I had to tell him. And tell him—and mean it—that I wanted him and Oona to be happy. I didn’t get marriage, exactly, had never really seen it up close. Maybe I hadn’t been paying enough attention.
I guess I understoodfamily, though. Family made itself out of whatever materials it found. Out of scraps, if necessary. Out of strays.
But I’d never said the words. And why? Because it cost me too much? Because if I poured myself out, I’d be somehow depleted? I didn’t feel wrung out when I thought about what Alex meant to me. I felt full, brimming. I had it to give. There was more to me.
Surely, there had to be more.
I hadn’t meant to put it all off for some moment in the future, to keep all my songs to myself. I had meant to be something here, now. Someone.
Someone drinking hot chocolate by the fire, eating burgers with the band. Listening to the thump of boot heels against the floor of McPhee’s, singing songs I loved and songs I’d written. I wanted all that. Maybe I did want Alex to keep McPhee’s open, because I wanted song circles on Sunday morning and writing sessions in the corner booth, my community crowded around the tables shoved together, pint glasses filled, raised, and emptied as we swapped stories and songs late into the night. Live, laugh, love, and see this dumb life to its natural end.
Then someday far, far in the future, if I lived it whole and full, I’d be willing to close my eyes and call this world quits, an old lady in peacock blue and sequins. Give me the funeral of a Viking, my candlelighting the north branch channel of the Chicago River as a chorus of friends and grandchildren wailed Patsy Cline from the shore, the sweetest damn thing you ever heard.
That’s how you went out. Fighting. Not bricked up in this tomb. Not waiting for someone to aim a gun down a pit. Not waiting to hear which of my friends made it out, and which of them…
Notstuck.
Not trapped, helpless, rabbit pulse rising.
The redhead blazed at me from the wall.Shehadn’t raised me to give up without a brawl.
I turned away from the light, peering back into the dark of the speakeasy, but there was nothing to drag over. Just a broken chair that wouldn’t hold me.
My nerves jangled as I struck off back the way I’d come, scraping along old floors and knocking into debris all the way to the slot of light from the storeroom bathroom, high, high above. Would Quin still be there? What if—
I could feel my breath getting short and I imagined Jim and Ned, the door, Quin, the guns—
My heart gave a hard thump at what I might have heard, withthreeguns in play.
Had Quin taken charge? Or had he bled out in the storeroom, no help to anyone?
I spun in place, my boot brushing up against something that scraped away with a metallic rasp.
The walls were closer, the air dustier.
I couldn’t catch my—
A pinpoint of memory: the thin-aired stratosphere of the scuttle space. I’d been far out on a limb just like this, lungs collapsing, the walls pressing in.
How? How had I come back from that?
I could doallmy animal noises. I dug for Marisa’s voice in the scuttle space, for—
Sunshine. For the familiar tune to sing me home.
I focused there. On my breath, in. On my breath, out, pushing away thoughts as they occurred, Alex, Sicily, the bright blood at Quin’s cuff, until I had recaptured my runaway breath and could fill my chest with a tuneless hum.
When I came back to myself, I was sitting on the cold bottom step under the opening we’d climbed through, the wood cold through my leggings. I could feel my sore throat, smell mold, taste dust in the air. I was thirsty.
I wiped at my eyes with the back of my wrist and brought in a big, shaky breath. Here, now.
Seemed like something else ran in the family, didn’t it?
Next to my boot lay the towel bar Quin had dropped as a sounding rod from the opening. I picked it up and cradled it in the crook of my arm, the scepter of a beauty queen. A weapon, if necessary. It wassomething. What else did I have?
I stood up. The stairs we’d used to climb out of the opening ran against the wall, up into shadow. Stairs towhere? Did it make sense to build a staircase that didn’t go anywhere? Had Pascal tried?
I scrambled up the steps, heels on wood, going quickly, starting to hope—
