Page 9 of Rush: Deluxe Edition

“I got busy with the Strings, then graduation…” Keith shrugged, his smile widening. “But it’s good to see you again, and as much as I’d love to catch up, my friends are going to send a search party if I don’t get back with the booze.”

He slung his arm on the bar as if we were in a saloon and winked at me like a cowboy in a bad western. I was suddenly overcome with embarrassment that this insincere asshole was part of the reason my bruised and battered heart couldn’t find my music.

“Sorry,” I said, tossing the rag down. “I’m on a break.”

I pushed past Samneric to get to the alley outside, sat on an overturned bucket used for hauling ice, and burst into tears. Not for what Keith had put me through, but for the awful déjà vu of those awful months after Chris’s death. Keith’s pleasantly indifferent face brought it all back to me in a rush.

I cried for what I’d thought I’d had with Keith, which was—as it turns out—nothing at all. But mostly I cried for Chris. I sobbed for my brother, the ache in my heart throbbing along with my pulse. I could have sobbed all night, and the tears would never stop. There was an endless well of them that never seemed to dry up.

Ten minutes later, I stymied the geyser and went back inside. Thankfully, Keith was back at his table and Melanie had returned, along with some other friends of ours from Juilliard: Mike Hammond, Felicia Strickland, and Regina Chen. They all recognized Keith and surrounded me at the bar, like a protective barrier. My eyes threatened to turn on the waterworks again at their kindness.

“You missed it, Char,” Regina said over her martini. “It was an epic party—even by my high standards—but could have been evenmoreepic if you had been there.”

“I tried to drag her out,” Melanie said, “but—”

“But I was busy,” I said quickly. “Sorry, Regina. I’ll try to catch the next one.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” Regina said. “I’m thinking late May. Save the date, Conroy, or your ass is grass.”

Regina Chen’s parties were legendary among the Juilliard crowd. Everyone had to bring their instruments, and a bunch of people would play the themes from popular TV shows. I’d attended a few before Chris’s death and none after.

Regina and the rest of my Juilliard friends thought I was taking a break from auditions. Only Melanie knew the truth. That I didn’t like to play in front of people anymore. Not when my music was so hollow now. Rote. Notes on a page and nothing more.

My friends kept me talking and laughing about other things, and before I knew it, my shift was over.

I closed the night with ninety dollars in tips. Pretty good but not quite enough.

Pretty good but not quite enough.

It was amazing—and depressing—how much of my life those days could be described with that sentence.

chapter four

I bolted upright from that same damn nightmare, the dream that was both fiercely terrorizing and mercilessly glorious at the same time. I gasped for breath, drowning on nothing, while trying to hold on to the images that painted my darkness with vibrant color. There was white snow and blue sky, gold sunset tints and blue-green water. In the dream I could see again.

Sometimes that made it worth the terror.

Sometimes it made me wish I’d never woken up at all.

I vaguely wondered what time it was. It might have been morning. It might have been three in the afternoon. My sleep patterns were fucked since the accident and what difference did it make anyway? Dawn or dusk, it was all the same black nothing to me.

I threw off my sweat-drenched covers. They stank and so did I. I needed a shower and Lucien needed to hurry the hell up and hire another assistant. It had been three days since some chick from that restaurant delivered food along with the news that Trevor—the useless prick—had quit. Good riddance. Trevor was slow, stupid, and if he’d walked out of here without stealing something, I’d be shocked.

Not that I’d know.

I lay back on the pillows, a sigh gusting out of me, and listened. The street traffic was quiet. No voices. No cars. I guessed it was three a.m. and decided to check with the precious little wristwatch they gave me at the rehab facility. Especially designed for blind fuckers like me, it chirped the time at the press of a button.

The time is 3:22 a.m., Tuesday, March 31st.

Pretty close. I pushed it again. And again. The robotic voice filled the silence. I couldn’t handle silence. If I lay still enough, if I held my breath and didn’t move, I could pretend I was in a cave deep beneath the ground where no sunlight ever reached. Like that old mining cavern in Colorado I once visited. I remember thinking then that this kind of ultimate darkness was impossible. There was always light in the world, even in the blackest night. There were always shadows and shades, never just…nothing.

Ha. Life—bitch that she was—sure showed me.

Lying perfectly still was a bad idea, anyway. I felt as if I were buried alive, a mind floating in the black ether. Bodiless. Weightless. And utterly alone.

I pushed the button again. Over and over, but it wasn’t enough.

“Alexa,” I said to the voice-activated system Lucien had acquired three months ago when I first got out of rehab. “Play: Rage Against the Machine.”

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