The flared sweep of staircase was work but he held her and waited while she caught her breath and then continued down. He imagined having an elevator installed or one of those gliding bannister chairs. Then he caught himself. What the hell was he thinking?
Through the cavernous living room and the long main dining room, so little used in recent years. Through the french doors and onto the patio. The landscaped courtyard beyond. The whole place suddenly obscenely large.
He sat Jem in a white adirondack patio chair and set her IV beside her and made sure she was comfortable and then went to the kitchen to get her a bottle of room temperature water. The huge spotless space, all the stainless steel. Like some underutilized restaurant.
Going out again he stopped. Jemma ghostly in the sunlight on the wooden chair, the IV pole beside her. The simple heartbreak wrongness of it. Look at her, you son of a bitch.
He gave her the water and dragged another chair beside her and sat on the edge of it and watched her drink most of the water in one go. He took the bottle back and asked her if she wanted more.
“I’m good right now.”
“You look a little better today.”
“I feel a little better today. You don’t know where the mountaintop is till you’re past it.”
“All downhill from there.”
“That would be nice.”
“You comfortable?”
“Considering, yeah.”
“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln.”
She smiled a little. The new sharp contours of her face, the hard prominence of veins on her arms and on the backs of her hands. The daylight merciless.
“It’s nice out here, isn’t it?”
“It is. I’m not sure the sun’s good for you.”
“It won’t kill me.”
“Aren’t you the comedian.”
“I’m here all week. I’d like that water now I think.”
He picked up the bottle. “Sure.”
“Bring your guitar back too.”
“You got it.” A ghost bullet in the heart, but he didn’t hesitate. He went inside again and got the Goya from the study and got a pair of sunglasses from a drawer and grabbed another bottled water from the kitchen. Back outside he waited while she gulped down most of her water again and then set her chairback more upright and put the sunglasses on her face. “Ooh look, I’m a movie star. Alfonse, strike up a fandango.”
He set the Goya on his lap and started up a fandanguillo. She had an awful coughing fit and he stopped and then realized she was laughing.
“Aren’t you the comedian,” she said.
“I’m here all week.”
“Play something.”
Niko looked at the guitar. For the first time in living memory it felt like a block of wood on his lap. What notes and chords for such a time as this? What meter counts the winding down? He looked up from the guitar and felt a sudden shock of recognition. They had been in almost exactly these positions long ago. This moment nearly reenactment. He shut his eyes and remembered and his hands moved on the wooden body, remembering as welclass="underline"
IN THE SILENCE after he cut the outboard they listened to the water gurgle against the hull. In the fading early morning gray the surface of Lake Arrowhead was haunted by a mist. They drifted, they bobbed, they breathed the rarefied air.
Niko closed his eyes and felt himself cradled, endlessly rocking. Floating on a lake high in the mountains. A wonder to a flatland Florida boy.
Between them Niko’s Martin lay within its case. On the deck a thermos rolled and rolled.
He opened his eyes.
She faced him with her Navajo blanket across her knees, its thunderbird wings spread toward him. She reached for the thermos and poured fresh Kona. “You look good.”
He took the offered cup. Vapor rose to join the mist. “I feel good.” He lifted and drank and felt the coffee lighting up his veins.
“So. New band. New album. New single. National tour. No drugs. And you look ten years younger. What’s your secret?”
Niko handed back the thermos cup. “I signed a deal with the devil.”
“You signed a deal with Atlantic, anyway.” She blew to cool the coffee.
“Same thing.”
Water gurgled on the hull.
They opened a brown paper sack and ate thick bearclaws and washed them down with strong fresh coffee. They floated without speech or navigation as they ate and drank and watched the sun burn off the mist.
“So,” he finally said, “here we are.”
Jem looked away from the rumpled shoreline drawing slowly past. She seemed a little disbelieving she was here, like someone recovering her memory in the midst of a vacation. “Here we are. I swore I wouldn’t.”
“I know.”
She watched him and he looked steadily back. “But you really do seem changed. Since—” She gestured vaguely.
“You can say it. Since the accident.”
She nodded but said nothing. Niko took her napkin and put it with his in the paper sack that had held the bearclaws and folded the sack then crumpled it.
They floated.
“I wish I could’ve met your brother.”
Now Niko made his own vague gesture and looked out at the fractured mirror of the lake. “Yeah.”
“It saved you, didn’t it?”
“I guess it did. That’s a hell of a price for going clean.” Her eyes teared as she nodded. “I’m so sorry.”
He gave a little helpless shrug.
A fish chopped water near the boat and they both jumped. Jemma smiled a little and glanced at the case between them and they both knew it was time. He unlatched it and pulled out the Martin and tuned it and thought how he could play before a screaming thousand without a second thought yet here with Jemma astonishingly returned to his life and all between them fragile and uncertain he felt his palms grow damp.
Niko played.
Jemma watched him close his eyes and rock with their boat’s rocking. She listened to his music, the morning birds, the water lapping on the hull. She thought of how he loved to watch her sleep.
The final notes had disappeared across the morning before he opened his eyes to find her watching him. He lowered the guitar. “Long time since I had to audition.”
Jemma took a deep breath. “I think you got the gig.”
They should have met each other in the middle of their little boat but they did not. They swayed and turned upon the water. They were laughing by the time he brought the boat back to the rental dock. It looked unfamiliar and Niko asked the old guy watching them if they were at the wrong dock. “Hell, you’re at the wrong shore,” the old man said, and pointed them back across the lake. They laughed harder and gunned the engine and fractured the lake’s glassy surface heading back as the sun burned off the last of the mist.
It was the happiest day of Niko’s life.
HE OPENED HIS eyes as if awaking from a dream but the playing continued and the dream went on. Slowly rocking back and forth. Jemma in the sunlight in her sunglasses with the IV pole beside her. Vamping along with him, slow blue notes robbed of the authority that had been their trademark. But the feeling was there. Their faint duet a fragile elegy on this beautiful California day. A motionless dance.
He struck a final open chord and set the guitar aside. She nodded and said, “I think I’m ready.”
Back upstairs he helped her to the bathroom and then removed her slippers and tucked her in and reattached the IVAC monitor and turned it on. The nurse had taught him how. Complicit in their understanding. He got her yet another bottled water and gave her her meds and asked if she wanted anything else. She shook her head and he hugged her and got up and turned down the lights. Just as he was leaving he heard her say, “Did I get the gig?”
“You’ve always had the gig,” he said, and closed the door on their last good day together.