Page 37 of The Invisible Roommate

By the time he started attentively listening again, the album was nearly over. The final song cued up, and its differences took Emory by surprise. A simple, timeless-sounding piano line was all that rivered out of the speaker. After so much upbeat pop, it was a balm to his ears and yet a shock to his senses.

“They say seeing is believing, but I still swear that you’re unreal,” a younger, higher-voiced Gerard sang sweetly and without ornamentation. “I rub my eyes and count to ten, can’t shake the way I feel.”

Emory leaned over. The track was titled “See You Sometime.”

“When we turned in the album,” present-day Gerard said, shaking Emory out of his unexpected trance, “the label kept telling us, ‘You can’t end on a ballad. It’s a nice song, but you just can’t do it.’ They kept trying to get us to replace it with some half-baked party track we wrote for shits and giggles, but I knew there was something honest about this one that would resonate with people. If they listened to the album in order—which I know a lot of people don’t do these days, what with streaming—this is how I wanted to leave them. I wanted them to feel how I felt when I was writing this, hopeful that there was somebody out there for me and that someday our paths would cross at the exact right time. I ended up being right.”

“That you’d meet somebody?” Emory asked.

“No,” Gerard said darkly before glancing away. “About the song. This is the fan favorite, the one they always request when we do VIP sound checks.”

As the final turns of the melody caressed Emory with pleasure, his limbic system powered down from overdrive. By the final resonant chord of the song, he was left nearly breathless.

He understood why this was the fan-favorite song, and why those women in college put up posters of We the Wells on their walls, and why listening to music was such a ubiquitous human behavior. Because as soon as Gerard disappeared into the bathroom to shower before bed, Emory stole his wired earbuds, popped them into the iPod, and replayed “See You Sometime.”

When the key change in the bridge hit again, Emory’s invisible skin was overrun with chilly goose bumps of a foreign kind. An experience he could only describe as decadent frisson.

19Gerard

At his first choir practice, Gerard was do-re-mi-fa-so nervous.

Under the watchful gaze of the Jesus statue up on the cross and Regina behind the organ leading vocal warm-ups, Gerard suffered flop sweat like the imposter he was. He pretended to be a practicing Christian and pretended to be James. Oh, and he harbored an invisible fugitive in his rented apartment. He was not sure which of the Ten Commandments that last one violated, but maybe all of them? His hands holding the hymnal shook.

Gerard rounded the choir out to an even twenty singers. Before Gerard arrived, there were six sopranos, eight altos, two tenors, and three basses. The average age was sixty-one, and the average hair color was graying or nonexistent. Gerard stuck out like a sore thumb, which worried him at first, but then he concluded they were less likely to recognize him, given their age and seeming disinterest in secular music.

Iping Island was behind when it came to pop culture. Every year after graduation, eighteen-year-olds left for college or to enlist in the service, and few returned, dwindling the population and mostly cutting them off from new media, except in the summer when tourists came to town talking of superhero movies and must-watch reality TV.

While the insular island was perfect for him to hide on, he worried his voice could ring a few bells for people—what if someone’s teenager had We the Wells on their favorite playlist?—but then he remembered the island didn’t even have its own radio station, so he was probably safe.

The following Sunday’s selections were a mixture of hymns still vivid in his memory from childhood and others that sounded vaguely familiar. As they worked through some trickier harmonies in “To Do Your Will,” Gerard flashed back to Mr. Bud coaching his old church’s choir through a different arrangement of the same hymn. At the time, he’d idolized Mr. Bud as a talented musician and leader in their parish, but it occurred to him then that perhaps Mr. Bud was gay and Gerard had been seeing not only a hero in the man, but also a blueprint for how to survive as a marginalized person in the church. Especially during a time when marriage equality was lambasted by the pope.

After the hymns, they switched to service music—various responses sung in the middle of mass—before Regina announced that in a little over two weeks, they would begin rehearsing choral music for the Christmas season, though by that time she hoped to recruit a few more singers into the fold for a more vigorous sound.

Gerard couldn’t think that far ahead, because he loved the fall and didn’t want to skip over his favorite season. He also didn’t know how long he’d go undetected on Iping. No sense getting excited about “Away in a Manger” when he might be sweating it out in a recording studio in Los Angeles by Thanksgiving.

“For today, let us once again give a warm welcome to James,” Regina said, before turning her attention to him. “I can already tell you’re going to be a big help to our men in finding the right notes.” An elderly Black man to Gerard’s right gave a snort. “Before we move on to coffee and doughnuts, Angie will lead us in our closing worship.”

Angie was Kellen’s wife. She had chestnut hair, high cheekbones, a new-mother glow, and not a lick of an Iping accent.

Angie read aloud a short passage from Isaiah 49 about how a mother cannot forget her child and therefore God cannot forget His disciples, which Angie then meditated on, talking about how much she loved rehearsals and the choir, but as a mom of a two-month-old, every second she was not singing for Him her mind was on the lowercase-him being watched by his dad back home. Several of the women around Gerard put their hands over their hearts, let out amens of agreement.

Tears speckled the edges of Angie’s doe-like eyes as she finished speaking of Kellen Jr., and as they all moved into the vestibule for refreshments, Gerard wondered about his own mom back home. Yes, he was a grown man who was capable of fending for himself, but had his disappearance upset her? After two weeks of absence, had she run herself ragged putting out missing person calls for him?

Surely their publicist would’ve stamped that idea out. Think of the bad press! If his brothers got photographed leaving a New York City recording studio without him, they probably would have said he was under the weather or resting at a spa after a long, grueling tour.

Instead, he was shacking up with an invisible scientist on a remote island.

Still, he pictured his mom somewhere in his parents’ sprawling New Jersey home, sobbing into a WE THE WELLS T-shirt, and for the first time since arriving, he regretted being so hasty in his escape. He wished he could send her a message to let her know that he was okay and that she was not to blame for his disappearance, but the risk of his discovery via postmark was too high.

“Coffee?” Regina asked, waving an aromatic cup under Gerard’s nose. The warmth of the paper cup he accepted from her grounded him. “You are a natural. What’s your musical background?”

“Just a hobbyist,” Gerard said, piling on a new lie.

“Get out,” said a burly man with tan skin, wizened lines crisscrossing his face like tributaries of his forehead.

“Ignore Joe,” said Regina. Surely this couldn’t be the same Joe who manned the Susanna, the crabbing boat Emory had worked on. He’d stood next to the guy the whole rehearsal, and while he wouldn’t call him a good singer, he was definitely the most enthusiastic of the basses. “He is a more recent addition to our choir, and we’re still working on finding pitch.”

“You sound like your pipes are made of gold,” said the Black tenor whose name he learned was Jericho.