She pointed at me. “Exactly, Teddy Knight, exactly.”
“You want another drink?”
I was disappointed when she said no. “I’ve already had too much.” She heaved herself to her feet. “You know I only told you all this because I’m drunk, right?”
“Right.”
“Which means you can’t hold it against me tomorrow.”
“I won’t.”
She shook her head and sounded genuinely dismayed when she said, “I can’tbelieveI told all my pathetic shit to the local rock-and-roll asshole.”
“I promise your pathetic shit is safe with me.” I made an X over my heart.
She looked momentarily confused, then seemed to give up on whatever thought was dogging her, shrugged, and executed one of her signature leaps off the porch.
I was glad the leap was back.
I was jolted awake in the middle of the night by my phone.
It was a FaceTime from my sister, and I fumbled to answer.
“Oh my God, you wereasleep?”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, checking the time. Eleven twenty.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” Auden said.
“No, no, it’s OK.” Calls from Auden were the one thing in my life that were a constant, and I wanted to talk to her morethan I wanted to sleep. I reached for the bedside lamp, and when my fingers found the switch, I was confronted with the sight of myself blinking and befuddled. I’d been having a dream. Something about Scott. We’d been at his parents’ apartment, but as adults, not as teens. We’d been… doing something with a marching band? The more I tried to send my mind back to it, the more the fantastical tendrils loosened their hold on me.
“Look at you! Dead asleep, and it’s barely past midnight!”
My sister and I were night owls. It was normal for one of us to call the other in the wee hours—after my shows, after her late-night bursts of work.
“It’s not even midnight here,” I said. “Minnesota’s on central time.”
The exaggerated funny-shocked face she made turned my yawn-in-progress into a grin. Like me, Auden had “made it.” She’d transcended our tumultuous childhood and made a life for herself. She was an actuary. I sometimes thought she’d chosen that line of work because it was lucrative and stable—the opposite of our scrabbling, chaotic childhoods—but she seemed to really like it. She was a kick-ass musician, but she had also always been freakishly good at math. But even though she’d changed pretty much everything about her circumstances—job, borough, personal style, you name it—that face she was making was the same. It was her all-purpose Teddy face, and I loved it. Depending on the circumstance, it could express shock, outrage, amusement. It was the same one she’d made when Mom had decided to demolish an interior wall once in the middle of the night. But also the one she made when Scott and I first got signed. The key, with this face, was that whatever else it was doing, it was always expressing solidarity. Auden andI, we were siblings, yes, but we were more than that. We were fellow soldiers.
She exaggerated “the face” and said, “Who are you and what have you done with my brother?”
It was actually a good question, but she was joking, so I answered in kind. “I dunno. I guess the deep dark North Woods has a lulling effect?”
“Or, call me crazy, you’re completely exhausted by the implosion of your career?”
I made my own face at her, deciding to stay on the joking train, but she wasn’t wrong. Concrete Temple had been a touring band. Yes, we’d made records, good ones, but our success and longevity had been largely down to the fact that we’d spent most of the year, every year, on the road. We had a die-hard fan club, and people would come to see us year after year, some of them road-tripping to hit more than one city. It had been awesome, but it had also been exhausting.
It was possible that I was only now realizing how much.
“Well, either way,” Auden said, “I like this for you. Rest. Real rest. Are you writing?”
“Yes.”
“Liar.”
“How do you do that through a phone screen?” I loved it, though. This was what I meant about Auden. No one else was ever going to get me like she did, because no one else had lived our life. I’d thought Scott got me, because even though he came from a wealthy Upper East Side family, he’d been around since we were teenagers. But I guess that wasn’t long enough. I guess you had to go further back for someone to really get you.
“I wouldn’t beat yourself up about not writing,” Auden said.“Honestly, I don’t think you should rush whatever’s going to come next.”
