I want to throw the phone at the wall. I’m so sick of hearing his fucking name.
“Good,” I reply as I grit my teeth to bite back an angry retort. “Can you talk right now? About Abigail?”
“Yeah,” she whispers so low I can barely hear her.
What is it about hearing a name that can provoke such a strong emotional reaction? I hear the name Adam and I want to pummel something. Claire hears the name Abigail and she immediately shuts down. Maybe I shouldn’t talk to her about this stuff. She needs a clear head to do well in her classes.
“Are you sure you’re okay talking about this?” I ask.
“Yes. I’m fine. I need to talk about it, too.”
I take the stairs down to the first floor and head for the kitchen. I have an apartment in L.A. that’s been empty for months while I’ve been on tour. This Home Sweet Home tour is the last leg for this year. It’s over in the end of September. I’m headed back to L.A. in October to record for a few weeks then I’ll be back before Christmas.
“I need to get you up to speed on the details of the agreement and I need to give you my schedule for the next few months so you can try to handle some of this stuff alone while I’m gone, if necessary.”
“I can’t do this alone.”
I open the refrigerator and grab a bottle of water. When I close the refrigerator door, I notice a new picture my mom must have dug up and stuck on the fridge before she left for work this morning. It’s a picture of me playing at one of my first paid gigs when I was sixteen. A small piece of the back of Claire’s head is visible in the bottom-left corner of the photo. This picture was taken just a few months after I met Claire, when we were still “just friends.” So much has changed. Claire and I will never be “just friends” again.
“You won’t be alone. You’ll be working with Tasha. I’ll be gone for less than four weeks and I’ll be just a phone call away.”
“Don’t you think that’s going to look bad? Leaving to L.A. when we’re so close to coming to an agreement with her parents? They’re already nervous about your… lifestyle.”
I laugh as I take a seat on a barstool. “My lifestyle? What the fuck does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she replies, probably afraid she’ll offend me if she elaborates.
“Come on, Claire, you can be honest with me. What the fuck do you think I do when I’m not sitting in my mom’s kitchen talking to you?”
“It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what Abigail’s parents think.”
“It matters to me what you think.”
There’s a long pause followed by a sigh. “I have to study. Feel free to give Tasha my phone number so she can fill me in on the details. Bye, Chris.”
She hangs up before I can get in another word. When I pull the phone away from my ear I see two text message notifications. The first message is from Amira, a girl I made the mistake of giving my phone number to when we fucked two months ago after a show in Houston. She texts me every now and then to tell me about shows she went to in Houston, like I give a fuck. I think she’s waiting for me to tell her the next time I’ll be there for a show.
I delete her text then open the next.
Tasha: Got a cryptic message from adoptive mother. She wants to meet me alone tomorrow without her husband. Will keep you posted.
My stomach twists inside me as I imagine what this could mean. Does she want to call the whole thing off or is she going to allow us to visit Abigail without her husband knowing? Maybe she just needs someone to talk to. I hate the idea that this whole agreement might be causing turmoil in their marriage, but I want to see my daughter. Abigail and Claire are the missing pieces of my heart. Even if I only get to hold Abigail once, I think I can live with that.
I slide off the barstool and make my way into the living room where I grab my acoustic guitar, Betty, off the ottoman then sit down on the hardwood floor. Betty was a gift from Claire for my eighteenth birthday. I have at least six better sounding acoustic guitars, but this vintage guitar with the initials she carved into the wood is still my favorite.
I trace my finger over the “CC” carved into the curve of the body then tune her up. Tristan and Jake aren’t coming over to practice for another hour so I have some time to work on a song I began writing in my head while lying in bed last night. I play the opening exactly as I heard it in my head last night, but the transition to the melody of the first verse is all wrong. I start from the beginning again a few more times before I finally get it right and the first verse comes to me.
“This ain’t our last goodbye. It’s our last hello. I can feel it in my shattered heart; all through my weary bones. You’re the missing piece, the final scrap. Someday we’ll fit together; someday I’ll bring you back.” I type the lyrics into the notes app on my phone before I continue working on the chorus. “These pieces of you are promises, whispering endless possibilities. My pieces of you are haunted, just echoes of shattered memories.”
