The People Who Were There

The Hollow had not changed in two years, which Marisol took, walking in on a Friday night with her notebook in her bag and no good reason to be there, as a small personal insult.

It should have changed. Things you survive are supposed to look different afterward, smaller, the way your old elementary school looks when you go back — the water fountains too low, the menace gone out of the principal's door. The Hollow had refused. It was the same long brick room with the same mismatched lamps and the same espresso machine that hissed like it resented the work, the same corkboard by the door three layers deep in flyers for shows that had already happened, the same low plywood stage in the corner with the same single boom mic and the same gaffer-tape X on the floor where you were supposed to stand. She had stood on that X exactly never. She had stood in the back of this room, once, in clothes she'd picked out, watching a stage stay empty, and the room had kept every detail of that night in its pocket like loose change and handed none of it back, and now here it was, unchanged, hissing, full of kids she half-knew, daring her to pretend she'd come for the coffee.

She had not come for the coffee. She'd told herself a story on the bus about supporting the local scene, about how a person who wanted to write songs ought to know the rooms songs got played in, and the story had lasted exactly as long as the bus ride and then collapsed under the simple weight of the truth, which was that she could not stop thinking about the song. Their song. The three-quarters-built thing in the notebook in her bag, the porch light and the four-note chord and the sixteen bars that were the best thing she'd ever made — it had gotten so far into her that she'd started needing to be near other people doing the thing, the way you want to be around other people in love when you are, badly, and can't say so. The closet was Monday-through-whenever. It was Friday. She'd had two days with no Dominic and no piano and the song just ringing in her with nowhere to go, and the Hollow had an open mic on Fridays, and she'd come to sit in the back of the room that had wrecked her — the same all-ages coffeehouse where, freshman year, the band had been booked to play her songs and never went on — and watch other people do, badly and bravely, on a taped X, the exact thing she had never once managed to do.

The Thursday session had been nothing. She made herself remember that, finding a stool at the far end of the counter where she could see the stage and not be seen. Thursday they'd met in the closet and worked the second verse and it had been fine, it had been work, the wall all the way back up and bolted, Dominic flat and even and economical, no sixteen bars, no forgetting, no laugh almost landing. He'd been careful with her in a way that was its own kind of cold — careful the way you're careful around a thing you've already knocked over once. They'd gotten four good lines and a problem with the pre-chorus and he'd left fast, the way he always left, same Friday for both of us, and she'd gone home and not been able to play any of it and lain awake with all of it finished and ringing and useless. So. The wall was up. Whatever she'd seen on Tuesday — that wasn't him being cold, that was him being scared — the wall had had two days to repair itself and had used them. She'd half-convinced herself she'd imagined the crack.

She ordered a tea she didn't want and watched the open mic. It was what open mics are — a ukulele kid doing a song that was technically about a girl and actually about himself; a senior with a real voice and nothing to say with it; two boys harmonizing a cover badly and grinning so hard about it that the badness didn't matter, that was the whole secret, they were having it, the thing was leaving their heads and arriving in the room and they did not care that it arrived imperfect because at least it arrived. Marisol watched them and felt the old envy come up under her sternum, the specific envy of a person who hears finished things and can't make them real — these kids with their three chords and their nerve, dragging their beautiful imperfect things out into the open while hers stayed locked up inside her where they stayed perfect and stayed silent. She'd take the nerve, she thought. She'd trade the ear for the nerve in a second. The ukulele kid's song was nothing and he'd sung it, out loud, on the X, and she'd never sung anything out loud on any X in her life, and the one time she'd been about to, the stage had stayed empty and the band had never gone on, and the band had never gone on because of—

"Marisol Vega." A stool scraped. "No. You don't come here. I'm seeing things."

She knew the voice before she turned, the way you know a voice from a year you don't visit, and turning was like the room: it should have been harder than it was. Reggie had gotten taller and kept the same face, the open uncomplicated face she'd known across a band-room two years ago, the only other freshman in a band of older kids, the bass player who'd been as out of his depth as she was and had grinned through it. He was grinning now, dropping onto the stool beside her without asking, a coffee in his hand and a gig bag on his back, and he looked so glad to see her — so simply, uncynically glad — that her first feeling, before she could stop it, was shame, because she was glad to see him too and she hadn't thought about him in months.

