Rock Read online

  “It’s a confession.”

  OK. I walk over to the family room with my beer and take a seat in the chair opposite her, not bothering to remove the white sheet. I wave my hand, a gesture that says, Let’s get this show on the road.

  “Back when we were kids—” She stares at me and her blue eyes sparkle as the corners of her mouth lift up into a smile.

  I like the smile, it feels so very, very familiar, so I smile back.

  “We were all at that summer camp that came to town, remember? The music one? Your dad had talked all those college kids from the Colorado Conservatory into coming up here for six weeks to turn us into musicians.”

  I smile bigger at that memory because it’s a good one. Teej and me. Mel and Missy. And a bunch of other kids too, tourist kids. Not even town kids. It was a pretty big deal that summer. We were music freaks. I come from a family of music freaks. Mel and Missy too. And even if the twins didn’t come from a family of music freaks, they were along for the ride because they were the only neighbors for six miles in any direction. Teej is two years older than me, Mel and Missy are my same age. The four of us were inseparable.

  Until I broke the girls in half.

  I lean over and massage my temple with a fingertip as Melanie talks.

  “I was mad that summer because you wanted—”

  “Melissa played the cello, and I needed a cello,” I explain, before I remember I should not be talking. I wince and grab my throat, then take another small sip of the cold beer and the tears are knocking as that goes down, that’s how bad it hurts. It feels like I’ve got sand or rocks in my throat and there’s no way to get beyond it. If I drink, it hurts to use the muscles. If I don’t drink, it hurts because it’s dry.

  “I know, RK. You always made decisions based on logic. My sister always thinks ahead too. She’s a planner. Like you.”

  Melanie using the present tense to talk about her sister hurts more than my throat and I almost get up and walk out.

  “She always knew what you needed before you knew you needed it, didn’t she?”

  And the switch to past tense makes it all hit home again.

  “So poor, pathetic Melanie was the odd one out that summer. You and TJ on violin…” Melanie hesitates for a second. “Missy on cello and that little blonde summer girl on viola.”

  “You have to have a violist, Mel,” I say, the rocks in my throat grinding together. I take another small sip. I’ll never be able to drink enough alcohol to get drunk at this rate. I can barely swallow. “It wasn’t like I—” Jesus. I take another sip and force it down.

  Mel appears beside me with a glass of ice water. “I’m pretty sure the alcohol is making it worse.”

  I shake my head, but accept the ice water all the same and take a small sip. It still burns, but it’s soothing too, so I take another sip and then guzzle the rest, hoping the cold will numb the pain a little. Melanie waits me out, so I try to get one last sentence past the agony. “I just wanted you to have a good group, and our group was not good for you. Your viola skills sucked, no offense, and your bass skills”—I look up at her—“rocked.”

  I think that was the longest sentence I’ve said since the accident and it requires a very deep breath for many reasons after I’m done.

  But Mel is still chatty. “No, RK, you’re misunderstanding me. I’m not telling you this so you feel sorry for me or so you can make me feel better with some bullshit compliment. I’m telling you this because that was the summer I realized something.”

  I look her straight in the eyes as she pauses.

  “That was the day I realized you were always going to plow over me. Over us. Over everyone. I knew you wanted the best group. I knew you wanted to impress people with your skills. I knew that I was not what you were looking for. And I came to terms with it back then. When I was fourteen, I already knew. That summer was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  I just stare at her, confused as to where this is going.

  “Because you’re the kind of guy who changes people, RK. You’re the kind of guy girls fixate on and can’t let go. You’re the kind of guy who breaks up families, and drives drunk, and ruins lives. You ruin people, Rock. And I just wanted to come here tonight to thank you. For knocking that stupid crush I had on you right out of my head. Because if you were any less of an asshole, I might’ve actually liked you. And then I might’ve been the one you killed on prom night instead of my sister.”

