Blue Notes (17 page)

“First, you’re right about our ages. Five years doesn’t seem like much, but it’s huge. You don’t know what it’s like to live in the real world and make the decisions I’ve been forced to make.”

“Stop right there,” I say, as angry as he is. “You don’t know shit about my life. And this is exactly what I didn’t want. You might as well have a family at home that you’re hiding me from, like how that creep professor hides Adelaide from his wife. You’re not ready to tell a colleague my name, let alone take me out on a date, just to get some burgers.”

He clenches his jaw. He doesn’t look at me. “That’s the other thing, sugar. Who ever said we’re dating?”

 Twenty-Three 

I
don’t sleep that night.

Jude drove me home in silence, but I heard his words, over and over, like an out of tune piano repeating the same song.

Who ever said we’re dating?

I didn’t even change out of Janissa’s dress when I snuck in—just crawled under the covers and hoped six hours before dawn would be enough time for me to pull it together. I lie in the dark with tears leaking down to wet my hair and my pillow. I don’t make a sound. Crying is something I learned to keep to myself a long time ago, and I don’t want to wake Janissa. She’s sleeping soundly across our little room, making quiet, indelicate snoring noises.

I don’t think I hate Jude. He turned out to be just what I’d been so wary of, and just what Janissa warned against. Mostly, I hate that I was right. A sad, fatalistic ending is the safest bet.

I gave him more trust, more of myself, more quickly than I have to anyone else. I got my hopes up that the time between us, no matter how brief, could be amazing—that he could show
me
how to be amazing. Instead he showed me what I’d already been wary enough to suspect. I had no chance of protecting myself against such a smooth, aggressive man. He’d held me the right way and told me what I needed to hear, and had it not been for that guy Templeton and his plastic surgery gone wrong wife, Jude would’ve taken me for all I’m worth. That meant my virginity, sure, but also my self-esteem and my stupid, eager,
please love me
heart.

I was a fool to look for more. I was a fool for thinking the thrill ride would be enough—and it had been,
in the moment
. I was a fool for hoping it would never end.

I relive so many of those moments as tears keep trickling down my cheeks.

I’m sure I’ll be memorable now. I’ll be that girl who got so starry eyed that I couldn’t tell night from day, seduction from dating, player from gentleman.

Dawn slowly changes the color of the ceiling from charcoal gray to stuff that’s way too bright and cheery. I’m no closer to pulling myself together than when I stood on trembling legs and forced myself to walk with Jude away from that bar. Side by side. A wall between us.

End of story.

Only, my epilogue is still in the making. I find a new refrain to drive myself crazy with.

Now what?

When Janissa wakes up, she smiles over at me. “Hey, you. How’d it go?”

I’ve held it together long enough. I can’t answer her. I just double over and hug the pillow to my face, letting hours’ worth of sobs take over. She’s perched on the edge of my bed in no time, her arms around both me and the pillow.

There’s really no telling how long I cry. It feels like a week before I’m finally able to tell Janissa what happened. She helps me out of the dress and into some pj’s, then makes me my favorite peppermint tea.

“You told me so,” I whisper over the rim of the mug I clutch like a lifeline. I’m propped up in bed, where Janissa stacked some extra pillows against the wall. She even closed the curtains halfway so the sun doesn’t hit me full in the face. “You said he was too dangerous.”

Janissa is sitting cross-legged on the floor, holding her mug of hot chocolate. “Yeah, but what I never told you is that a little part of me was jealous. I’d have done just what you did. In a heartbeat. You’d be the one popping open a second box of Kleenex for me.”

“I’m glad that isn’t how it went. You’ve been so good to me.”

“You’re my friend,” she says simply.

I start to cry again, but softly. “Thank you, Janey.”

“Did you just call me Janey?”

My cheeks heat up. “Sorry.”

“No, I like it.” She sips her cocoa. “I’ve always thought Janissa was too formal, but I didn’t want to be the dork who starts insisting on a nickname. You just gave me one spontaneously.”

“I goofed. That’s all.”

“Too late. I’m Janey to you. Maybe it’ll catch on.” After standing up, she stretches. “So here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to get dressed and go work at the chem lab. You’re going to take a Unisom and sleep until dinner. I’ll bring us back a bunch of stuff, from crackers to chocolate bars. Then more sleep. If he doesn’t call to apologize by then, fuck him.”

I feel my eyes go wide, but she stands even more resolutely.

“I mean it, Keeley. No one has the right to treat you that way.” She gathers a change of clothes and starts getting dressed. “Next chance we get, we’ll stay in like hermits. You’ll work on your sonata and store up more strength. We’ll eat too much, refuse to get dressed, and pretend the Internet was created just for Twitter.”

“You’re so bossy,” I say with a little smile.

“It’s my way of coping. I really want to make fliers and post them all around campus. ‘Beware This Handsome Dickweed.’ ”

I nod to my mug. “Peppermint tea and Unisom are a lot better.”

“Mission accomplished.”

• • •

Janey is great, and so is the familiar pattern of my classes, but I need my parents. When I’m this desperate for some safety and affection, I stop thinking of them as Clair and John. They’re my parents, way more than the two people who shot me into the world. That doesn’t mean it’s easy to ask John to drive down and get me. I don’t have a car, and it’s three hours round trip down I-10. Guilt about being treated how they insist I deserve being treated is a hard thing to get over. Six years, and I’m still trying.

