A pair of drumsticks was lying on the floor tom. “Here,” I said, handing them to her. “You can try playing if you want.”
She looked at me a moment, then took the sticks. A couple of light taps on a tom-tom. On a cymbal. Abruptly she stopped, got up from the seat, and handed the sticks to me.
“You do it,” she said.
The drum set was mine. Or it used to be, anyway, charged on my Visa card the year I graduated college and paid off slowly over the next several years. Before that, all I had were the secondhand drums my parents had bought me when I was twelve years old.
The newer set was the best purchase I’d ever made, and well worth going into debt for. The shells were made of birch, with a beautiful red lacquer finish. All the best hardware. I’d taken excellent care of them, too, somehow keeping the drums free of nicks and scratches even as I hauled them in and out of a hundred clubs crammed with drunk, careless patrons.
The best part of the drum set, however, wasn’t even the drums at all, but the cymbals. There were a ride cymbal, two crashes, a splash, and of course a hi-hat. Most people don’t think about the importance of cymbals, but drummers do. The cymbals are like the drummer’s signature. Choosing them had taken hours at one of the giant music stories on Forty-eighth Street in Manhattan. Finally, as one employee began to dust the equipment, and another began to vacuum the carpet in some other part of the store, I decided on a series of Zildjian “K” cymbals for their dark, mournful tones.
After Cynthia and I moved to Newfield, the drums and cymbals remained in their cases for months, stacked in a corner of our bedroom. Eventually I gave them to Joey as a gift for the studio. I only ever sat at the drums anymore to tune them up for a band. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually played them, but I wanted to now. They were sharp and shimmering—a wonderful instrument—and I wanted Marie to see me play, to know about this other side of me, the musician. It’s hard to imagine, now, what I’d hoped to achieve, but it seemed important then to prove to her, in the last few minutes of our ordeal, that I wasn’t just some twisted man who locked people in closets.
I sat down at the set, and with everyone watching I began to play a simple funk beat, nothing fancy. I’d replaced the drum heads before The Fixtures had begun their sessions, and the drums had a nice thwap to them. They sounded pure and full of tone even when you hit them softly, though they always sounded best when you hit them hard. So I hit them hard.
What a release, banging on a set of drums! I had forgotten. I’d forgotten, too, what it felt like to have a group of people watching me play and thinking, This guy’s good. Even Marie. Ever since jamming with Burn in Ronnie Martinez’s musty basement I’d come to know the look on someone’s face of being transported, however briefly, to a place they hadn’t expected to go. I threw in a couple of fills, complicating the beat a little, some syncopation, off-beats on the ride cymbal, ghosting on the snare drum. And as I played, it felt as if I were controlling our collective pulse. Everyone’s trust was in me, and it was well-placed trust because I knew exactly what I was doing, and even now—especially now, after everything that happened after—I wish that I could’ve found a way to keep that one beat going without ever stopping. Because for the briefest of moments there was only this rhythm I was playing, only this rhythm and nothing else—no kidnapping, no desperate plans, no deception. For thirty seconds, maybe a minute, all of that was forgotten.
But every song ends. I ended mine with a couple of cymbal crashes that echoed and then died away, and then the room fell silent.
Everyone let the silence linger a moment, until Marie looked at me and said, “Sweet.”
I smiled, set the drumsticks on the floor, and left the recording room for the bottle of Jack Daniel’s I kept in a drawer in the control room. When my bands finished their final session with me, I liked to have a toast with them, unless they were underage. And sometimes even then. No matter how difficult the recording might have been—even in the best of circumstances there are usually some disagreements and hurt feelings—the whiskey toast always made for an uplifting coda to the project and left the band feeling like they were wrapping up something important.
This morning our toast would go beyond music. It would be a toast to freedom. To the possibility of keeping a lifelong secret. And, of course, to luck. I wasn’t sure whether we’d already been granted luck or whether we’d need it sometime in the future, but I felt that the role of luck ought not be dismissed, though others might call it fate.