Discreet by Nicole French
1
Dust flew into the air, a dry, hot flurry. I turned at the familiar fork in the road and the car kicked up even more.
Hot. Hellfire and damnation, hot. My skin was “glowing” if you were polite, which at the moment I was not, so really I was sweating like a pig. I’d been driving for three days at a breakneck speed from New York with a busted taillight and a broken air conditioner, but none of that had been an issue until I’d crossed the Idaho border into the city limits of my hometown: sleepy Newman Lake. And of course—of course—the last five minutes would be the worst. Because that was just the kind of luck I was having. That was just the kind of life I was having.
I rolled down my window, eager to let in some of the breeze off the lake where I grew up. I squinted at the sun-dappled surface, reveled in the low rustle of the cattails and shoulder-high tules, inhaled the brackish scent of lily pads abloom with massive white flowers. I wasn’t sure I could call it home anymore, since I hadn’t set foot anywhere near the West Coast in about six years, when I’d last visited home and given my mother an ultimatum: get sober or get a new daughter. But at the tail end of my trek and four years that would ruin anyone’s resolve, Newman Lake was the only refuge I had. Funny how ultimatums lose their potency when you’re equal parts broke and broken.
My humble Passat hatchback was packed with every belonging I had to take or couldn’t sell before leaving the city. My life was in that car, in more ways than one.
Clothes.
Books.
Guitars.
They were all locked away in their cases and had been for a while. Three weeks, exactly, since I last played, which was the longest I’d ever gone without tickling the strings since I’d picked up my first guitar at age seven. The old Yamaha was a birthday present Mama had found at a yard sale, and it was still one of the best guitars I’d ever had, sound-wise. Playing it used to make me feel like I was flying, but now just the idea was like dead weight.
Sometimes I could still hear my name blaring over the loudspeakers of the club. Maggie Sharp. Once a promising singer/songwriter, or so said my manager, Calliope Jackson, when she would announce me before my gigs. To A&R reps. Really, anyone who would listen. Now I was just that girl.
The one who screwed up her chance.
The one who ran off stage.
The one who ruined her entire career, all her dreams…over a man.
Flower…
The word drifted through my mind, his voice slithering between memories like the snake he was. Theo del Conte. I could still hear the pet names he used, feel the tender touch that gradually turned wicked. I turned a corner, past the ramshackle Barrett house with its yard full of daisies. Fear knotted in my stomach, though I knew Theo couldn’t find me here. I punched the gas, urging the bald tires to squeal on the pavement, blocking out the low thrum of his voice. Three more turns and I’d be safe at last. In a place where I could lick my wounds in peace. And, of course, in shame.
The truth was, coming back to Newman Lake was the last thing I ever thought I’d be doing. Ten years ago, if you had asked me where I thought I’d be at twenty-six, I would have said making music with the greats and hopefully on tour. Nobody plans on failing. Coming home to take care of an alcoholic mother. Figuring out what the hell to do with your life when all your dreams are nothing but a faint vapor.
At the top of the last winding curve, I turned onto the familiar gravel road that led down to three parking spots terraced into the side of a steep hill. Those were new—must have been put in when Mama got the idea to start the bed and breakfast a few years back. That was during her Alan phase. Mama had a phase for every man she was with, and they were good until they weren’t anymore. That was usually when I would get a phone call begging me to come home for a visit. Phone calls that were laced with gin; messages I’d guiltily erase before I heard all of them. Before they turned from pleading to nasty.
Everything about the old place looked the same. The tall pine trees scaling down the rocky hillside to the water, the thatches of nettles and wildflowers blooming from the crevices of massive boulders. The chicken coop just above the main house, the two small outer cottages surveying the rest of the property, and a sleeping shack perched on the point below. It was too big, really, for a single woman in her early fifties to maintain, the remnants of her grandfather’s dream of opening a grand resort with his prospecting money. The resort had gone bust in a matter of years, but the dream remained, along with the estate, passed down through the next two generations until landing in my mother’s lap.
I parked my car next to Mama’s old Pathfinder and inhaled a deep breath of the warm lake air, enjoying the familiar scent of pine trees, freshly turned dirt, and smoke from a barbecue somewhere. The occasional hum of a boat punctuated the soothing chime of waves while the chickens clucked from their roosts. I’d moved out eight years ago, and it had been six since I’d last visited. Six years since I told my mother she had to sober up before I’d ever return.
Just one more way I turned out to be a liar.
I grabbed my purse and a couple of duffel bags, then locked the car before starting down to the house. Seventy-three stairs. I only knew because I used to run them daily, up and down ten times every morning except during the winter. Track and swim were easy to practice when I was in high school, harder to maintain when I left. You can pretty much run anywhere, though I found myself doing it less and less often the longer I lived in New York. I hadn’t swum anywhere in that concrete menagerie.
