Catherine (11 page)

In the privacy of my mother’s room, I toasted some Pop-Tarts and settled down in front
of my computer. As it turned out, a search for
Jackie Gray
turned up a mere thirty-two thousand hits. I scrolled through the list, looking for
clues to which one was my mom’s Jackie—a New York address, maybe? That narrowed it
down to about five hundred. It was all so frustrating. Hence could have told me which
one was my mom’s friend, but I wasn’t ready to face him again just yet. Coward that
I was, I munched my Pop-Tarts and scrutinized the faces of Jackie Gray the biology
professor, Jackie Gray the screenplay writer, and Jackie Gray the financial strategist,
willing them to come to life and give up their secrets.

The music started around eight. I’d given up on the Internet and had taken down a
stack of my mother’s books to browse
through when the bass started thumping from downstairs. So far I hadn’t found much
of anything new—just some doodles of men with curlicue mustaches and women with elaborate
beehives.

Close to giving up hope, I paged listlessly through another book, then another, and
finally found something on the first page of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s collected sonnets:
my mom’s name doodled many different ways—curly script, balloon letters, zigzag letters.
Catherine Eversole
for a quarter page, and then, over and over,
Catherine Hence
, filling the rest of the flyleaf. So my mother had daydreamed about marrying him.
It wasn’t terribly useful information, but it was one more tiny piece of evidence
that Catherine Eversole had once existed, had been about my age, and had lived in
this bright little apartment with her lace curtains and books. Had she been kept awake
by the endless pounding bass guitar, and by drums I hadn’t noticed before but that
seemed to have gotten louder? Had she been tempted to dress in her best clothes, make
herself up to look older, and slip downstairs to blend in with the crowd, just to
see what all the fuss was about?

Because, come to think of it, I was tempted.

Not that I had brought much in the way of clothes. I did have my best pair of jeans
with me, a pair of boots, a purple T-shirt, and some dangly earrings. I had lip balm,
and some smoky eyeshadow that might make me look a bit older. I dressed slowly, unsure
if I was really going to go through with the plan blossoming in my mind. I bent over
at the waist and brushed my hair upside down so it would look fuller. I took a deep
breath and stepped out into the hall, locking the apartment door behind me.

The elevator’s creaking was, luckily enough, drowned out by
music that grew louder as I drew closer. When the door slid open into the gray hall
at the rear of the building, I looked both ways, then hurried down the hallway and
into the main room, which was almost full and buzzing with conversation. The blue
neon cast its otherworldly spell on the room, and bartenders in black vests waited
on the gathering crowd.

An audience pressed in close to the stage. On the room’s fringes, people were gathered
around high tables. I found a spot in a dark corner off toward the side and watched
the band, a trio of skinny dudes in matching snakeskin boots. The music was jittery,
full of jagged edges—not my usual taste, but catchy. From the edge of the room I could
watch the bassist joke around with the rhythm guitarist, and take in every emotion
on the lead singer’s face; I could even catch his eye from time to time. Did my mother
get to do this when she was my age? And how had she not missed living over The Underground
after she married my dad and moved to suburbia?

Once the song ended, I thought to check the room for Hence. When I didn’t see him,
I slipped closer to the stage. Just then, Cooper passed by carrying a bin of empty
bottles and glasses. He looked shocked to see me there and shouted something in my
direction. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, so he shouted it louder: “You’re not
twenty-one.”

“Neither are you,” I yelled, fairly certain it was true.

He shook his head and started to go. I tapped his shoulder before he got away.

“Don’t tell,” I begged, mouthing the words exaggeratedly so he wouldn’t miss them.
“Please?”

He frowned and stalked off. Still, I didn’t think he would rat me out to Hence, so
I stayed where I was, wishing I was daring enough to slip up to the bar and order
a soda. Instead, I retreated to my shadowy place on the sidelines. After a while,
the spotlight flashed on to bathe the stage in red light. The crowd started milling
around, jockeying for a position near the band. As tempted as I was to squeeze through
the crowd for a better view, I stayed put.

Eventually, a new band took the stage. “Hey, everybody. We’re the Charmed Particles,”
a man’s voice shouted. Around me, the crowd went berserk. Yellow and white lights
flooded the stage, and there, front and center, stood a guy with longish hair and
a triangle-shaped soul patch that made his grin seem devilish. Soul Patch grabbed
the mike and started to sing, stalking the stage in his tight black jeans and motorcycle
boots. A thrill ran through my body, from my feet right to the roots of my hair.

It wasn’t just that he was gorgeous, though he was. The rest of the band was gorgeous,
too, in a super-skinny, cooler-than-thou kind of way. The guitarist, a tall man whose
white-blond Afro contrasted with his dark skin, pogoed up and down as he played; the
shirtless drummer’s long, straight hair flew in and out of his high-cheekboned face.
A sleek woman with flame-red hair stalked the stage in a crushed-velvet catsuit, playing
her bass guitar almost as an afterthought. I couldn’t help envying her—so confident
and in charge, holding a whole room full of people at attention just by doing something
she obviously loved.

“What are you doing down here?” Hence growled in my ear, picking that moment to find
and humiliate me. He grabbed me by
the arm and yanked me out of the room, the crowd parting to let us through, and pulled
me down the long hall toward the elevator.

“Stop it!” I struggled to free my arm. “I can walk on my own.”

“What do you think you’re doing? This isn’t some teen hangout.”

“I know that.”

