Page 178 of Broken Lines
All my love,
Dad
My chest constricts. My pulse thuds heavily as I raise my eyes to stare at Alice as her eyes brim with tears.
“I…I don't know if he wanted her name to be Prudence…” She laughs quietly, brushing the moisture away from her eyes. “You know Ig; Beatles nut that he was. Or maybe it was just his way of…”
The sob wrenches from her throat. She starts to collapse against the counter, and I go to her, holding her as she cries into my chest.
“That girl, Jackson…that's Iggy.”
Alice looks up at me.
“I don't mean in the sense of God, or heaven, or spirits, or reincarnation, or any of that. But that girl came from a man we both loved dearly, and I don't think it's a coincidence that she and you connected like that. She's Iggy's kid, Jack. There’s a reason she dragged you out of whatever fucking hole you spent the last ten years—”
“She didn’t—”
“Jackson? Shut up.”
Alice smiles through her tears.
“Of course, she did. She got you out of that hole and off that island. You're not drinking. You're writing. You'rerecording, for fuck’s sake. People don't come into our lives by accident, Jack, and you can't let them go when it happens. Believe me, you'll carry that regret your entire life if you do.”
We stand there another minute—two people connected by their shared love and grief for a man gone way too soon.
“Your tea’s getting cold,” Alice finally mutters quietly.
I smile, leaning down to kiss the top of her head before I pull away.
“I don’t want to know why you and Melody aren’t together—”
“It’s complicated—”
“I told you I don’t want to know, Jack.”
She purses her lips, jabbing a finger at me.
“But I do want to know what the hell you’re going to do about it.”
No geniusever came to anyone in the morning.
Luckily, it’s late, and dark, by the time I get into the studio after hugging Alice and Eleanor goodbye.
I’m shaking a little. There’s still the lingering stab of pain in my chest from learning everything I did tonight. And yeah, I want a drink, or a line, or a pill so fucking badly that my very skin burns.
But it’s not drugs or alcohol that I’m going to numb myself with tonight.
It’s the past.
Specifically, a part of the past I haven’t once been able to even think about in eleven years.
For the last two months, I’ve been coming in here almost daily. And I’ve been rehashing, rewriting, and re-recording the same nine songs over and over. One is something I started writing when I landed back in New York. The other eight are from Maine.
They’re all cowrites, with Melody.
Recording them and reworking them over and over is both torture and therapy. It’s like flaying a cut open and then re-dressing it, only to rip it back open again.
And again, and again, and again.