Lennon Reborn Read online

  So, car it was. And she hated driving. It was the only thing she disliked about New York.

  “Dumb move, Starr,” she said as she climbed into her Mercedes and started the engine. The Dave Brubeck Quartet burst through her speakers. One of her absolute favorites, “Strange Meadow Lark.” She pressed the button on her phone to take the song back to the beginning. The song brought forth memories of sitting and listening to it in the greenhouse on the roof of the penthouse that had once belonged to her grandfather, the true jazz connoisseur, and had been her home since his death.

  As the piano intro played, she listened for the moment that was coming up. “Listen, Georgie,” her grandfather would say. “Listen how seamlessly it moves from the unclear time signature in the solo to four-four time when the others come in.”

  She felt her body finally start to relax in a way it hadn’t even when she’d slept. Some of her colleagues were into meditation to calm down, but a burst of jazz had always worked better on her mental state. So did thinking of her grandfather, the man who had loved her unconditionally and cheered for her every success—unlike her father.

  Snow hit the windshield as she pulled out of the lot and put on her wipers. The music and rare April snow might have seemed romantic had she been tucked away in her Upper East Side condo with a nice glass of Barolo. But she wasn’t. She was navigating her way through the city to a party she was dreading. But thankfully, the traffic was cooperating. A miracle, given how clogged the main streets usually were.

  When her phone rang, she answered it out of habit without looking at the screen.

  “Georgia.” Her father always sounded like he’d chewed on gravel when he spoke. “Why did I have to hear from Woo’s father about the surgery you completed yesterday? I just called Stein. Heard it went well.”

  It was so like her father to abuse the privileges of his position as the current president of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, blurring the lines of professionalism and nepotism. And so typical of him to call someone other than her to validate whether her surgery had truly been a success.

  “Yes, it did. I’m on my way to your house as we speak. I’m just south of the park,” she said.

  “Very good. Before dinner you can share your findings with your brothers and me, perhaps see if we can’t offer some perspective that might have aided the surgery in a more . . . effective manner. For example, I’d like to review your decision to split the superficial system of veins in the outer layer of the dura mater.”

  One day he’d surprise her and simply say “Good job.” After years of effort and determination to exceed his expectations of her, she’d never succeeded. Of course, she could defend herself—she could talk to him about all the case reviews of similar sets of twins. She could tell him all about the experts she’d spoken to. She could share with him how many staff members had been involved in the decision. But after all was said and done, William Starr wouldn’t be satisfied. He had never performed a separation of the one-in-ten-million condition, a procedure she had nailed. Only forty pairs of such conjoined twins had ever been separated—not one of them by her father or any of her neurological surgeon brothers.

  Yet he fought a complex internal battle of living vicariously through her success, and hating her because she was better than he was.

  “Perhaps another time, Dad. I haven’t showered yet and could do with some sleep before everyone gets there.” In retrospect, staying at the hospital to get ready probably would have been less stressful.

  “I’m sure we can work around it, Georgia. It troubles me that you didn’t review this case with us.”

  Georgia tried to bite her tongue, but couldn’t. “I’m a fully qualified neurosurgeon. A damn good one who—”

  “Because of me,” her father spat out.

  She shook her head even though he couldn’t see her. Anger bubbled. He didn’t care about the little girls. Didn’t care that Hope and Faith’s parents were sitting a vigil outside the ICU. He only cared about his reputation and legacy. That he got his share of the credit for her work. Something she didn’t care about. “The girls are fine, thank you for asking,” she said, sarcastically. “And I’m a damn good surgeon because I worked my ass off.” She had sacrificed having real friends, boyfriends, life-changing fun college years. She’d been on this path since her sixth birthday, when her grandfather had bought her a model of a three-part skull with a coordinating eight-part brain that fit perfectly into its cranial cavity. She’d spent the day learning how to pronounce and spell words like “zygomatic,” “maxilla,” and “mandible.” It sat now on a shelf in her office, where she’d use it to help explain to children what their surgeries would entail.

