She’s worried. I can see that.
“I know. I’ll talk to him.” I smile and try to reassure her. “He’ll be okay. He’s tough.”
She looks me in the eyes. “Everyone can break though. I don’t want Sabin to break.”
“I don’t want him to break either.”
I should ask her if she’d like to come out with us. I know that. It would be the polite thing to do.
Yet I don’t. I’m not sure why, but I don’t.
Mollie gives a little wave and rushes out.
Sabin doesn’t seem to be walking funny or having any trouble carrying his stuff to the car, so I decide to forgo a lecture on motorcycle safety. The larger concern I have is that his behavior feels unsafe. He’s risk-taking and chasing danger. I don’t like it.
“Mollie seems nice,” I say on the drive.
“Yeah, she’s all right.” Sabin has his window down and is letting the wind rush over his face while he closes his eyes.
“She seems to like you.”
He turns and grins. “Why wouldn’t she like me? The ladies love Sabin.”
I laugh. “I’m serious.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get excited. That’s not gonna happen. She looks about twelve.”
“She does not. She’s cute.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. But she had a bag full of every kind of bandage anyone could need. Jesus, I could have chopped off an arm, and she probably would’ve had something for that. Oh, I love this song!”
Sabin turns up the indie radio station we have on, which is fine with me because I need a minute. I’m taken aback at how undeniably and markedly relieved I am that he doesn’t pounce on the idea of Mollie as anything more than the girl who bandaged him up. Sabin is my best friend, so I reason that it’s normal to feel protective. Of course, the jealousy piece here is a little weird and creepy. It’s not true jealousy though. It’s just…
Okay, I’m a little possessive over Sabin. Fine. I can admit that.
Sabin turns down the radio. “By the way…”
“Yeah?”
“You look really good tonight, B. The…” He waves his hand around. “The hair and stuff. You look nice.”
He turns the music back up, louder than before, so I don’t have a chance to reply. But I do smile.
The traffic isn’t awful, so we make good time.
We walk in to loud cheers of, “Sabin,” from Chris, Eric, Estelle, James, and Zach, who have taken up a long table by the stage.
This place appears to have more of a bar scene than I thought, but Sabin doesn’t seem to flinch. In fact, he looks elated and energized to be here. He high-fives James, and then the manager directs Sabin to a back room, so I go with him to see if he needs anything else.
“Sabin!” I pat his back as we set down his things. “I’m a roadie!”
He laughs. “You are the best roadie ever, B.”
“Are you nervous?”
“I’m really not,” he says. “Singing’s kinda my thing. It’ll be fun. You’ll stay the whole time, right?”
“Are you crazy? Of course, you nut. You couldn’t drag me away. Listen, Sabe…” I start. “Look, I didn’t know this place had a bar scene at all. You okay with that?”
“It’s not a problem, sweets. To be honest, I really don’t miss the booze. But you go have a drink, and I’ll drive us home, okay?”
“Maybe. I’m just here to see you.” I give him a hug. It was going to be a short hug. That’s what I intended, but instead, I’m finding myself holding on to him for longer. “You’re going to be great.”
Sabin’s arms tightly embrace me, and we just stand there. He’s supposed to be unpacking and warming up and doing whatever pre-gig thing he needs to do, but instead, we are clinging to each other.
“Okay,” he finally whispers.
“Okay,” I whisper back.
Slowly, he drops his arms and turns to open his guitar case without looking at me. “Love you, B.”
“Love you, too, Sabe.” I stop in the doorway. “We’ll be the people screaming and clapping two feet from the stage. Try not to miss us.”
Sabe laughs and turns my way now. “I’ll won’t.”
Chris is drinking seltzer when I sit down next to him, but based on the clutter of glassware on the table, he’s the only one.
“You look smokin’ tonight,” he says, draping an arm over my shoulder. “How’s Sabin tonight? He doing okay?”
“I think so, yeah.” I signal our waitress and order a grapefruit and vodka.
“Nervous for him?” he asks.
“Not really nervous. Just antsy. Did you get to talk to him more yesterday?”
