The Scream (9 page)

But it's my house
, she thought, and the truth of those words made all the difference in the world.
Jake and I own the thing: lock, stock, barrel, and twenty-year, variable-rate mortgage.

The house was old-style big; Pete's grandparents had been fairly well-to-do for their time, and their living quarters had reflected it. Most of the original furnishings remained, though she'd solicited brother Cody's help in stripping and refinishing them, and she'd reupholstered them herself. Lots of solid oak and mahogany to go with Jake's beloved burnished brass. Above all, tons and tons of
space
, the likes of which she couldn't have achieved in New York City for less than the gross national product itself.

It was hard to believe sometimes; even now, with almost a year in the house behind her. It was hard to believe how lucky she was, how close to ideal her life had actually become. She had a man she loved: more important, a man she trusted with her life, who would be with her till the end and maybe even after. She had the baby she'd been dreaming of and the economic freedom to stay home with that baby. She had gotten Ted out of the city, whether he liked it or not. She had gotten out herself.

But most of all, she was
centered
, at long last and hopefully forever; and, God, what an amazing feeling that was! What a weight off the shoulders and the soul! There was an incredible sense of completion, of all the threads running through her life finally having come together into something coherent and beautiful. Something she could show for all the years of struggle, the years of mistakes and shortcomings and failure, the years of making do and making peace with imperfection.

This
was what life was supposed to be like.

This was her dream, come true.

And that was the scary thing about it, the tiny terror that struck her occasionally, unexpectedly, like walking face-first through a spiderweb in the dark: the idea of just how fragile it was, how delicately balanced the pieces of her joy. What if anything were to happen to Natalie? To Ted? To Jake? What would happen to them if anything happened to her. . . ?

"WAHHH!!!" Natalie remarked. Her face was a Kabuki mask of misery.

"I think it's nappytime for you, kiddo. Give Mom a little bit of time for herself and her art, whaddaya say?"

"WAHHH!!! PFTHHH!!!"

"Well, that's a start, anyway."

They turned, Natalie helplessly, toward the staircase. It was an elegant old affair, wide enough for three fat people abreast, winding slowly to the right and upwards at the fifth to fifteenth steps. Like so much of the rest of her life these days, it was a gorgeous thing.

Even with the crazed music pouring down from its summit, courtesy of good ol' Deadbeat Konopliski and her own ever-lovin' son. In a minute she would be telling them to turn it down so that Natalie could manage a nap. They would be grumpy about it, and no doubt stoned again. God, life was tough.

But even Ted's music was pretty good these days. It was nice to see him graduate from the angry young no-talents to more sophisticated fare, even if they
were
still singing about demons and gang bangs and all that charming smarm.

Take this group, for instance. The Scream. There was real depth there, real sonic texture. Even Jesse had to agree. Whatever else you might say about it, the music was powerful; you could almost believe, engulfed in that sound, that hell wasn't such a bad place after all. . . .

"PFTHHHH!" Natalie said.

"Yes," Rachel agreed. "Then again, there's always that."

Jesse was waiting for the phone to ring.

She sat watching the silently replicating waveforms on the monitor before her. The amber screen flickered and glowed. On it, pirated dulcet tones of the entire New York Philharmonic string section silently reinterpreted themselves as a series of sharply etched peaks and valleys, cascading forward like the topography of an alien planet.

The light pen sat limply in one hand, its fiber-optic tip staring blankly back like a tiny, glowing eye. Watching, impassively. Waiting patiently, like everything else in the great hall, for her to make a move.

Waiting, for the phone to ring.

And the bottom to drop out.

She looked up, past the high-tech sprawl of cables, keyboards and consoles that covered well over three quarters of the room. She was alone at present, the amps and mike stands that I marked the positions of the other band members pointing only toward empty space.

Normally she'd be thrilled. Solitude was an all-too fleeting phenomenon in the hyperpace of the last five months, with its concert preps and news clips and round-the-clock rehearsal/recording/production/promotion sessions. Normally she'd be seizing on the chance to diddle, undisturbed, with the vast array of digital samples that were her specialty and the textural trade-mark of the Jacob Hamer Band's muscular sound. Normally, the animated patterns on the screen would mean something.