  Chapter Three

  I am stunned silent as she walks out. I watch her, and I’m silent because of the injury, but I’m stunned silent on the inside too.

  I am blank. I am RK’s blank mind.

  And then, after the door slams shut with a bang, my thoughts are racing, my throat is killing me, and the house seems like the wrong place to be. Like wrong, man. Just wrong. I get up and follow Mel out the door. By the time I get to the driveway she’s already inside her place and the lights are off. A signal, I guess. It speaks loud and clear to me. Don’t come here.

  I get in my truck and start it up, the tires spinning a little on the wet blacktop driveway, and then head down the hill and drive towards town. There is nothing going on in town. Less than five hundred people call Grand Lake home year-round. No one wants to stick around for the dead-end life up here in the winter.

  But in the summer it’s overflowing with people. Tourists. Parties and boating and fishing and music and theatre. The place is alive during the summer.

  It’s May, so when I come around the mountain and see the streets down below it’s clear we’re not quite there yet. It’s empty and dark tonight. As dark as it gets on a night with no moon and only the occasional street lamp. There’s no twenty-four-hour drugstore here, but I got the next best thing.

  The bar. Float’s.

  We have more than one—even in the winter we’re not that small. But Float’s is my dad’s bar.

  Was my dad’s.

  It’s TJ’s bar now and even though he’s the last person I need to see and talk to at the moment, I need something for this pain and that place is my best bet.

  And a drink would be nice too. Something stronger than beer that will help knock my ass out with a few swallows. Something that will take away the nightmares, and the crazy thoughts, and the confusion.

  I drive down the twisted road to the town and the lake and pull into the dirt parking lot. I practically grew up in this parking lot and I’ve got so many memories rattling around in my head, I clear my throat to make the pain worse, just to keep them at bay.

  Float’s is a ramshackle wooden building made of graying barn wood. The large deck has umbrella tables in the summer, but none right now, and a small grassy lawn that is mostly covered in snow. The large dock out back that the place is named for has no canopy and no band playing since the outside shows don’t start until Memorial Day weekend.

  I pull open the door and there’s a familiar scent and a familiar sound, but that’s it. It’s been remodeled inside—new gleaming stainless-steel bar, new stainless-steel tables that look like they belong down in some trendy LoDo bar in Denver. The booths are black leather with stainless-steel accents and the staff are all wearing black slacks, crisp white collared shirts, and black aprons. It’s all very trendy and not at all my style.

  Not TJ’s style either.

  I scan the room looking at the faces and realize I recognize way too many of them.

  A few turn and look in my direction and that’s when the whispering starts. Every head turns towards me. Every face is staring at me. And I just stand there like an idiot until TJ pushes his way out of a group of guys at a back booth and stands a few feet in front of me. He looks different too. His hair is short and styled, which matches his very conservative clothes—dark suit coat, dark slacks, and white shirt.

  We are the same height, both over six foot, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end. My hair is brushing against my shoulders, my black leather jacket jingles with the zippers on the sleeves and front
, and even though I spent the better part of the last six weeks working out to take my mind off the injury and the accident, I’m nowhere near as big as he is.

  Even under the clean-cut costume, one look into my brother’s eyes tells me all I need to know. He is every bit the soldier he turned himself into five years ago when I left town.

  The music cuts off and the whole place goes quiet. “She already called me,” Teej says, like this silence was planned for dramatic effect. “Says you haven’t changed.” He looks at me with that steely gaze, seeing me for what I am as well. The good-for-nothing rock star.

  I don’t think that’s a fair assessment to be honest. Both the ‘rock star’ part I see in TJ’s disgusted expression and the ‘haven’t changed’ part Mel accused me of. Melanie was never going to give me a chance. She had her mind made up the second she saw me pull in the driveway.

  “Says you’re an asshole, says you were rude, says you’re just as fucked up as ever.”

  I nod and sigh.

