Run Rose Run(44)

Ruthanna unfolded her napkin and then folded it back up again. AnnieLee had stopped eating her dinner.

“Somewhere on the tour, she started drinking again. And a little while after that, Mikey decided that it wasn’t good for Trace Jones’s image to have a girlfriend. Mikey told him that if he was serious about his career, he needed to break up with Sophia.”

Ruthanna poured more wine into her glass.

“So he did. I’m not saying it wasn’t hard for him. All I know is that he did it. And that night, in her hotel room, before she was supposed to fly home to me, Sophia drank all the bottles in the minibar and took some pills she’d gotten from a roadie. I don’t know if she was trying to die. Maybe she was just trying to drown her sorrows. Trying to get to the place where she didn’t feel the pain. But she went to sleep, and she never woke up.”

Ruthanna had been looking out the window as she spoke, and she could feel the tears trickling down her face. When she looked at AnnieLee, she saw that the girl was crying, too.

“I’m so sorry,” AnnieLee said. “I can’t even imagine.”

Ruthanna put her hand on top of AnnieLee’s. “I know your life hasn’t been easy, and I bet you’ve felt loss, too.” She pulled her hand away and her voice grew firm. “That’s why I don’t want you talking to Mikey. There’s a darkness in him, and a coldness. A man who would do anything to win is not the kind of man you want on your side.”

She got up and walked over to the sink to get herself some water. “‘I have been in sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots,’” she said softly.

“Is that a line from a song?” AnnieLee asked.

“It’s from a book—Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston.”

“Sorrow’s kitchen,” AnnieLee repeated. “I might’ve visited there once or twice.”

Then they were silent, and the sun passed down into the garden, illuminating every flower in one last bit of angelic light.

Ruthanna gripped the edge of the sink to steady herself. “Good night, Sophia,” she whispered.





Chapter

39



AnnieLee half woke to the sound of an urgent whisper. A figure, dressed all in white, stood by the side of her bed. Sophia, she thought, still in sleep’s clutches. The ghost reached toward her, even as she rolled away from it, and then it yanked the blankets back.

“Ahem,” the ghost said, and AnnieLee woke up enough to realize that it was Ruthanna standing there, her red-gold hair shining like a halo around her head. She was telling AnnieLee that it was time to get up.

Last night, after they’d talked and cried and drunk a bottle and a half of rosé, they’d agreed that it made little sense for AnnieLee to wend her way back to her motel, not when there were six empty beds in Ruthanna’s beautiful house.

“It’s almost eight a.m.,” Ruthanna said, saying “eight” as if it were as scandalous as “noon.” Then she bent over and picked a piece of paper off the carpet, peered at it, and began to read out loud as AnnieLee tried to burrow back under the covers. Her head felt like someone was hitting it with a hammer.

I was standing up just as tall as I was able

Already begging for a seat at the table

Feeling like a shadow, pressed against the wall

All those years he didn’t see me at all

I was invisible, invisible

Like shade at midnight, a ghost in the sunlight

Invisible

Ruthanna looked at AnnieLee. “What’s this?”

“A song I started last night,” AnnieLee said groggily, sitting up and blinking as the world came into focus.

“We went to bed at two!”

“I like to write late,” AnnieLee said. She ran her fingers through her tangled hair. “Though it makes getting up at eight unpleasant.”

“So does drinking too much wine.” Ruthanna shook the paper at her. “You got any more lines?”

AnnieLee cleared her throat and sang the next two, which she hadn’t written down yet. Her voice was still jagged, and she yawned midway through.

But then I grew up pretty and I grew up wild

Didn’t look no more like a hungry child

She looked up at Ruthanna. “I got stuck on the next bit,” she said, “the part where the girl’s old enough to realize that being noticed by a man can be worse than being ignored by him.” She paused. “So, yeah, it’s kind of a tragic song, too.”

The sadness of Sophia’s story had moved AnnieLee, and in the middle of the night, she’d allowed fragments of her own story to come back to her. But they were memories so unspeakable that the only way to survive was to deny them—at least in daylight, when such things seemed a little easier.

“It’s good so far,” Ruthanna said. “Maybe we can work this up.”

AnnieLee threw off her covers and plucked the paper from Ruthanna’s fingers. “I think I need to burn it,” she said.

Ruthanna sniffed. “You’re a baffling little thing,” she said, heading for the door. “Anyway, meet me downstairs in half an hour. We’re going down to the studio to see what else you’ve got.”

“Don’t call me little,” AnnieLee called after her.

And you’re the baffling one, she almost added. Last night Ruthanna had revealed an unimaginable grief, and now here she was, ready to work.