Page 104 of If Not for My Baby
“There he is,” Conor says, smacking his friend on the shoulder.
“Look, guys,” Molly purrs. “Daddy’s home.”
Gabriel’s look of mild revulsion earns a good chuckle out of both Indy and me. It’s always fun inflicting Molly on new friends.
“Don’t applaud me yet,” Tom mutters. “I may pass out on all of you still.” But he’s kind of glowing and my heart does a cartwheel. These people are his family, too. Even if his woes with this industry have pushed them to a distance.
“What’ll it be tonight?” Conor asks the group.
Usually we warm up with uplifting oldies like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” or bare-bones renditions of modern hits by artists like Daft Punk or Calvin Harris.
“I got one,” Tom offers. Conor beams at him, and Tom begins to hum. A low, soulful sound that carries into a melody. His eyes are softly closed. I know the tune instantly. “Blue-eyed boy meets a brown-eyed girl,”he sings.
In my mind, we are back in the bus suite, tangerine sun fading over Lake Michigan as we leave Chicago. His sweatpants are indulgent on my skin. His notes, finger-plucked and softly whispered against my ear. Molly and Conor join in. Me, Wren, and Gabriel, too. Even Pete and Lionel begin to clap. My smile bursts from me like the sun from behind a cloud. The chorus overtakes us all, and Tom’s eyes drink in every movement I make as I sing. Every inhale, every clap of my hands, every note from my lungs.
His crooning is smooth and effortless. His voice harmonizing with each of ours. Wren’s low register, Molly’s impressive warble. This moment—a family like I’ve never known, the music that lives in us, the end of a journey that’s changed me—it’s like clean air on a mountaintop. Rainfall in your ears.
It’s shimmering. It’s alive. Transcendent. Tears spring to my eyes.
“Ain’t love the sweetest thing,”Tom sings.“My baby’s the sweetest thing.”
He’s changing the lyrics for me.
He’s watching me sway and laughing as I laugh and the entire band is belting the lyrics like we’re kids in the back of our parents’ car—windows down, friends coming over for dinner—even though we know we’re minutes from the end of it all.
I’m gutted and I’m free and I’m in the kind of love I spent my entire life hiding from. I’m sailing through the air with no parachute and the wind in my ears sounds like a harmony. I wish I could tell if I’m falling to my death or flying with wings I never knew I had.
The song ends and my heart races and we’re called onstage for the very last time.
—
Despite all the turmoil in my heart over Tom and what will become of us when the clock strikes twelve and our relationship becomes a pumpkin again, our final show takes mybreath away. The Bowl is incredible—the lights, the last dregs of sunset, the acoustic splendor.
The entire band is playing at a level I haven’t seen before and I can’t help but wonder if that’s because of the magic that was Tom joining our vocal warm-up. Lending us his voice to share. All of us, clapping in rhythm, singing as one, familiar as breathing.
The audience tonight is no larger than our last few stadium shows, but this crowd has been hooked up to some kind of generator. Ecstasy and awe radiate from them, and they don’t stop moving the entire show. Painted by the stained-glass colors of the Bowl, they look like a school of shimmering fish, swaying this way and that under a generous, multicolored sea. They scream like banshees when Tom slips his leather jacket off or unties his hair—and Tom’s a good sport, laughing along, replying with ease and humor to all their silly signs, sticking his tongue out only for some to audibly moan. He plays like he was born to do this—feet stomping, chest slapping, soulful crooning, and all.
Before I know it, we’ve barreled into the final song of the final show. The end of the greatest experience I’ve ever had, and likely ever will again. There’s nothing I can do but enjoy every minute and try not to fight the way time slips through my fingers.
When the chords play I steel myself. Cara and Tom are old friends. If he’s still hung up on her, there’s nothing I can do about it. If he isn’t, there’s no reason watching them sing a love song should have any effect on me. Even if it’s a song he and I have sung to each other nearly every night for six weeksstraight, all the while I was falling in love with him. I’m an adult. I’m not going to cry about his past loves.
Except…that’s exactly what I do.
Cara Brennan swoops down the stage like the Celtic goddess of acrylic nails and red wine, and delivers her verses in their duet like it was always meant to be sung. It’shersong, and the entire audience—the entire band—can tell. She sings the words to Tom as if the pain is as raw today as it was when she wrote them for him.
“The ashes feel no suffering, and my baby’s just like them. Through rust and cults and roughening, I’m carried on my darling’s gentle whim.”
It’s poetry, more than anything. And she sings it as such. I’ve been singing it to feel those high notes in my lungs. To belt the words until I get a runner’s high and feel it scatter across my limbs like a firework. I’m a theater performer, not a singer-songwriter, and now the difference is painfully obvious.
But that’s not why tears spill down my cheeks. It’s the way he looks at her. It’s the raw sorrow in Tom’s eyes. He looks at Cara the way you drift off, unplanned, into a painful memory. In his mind, he’s there, with her, whenever it all went wrong.
And Cara sings back to him, wistfully cool, hauntingly sorrowful, a song of their love gone sideways. This graceful, noir-shaded femme fatale has moaned into Tom’s mouth. She’s woken up from an indulgent nap in his sweatshirt. Kissed his palms. And then it ended. My stomach is filled with lead.
It’s the Ghost of Christmas Future, singing right in frontof me, ruining my favorite song. It’s every single thing I’ve been afraid of, laid bare before my eyes.
And I wonder if I am capable of sharing the stage with them for another minute. This feeling, this gnawing at my chest, this ache that’s streaming from my eyes—it’s the exact pain I’ve worked twenty-four years of hard labor to avoid. Lonely, cynical labor. And for what?
In an instant I’m in my kitchen, knees bent up in a chair across from my mom as she sobs drunkenly into her ice cream. She cries like an actress in a movie—mascara rivers, loud, open-mouthed wails, the whole Oscar-worthy performance—over my father. A man who she hadn’t seen in a decade plus.
