Chasing Kane (16 page)

“Go,” I implored. Impatient.

Nessa shook her head, pulling her hair away from her face with a wide stretchy headband that had been slouched around her neck. Bright pink
.

“Well, yeah, I took lessons. I went to a public high school and played in ensembles there, but they had a regular concert band, not an orchestra. No other violinist. One bassist but, what can you do?” She shrugged.

“No private schools around?”

She huffed through her nose. “My parents couldn’t even afford lessons all the way through high school, let alone a private school on top of it.” She looked down just briefly. Enough for me to feel the weight of the unspoken. Whatever it was.

“What about college?” I swallowed, hoping to slide past the lesson misstep.

Nessa grinned, taking a sip of her coffee. “No money for lessons, no money for college.”

My stomach sank. I was failing this conversation wonderfully. And, worse, there was no way out now that the busses were merging onto the highway. I was stuck in this seat for at least the next couple of hours.

“But you kept playing,” I encouraged the conversation in yet another direction.

“Hell yeah I played. I shouldn’t have been so depressing. I
did
get to take lessons through high school. By junior year my parents couldn’t pay anymore, but the instructor I’d had since age six took pity on me. I helped out teaching some of the little kids in exchange for lessons myself.”

I shook my head. “That wasn’t pity. He saw talent.”

She shrugged, opening her mouth, but I cut her off. “No, listen to me. I’ve taught private lessons. In poor countries and rich neighborhoods in the US. It’s not the most lucrative way to earn money as a musician, and pity isn’t worth its weight in dollars when you’re trying to feed yourself. Whoever your teacher was knew it was a greater risk to the world to lose you as a musician than to skip the organic chicken on their next grocery trip.”

“Jeez.” She blushed, swallowing hard. “You’re awfully sure of yourself for not ever hearing me play.”

“Show me,” I asked softly. “I know Yardley doesn’t settle.
Especially
on something new. If she thought you could handle what I scored from a sight-read, I’d say it’s worth it to her. And,” I reached my hand across the table, offering hers a gentle squeeze, “if you travel with your violin after all these years …” I took a deep breath. “It’s your passion.”

Her eyes met mine and held onto them for what seemed like years. One blue, one green, both desperately vulnerable. Pleading, almost, but I didn’t know for what.

“Come on,” I encouraged with one last squeeze of her hand before pulling it away.

Nessa stared a few seconds more, then cleared her throat, looking around as if she just dropped back to earth. I didn’t know what she was holding back, but I bet if I watched her play for long enough I could get some idea.

“Fine,” she spoke, sounding more like herself and less lost as she had before. “But you can’t look at me.”

I screwed up my face incredulously. “What?! That’s half the story.
Watching
someone perform.”

“You didn’t ask to watch me,” she corrected, reaching into a storage cabinet above her, pulling down a worn nylon-covered hard case. “You asked to hear.”

“Ah,” I corrected, smiling. “
You
said I’d never heard you.
I
said
show
me.” I crossed my arms in front of my chest, leaning back quite proud of myself.

She shrugged, reaching to put the violin back into storage. “Fine,” she said flatly.

I lunged forward, my hands waving in surrender. “No, no! Fine. Sorry. I’ll … I’ll turn around.”

“Relax, legs. I’ll just move to behind you. Your beanpoles won’t fit backward at that table.”

I sighed a breath of relief that I’d get to hear something that was clearly closer to her than she let on.

“Guys!” she called to the rest of her band through a cheap pocket door between the kitchen and the rest of the bus. “I’m playing for a few minutes. Deal.”

Muffled sounds of consent sprang from the back of the bus.

“I’m just going to warm up a sec.”

Lacing my fingers behind my head, I splayed my elbows out and leaned back. “Take your time.”

After a brief pause, she struck her bow against the strings and drew out long, low notes. Each one two-seconds long, or more, before changing to another. After ten seconds she picked up the pace, offering one note per second, still a slow pace, but fine for warming up. Every ten or fifteen seconds, though, she upped the tempo, and the notes became more familiar. She wasn’t warming up with scales, as is traditional—though I sometimes skipped those too.

