Love Songs for the Road (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

…And Opens Another

For a few days, Marcus tried to write off his relationship with Ryan as an ill-advised fling, a joyride: fun while it lasted, but not built to last. That was how he explained it to anyone who asked, even Smitty, who could probably tell he was lying, but had the decency to let him grieve in privacy.

For the two-day bus ride home, a replacement nanny was sent through an agency, and she tended to Charlotte and Miles with an air of corporate competence, but little warmth. They were devastated to lose Ryan with no warning at all, and Marcus struggled to explain to them what had happened. What was he going to say—that they’d probably never see her again? That their father couldn’t hold on to
any
woman, so it was best that they not get too close?

Once back in Montana, he began to piece his life together again. After ten days with their mother, the kids were with him again, and were now enrolled in a public elementary school in Bigfork. Bianca, claiming nervous exhaustion following the hearing, had fled to Cancun with her latest boyfriend. Reversing her position completely, she seemed uninterested even in joint custody, giving them to Marcus, excepting vacations, for the remainder of that school year. “If you want them, you can have them,” she’d told him over the phone, confirming for Marcus that their fight hadn’t had a whole lot to do with the children in the first place.

Marcus and the kids were totally alone in Bigfork. Smitty, who was considering buying a place in the area, dropped in every few weeks, but except for Serena, who stayed on but worked from a home office in LA, Marcus didn’t need any staff. He was a full-time parent now, and had no regrets about it.

In business terms, the summer had been an unqualified success. The reviews had been respectable (Marcus was a favorite target for brainiac rock critics, so even mixed notices were a major victory for him), and album sales had spiked 400 percent. Having done his duty, Marcus reasoned that he deserved a break for a year, two, or maybe more. Anyway, he didn’t care about record sales, and seeing his picture online or in a magazine just made his stomach curdle now. He was richer than God, and wanted less attention from the media, not more. He was doing the disappearing act he’d planned with Ryan, but he was doing it alone.

After six weeks, Marcus and Smitty, staying at the house for a long weekend, recorded a crude acoustic version of “I Lock the Door” and uploaded it to YouTube under an alias band name,
The Ambulance
. His fans had figured it out soon enough, and within a week, the clip had been viewed over three million times. Many of them still hated it, but to Marcus’s delight, the uber-hipster website
Pitchfork
ran a positive piece about the song in mid-October, calling it “a major artistic breakthrough for the formerly middlebrow Troy.” Marcus couldn’t believe that the same snobby rock critics who had been giving him such a hard time for so many years were now lavishing him with praise. And the kids who read
Pitchfork
and
Brooklyn Vegan
and all the rest now seemed interested in exploring his past work. One of the executives at his label said that his
Daisy
and
Spotify
numbers were through the roof. Even without performing live, Marcus could reach out to a new, younger audience, without ever leaving the comfort of his home.

Before long, Marcus found himself imagining the possibility of never touring again. For so many years, he’d tried to say yes to everything, fearing that if he began to turn down offers, they would dry up on him when he wasn’t looking. Also, even for someone who had “made it,” the pressure to continue grinding away was immense. If Marcus didn’t tour, his label didn’t make money, which was fine. But neither did his band; neither did Smitty. Still, Marcus reasoned, he had enough money to keep his guitarist fat and happy until their dying days. If the two of them could write and record, alone here in Montana, hiring local musicians only when they needed them, they might well enter a whole new phase of their artistic collaboration. How had the hippies put it, back in his parents’ day?
Turn on, tune in, drop out.

But amidst this surprising breakthrough, Marcus never stopped thinking about Ryan, especially as he couldn’t imagine it having happened without her. She was the one who helped transform “I Lock the Door” from a so-so song to a great one, and she was the one who had gotten him thinking about ways to avoid the grind of the touring life.

