“There they are.” We look up to find Randy. He drops down beside me. He’s soaked in red goo.

“Tell me you didn’t do that,” Caleb says, sounding equal parts awed and mortified.

“Had to try the fire pit!” He slaps Caleb’s shoulder. “Big old hairy guys are money for this crowd, especially when they fall in a sideways cannonball and soak half the audience.”

“That was your real goal,” Caleb guesses.

Randy salutes. “Just doing my duty to my stereotypes.” He wipes more of the sweet-smelling slick from around his eyes. “So,” he says, looking past me to Caleb, “got a case of the crazies up there, huh?”

“No, just messed up.” I catch Caleb glaring at Randy.

“What?” I ask.

Randy raises his eyebrows at us. “Nothing, I guess.” He starts running his fingers over his beard and flicking red goo off.

Caleb is back to digging in the sand.

“Caleb, what is it?”

“Nothing, it’s nothing. I just freaked. I already told you.”

Randy rolls his eyes. “Dude, stop being an idiot and tell her.”

“Yeah.” I turn his chin toward me. “You heard him.”

Caleb shrugs. “It’s no big deal!” He’s practically whining.

“Clearly it is.”

Caleb runs his hands slowly through his hair, then looks at me. “Fine. Randy is referring to my shrink-approved anxiety issues. Generalized anxiety disorder, technically. I have medication I can take when it gets too crazy, but that’s not that often. And I don’t like how it dulls me.”

I feel my shields going down, and I rub the between his shoulders. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I don’t know,” says Caleb. “I was hoping I could manage it and you wouldn’t have to know. It’s not a very cool thing for a potential lead-singer rock star to have. And I hate when people classify me.”

“I wouldn’t have classified you.”

“Yeah, but . . . once people know you have a weakness, they assume it’s always going to be an issue, which technically it is, but it can be an excuse. Not for me, for them. Like if the going got rough, you might decide to find a band who’s singer didn’t have a condition.”

“Jesus, Caleb . . .” I’d tell him he’s an idiot for even thinking such a thing, and yet, flash to earlier this week, when I imagined him dropping me because I couldn’t be his sing-in-harmony girl (though there’s still tonight’s display, but I’m thinking more and more that Val was the main instigator there). “I like you, not some idealized version of you. The anxiety’s part of what makes you, you.”

“It was part of Eli, too,” he says.

“You’re not him.”

Randy chimes in, “Listen to your manager, nephew. You are so not Eli. And I mean that in the best possible way.”

Caleb shrugs, as if he’s considering believing it, but that’s all. “The point is, every show feels like a high wire. Which can be great, until you fall off. With everything tonight . . . Sometimes it swallows me up. And the worst part is I get how important a night like tonight is, like how the world is an enormous and constantly moving place, and I want to grab on to moments for all they’re worth, except then I get so worked up that it backfires.” He sighs. “It’s a lonely feeling.”

My heart is time traveling, applying this new information to everything from tonight. Not that tonight didn’t happen, but there was more to it, and I get why he didn’t tell me, and I just want it all to be over and for neither of us to feel lonely when we’re right here together. “Far comets,” I say quietly. I put my arm around him.

“It’s okay, nephew,” says Randy. “The great thing about rock ’n’ roll is that there’s always another gig.”

“I guess,” says Caleb. “Right now I’m just hungry.”

“Burritos,” says Randy, as if he’s making a wish to the sea.

“Reuben with pickles,” says Caleb absently.

“Ask for Vic,” I add, and I put my head on his shoulder.

There’s a moment of silence. I feel a strange sensation and turn to find Randy staring at us. His brow is furrowed like he’s heard something blasphemous. “What did you just say?”

“It was in a letter I found,” says Caleb, “inside Eli’s old bag. I’m guessing you didn’t know it was there.”

His expression contorts more. Now it’s like we’re saying something blasphemous in a foreign language. “What kind of letter?”

“To me. From a few months before he died.”

Randy rubs his face slowly. “Holy crap, really? And it said something about Vic?”

“You know who that is?” I ask.

Randy nods slowly. “Vic is a legend.” To himself: “I mean, that’s gotta be who he’s talking about, right?” To the ocean: “Obviously, who else would it be?”

“Earth to Randy,” says Caleb. He’s dead serious now.

“Vic is a waiter at Canter’s Deli,” says Randy. “On Fairfax. It’s a classic joint. Allegiance used to go there after shows. You’d see famous bands, too, and TV stars. Eli loved going there.”

