Everything After(71)
“What happened?” she asked Emily. “Is he still pissed about what I said this morning?”
Emily pretended not to hear her. Rob hadn’t shared his conversation with Diana, and she hadn’t asked. She wondered if it had anything to do with her.
When it was time for the last song, Rob introduced her, this time calling her Emily Gold, saying she was a friend from a long time ago who inspired him, leaving out the line about her being the one that got away, playing that aspect of things way down. She walked on stage to a round of applause and waved, and then she heard someone shout, “Em!”
It was a voice she’d know anywhere. Ezra. He was here. She shaded her eyes and tried to look out into the audience, but she couldn’t find him.
Before he could call out again, Rob was starting “Crystal Castle” and then Emily’s fingers were on the keys and she was singing her part. She heard the crowd singing along with them, saw them with their arms around one another swaying. She felt the surge of the audience’s love travel through her, grow within her.
Rob turned and winked, as if to say, Even when we’re off, we’re on.
She smiled and kept singing, kept playing. But thoughts of Ezra intruded. He was here. Somewhere out there. Did There aren’t enough words mean that he was going to fly to Mexico? Was she supposed to have figured that out?
When the clapping started, Rob walked toward her on the stage, so their voices were drowned out by the audience. “Who called your name?” he whispered, even though she was pretty sure he already knew. “I saw your face. It’s someone you know.”
“It’s Ezra,” she whispered back.
She could see Rob thinking, and then he said softly, “Do you want to sing for him? Your song?”
“My song?” she echoed.
The applause died down. “Em!” She heard Ezra call again from somewhere down below. He wanted her to know he was there, that he’d come to talk to her. He didn’t disappear this time, and he didn’t let her disappear either. She wanted to send him a message, too.
She turned to Rob and nodded.
He turned to the audience. “We’ve got some’m real special for all y’all tonight. Our girl Emily here’s been working on a brand-new song. And this is the first time anyone but me’s ever gonna hear it.”
The audience cheered. The stage went dark, except for a spot on Emily. She saw Rob sit down and sip a glass of water someone had stuck under a stool for him. Then she started to play.
When she got to the end, she had to push the song around the lump in her throat as she sang:
I hope you can see
That there’s love there waiting
For you, from me
Just before the lights came up on the stage, she saw Rob wiping a tear off his cheek. Then the spot was back on him and he was saying, “I think we’ll leave you there tonight. Thank you for being such a great audience.”
The audience cheered and Emily and Rob headed into the wings to the mic guys. As they were getting unwired, Emily couldn’t stop thinking about Ezra, about the fact that he was here, that he’d heard her song. She had no idea what he would think about it. Whether he would know it was about him, the same way she knew that Rob’s “Crystal Castle” was about her.
The mic guys left, but Emily stood still.
“You’re not happy together right now,” Rob said, “but you still love him.”
“I do,” Emily said, looking into his green eyes. “And I’m not—we’re not. But just because we’re not happy right now . . . I’m not ready to give up. He and I need to talk. We’ve been through a lot and our marriage cracked. But I want to try to put our pieces back together. I owe him that. I owe myself that.”
Rob leaned his guitar into its stand. “You know,” he said, looking up at her, “sometimes the pieces don’t fit back together.”
“I know,” Emily said, taking a deep breath, “but sometimes they do.”
60
When Emily walked out the stage door exit, Ezra was waiting there for her.
“It was powerful,” he said quietly.
“Hm?” Emily said, looking up at him.
“Listening to you play at the benefit last week. It’s part of why I was so thrown. I could feel you in that song. I could feel the rawness of your emotions—your pain and your love and your passion and it . . . it was a part of you I didn’t know, a vulnerability you never shared. It was that times a million tonight. When you sang . . . that was about me, right?”
Emily nodded. “It was. I’m sorry for . . . for screwing up, for making mistakes, for making them worse.”
Ezra slid his arm around her back. “Can we find somewhere to talk? There’s a lot I have to say. Too many words.”
Emily led Ezra down to the beach. It reminded her of the night they got married, of the evening they got engaged, the waves lapping against the shore. The beach, she realized, was always their place. They took their shoes off and sat down on the sand.
“You gave me your journal,” he said.
“I want you to know all of me,” Emily said. “It felt like it was about time I did that. But I didn’t know how you’d feel once you did.”
“You wanted to be whole again,” he said. “You wanted to feel loved.”