Love Songs for the Road (6 page)

During the first five or six songs, though, Marcus was distracted. His thoughts kept drifting to Ryan and their chance meeting at Pike Place. To his mind, there was absolutely nothing sexier than a woman who was beautiful
and
athletic. Of course, like any guy, his head turned when a gorgeous chick walked by, whether she was a wallflower or a marathoner, but over the years he’d become less interested in women who were simply beautiful. And when it came to Ryan, it was more than just her “pretty and sweaty” body, as Miles had so hilariously put it, that got Marcus thinking. It was little things, gestures, facial expressions, that stuck with him. Like how embarrassed she got when Miles had complimented her. She’d turned as red as a beet, and Marcus wondered why. Could a girl as sexy as Ryan possibly be unused to getting singled out for her looks? No way. Impossible.

Could she not take a compliment? The jury was still out, but the way she had turned and blushed in the market, smiling and brushing her hair back, made it seem like she wasn’t used to being admired. That kind of modesty, that natural innocence, was something he hadn’t seen in a woman in years, and Marcus couldn’t get the idea out of his head. Ryan was not only sexy and smart, but so, so real.

Smitty was soloing. Sending off a flurry of notes, the guitarist gritted his teeth, then cackled to himself as he turned his instrument toward his amp to spark a squawk of piercing feedback. Marcus thought it almost sounded like the Smitty Angel on his shoulder, warning him…
Don’t! Go! After! The! Nanny!!!
He spat the next line into the mic with more intensity, partly feeding off of Smitty, but also willing himself to be in the moment, the way Smitty always seemed to be. If Marcus knew what was best for him, he needed to spend less time obsessing about Ryan’s rocking body and soulful spirit, and more time rocking this capacity crowd of concertgoers.

Midway through the set, Smitty and the rest of the band left the stage, and a roadie brought Marcus his old, beat-up Martin guitar. It was his favorite instrument, but this was the first time he’d ever played it live, because this was the first time Marcus was attempting to play the kind of intimate, intense acoustic music he played at home when there was no one else around. As a single spotlight shone down on him, he felt, for the first time in years, nervous.

“Okay, guys, as you can probably guess,” he told the audience, “I’m going to slow things down a little bit now.”

The audience screamed, which didn’t mean much. Once audiences got this big, they screamed at just about anything Marcus said. He had learned not to take the audience’s adulation too seriously.

“I hope you like this one. It’s brand new.” More screams.

Marcus began singing “I Lock the Door,” the first song he’d written after his divorce with Bianca, but which the record company hadn’t wanted included on his album. The song wasn’t really about Bianca, though. It was about the deepest sadness he’d ever known, after a court of law had told him he couldn’t wake up every day in the same house as his own children. It was about a loneliness he’d never known before he’d been separated from them.

I lock the door upon myself

Because that is the only way

I’ll get my rest today

I turn the latch and I draw the shades

And I wait until the evening’s last light fades away

Into dark nights of the soul

And the tone of my bedroom is blacker than coal

Yeah, it wasn’t exactly a party anthem, but Marcus loved the song. He played a short instrumental break before the second verse. The crowd was dead silent. Maybe they were loving the song. Or maybe they hated it so much, they were sitting on their hands in protest.

He didn’t care.

I lock the door upon myself

Because as the day brightens

Something in my chest tightens

Ventricles bubbling, panic attacks

Only in my solitude can I relax

Please don’t judge me when I stay inside

‘Cause I know in this world there are no free rides

As Marcus continued, he took a glance stage-right, hoping Charlotte and Miles would be there, cheering him on. The truth was, he needed the assurance of seeing them, because he was feeling the song deeply, and he needed to remind himself that, today anyway, his kids were right there with him.

Sure enough, there they were with Ryan, and they both waved broadly, huge smiles on their faces.
Thank God they don’t understand these sad-sack lyrics
, he thought, smiling back.
And thank God Bianca hasn’t turned them against me.

It was normally quite dark backstage, but a mirrored panel from the stage floor was reflecting light directly on the three of them, spinning across their faces like a kaleidoscope. The effect was beautiful and otherworldly, and Marcus didn’t break eye contact, not just because of the kids, but because of Ryan, who had an arm around each of their shoulders. She had to be more than twenty feet away, but Marcus could see the unreal green of her eyes perfectly, and her beauty sent a shock through him.