I’ll have to work on this later; these are just the bones. The only song I ever wrote that I never changed a word—and it shows—is “Relentless.” I wrote it in a hotel room in L.A. when we were almost done recording the album. When I played it for the producer he insisted we add it to the album and make it the title track. It took less than an hour to get down the lyrics and the basic melody for “Relentless” and it’s still the one song that gets me the most love from the fans. Maybe people prefer their art a little raw.
As soon as Jake and Rachel arrive, we get to work on an upbeat track that’s supposed to be the first single released from the next album, tentatively titled Chris Knight. Jake and Rachel wrote the lyrics for this song—“Highway 99”—about falling for the wrong girl and how exciting it is to go to their secret hideaway off Highway 99. Now that I’m in this fucked up situation with Claire, I hate this song.
“Is Tristan ever going to show the fuck up?” I ask.
As much as I love Tristan, he’s unreliable as hell. His sex life always gets him in some kind of drama that keeps him from showing up to practice sessions. Technically, Tristan is easily replaceable now that I’m considered a solo act, and the shit that happened with Claire’s boyfriend hasn’t made things better. But so many of our old fans, the ones who followed Blue Knights from the beginning, go to the shows just to see him. And he’s still my oldest friend.
“I’ll text him,” Jake says, grabbing his phone off the coffee table.
Since my mom refuses to allow Jake to set up a drum set in her house—the way we used to have it before I went solo—Jake is just here to hang out and watch. Without Tristan here, this practice session is a big fucking waste of time.
Tristan never responds to Jake’s text and finally, after my eighth time quitting at the bridge, Jake groans.
“What the fuck is going on with you?” he asks. “The bridge starts on C7.”
I shake my head as I drop the guitar onto the wood floor and one of the pins pops out. “Fuck this song.”
Rachel glares at me through her icy blue eyes, which are partially obscured by her bangs. “Did something happen with Claire?”
I storm into the kitchen and grab the key for my bike off the hook. “I don’t want a fucking lecture.”
“You’d better not drink if you’re taking the bike. Don’t be a fucking asshole!” she yells as I open the door to the attached garage.
I slam the door behind me then hit the button for the door opener. The garage door rolls open and I’m pleased to see the sun has almost set. I hop onto my bike and kick the stand back. I’m already pulling my bike out of the cul-de-sac by the time Jake makes it out to the driveway.
Chapter Sixteen
Claire
THE BUZZING NOISE BREAKS ME out of my trance and it takes a moment before I realize it’s my phone vibrating on my nightstand. I reach for the phone and see I have four missed calls. I must have been really out of it this time. Until now, I hadn’t meditated since yesterday morning.
All the miss
ed calls are from an unknown number with a Raleigh area code. I debate ignoring the calls to continue my meditation, but the number of missed calls gives me an uneasy feeling.
“Who is it?” Senia asks from where she’s lying on her bed studying for a biochem exam.
I shrug then call the number. Someone picks up right away.
“Claire?”
It’s Jackie and she sounds frantic.
“Jackie? What’s wrong?”
“Oh, my Lord. I left my phone at the shop. I’ve been calling you from Rachel’s phone. I didn’t think you would ever call back.”
“Jackie, what’s happened?”
“Claire, honey, I’m at the hospital. Chris had an accident.”
“An accident? What kind of accident?” My heart pounds as that uneasy feeling transforms into panic.
“Who had an accident?” Senia whispers.
“On his bike,” Jackie replies. “We’re at WakeMed.”
Just hearing the word WakeMed makes me want to vomit. I haven’t been there since I had Abigail five months ago. Jackie doesn’t know anything about Abigail.
“Claire? Are you still there?”
“Yes. I’m here. I’ll… I’ll be there in an hour.”
I’m shaking so hard as I pull on a pair of jeans and a clean shirt.
Senia grabs my hand as I reach for my car keys on the nightstand. “I’ll drive.”
“Drive fast, please.”
The whole forty-minute drive there, I keep imagining all the worst scenarios: he’s missing a leg, he’s in a coma, he’s on life support… or worse. Senia attempts to distract me with music, but I can’t stop my mind from wandering to the darkest places.
She drops me off in front of the emergency entrance then sets off to find parking. I stand outside the sliding doors under the red emergency sign for a moment, unable to move. This is exactly how it happened when I went into labor.
