At the arch, I spotted words. A sheet of paper pegged to the wall, its corners rolled with age. It had women with dour faces looking out, scolding eyebrows. The caption read:Lips that touch alcohol shall never touch ours.
I couldn’t help it. I laughed.
A temperance poster in a bar. Somebody had had a sense of humor. Even with the cracked floors, inch-thick dust, and peeling paint, this place was a kick. A time capsule. A gold mine.
The laugh caught in my throat.
I’d caught sight of a face in the dark.
She gazed out from the back wall, chin held high and eyes blazing. I stepped closer.
Red, flowing hair, forthright expression, take it or leave it. She was defiant but also tweaked to please an audience: rosy cheeks, full lips. Lips that surely tasted whatever they wanted.
Jolene d’Arc.
All these years I’d been assigning these features to Marisa, they’d belonged to a blowsy beer girl on a speakeasy wall. How had I conflated this vintage cupcake with mymother?
I must have known this place at some point. Played here. Played… in some dark corner of this pub I loved so much? The darkness pressed at my bare skin as time and memory shifted to include Marisa’s version of my childhood injury.
When I got out of here, when I could ask Alex—
I turned my face to the opening in the ceiling, the daylight painfully bright, a spotlight. I stood looking up through the patch of ruined floor. I was suddenly a solo act, no one left to boost me or pull me up.
No one should have been. This was the plan. Pascal would run for help, and Oona would make sure everyone got up and away.
Marisa would get the hell away from this place and never look back. She had what she wanted: her freedom, the chance at safety for her family. Her real family. And Sicily had whatshe’dcome for.
The band—they couldn’t hold it against me if they hadn’t taken the first opportunity to get out of here, forever. Every woman for herself, and who would blame them?
In the light from above, I could see the broad smear of Quin’s blood across my wrist, my red fingers, and remembered, keenly, how much blood, how bright.
I crouched down on my boot heels, dizzy suddenly. When I closed my eyes, I saw the gray of Joey’s flesh on the ice.
This moving sidewalk, propelling me forward. But into what?
55
I caught sight of the blazing eyes of the redheaded beer girl on the wall and turned my back to her.
I was letting her down, just as I had let down everyone else. Alex, Oona. Sicily. Even Marisa, somehow.
Myself. There was a person out there ahead of me, someone I was supposed to become. I had things I still wanted up there in the light. All those songs I wanted to write. All the stages I hoped to play. Maybe one of those golden gramophone statuettes with my name on it on a mantel someday, gold records framed on the walls.
Instead, I was here, stuck in a hole, crying a little bit, feeling sorry for myself.
But, except for the part about being in a literal hole, hadn’t that been true for a while now? A work in progress, except I hadn’t made any.
Dahlia McPhee,lookat yourself.
I sat back in the dust and sniffled into the sleeve of my sweater. Alex’s sweater.
I couldn’t pretend I didn’t know what some people possessed that kept their hope burning bright. Not gold records, not acclaim. Even the songs they wrote were just placeholders for the real stuff. And I had it,too. I just hadn’t ever found the right words. But did it matter which words you used?
Sing anyway. I guess I got what Sachin had meant now.
I loved Alex. He was my home. Not the bar, not the stage. Not the building. He could sell it if he wanted. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered, except—
I had meant to tell him all this time. Not just sweep the floors like it was some secret code. Even though, yeah, he spoke the code. He’dtaughtme the code. I’d meant to say theactual words. I loved him.
