Chapter 9: The Wrong Door

“Come on,” Hollis said. “You’ve been sitting there an hour making the whole room sad.”

“I’ve been sitting here an hour being sad,” Quin said. “It’s not the same thing. I’d explain it to you, but you’d have to be listening.”

“Get up.”

Outside, the sky had dropped down onto the building. The parking lot already smelled like rain that was still somewhere else, and the rain was coming anyway.

Hollis shook his keys out of his pocket and looked up at it.

“So,” he said. “The kid inside.”

“What kid.”

“The one with the bows. The one you couldn’t stop looking at.”

“I was looking at the target.”

“There’s no target on him.”

Quin pulled his mask up over his mouth and nose, slow about it, like a man who didn’t want to be seen doing it.

“He didn’t look at you once,” Hollis said. “Four hours. He was down at the far end of the range and you were on that couch and he never turned his head.”

“Good.”

“You looked at him the whole time.”

“Maybe he’s got a thing for archery,” Quin said. “Maybe he’s got a thing for this face. People have done a lot for less.”

Hollis unlocked the car.

“One drink,” Quin said.

“You said that last time.”

“One drink, and then I go home, and then I sleep like a normal human being, and tomorrow I’m somebody completely different.”

“You’re not.”

“Get in the car, Hollis.”

Inside, the last group of the night was finishing up — a family with three kids fighting over a VR headset while the woman at the counter explained, for the second time, how many minutes were left on it.

Eli went through the staff door and changed.

“You want to get out of here before it hits,” one of the range guys said, coming in with his bag already over his shoulder. “They’re saying all week.”

“Bike.”

“Yeah. I wouldn’t.”

He had his shirt half over his head when the window went white.

One second of daylight at six o’clock in the evening, and in that second he was somewhere else.

A hallway with the heat turned up too high. Radiators knocking. A gray wet stain spreading by the doors where everybody’s boots came in, shaped like nothing at all. A boy leaning against the lockers with his head tipped back and his eyes shut, one earbud in, and every single thing he did, he did with his left hand — flipping a pick, opening a bottle, pushing his hair out of his face — the way you do a thing you’ve done so many times you don’t know you’re doing it.

The white let go.

He was in the locker room with his shirt in his hands.

And a left hand went up to the tab of a can — the same hand, the same route, every time for six years — and stopped.

It was one can of soda. That was all of it. One can, opened the wrong way, against six years of watching the same hand do the same thing without ever thinking about it.

Eli had one rule, and he had never said it out loud. Things were supposed to stay the way they were. When they didn’t line up, it meant something had gone wrong.

Left hand, always. Both hands, today.

He could set those two things down next to each other. He just didn’t want to.

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was only how a person opened a can. People changed, and he had spent half his life reading a pattern into something that didn’t have one.

His phone buzzed twice against his leg.

[Theo: just got out of class. heading to the studio.]

[Theo: it’s already pouring out here. be careful.]

He put the cap on and picked up the bass.

He hated changing a plan. He hated it more than the rain and more than the cold and more than most things.

He changed it.

The bar was warm and loud and Hollis knew the bartender, which meant nobody asked Quin anything. He had one drink and then a second one that didn’t count. Hollis ordered food neither of them ate. They were out of there by eleven.

The rain had settled in for the night, flat and hard, no wind in it.

Quin got in the back and pulled the blanket off the seat and put it over himself, which was a thing he’d done since he was ten years old in the back of Hollis’s mother’s car, and Hollis let him have it.

Twenty-three minutes. He knew the number, because he’d made the drive a hundred times: thirty-one in traffic, nineteen if you hit the lights.

Most people dream. Quin didn’t. Twice a year, maybe, and always something stupid — a staircase, a bicycle, a test he hadn’t studied for.

In twenty-three minutes, he dreamed four times.

A hallway with the heat up. A parking lot in February with two inches of slush in the bed of somebody’s truck. The music room at seven in the morning, empty, before anyone else got there. The back of a permission slip with a girl’s handwriting on it, and he could not have told you her name now.

Not one of the four had a stage in it.

He sat up. The cold got to him all at once and he pulled the blanket to his chin and felt like an idiot. He was twenty-two, and he had no business being nostalgic.

“You were talking,” Hollis said, watching him in the mirror.

“Was I.”

“Mm.” Hollis’s eyes went to his throat — four small letters, right over the Adam’s apple — and back to the road. “Dreaming about your ghost again?”

“Your ghost.”

“Look at you.” Hollis changed lanes. “Six years I’ve watched you do this. Back then you were walking around like somebody’d put a hex on you. So what, it’s over now? You don’t like him anymore? That’s the news?”

He’d had years now to take it apart.

