Prologue
March
We lived here in Hawaii, where the ocean is warm and the air smells of flowers, for eight years, Kai and me. We were happy. Even last year. Even this. But what am I going to do all alone, seven thousand miles from home, for the rest of my life? What’s keeping me here now?
Kai died.
It’s an excellent sentence, resonant and rhythmic, a vocal exercise of a sentence. Compare “My husband has passed.” That’s a prissy, bridling quitter of a sentence, isn’t it?
They’re both true. But the sound matters.
Thing is, I read out loud for a living. Audiobook narration.
And Kai wouldn’t mind me noticing the best way to announce his death, because he was an audiobook narrator too.
He had heard of me before we even met. He crossed the main exhibition floor at the annual convention in New York City and stopped in front of my booth.
“Are you Lindsay Lord?” he said, as if I wasn’t wearing a lanyard.
“And are you free for dinner, if we can find somewhere where the air isn’t too dry and the music isn’t too loud?
” It wouldn’t have sounded romantic to anyone else, but the offer of a first date with someone protecting their voice, getting that I’d protect mine, charmed me.
I was free for dinner and to marry him and leave Scotland and move to Hawaii and spend all day every day together, mostly right here in our dead room.
I suppose that’s why I’m in here now: not because the soundproofing soaks up all my rage and grief without the neighbours hearing but because this is where I feel closest to Kai.
Of course, we shared our bedroom and the kitchen and the deep shady porch, and Kai died in a hospital bed in the living room, but here is where he designed and built sound decks for us, stacking the equipment, wrapping wires into thick ropes with insulating tape like a horse bandage, choosing just the right plug board, with nothing left over, getting a sprawl of mics, keyboards, monitors and control boxes Tetris-ed in.
I look at myself in the mirror, since that’s my only option now.
We always had a mirror each, to check posture and make sure we had that slight smile that comes through in the voice, but I usually had mine angled so I could see him instead as he concentrated so hard on whatever he was preparing. Kai’s bent head was what made me smile.
Get him onto discussing the tools of our trade and he made me laugh out loud. “PreSonus Studio One, for sure,” he used to say, “but Aston condenser mics.” That punch on the but cracked me up and he had no idea why it was funny.
Start a conversation about the human voice, though, and I stopped laughing as my heart filled.
Different kinds of books need different kinds of voices, obviously.
Technical manuals, straight and simple; business guides, punchy and bright; memoirs, not quite sad but on the way there; self-help, the less said the better about my one brush with that genre.
Kai used to say romance novels were tough.
Unless your life was a love story. “Like yours, babe—you’re welcome.
Producers can hear our marriage. I should get a cut, really. ”
I slip Kai’s phone out of my pocket and plug it in to charge, flooded with the memory of the day he took his fingerprint off the lockscreen so I could use it once he’d gone.
He would kill me: a phone in the studio?
But it’s not connected to anything now that I’ve closed his account and there’s no way it’s ever going to make a sound, even if I was working at the moment, which I’m not.
When it’s at 1 percent, I swipe it on, gazing at the picture of the two of us sitting on the porch of this house, grinning like the idiots we were back when we thought we were bulletproof.
“I can’t stand being here without you, sweetheart,” I say into the warm silence. “But how can I break all this down? I’ll never be able to rebuild it on my own. But I can’t leave it behind me if I go either.”
And anyway, go where? Home? Or, as I like to call it with a hollow laugh and a good attempt at being over it all, “home.” There is a difference. My audible scare quotes are second to none.
Whatever I decide, I need to clean up my files.
So I switch on all the output gear and move one headphone into place.
I have no recollection of what I was doing just before Kai’s last step down to the end and I’m shocked to realise that it’s been months.
I delete out-of-date samples and bids for work long since contracted to someone else.
There’s only one recent file I don’t recognise. I click it on.
Kai’s voice.
At first I don’t pay attention to what he’s saying, too drunk on the sounds.
He was a born audio artist, with a deep, sonorous tone, a talent for silent breath and that unplaceable accent; the faint Hawaii lilt intriguing everyone who heard it.
Publishers loved it. He sounded so close to American, yet there was nothing to put him in a region and turn off anyone from the others.
Plus there was that slight mystery in his plosives that made you keep listening.
I slide the second counter back to the start and prepare myself to hear whatever he’s going to tell me.
If you’re there, Lindsay, he says, that means I managed to shift this file to somewhere you’re going to find it.
I didn’t want to leave it too long. I wanted to sound like me and I can feel my range narrowing every day.
Anyway. So I died, huh? What a downer. You okay, babe?
I want you to be okay. I want you to be happy.
I want you to meet a nice guy—not too nice, but solid, you know?
He’ll cope with living in my shadow if he gets you thrown in.
And then you and him can get started on those babies we were going to have if it had turned out that way.
Deal? We got a deal? Try not to mind them being basic issue and not the angels we would have made.
Love them anyway. And even if he doesn’t show up, just go ahead and have the babies.
Seriously, Lin. I’m not going to tell you not to mourn. I would be ready to burn the earth to embers if it was me losing you. So, mourn. Grieve. Don’t forget me. But be happy. You’re living for two now, hon. You’re living for me as well as yourself. No slacking.
I wait and wait. There are eleven unused minutes on the track and I have sat in silence through nine of them before I believe that’s it.
Because he didn’t even say he loved me. Downer? Basic issue? No slacking? If he wasn’t dead already, I would kill him.
“You fucker!” I say, cursing his skill at dead room design because I want my anger to ring out, not be folded into a perfect audio-cuddle.
“You fucker!” I say again, jumping up and opening the door to the corridor outside.
That’s better. “You spent ten years turning me from a standard, sarcastic Brit-bitch to someone who thrives on all-American emotion and then you leave me with this-this—”
It’s at this precise moment that my phone goes. It’s my brother. Not my sister-in-law on my brother’s phone, not one of the boys calling to thank their auntie for birthday money, all in one breath with their mum standing over them, but my brother calling me.
“John?” I ask. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything here’s okay,” he says. “How are you?”
I don’t answer. There’s no answer.
“Listen, Lindsay,” he goes on when he realises it’s still his turn, “why don’t you come home? Why don’t you just . . . come home?”
“Where do I start?”
“Yeah, but . . . I’m here. Shelley’s here. Zak and Nicky are a laugh. And it’s different now that . . .”
It must be, I suppose. He lives in the house where we both grew up. He owns the business that used to be our mum and dad’s. He’d hardly be there if it made him feel what I’m scared I’ll feel, if I go back.
“Really?” I say. “Promise?” I sound like a child.
“Truly,” he tells me. “Hope to die.”
And so I do.