Writing Our Song:A Billionaire Romance

Chapter 4


I had no memory of how I made it back home from the hospital. It was like my mind reached some kind of limit, said ‘Nope’ and then just switched the lights out. Waking up in my own bed was a mystifying straw that I grasped at with both hands.

A nightmare! Of course it was a nightmare, things like that can’t happen, not to my dad. From my perspective everything in my room looked normal, all the sounds outside my window were normal. I breathed a sigh of relief and sat up, only to feel the wind knocked out of when my eyes spotted the outfit I had been wearing the previous night strewn across the floor.

Reality hit me like a physical thing and knocked me flat on my bed again, my hands reaching up to rub away tears welling up from my eyes, which I found to be already raw from so many similar gestures that I must have already performed.

Eventually I had to get up. I swung my feet out on to ground that had never felt so unsteady and changeable before. When I peeked out into the hallway, all was silent. Everything in the house looked superficially the same, but fundamentally different as if some crew of humorless pranksters had come through in the middle of the night and swapped everything for nearly identical items.

The couch was still the same color, the same model and brand as it had always been but somehow it wasn’t the same one where I had bounced for hours straight while watching cartoons on a Saturday morning. If I flipped that cushion over I wouldn’t see the stain that had resulted from the time my dad spilled his drink on it while mom was in the kitchen preparing popcorn for our movie night. It would be gone. I couldn’t force myself to check.

I considered making myself some breakfast but my stomach turned at the thought, so I went back upstairs and heard the first sound inside the house not caused by myself. Behind my parents’ closed bedroom door I could hear crying.

The hitching sobs fuelled the embers of panic in my own stomach and I felt it bubbling up all over again as I reached for the door handle. Locked. I knocked on the door and my mom’s crying stopped, leaving me alone in the silence again until I spoke.

“Mom?”

In my whole life I couldn’t remember a time when my mom or dad had locked their door and shut me out. My panic was in full control now and I knocked more urgently, my grief and crying making me slur my words when I called for her again.

“Mom? Please! I… Mom? I need to talk to you… I need… Mom?”

My legs slowly gave way and I sunk down to the floor with my head resting against the door and my knocks eventually trailing off. From inside the bedroom I heard nothing. Nothing at all.


*****

“It’s time, Beatrice,” said ‘Uncle’ Albert, some distant relative on my mom’s side.

I was the only child of an only child on my dad’s side, his parents had toppled over like dominoes one after the other not too long after I was born. I was his only close family in the whole world. It was that thought alone that picked me up off my bed and got me moving that morning.

I had to be there for him. If not me, then who else was there? People he worked with and some old friends were the only people there purely for him and their number was dwarfed by the amount of people my mom had invited. Relatives, friends and neighbors that had played little, if any, role in the life of Henry Hampton filled a disproportionately large amount of fold out seats.

My mom and I sat next to each other, front and center. If this was an event that anybody wanted to go to, they would have been the best seats in the house.

As I listened to the man who had never even met my father speak about what a fine man he was, surrounded by people who were mostly not even close to him, my tears flowed like they had no intention of stopping between now and the end of time. I hung my head, letting my hair fall around my face like a veil.

To my right I could feel cold radiating off of my mom as if she was some kind of air conditioner. We’d hardly said a word to each other since before I left for the gig at the community college and, ever since that first morning afterwards, I hadn’t seen or heard her crying.

I didn’t know if she did cry again or if she’d found some kind of a switch inside to turn it off. I tried to hide my grief, my guilt, as much as possible too, keeping out of sight in my room whenever I felt the sobs, the big unstoppable ones, coming. I guessed, aside from right now, she hadn’t seen me cry much more than I had seen her.

Now though. Now, it was too much to stop, my room was too far to run to and I wished she would tell me where that switch was as I glanced up at the box that held my dad before casting my eyes back down to my lap.

It felt wrong to look at the coffin directly. It was too bright, it hurt my eyes, and I was sure it was more than just reflected sunlight off the polished handles. It was as if it was shining a spotlight of blame towards me, a blamelight.

My fault. I thought back to how hard I’d had to convince my parents that the community college gig was an essential step for our band’s career. It was a Sunday night, a school night, and their gut reaction was to say no. But I had got my own way in the end and then my dad had died coming to see me perform.

He never would have been there, the wrong place at the wrong time, if it wasn’t for me. My hands bunched up into little impotent fists as I thought about the delirium I’d been walking through for the past several days.

Only a few minutes away from where I had been happily talking music with the rest of Apollo Gone, my dad had been hit on the driver’s side by some kid in an old muscle car his rich parents had bought for his nineteenth birthday.

Sporting a classic racing-red paint job and an engine that had been heavily modified for more power, the car was too unwieldy for the inexperienced driver. He had lost control in the wet conditions while pushing the car as hard as he could, trying to impress his friends. The old fashioned brakes and suspension were no match for the updated engine and high speeds. So I had been told.