Not today. Nothing today would be normal.

Not until the telephone rang.

And maybe not even then . . .

On the screen, the patterns had ceased cycling. One-it looked like a pizzicato violin sample, but she wasn't really I paying attention-had frozen in mid-strike. It was an eerie metaphor for the immediate future, like a cheap videotape stuck indefinitely on pause, static bands of white noise blotting out any hope of concentration.

Jesse reached over and laid the light pen to rest. Her breasts ached, full and heavy. Bad sign. Even the slightest brush of fabric against her nipples was becoming almost unbearable.

And you know what that means, don't you?

Down the hill, the voices came together in ragged, home-grown harmony:

"Holy, ho-lee,

Holy, ho-lee,

Holy, ho-lee,

Lord God Almigh-tee"

Shut up
.

Jesse winced. If she heard their spirited off-key rendition once more, she would explode. The likelihood was high: that was the twelfth tuneless time today, and they showed no sign of stopping. Once an hour, every hour. A dawn-to-dusk, daily vigil of prayer, song, and righteous wrongheadedness.

Ordinarily she'd find it amusing to sharpen her wit, and her claws, on the pious blockheads who power-jockeyed for God and country and five-figure love-gifts on cable affiliates nationwide. Lately, though, they had been hitting a little too close to home.

Today particularly, she simply wasn't in the mood.

Down the hill, the voices swelled, majestically akilter. Probably a fresh news team had arrived. The protesters started in on the rousing third verse:

"Father, fa-ther,

Father, fa-ther,

Father, fa-ther,

Lord God Almigh-tee"

"Shit."

Jesse brought a nimble, articulate hand up to rake through her cropped auburn hair. Then she stood and stretched. It was a purely symbolic act, relieving absolutely nothing. The cramps were gone, but what did that prove?

Her first time, she had thought she had the flu. The second, there were no symptoms whatsoever beyond a little swelling and tenderness.

And the third?

She made her way across the room, heading for the open window. She didn't want to think about it.

She couldn't think of anything
but
. . .

The three mike stands were spaced in an arcing parabola, dividing the room into irregular pie-slice quadrants. It was the preferred rehearsal arrangement of late, as it left everyone facing inward and hence able to communicate better.

"But not as good as New York," she said to herself, thinking back to the cavernous, forty-eight-hundred-dollar-a-month converted dance loft into which she'd built the separate light-and-sound booth and the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that let them see
exactly
how they'd look on stage. That had been her dream and her domain: a huge work area with a kitchen and a sleeping loft, a weight room and even a little niche where she could escape to meditate, though even that had become a luxury in the months before they'd left.

Pennsylvania had seemed intriguing at the time-positively
idyllic
if one bought Pete's heartfelt schmooze, which she did more often than she wished. She could kick herself for just letting go of the place, for not hedging her bet and going through the myriad hassles of subletting. Another fool for love learns the hard way. She should have known better.

Too late now.

Shut up.

It had seemed like a good idea, then: Pete's dad had died, and his grandmother was in danger of losing the whole mountain. Jake and Rachel were anxious to get their newborn out of the funky confines of Manhattan's Chelsea section, and the appeal of a farmhouse on a mountain in Pete's old stomping grounds, yet still within an afternoon's drive of the Apple, had proved irresistible. The inevitable tinge of urban burnout was beginning to reach even through her carefully cultivated patina of fast-lane fever.

Eventually, the country called. Bigger work space, lower cost of living, scenic splendor, quaint and friendly locals . . .

Outside, a bullhorn blared and fed back in howling counterpoint to her train of thought. She reached the window and shut it abruptly, mercifully muting the harangue. Something about homosexuals; she couldn't tell. The following ripple of cheers didn't make it through either.

"Shut up," she said, out loud this time. Another bad sign. Stress.