She was using Bach’s “Partita” number… two—no—three. In E major. She was using a lovely Bach sonata as her warm up. At a moderate tempo, she hit all the notes and held on lovingly to some at the ends of measures or lines. I closed my eyes. If they were open, I’d be searching for her. Before long she held onto a high note, and it was clear to me that she was changing songs, or warm-ups, or whatever it was she was doing.

She started slow again, but closer on pace with the “Sonata No. 1 in G minor” I easily identified. Bach sonatas are lovely and intricate, whether playing for a crowd or using as a warm up. Within ten seconds, Nessa was working the sonata at its
presto
tempo, flawlessly fingering the complicated collections of notes. Keeping my eyes closed, I leaned forward and placed my elbows on the table and rested my head on my hands. I took a deep breath. I wanted to turn around. I wanted to join her. But, she asked that I listen. So, listen I would.

“Okay,” she finally said as if she hadn’t already played marvelously for four minutes. “Here goes. No looking.”

I put up my hands. “Not gonna.”

She chuckled softly before taking a deep breath, and striking her strings once more.

Immediately, I wanted to cry.

Chopin’s “Nocturne” never did anything less than put a lump in my throat. A mournful love song. A goodbye. A plea at best, but a gut-wrenching tale of broken lovers nonetheless. Chopin dedicated the song to his dear friend, and his friend’s wife—who had a messy situation of their own. Regardless of the original intentions of the piece, it had always been one I played on a rainy day when I needed some self-inflicted brooding.

But on this occasion, I knew I was hearing something more than notes she’d memorized. As the strings wailed under the gentle touch of her bow, I could wait no longer—I turned around. Before me stood a tall and swaying Nessa. Her eyes closed, squeezed so tightly shut I could barely see her eyelashes. Whatever tension she was holding in her face, she released through the instrument.

I didn’t know her story, and didn’t know if I ever would. She came from far less money than I did, and had what seemed to be much fewer opportunities and less professional experience, but you couldn’t tell. It didn’t matter. It never did with those born with an instrument sewn to their soul.

Despite my own desires, I forced myself to turn back around. I didn’t want to blow Nessa’s trust if she saw me staring at her when she’d asked me not to.

Not if I hoped for a shot in hell to get her to play like that for me again. Or in public. She was far too good to leave her violin on the bus when she stepped on any stage. I didn’t need to hear her play any more to be assured of that.

At the close of the piece my eyes were full with tears. I missed Georgia just as badly as I did when I dropped her off at the airport this morning. I breathed. It would be a few days until my road equilibrium returned and I wasn’t looking for her every time I turned around. “Nocturne” always made me think of Georgia. It made me miss her and love her and need her. Also, even though I didn’t know the details, it made me feel for Nessa. For the reasons behind her emotion in that song.

“Okay. Done,” she said without much fanfare. “Happy?”

Speechless, I turned around and tried to hide the emotion in my eyes with a smile. She caught me in my act, meeting my eyes and immediately looking down.

“Yeah,” I said, exhaling. “Hell. Yes.”

Standing, I faced her and put my hands on her shoulders. “Why?
Why
don’t you play this? Like
on
stage?”

She rolled her eyes. “And be compared to
you
for the whole tour? Please. I’ve followed your career since you were in college, Regan. It’s a tough act to follow.”

My eyes bulged out. “Excuse me?”

She waved her hand is if this was run-of-the mill. “Everyone who has a clue about the classical music scene for the under-forty crowd knows you.”

I shook my head. “Maybe people
in
the scene …”

“No,” she cut me off. “You turned out that little album your senior year in college—
Dublin Nights
or some cliché-as-shit title. Right before you left to teach around the world.” She winked, then continued. “People passed that hand to hand, and all of us in or around the
scene
made sure it got to any bar with a whiff of Irish—even if they were only Irish on St. Paddy’s Day.”

I swallowed hard, feeling heat spread across my face. “I knew bars on the cape played it … But then I was out of the country for nearly two years.”

She grinned. “It went a lot further than your precious peninsula.”

