Darcy Minzer didn’t care much for labels; she just considered herself open-minded, into the moment—whatever that may bring. Like last night, at the club. Females aren’t necessarily her preference, mind you, but this one here, the girl lying asleep beside her, she told a good story, made an interesting promise or three, maybe even twisted the truth just a little. Didn’t matter; talked her way in, she did.
Scrutiny had a go at her promises.
And that twisted truth, it sort of fell to the floor in wicked knots.
The girl made good on the meat of it, though, that thing Darcy craved most. Without this one here, Darcy might not have known, might never have even suspected.
The girl—Wendy, isn’t it?—lay against the mattress, sprawled face down, dainty hands tucked beneath a pillow, the rhythm of her breathing keeping time.
Such a small thing, really; young enough to be Darcy’s daughter—if Darcy had been inclined to have had a daughter. Her bare body, stark in its whiteness, hinted a mix of sex and vanilla extract. A curious scent, that. And natural, too, if the girl could be believed.
Strawberry blond spilled down her back in a tangled mess reminiscent of that actress girl, the one always at odds with the law.
Nice to look at, though.
And eager, too.
Darcy’s feet hit the floor with a soft thud. She snatched up her bathrobe and drifted toward the living room for another look—just to be sure.
She’d watched it the night before, just once, that grainy image on her computer screen. Still, she couldn’t ratify the face laying claim to that name—his name—even after twenty-odd years. Yeah, she’d admit a resemblance—though only slightly in degree. And sure, people change—especially after two decades.
But still…
She played the video again and again, set about deciphering movements and mannerisms meant to betray this obvious imposter. But those movements and mannerisms, they belonged to him.
So did that voice.
He sang the song just the way he did on the album.
Darcy’s weight shifted against the hard plastic chair; her fingers worked at the keyboard, brought up that image for another view.
The one calling himself Avis Atwater trod a dark stage in a dive somewhere outside of Denver, a familiar black guitar slung low, favoring his right hip. Custom built, that guitar, back in eighty-eight, made special for his twenty-first birthday.
A gift from Darcy.
But even a fact like that didn’t prove anything. Pictures of Avis and the instrument had graced more than a few magazine covers in the years since the accident. A good eye and the right tools could easily replicate the thing—should someone be so inclined.
Faces backing this version of Avis—a drummer and bass player—retained boyish intensity too recent to recollect any goings-on way back when. They might not have even drawn breath before 1988, before that moment responsible for ending something so promising. Easy marks, they’d be; fools for an image that came undone long before ever fully forming.
Darcy’s cell phone chirped, yanked the woman back through the years, flung her down in a reality of which she’d long ago grown weary.
“I’d need to see more to be certain,” claimed a familiar voice, “but I’m leaning toward it being him.”
It couldn’t be, though, and Darcy said as much. “You saw him same as I did, Ricky. Persistently vegetative, that doctor promised.”
Silence as thick as margarine buttered the moment before Ricky Kulkrick fully committed. “You asked my opinion last night. If that’s not Avis, then his ghost is out there playing his songs.”
“A vegetable,” is what Darcy said. “People don’t come back from a thing like brain damage.”
“Avis could—you of all people know his stubborn streak.”
Darcy’s sigh came swollen, a thing ripe with frustration. “Suppose we go and see him?”
“See who?”
“Avis,” she said.
“If he’d wanted anything to do with us—”
“At the nursing home,” Darcy explained. “We can put this mess to rest.”
Ricky had other thoughts, though. “You don’t need me for that. Go and see for yourself.”
* * *
“So, um, am I staying over again?” Wendy trickled in like a slow leak, pooled beside the desk, and shifted on her feet like a naughty schoolgirl in the principal’s office. A white Arcade Fire T-shirt highlighted the shapes of her breasts; tight jeans hugged the rest of her contours. “I mean, because you promised…”
They’d talked about it last night, briefly, during their post-coital chit-chat. But the tone had been decidedly noncommittal—at least on Darcy’s part.
“How about I call you?” Darcy proposed.
Wendy swiped a pad of Post-It notes from the desk, scribbled her digits, and stuck the guilty note to the computer screen.
Darcy eyed the yellow scrap of paper like she meant to commit the numbers to memory. “What’s your last name?” she asked.
“Limus.”
“How’d you come across the video?”
The girl flinched a nervous shrug, told a story concerning an uncle, how he’d been in Denver a few months back, saw Avis at a club, sent her the image over the phone. “I posted it on YouTube right away.”
Darcy needed to know. “Why tell me about it?”
There went that flinch again. “Just figured you’d want to know.”