"I play here now," Reggie said, like it explained the universe. "Friday and Sunday. Different bands, whoever needs a bass. You should've told me you were coming, I'd have—" he gestured with the coffee, vague and warm, "—I don't know. Saved you a stool. Which I did anyway. So."

"I wasn't planning it." True. "I just wanted to—" and there she stalled, because I wanted to be near the thing was not a sentence she could say to a person, and I'm writing a song with Dominic Reyes was a grenade with the pin out, and she didn't know yet whether Reggie knew, whether the whole scene knew, whether her private nightmare was somebody else's piece of gossip. "Watch," she finished. "I wanted to watch."

Reggie nodded like that was the most natural thing in the world, which to him it was, and for a few minutes they just watched together, and it was easy in a way almost nothing in Marisol's life was easy. He told her who the acts were. He told her the ukulele kid had been coming for a year and was getting better, actually, if you'd seen him last spring you'd know. He told her the senior with the voice was going to a conservatory and didn't deserve to and everyone knew it and that was just how it went. He had the whole room in his pocket the way kind people do, no edge to any of it, and Marisol felt the two years fold up small between them, felt how easy it would have been to have kept him, this one, the other one who was out of his depth, if the band hadn't—

"You ever play out?" Reggie asked. "You were the writer. You had the songs, man, you had the only real songs any of us—" He stopped, because he'd walked them both up to the edge of it without meaning to, the way you do, and she watched him decide whether to step back from the edge or over it, and watched him, being Reggie, being constitutionally unable to leave a hard thing un-said-out-loud, step over. "I still think about that band," he said, quieter. "I do. We were good, before it went sideways. You know we were good."

"We never played a show, Reggie."

"We were good in the room." He said it stubbornly, like it counted, and the awful thing was that it did count, that being good in the room was the only thing that had ever counted, that she'd built a whole grudge on the difference between good-in-the-room and good-on-a-stage and here was Reggie holding up the good-in-the-room part like it was treasure, which it was. "That's the part I keep. We were so good in that band room. And then the show, and—" He shrugged, and drank his coffee, and said the thing as lightly as a person can say a thing that broke them, which is the only way kids ever say those things, sideways, on the way to something else. "And then Dom pulled the plug and that was that. You were there. You saw it. One day we've got a show booked and the next day Dom's out and you can't run that band without Dom, so." He turned his cup on the counter. "So no band. Sucked. I cried, actually, which, don't tell anyone, I was fourteen." He smiled to take the weight off it. "Anyway. You should play out. You had the songs."

And there it was.

It came so easily, so without ceremony, dropped into the middle of a kind conversation by a kind person who had no idea he was handing her a knife she'd been sharpening for two years: Dom pulled the plug and that was that. The confirmation. The grudge, in someone else's mouth, in plain daylight, from a witness — not her story, not the thing she'd told Cami a hundred times and built her cold around, but a fact, reported by the one other person who'd been in that band room, who had no reason to lie and no grudge to feed. Dominic pulled out. Dominic ended it. The band died because Dominic killed it and you can't run that band without Dom, so. She felt the grudge sit up in her, satisfied, fed, vindicated — see, you weren't crazy, you weren't being dramatic, he did the thing and a witness will say so — and she should have felt better, she had been wanting exactly this for two years, the outside confirmation, the second source, and the strange flat truth of it was that she felt worse.

Because Reggie wasn't angry.

That was the seam, and she almost walked right past it, the way the outline of her grudge required her to walk past it, and something — maybe the song, maybe two days of the song wearing a groove in her, the song that kept arguing with her — made her, this once, stop on it. Reggie had said Dom pulled the plug the way you'd report weather. He'd cried at fourteen and kept the band room like treasure and he was not, two years on, carrying one ounce of the thing she carried by the ton. He'd said Dominic's name with — she made herself hear it — with fondness. The way you say the name of someone you came up with. Dom. Not the wall. Not the villain. Dom, who pulled the plug, said in the same warm voice he'd used for the ukulele kid and the conservatory senior, no edge, no heat, a sad thing that had happened a long time ago to people he was fond of.