“Are you in labor?” the nurse with the blue cardigan and the straw-colored hair asks.
“Yes. Please put me in a room. Now, please.”
I’m more afraid of running into someone I know than anything else. I just want to get into a delivery room where no one but the doctors and nurses, and Senia, will see me.
“We’ll get you into a room right now, sweetie.”
Another nurse comes up behind me with a wheelchair and I’m hit with another contraction right as I sit down. It’s the worst pain I’ve ever felt and I’ve been suffering through it for the last three hours in Senia’s bedroom while waiting for the contractions to come less than four minutes apart. It’s 2:30 a.m. now and I can hardly keep my eyes open. My eyes roll back in my head and I feel as if I might actually die from the pain.
I’d rather be dead than be here right now.
Finally, the nurse wheels me away and it feels like it takes an hour before she finally arrives at the Women’s Pavilion. They set me up in a spacious room and hook me up to a zillion monitors. Every beat of my baby’s heart is like a hammer driven into my heart, breaking it into a million pieces. I finally ask the nurse to lower the volume on the heart rate monitor and she does it, but not without a judgmental scowl.
“Have you decided on any names?” another dark-haired nurse asks, putting on some gloves as she gets ready to probe my cervix for the third time since I arrived.
Senia throws her a look of disgust before she pulls the nurse outside. I don’t know what Senia says to her, but the dark-haired nurse, Sybil, is overly nice for the rest of my two-night stay. The entire staff is overly nice after that. Sybil must have shared the news about the adoption with everybody. But their kindness doesn’t soothe my anxiety or my guilt. I almost wish they would tell me what an awful person I am. Just confirm what I know they’re all thinking about me.
She’s just a stupid college student who got knocked up by having unprotected sex with some guy who probably wants nothing more to do with her.
If they knew the truth, if they knew that I kept this whole pregnancy a secret from Chris, they wouldn’t be this nice to me.
“Claire?”
Senia places her hand on my back and leads me toward the emergency entrance. The doors whisper accusations as they slide open. Unfit. They slide shut behind me. Liar.
“It’s okay,” Senia whispers.
“Nobody knows what happened. That’s between you and Chris.”
Chris. Oh, God. Where is he?
I break away from Senia and race to the long counter where a woman in a black cardigan watches wide-eyed as I approach.
“Can I help you?”
“I’m looking for Chris Knight.”
Her eyebrows knit together as if she has bad news for me, but then she points at a set of double doors. “Go through there and you’ll find the nursing station. They can help you.”
I powerwalk across the lobby to the double doors and shove my way through them. The hospital smell is more intense in here. The woman in the lobby didn’t say they would tell me where Chris is. She didn’t say he’s okay. She just said they would help me at the nursing station. Maybe that’s her standard response after dealing with so many people who come in frantic looking for loved ones who’ve…. I have to stop thinking like this.
The nursing station is a huge L-shaped counter with Plexiglas panels stretching from the counter to the ceiling. A woman with short red hair is standing behind the counter wearing a midnight-blue nursing uniform and staring at the inside of a manila file folder.
“You looking for someone?” she asks as she looks up from the folder.
“Yes. I’m looking for Chris—Christopher Knight.”
Everyone knows him as Chris Knight, not Christopher, but there’s no way she doesn’t know I’m talking about the Chris Knight.
“Are you family?”
I hesitate. Am I family? Technically, Chris was my foster brother, but Jackie never adopted me. And I haven’t lived with her or Chris for more than two years.
“No. I’m….” Senia watches me as she waits to hear exactly what I am to Chris. “I’m his wife.”
Senia’s eyes widen, which doesn’t go unnoticed by the nurse. Senia drops her gaze to my hands as I tuck them behind my back. The nurse cocks an eyebrow before she closes her folder and picks up the phone to dial an extension.
“I have Chris Knight’s… wife here.” She looks up at me. “What’s your name, honey?”
“Claire.”
“Claire is here to see her husband. What’s his status?” She purses her lips as she listens to Chris’s status then hangs up the phone. “They just moved him out of the trauma unit and into the OR.” She grabs a piece of paper off the desk and hands it to me. It’s a floor plan of the hospital. “You can wait in the Critical Care Waiting Room. They’ll keep you updated on his status and when you’ll be able to see him.”