He makes it easier by showing up late after his shift at the supply company, where he manages a company that imports and distributes things that make things: sheet metal, ball bearings, rivets, screws, rebar. Stuff comes in from China, and then gets shipped out to all the places across the planet that need the basics for their own manufacturing. His job is mostly about people and keeping them happy and productive—more of that
he’s our rock
personality—but it’s always been a job that helped me make sense of a crazy world. I mean, who thinks of where hinges come from? How they get to houses so that doors can open and close? The little details are cool. They ground me.

It’s late when he bundles me and my duffel in his ten-year-old Accord. He and Clair are frugal and they work hard. They just couldn’t ever have kids of their own. A few tries at adoption, and even fostering babies, had broken their hearts. Instead they wound up with me. I guess it was a good tradeoff, no matter how hard I was to handle in the early years, because I sure as hell wasn’t going to leave them.

“You planning on telling me what this is about?” John asks, about ten minutes out of the city. We’re surrounded by green and green and more green. I’m convinced Louisiana is about fifty percent water and fifty percent blinding foliage. “Clair and I made a lot of guesses, but we’d rather hear it from you.”

“Can we talk about it when we get home? I don’t . . .” I swallow an unexpected sob and look back out the window. “I don’t think I want to say it more than once.”

“Sure.”

He says it so plainly, and he means it. No offense taken. Instead he turns on the radio and listens to the sports recap before turning it over to a classical station that lulls me to sleep.

We arrive in Denham Springs just after ten. Clair is swinging softly on the porch and has the light on above the front door, as well as the one over the one-car garage. Gravel crunches beneath the tires as John pulls up. Bugs think the light is the best thing ever, but they’re fewer in number now. I’d never seen so many bugs before moving to Louisiana. You can’t have that much water and greenery without the inevitable result.

Clair darts off the porch and squeezes me into a big hug. She looks the same as when I left for Tulane in September. Maybe because I’ve changed so much, I expected the same from her and John. But her hair is still coppery red and wiry, a holdover from her Cajun roots, and her skin smooth and freckled. She’s only forty-five and sometimes acts about half her age. Her vivaciousness reminds me of Adelaide—or vice versa. No wonder I’ve tried so hard to get along with the girl. It’s not wildness so much as sucking up life with every breath.

John kisses Clair and gets my bag. Soon I’m slouched on the sectional in the living room, where a big wall of books and a flat-screen TV take up the whole thing. The windows are open a little and the ceiling fan is a gentle whirr of sound. Everything is pinewood, from the ceiling panels to the floors, except for the marble-wrapped fireplace they barely use except during the holidays, when crackling flames add to the hominess. It even smells like home, with lemon wood polish and the remnants of what must’ve been a roast. I bet if I sneak into the kitchen later, I’ll find homemade cornbread. Cornbread plus honey equals comfort-food heaven. I feel tension leak out of me, down into the couch upholstery, down into the marrow of the wood.

Clair brings me sweet tea and settles in beside me. John sits on his recliner, a little distant, but still all ears.

I tell them what happened. Well, almost all of it. A rehash of Yamatam’s. How I didn’t play the second time I went. Jude. Janissa. Adelaide. More Jude. Not a word about our seduction plans. My classes.

And finally, the nondate that ended with me in tears.

John only shakes his head, mumbling something about a shotgun. Clair, though, has bright green eyes full of sympathy. “Oh, baby, you didn’t deserve that! To have him just . . . dismiss you? If he was anything like you’ve described, he should’ve stood you up and put your arm through his and introduced you with a smile on his face—lawyer be damned. Has he called?”

“No.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Then I have to say it, even if you can’t, but screw him. He doesn’t get to treat you like something to be ashamed of.”

She’s got her full tiger going, which means there’s no room for me to break in and defend Jude. I shouldn’t. There’s no reason to. But the urge is there. I think it’s because I’m still in shock and disbelief, hoping what happened is a misunderstanding. I tried playing that game. Maybe he was just startled because of the area of town we were in, or because he was wearing such casual clothes. I never win at guessing. If the lawyer was in that area of town, then he had no reason to judge Jude for it, and I was dressed in that pretty black dress I’d borrowed from Janissa.

No reason to defend him. Just a lot of reasons to be heartsick.

“I know that,” I say. “I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of.”
Not even what we did in his Mercedes and what we’d planned on doing.
“But it almost felt like he could tell about . . . about the old stuff. I’ve been struggling with it a lot lately. The nightmares and all. The change from here has been harder than I thought. More pressure. New friends to try and make. My music. And now this. It’s stirring up a whole bunch of crazy. I thought I could handle it, and I was doing good. But that was because things were going good.” I wipe my eyes. “Now, not so much.”

“You still have all that,” John says quietly. “Your studies and music, even the new friends.”

“We’ve been concerned.” Clair gives my hand a quick squeeze. “Jude Villars? Really? It’s so impossible to believe. And I’m not saying you don’t deserve a guy who’s practically Louisiana royalty, baby. That’d suit you just fine. But he’s not stable. He can’t be, with all that’s happened to him and his family business. Now he’s proved he
can’t
handle it. Otherwise he’d have stood up and been a man about you two.”

“So that’s it,” I whisper to myself. My throat is parched. Not even the tea helps. Hearing it from Clair is like shutting it all down. No more me and Jude. Clair hands me a box of Kleenex and hugs me when I start crying again.

“How long can you stay?” she asks.

“I emailed my profs that I had a family emergency,” I reply between sniffs.

“Good. A little R and R.” She touches what must be huge bags under my eyes. “I think you could use it. And maybe you can play us the sonata you’ve been working on.”

“Maybe.” But I know I’ll dodge that like flying bullets. Too much of it is bound up and tangled with and inspired by the man I can’t have.