* * *
They’d once shared all things common, Avis and Darcy; high school sweethearts, they’d been, long before he allowed her to breach the inner sanctum and bang drums in his band. But even that, the drumming part, had only been an angle, a move meant to help distinguish Beautiful Chaos from every other rock group scratching for attention on the local club scene. Female drummers will get a band noticed—especially the cute ones.
To recall Avis telling it, Darcy Minzer wore cuteness like a comfortable T-shirt.; brunette hair down to her shoulders, green eyes like a china doll’s. A petite package, that girl, with just enough curves in all the places any straight boy hoped to find them.
Darcy bore a bold streak, too, playing drums in skimpy little get-ups. Show enough skin and you were assured of steady-paying gigs among those frat houses on campus.
Twenty-five years can issue awful updates on a human body, though; brunette turns gray; curves go doughy; girlish charm dries up worse than two-day old toast.
She could still play those drums, though; plays better than most guys. But a thing like talent, it can put a girl at odds with the ruling elite. Can’t go running circles around boys, laying shame to their game.
Suppose it is Avis in that video?—though Darcy clung tightly to doubt. Why didn’t he contact her and Ricky? Certainly a Beautiful Chaos reunion offered greater potential than just Avis alone might manage.
They’d been special once—if only for a moment. Darcy still had the album to prove it. They’d caught a groove that summer, fell into a deep pocket, put down those ten songs Avis wrote and polished to a high shine. Three parts working together as one.
Thing is, it didn’t last.
And talent—nor lack of—had nothing to do with it.
* * *
“The big forty-five, huh?” Donnie Corver’s arms went easily around Darcy’s meager shape. He administered that familiar hug, the sort of hug possessing bone-breaking potential. But Donnie, he’d never hurt a soul. “Well happy birthday, girlie. And welcome to old age.”
Darcy pulled free from the giant, wandered deeper inside his lair, and took rest on a sagging leather sofa that no doubt came into its first moments during the Seventies. Everything in that cluttered space, in fact, reeked of some other decade—besides the one currently in charge.
“You ever going to update,” she asked, “you know, get modern?”
Donnie settled beside her, let his hands rest on his knees. “Ain’t got no use for all that fancy stuff,” he explained.
Darcy’s gaze rolled across the floor like a favorite old marble. “A vacuum cleaner isn’t considered fancy anymore,” she assured the man.
“A broom works just as well.” His bulk shifted, rattled that old sofa. “But you ain’t here to discuss my housekeeping, are you?”
Donnie gigged with Chaos way back when; equipment setup, mostly. But his size, that’s what assured club owners the band would be paid the full amount agreed upon.
Darcy smoothed a wrinkle from that faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt clinging tightly to her shape. She sifted a pile of words in her mind before deciding on direction. “When’s the last time you visited Avis?”
Donnie’s meaty hand rubbed at that stubble on his chin; he pondered the question floating in the space between them. “Been an awful long time, I suppose. Ten years, I guess. But I ain’t the only one who stopped going up to see the man.”
Darcy said, “I’m not looking to blame anybody for anything.” She gained her feet, jammed her hands in the pockets of her jeans, and laid down a slow pace meant to draw the moment into its proper context. “I don’t think anybody has been to see him in a long stretch.”
“Well shoot,” Donnie protested. “Ricky’s his best friend. And he ain’t been to see him since right after… I mean, at least some of us kept going for a spell.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“Because he ain’t there. He don’t know anybody anymore. Even those doctors said Avis ain’t aware of nothing going on around him.”
Darcy’s pace went still. “Do you think he could recover?”
Donnie’s head wagged left and right. “Not a chance,” he said. “His brain’s been scrambled, girlie. You heard those doctors.”
“Could be they were wrong.”
Donnie scoffed. “When’s the last time you were up there to see him?”
Sharp needles of shame etched guilty tattoos all across her skin, painted the girl as no better than the others. She’d abandoned Avis just as surely as those others had.
“He’s on YouTube,” she said. “A video of some club gig in Denver.”
“Bullshit.”
“Ricky thinks it’s him.”
“Maybe Ricky’s back to banging dope.”
“And I’m thinking it’s him. Maybe.”
Donnie’s head tossed up that wag again. “Ain’t no way he’s up and about.” His mass came loose from the sofa, angled toward the picture window overlooking Portland Street out front. “That part of the story is over.”
The truth of his words sported spines of the prickly sort, sharp enough to draw blood and bad intentions, opening wounds that never really closed.
Darcy dropped onto the sofa again and thought to change direction. “Are you still messing with that April woman?”
Donnie snorted his derision at the mention of that name, said, “I ain’t seen her in nearly two years.” He drifted closer, propped his weight against the sofa’s arm. “How about you? You going guy or girl these days?”