  “She says you’re pretending you can’t talk, but she says you sounded just fine to her. Why the fuck are you here, RK? You’ve been gone five years and never once came home. Not for Dad, not for Mel’s dad. Not for me, not for her. So why the fuck are you here?”

  I pull the pen and paper out of my pocket and start writing, but Teej smacks the pad out of my hand and it goes flying across the room, hits the floor, and slides under the pool table.

  “You’ll talk to me, asshole. I deserve that much, you understand? I deserve the pain it takes for you to speak. So fuck you and your little pad of paper.”

  I don’t know how to answer his question in a few words. That’s like a fucking paragraph of words. And it’s really two questions in one. Why am I in town? He knows why. I’m not allowed to leave the county until the sheriff clears me to go. And there’s not a lot of towns in Grand County, Colorado. Winter Park is too close to Denver, too accessible and too many people, even though the ski slopes have been shut down for the year. Steamboat is in the next county over, so I can’t even stay in rehab. Grand Lake is the only place I had to go unless I wanted to hide out in some seedy mountain hotel in Fraser or Granby. And why the fuck should I? I own a four-bedroom house with a view of Rocky Mountain National Park on one side and Grand Lake on the other.

  That is a no-brainer.

  “Why the fuck did you come here tonight, RK?”

  That’s a more difficult one to explain. Especially with my history, so I start with something easy. “Thank you,” I croak out. “For the fridge stuff.”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” he says back. “So save your thanks.”

  OK, I throw up my hands and turn to leave because I know when I can’t win. I’m not getting any help here tonight.

  “I know why you came,” he calls after me.

  If I was smart I’d keep walking, because I can see it coming. But I don’t. I turn around and ask for it. “Why, Teej? If you’re so smart, go ahead and tell me.” I growl out the words past my damaged vocal cords and try my best to keep a straight face through the pain.

  “Drugs,” he says simply.

  And I’d like to deny it, but I can’t. Because it’s true. So I just nod. “I’m in a lot of pain and they didn’t give me a prescription when I checked out today, so—”

  “They didn’t give you a prescription because you’re an addict, Rock.”

  I raise my hand in a goodbye because it’s no use denying it. It’s a waste of breath, or in my case, the pain required to get the words out.

  He doesn’t call out to me this time, just lets me go. I can hear the whole place erupt in talking before the front door closes behind me. Let them talk. They don’t know shit. I don’t need his fucking bar anyway. We have a liquor store on the edge of town, so I get back in my truck, drive over there, and go inside. There’s one dude behind the counter strumming a decent Martin guitar. I give him a nod and head for the Scotch. They don’t have much.

  “You need something special?” the guy with the guitar asks me.

  I was hoping I wouldn’t have to talk to anyone, but I look past him and see the cheap good Scotch on a shelf behind his head, and then point to a bottle of Glenmorangie. He grabs it and puts it on the counter.

  “Looking to get drunk, my friend?”

  I shake my head. “Sleep,” I croak out. And that’s when he recognizes me.

  “Rock?” he asks, even though he knows it’s me. “Hey dude, how’s it going?” He says it with sympathy and a wave of gratitude flows through me. Mel didn’t ask. TJ didn’t ask. But this guy, someone I don’t even know, he asks.

  “Could be better,” I say as clearly as I can, because he deserves a few painful words.

  He pulls a marijuana container from his pocket and holds it out. “You need some pain relief too?” He obviously reads the tabloids, which is more than I can say for my ex-friends and family.

  “Thanks, but can’t smoke,” I say as I clutch my throat.

  “I wish I had some oxy, dude, that’d do it. But I don’t touch the shit.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I tell him and throw down a hundred-dollar bill. “Keep the change.” He puts the bottle into a paper bag and hands it over.

  “Hey,” he calls out just before I walk out the door. “My uncle is an ear, nose, throat doctor in Denver. But he has appointments at the medical offices in Granby one day a week. He’s real good, maybe he’ll give you a prescription? I’ll tell him you’ll stop by on Monday.”

