Chapter 8
The box set had been in production for fourteen months and nobody had told her about it until Hal left a schedule on her folding table in October.
Six records, remastered. A disc of live material. A disc of outtakes. Forty pages of notes. It shipped in April, it was already sold in, and on the ninth of October it had become legally impossible.
"You're a credited writer on all of it now," Angela said. "Which means the mechanical licenses are yours to grant. Which means it does not ship without your signature."
"So I don't sign it."
"You could do that." Angela let a beat go by. "It would kill about four million dollars of other people's work and roughly nobody would blame you."
Grady's opinion, delivered at volume from a truck stop outside Knoxville: "Sign it. That box is going to be the thing that proves it, Jenna. Forty pages of notes with your name on every line, sitting in people's houses forever. You don't get that twice."
The problem was the tape.
Twenty years of it was in the barn, in the racks along the north wall, on reels, and the approvals could not be done from a laptop in West Asheville because half of it had never been digitized. Somebody had to sit in that room with the machine and listen.
"Send somebody," Jill said.
"There isn't a somebody. It's two people who know what's on those reels and one of them is me."
"Jenna."
"It's four days."
"It's four days in the room where you wrote your entire life with a man who — " Jill stopped. Started over. "Do you want me to come?"
"No."
"Right," Jill said. "That's what I thought."
She drove up on the twenty-seventh of December with a thermos and a notebook and no plan for what she would say to him.
The barn was warm. He had lit the stove hours early, which meant he had been down there since before light, and there was a second chair by the machine that had not been there in October, and a box of the crackers she'd been eating since September sitting on the shelf like it had walked there by itself.
Shane was at the far end coiling a cable he did not need to coil.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey."
That was all either of them managed for about a minute, and it was the longest minute of the winter.
He looked bad. That was the first real information. Not dramatic — he had not grown a beard or lost forty pounds, none of the things men do in stories. He looked like a man who had been sleeping four hours a night for three months and had stopped being lit from the front.
"I pulled the first two records," he said. "They're on the bench. I didn't listen to them."
"Why not?"
"Didn't seem like mine to listen to without you."
She let that go by, because if she picked it up they would be there all day.
"Let's work," she said.
It took about an hour.
That was the thing she was not ready for, and she would think about it for weeks afterward — not that it was hard, but that it was easy, and how fast.
By ten they had a system. She ran the machine because she had always run the machine.
He read the log sheets out because his handwriting was on them.
When a reel was mislabeled — and a third of them were — he said the year and she said the studio and they arrived at the answer from opposite ends and met in the middle, the way they had since they were kids.
Mid-morning he said, "That's not the Sylva session," and she said, "It's the Sylva session, you just weren't there yet," and he said, "I was absolutely there," and she said, "You were asleep in the van," and he laughed — actually laughed, once, out loud — and then stopped like a man who had been caught doing something.
Neither of them said anything for a second.
"Next reel," Jenna said.
The truth was that they were good at this.
They had always been good at this. Twenty years of two people who could work a room of tape faster than anybody either of them had ever hired, and the fact that one of them had done a monstrous thing to the other did not make them worse at it, which struck Jenna as one of the crueler facts of her life.
She kept the coat on. He did not say a word about it.
He did not say a word about it at eleven, or at two, or at four when she had to sit down on the bench for a minute and put her hand flat on her back. He got her a glass of water and set it down and went back to the log sheets and did not look at her.
He knew. Of course he knew. He had known since the moment she came through the door, and possibly since a stairwell in the Wheelwright, and he was not going to ask, and Jenna could not decide from one hour to the next whether that was the most respectful thing he had ever done or the most cowardly.
Day two they got through the second and third records and half the outtakes.
The outtakes were the good part. Nobody's best behavior is on an outtake reel.
There was a version of "Cane Fire" at half speed that was better than the record.
There was four minutes of Micah, aged twenty-six, explaining a drum part to a producer with escalating profanity. There was a whole take ruined by a dog.
"Put the dog one in," Shane said.
"Nobody wants the dog one."
"I want the dog one."