But home didn’t hit me—didn’t really hit me—until I wound around the small concrete path at the bottom of the stairs and saw the small yellow house where I grew up. The deck looked the same, with two weathered Adirondack chairs facing the lake that shimmered through the willow tree boughs. There was a small terra cotta chimney in one corner, a gas barbecue in the other, and a variety of planters, all bursting with bright blooms and green foliage. Emmylou Harris crooned from the speakers mounted above the sliding glass doors, open except for the screen. Mama used to wonder why I ever wanted to be a musician. She never realized it was her record collection that inspired me in the first place.
The scent of roasting chicken wafted through the screen door. Well, then. At six o’clock at night, she was sober enough to cook. I took it as a good sign.
“Mama?” I called, dropping my bags.
“Back here!”
I walked around to the back of the house, where I found my mother, Eloise Sharp, struggling to move a huge plastic rain barrel under a drainpipe.
“Ouch!” she yelped, as she heaved again unsuccessfully and broke a nail in the process. “Dag nabbit!” She spotted me just as she stuck the wounded digit into her mouth. Nevertheless, her face lit up, and her hands flew to her hips. “Well, who’s come to visit? Is that my daughter I see there?”
I nodded, unaccountably flushed. “Hi, Mama.”
This was Ellie Sharp’s magic. She always had the power to make everyone she talked to feel like the center of the universe. Even if you hadn’t seen her in six years. Even if the last time she saw you, she was crying in a heap on the ground while you walked away, nursing a slapped cheek.
“You just wait there, baby,” she said before she replaced her glove, squatted back down, and shoved her whole body against the barrel. “Mama’s gotta finish her chore, and then I’m gonna give you the biggest hug and kiss you’ve ever seen.”
With a great grunt, she pushed again. The rain barrel stayed put.
“Mama, why don’t I help you with that?” I asked, starting toward her.
She waved a hand at me. “I can do it, Maggie Mae. Just give us a second.” She took a deep breath and stared down at the barrel with immense hatred. “I’ll admit, this is the kind of thing that makes me wish I still had a man around. Say what you want about Alan, but he did help me take care of the place, the goddamn bastard.”
I blinked. That was new. My whole life Mama called herself a church-going woman. Despite her more unsavory habits, she always said things like “heck” and “dag nabbit,” but now apparently had a mouth like a sailor.
As if the mild profanity inspired her, Mama gave one last almighty push and managed to reposition the barrel correctly under the spout. She swiped a handkerchief across her forehead under the fringe of carefully dyed brown bangs. The bones of her wrist pressed knobby through the skin. We were both thinner than we should have been.
With a sigh of relief, she weaved her way back to the deck.
“Let me look at you, baby girl,” she said as she shucked her gloves onto a bench and turned to face me.
She was a tall woman, with thin legs her best friend, Barb, always said looked like a stork’s. Her worn gardening pants that looked like they were probably Alan’s or some other lover’s hung loose on her hips. She reached out to take my hands, holding my arms open like a bird’s wingspan. Her familiar touch, which I hadn’t felt in so long, was electric.
“You’re too thin, Margaret,” she noted as she perused my spare frame. “I think you need a cookie. Or four.”
I pulled my arms back and held them around my ribs. I was several inches shorter than her, but we had the same delicate bone structure. She used to say I must have gotten my insides from her and my outsides—the skin that was tanner than not, the deep brown eyes, the unruly dark hair—from my father. Hard to say, considering I had no idea who the man actually was. But yeah, a few pounds gained or lost showed more on me than it did on her.
“You’re one to talk,” I retorted. “You must have lost, what, twenty pounds? Thirty since…everything?”
“And we weren’t exactly big women before, were we?” she agreed with a sad nod as she sat down in one of the chairs. “Well, that’s what having dirty, lying, good-for-nothing shitbags around does to you, don’t it? Sucks the life right out of you.”
I sank into the chair beside her. I didn’t know the whole story about what had happened with Alan—one never really did with Ellie Sharp. I’d never met the man, only heard the stories at first of how he’d wooed her, taken her to expensive dinners and on expensive trips, and slowly convinced her to share just about everything she had with him before he’d up and left. Everything but the house. I didn’t know if Alan was as bad a guy as Mama made him out to be. Maybe he just got tired of living with a drunk. Or maybe he was something worse.
I closed my eyes, breathing in the warm, familiar air of the lake. Mama wasn’t wrong. I did feel like the life had been sucked out of me. I felt like a shell of myself, and had for years now.
