In Harmony (26 page)

A friend from back home’s crashing.

“Yeah?” said Ruth.

Her accent was just as strong as his and immediately I was imagining them together. She was wearing a vest top and I saw that she had a tattoo, too: A guitar, with a name running down the side. I knew what name it would be.

“Well?” she asked as I stood there frozen. Each word was snapped out with a viciousness that made me flinch, the hiss of a lioness warning me off her mate.

I turned and ran.

***

It was too early for the low-lifes and the dealers to be out on the streets so no one hassled me as I blundered down the street, wiping at my eyes. I didn’t want to cry in public.

I held it together even in the back of the cab. I held it until I got home and then I collapsed on my bed and sobbed and sobbed.

Chapter 20

I got the full story from Connor the next day as we prepared to rehearse in a practice room.

“Saturday morning, I get a collect call. She was standing at a payphone at JFK with a handbag—that’s all she brought, a handbag—and no money. She had nowhere else to go.”

I was staring down at my cello, ostensibly tuning it. “So the two of you are…?”

He sighed. “I don’t know yet. It’s complicated.”

I thought of the lyrics I’d heard.
I was bad for you, you were bad for me.
But I knew he loved her, or had loved her. They’d permanently etched each other’s names on their bodies, for God’s sake. If I came between them now, even if I stopped them before they’d properly got back together, what did that make me?

“You’ll have to write a new verse now,” I said as brightly as I could.

He nodded. “Or maybe a whole new song.”

We ran through the first two sections, and it was like moving through the stages of our relationship. In the first pair, the ones we’d written when he barely knew each other, the cello and the guitar were almost fighting. My piece was all me; his piece was all him. For the second pair, we’d written each other, my section angry and confident, his timid but passionate. That left the final pair—one piece each—the final stage in our relationship. And both of us were hitting a brick wall writing it.

We’d been playing around with the acoustic guitars, trying to find ways to make the cello sound like an electric guitar and vice versa. We had some ideas, but I could tell he was as stuck as I was.

“It’ll be fine,” he told me. “It’ll all work out.”

I gave him a plastic smile. Nothing was fine, not at all.

***

It was myself I was angry with. Firstly, for not just blurting out how I felt back in Flicker, or later, when I was drunk. Now it was too late—forever. I’d seen the look in Ruth’s eyes when she opened the door to me. Whatever she’d told Connor about needing a place to crash, she was in New York to get him back.

There was a part of me that said I should tell him, even with Ruth in the picture. Some romantic notion of fighting for my man, no matter what. But unlike Ruth, I didn’t know how he felt about me—what if I poured out my heart and he said “No”? Would Ruth allow him to keep working with a woman who was madly in love with him? More likely she’d pressure him to pull out of the recital and drop out of Fenbrook—after all, that was the path he’d been on when they’d last been together.

There was another reason, though. I didn’t know
how
to fight. I’d never felt that way about anyone before, let alone had to compete for them. Maybe Jasmine would have had the strength to go up against Ruth, but I knew I didn’t.

***

The following night, I was in Flicker with the girls. I’d managed to get Natasha alone for a few minutes while Jasmine and Clarissa fetched more drinks.

“So? How’s Darrell doing?” I asked.

Natasha shook her head. “He still doesn’t sleep. He lies there awake until four or five in the morning and then finally collapses for a few hours.”

“And before all this started—back when you were first together?”

“He’d go down to the workshop and work. That’s how he dealt with it.”

“And now he doesn’t.”

“Now he doesn’t. Since he quit his job, he hasn’t worked at all.”

I shook my head. “I don’t get it. He’s this amazing designer and engineer, right? So why doesn’t he just make something new, if work is what he needs to be happy?”

She looked at me, and her eyes were suddenly moist.

“What? Nat, I can’t help if I don’t know.”

She took a deep breath. “It’s not that his work made him happy. He was”—she sighed—“Karen, he was making weapons.”

I blinked. “
Weapons?!”
I knew he’d worked for the defense industry, but I’d had vague images of aircraft, or radar or something.

She nodded.

“Like…guns?”

“You remember when I started dancing for him, as inspiration? He was working on some big project and I didn’t know what it was?”

I nodded.

“It was a missile. A missile that would wipe out half a country. He came up with a way for it to dodge by shifting its weight around as it flew.”

I felt sick inside. “Based on….”

“Based on watching me dance, yes. Based on
me.”

I’d gone numb. I’d always liked Darrell, but now, hearing that…. “What happened when you found out?”

“He told me why he was doing it. He—” Her voice broke and she had to swallow and start again. “He watched his parents die. Killed by extremists in the Middle East. He came home and designed his first weapon out of anger—for revenge—and it should have ended there, he should have grieved and moved on. But the weapons company used him…exploited him. They encouraged him to build more and more, bigger and better, and he did—for years. Until I came along. It was killing his soul, Karen, but it was a focus for all that anger.”

I sat there digesting it. It was a horrible story, but in a way I was relieved because it helped me understand why Darrell had done what he did. And I saw how his life had been changed by meeting Natasha. “You found out,” I said, “and he quit his job because he loved you.”

She nodded. “But he’s still angry, inside. And now, it has nowhere to go. It’s eating him up from the inside.”

“That’s why he can’t just make something else,” I said slowly. “It won’t help with the anger because if it’s not a weapon, it’s not
revenge.”

Natasha nodded. “So he lies awake at night and sits around all day and it just gives him more time to think about the past. You remember in Harper’s, when I told you he’d gone sex mad?”

I nodded.

