Exile (25 page)

“No thanks to you,” Randy mutters, and I’m startled by the venom in his voice.

Kellen winces, and flashes an almost annoyed glance at Randy, but he doesn’t bite on whatever Randy is referring to. Instead he looks back to Caleb. “Look, the world should hear your dad’s songs. He was a genius. Legally, though, they’re Candy Shell’s. I know that may not sound right to you, but that’s the deal he made.”

“He wouldn’t want
you
to have them,” Randy adds.

“Maybe not, but that’s not his call to make. Caleb, you probably feel torn about this, but I’ll make you a deal. Show me the songs, and I’ll let you play on the record when we release them. Everybody would love that.”

“Can it be my band?” Caleb asks. I’m proud of him for thinking of that.

Kellen shrugs. “I don’t think so. They’re Allegiance
songs. I think the rest of the band would want to get together and play them.”

“You don’t deserve it, Kellen,” Randy says through clenched teeth.

“Randy, come on,” says Kellen. “These kids are in over their heads with this. You knew Eli, isn’t this all classic
him
? I don’t want there to have to be legal awkwardness, talks with all your parents . . .”

This point spears me, as it was probably meant to.

Caleb stands there, hands in his pockets. I wish I could talk to him telepathically. I don’t want him to agree, and yet I don’t know what else he can do.

“Think about your mom, too, Caleb,” says Kellen, “having to hire lawyers . . .”

“Okay,” Caleb snaps. “I get it.” He starts to reach into his pocket.

“What are you doing?” Jon asks.

“Caleb . . . ,” I say, but I don’t add
don’t
.

“He never bothered to send me a letter, or even call, while he was alive.” Caleb produces the tape. I didn’t realize he’d been carrying it with him. Kellen leans forward when he sees it.

Caleb turns the tape over in his fingers. “I was happier without him. All this has done is remind me what’s missing. What I can’t ever have.” He turns to me. “Even playing the songs was never going to bring him back. Never going to give me a dad.”

He’s still holding the tape close to him. His eyes lock with mine. He looks like he might pass out. I don’t want him to hand it over, but I don’t see what choice he has. I nod slightly.

And Caleb holds out the tape. His hand is shaking as Kellen plucks it from his fingers.

“Thanks, Caleb. This was the right choice. And I’m guessing you’re here because there’s another one?”

Caleb nods. “Hidden in a Beatles record.”

Kellen turns the tape over in his fingers. “Go ahead. I won’t steal your chance to find it.”

“Come on,” Caleb says to me. We cross the room, reading the labels. Caleb is silent, his face stone.

We stop at the “B” section.

“I don’t think you had a choice,” I say to him. He doesn’t respond.

Then his hand shoots out, and his fist slams into the back of an empty chair beside us. It makes a loud smack—Caleb was probably aiming for the padding but it sounds like he hit the frame—and the chair wobbles. Caleb shakes his hand, wincing, and lets out a slow, crushed sigh.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. I move to hug him whether he likes it or not, but he lets me.

Caleb sniffs, maybe fighting tears. He’s so still, I can’t tell. As we hold each other, I hear urgent voices from behind us. We turn and see Randy talking angrily to Kellen. Jon and Matt have stepped away awkwardly. A librarian-waitress swoops over and shushes him.

Caleb takes a deep breath. He makes his best attempt at a smile for me. “Look at the bright side: we can wake up tomorrow, and just focus on having an awesome band. On having fun and being great. Doesn’t that honestly sound like a relief?”

“Yeah, kinda.” I wonder if he will still feel that way tomorrow. I point to a nearby shelf. “There.”

Caleb climbs a ladder. The Beatles records take up nearly an entire floor-to-ceiling section. There are imports, mono editions, all kinds of things. They’re alphabetized, and Caleb runs his finger over the spines. “I don’t see it.”

I catch the eye of a librarian and wave her over. I explain what we’re looking for. “Oh, yeah,” she says, “a classic. Of course we have one. It’s so rare that we keep it on the side here—” She’s points to a vertical line of records displayed face out between this section and the next. Each record is on a stand in its own little alcove. A sign between them says, “These rare covers are for viewing only.” One of them is empty. “Oh my. It should be right there. . . I’ll be right back.” She hurries off.

Caleb climbs down. “It’s gone?”