Suddenly, he had no idea what the next lyric was. Something about a vent, and a fire escape? But the words were just not coming to him, and he had to stop playing to gather himself.

“Oops, I told you this was a new one, right?” Marcus said to the audience. “It’s so new, I guess I haven’t even memorized the words yet!”

Some awkward tittering, and a few encouraging cheers. Then some doofus yelled, “Play ‘Love of My Life’!”

“I’ll get to that one,” Marcus said. “Promise.” He was thinking,
Shut up, dickweed.
He was so tired of playing “Love of My Life.”

He recovered quickly enough, launching into the final verse and chorus of “I Lock the Door” before reverting to acoustic versions of some of his most beloved songs. The audience hadn’t responded to his new, darker direction, but he didn’t care. All he was thinking about was Ryan, that perfect vision of her standing beside his children. The image of her, with Charlotte and Miles, made him feel strong. And for the first time in too long, alive, fully alive.

Chapter Seven

A Glimmer of Light

On the bus ride to Portland, Ryan struggled to keep her eyes open. She was exhausted, which wasn’t very convenient, given the fact that Miles was going bonkers, running up and down the aisle, while Charlotte kept pestering her with precocious questions. Sometimes being a nanny felt like being in combat, stuck in the trenches with two tiny soldiers who either didn’t know, or simply disregarded, the rules of engagement.

“Were you ever married?” Charlotte asked.

“No.”

“Have you had lots of boyfriends?”

“Not really. Just one serious one.”

“What was his name?”

“Charlotte, that’s really kind of personal.”

“Come on, please…” The girl looked as steely and unmovable as the toughest of the journalists who, Ryan had seen firsthand, followed her father around with the sole intent of pulling out of him some unknown detail from his past. “Just tell me.”

“His name was Nick.”

“And why aren’t you with him anymore? Did he stop loving you, like Bianca stopped loving Daddy?”

Ryan still couldn’t get her head around the fact that Charlotte called her mom by her first name (Miles still called her Mommy, thank God for him).

“It was more complicated than that,” Ryan said.

“What do you mean? If you still loved him, and he still loved you, you’d still be together, right?”

“I guess.”

“Did he just stop loving you, then? Did he start loving somebody else? That’s what happened with Bianca and Daddy.”

“Okay, that’s enough, Charlotte.”

But Charlotte stared right back at her nanny and said, “I’m just trying to get to know you.” And with that, she marched down the aisle and plopped herself in Smitty’s lap. Smitty startled awake, but then let Charlotte rest her head against his shoulder. Ryan couldn’t believe that, until last night, she’d thought he was just a roadie, when in fact he was this amazing guitarist who had been with Marcus his entire career, and even co-written a couple of his smash hits. Smitty was such a good guy, and Ryan felt thankful that his kindly presence translated into some downtime for her.

She didn’t know what it was like to be a child of divorce. Her own parents had had a pretty great marriage—maybe not the most exciting marriage in the history of the world, but a stable and loving one, at least—so she had no idea what it would have been like to be exposed so early to a relationship that had withered and died. It made her sad that Charlotte knew about such things as “loving somebody else” at her age. Ryan herself had known that a relationship could end painfully, that loss and betrayal existed as concepts, for some time. But she’d never really known the pain of being abandoned, thrown away like yesterday’s newspaper, until Nick and Natalie had hooked up, destroying her two closest relationships in the process.

Ryan still couldn’t believe they’d done that to her. She’d been with Nick for almost a year, and it had been—or so she’d thought—the best year of her life. She and Nick were so alike. They loved all the Montana stuff: hiking, canoeing, kayaking, and running, sometimes fitting in three sports activities in a day. It drove their friends crazy, how active they were, and the couple was often teased for their well-scrubbed, all-American obsession with fitness. But Ryan never felt more alive than when she was outside, taking in the natural beauty of her home state, those endorphins
pulsing through her and making her feel strong and almost giddy. And when she’d found someone to share that with, well, she’d felt like she’d found the first true companion of her life.