Memories of their time together came back to him in a flurry: the absurd underwear incident on the day they met; the run-in at Pike Place Market; Ryan’s twisted ankle and the foot massage; all the ill-advised onstage antics he’d engaged in to try to woo her; the fleeting moments of passion they’d shared in his room. Marcus had tried for weeks to shake the hold these recollections had on him, but he couldn’t do it. As much as he tried to reason his way through losing her, the feelings he’d developed just wouldn’t go away.

One day, when the kids were at school, and he and Smitty were trading ideas for chord changes on yet another new song, his old buddy finally broke his silence.

“Come on, man,” he said, handing Marcus a fresh cup of coffee. “We need to talk this out. Put that guitar down. Your ideas aren’t worth a damn today, anyway.”

But Marcus didn’t know where to start. He’d been left behind again, and the cause was obvious—his fame had eaten another woman alive. He said as much to his friend.

“Well, that’s a pretty dramatic way of putting it,” Smitty said. “But you see her point, right? Ryan’s a good ol’ girl, not some gold-digger like, well… You know I never liked Bianca.”

“Yep. You called that one from the start.”

“And boy, you couldn’t stand the sight of me for, how long was it?”

“We didn’t talk for eight months.”

Smitty laughed. “You didn’t talk to
me
for eight months. Man, are you stubborn. And dumb. Then again, so am I. Look at me here, thirty-six years old, and still on my own.”

“That ain’t dumb, brother. That’s genius.”

“No, it’s not. There’s nothing smart about growing old alone, or letting go of the best woman you’ve ever had.”

“You really think Ryan was the best woman I ever had?”

“Are you kidding? By a mile.”

Marcus’s old friend helped remind him that Ryan’s reasons for leaving weren’t insubstantial: an innocent woman, unused to the perils of celebrity culture, had been dragged through the mud, her reputation ruined for no other reason than her proximity to Marcus and his music.

“I do realize that,” Marcus said. “But what can I do about it?”

“Do you love her?” Smitty asked. The question took Marcus by surprise, but before he could answer, his friend added, “If you don’t, you’re even stupider than I realize.”

Marcus laughed ruefully. “Yeah, man. I’m totally in love with her.”

Smitty leaned over and slapped Marcus’s chest with the back of his hand, and Marcus’s coffee spilled on his flannel shirt. “Well then, why the hell didn’t you fight for her? Give the girl a call, or get on a plane to Michigan. Do something, you damn mule!”

Later that week, Marcus did call, but Ryan’s number seemed to have been disconnected. He emailed, and even tried to friend her on Facebook (this required, of course, opening a Facebook account, which was surprisingly complicated for a thirty-four-year-old who needed to conceal his identity), but he couldn’t find her profile.

By the third week of October, he’d had enough. He left the kids with Smitty for the weekend, put two changes of clothes in a duffel bag, gunned the El Dorado, and headed east. Four months earlier, he’d sped down these same roads, in this same beautiful example of classic Detroit craftsmanship, and convinced Ryan to take a journey with him.

Now he would ask her to take a different kind of trip.

One that lasted a lifetime.

…

Just as she’d done after learning about Nick and Natalie, Ryan had plunged right back into her obsession with running before she had even familiarized herself with the Michigan campus. She used her runs as a way to orient herself to the new surroundings, letting herself get lost in the Leslie Woods Nature Area that abutted her apartment building for three miles, then five, then seven, then ten. She ran to get that addictive brain buzz, that sweet rush of endorphins that had been so elusive since she’d walked off the Bus of Awesome. She ran to forget the tour. She ran to forget herself. And, of course, she ran to forget Marcus and the kids.

Admiring the gently rolling hills and fall foliage that had appeared only a few days earlier, she told herself that she had begun to appreciate the natural beauty of Michigan, so different from the vast open fields, legendary vistas, and towering mountain ranges of her home state. But in truth she found herself in the midst of a bout of homesickness almost as debilitating as her heartbreak. At the end of September, she’d seriously considered buying a plane ticket home for a long weekend. But then she realized that she could easily run into the Troys there. And if she saw Marcus, God knew what she might have done—probably run straight into his arms, straight into his life again. No, better to stay put. She’d get used to Ann Arbor eventually.