  Her grandfather had always been the one to encourage her, to support her.

  Now, because she was just full-on mad, she couldn’t help but be defensive. “I asked my peers at the hospital. I consulted with surgeons who had actually done this procedure. I had plenty of advice from people who were legally allowed to review the case.”

  “Ah, so now you think you are better than your brothers and me? That our collective decades of experience are worth less than your paltry years.”

  Paltry? At thirty-six, she was already recognized as one of the country’s leading pediatric neurosurgeons. Though her brothers had set an exceptionally high bar in the field, she was on a path to best all of their accomplishments. Even her second-oldest brother, Randall, who was already head of neurology at a prestigious children’s hospital in Atlanta, couldn’t compete with what she’d now done.

  And while she hated to admit to herself that competition mattered to her, the truth was you couldn’t grow up in—or survive—a family like hers without embracing it. Graduating from high school a year early, getting her undergrad degree and completing med school in three years each, and blowing through her neurology residency in only five years—as her professors realized there was little left to teach her—had all been motivated by her brothers’ assertions that she’d never beat them.

  But she would never have been able to do what she did day after day if she hadn’t cared. And her motivation was purely the number of children she could help if she worked hard enough, learned more. In her mind, her reputation wasn’t in the certificates hanging on her walls or the praise she got after surgeries, it was pinned to the notice board in her office. Pictures of children who thrived after they had left her operating table.

  “Dad, I just didn’t need your advice on this, a procedure you’ve never done.”

  “We’ll discuss this further when you get here.”

  And with that, he hung up.

  Adrenaline coursed through her. She should just turn the car around and head back home. She was tired of being treated like the less-experienced one, the less-tenured one, the less-smart one.

  The traffic began to move, the weather obviously keeping some people home, and a large bus pulled in front of her. It looked high-end, and for a moment she wondered if the Knicks had a game that night before dismissing the idea. Surely the visiting team would arrive sooner.

  It seemed to take an age for the lights to change and even Brubeck’s “Kathy’s Waltz” failed to slow down her breathing, which, like her heartbeat, had accelerated during the conversation with her father. Finally, the bus’s brake lights went off as it began to move forward.

  In only a few minutes, she’d be at her parents’ place.

  Now she had to decide if she was going to step inside.

  * * *

  Lennon looked down at the blank page of the black notebook that lay open on the table of the tour bus. It was the same kind of hardback Moleskine notebook in which he’d documented his life ever since the day one had first been put into his thirteen-year-old hands. When this book was filled, it would join the hundred and forty-nine others he’d stacked in an old trunk over the last fourteen years. The outside of the notebook was battered, the corners beaten, looking like he felt. The pages were plain—unlined and unstructured like his
thoughts.

  He flipped back through the pages. Archival ink from his Meisterstück Solitaire Blue Hour Skeleton fountain pen covered the page. The pen was his sword, the only defense he had against the thoughts that constantly crowded his head. Words, ideas, memories—the things he couldn’t possibly express to his fellow band members. Having grown up with him in a group home, they were his brothers in every way that mattered and the only real family he’d ever known. They’d humored him, the youngest of them, as he’d trailed after them. They’d dealt with him. They’d tolerated him—then, and now. He was their second choice after their original drummer, Adam, had committed suicide when the band were still boys in a group home, long before they hit it big. He knew that. He was still waiting for the day that they’d decide to shut the band down.

  The sabbatical was the first sign of that. After the tour ended, they were taking the rest of the year off to do other things. Other things. He couldn’t think of any other thing he wanted to do more than play drums.

  He tapped a rhythm with the pen on the surface of the page. Drummer’s habit.

  In the earliest notebooks, he’d made lists. Boring shit about his day. What he’d had for dinner. Which teacher had pissed him off. Which girl he wanted to make out with. But then at fourteen, he’d seen images of Kurt Cobain’s notebooks and had become inspired by the way he could spew the chaos in his head down onto paper. Lennon flicked back a couple of pages. A sketch he’d drawn of the square in Cleveland, a poem he’d written one morning as the sun had exploded over the Baltimore sky, song lyrics he’d started then scribbled over in Atlanta because they revealed too much.