So when she’d innocently picked up Nick’s phone one day and seen an insanely racy sext message from Natalie, her best friend since middle school, it cut her deeply. She confronted Nick right away, shocking the hell out of him, and getting straight answers before he could make up lies. He’d been fooling around with Nat on the side for more than a month, during which he’d told Ryan he loved her probably a gazillion times. Bald-faced dishonesty like that? To Ryan, it was disgusting.

After the breakup, Nick had left with his buddy Jack on a summer-long road trip to God knows where. She didn’t know if she’d ever see him again. She did know that it would be a good, long time—years, maybe—before she’d be in a relationship again. Being single was a little lonely at times, sure, but it beat being so depressed she couldn’t even get out of bed.

Ryan’s phone buzzed. For a minute, she thought she might have conjured Nick just by thinking negative thoughts about him, but it was just a text from Em.

Hey you
, it read.
Just a heads up. Guess who popped up on my Internet today? You! You’re famous!

Em had posted a link, which Ryan clicked on right away. It took her to a website she had never heard of called
CelebriBites.
After clicking on a headline that read, “Troy Tour Takes Off,” she found a slide show with captions. Most of the photos, of course, were of Marcus, talking and laughing and being his charming self while a drenched Serena held his umbrella for him, though there were also a few of Jacey and her band entering the hotel at God knew what hour of the morning.

But there was, just as Em had said, a single photo of her. It showed a vexed-looking Ryan covering Charlotte’s and Miles’s faces from the light of the flash. Her shirt was soaked, and horrifyingly, see-through. The caption read: “Introducing Marcus Troy’s hot new nanny, Ryan (no last name yet, folks, but we’re working on it).” The story had been posted a full day earlier, and there was only one comment. “What’d she have to do to get that job?” asked somebody named BRadfar, “Win a wet T-shirt contest in that hick town where Troy lives these days?”

Oh my God,
she texted Em.
Not good.

Em texted back a sad-face emoticon, and Ryan opened a browser window on her phone, typing in “Marcus Troy Nanny Ryan,” but she found no other images of herself, and at least at first glance, no other site had posted that particular picture. It was impossible to tell, of course, but
CelebriBites
couldn’t have been too popular if the story had been up a whole day and there was only one comment. She Googled “Ryan Evans” and the picture didn’t appear. That must have meant that nobody had managed to sleuth out her last name yet. Maybe that also meant nobody cared about her and her wet T-shirt. She just hoped it would stay that way. Was this what it meant to be part of Marcus’s life—you would be subjected to the constant threat of Internet exposure? How did he live this way, and how would anyone else begin to share a life with him in an environment like this?

“Hi there,” Marcus said suddenly, plopping down in the seat across from hers. “Mind if I hang here for a minute?”

“Oh hey,” she said, cramming her phone into her bag. “What’s up?”

“Not much.” He unbuttoned a button on his shirt, which made Ryan swallow, hopefully invisibly. “I’m just killing time, I guess.”

“Why, thank you. How flattering.”

Marcus laughed, a bit uncomfortably. Ryan was trying to hold it together. Wasn’t there a law against taking a picture of someone without his or her permission? Didn’t that photographer need a release from her before selling (she assumed) the picture to a gossip blog? She tried to block out these thoughts and focus on what Marcus was saying.

He’d been acting a little odd since that instant they’d locked eyes, when he’d lost his place in that dark, strange song of his. Not that Ryan was absolutely sure that
she
was the reason he’d spaced out, but there had definitely been a moment. And ever since, Marcus had seemed unfocused. Unlike the friendly, teasing, naughty character he’d been only yesterday morning, the man in front of her seemed a little forlorn.

“I liked that song of yours,” she said, thinking it might cheer him up to hear praise for the song that the audience hadn’t seemed to appreciate very much.

“Oh yeah? Which one?”

“That super-depressing one. About locking the door on yourself.”

“Are you being serious?”

“Yeah. I liked it. It was…interesting.”

“Interesting? I’d rather you say you loved it or you hated it. But ‘interesting’? Interesting is the kiss of death.”

Ryan realized she was no music critic, but how could
interesting
be considered an insult? She realized she was in over her head—Marcus probably didn’t get a whole lot of criticism on new compositions from his staff—but tried to come up with something intelligent to say.

“No, I really mean it. Most of your music is good-time music.”