“Neither,” she said, “—till last night.” Darcy fell into a rhythmic explanation concerning Wendy Limus and the goings-on of the previous twenty-four hours; told how the girl pulled up that video, brought back the past in full grainy color.
Donnie asked, “Who’s her uncle?”
“Don’t know,” Darcy said. “Claims he shot the video, though.”
“Denver, huh?”
“So she says.”
“Gonna go see him?”
Darcy pondered the question, answered with one of her own. “See who? Avis or the uncle?”
Donnie shrugged. “Don’t matter which, I suppose.”
“I’ve got to do something,” said Darcy, taking to her feet again. “The mystery’s already been built up.”
* * *
“Avis Atwater?” The receptionist peered over the top of her glasses, acted as if Darcy might not have all her screws tightened. “What do you want with Avis Atwater? Are you family?”
Not exactly family, Darcy tried to explain. “But I once was engaged to him—before the accident, of course. I played drums in his band—”
“I know who you are.” Like poison from her tongue those words fell onto the reception desk. “That whole bunch of you, his best friends—when it looked like he’d be rich and famous!” The woman nudged her glasses higher up the bridge of her thin nose. “But where were any of you people while he sat up in here year after year, rarely getting visits?”
There’d been a million and one excuses, those flimsy reasons why Darcy couldn’t make it in to see the boy she’d once meant to marry:
The antiseptic smell of the nursing home turned her stomach.
All of those souls just waiting for death to claim them simply depressed her too much.
Avis, he wouldn’t even know who’s there and who isn’t.
“Avis isn’t here anymore,” the woman claimed, leaning across the desk. “He left Birch Run Manor five years ago.”
Left?
And just how did he leave? Darcy wondered, unable to bring sound to those words.
“Maybe he just got better and walked himself right out that front door one fine day.” Sarcasm dripped from the woman’s words. “Or maybe it was a cousin who claimed him, gave him a home and friendship.”
Darcy found her strength again, spoke against this lie. “He didn’t have any cousins.”
“Did so.”
“He never met his father and his mother died three years after the accident. No siblings, no surviving relatives—”
“The son of his father’s sister,” the reception lady argued. “He had all his paperwork in order. We don’t just turn patients loose—even if they can’t afford to stay.” Her back went straight, as if somebody sneaked up behind her and rammed a stick up her ass. “Besides, that cousin is the only one who came to visit Avis faithfully across all those years.”
* * *
“He’s playing in a club up in Piedmont,” Darcy explained, certain Ricky Kulkrick wouldn’t waste time chasing a phantom.
But the Indian surprised her. “If you’re in the mood to drive, I’ll ride up there with you.”
* * *
The Zoo occupied in its usual place along the 615 Corridor just outside Piedmont city limits—right where it had been twenty-odd years earlier, back when Beautiful Chaos last played the club.
Darcy angled her Toyota into the lot, squeezed the car between a pair faded yellow stripes, killed the engine, and listened to the low rumble of music seeping through the building’s walls.
Ricky’s the one who spoke the song’s title aloud. “‘Breakdown,’” he said. “I can tell by the beat.”
Darcy knew it too. She’s the one who came up with that nasty beat; laid it atop a song Avis intended to record with only guitar and vocal. That’s how she earned her only writing credit.
She shifted in her seat, set her gaze upon Ricky? “You ready to figure this thing out?”
* * *
He moved across that stage with a familiar cat-like strut, wearing that low-slung black guitar on his hip. Those long fingers walked between the frets like they’d always been there; as if twenty-odd years hadn’t occurred. And from the view by the front door, he could easily pass for Avis.
But up close, though, that’s where the charade failed.
Oh, sure, those who didn’t know the man might not decipher the difference.
Darcy cracked that code, though. She knew the boy before the man.
“Even after the accident,” Ricky said, “Avis still looked like Avis. This guy, he’s not him.”
A stray thought drifted through Darcy’s head. “He could pass,” she said, though barely loud enough to top the pounding music. “In a pinch, I mean.”
“Pass for what?” Ricky’s gaze bounced between Darcy and the imposter.
It was only a thought—a brief one at that. But Darcy spoke it aloud. “A reunion. Everybody here believes he’s Avis.”
It could never happen, though. There were just too many people who’d be able to blow the charade. Nobody would want that on their resume.
“I’ll talk to my lawyer,” Ricky conceded, “have him draw up a cease and desist.”
It couldn’t go that way either.
“Leave him be,” Darcy said, moving for the exit. “We missed him while he was here. Let these people enjoy him now that he’s gone.”
