who asks for company has admitted something.
The waiting room had six other women in it and five of them had somebody with them. She counted. She did not want to count and counted anyway, and then read a magazine about kitchens for twenty minutes.
The tech was about twenty-five and very kind and talked the whole way through it, which Jenna understood was a skill they teach.
"Do you want to know?" she said. "You don't have to today."
"Yes."
"It's a girl."
Jenna lay on a table in a dark room in a building on Biltmore Avenue with a screen turned toward her and heard the sound coming out of the speaker, fast and stupid and enormous, and it went straight through the middle of everything she had spent six weeks building.
A girl.
She got as far as the parking lot before she took her phone out.
His name was still at the top of her favorites.
She had not moved it. She looked at it for a long time, with the heater running and her coat open, and she thought about how in any other version of her life she would already be talking, she would have called him from the table with the tech still in the room, and he would have made a noise she had never heard him make before.
She locked the phone and put it in the cup holder.
Then she drove to a hardware store, because she had told herself she would go to a hardware store, and bought a lamp she did not need, and cried in the aisle with the extension cords for about four minutes, and then paid for the lamp.
That night she wrote the best of the seven songs.
She wrote every day. That was the actual news of those six weeks, if anyone had asked.
She wrote seven songs in November, and four of them were the best she had ever done, and she knew it the way she always knew it, without pride and without much interest in arguing about it.
She wrote them on a folding table with a pencil in a room with a sloped floor while a compressor ran under the boards, and she would think, years later, that she had never been more purely herself than in that terrible narrow month.
Thanksgiving she spent with Jill in Nashville because Jill drove up and got her and would not discuss it.
Jill's brother came, and his kids, and a neighbor with a dog, and it was loud and easy and nobody handled her.
At some point in the afternoon Jill's nephew, who was nine, asked her what she did.
"I write songs."
"Like for the radio?"
"Sometimes."
"Do you have one I'd know?"
And Jenna sat on a step in a stranger's back yard and sang him eight bars of something he did in fact know, and watched a nine-year-old's face do the thing faces do, and it was — she would think about this for a long time — the single best moment of that entire autumn.
It was the first one in twenty years she had not cooked for fourteen people in a house on a hill.
She got through the day fine. She got through the pie fine.
Then at nine that night the radio in Jill's kitchen played "Hold Still" and Jenna went and stood in the yard in the cold for six minutes, and when she came back in Jill had turned it off and neither of them said anything about it.
The envelope came on the second of December.
Padded, hand-addressed, no return. She knew the handwriting from twenty years of reel boxes.
Inside was a hard drive, the small ugly kind you buy at an airport, and a piece of paper folded once.
One word on it.
Everything.
She put it on the folding table and looked at it, and then she went out and walked to the river and back, which took an hour and a half, and when she got home it was still on the table.
She didn't open it that night.
She opened it Wednesday morning with coffee she wasn't drinking.
It was not the shared drive. That was the first thing she understood. The shared drive had been what he put there — trimmed things, keepers, the two-minute cuts. This was the raw. This was his phone and his laptop and the session machine turned upside down and shaken out.
There were folders for months. There were folders inside the folders.
There were the memos, untrimmed. Not the two-minute versions. The forty-minute versions, with the dead air and the tuning and the coughing and the three-quarters of an hour where nothing works.
She listened to a day in February all the way through, four hours of it, sitting on the mattress with her back against the wall.
It was awful. Not because it was intimate. Because it was bad.
She heard her husband, who could sing anything, spend two hours failing to write a second verse.
She heard him get pleased with a line that was cheap, and heard the young woman, carefully, not say anything, and heard him say it again like a man knocking on a door.
She heard him talk about his own catalogue in a room with a stranger, the way men do, telling stories that had the sanded edges of stories told a lot.
And then, in the middle of the third hour, she heard him say:
"My wife would've had this in four minutes."
The room on the recording went quiet.
Sadie Kaye said, "Do you want to call her?"
And Shane said, "No."
Jenna stopped it.
She got up and stood at the window for a while. The bike shop compressor came on and ran and stopped.
Then she sat down and started it again, because she had decided somewhere on the walk to the river that if she was going to do this she was going to do all of it.
It took two days.
There were the text threads. Not screenshots — the whole export, everything, in order.
Hal, in January: Kaye's the one. Trust me.
Hal, in March: Don't play it for J yet. Let it breathe.
Hal, in July: Nothing goes to Jenna till after the single. I mean it. Let me handle the wife.
Let me handle the wife.
She read that one four times and then got up and was sick, and could not have told anybody afterward which part of it did it.
Shane, in July, to Hal: she gave me a song in august last week i mean. it's better than mine.
Hal: Then cut it next record.
Shane: yeah
There were the threads with Sadie, and they were the strangest part, because there was nothing in them.
No flirting. Not one line. Eight months of a man sending demos at three in the morning and a twenty-seven-year-old writing back !
!!! and ok the second one, and once, in May, Are you okay?
You sound tired — and Shane, twenty minutes later: im great. best year ive had in a while.
Best year I've had in a while.
That was the sentence that got her, in the end. Not the memos, not the photographs of her notebook. That one, typed at one in the morning in a hotel somewhere, to a girl he barely knew, in the year his wife had been alone on a mountain writing his record.
The last folder on the drive was dated the twenty-eighth of September.
The night she left.
There was one file in it. Fifty-one minutes.
She almost didn't. She sat with the cursor on it for a long time.
It was the barn. She knew the barn's sound the way she knew her own hands — the room tone, the hum in the board, the way the high window rattled a little when a truck went by on the road.
For the first three minutes there was nothing at all. Just the room, and breathing.
Then he said, "Okay."
Then nothing for a while.
Then: "Jenna, I — " and it stopped.
Then: "Jenna. I know what I — " and it stopped.
He tried it nine times. She counted. Nine starts, none of them past six words, and between them long stretches of a man sitting in a room he built with a woman he had just lost, not crying, not talking, doing nothing, for the better part of an hour.
At forty-four minutes he said, in a completely different voice — flat, almost curious, like a man reading a diagnosis off a chart:
"You don't get to have the apology. You'd take it."
And then, after a pause:
"You'd take it and then you'd be stuck with me."
The file ran another seven minutes of nothing and ended.
Jenna sat on the floor of a one-room apartment over a bike shop with her hand pressed flat over her mouth.
He hadn't sent it. That was the thing. It had sat on a machine in the barn for nine weeks.
He had not attached it to a text, had not read it out on a stage, had not let Hal hear it.
It had gone onto this drive because he had put everything onto this drive, in a padded envelope, hand-addressed, with a note that said one word and made no request.
He had also, on the same drive, in the same folder tree, included the messages where he sounded worst, and Hal saying let me handle the wife, and four hundred hours of proof that he had not written a song since he was thirty.
Any one of those things could end him. All of them together, in Grady Ames's hands, or Angela Mackey's, would have ended him twice over.
He had put them in the mail.