“Do you know what kind of trouble a girl like you could get into in a nightclub?”
He was screaming at me now. “For one thing, you can attract the wrong kind of attention.
You could get…” His voice trailed off.

“I could get what?”

No answer. He glowered down at me.

“You don’t need to worry. I can take care of myself.”

Hence’s voice got quieter, but if anything, he sounded even angrier. “It’s not you
I’m worried about. I could get busted for having an underage
child
in my club. Fined. Or even shut down.”

“I wasn’t planning to drink. I was just watching the show.” I started to explain that
the noise had kept me awake and that I’d been curious, but he cut me off with a wave
of his hand.

“No excuses. I’m letting you stay in my house, and if you give me any reason—the tiniest
reason—to regret it, I’ll kick you out faster than you can say ‘boo.’ ” His eyes narrowed
and his glare froze my tongue.

What choice did I have? I got into the elevator. Up in my mother’s apartment, I changed
into my pajamas and lay in bed seething. If only I could at least make out the words
and music—but, like a cruel taunt, all I could hear was that thumping bassline.

Just when it felt like I was on the verge of really getting to know Hence, fate touched
down like a tornado to spin me off track. Early the next week, I was making chicken
salad, hacking the last of the white meat from the previous night’s bird, when Dad
came into the kitchen and kissed me on the cheek. “Have I told you lately how proud
I am of you?”

“Once or twice.”

“Your creative writing teacher couldn’t stop raving about you.” He’d gone to parent-teacher
conferences the night before. “She says you’re one of the most promising writers she’s
ever taught. She wants to submit one of your poems to a real literary magazine. And
here I’ve got you slaving over the stove when you should be off at a writer’s colony,
working on your magnum opus.”

“Somebody’s got to make dinner.” Dad’s cooking repertoire
consisted of instant mac and cheese and frozen peas. As for Q, he lived on Big Macs,
potato chips, and Gatorade. The two of them would have been perfectly happy eating
takeout every night, but I couldn’t go without home-cooked food very long without
starting to feel sad and motherless. Which of course I was, but that didn’t mean I
had to eat pork fried rice every single night of the week.

“You won’t forget your old man when you go off to Harvard, will you?”

“I can’t go off to Harvard. Who would feed you?”

“Peking Road misses me. I’ll go back to being their best customer.” Dad picked a chunk
of chicken out of the bowl with his fingers. I pretended to wave my chef’s knife at
him, and he pretended to cower in fear. “You win! I’ll wait till dinner.”

“You’d better.”

Dad got a glass out of the cupboard and poured himself some cabernet, his dinnertime
ritual. “Of course you’ll go to Harvard. You’ll make all sorts of snooty friends,
and be ashamed of your lowbrow old man.”

“
You
went to Harvard,” I reminded him, as if he needed reminding.

“And got gentleman’s Cs. I wasted my college years screwing around.” That’s my dad:
Even when I was a little kid, he talked to me like I was a grown-up, swearing, making
embarrassing revelations about his past, and generally saying whatever popped into
his head.

“Mom went to Harvard,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t. Though eleven years
had passed since we lost her, the
mention of her could still send Dad into his sad and wistful mode, and that night
was no exception.

“Your mother kicked Harvard’s ass,” he said after a pause. “She had this amazing swagger.
And determination: That woman knew her own mind. She wanted to write for
Rolling Stone
, and she never let anything get in her way. God knows what she saw in a dilettante
like me. I had no idea what I wanted out of life.” I’d heard this story before, but
it never got old for Dad. “I wasted all my time at college partying with musicians,
painters, writers, wishing I had some kind of talent. Did I ever tell you I played
drums in a punk band for a while?”

“The Bloody Crusades,” I offered, filling in the blanks.

Dad smiled absently. “I even had my retro-beatnik phase—smoked clove cigarettes and
wore a beret, if you can picture that.”

I smiled, washing the mess off my hands.

“All I ever wanted was to be some kind of great artist, but all I turned out good
at was business, like my old fart of a father, and… well, you know the rest. Look
at me now.”

“Yeah, you’re a real failure, Dad.” I rolled my eyes. “I don’t know how you live with
yourself.”

He kissed me on the cheek. “I’m relieved you got your mother’s brains.” Then he grabbed
the rolled-up newspaper from the kitchen table and bonked me on the head with it.
“I know what we should do: Let’s take a family vacation. You deserve a break, and
come to think of it, so do I.”

So, less than a week later, we were headed for Mykonos, Greece. Sebastian Clegg, one
of Dad’s rock-star friends, had a
villa there, and Dad pulled some strings. “But I’ll miss school,” I said when he showed
me the plane tickets.

“You’ll make it up.”

“But what about Q? Can he afford to skip a whole week of classes?”

“Your brother can fend for himself. He’ll charm his professors into giving him extensions.”
Dad grinned. “You and Q will learn more about the world from going places than from
sitting in some stuffy classroom, daughter of mine. So no more worrying. Just sit
back and enjoy.”

For about a minute and a half, I was thrilled. I’d always loved our family trips.
And Dad had taken us lots of places, but never to Greece. But then I thought about
Hence. Did I really want to leave him behind, even for just ten days? Our time together
wandering through Chelsea had been so much fun. After the Hotel Chelsea I’d even lured
him into a few record stores, and while we browsed through used albums, he told me
about the first time he’d picked up a guitar at a friend’s house, how right it had
felt in his hands, and how he’d hated to give it back.