  Through the condensation on the inside of the window, he caught sight of the rare April snow. The sky was the color of freshly poured concrete. It was depressing, especially when spring had appeared to be just around the corner when they’d played Washington a few nights earlier. But New York was it, the final night of a world tour that had started with Europe and Canada the previous year and ended with three straight months across the United States. He was tired, and wanted his own bed. Preferably a bed anywhere there was no fucking chance of snow.

  The bus lurched as it hit a series of winter-ravaged potholes. They weren’t supposed to be on this damn bus, but the weather had caused airport problems, and their private jets were still in Philadelphia.

  Once upon a time, the band would have just hopped on the crew bus, but what had once been just the five of them was now an entourage of ten.

  He looked up as two-year-old Petal, daughter of lead singer, Dred, squealed from her car seat that was fixed to the booth near the front of the coach. Thankfully, the previous occupants had taken young kids on tour and had modified the seats to accommodate them. Nik, and his girlfriend, Jenny, sat opposite her in the booth-style seating, entertaining her using Jenny’s scarf to play peek-a-boo. When Nik dropped the scarf, Jenny shouted “Boo,” making Petal giggle all over again. When the women and kids had flown out to Philly to join them for the last two shows, no one had been planning for a multi-family bus trip to their last show in New York.

  Nik’s free hand trailed down Jenny’s back and skimmed the inch of skin between her jeans and shirt. Jenny reached behind her and gripped his fingers to stop him, then linked her fingers with his.

  Lennon picked up his pen and wrote.

  Envy.

  Dred walked out of the washroom holding his two-month-old daughter, Arwen, and a full plastic sack whose baby-powder scent didn’t quite conceal the odor of its contents. “Fuck, it never gets any easier,” he said. He made gagging motions as he dropped the diaper into the garbage. “How did I end up with two girls who poop like grown men? It’s a good thing I love you,” he said as he kissed Arwen on the crown of her head, a head Lennon knew would smell faintly of lavender, like it always did. Lennon’s heart squeezed tightly as he watched one of his best friends with the daughter he’d given a dumb-ass Lord of the Rings name like his own. Dred stared at Pixie with love as he handed their daughter back to her. When Petal lifted her arms up toward her daddy, Dred sat back down next to her to cover her cheek in kisses.

  Love, Lennon wrote.

  Elliott’s laugh sounded from the back bedroom, where the guitarist was locked away with his girlfriend, Kendalee. It was the first time she’d ever been on a tour bus, and from the sounds coming from there, the quality walnut furniture was not the only thing Elliott was showing her.

  Jordan, the band’s bass guitarist, emerged from his bunk where he’d been video-chatting with his fiancée, Lexi, who was in London for a guest appearance with the English National Ballet. His shoulders were no longer up near his ears with stress, and from the satisfied smirk on the big lug’s face and the way he was still tucking his shirt in his jeans, they’d done more than just chat.

  Desire.

  His pen hovered above the word, ready to cross it out. But he decided to add another word instead.

  Lust.

  But one was not enough.

  Sex.

  Fuck.

  Envy.

  Envy.

  Envy.

  Lennon bit down a curse and scribbled his pen over the page, blacking the whole thing out, before slamming the notebook closed. He popped his earbuds in, found “Drain You,” and looked out the window again. Fans droned on about the five distorted tracks and Cobain’s dislike of overdubbing, but they missed the heart of the song. Grohl’s fucking clever attention to the eighths. The crash of the first beat carried by the half-open hi-hat on counts two, three, and four was simple, but the combination of the snare on two—the “and” beat—and four with the bass drum filling in on every eighth when there was no snare was fucking genius.