It had never been a pair of eyes. He’d gotten that far. He had fallen for the person those eyes were pointed at — the top of the best night of his life, a crowd losing its mind, one face in it looking at him like he was something. Six years in love with a look.

Nobody was going to look at what was left like that.

Whoever that had been, they were probably doing what everybody did. Getting tired of him. The internet had. The band had. Love was cheap, and it got spent, and whatever was still standing when it burned out, he had never once let himself find out what that was called.

The truth was that he didn’t want to know.

Hollis had the face on that he got right before he said something true. He drove a whole block with it on and let it go.

“Stop looking like a dog somebody left on the road,” he said. “Where’s your lionheart?”

Quin hated when he did this.

Lionheart was a song he’d written at sixteen, in a bedroom with the door shut, on a guitar he hadn’t paid for yet. It ended up on the first Rough Corner record, which meant it was out there now, which meant people had opinions about it.

He was not going to talk about it in a car.

He gave Hollis the finger and said, “Woof.”

“Take the umbrella.”

Quin got out without it.

The rain came down even and hard, the kind that soaks you in the time it takes to cross a street, and he crossed the street.

The building had five floors and no elevator. He climbed all of them.

On five he stopped at his own door and stood there in the dark and put the key at the lock.

It didn’t go in.

He tried again. It didn’t go in again. It didn’t go in the third time either, and he knew this lock — he’d put this key in this lock at three in the morning and at six in the morning, sick, and drunk, and once with his hands shaking so hard it took him four tries, and it had always gone in.

He kicked the door.

Bang. The hallway light came on over his head, on one of those motion sensors the super had put in so nobody had to leave the switch on all night.

5C.

White numbers on a steel plate, four screws, right at eye level.

He lived in 5D.

“Unbelievable,” he said, to nobody.

He turned around. Four steps, that was all it was, and on the third one something caught him across the shin and he went down onto one knee with his hand out on something that was not the floor.

A case. Hard-sided, long, cold from the hallway, standing up against the wall beside the door of 5D — and he knew that shape before he knew anything else. Nobody hauled a case that size around for anything but a guitar or a bass.

And in front of the door of 5D, sitting on the floor with his back against the frame and his legs out in front of him, a hat down over his face, wet through to the bone, there was a person.

For a second Quin stayed exactly where he was, on one knee in the hallway.

He thought, without much interest, that this was the fifth dream, and that at least this one had a stage in it.

Then the shape came up off the floor. Slow, unfolding — a shoulder, then the rest of him, standing with one hand down on the case — and the light over Quin’s head went out on top of them, because it had been on a timer since the day they installed it.

Dark.

He couldn’t see the face.

He knew.

“Okay,” Quin said, and heard how soft it came out. “Okay. This again.”

He laughed.

“Is this a hobby? Is there a name for this? Is there a club?”

He got the key into his own lock on the first try. Of course he did.

“Let it go,” he said, like he was asking a favor of somebody he knew. “There’s ten million people in this city who can play the guitar. More than that who can sing. It doesn’t have to be me. It really, seriously doesn’t have to be me.”

“I only want you.”

There was a whole book of things to say to that, and Quin didn’t say any of them. He laughed once — one breath of it, out through his nose, like something had gone down wrong — and turned the handle.

He got it open and started to swing it shut.

The door stopped.

Not the frame. Not the latch. Weight — weight on the other side, coming back at him, and for half a second he was completely sober.

Steel door. Get a hand in a steel door, the hand comes back broken.

Something jumped in his temple.

He let go of the handle, got both hands flat on the edge of the door, and pulled it the other way. All the way open.

Eli’s hand was still on the frame.

“You’re out of your mind.”

He got the wrist. He got his whole hand around it and brought it up between them, hard.

“That’s your hand. That’s your fucking playing hand.”

Eli didn’t pull it back.

He let Quin hold the wrist. He picked the case up off the floor with the other hand, and he walked into the apartment — not around Quin, straight through the space where he was standing — and shut the door behind him.

Rain hammered the window.

Inside, the two of them stood in the dark and breathed, and that was the loudest thing in the room.

There was light in here, coming up off the street through the wet glass, enough to see by. Eli looked down at the hand holding his wrist.

There was ink on it. There hadn’t been, six years ago. It came up from the wrist and crossed the back of the hand, splitting at the knuckles and running out along the index finger and out along the little finger: a magnolia tree, branches laid down over the tendons, the flowers done small, done careful.

He said the name he had not said out loud in six years.

Not the short one — the short one had never been his. The whole of it, first and last, the name a class roster had for him, back in that hallway with the radiators knocking.

“Quincy Cornell.”

Quin didn’t move.

“When did you hurt your hand?”

The rain kept coming down on the other side of the glass. Neither of them stepped back.