The next morning they found his car at the bottom of Shinnecock Bay.
After dinner, we sat around the living room, Charlie strumming on the guitar. ‘Evan was getting pretty good himself,’ he said with pride. ‘Even better than me!’ He picked through versions of ‘Get Back’ by the Beatles, The Byrd’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’, ‘White Room’ by Cream, Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’.
‘Jay . . .’ His eyes lit up. ‘You remember this?’ He sang, ‘Just when you say your last good-bye / Just when you calm my worried fears . . .’
I did recognize it. It was the song he had recorded back in LA. More than thirty years ago. ‘One Last Thing’.
‘Just when the dawn is breaking / There’s always one last thing . . .’
He always played the same two verses. Only them. To this day, I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard the whole thing through.
Charlie cooed, happily. ‘Ooooh, girl, it’s always one last thing . . .’
He put down his guitar. ‘You know it got to number twenty-nine on the charts,’ he said with his ground-down grin. ‘In 1973. Of course I was crazy as a loon back then. Not to mention I was taking LSD like vitamins. I got to thinking my record company was trying to screw me. Hell, I thought everybody was trying to screw me then . . .’ He cackled, a glimmer in his eye.
‘Hey, check this out, Jay!’ He went over to the chest against the wall and came back with a bulging photo album. It was stuffed with artifacts from his past: pictures of him, of him and Dad in happier days at his beach house. Charlie growing up in Miami in the sixties, before his crazy hair and wild eyes.
He laughed, ‘I was so deluded on acid I told them I would burn down their fucking building if they didn’t send me out on tour. And you know what they did? They pulled the record! Right off the fucking airwaves.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘Just like that! And you know what? I could hardly blame them. Who would put a nut job like me out on the road?
‘But you know what, Jay? Maybe if I hadn’t been off my rocker back then, you might be sitting here with Rod Stewart. You know you wear it well . . . In a mansion in Brentwood, not this shit hole here, right? Look . . .’
He opened the album and pushed it over to me, a soft smile lighting his eyes.
It was a clipping from an old Billboard magazine. Yellowed, dog-eared, protected in a plastic liner. Top Singles for the week.
I noticed the date: October 1973.
At #1 was ‘Angie’ by the Rolling Stones. Midway down, I saw a red, drawn-in arrow marking number twenty-nine:
‘One Last Thing’. Charlie Earl.
‘Hey!’ I grinned. I’d never seen this before. I never even knew if I truly believed him, all the times he talked about it.
Charlie winked. ‘Not bad from your loony older brother, huh?’ Then his grin seemed to wane. ‘Hell, who’s kidding who, right? Biggest moment of my life, and I fucked up the whole damn thing. Guess that’s where all our similarities end, right, Jay?’
He picked up his guitar again.
‘Charlie, what do you want me to do?’ I asked him. I came over and sat across from him. ‘About Evan. You want me to find you a lawyer? You want to try and make a case against the hospital? You know I’m going to have to go back in a couple of days.’
My brother nodded, scratching his scruffy beard, pushing his graying hair from his eyes. ‘We don’t want a lawyer, Jay. People like us can’t make waves. You go. Gabby and I, we appreciate what you’ve done. You just being here.’
I patted him on the shoulder and got up. ‘I’m going to make a call.’
I went outside and stood against the building in the cool night air. Their apartment faced a grassy courtyard. Beyond it was a darkened street. The light from a single streetlight cast a glow.
People were arguing loudly in an apartment across the courtyard.
I called the house.
‘Hey, how’s it going?’ Kathy answered, happy to hear my voice. ‘How are Charlie and Gabriella?’
‘The poor kid should never have been released.’ I exhaled. ‘You should see where they put him.’ I took her through my day, my frustrations. ‘All the doctors here are just stonewalling us.’
‘You’re going to be coming home in two days. What are you going to do, Jay?’
‘All they want is an answer, Kath. Someone has to take responsibility. That’s what I’m doing.’ I told her about visiting the rock and the halfway house. Then the TV station.
‘I warned you, didn’t I,’ Kathy said, a little in jest, but a little in truth too, ‘that you’d get drawn in.’
I was about to tell her she was wrong. This time, I wasn’t being drawn in. I just had to help get them through some things.
That’s when I noticed something out on the street.
A car, black, or dark blue maybe, parked beneath a tree. A VW or a Kia or something. A hatchback.
And someone sitting in the driver’s seat. The person’s face was hidden under a cap. I couldn’t even tell if it was a man or a woman, but the window was cracked slightly and the person was smoking.
And they seemed to be watching me.
‘Jay . . .?’
Kathy’s voice brought me back. ‘Sorry . . .’ I said, ducking back under the carport.
‘I said that Maxie’s coming back tomorrow. I’m picking him up at school. And Sophie said she texted you . . . She’ll call them later today.’
‘Okay . . .’
I heard an engine start up and glanced back and saw it was the car I’d been watching.
The headlights flashed, momentarily blinding me. I was about to turn away when the driver’s window rolled down and the person behind the wheel, eyes still seemingly fixed my way, flicked their cigarette onto the street.
In my direction.
Then they rolled up the window and drove away.
The whole thing had the feel of some kind of strange warning.
‘Jay, have you even been hearing me?’ Kathy sighed, frustration in her tone. ‘You know, you’re not going to change them. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Yeah, I know that, Kathy.’
I stepped out from under the carport and watched the car drive away down Division Street. ‘But what happened to Evan was wrong, Kathy. And when I get back on that plane Thursday, what the hell else have they got?’
Chapter 15
‘That was nice,’ Gabby called from the kitchen after Jay had left, finishing cleaning up.
Charlie had picked up his guitar again. ‘Yes.’ He strummed a few chords distractedly. ‘It was nice.’
‘Here, do something . . .’ Gabby said to him. ‘You’re always in your own world. Make yourself useful.’ She bundled up a bag of trash and handed it to him to him to take out.
‘All right.’ He put down the guitar and, without objecting, took the bag outside to the plastic trash bins on the side of their apartment.
She was right, of course, he decided – it was nice to have Jay out here. To feel they were close again. Like time had taken them back to a simpler and better day. Even if . . . Suddenly the reason Jay was there came back to him.
Even if it was because Evan had died.
He