Just One Look
The air felt heavy. She shifted in her chair. Jimmy’s face had no color.
“I tried, you know. To apologize, I mean. He’s right about that. I owe them that. At the very least. And I’m not talking about that stupid photo op with you at the hospital. My manager wanted that. I was so stoned I just went along. I could barely stand.” He stared at her. He had those same intense eyes that had made him an instant MTV darling. “Do you remember Tommy Garrison?”
She did. He had died in the stampede. His parents were Ed and Selma.
“His picture touched me. I mean, they all did, you know. These lives, they were all just starting out. . . .” He stopped again, took a deep breath, tried again. “But Tommy, he looked like my kid brother. I couldn’t get him out of my head. So I went to his house. I wanted to apologize to his parents. . . .” He stopped.
“What happened?”
“I got there. We sat at their kitchen table. I remember I put my elbows on it and the whole thing teetered. They had this linoleum floor, half coming up. The wallpaper, this awful yellow flowered stuff, was peeling off the walls. Tommy was their only child. I looked at their lives, at their empty faces . . . I couldn’t bear it.”
She said nothing.
“That was when I ran.”
“Jimmy?”
He looked at her.
“Where have you been?”
“Lot of places.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you just give it all up?”
He shrugged. “There wasn’t all that much, really. The music business, well, I won’t go into it, but let’s just say I hadn’t received much money yet. I was new. It takes a while to get serious money. I didn’t care. I just wanted out.”
“So where do you go?”
“I started in Alaska. Worked gutting fish, if you can believe that. Did that for about a year. Then I started traveling, played with a couple of small bar bands. In Seattle I found a group of old hippies. They used to do IDs for members of the Weather Underground, that kinda thing. They got me new papers. The closest I came back here, I played with a cover band in an Atlantic City casino for a while. At the Tropicana. I dyed my hair. I stuck to the drums. Nobody recognized me, or if they did, they didn’t much care.”
“Were you happy?”
“You want the truth? No. I wanted to come back. I wanted to make amends and move on. But the longer I was gone, the harder it was, the more I longed for it. The whole thing was a vicious circle. And then I met Madison.”
“The lead singer of Rapture?”
“Yeah. Madison. Can you believe that name? It’s huge now. You remember that movie Splash, the one with Tom Hanks and what’s-her-name?”
“Daryl Hannah,” Grace said automatically.
“Right, the blond mermaid. Remember that scene where Tom Hanks is trying to come up with a name for her and he says all kinds of stuff like Jennifer or Stephanie and they’re walking past Madison Avenue and he just mentions the street name and she wants it to be her name and that’s a big laugh in the movie, right, a woman named Madison. Now it’s a top-ten name.”
Grace let it go.
“Anyway, she’s from a farm town in Minnesota. She ran away to the Big Apple when she was fifteen, ended up strung out and homeless in Atlantic City. She landed at a homeless shelter for runaway teens. She found Jesus, you know the deal, trading one addiction for another, and started singing. She has a voice like a Janis Joplin angel.”
“Does she know who you are?”
“No. You know how Shania has Mutt Lange in the background? That’s what I wanted. I like working with her. I like the music, but I wanted to stay out of the spotlight. At least that’s what I tell myself. Madison is painfully shy. She won’t perform unless I’m onstage with her. She’ll get over that, but for now I figured drums are a pretty good disguise.”
He shrugged, tried a smile. There was still a hint of the old knock-’em-back charisma. “Guess I was wrong about that.”
They were silent for a moment.
“I still don’t understand,” Grace said.
He looked at her.
“I said before I’m not the one to give you absolution. I meant that. But the truth is, you didn’t fire a gun that night.”
Jimmy stayed still.
“The Who. When they had that stampede in Cincinnati, they got over it. And the Stones, when that Hell’s Angel killed a guy at their concert. They’re still playing. I can see wanting out for a little while, a year or two . . .”
Jimmy looked to the right. “I should leave.”
He stood.
“Going to disappear again?” she asked.
He hesitated and then reached into his pocket. He pulled out a card and handed it to her. There were ten digits on it and nothing more. “I don’t have a home address or anything, just this mobile phone.”
He turned and started for the door. Grace did not follow. Under normal circumstances, she might have pushed him, but in the end, his visit was an aside, a not very important one in the scheme of things. Her past had a curious pull, that was all. Especially now.
“Take care of yourself, Grace.”
“You too, Jimmy.”
She sat in the den, feeling the exhaustion begin to weigh on her shoulders, and wondered where Jack was right now.
• • •
Mike did indeed drive. The Asian man had nearly a minute head start, but what was good about their twisty development of cul-de-sacs, tract houses, nicely wooded lots—this wondrous serpentine sprawl of suburbia—was that there was only one true entrance and exit road.
In this stretch of Ho-Ho-Kus, all roads led to Hollywood Avenue.
Charlaine filled Mike in as quickly as possible. She told him most of it, about how she’d looked out the window and spotted the man and grown suspicious. Mike listened without interrupting. There were holes the size of a heartache in her story. She left out why she had been looking out the window in the first place, for example. Mike must have seen the holes, but right now he was letting it go.
Charlaine studied his profile and traveled back to the first time they met. She had been a freshman at Vanderbilt University. There was a park in Nashville, not far from campus, with a replica of the Parthenon, the one in Athens. Originally built in 1897 for the Centennial Expo, the structure was thought to be the most realistic replica of the famed site atop the Acropolis anywhere in the world. If you wanted to know what the actual Parthenon looked like in its heyday, well, people would travel to Nashville, Tennessee.