21. Gerard #3
His digging grew frantic. More flyers. More pictures. Bent dust jackets missing their LPs. A worn-out concert T-shirt. Each piece of Hallowitz & Hart memorabilia made the fizzling in his chest morph into fireworks that exploded throughout his whole body.
Either Regina was a superfan, given they were the island’s only claim to entertainment fame, or he’d uncovered a truth that should’ve been extremely obvious from the moment he knocked on her front door.
Anxiety spiked his gut. Inadvertently, he’d found his way into the same room as his biggest musical inspiration. In the past six years, he’d hardly ever been starstruck, but in that spare room in a crumbling Victorian house, he felt seconds away from fainting.
He sorted through the photos he’d set aside, assuming they’d be nothing more than family portraits or empty frames.
Instead, they were all various performance photos.
One of them stuck out from the rest. In bleached color, in front of a brick wall, there was a lithe white woman with butt-length hair wearing patterned capris sitting barefoot on a stool with a mountain dulcimer in her lap, and a bearded, long-haired man to her left, with an acoustic guitar strung around his broad shoulders in front of a microphone stand.
Both of their mouths were open mid-song.
Suddenly beside him, Regina waved the recovered dulcimer around. The instrument looked like a pancaked, shrunken-down cello about the length and coloring of a crusty baguette fresh from the bakery.
“She’ll need some tuning,” said Regina, blowing across its time-chipped body. Her breath sent a cloud of dust into the already-musty air, tickling Gerard’s nose. He bent forward, held down the detritus of music history before he sneezed so it didn’t scatter across the room. “God bless you.”
God had blessed him.
Landing on the doorstep of Regina Hallowitz must’ve been the hand-spun miracle of a higher power. There was no alternative explanation.
“This is you?” he asked.
Regina spared a split-second glance at the photo before shuffling into a corner where she flopped into a sheet-draped chair. He tried again. “Were you and your husband Hallowitz & Hart?”
The mountain dulcimer balanced on her spread-apart knees, pressed up against her flat stomach.
From a nearby box, she produced an analog tuning fork.
She shushed him, slapped the metal prongs against her knee, and then held it to the body of the instrument.
A chime like that of a school bell buzzed through the room.
Having memorized the sound, she worked diligently to match the tone on the dulcimer by twisting the tuners on the head.
To Gerard, this was like being a painter standing beneath a scaffolding as Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel.
He couldn’t tear his eyes away from Regina’s age-crooked fingers as they plucked at the three strings.
When she was satisfied by the sounds, she glanced back up at him. “What was it you asked me?”
“Were you Hallowitz & Hart?” he repeated.
“No,” she said, the word like a clamp on Gerard’s hopes.
“Why do you have all—”
“Quincy and I performed as Hallowitz & Hart, but I am, was, and always have been just Regina Hallowitz,” she said succinctly.
Her attention fell back on the instrument, but he was too hyped to hold back. “I can’t believe it’s you.” He was almost breathless with serendipity.
She mumbled, “You’re a little young to be a fan.”
“My mom used to play your whole album for me when I was a kid. It was the only thing that calmed me down,” he said.
His mind flashed back to all those tantrums. All those bouts of overstimulation only Regina Hallowitz’s and Quincy Hart’s voices could soothe.
He’d never understood why nobody thought to have him assessed to see if he was on the spectrum.
He’d had to scratch, barter, and claw his way into adulthood before a professional told him the world was built for neurotypicals, and he was not one of them.
So much struggle, so much depression, for what?
“‘Island State of Mind’ is the song that made me want to come here. Probably even the song that made me want to be a musician.”
“If you’re looking for a professional music scene outside of the church choir, you’re not going to find it here, James,” she said, looking beautiful and mostly confused.
He opened his mouth to reply, only to be smacked anew with his white lies. To her, he wasn’t Gerard of We the Wells, and the longer he stayed here, and the more he listened back to his old music with Emory, the less he felt like Gerard of We the Wells. He was just Gerard. Maybe not even that.
Could he change himself? Burn off his fingerprints, cut off his hair, falsify his documents? What would life be like if the person he’d been fell from the face of the earth?
The publicity would be endless, a narrative his brothers could milk well into retirement. Maybe they’d be better off without him in that way.
“Still want to learn how to play?” Regina asked, softly reeling him back to the moment.
“Yes, please,” he said, accepting the dulcimer from her.