“Ouch.”

Everything she said was turning into an insult, somehow, though this was the exact opposite of what she meant. She’d had no idea how sensitive musicians could be.

“Well, it makes people feel good—you see that, right? They were loving it. But in that ‘Lock the Door’ song, you were obviously digging deeper, and I for one appreciated it.”

“Really? Do you mean that?”

“I do. I mean, it was a little dark and a little weird, and
I don’t know if I understood every line, but life can be dark and weird, and sometimes people need to hear about that, too.”

“Exactly.” He leaned forward in his seat. “I just wish I could do more of that—sing about whatever’s on my mind, without worrying whether it’s going to work as a video or get radio play, you know?”

“Listen, I can tell what you’re trying to do. You want to reinvent your style, to give your audience something that’s actually challenging.”

“Right!” Ryan couldn’t believe that Marcus actually cared about her opinions on his music. “The only problem is, they’re there to see us play the songs they’ve known for years. They basically just come so they can drink and party with their friends.”

“And you know this how, exactly?”

“I don’t know, maybe by the deafening silence that followed the song?”

“Well, it’s a new song, right?”

“Yeah, very new.”

“Maybe it’s not finished yet.”

He raised his eyebrows. “That song is perfect.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Ryan had no idea where this confidence came from, but somehow she felt comfortable telling Marcus exactly what she thought. He looked strong enough to handle it.

“Well, how would you change it, then?”

“That’s your job.” Ryan laughed. “I mean, I would have no idea, but…”

“What?” Marcus leaned forward. He was actually waiting with bated breath, or so it seemed, to hear Ryan’s thoughts on the craft of songwriting.

“Well, that song is personal, and it’s dark. Almost hopeless. And if you go that dark, you need to show a little glimmer of light, too.”

“A glimmer of light?”

“Yeah, like, if you lock the door, you need to unlock it, too. Show people a little hope.”

“Who are you, Ryan Evans? Are you a rock critic, posing as a nanny?”

“Nope, I’m just a nanny,” Ryan said. “But I’m an honest nanny.”

She thought,
Hopefully I’m not going to become a celebrity, wet T-shirt nanny.

…

Marcus tried his best not to show it, but Ryan’s critique had unnerved him. Ever since he’d come up with “I Lock the Door,” he had considered it one of the best songs he’d ever written. He knew he would never scale the musical heights of his heroes, guys like Springsteen, Bon Jovi, and Chris Martin from Coldplay—songwriters whose compositions would endure for decades, maybe even centuries. But with “I Lock the Door,” he thought he had gotten pretty close, for the first time ever.

And as Ryan, his nanny for God’s sake, critiqued this precious gem that had sprung from his imagination, it had taken a superhuman feat of willpower not to get defensive. Except for Smitty, no one in his inner circle would have dared to give him songwriting advice. And if they had, he would have probably responded by asking just exactly how many number one hits
they’d
been responsible for (Marcus had written or co-written eleven), or how many triple-platinum albums they’d released (he’d put out four).

Yes, the songs he’d written and performed, from the very beginning of his career, were hugely popular, had made him a multi-millionaire who never had to worry about a day job again. But that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt when a critic, or a fan, or his nanny, told him his writing wasn’t good enough. It did hurt, just as much as it had when he’d started writing songs for his high school garage band in 1994, and just as much as it had a decade later, when his first album had sold millions while also being lambasted by writers from
Rolling Stone
,
Spin
, and the
New York Times
. More recently, Marcus had learned to grin and bear it, to take the inevitable bad
reviews a bit more graciously, but that didn’t mean he liked it.

It might have been an exaggeration to say that he liked hearing Ryan tell him his near-masterpiece of a song needed some lightening up, but he did like talking to her. She was honest, direct, and best of all, whip-smart. So many people near him had become yes men, willing to tell him what they thought he wanted to hear. But Ryan wasn’t censoring or second-guessing herself; she was simply being truthful. Marcus found himself not only trusting her, but wanting to glean more wisdom from her.

He realized, with a shock, that he actually wanted to be friends with Ryan. But was it possible for him, Marcus Troy, to just be friends with a woman? A woman as sexy and fun as Ryan? The idea seemed insane. But was it so crazy that it just might work?