Senia and I follow the map through a few more corridors.
“Claire Knight,” Senia remarks with a shake of her head. “Nope. I don’t like the way it sounds.”
“How else are they going to let me see him? Everybody knows he’s an only child.”
We reach another quiet lobby where a woman with poufy brown hair is sitting behind yet another counter.
“May I help you?”
“I’m here to see my husband, Christopher Knight,” I reply without hesitation.
“Claire!”
I turn my head at the sound of Rachel’s voice. “Rachel?”
She looks exactly as I remember her, messy brown bangs and clothes that fit too loosely over her tiny frame. Jackie stands from her chair and they both stride toward me. Rachel throws her arms around me first, but I note that her makeup seems untouched as if she hasn’t shed a tear. I look over Rachel’s shoulder at Jackie and her makeup also seems to be intact.
“What happened?” I ask Jackie and she smiles a bit sheepishly.
“They’re resetting his fibula.”
“His fibula? You mean, he broke his leg?”
Rachel lets go of me and J
ackie holds her arms out for a hug. I give her a quick hug then look up at her questioningly.
“When I called you I didn’t know his status yet. If I had known it was just a compound fracture I wouldn’t have asked you to come.”
“Just a compound fracture?” Rachel says. “That’s some serious shit.” Typical Rachel, always eager to speak her mind. “Did you just refer to Chris as your husband?”
I’m sensing some hostility from Rachel, but I don’t want to make any incorrect assumptions. “They wouldn’t let me see him otherwise.”
Her lip curls up in disgust. “Don’t let him know you did that. It will kill him.”
Jackie purses her lips at Rachel. “Come now, Rachel. Be nice.”
“It’s true. He’s been miserable the past few weeks. Claire’s the reason he was upset when he got on his bike.”
“What?” Jackie looks confused as she looks back and forth between Rachel and me.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Jackie’s eyes widen at me. “Claire! Watch the language.” She turns back to Rachel. “But, yes, what are you talking about?”
Rachel shakes her head. “Nothing. He was just upset when he left and I know it’s because of everything that’s happening between you two.”
“What’s going on between you?” Jackie asks me.
There’s no way Rachel knows about Abigail. Chris told me he hasn’t spoken to anyone about her and I believe him. She’s probably referring to Adam. I don’t think Chris would tell Rachel about the fight, but I wouldn’t put it past Tristan to blab about it to everybody he knows.
“Nothing. We’re still trying to work things out. We’re just friends.” I whisper the last sentence like it’s a dirty secret because it is, as far as Jackie is concerned.
“Just friends? Did you friend-zone my baby?”
Rachel cackles at this remark and I probably would too if it didn’t make me physically sick.
“No, Jackie. It’s just that a lot has happened since we broke up.” Oh, no. This is not how I wanted her to find out. “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry.”
Jackie looks as if she can’t decide whether she should be confused or disgusted. I want to sink into the floor or disappear. I can’t bear to see the scrutiny and disappointment in her eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” I repeat this mantra a few more times before she pats my shoulder.
“It’s fine. I know you two will work this out. You can’t just throw away four years and an engagement without trying to work things out.”
Engagement? Chris told her we were engaged?
I don’t want to be pissed at him right now. He probably had a good reason to tell her this, though I can’t figure out what that could be. Jackie knew Chris and I were having sex the last two years we were together. She told us to be safe and that was the end of our birds and bees discussion. Why would he tell her that? I was nineteen when we broke up. We did promise to love each other forever, and we talked about getting married many years down the road, but there was definitely never an engagement. I would never have put myself through the pregnancy and adoption alone if we were engaged.
Poor Jackie. Chris and I have kept so many secrets from her and told her so many lies, we should both be hanged.
“You’re right. We’ll try to work it out. I promise.”
She smiles even though I can see it in her eyes that she knows I’m humoring her. “He should be out of the care unit in a couple of hours. I’m sure he’d love to see you when he wakes up.”
I bite my lip as I attempt to stop the tears from spilling over. Of all the lies I’ve told this year, I think I regret the ones I’ve told Jackie the most.