Chris shakes his head. “No. It felt like he needed a little space to come down, you know? I’m glad he stayed at the house with us though.”
Eric plops into the chair next to me. “Psst, Blythe! Blythe!”
His attempt at being hush-hush fails significantly, and I have a feeling that the beer in his hand might not be his first of the night.
“Hi, Eric.” I smile warmly. I adore him, and I’m glad he’s letting loose tonight because he’s so often on the more controlled side.
“Psst!” he says again. “I just wanted to tell you that I’m gay. And I am in love with a boy.”
Chris and I both burst out laughing.
I fake gasp. “You are not!”
He nods energetically. “I am!” Then, he inches in a little more. “Okay, seriously, I’m going to ask Zach to live together after graduation. Wherever he wants.”
“I think that’s wonderful,” Chris says.
“So awesome,” I agree.
“Okay, cool. Just needed your blessing to live in sin.” He bounces away and sits comfortably on Zach’s lap.
As if that didn’t already make me happy, he then actually moves in and kisses Zach. And it’s not a token short kiss. Eric kisses Zach. The entire table whoops, and we all raise our glasses. Eric doesn’t even pull away. He just continues the kiss while lifting his own glass.
Estelle leans over the table. “Dudes, I need to talk to you about something.” She’s liquored up for sure, but she’s better at holding her drink than her twin.
“Shoot,” Chris says. “Seems to be a night of confessions already.”
“I don’t know what to do after graduation.” She takes a swig of her beer. “Eric’s gonna live with Zach, isn’t he? Is that what he said?”
“Maybe,” I say.
She doesn’t often look worried, but she does now. “Chris? I don’t know how…it’s just…” she stammers. Estelle is not one to stammer.
Chris stops her. “Do you want to come stay with us in Maine for a while?”
She brightens and looks relieved. “Could I? With…James?” She looks at me.
“Estelle, of course,” I say insistently. “You’re welcome anytime at all. It’s your home, too.”
I realize that they’ve never had anywhere to go home to during summer and college breaks. It was always up to Chris to corral them somewhere, figure out a plan for each time away from school. Even after my own parents died, James and I had a home base with Aunt Lisa. Not that we liked her all that much, but we still flew back home to familiar territory and had some semblance of family. It’s pretty normal for kids to stay with their families during their off times, to always have a backup place to stay.
The Shepherds have never had that, but they do now.
“James wants to talk to you about redoing the front porch, expanding it and adding in a larger patio area. Then…he’s thinking about grad school or an architecture internship in Boston.” She strums her nails on the table surface and looks around. “It’s going to be fucked up, being apart from Eric, but it has to happen, I guess, so I’d feel better…being with you. We won’t be in your hair, and you can just kick us out anytime you want.”
“We would love to have you,” Chris assures her. “You don’t have to walk on eggshells.”
“I’m not walking on fucking eggshe
lls.” Estelle sticks out her tongue. “Have we met? I don’t do eggshells. I’m just telling you that we won’t interfere with your exceedingly loud sex life this time around.”
Chris covers his face with a hand. “Oh my God, did you have to throw that in?”
She polishes off her beer and clunks it loudly on the table. “I did. And that means you don’t get to interfere in my exceedingly loud sex life either. This is going to be beautiful!” She grins and blows me a kiss, and then she makes a dramatic show of kissing my brother—with a lot of tongue.
When James can breathe, he looks bashfully at me. “Sorry, Blythe. Sorry…but since Estelle can’t keep her voice down and I heard all of that, thank you. You guys are the best.”
“And because you’re so fabulous and all that,” Estelle says, “maybe you won’t mind that Zach invited Eric, James, and me to go skiing with him and his family in Jackson Hole. We’d leave in a few days, cutting this trip short.” She squeezes her eyes shut and crosses her fingers after she drops this bomb.
“Oh.” I’m hit with disappointment, but…well, they’re college kids who want to go skiing.
James glares at her. “We totally don’t have to. He just asked us tonight.”