"Were you mad at him?" she asked, before she could decide not to. "When he pulled out. Were you—"

"Mad?" Reggie looked honestly surprised by the word. "I mean. Yeah, for like a week. It was our shot, it felt like our shot." He turned the cup again. "But you couldn't really—" and he stopped, and something moved across the open face, something that wasn't a fact, that was the absence of a fact, the place where a person knows there's more and knows it isn't theirs to say, "—you know how it was," he finished, which finished nothing, which was the exact shape of a sentence with its end bitten off. "With Dom. You couldn't really stay mad. It wasn't—" Again the stop. The glance, fast, away, toward the stage, away from her. "It just wasn't a him being a jerk kind of thing. That's all. Anyway."

Anyway. He'd done it twice now, the anyway, the door closing on a room she wasn't being let into, and a smarter version of her or a less armored one would have put her foot in that door — what do you mean, it wasn't a jerk thing, what kind of thing was it, Reggie, you know something, what's the thing your sentence keeps not getting to — and she felt the question right there, fully formed, hers to ask. And she didn't ask it. She let it go by. She told herself, even as it went past, the story she needed: that Reggie was being nice, that Reggie was always nice, that you couldn't stay mad at Dom was just the kind of soft thing soft people said, that there was nothing behind it but Reggie's bottomless good nature, which made you forgive people who didn't deserve it. The grudge needed Dominic to not deserve it. So she handed Reggie's bitten-off sentence to the part of her that explained things away, and that part filed it under Reggie being Reggie, and the truth sat in the room between them, in the space where his you know how it was didn't land, and she was too armored to chase it and the music was too loud and the moment closed.

"The setlist," she said instead, and didn't know she was going to say it until it was out.

"The what?"

"That band. We had a—there was a setlist. Did Dom—" She kept her eyes on the stage, on the boom mic, on anything. "Who made the setlist? For the show."

"Dom did." Reggie said it instantly, no weight on it at all, a nothing fact. "Dom made all the charts. He was the only one who could write them out so they made sense — he'd chart your songs out for the rest of us, like, properly, with the counts and everything, because none of us could read what was in your head but him." He laughed, fond again, fond and oblivious, scattering the thing across the counter like it cost nothing. "Took it so serious. He'd sit there with your lyrics and a pencil and chart the whole thing like it was—I don't know. Like it mattered more than anything. We used to give him crap for it. It's a coffeehouse, Dom, it's twelve people." He shook his head, smiling at a boy two years gone. "He said it didn't matter how many people. He said you don't get songs like that handed to you twice. Meaning yours." The smile, easy, final, the door he didn't know was a door swinging shut on the most important sentence anyone had said to her in two years. "Anyway. You want another tea? You haven't touched that one."

She brought it into the closet on Monday like a stone in her shoe.

She hadn't meant to. She'd meant to come in and work the pre-chorus problem and keep the wall on her side as high as he kept it on his, the deal they'd struck without striking it — we don't have to like it, we just have to win it. But she'd spent the weekend with Reggie's two sentences turning over in her, Dom pulled the plug and you don't get songs like that handed to you twice, the knife and the thing that wasn't a knife, and they would not lie down together, and she'd come in Monday sharper than she meant to be, the grudge fed and itching, looking for somewhere to put the thing she couldn't put down.

He was already there. Of course. Practice pad, sticks, the small economical wrists. He didn't look up. "You're late."

"I saw Reggie this weekend." She said it to the side of his face, watching, the way you'd hold a match near something to see if it caught. "At the Hollow. He plays there now."

The pad didn't stop. The wrists kept their small clean pattern. "Yeah," Dominic said. "He's good. He should play more." Nothing. Flat water.

"He remembered the band." She sat down on the bench, four feet, and opened the notebook on the lid, and kept her voice as even as his, which took everything she had. "Freshman year. Your band. He had a lot to say about it."