I gaze at the blank spot and all I can picture is Val. “Gone.”

Both our heads turn as Randy’s voice swells again. Now a pair of nearby listeners joins in shushing him. The anger on Randy’s face is obvious from here.

“Here it is.” The librarian returns, the record held like a
plate of hot food between her hands. “Phew! Someone slipped it out of there, and left it over at a listening station. All the records are tagged; it would have set off an alarm if it left.”

“Can I look at it for a sec, and show my friend over there?” says Caleb.

“It’s not a handling copy,” says the librarian.

“That’s Kellen McHugh from Allegiance to North,” I say. “He’d really been hoping just to see it.”

“Well . . .” But the librarian gets a little starry look in her eyes. I want to tell her he’s not worth it. “Okay,” she says, and we bring it over.

“Success?” Kellen asks, leaning forward.

Caleb feels around the outside, pressing the cover flat in every spot. After a moment, he hands the record to Kellen. “It’s not there.”

Kellen does the same, “Are you sure there was a tape?” he asks Caleb as he hands the record back to the librarian.

“Not completely,” says Caleb. “I mean, he made it sound like there would be.”

Kellen shakes his head. “Caleb, I don’t mean to speak badly of your dad, but he was in a pretty bad way on that tour. I’m surprised to hear he could get it together to make even one tape, never mind a second one.” He stands up, flipping the first tape in his fingers. “Thanks for this. And I’m sorry. You probably got your hopes up. I think he’d be proud if he knew you. But . . . this is kind of what it was like working with Eli.”

“That’s enough, Kellen.” Randy is still fuming.

Caleb just stares into space. “No, it’s cool.” Then, more bravely than I can imagine being, he meets Kellen’s eyes. “Thanks for the offer to play on the song. I’ll let you know if anything else ever turns up.”

Kellen smiles. It’s impersonal, like business, but still a smile. “I hear you know Jason over at Candy Shell?”

“Yeah,” says Caleb.

“Good. I’ll make sure he hooks you guys up with some great shows.”

Kellen and the detective get up and head for the door.

I watch them go. “What are the chances they’re going to meet up with Val somewhere? That she got the tape out of here before?”

Caleb shrugs. “I don’t even know if I care. Maybe it’s better there’s no second tape. I never wanted this. That gig tonight? It was fun. It should just be about that. The music.” He turns to Randy. “Can we go home? You up for driving back?”

Randy is distant. “Oh yeah, I’d be awake all night anyway.”

“I’ll text Weezil again,” says Caleb. “Just in case.”

I wish I could share his optimism. Caleb thumbs his phone as we make our way out of the Vault and back down through the seething club.

“Anything?” I ask as we emerge from the dancing horde in the welcome cool of night.

“She says to go without her,” Caleb reports.

“Are you going to ask her if she has the tape?” Jon wonders.

Caleb shakes his head. “Not tonight.”

We walk silently back to the van, and go.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

MoonflowerAM
@catherinefornevr 45m
Yoo hoo. Any other space travelers awake out there?

Hours pass in the infinite dark. Despite the swirl of the evening, exhaustion takes over. Caleb, Jon, and I lie on the floor in the back of the stalker van, the gear precariously stacked to either side of us. Our only contact with the outside is the retreat of taillights across the inside of the roof from the windshield, and the advance of headlights from the two tiny back windows. Randy is driving fast, always in the passing lane, eating up the late-night drivers and trucks.

“Randy,” Caleb asks, after a rest-area pit stop an hour into the drive. “What was going on with you and Kellen at the Vault?”

“Well, for one, I think he’s a dick.” He’s quiet for a minute, but we can feel that he’s got more to say. “I always
thought it was bullshit that Kellen and Jerrod were trying to sue your dad for lost money and royalties. They were basically trying to get him to forfeit his rights to Allegiance money. After your dad got his head on straight, he was actually going to give them the rights. Void his contract. I told him I thought that was crazy. That what he needed to do was worry about fixing his drug and depression problems, and then get back to making music again.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t. We talked about it the last time I ever saw him. The afternoon before he died.”

“So, you blame Kellen for all that legal stuff,” I say.

Randy is quiet again. “There’s more. When Eli left me that afternoon, he said he was going to go see Kellen, to talk it out. Next thing I know, I’m standing over a casket.”