Rather quickly, Chris answers, “I think you should go. You’ll have an awesome time, and it’s been ages since you’ve been skiing.”
I’m about to say something, but Chris rubs his fingers against my arm. He has a reason for thinking this is a good idea. I just don’t know what it is.
“Really? You won’t be mad?” Estelle claps her hands. “Fuckin’ bitchin’, James! We’re going skiing! Sexy snow-bunny outfits for me. You slipping your cold hands under my—”
“Hey, hey!” Chris rolls his eyes. “Don’t make me change my mind.”
She makes an overly serious face. “Yes, brother dear. Understood.” Then, she stands and yells toward the stage, “Sabin! Woohoo!”
I turn in time to catch him winking at his sister before he launches into a song. This might be a small bar, but they’ve got a stage light shining on him. This is his element, and I feel an onset of relief to see him as he is tonight. Despite a rough afternoon the other day, he is still the Sabin with all the strength and character I know he has. It’s just good to be reminded of that.
He spends over an hour doing crowd-pleasing cover songs, including “Sister Christian.” He dedicates it to Estelle and even lets her sing loudly and off-key into his mic. While it might be a drunken audience, they are wholly enthusiastic, and Sabin easily gets them all to sing along with him.
It’s a happy group tonight, and I don’t want this all to end, but at twelve thirty, Sabin announces that his set is over. I can barely hear what he’s saying over the audience’s applause and particularly over Eric’s thumping on the table. We all join in though, and it creates one of the only embarrassed expressions I’ve ever seen from Sabin. He thanks the crowd and hops off the stage to grab a seat with us.
Chris jumps up and stands behind him, putting his hands on Sabin’s shoulders and shaking him. “Who’s my rock-star brother, huh? That’s right! This boy! So proud of you, man.”
Sabin pats Chris’s hand. “Thanks.”
“We’re getting marrieeeeeeed!” Eric hollers.
We all whip our heads to Eric and Zach.
“You’re what?” Sabin asks.
Zach smacks his forehead. “We’re not getting married. We’re moving in together,” he explains.
“Oh!” Eric claps the table. “That’s right! We’re moving in together!”
We cheer and congratulate them.
But Eric wrinkles his brow. “Wait a minute. If we got married, there’d be cake, and I could totally go for some cake right now.”
“And maybe a gallon of water and a few aspirin,” Chris mutters. “Actually, there is that late-night bakery we walked past on the way here. Just a few doors down.”
“Let them eat cake!” Eric hollers.
“Chris, why don’t you take the drunks out for cake, and I’ll help Sabin pack up?” I suggest.
“Take your time. Eric has to sober up a little before I put him in the car. If he pukes everywhere, I’m gonna be pissed.”
Chris manages to wrangle them all outside, leaving just Sabin and me.
“So?” He sits across from me now and fidgets with a napkin on the table.
I feign confusion. “So…what?”
“Blythe! Come on.” The napkin is in shreds.
“You were amazing.”
“Yeah?”
“Outstanding. Perfect. I’ve never seen you do better.”
Suddenly, the manager rushes over with a panicked but hopeful look on his face. “Sabin? That was great, and obviously, the crowd loves you. Here’s the thing. Another guy was supposed to close out the night, and he no-showed. I try to end the nights with something kind of mellow. It helps calm the place down and all that. Fewer bar fights. Any chance you want to do a few more songs? Just twenty minutes even? It’d really help me out.”
“I don’t know,” Sabin says. “I mean, I guess.”
“Sabe, you have to!” I insist. “You’re the king of the slow song!”
He laughs lightly. “Okay. Sure.”
Sabin gets back on stage, and the applause is immediate and loud. “All right, kiddos. We’re going to bring it down a notch here, so sit back and listen to the mellow stylings of yours truly.”
It’s as though the entire room is under his command, and I’m not surprised when the room quiets down to listen to him. Sabin has a magnetism that reaches every person here, and I cannot take my eyes off of him. A few couples slow dance near the stage, and the atmosphere he creates with his music puts us all in a bubble where the outside world does not exist. We are all simply here with Sabin. He plays a few songs, and then he taps his guitar and thinks for a moment.