  I give him a nod as the door closed behind me.

  With any luck I can drink myself into a stupor and sleep right through Monday.

  Chapter Four

  I met Kenner before I met all the rest of the guys in the band. We were hanging out on Sunset Boulevard passing out flyers for a show, just a few blocks down from a local club. We were promoting this piece-of-shit band called EC Twist—stupid fucking name—and lamenting the lack of good rock music in the current LA scene as we talked ourselves up and generally beat on our chests like alphas. But the second he called himself a percussionist I knew he and I were going to do something together. Maybe just bang the drums for a while or maybe just fuck off and get drunk, but we were going to do something.

  We tossed the flyers in the overflowing trash bin on the corner and walked the sixteen blocks back to his place, which was really nothing more than a three-hundred-square-foot room, with a decrepit hotplate acting as a kitchen, pretending to be an apartment. He had a hammock hanging from large rusty bolts on either wall as his only piece of real furniture, and all his clothes were stacked neatly in towers along the perimeter of a pile of sheet music, random magazines, and unopened mail.

  But in the middle of the room sat a sweet drum kit, and wedged into a space that practically blocked the entrance to the bathroom was an upright studio piano with a sleek ebony finish.

  “My prize possession,” Kenner said, waving to the piano. “Saved up for two years to have it professionally moved out here from my parents’ house back in Kentucky.”

  The minute I sat on the bench and he took the stool, it was over, man. That bitch had a tone I hadn’t heard since I left Colorado. They keys were perfectly weighted and responsive and my fingers picked out Missy’s death song as Kenner found a beat and joined in. We played like it was meant to be, like the heavens opened up, and the sadness poured out of me until I saw the look of success in Kenner’s eyes and had to stop and tell him we would never play that song again, but I had hundreds of songs just like it. They are locked inside my head, I told him. But they are there.

  And the rest, as they say, is history. None of my songs are anything like Missy’s death song, but Kenner didn’t care. They were rock and fucking roll, man. They were loud, and sick, and had beats that would raise the dead—as long as the dead weren’t named Melissa Vetti.

  I pull into my driveway and cut the engine, holding the paper-bagged bottle of Scotch by the neck, and get out. I look over at the Vetti house out of habit and that pain in my chest�
��that fucking pain I’ve been running from for five years—hits me so hard, I don’t even have a word to describe it.

  But then there’s a movement in the dark window, a flutter of the sheer white curtains in Melissa’s room, and I know she’s watching me.

  Elias and Ian came next. Both played guitar, Ian on lead and Elias on bass.

  We added Mo a few months after we started getting noticed in the club scene, after that first demo that landed us in meetings with assholes and scammers—the general term we used to describe the underground music scene of the up-and-coming. That’s when I decided I wanted to concentrate on singing and writing, and he took my place on the keys.

  I wrote a new song every week that first year we were playing. We released them all online first, and when the big-shot assholes came knocking we had at least sixteen guaranteed hits on our hands. We exploded onto the scene, opening up for bands with millions of fans, millions of hits online, and millions of dollars backing their shit up.

  The fans ate us up and we did the lather, rinse, repeat. One more year of weekly songs, not signing shit as far as contracts go, not making any promises to anyone other than ourselves, uploading direct until we had so many plays for the subscriptions service and a feature in all the stores at least once a month, the dollars came pouring in.

  We signed our first recording contract with smug faces and know-it-all attitudes, flicking the middle finger at the very men who wanted to take us global until they loved to hate us because they needed our rising star to make them shine.

  I walk up the snow-covered stone pavers leading to the house and realize I never locked the front door when I left. In fact, it’s standing open about an inch. I go inside, slamming the dark mahogany monstrosity so loud, I hope Mel hears it from her house down the hill.

  There’s melted snow on the heated floor tiles that look so much like aged antique barn wood, you can’t tell the difference unless you get down on your knees and touch the planks with your fingertips.