She tried not to let her mind drift toward Marcus, but sometimes she couldn’t help it. There were specific, individual memories, of course—Marcus’s equally impressive skills as a paramedic and a foot masseuse, his consulting her on unfinished song lyrics, his “accidental” drop-ins on the bus—but more than that, she recalled moods and emotions. She’d never felt so alive as she did around him, so relaxed, so much
herself.
She’d never been tended to as gently and kindly. Sometimes she wondered if she’d ever meet a man who even came close to Marcus Troy.

May as well admit it,
Ryan thought.
You loved him. You
still
love him.

Ryan didn’t feel lonely, exactly. She was glad to have some time to reflect on what had happened—she almost relished the opportunity to punish herself by going over the events of the summer again and again and again—and spent much of September trying to parse out whether, had she done things differently, her relationship with Marcus might have survived. She knew, of course, that the media would have jumped on any hint of a relationship between Marcus and his nanny—the trope was just too good for them to pass up. But she had added fuel to the fire in some ways, hadn’t she? Marcus was no master of self-control, but Ryan had always thought she
was
. Why had she allowed the Troys—two generations of them—to drag her up onstage like that, not once, but twice? And why had she stooped to Jacey Richards’ level, not to mention Benjamin Little’s? Ryan had never been a confrontational person, and the fact that she had allowed those two to provoke her was still shocking.

In the third week of October, Ryan went running a couple hours before dusk. She had finished her third loop around the Leslie golf course, on a brisk pace of eight minutes and twenty seconds per mile, and was about to enter the woods. The trees transformed on a daily basis, and she loved to track the changes. Today, the last of the green leaves had disappeared, replaced with resplendent yellows, oranges, and rusts, and as she found herself gazing up at the psychedelic canopy above, she had to remind herself to watch out for stray rocks and tree roots in the path. If she sprained her ankle here in Ann Arbor, she wouldn’t have a rock star on hand to nurse her back to health.

Checking her progress on her running app, Ryan exited the woods and built speed toward Lake Lila. She had actually improved her time since leaving the golf course, and was on track to beat her personal best. By the time she finished her second lap around the lake, she was gaining speed with every step. She didn’t feel like stopping, not when she had such momentum, but she also knew that if she kept going, she probably wouldn’t be able to stop herself—she’d run by that damn house again.

The first time she’d run down Avon Street, it had been a complete accident. Ryan had only seen Crane House once, on Marcus’s tablet. She’d forgotten the address, and hadn’t ever thought to Google it. She wasn’t the type to torture herself like that—or so she thought.

But in late September, she had run right by the house, tucked into a very normal suburban neighborhood, and as if seeing a vision from a dream, she’d stopped in her tracks. At first, she thought it might not be Crane House, but there was a For Sale sign in front. Unable to help herself, she walked across the lawn, nearly turning around when a motion-sensor floodlight turned on and lit the stone path to the front door. She kept going, though, shielding her eyes from the glare and looking through one of the windows to the right of the door.

It was seven p.m., and the light was dim inside, but it was most definitely Crane House. No one seemed to be living there at the moment, but the sparse furnishings, the light fixtures, the island kitchen—everything was exactly the same as on the website. She even saw the doorway to the room that would have been her study. Knowing it was pure masochism, she imagined herself working at the little vintage desk she’d seen in the picture, while the sound of Marcus’s voice and acoustic guitar filled the house.

Aching with longing, Ryan turned around to find herself facing a middle-aged brunette in a pantsuit, jiggling a set of keys with a University of Michigan key chain.

“Interested?” the woman asked.

Ryan, in a lightweight running outfit more appropriate for exercising in the Indian Summer than for going on vintage-architecture tours, realized how silly she must have looked to the real estate agent. “Oh, no. It’s just…I read about this house once, and recognized it as I ran by.”