My fingernails dug into the palms of my hands as I squeezed even harder, channeling all the blame emanating from that coffin away from myself, adding my own anger to it and sending it full-force in the direction of that bastard rich kid and his stupid parents. More money than sense.

My dad had always said that a kid’s first car should be an underpowered piece of crap, they’d get into less trouble that way. He’d said my first car would probably not even have an engine. What were they thinking giving the boy a monster of a machine like that? Did they think that the rules didn’t apply to them because of all their money?

I let myself seethe with hatred for them. Anything was better than feeling that blame completely on my own shoulders. The rest of the service passed in a blur, I barely even heard any words that were spoken until the casket started lowering into the ground and I almost jumped up screaming ‘Don’t put him in there!’ but instead all that came out was a whimper.

A funeral is supposed to be about letting go, about some kind of closure, but when they started putting dirt on top of him not even my newfound hatred could stop the guilt from resurfacing. I was sorry for so many things. Sorry for asking him to come watch me sing, sorry for all the times I said ‘I love you’ out of habit rather than taking just a second to really appreciate what the words meant.

I was sorry I’d never listened to his song, the one he had just been working on. For some reason that thought more than all the others gave new strength to my tears. Now nobody would ever hear his song.

*****

Throughout the entire ordeal I’d been avoiding all of my friends, even Blair. I couldn’t face them, I didn’t know what to say, I didn’t know what they’d ask. Unfortunately, after a couple of weeks, I had to go back to school and as soon as they spotted me in the hallway they all rushed over.

“Bea! Are you OK? I haven’t been able to get through to you!”

“I’m so sorry, Beatrice!”

“Did you make it to the hospital in time?”

“You don’t look so good, are you alright?”

Their hands seemed to be all over me, arms over my shoulders, what they must have thought were supportive grips on my elbows. I looked from one to the other, barely able to get a the first word of a reply out before the next question hit and all of a sudden I felt surrounded, trapped, and felt my heart begin to thump heavily in my chest as a hot flush rose up my neck and over my face.

I looked upwards, trying to get my face into the fresh air above the swarm around me, and ended up looking right at a fluorescent tube light that was flickering away with an annoying buzz that I could somehow hear despite the noise of everything else. Every flash was like another blast from the blamelight and as my breaths became shorter and faster, their questions got all twisted in my mind until they were almost accusations.

“Are you glad he’s gone?”

“You getting a big pay out for the crash?”

“What did he look like after the accident?”

“How does it feel to kill your dad?”

I stumbled backwards and fell on my ass against some lockers, screaming and holding my hands over my ears. My heels scrabbled on the floor, trying to push me backwards through the lockers away from them, their questions, that blamelight, but there was no escape.

That’s how I earned my first visit to the school’s counsellor, a middle aged man named Elias Rothenberg (‘call me Eli’) with a stereotypical psychiatrist’s beard, who was full of infuriatingly open-ended questions. The principal had been so proud when he first announced this addition to the faculty, he apparently had a lot of qualifications.

For myself, I thought he was almost useless. All the calmly delivered open-ended questions in the world wouldn’t bring my dad back but it did at least get me another week off school before I had to return and face regular meetings with him.

When I returned for the second time the same group of friends spotted me in the same hallway but stayed back as if I was either made of delicate china or plastic explosives. I didn’t mind, the last thing I wanted to do was answer any questions or talk.


Even when Blair sat with me at lunchtime I couldn’t bring myself to open up or say anything more than the most basic of single word responses. It was awful.

In class and walking between classes I hunkered down, trying to make myself as small as possible. I wanted to be invisible, to be anywhere I wouldn’t feel so closely scrutinized.

The groups of friends that tried to talk to me got smaller and smaller, the text messages I received and never responded to became more and more infrequent. Somehow, impossible though it seemed, time just kept marching on.

At home my mom was as concise with me as I was with everybody at school. It was a quiet and lonely existence.

One night I was sitting at my desk staring at homework I had no idea how to complete because I hadn’t been paying much attention in class and my phone announced a text message. It was the first message I’d had in about a week and it was from Blair.

‘Come 2 my place for band practice? Do u good to get out of the house’

Of course I hadn’t been to a practice session since the accident. I didn’t even know if I could still do it anymore. I thought back to that night at the Seattle Days festival, how all our practice and hard work had come together to make something that bordered on the magical for me.

That was a lifetime ago, a different world. Was it even OK to do anything that made me happy in this new age and this new world? Would that trivialize what had happened to my dad? Could I… maybe… let the music take me flying again?

I bit my lip and kept on pressing buttons on my phone to keep the screen lit up as I stared at it. To say I wasn’t coping well in public situations would have been an understatement. Could I handle the noise of band practice? The expectations?

From the hallway I heard the creak of a floorboard as my mom walked past and, with a squeak of wheels, my chair rolled back from the desk as I stood up. I had to try, even if I just sat there with my eyes closed while the others rehearsed around me. Maybe recovering my place in the world could start with recovering my place in the music.