"It's your box set."
"It's not," he said. "That's the whole point of the four days."
She looked over at him. He was sitting on an amp with a log sheet on his knee and a pencil behind his ear, and he was not performing anything; he had simply said a true thing and gone back to work.
"Put the dog one in," she said.
Then there was the demo reel.
It was in a box marked in her own handwriting, from the winter she was twenty-three, and she knew what was on it before he threaded it.
Her voice. Her, alone, singing the songs first, the way she had done for every record — a rough vocal and a guitar, made so he could learn them.
Fourteen songs in her own voice, at twenty-three, in the room they were sitting in.
Shane stopped the machine after a minute and a half.
"That goes in the box," he said.
"No."
"Jenna."
"No. That's a work tape. That's not for people."
"It's the best thing in this building." He turned around on the amp. "You know it is. Whoever gets to that disc is going to hear that and understand the whole thing in four seconds without anybody having to explain it to them."
"And you'd be the man who put his wife's demos out during a divorce."
He took that.
"Yeah," he said. "That's fair. That's — yeah." He rubbed his face. "Then it's yours to say and I'll never say it again."
"Leave it out."
"It's out."
She sat there with her hand on the machine and hated, briefly and sincerely, how much she had wanted him to argue.
Micah came by at four with a truck full of firewood nobody had asked for.
He stacked it along the outside wall and then stood in the doorway with his gloves in one hand and watched the two of them work for about ninety seconds, and Jenna could feel him watching, and so could Shane, and neither of them looked up.
"You want coffee, Micah," Shane said, to a log sheet.
"I'm alright."
"Nobody in this family drinks coffee anymore," Shane said, and Jenna laughed before she could get her hand up, and Micah's face did something complicated.
He walked her to the truck at six.
"That's a lot of firewood," she said.
"He's been down here every day since the twenty-second getting the racks in order. Alphabetical." Micah put his gloves on, slowly. "Jenna, can I say a thing."
"Everybody keeps asking me that and then saying it anyway."
"I've known him since we were fifteen and I have never once seen him scared.
" Micah looked at the barn. "He's scared.
He's scared of you, and of four days, and he's not sleeping, and I want to say that's good and I do think it's good, and I also came up here with a truck of wood so there'd be somebody else on this hill. "
"Why?"
"Because I watched the two of you in there for a minute and a half," Micah said, "and you looked exactly like you did in 2011, and that's the most dangerous thing I've seen all year."
Day three they reached the fourth record.
The fourth record was the one that changed everything — the one that went to arenas, the one that meant a house on a hill and a bus and a manager who bought a bigger office. It was also the year her name came off, and she had known that going in, and had thought she was prepared.
The reel boxes for the first three records were labeled in her handwriting.
The reel boxes for the fourth record were labeled in his.
She stood in front of the north wall with a box in each hand and looked at the two labels for a long moment, and behind her Shane went completely still, because he had seen what she was holding.
"I started doing the boxes that year," he said carefully.
"I know."
"You were — that was the year you were doing the school thing, and the tour was — "
"Shane, I know."
She put them down. She was fine. She wanted to be clear with herself that she was fine, and she was, right up until they got twenty minutes into the third reel and hit a false start.
It was a bad count-in. The band came apart.
And on the tape a much younger Jenna Bishop said something inaudible off-mic, and a much younger Shane laughed so hard he had to put his guitar down, and the two of them went on for twenty-two seconds, laughing, in a room, in the summer of a year when they had nothing and everything.
Twenty-two seconds. She had no memory of the day at all.
The tape rolled on into the take.
Neither of them moved. The machine ran. Jenna stood with her hand on the transport and listened to two people who were about to be extremely happy for a while and did not know that the same summer, in the same room, on the same tape, a man had started writing his own name on the boxes.
She stopped it.
"I need a minute," she said, and went outside into the cold without her coat, which she regretted immediately and stayed out in anyway.
He did not follow her. He gave it four minutes and then came out and stood a good ten feet away with her coat over his arm and did not hand it to her or say anything at all until she put her hand out for it.