And there — there, finally, after two years and a weekend and a sentence with its end bitten off — she got the thing she'd come for, the thing she'd been testing the wall to find. The pattern on the pad caught. Just for a beat — half a beat — one tap landed a hair late and the next one rushed to cover it, and any other person in the world wouldn't have heard it, but she was a person who heard finished things, and she looked up and his face was doing the careful nothing it always did while his hands told on him. The hands always told. She'd watched them build a floor under her song without him meaning to; now she watched them stumble, once, on a word, and the word was band.

"Did he," Dominic said. Even. The pad resumed, clean again, the stumble papered over so fast it was almost not there. Almost. "We doing the pre-chorus or are we doing this."

"He said you made the charts."

"Reggie talks a lot."

"He said you charted my songs out. With the counts. So the others could read them." She watched the wrists. "He said you took it serious. That you said you don't get songs like that handed to you twice."

The pad stopped.

It stopped, and he set the sticks down across his knee, slow, controlled, the exact movement he'd made in the band room two years ago when Okafor read his name, a man setting something down so his hands wouldn't show him, and for one second — one whole second, in the closet, with the gray light coming in off the loading dock and the flute girl gone for the day and the radiator ticking — Dominic Reyes looked at her, really looked, the flat even surface of him gone still and deep the way water goes still and deep when something's moving under it, and she saw it, she saw the thing rise almost to the top, she saw him about to say it, whatever it was, the true thing, the end of the bitten-off sentence, the thing Reggie wouldn't say and the setlist couldn't say and two years of cold had been built on top of — it was right there, behind his eyes, surfacing—

—and he reached for the sticks.

"The pre-chorus is the problem," he said, and his voice was so level it was almost gentle, and that was how she knew the thing had gone back under, that he'd reached down and held it back under the surface with both hands the way you drown a thing you can't afford to keep. "It's rushing into the chorus. Same problem as the verse, different bar. You wrote it to lift but it lifts too early, so by the time the porch-light line comes you've already spent the climb. We pull the pre-chorus back, give it somewhere to go, and the chorus hits like it should." He was already tapping it, demonstrating, the count, the math under the feeling, his whole self pouring back down into the one channel where he was safe, where he could be exactly as honest as he wanted because honesty about a count cost nothing. "Hear it? You climbed too soon. Hold the climb."

And she let him. That was the thing she'd think about, after — that she let him take them both back into the work, back down into the only water they could both breathe, because the alternative was to stand in the door he'd just shut and bang on it, and she didn't have it in her, or she did have it in her and the song wanted her hands worse than the grudge did, because here was the unbearable part, the part that made the whole thing impossible: he was right about the pre-chorus. He was right the way he was always right. The climb came too soon. And when she pulled it back where he said, sang it small with the lift held, the lift aching to come and held anyway, and the porch-light line landed into the four-note chord with the whole weight of the held climb behind it — it was better. It was so much better. The unspoken thing under the floor of the room had nowhere to go but into the song, and it went into the song, and the song got truer by exactly the size of the thing neither of them would say, and Marisol bent over the notebook with her face hot and her eyes stinging for no reason she'd admit to and wrote the better version down, and hated, the way she always hated it, that the only place the two of them could tell each other the truth was in a thing with no words in it at all.

"Yeah," she said, when they'd run it clean. Her voice wasn't quite steady. She didn't look at him. "That's better."

"I know," Dominic said, and picked up the sticks, and the wall was back, smooth and whole and total, as if it had never once in its life let anything cross. But she'd seen it. She'd seen the thing come almost to the top and she'd seen him hold it under, and you could not un-see a person deciding, in real time, to drown the truth rather than be seen holding it — and the grudge, the load-bearing wall she'd built her whole self against, had a crack running up it now that exactly matched the crack in him, hairline, lengthening, and she did not know yet what was on the other side of either one.

She couldn't make it square, and Monday night she finally stopped trying to and just sat with the not-squaring, which was worse.