  He’d met Grohl, even talked about doing something together while the band was on hiatus. Dave was one of the best drummers of his generation, and while Lennon was good, he didn’t have the swagger of Zeppelin’s John Bonham, the ferocity of The Who’s Keith Moon, or the showmanship of Cream’s Ginger Baker. No matter what Rolling Stone said.

  He closed his eyes and leaned back.

  The seat jostled. Someone had come to sit on the curved seat with him, but he kept his eyes closed. The thoughts were all too close to the surface.

  God, how he wished he could stop the never-ending stream of thoughts that kept him awake and edgy and raw late at night and forced him out of bed early in the morning. The band assumed he was one of the—what the fuck had Dred called them?—sleepless elite. People who could thrive on no sleep. People like tech geeks, according to Dred, who could sleep during the day in their beanbag-filled offices in between building apps that nobody gave a shit about. He’d let Dred believe it rather than explain the truth.

  When a foot made contact with his shin under the table, Lennon opened one eye for a moment before closing it again.

  Jordan was sitting across the table.

  “You okay?” Jordan asked. “You’ve been quiet since Philly.”

  Lennon took out his earbuds, but looked over Jordan’s shoulder toward the windshield instead of at his eyes. Eyes told the truth. Lies could fall easily from lips, but the eyes were the most honest thing about a person—that and the way they got off. Orgasms are as honest a reaction as they come. He laughed at his own pun.

  “What’s funny?” Jordan asked.

  “You walking in here still putting your clothes back together after tugging one off in your bunk.”

  Jordan shook his head, sadness etched in his eyes, and Lennon’s chest tightened. Why couldn’t he just tell them the way he felt, the way the thoughts filled his head to the point where he felt he was going to break? He was happy for his friend. Fuck, Jordan deserved every moment he spent with Lexi.

  Jordan slapped the table that sat between them. “Okay,” he said as he stood, “you know where I am if you need to . . . you know . . . talk or shit.” Jordan headed back to his seat near Pixie.

  I didn’t mean it.

  I’m sorry.

  Come back.

  God, he wanted
Jordan to turn around so he could tell him what he meant to Lennon. So he could tell Jordan how much he loved Lexi and the two of them together.

  But he couldn’t. The words stuck somewhere between his heart and his brain . . . his head forcing them to remain deep inside.

  Because Jordan, like all the rest of them, had everything he wanted.

  Everything he could never have.

  He was stuck in the spiral.

  It’s all over tonight.

  Preload won’t get back together after the hiatus.

  Which means I won’t have a job.

  Which means I should sell the condo.

  Because no job equals no money, which equals no home.

  No different from being left—

  “Fuck, I need sleep,” Nik said as he crashed down next to him.

  Lennon looked at his friend out of the corner of his eye. “Stop banging your chick and you might get some.”

  Nik laughed and looked across the bus at Jenny, who was in conversation with Dred. “Yeah. Like that’s going to happen.”

  Nik leaned forward and placed his elbows on the table. Which meant he was about to get serious. Lennon really couldn’t handle serious Nik. Because when Nik got serious, he became the older sibling Lennon craved. Not that anyone could replace his sister.

  “I want to talk to you about Jennifer.”

  Lennon’s chest tightened. Of course he did. He wished he’d never mentioned her name. He wished it had never come out that he’d helped out Nik’s girlfriend, Jenny, all those years ago simply because she’d shared a name with his dead sister. Because in some small way, it had felt like he was helping Jennifer. Which was stupid.

  They want to know about her.

  They’ll blame you for her death.

  Just like your mother did.

  Just like you do.

  They want to help.

  You did kill her.

  They’ll abandon you like Mom did.

  Bile began to rise, stinging his throat as he tried to formulate a sentence. “You don’t know how to take care of your girl? It’d be my pleasure to show her what she’s missing.” He grabbed his crotch for good measure. Distract, dismiss, evade, offend. Anything but talk about the other Jennifer. His Jennifer. The one who’d loved him. The one who’d handed him cheese strings through the bars of his crib when he was starving. The one he’d watched curl up next to that prison, a trail of blood leaking from her ear as she died.