The Unsinkable Greta James(6)

Luke hadn’t been able to help himself; he’d burst out laughing. Even now, Greta can picture the look on Conrad’s face, the dawning disappointment as it all snapped into place.

The second time, things were more serious between them, and she brought Luke home to Columbus over the Fourth of July. For two days, he did everything right: he collected candy with her nieces at the town parade, helped her mom decorate the American flag cupcakes (adding an Australian one for good measure), and brought her dad a bottle of his favorite scotch. He even found a way to ask Conrad about his job selling ads for the Yellow Pages without seeming to imply that this line of work had perhaps outlived its usefulness.

On the last morning, she found him out on the patio, attempting to fix the broken barbecue, and as she watched him bend over it the way he usually stood over the sound board in the studio—tweaking and adjusting her songs until they became as close as they could to the way she heard them in her head—she was surprised that something so mundane could still be so attractive.

But afterward, as they sat waiting for the plane that would take them back to New York, he put his arm around her shoulders. “I can’t wait to get home,” he said, and when she murmured in agreement, he tipped his head back with a sigh. “If that were my life, I think I’d off myself.”

This, of course, is the exact same thought Greta has every single time she goes home. It’s the same thought that kept her picking at her guitar most nights in the freezing-cold garage when she was younger, the one that propelled her to a college two thousand miles away in southern California, then catapulted her straight to the opposite coast afterward.

It’s what’s driven her all these years, the fear of all that—of getting stuck, of standing still, of being ordinary. And it’s what’s kept her going, in spite of the wall that rose up between her and her dad, another brick for every aspect of her unconventional life, every decision that carried her farther from Ohio, from a nine-to-five and a mortgage and a white picket fence, from the way her brother’s life has unfolded—which is to say, the way most lives unfold—first a steady job, then marriage, then parenthood, all of it sure-footed and predictable.

But to hear Luke say it—Luke, who drinks only out of mason jars and wears a knit hat even in the summer, who can light a cigarette in the wind and recite the lyrics to all of her songs—was too much.

“It’s not so bad,” she said, watching their plane appear out the window, inching toward the accordion-like jet bridge. It always struck her as extraordinary that the distance between Columbus and New York could be covered in just a couple short hours. Most of the time, it felt like the two places existed in entirely different universes.

Beside her, Luke sat up a little. “You can’t be serious,” he said, his accent getting thicker, as it always did when he said something snarky. “I can’t even picture you living there when you were a kid. Never mind now.”

“I’m not saying I’d want to—I’m just saying it’s not so bad.”

“What? The suburbs?”

“No,” she said. “Coming home.”

“There are fifteen thousand kilometers between me and my parents,” he said with a smirk, “and that’s still not enough.”

She didn’t know it then, but that was the first loose thread.

From across the table, Mary is still watching her expectantly.

“It wasn’t meant to be,” Greta tells her.

“Well, that,” her dad says, “or you didn’t want it to be.”

“Conrad,” Mary admonishes him in the exact same tone that Helen would’ve used, and Greta gives her a grateful smile. But it’s not a surprise. And it’s nothing new.

She turns to her dad, whose collar is wrinkled now that her mom isn’t here to iron it for him. He’s looking at her the same way he’s been looking at her for twenty years: like she’s a math problem he can’t quite work out.

“What?” he says, like he isn’t trying to pick the same fight they’ve had about a thousand times. It’s not about Luke. It’s not even really about her settling down, though that’s part of it. It’s that the life he wants for her is fundamentally different from the life she wants for herself, and music is the boat that’s forever carrying her away from it.

“You didn’t even like him,” Greta says, and though her voice is light, there’s something unmistakably steely underneath it.

“But you did,” Conrad points out. “So I don’t really understand what happened.”

What happened, she wants to say, is that her mom died. What happened is that Helen went into a coma, and the world turned inside out.

But that’s only part of it, of course. That’s the cause.

Here’s the effect:

Greta had been in the middle of a show at the time, a sixty-minute set at a music festival in Berlin, and when her brother kept calling and calling, Luke was the one to pick up her phone. By the time she’d finished playing, he’d booked her a flight to Columbus.

“Just me?” she asked, the shock of it coursing through her as she stood with him backstage afterward, still sweaty and jangly from the show, still trying to absorb the news.

He looked surprised by the question, which was ridiculous. They’d been together for two years by then, and this, she’d assumed, is what people do in situations like these; this is what it’s supposed to mean to have a partner.