Mama looked at me sadly. She didn’t know the whole story that had happened with Theo, but she knew enough. Had heard my choked sobs over the phone. Had shared a few hushed phone calls with Calliope.
“I hate that you know what this feels like, but I’m glad you’re here.” She reached out and patted my hand. “You’re safe now, honey. We both are. Just have to keep tellin' ourselves that until we can believe it.”
Suddenly, I felt exhausted. The fatigue of the long car ride, the frantic goodbye to the friends who shoved wads of ones and fives in my pocket to help me get here, the fear at every gas station and rest stop that Theo would show up with some new threat, even if he was still in jail for what he did. But really, it was the loss that weighed me down the most. The loss, the complete and utter loss, of everything I had built since striking out on my own. The music—my music—was gone.
All of it came crashing down at once. A lone tear dripped down my cheek, quickly followed by more. It had been so, so long since I truly felt safe.
“That showcase-thing was just a few weeks ago, wasn’t it?” Mama asked, still gripping my hand.
I sniffed back a few tears, recovering quickly. We’d never been huggers, Mama and I. Talk it out, she’d always say. Get it out, and let it go.
“Yeah,” I sniffled. “It was.”
“And he showed up, did he? That’s what finally sent you home?”
I shook my head. “N-no. I just thought he did.”
She already knew the story. I’d told it to her on Saturday when Calliope, my manager, and I were packing everything I owned. Four years prior, I’d met Theodore del Conte, son of Max del Conte, CEO of Del Conte Entertainment, which owned one of the biggest independent labels in the world. We met at one of my shows—my biggest show to date, actually, where I’d had the luck to sub as an opening act for a major artist. Theo had been there with his father and began tracking me. We met a few months later, and he quickly consumed my life. He accompanied me on the short tour, then whisked me back to New York. In less than two months, I went from being just another starving artist in the city to being Theo del Conte’s girl, from sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three other women to living in his loft in Soho. I would have done anything for him. And he knew it.
Things were good for a while. But then they turned bad quickly and lasted much longer. It had started with a shove here, a grab there, and then progressed to much, much more. So much that when I did finally manage my escape, I had enough documented evidence to press charges. It took me close to a year in court and a completely depleted savings account, but I won. Theo was behind bars. But that didn’t stop me from seeing him everywhere I went.
The night of the showcase was supposed to be my grand reentry back into the scene. I still had some notoriety as Theo’s ex-girl. People came to see me the same way they would come to see a car wreck, but Calliope said it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that they were there. Theo was not. There was no one left to threaten me. Ruin me.
Until, of course, I did that myself.
“Just as I was about to start, I saw him,” I said to Mama. “I was already a mess. I fell on my way to the club—tripped on the sidewalk. Nerves. My wrist was already hurting, and it reminded me of one of those times when he—you know. And then, Mama, I know he’s in jail. I know he’s locked up. But I swear, I saw his face, and, Mama…God…y-you know?”
I focused on breathing through the stutter that had emerged over the last four years. I couldn’t cry. There was no crying in this house. When I was little that was a sure way to get a smack on the ear. So I sucked in air and hissed it out. Mama just nodded and murmured her agreement. She knew. Of course she knew.
“I—I just froze,” I whispered. “My hand slipped. I screwed up. The biggest night of my career, and I messed it up because I was scared. And now…it’s over.”
“Maggie, come now,” Mama put in. “It was one show. I’m sure with time you could get somethin’ else together. Call the men back, have them come watch you again.”
“No, Mama,” I replied lamely. “You don’t get another chance like that.”
It was supposed to be a night about celebrating the fact that I had moved on from the man who had torn me down, bit by bit, for years. But instead, I’d had to watch all of my dreams tumble down around me too.
Mama tapped a fingernail on the wood armrest. “Hmmm. Well, we’ll see.”
I gave her a grim smile, and she tilted her head to the side, as if checking me over for something she’d missed.
“People come around,” she said kindly. “You did.”
I didn’t want to tell her that I wouldn’t have come unless I’d had no other choice. That I had wanted to keep my promise—hold her to sobriety or stay out of her life. But principles are luxuries for people with money, like valet parking or fancy French cheese. I didn’t have time for them anymore. I just needed to be home.
“Oh, honey, come on. Let’s get you settled. You look like you need a nice long sleep, and then you’ll want to see the lake. Barb and Jimmy are coming with the boat for a cocktail cruise, and we’ll have just the thing to brighten you up.”
I leaned my head back in the chair and stared up at the sky. Mama chattered on, but all I could think about was that she was doing the same thing she always did: solving her problems with friends. Parties. Drink. But instead of fighting it, trying to talk her out of it like I used to, I was far too tired to care.