There was definitely trouble in paradise. The first six months had been great, like a protracted working vacation. The hotel was long defunct; they leased it and began fixing it up. The combined monies had allowed Pete's grandmother to keep the family property from being parceled out to pay ongoing taxes. She and Pete and the rest of the Jacob Hamer contingent had a twenty-six-room hideaway to live and work in. The potential was staggering. In theory, anyway. In theory, they should all be one big, happy family.

Except . . .

Except that she hated sharing the kitchen. And the bathrooms. And the clutter of sixteen wildly different souls, and the homey chore sheet that no one but her ever seemed to take seriously, and a thousand other niggling little domestic details that marked the loss of autonomy.

Mostly, though, was the simple fact that the old studio had been-when all was said and done-hers, and hers alone. One person with the bottom-line say-so. One name on the lease.

And she liked it that way. She'd always been nothing but generous with regard to its access, even from the early, hungry days. She dearly loved the group and was as dedicated as anyone, perhaps more so. But she'd had a decent career as a hired studio-gun before this gig, and she always considered the loft, which facilitated that success, her ultimate safety net. Her ace in the hole should things, God forbid, ever go wrong.

Hamer band or no Hamer band, Jesse Malloy's butt was covered in New York.

But this place . . .

This one was theirs.

And that was a difference she'd spent the better part of the last five months trying to pretend she hadn't noticed. It was getting harder and harder to do: the renovation process, which had been massive and unanimous at first, had gradually tapered off with the increased workload that the Rock Aid gig had brought on.

It was pretty much in an everyone-for-themselves status lately. The contractors were unreliable and expensive, especially with the lack of session money coming in and royalties not due in for another couple of months. The crew had their rooms in varying states of disrepair. Pete had helped her a little, but somehow his latest efforts to put the finishing touches on his own private writing room had superceded any commitment to helping her with the carpentry work she needed to get hers going. And so on and so on.

It was selfish, to her way of thinking. The same self-absorbed quality that had so recently emerged in other areas of their lives. Like the bedroom.

It wasn't that she was helpless, even though carpentry was not her cup of tea. It wasn't just that she was so damned busy, even though major portions of her day were consumed in programming data for the new album as well as integrating the special effects and video sequences for the ever-so-important Rock Aid gig on Saturday, their big fifteen minutes for the history books.

She just needed some time to herself, in an utterly private space.

Especially now. Her second home test had conflicted with the results of the first, at which point the instructions on the box cheerfully suggested that you purchase yet another to be sure. Yeah, right. There was only one way to be absolutely certain, and she had already gone and done it, yesterday afternoon.

And now she sat, trying not to think about it, unable to avoid it. Waiting for the results.

She looked down at the phone, which sat in squat black antiquated silence on the end table. Its dimwit Radio Shack companion sat next to it: an old-style, boxy answering machine in fake-wood tones that ate more messages than it ever relayed.

"C'mon, Jaws, cough it up."

She stared at the little green running light, hoping that the red incoming light would magically light. Nothing. The green light winked balefully back.

Her guts throbbed from the tension. She couldn't stand it anymore.

"Ring, damn you," she said to the phone, half-convinced she could psychically
will
a response. She waited a beat. "
Ring
."

It did.

She gasped, feeling as though a garrote had suddenly tightened around her throat. Faraway sounds of trapdoors swinging open echoed in her inner ear.

The phone rang again.

She did nothing. The throbbing need to take charge just froze up inside her. A distant, more dispassionate voice in-formed her that she should pick up, that Jaws would do it on the third ring if she didn't. She debated the wisdom of letting it. She debated the wisdom of a lot of things.

But she caught it, halfway through the third ring.

Too late.

Jaws cut on, red incoming light glowing dutifully. She put the phone to her ears. A howl of feedback instantly started up. She slapped down on the volume, muting the speaker. The howling evaporated. Jaws looked utterly indifferent and continued recording for its allotted three minutes maximum. She would play the tape back another dozen times before ultimately erasing it.