Neverworld Wake(54)

Jim pulled me through a door and closed it behind me. It was his bedroom, a shadowed, chaotic rock star’s lair with electric guitars mounted on the wall and sheet music covering every flat surface, handwritten quarter notes and half rests spangling the bars. Synthesizers. A McIntosh stereo. Three laptops. Piles of notebooks burping up pages where song lyrics were taking shape in terrible handwriting. Lost Little Blue. A biography of Janis Joplin. Sweeney Todd: The Complete Score. A framed copy of a Bruce Springsteen Madison Square Garden set list signed with a note: Love you, Jimmy. Keep hearing the music. Bruce. Rumpled boxers and T-shirts and rolled-up posters swamped the corners of the room.

Jim was rifling through a bookshelf, looking for something.

“Okay, so, I have this song I wrote about a girl I haven’t met yet,” he said, pulling out a notebook. “?‘Immortal She.’ It’s about the love you have for someone that can’t die, no matter how far apart you are, even if you’re separated by death or time. That’s what I’m searching for.”

The lump in my throat was there again, a pile of rubble.

He began to read the lyrics, as he would countless times after this. I came to know that song well. It was one of the best he ever wrote. I’d sing it for him on a picnic blanket at school during finals week. He’d sing it to me some nights at Wincroft as I fell asleep.

I remembered this exact moment. I’d related it to Whitley a dozen times, because it was the classic chorus refrain of “The Ballad of Jim and Bee,” an old standard. This was the first time we were ever alone together, our first deep conversation. Our first kiss was seconds away. Having it before me again made me feel paralyzed, out of control. As he read, stumbling over a word here and there, pausing to scratch his nose, he seemed so beautiful and so young—younger than I ever remembered. He raised his chin and strained his voice a funny way on certain words, as if they were spears he was launching blindly over a wall.

“It’s beautiful,” I said when he finished.

He had a funny look on his face. He carefully set the book on his desk and sat beside me.

“I was going to wait to do this, like, weeks, and be this total gentleman and woo you like a knight in medieval times? But I’m punting that plan. I’m not a knight. I’m not even a gentleman. But I am devoted. Once I decide I’m with you, it never goes away. I swear to you that, Beatrice.”

He kissed me. There was a whole world in that kiss. Every moment of pain, regret, loneliness I’d felt since he’d died fell away. I’d missed him so much, how much hit me only now. As his hands slid down my back, I knew I was going to tell him about the Neverworld, the Keeper, the vote, his death. Would he be able to tell me why he died if I asked him? Couldn’t we run out of here, get into a car, and go live out the wake at a highway motel where the light was gold and the carpet full of vending machine crackers?

Tomorrow we could do it again.

And again.

And again.

I didn’t have to be without him anymore. I’d tell him everything. He, of all people, would understand. It’d be like it was before, before his strange moods, his anger, his lies.

When he pulled away, I was aware of a rapid popping noise behind us. Jim looked stunned.

“How weird.”

He stood, moving to the guitars mounted on the wall. He widened his eyes, mystified. “All the strings just broke. Every single one.” He grinned. “It must be your effect on me.”

I smiled weakly.



* * *



—

My decision to tell Jim everything set off some gangster-movie escape scene from the funeral, wavered, and stalled the moment he took my hand and we rejoined his family.

There were so many uncles, cousins, women wearing black mink coats and stilettos with toothpick heels, swirls of blond hair like sugar garnishes on thirty-four-dollar desserts. We made our way outside, a glamorous black-clad procession up Madison Avenue into the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel.

“Last time I was here it was for Allegra de Fonso,” a woman told me.

The funeral service was long, filled with sniffling people quoting Dylan Thomas and Bob Dylan, “Let It Be” by the Beatles. There was a speech from a red-eyed woman who couldn’t stop clearing her throat. Children snickered over an ancient man in the front row announcing too loudly, “It smells like cat piss,” before a nurse escorted him out. Jim smiled down at me and squeezed my hand. I found myself staring in wonder at a photo of the dead man: Great-Uncle Carl, memorialized in a laminated poster propped on a brass easel beside the casket. He had mottled red skin and an oblivious yellow smile. Had he ended up in some kind of Neverworld? I was closer to Great-Uncle Carl’s state than any of these people could imagine.

I had to tell Jim.

However, once the service ended and the crowd spilled onto the sidewalk—black Cadillac Escalades lined up eight deep, everyone shaking hands and muttering condolences and observations about Carl, how he “did it his way” and was a son of a gun—every time I was about to tell him “I need to talk to you,” some new person tapped his shoulder and gave him a bear hug, asking how he’d been, when his first musical was premiering on Broadway. Jim was amiable and kept trying to make his way back to me, but before he could, someone else would approach. When he finally rejoined me, he had two girls in tow. He knew them from grade school.