“Is there a Daisy there?” I ask, remembering that other line in the letter. “Or did Eli know a Daisy?”

Randy scratches his sticky beard. “Not that I know of.”

“Did you ever go to Canter’s with him?” Caleb asks.

“Yeah,” says Randy. “Early on, a bunch, but . . .” In his pause, I sense him skipping over something. Something big and subterranean. “Not in the later years.”

“He wrote the letter right before the Hollywood Bowl show,” Caleb adds.

“On the last tour? Jeez,” says Randy. “Did it even make sense? Eli was off the deep end around that time. Heavy drug use, and really paranoid.”

“About what?” I can feel Caleb wondering the same thing I am. Does Randy know about Eli’s lost songs? Does he know about “the tapes” that the letter refers to?

“Ah,” says Randy. “It’s complicated.”

“Hello,” I say, “we’re eighteen. We get complicated.”

“Sure, but this is boring complicated. I think Eli felt like the other guys were going to screw him out of his money. Eli and Kellen, the bass player, they hated each other by the end. Like, separate-cars-to-and-from-the-gig hated. After Eli bailed on the tour, they tried to sue him for lost royalties on the canceled shows and . . . man, it was as ugly as rock ’n’ roll gets. They were even threatening to go after his family, since Eli had lost most of his money, but they dropped the lawsuit when he died.”

I grip Caleb’s shoulder. The letter’s warning: doing something drastic to clean up the mess . . . I wonder if he’ll bring it up. I hope my squeeze gives him the message to keep this between us, for now.

Caleb must feel the same. He digs intently at the sand, then adds, “I want to go there.”

“Canter’s?” Randy asks. “Sure, we could go sometime.”

“How about now?” I suggest. “I think we’ve done about all there is to do here.” As I say it, a guy comes staggering down the beach, reaches the surf, and barfs into the sea. “Well, except that.”

Randy looks at Caleb with concern. “You sure?”

Caleb flashes a half smile at me, the first in what seems like years. “Actually, yeah.” He starts to get up. “That sounds great.”

“Well, I could certainly use some matzo-ball soup,” says Randy. He looks down at himself. “Maybe I’ll say I’m an extra in a horror film.”

As we walk back, I hope I was reading the moment right. Is Canter’s too close to more ghosts? Caleb is Fret Face and quiet, but I need to wait until we’ve navigated this hideous party one last time before I can ask him.

We run into Maya by the stage. Shouting over the screaming guitars of Thesis in Blood, she informs us that Val has left, too. Lucky break, though I was directing a short fantasy in my brain where I would march right up to her and ask her, you know, “What the hell?”

As we trudge up the dune, the echoing drums and drunken shouts fading behind us, I fall back beside Caleb. “I know going to another of Eli’s haunts doesn’t sound fun, but that stuff Randy said . . .”

Caleb nods. “The trouble Eli was in . . . if he was thinking of killing himself, then the stuff about Canter’s might be a clue. If he knew he wouldn’t be around to give us the tapes, then maybe . . .”

“Vic knows something,” I finish.

“Exactly what I was thinking.”

Despite all this possibility, not to mention all that’s happened tonight, the pure gravity of what he’s saying hits me again. I can’t even imagine not having a father, never mind learning that he was a famous dead guy whose footsteps I’m following in. I’m holding Caleb’s guitar case while he lugs his amp against his chest, but I reach out with my free hand and touch his chin. I just want to be so careful with him; I need him to know it.

“You don’t have to say ‘us,’” I say. “You’re going through so much. I just want to help. It doesn’t have to be—”

“Summer.”

My name in full. I’m there.

“I want it to be us.” He glances back at the beach, almost like the ghosts of tonight’s mess are wailing to him. “If that’s okay.”

“Yes, Caleb,” I say. “It is more than okay.” Finally there are smiles. He steps toward me and tries to lean in, but nearly falls over with the weight of his amp. I catch the bottom of it. “Crushing my toes would really ruin the mood.”

“Sorry.” We kiss, and as soon as our lips touch, it seems like the sound of the surf and the smell of salt increase and we could be anywhere, marooned, just us—

“Ugh. Come on already!” Randy calls from above.

But we’re not. We’re here. Tonight.

With business to do.

I pull away, rubbing Caleb’s cheek. “Come on, let’s go see Vic.”

12

MoonflowerAM @catherinefornevr 2m