“Even if it means she’s dead?”
“Like you said upstairs, it’s complicated. But none of that’s your fault, so, yeah, I’m glad.” Stephie stood. “Come on, I want to show you something.”
They went back into the studio, where they sat side by side at the console in the control room. Stephie powered on the board and played Con a song. It was a good track, spare but melodic with a driving guitar line anchoring it. Stephie brought up the bass a touch, and Con’s head began to nod appreciatively.
“This is good,” she said.
Stephie found that funny. “Well, she wrote it, so I’m not surprised you like it.”
“Really?” Con said, listening more closely. “Man, I’m full of myself even when I don’t know it.”
“No, you’re not. She was so inspired while she was here. I’ve never seen someone so locked in.”
They sat there while Stephie played track after track, all in varying stages of completion. Some Con didn’t know, but others she recognized as songs she’d written since the crash. The ones she’d never been able to bring herself to record. It was overwhelming to hear them taken from scribblings in a notebook to full-fledged songs. One sounded exactly how she’d imagined in her head, but others had evolved in new directions. Stephie’s influence was unmistakable. She had never been a songwriter herself but had a gift for always improving a work in progress.
Con squeezed her friend’s arm. It was thrilling and incredibly disconcerting all at once. The hardest part was hearing her own voice singing words that she’d written but had no memory of singing.
Stephie paused the music. “Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s just confusing.” Con pantomimed her head exploding. “Part of me is even jealous that I didn’t get to work on them with you. How messed up is that?”
“Part of me is angry we never finished them. How messed up is that? My best friend died, and I’m upset about some stupid music.”
“I think that’s what we all do, though. Find ways to make sense of”—Con waved her hand vaguely in the air—“all this. For weirdos like us, it’s music.”
Stephie laughed and leaned against Con appreciatively.
Con asked, “Kind of on that subject, but do you know what happened to my notebooks or guitar? They weren’t at her husband’s place.”
“Yeah, sure,” Stephie said, pointing through the window. “In there.”
“Seriously?”
Con went into the live room and saw her things stored neatly under a table. She sat cross-legged on the floor. Reverently, she opened the case and took out the guitar. She tuned it and tried to strum a C chord, but it didn’t come out right. In her mind, she knew what to play, but her fingers struggled to follow along. Eventually, she got her fingers in place, but she had to look at her hand and tell each finger where to go, like a child learning her first chords. Or a clone remembering how to walk again.
Stephie followed her into the live room and sat at the bench of a world-weary Hammond B3 organ attached to a Leslie speaker cabinet. She listened while Con struggled through the chord progression of “North Dakota,” an old Lyle Lovett song. Texas country was the only kind of music her mother would tolerate, and Con had taught herself hundreds of old songs so she could practice without catching hell: Tish Hinojosa, Nanci Griffith, Townes Van Zandt, Terri Hendrix, and so many others. It was a surprise yet no surprise at all that she would return to them now to remind herself how to play. Always start at the beginning, her gamma had said, otherwise a body is apt to get lost.
Third time through, Con’s fingers moved less stubbornly. Stephie switched on the Hammond, holding the run toggle for ten seconds before flipping the start switch. She filled in around the edges of Con’s halting guitar with honeyed chords that gave Con the courage to look away from the strings and keep playing by touch and memory. Together, they began to sing, Stephie taking the Rickie Lee Jones part, her breathless, ethereal soprano blending with Con’s rougher alto. It felt like old times, and Con would have given anything to stay in the middle of that song forever. But when the end came, she let it fade away, tapping out the final syncopated rhythm—a castaway’s heartbeat—on the body of the guitar.
The room fell silent, neither of them wanting to be the first to break the spell. Con looked down at the guitar—her guitar—and felt vindicated at what it meant. Her original hadn’t been coming to Charlottesville because she was having an affair. Nor had she sneaked her guitar and music out of Levi Greer’s house because she was leaving him. She’d been coming to Charlottesville to record music with Stephie.