She had everything now. That was the maddening part, sitting cross-legged on her bed with the notebook closed in her lap and the porch light coming yellow through the curtain. For two years she'd wanted evidence and now she had it, a whole weekend's worth, a witness and a confession-by-hands and a setlist, and none of it pointed where she'd spent two years insisting it pointed. She laid it out the way you'd lay out a song that wouldn't resolve, looking for the wrong bar. Fact: Dominic pulled the plug on the band. Reggie said so, plainly, no grudge in it. The grudge held that part up; the grudge had always had that part right; he'd ended the thing and her songs had stayed in her head where they'd been rotting ever since. Fact: Dominic made the charts. Sat with her lyrics and a pencil and wrote her songs out properly so other people could play them, took it more serious than the show deserved, said you don't get songs like that handed to you twice. Fact: the setlist was his. That band's setlist, that show's setlist, in his small slanted hand, the show that never happened — and he'd carried it for two years, soft-creased, pencil-worn, for M. almost rubbed away at the top from being carried so long against his ribs.

And those three facts would not play in the same song.

The grudge could hold any two of them. It could hold he pulled the plug and he was a wall — easy, that was the whole story, that was the story she'd told Cami in her sleep. It could even, at a stretch, hold he made the charts, because making charts was just being good, being the only one who could read what was in her head, technical, cold, a metronome doing what metronomes do. But it could not hold all three at once, because the third fact wasn't a fact about a chart. The third fact was for M. The third fact was a boy who pulled the plug on the one chance her songs ever had to be real, and then kept, for two years, against his own heart, soft from carrying, the relic of that exact night, dedicated to her. She'd felt the edge of that in Cami's kitchen and skidded off it — but it had teeth now that it hadn't had Sunday, because now she knew the charts were his and the serious was his and you don't get songs like that twice was his, and the meaning of the thing was creeping up out of the dark toward her like the second verse had crept up before she had the words, and she did not want it, she was afraid of it, the way you're afraid of a melody you can feel coming that you know is going to take the song somewhere you can't come back from.

Because if the for M. meant what it was starting, terribly, to look like it meant — if it meant the way Reggie's bitten-off sentence meant, and the way the thing behind Dominic's eyes meant before he drowned it — then it had never been he chose himself over me. And if it had never been that, then she had spent two years hating a boy for a thing she'd invented, and built a wall against a wall that wasn't a wall, and stood in the back of the Hollow blaming the empty stage on the one person who'd taken her songs more seriously than anyone alive, and the cost of that, the cost of two years, came up the back of her throat so fast and so total that she had to put the notebook on the floor and breathe.

She didn't open it. She wanted to — she could feel the line waiting, the way she'd felt you built the floor and then you wouldn't stand on it waiting last week, another true thing about him that would write itself if she gave it the pen. She didn't give it the pen. Because the true thing waiting tonight wasn't about him; it was about her, and it was what if you've been wrong since you were fourteen, and there are some lines you don't write down because writing them down makes them real and arrives them in the room exactly as good as they were when they were only yours, and this one she could not afford to have arrive. Not yet. Not with the showcase nine days out and a song three-quarters built and the only person who could finish it sitting four feet away every afternoon behind a wall she'd just watched him hold a drowning truth behind.

So she left it. She picked the notebook up off the floor and put it on the nightstand, closed, the for M. and the porch light and the better pre-chorus and the line she wouldn't write all shut up inside it together, and she turned off the lamp, and she lay in the dark of a house where somebody was home, and she did not solve it. That was the thing she made herself do, the hardest thing, the thing the song had been teaching her all along without her noticing: she held the climb. She had three facts that wouldn't play together and a meaning rising she couldn't face and a grudge with a crack up the middle of it, and she held all of it, unresolved, aching to resolve, and did not let it lift too soon — because some things you can't make land before the count is ready for them, and she was not ready, and Dominic was not ready, and the truth, whatever it was, the real shape of the night the band didn't play, was still somewhere out past the bar where she could finish walking up to it.

She fell asleep with the porch light on outside her window, the way her mother left it whether anyone was home or not, and somewhere across town, she did not let herself think, a boy she'd spent two years hating was maybe lying awake too, with a setlist soft from carrying and a truth he'd held under all evening, in a house she had never seen and had spent two years being sure she understood.