“I think that was him trying to find a way to cope with it—to take his mind off it. But it didn’t work, and now he’s just….” She sighed. “I think he’s depressed. I mean, actually, clinically depressed.”

“And you’re not….I mean, the sex thing has…?”

“Put it this way—you know I cut, that night when you came to my apartment? I thought he’d see the scar. I needn’t have worried.”

“God…you haven’t…? Not since…?”

“We haven’t had sex in a month.”

I sat there and thought for a moment. “What does Clarissa think?” I’d been wondering, ever since that night when Natasha called me over to her apartment, why she hadn’t been having these conversations with her roommate.

Natasha hesitated. “She thinks we should split up.”

My jaw dropped.

“She likes him. She just…she thinks that we can’t be happy together. She thinks he needs the weapons, that maybe that’s the
only
sort of work that’ll make him happy. Neil’s worried about him, too. He always hated Darrell designing weapons, but he hates seeing him depressed.” She bit her lip and I saw her eyes well with tears. “But I didn’t want us to split up, so I stopped talking about it with her, but now I think maybe she’s right, maybe we’d be happier apart and—shit, I don’t know!” And she started to cry, big hot tears splashing onto the tabletop.

I bundled her into the restroom. “Look,” I said with a firmness I didn’t feel. “I’m not like you three. I don’t have all your experience, but I know how good you and Darrell are together. There must be a way to fix it.”

Natasha lifted her mascara-streaked face from her hands. “
How?!”

“I don’t know. But trust me, okay? I’m going to think of something.”

***

Natasha cleaned herself up and we went back to our table where Clarissa and Jasmine were waiting with fresh drinks. Natasha was still red-eyed and I was worried that Clarissa would demand answers, but as we got closer I saw that wasn’t going to be a problem. She and Jasmine looked distracted…worried, even, as if they had bad news. As we approached, I realized they were looking at me.

“What?” I asked as I sat down.

They looked at each other, neither wanting to be the one to tell me. Then Clarissa nodded across the bar.

Connor was there, laughing and joking with Ruth. It was impossible to tell if they were
together
or just together, but Ruth seemed to be doing her best to touch him at every possible opportunity.

The world dropped out from under me. He’d brought her
here?!
He hadn’t even gone to Flicker much before we started working together, preferring the blue collar bars downtown. In fact, that night he’d wandered in drunk and singing had been the first time I remembered seeing him there. Then I’d brought him along with me the night he’d got together with Taylor…I’d as good as introduced him to it!

“It’s not fair,” said Jasmine. “You should get custody of Flicker.”

“We didn’t break up,” I told her. “We were never together.”

Natasha squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry, Karen. I really wanted the two of you to work out.” She caught my eye and I knew we were thinking the same thing: with her and Darrell on the verge of breaking up, Clarissa and Neil having problems and now Connor and me off the cards, it seemed like there was no hope for any of us. Even Jasmine was single—she’d never mentioned Ryan, the cop I’d given her number to, so I assumed he’d never called.

“I’m going to the bar,” I told the others, and stood up.

“You still have half a Pretty Woman,” Jasmine pointed out.

“I’m not going to get a drink. I just….” I looked across at Connor and Ruth.
I just want to be alone,
I thought, and walked off.

It wasn’t quite true. I didn’t want to be alone; I was sick of being alone.

At the bar, I found a spot where I couldn’t see Connor and Ruth. I knew I was being rude, that I’d have to rejoin the others in a few minutes, but I needed to get my head straight. Maybe we could all move to a different bar; Flicker was clearly cursed.

“You look like you could use a drink,” said a voice beside me.

I didn’t recognize him from Fenbrook. Tall and lean, with a shock of blond curls. His voice was as refined as his suit. A Harvard man, at a guess—maybe final year, maybe just graduated.

“That didn’t work out so well, last time,” I told him.

“Come on. One drink.”

I stared at him for a second. He wasn’t bad looking, in an all-American sort of a way. And there was that ache inside me that Connor had left—the need for closeness cruelly denied. I just wanted to connect with someone.

“I’ll have a 101 Dalmations, please.” I told him.

He frowned. “But that—”

“Doesn’t have any alcohol in, no. But it’s what I want.”

He shrugged and made a big show of holding up a fifty to attract the barman’s attention. A few minutes later I was sucking vanilla milkshake through a straw, the “spots” chocolate buttons stuck to the inside of the glass.

“I’m Anthony,” he told me. “And you are?”

He seemed nice, if a bit fond of flashing his money. And he’d bought me a drink and the girls would be happy to see me actually talking to a man and Connor was happy with Ruth and—

“Karen.” Saying it made my mind up. I’d been standing at the bar, but now I sat down on a stool and he sat down next to me.

“Actress, dancer or musician?” he asked.

He knew about Flicker, then. Probably what had attracted him to the place, the chance to meet some young starlet or ballerina. He was going to be disappointed. “Musician.” And then, anticipating his next question, “Cello.”

He smiled, just like Fifty Shades of Gray Hair had at the party. “Oh—”

“Yes. The one where you sit with your legs spread.” I’d meant to say it just a little testily, to let him know how I felt about that line. But it didn’t quite come out like that. It came out as confident, even flirtatious.

He told me he was at Harvard and about his plans after graduation. I told him about playing with the quartet in Central Park and composing and cramming into tiny practice rooms. It felt good, to talk to someone outside Fenbrook’s little world. I glanced over to where the girls were sitting and got an encouraging smile from Natasha. I didn’t dare risk looking at Connor. If I saw him and Ruth were kissing, I felt like my heart would shatter.