“I just got home from being lost in a state park for eight hours,” I said before she could speak.
“What!” She’d been reading in bed, and she sat up, alarmed. “Are you OK?”
“I’m fine. It was wild, and I’m covered in mosquito bites, but I’m fine.” I recounted the whole adventure. Well, I recounted the whole adventure minus the kissing.
She shuddered. “Oh my God; that is my worst nightmare.”
I moved the phone closer and studied her. Her tone had been odd—not sympathetic, as I might have expected, but sounding as if she was truly terrified.
“It all turned out OK. I really am fine.”
“I know, I know.” She relaxed against her headboard, looking more like herself. “So what are you going to do now?”
“I have no idea. I should sleep, but I don’t think I can. I’m too wired.”
“What does that actually mean, ‘wired’? You hear people say that, but what actuallyisit? What does it feel like?”
I considered the strange question. “It feels like I have too many fragments of thoughts and emotions clanging around in my head for there to be room for sleep. They have to burn off if I want to sleep.”
“Write a song.”
“What?”
“I’m not an expert, but it seems like writing a song might do exactly that—burn off the fragments.”
“What happened to not pushing it? Not being reactive?”
“This isn’t reactive. At least not in the tit-for-tat way we were talking about before. If you wrote a song now, it wouldn’t be a revenge song. It wouldn’t have anything to do with Scott, or Concrete Temple. It would be about a major thing that happened to you. Wouldn’t it be weirdnotto write about it?”
Huh. She might have a point, but I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “How are you?”
“Oh, I’m fine. I’m always fine.”
The way she said that seemed a bit off to me, but at the moment I was too self-absorbed to press her. The fragments swirling around in my head were… starting to coalesce a little? Maybe?
We said good night, and fuck me if I didn’t haul my ass out of bed and over to the keyboard. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d written a viable song on a piano. Most ofthem had been when I was younger, before the band really hit, before I spent so much of my life on the road. Some of those eventually made their way onto Concrete Temple albums, but later it was easier, sitting around with Scott in studios and hotel rooms, to write on our guitars. I got used to doing it that way.
But Scott wasn’t here anymore.
And I had this phrase in my head. It was only six notes, but I heard them, clear as day, and I heard them on the piano.
So I turned on the keyboard and got to it.
A couple hours later, as the sun was coming up, I had a song.
I was startled sometime the next day by a knock at my door—I’d been playing the new song—the new song!—over and over in almost a fugue state. I looked around for my watch to no avail. I wasn’t the kind of person who could judge what time it was by the quality or direction of the light, so it could have been seven or it could have been noon. Or maybe I’d completely lost track of Sunday and it was Gretchen, come to rouse me for Monday’s sunrise circle.
I stumbled to the door, and itwasGretchen, but I was pretty sure she wasn’t here to rouse me for sunrise circle, because she looked like she had been cast in a comedy in which she was playing the role of Extremely Ineffectual Spy. She was wearing a hoodie with the hood up and drawn tightly over her head so only the center of her face was visible, and her eyes darted back and forth as if she expected someone to jump out at her.
“Hey,” I said, smiling despite myself. I must have been feeling a sort of residual camaraderie from our time in the woods, because how else to explain the rush of affection I felt at seeingher in her silly getup and the accompanying bloom of pleasure that she was seeking me out?
“I need to ask you a question,” she whispered urgently.
“Shoot.”
“Can I come in?”
Yes.“Sure.”