“Stalker issues aside,” I shook my head, wholly uncomfortable with this kind of attention, “you’re
amazing.
And,” I caught her wrist as she turned away, facing her back to me, “if you’ve followed me for as long as you say, then you’d
know
I don’t dole out compliments that easily.”

She laughed and I dropped my hand. “Yeah, you
are
kind of a snob, aren’t you?”

I shrugged, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “Music will never survive if we all settle for mediocrity.”

Nessa swallowed hard, sliding by me in the narrow space to place her violin in its case and tuck it safely away in the cargo hold above the table. She bent down, reaching into the mini fridge, and came up with a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream in her hand and a comical grin on her mouth.

“You’re Irish, right?”

I slid back into my seat, sliding my mug toward her. “Even if I wasn’t …”

Our dinner stop consisted of a roadside diner in one of the most middle-of-nowhere places I’d ever seen besides the back roads of New Hampshire. There was something in the parking lot that claimed to be a food truck, chucking burritos, but I stayed with steak and eggs. And a couple of waffles.

As soon as we’d gotten off the busses, Nessa nabbed Clara when she departed Moniker’s bus, which was weird since she’d started this leg of the trip on my bus. In CJ’s bed. She didn’t look as pissed as I’d have thought for someone in her apparent position, but I tried not to think much more about it. Nessa escorted her into the diner and into a booth far in the corner for what I assumed would be CJ-related girl talk.

Mine and Nessa’s conversation on the bus in the hours before stopping for dinner stayed far away from the violin or this tour. She asked me about teaching music from Indonesia and Ireland, and I was brutally honest in an effort to get some information from her, too. And, I had nothing to hide. But, no dice. When the questioning shifted to her, and I asked how she got hooked up with The Brewers, she wasn’t rude, but she kind of breezed through the whole story.

She’d been singing with a band at a local bar in Phoenix, where she’s from, and an old friend from high school swept her away to San Francisco to be starving artists in the music community. She did, however, speak with wild light in her eyes about her time in San Francisco, and promised stories in more detail over drinks. I could only imagine.

By the time we had arrived at the diner, I knew conversation about or around Nessa and her violin was to cease. For the time being, anyway.

Halfway through my steak that actually wasn’t half bad for the looks of the diner, CJ plunked down in the seat across from me.

Without really looking at him, I started with, “Just … one of the other band members? Seriously? You could have your choice of
any
woman at
any
concert—married or not, unfortunately—and you choose one who we’ll be shacking up with for the next several months?”

He was silent. So silent, I lifted my eyes from my plate to see him staring into space, and his hands in fists under his chin as his nostrils flared.

“Ceej?

His empty eyes met mine for a second before he stood and barged out of the diner and into the parking lot. Instinctively, I followed him, asking a passing waitress to box up my food and hold it at the counter. Nessa caught my eyes as I left, and all I could do was shrug.

“CJ,” I called after him.

“Not now Regan,” he answered with his back to me, holding up his hand. He made his way to a set of benches that sat on the edge of a thick, dark forest.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, unaffected by his attitude.

“I said drop it,” he snapped.

“No you didn’t.” I plunked down next to him. “What the hell?”

“Georgia get home okay?” He changed the conversation one hundred eighty degrees. “Not that I even care,” he added. This was his roundabout way of asking me if she was still pissed at him, or to tell me his side of their fight.

“Obviously you care, fucker. And, yes, she’s home. I got a text from her a while ago that she was back at work.”

She was probably up to her eyeballs in hysterical mother’s-of-the-bride by now, trying to change the filling choices for the cakes or cupcakes at the last minute. I don’t know how Georgia had the patience for that. No one came up on stage in the middle of my performances and told me to adjust a note.

“Did she tell you about our fight?” he asked, almost accusingly.

“Does it matter?” I sighed, shaking my head. “If she didn’t, you would have.”

He shrugged.

I added, “She didn’t tell me any details, though.”

CJ looked out into the twilight, clearing his throat. “Frankie’s not stupid. She knew I had a girl on the side when we first got together.” It was a jarring change of subject, but I walked through the conversation with him, anyway.