“So, uh…Blythe,” he says, looking directly at me, “this one is for you.”
I can’t help but smile when he starts, “When You Say Nothing at All.” It’s an older song that I adore. A little sappy, a little syrupy, but it’s one of the sweetest songs ever. I had no idea that he knew I loved this.
It’s a song about communicating without words, about being there for each other always, about deep connectedness—the way we did the other day after the turmoil following the gallery showing.
It’s a song about us. And it’s beautiful. And I love every second of it.
The only problem is that I might love it too much because I realize that I am holding back tears and not doing a particularly good job of it. So, I just let my cheeks get wet because these are happy tears that come from how much I care for this person singing to me and how much I value every part of him.
The clapping throughout the bar is the only thing that snaps me from the moment. I realize that the song is over, and he’s starting another one.
He looks away from me now. “This song is called ‘Daisy.’ I wrote it last summer, and it goes a little somethin’ like this…”
SO LONG, MY LOVE.
YOU KNOW YOU WERE THE ONE.
YOU RIPPED MY HEART IN TWO,
BUT I’LL STILL SAVE HALF FOR YOU.
IF YOU WALKED INTO THIS ROOM RIGHT NOW,
I’D TELL YOU HOW I FEEL FOR YOU STILL.
YOU’RE THE ONE I LOVE,
BUT NOW I’M GOING AWAY.
If there weren’t already tears in my eyes, there would be now. The other problem, I realize, is that not every bit of me feels purely happy. There is a nagging ache, a pull, on my heart that I cannot decipher because it’s too strong and too confusing. And I don’t want to deal with it. So, I brush it aside and just stay with Sabin and his song.
SO, IF I AM LONELY,
I GUESS I’LL HAVE TO BE,
FOR A WHILE ANYWAY.
THE ONE I LOVE
ALWAYS ON MY MIND.
YOU’RE STILL WITH ME
ALL OF THE TIME.
SO LONG, MY LOVE.
DAISY, YOU WERE MY ONE,<
br />
BUT YOU RIPPED MY HEART IN TWO,
AND NOW IT BLEEDS FOR YOU
TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF.
I’LL HOLD ON HOPE.
YOU KNOW IT’S ALWAYS
HERE TO CLAIM.
I can’t even hear the rest of the song because my head is swimming, and I have some emotion that I cannot identify pounding through me. I have panic and anxiety and…and…and a longing of some sort that sends me spiraling.
More abruptly than he did before, he says good night and thanks the crowd before getting off the stage. He heads for the back room to get his things faster than I can stop him. So, I wait. I need a minute anyway. A minute to do what, I don’t know. To think maybe, but I don’t really want to.
I grab a fast shot at the bar. Not that a Mind Eraser is going to help me much, but I can still hope it’ll erase what’s eating at me.
He wrote that song last summer, I think over and over. Then, he left—without warning, without a plan.
He ran.
Did he run from me?
Oh God…
I see Sabin make his way across the room. He stops to talk to the manager for a moment, and then he hesitantly comes to stand next to me.
“You ready?” he asks.
“Sabe…” I start.
“Why do you look like that? It’s just a song,” he says, preempting whatever I might have come up with. He’s smiling, but it feels forced.
Maybe I’m wrong. I hope I’m wrong.
“It’s a powerful song,” I tell him.
“That’s how I do things. Come on. Let’s go find everyone. Chris has probably had all he can take.”
He rushes out the door, and I go after him, hoping to say…what?
I want it to be a few minutes ago when we were locked together in a song. This? This moment feels shattering, as though we might be on the brink of our friendship turning inside out.
Chris and the rest of our group are only a few feet from the entrance. He watches them stumble and then rolls his eyes at me. “Well, I fed them cake. Still drunk though.”
Chris and I are parked in the same area, so we all walk together with us up front. Sabin has positioned himself behind the others, and I suppose that’s for the best. I put my arm around Chris’s waist and try to regain my sense of stability, to remind myself what the boundaries and dynamics are.