KDBookOnline
Share Us
Lane burst into laughter.
“Well,” they said. “When you put it that way. Sign me up.”
Before
Life was sharply different for all of them, after Twice Struck broke up. Savannah drifted back down from the lofty heights she’d been dwelling in. There were no more tours, no television appearances, no promotional deals or stadiums to fill. If you ignored the flurry of attention, shocked faces and uncomfortably sympathetic responses she elicited whenever she ventured out in public, you could almost forget she was a star at all. Instead, she was Savannah again. The same Savannah Rosalie had once driven around Nashville with, for hours in a beat up old car.
Rosalie, selfishly, loved it. Sides of Savannah that had vanished during the height of her fame returned. For the first time in years, she began to devour books again, stashing weighty tomes about the Spanish Revolution and biographies of obscure early female film directors in her handbag for whenever Tucker fell asleep. Her secret nerdiness, her desperation not to be left behind in a world of knowledge, all quiet facets of herself that called back to the wary seventeen year old that Rosalie knew still lived inside her.
There was also no Cole.
Their old intimacy flared into flame like it had never gone anywhere. Savannah and Rosalie, Rosalie and Savannah, with a big warm helping of Coral and a tiny sprinkle of Tucker. For the first time since their teens, they were all single again and they reveled in it. They took turns hosting long family dinners, talking late into the night, enjoying the closeness and ease of old friends who knew you better than you knew yourself. Rosalie hated that Savannah had been through hell, but she loved that her friend had rescued herself from the clutches of a toxic marriage. She could see the damage though.
“Can you turn that off?” Savannah grumbled irritably one day when Rosalie put music on as she made them all dinner at her place.
Rosalie and Coral exchanged a look.
“You love Tanya Tucker,” Coral said.
Savannah frowned. “It makes my head hurt.”
Rosalie was pretty sure she meant her heart.
She turned off the music and silence rang in its place.
“You need to write again,” Rosalie told her a few weeks later. “You’ve got so much material now you’re going to burst.”
Savannah’s shoulders stiffened.
“No,” she said. “There’s nothing there.”
“Come on,” said Coral a couple of evenings after that, producing one of Savannah’s guitars, dust gathering on the lacquered wood. “I miss your damn voice.”
Savannah’s eyes flashed steel. “Drop it, would you?”
“Honey,” Coral wasn’t afraid of her. “Don’t you want to get back out on the road? You’re a born performer; it’s always been your fuel.”
“Not anymore,” Savannah denied with a short shrug.
Savannah claimed she was getting her outlet in other ways. She sold the house she and Cole had lived in and bought a wild piece of modern architecture out in the hills. She spent her winters in Vermont, redecorating both homes herself.
“It’s gorgeous,” Rosalie agreed as Savannah showed her what she’d done with her place in Tennessee. “But somehow I don’t think picking out interior color palettes is going to satisfy your creative drive.”
“Sure it is.” Savannah looked away, out through the glass walls of her home and off into the hills.
Rosalie missed the music. She didn’t realize how much her friendship with Savannah had filled her life with it until it was gone. There’d been so many concerts both staged and informal, the strum of Savannah’s guitar, the sound of her hum. She missed her voice like an ache.
Almost in direct opposition, her own music intake increased. She listened in her car, through her headphones on her walk home after work, while she cooked dinner, and as she lay in the bath at night. Pop, rock, R&B, rap, country. For the first time she had to reach out and fill her ears herself, to make up for the sudden sharp void now that Savannah had been silenced.
It drove Savannah nuts. Rosalie could practically set a timer by how damn fast she’d snap the music off when she came over. Rosalie knew all the excuses by heart. Tucker was sleeping, Tucker needed to sleep, Savannah had a headache, she couldn’t concentrate, she couldn’t hear the conversation over all that noise. It was as if she’d developed an aversion so strong that the very sound of the notes was an assault.
One Sunday afternoon Rosalie decided to go outdoors and garden. The sun was warm and while she normally let her garden grow wild, there was a difference between cottage chic and an actual jungle, so she put a new record on the stereo, cranked it up loud and went outside to tackle it.
The record finished, but since her hands were covered in soil, she had no choice but to let the silence ring out. A minute later she almost jumped out of her skin when all on its own, the record started again from the beginning. Did her house have a damn ghost? She peeked her head around the french doors to find Savannah, sitting on the floor next to the record player, a thousand yard stare on her face, listening as though her life depended on it.
“Noah Lyman,” Rosalie said as the song finished. “Indie guy out of LA. He’s great, right?”
Savannah shushed her fiercely, as if even the silence between the tracks was sacred. Rosalie shot her a look of disbelief but as she wandered back out into the garden she couldn’t stop her smile. The next day when she went to put the record on again, it was gone.