“Wait . . . ,” says Caleb. “Are you saying you think Kellen had . . . something to do with it?”

“Not exactly,” says Randy. “Kellen had a rock-solid alibi. He was at a party at Jerrod’s house. A big Candy Shell anniversary event that Eli was not invited to. So Kellen was never a suspect. But Eli apparently stopped by there. A friend of mine said he saw Eli early on at the party, and he seemed fine, but he wasn’t when he left.”

“How did he leave?”

“Shouting, screaming, and stumbling. Basically a wasted mess. Security threw him out. I don’t know if he got high before he went there, or while he was there, or
what. He was fine when I saw him, and had been sober for a couple weeks. But after the party, he drove down to the beach, and took that swim. But . . .”

“What?”

“I shouldn’t even be saying this,” says Randy. “It was so long ago and there’s no proof. It’s not doing anyone any good.”

“Jesus, Randy, just say it.” I can hear the tension in Caleb’s voice.

“Well, if you’re Eli, and you went to talk to Kellen, and it didn’t go well, why would you get high at Jerrod’s house? If you hated all those people and were in legal battles with them. It just seems like Eli would have left, and done whatever drugs or booze he was going to do somewhere else.”

“What exactly are you saying?” I asked.

“Nothing, I’m not saying anything,” says Randy. “I just wonder if Kellen, I don’t know, drugged him or something, even just put an extra shot in his drink. It didn’t take much to get Eli started, and once he was going, then he went all the way. I know that sounds all conspiracy-ish, but . . . ah, it doesn’t matter now anyway.”

“Drugged him why?” Caleb asks darkly. “So he’d kill himself?”

“No, I don’t think it was
that
. Maybe just to make him make a fool of himself at the party, to create a widely witnessed scene of Eli acting out of his mind. That would have helped with the legal stuff. They were trying to prove that
he was responsible for their loss of tour money and royalties, and also irresponsible when it came to himself, and the party would have been full of credible witnesses.”

He’s silent, and so are we.

I reach over and take Caleb’s hand. He responds, but there’s a guitar case between us and eventually our hands are cramped and he pulls his away. I try not to take it personally that he’s the one to retreat. I know he’s still hurting about the tape. But is he still hurt about me? What I kept from him about the gig and about Val?

With his hand gone, I fold my arms like I’m in suspended animation, nothing to do or be or even think until we arrive.

My thoughts run in circles anyway.

So, now what then?

It’s a three-ring circus spectacle. Tonight was a failure, or was it? I try to remember that even just the act of throwing yourself out into the universe and playing a stupid gig to twenty people is still participating, still practicing the routines that might someday get you to the place you want to be. I don’t have cliché notions, like that I regret not going on the college trips, regret lying to my parents, regret not telling the band about the better gig. I did what I thought was right for everyone. Except maybe when I thought
everyone
I was thinking more of me, of keeping myself safe.

Meeting Kellen has sparked a curious sensation in my
head. We think of ourselves as the center of our universe, the star of some universal play, and that everyone else is in some way in this galaxy to act out a role in our story. And yet the more you see the world, the more you realize how silly that is. We are all planets, far comets, asteroids, and suns, inhabiting a shared universe, acting on one another. Eli is a force acting on Caleb, and yet he is a force acting on me, but then there is Kellen, or Randy, orbiting the Eli system, and on and on beyond that. All of us rotating around each other, sometimes feeling the heat of a sun, sometimes colliding and killing off the dinosaurs, sometimes just glimpsing one another across the void, barely realizing the effect we had on one another.

Somewhere tonight, the members of Freak Show are all sitting around a San Francisco club living it up, orbiting Jason, who is orbiting us. Somewhere in Memphis, Ethan and Postcards from Ariel are learning about the real life on the road, somewhere my aunt Jeanine is on a date, and on and on, the universe expanding in overlapping circles, bigger and bigger, rendering you smaller and smaller, and something about it is terrifying and sad.

But something about it is also freeing. If we are not the center of a grand story, then the pressure’s off. Dangerheart can
not
release Eli’s lost songs. Dangerheart can just be Dangerheart. Caleb can just be Caleb. And I can just be Summer. I can look my parents in the eye and read them
Catherine’s eulogy. Then just focus on being the best version of me I can be, free, but the world doesn’t depend on it. Only I do.