My life was falling through my fingers like fine sand and if I didn’t figure out how to hold on to it I was afraid there’d be nothing left. Band practice might be a disaster, maybe even to the point of another panic attack, but I was on the verge of losing myself. That little spark inside, what my dad had sometimes referred to as ‘pure-Bea’, didn’t have much time left.

“Mom?”

I walked to my doorway and looked out to see my mom descending the stairs as if she hadn’t heard me. When I called again she stopped, eyes fixed towards the ground floor and gave me the kind of terse response that had become the norm.

“What.”

“Um… would… could you please give me a lift to Blair’s house? There’s a band practice and I…”

My teeth snapped shut with a clack as my mom turned her head to look at me and I saw for the first time what she’d been barely keeping in check for the past several weeks. Under her cold surface was hot rage and I’d just opened the floodgates.

“Are… you… f*cking… kidding me?”

Stalking sideways up the steps so she could keep her eyes on me, I could almost feel my mom’s restraints letting go. I’d never been beaten at home, never faced overly brutal bullying at school, but I knew danger when I saw it and right now it was directly in front of me.

I backed into my room as she approached, holding my hands out in a half calming and half defensive gesture. It was as effective as brandishing a white flag at a tidal wave and, even though I saw it coming, I couldn’t quite believe it enough to do anything when my mom struck my face in a powerful open-handed slap that sent my head rocketing to the side, followed by a shove that sent me sprawling backwards to the floor.

“You have the nerve…”

My mom’s sentence dissolved into an animal snarl as she advanced on me again. I retreated until my back hit the wall, my breaths already coming in shallow gasps as a cold sweat broke out over my forehead.

“He died because of this bullshit fantasy about being a singer!” she screamed as she bent over me, hands gripping my hair and shirt and shaking me back and forth until I thought she was going to rip both me and my clothes apart.

“And still here you are! You selfish bitch…” she continued, letting me go and walking to my desk, pulling things off and throwing them at me.

My phone hit me right on the knee, a snow-globe my dad had bought me when I was four years old shattered on the wall by my head, spraying me with glass, water and plastic. Throughout it all my mom screamed insults and accusations at me until I curled up into the fetal position, barely feeling whatever else hit me until suddenly it was quiet again.

I looked up and she was right there, kneeling by me, as angry as ever but chillingly under control again. Through bared teeth she hissed out words so quiet I could hardly hear them.

“He hated listening to you sing, you know…”

“I’m sorry, Mom… please…”

“Every night he’d be forced to hear your screeching he’d say what a cookie-cutter pop-voice you had…”

I rolled my eyes up at her from the floor where I was lying, my throat closed up despite how desperately my body tried to hyperventilate. I’d always thought he liked to hear me sing, he’d always given that impression.

If it was anyone else telling me this I would have called them a liar but this was my mom, his wife. Don’t married couples confide in each other things they would never tell anybody else? Was it possible he really did hate my singing but simply didn’t want to hurt my feelings? Him?

Even so I still might have been able to shrug it off but hadn’t my dad said something about my pop-voice breaking his heart? I was sure he had, and that gave everything my mom said the weight of truth. While these thoughts were racing through my mind, my mom leaned in even closer.

“You forget about all that crap, you hear me? Sort yourself out at school or get a job and start contributing. You’re not a singer, you don’t do that anymore. Understand?”

I nodded.

“Say it!”

“I… won’t sing.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

With one last shove on my shoulder that assisted her back to her feet, my mom stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind her. I stayed right where I was, surrounded by water, little pieces of glass and my other belongings that had become missiles.

When it was full-dark outside I tentatively sat up and lunged for my bed, almost yelling in fright with the thought that the hands of some boogeyman might shoot out from underneath and drag me away. I hid under my covers and didn’t move until the morning when I heard my mom leave the house.

I found my phone, miraculously unscathed from its flight and impact, and sent a message to Blair. Clearly I wouldn’t be making it to band practice, but there was more I needed to tell him.

‘Sorry. Have to quit the band. Can’t do it’

Feeling almost empty, I mechanically gathered a few things from my room and then some newspaper and matches from the kitchen before going into the back yard. Standing there in the unkempt grass was an old barbeque. No gas, just a grill over an area you could put some charcoal.

I bunched up the newspaper into loose balls, stuffed them in, piled my things on top and set a match to the whole lot. As the flames took hold of the newspaper and grew bigger they spread to the real meat of this cook out.


First to catch was the hat I had worn when I sang in my first school musical, next was the certificate I’d won in a talent show. Before my eyes everything blackened until at last my scrapbook was consumed too. In it were all the school newsletters and newspaper clippings that mentioned my singing, all my ham-fisted attempts at writing lyrics. My secret hopes and dreams, written on the pages I’d never shown anybody.

I watched it go up in smoke and tried to forget all about what it felt like to be on stage and flying.