“Probably,” she agreed. “But you know what the tradeoff would’ve had to have been, right?”
He looked at her in astonishment for a moment and then laughed. She had popped off another one.
There was one boundary, however, that Laura did not break down. She would discuss nothing about her personal life with her fiancé. She had let everyone know that she had a fiancé, that he was older than her by a considerable margin, that he was her dentist, and that no date for the nuptials had been set, but other than that, she was mute. She deflected any and all questions about her lack of an engagement ring, about if her fiancé would like to meet them all, about any plans she might have with him on her day off, or about whatever the mysterious “it’s complicated” might be. Even Phil did not know much about the good doctor, although he was able to confirm a few strong suspicions.
“I’ve met him a few times,” he told Jake once during a Jake day, when Laura wasn’t in the studio. “He usually comes over during lunchtime to boff her and then leaves right after. Every once in a while, once every two months or so, she’ll go away somewhere with him for the weekend. I’ve never once heard her tell me she was going over to his place and, unless she’s going away on a trip with him, she never spends the night away from home.”
“Interesting,” Jake said. “Married, I assume?”
“Obviously,” Phil said. “He has a goddamn wedding ring on his finger when he shows up at our place for his nooners.”
“That’s a pretty reliable sign,” Celia, who had been listening in, could not help but observe.
Phil simply shrugged. “It’s her business, and she’s made it clear to me that she doesn’t want me sticking my nose into it. I love her to death—she’s the sister I never had—but I’m not going to push her for information or judge her. I’ll just be there for her when this finally comes crashing down.”
“That’s sweet, Phil,” Celia beamed at him, patting him on the thigh.
Phil smiled at her and then went back to taking surreptitious glances at Jake’s juicy ass, pondering what it would be like to get his hands on it.
Now, as Jake and Celia reached the furthest inset of the cove and began to turn back toward the southern exit of it, Celia said: “I’ve forgotten how monotonous the recording process is. Over and over and over again with the same thing.”
“And we’ve only just begun,” Jake said. They were, in fact, still working on the first drum and bass tracks for the first song—Celia’s Playing Those Games—and they hadn’t even gotten past the first chorus yet.
“And the Nerdlys,” she said, shaking her head. “Madre de Dios, I love them and respect them, but I just might have to kill them before this is all said and done.”
Jake laughed. “You haven’t even begun to appreciate how annoying they can be,” he told her. “Wait until we start mixing.”
She groaned.
They ran on, exiting out of the cove and then going another half a mile, onto a broader beach that was part of Sunset Bay State Park. Here, was the most difficult part of their run. It was a set of steep switchback stairs that climbed two hundred and eighty feet back up to the main road. They mounted them and conversation quickly became impossible as they huffed and puffed and their legs burned with the exertion. By the time they made it to the top, the sun was now visible in the eastern sky and they were both dripping with sweat.
“That part is a killer,” Celia panted as they took up position on the left side of the road and headed back north.
“At least it’s mostly downhill from here out,” Jake said, panting as well.
And it was. Two and a half miles later, which they accomplished with an easy seven and a half minute mile pace, they were back at the rental house, both of them feeling the satisfaction of yet another day’s run being over and done with.
They walked up and down the road a few times to let themselves cool down and then went back in. They would have a little breakfast, take their showers, and then start getting ready to hit the studio.
Another day in Coos Bay had begun.
Everyone in the house except for Stan piled into the white van at 8:45 that morning. Ted got behind the wheel. He had been designated their driver since it was part of his profession to drive similar vehicles. On the way, he made a point to tell them another of his stories. This was quickly becoming a morning routine.
“I was working the night shift, you know, and around two thirty we got this call for a single car accident over on North White, just off the Ten. This dude was in a Mazda Rx7 and must’ve come off the ramp at well over a hundred miles an hour, lost it at the bottom, and spun into this oak tree on the roadside. Hit that fucker with his passenger side and destroyed that car. It was gnarly shit, dudes. We couldn’t even tell what the car was until we found a piece of the bumper. The dude himself got ejected from the vehicle and had to have hit something, maybe the tree, because he was on the ground about twenty feet away, smashed as flat as a fuckin’ pancake, deader than shit, his goddamn skull broken open. Didn’t even have to put the monitor on him to declare his ass.”
“Jesus Christ,” Celia whispered, unconsciously giving the sign of the cross.
“That wasn’t the weird part though,” Ted continued.
“It wasn’t?” asked Jake, encouragement in his tone. Ted’s stories were actually growing on him in some bizarre, morbid fashion.
“Naw,” Ted said. “The weird part is what we found later. You see, we start looking around the area after I pronounce him, shining our flashlights here and there, just to make sure there wasn’t someone else in the car with him—sometimes that shit’ll happen, especially with newer crews who get focused on the one patient and don’t think to consider if there’s more than one. Anyway, there wasn’t nobody else in the car, but about twenty yards away or so, one of the fire guys finds the dead guy’s brain. It’s just sitting there on the fuckin’ pavement, perfectly intact, like something out of an anatomy class or something. It flew out of his head in one piece and just landed there.”
“It had to have been ejected from the broken skull in a relatively stable parabolic arc in order to have landed intact,” Nerdly observed.
“Uh ... right,” Ted said. “My thoughts exactly.
“That is a disgusting story,” Cynthia declared.
“That ain’t no shit,” Ted agreed. “Of course, us medics, with our gallows humor, we can’t leave that shit alone. The first thing my partner says—old Jimmy Cann, a good medic, ex-Vietnam guy, he ended up killing himself a few years later, ate his fuckin’ gun, you know—anyway, he says: ‘That guy must’ve lost his fuckin’ mind, huh?’”
Cynthia, Celia, Laura, and Sharon were all appalled by this. Jake, Nerdly and Ben actually found it pretty funny. Out of political correctness, however, they kept their smiles to themselves.
“All right,” Jake said to Ted. “You know I gotta ask. What made you remember that story?”
“Drivin’ this van,” Ted said solemnly. “It’s the same year as the rig we were drivin’ on that call. I’ll never forget the old 82-973.” He looked back at Jake, who was sitting in the seat behind Celia. “It was the one where the heater would only blow on high.”
“That sucks,” Jake said.
“Yep,” Ted agreed. “It’s a sucky world sometimes.”
They made it to Blake Studios at two minutes to nine and all eight of them trooped in through the security and made their way to Studio B, which was theirs for the duration. Troy Stinson, a recent graduate of the master’s program in audio engineering at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, one of the most prestigious music schools in the United States, was waiting for them in the control room. He was twenty-six years old, looked like he was fourteen due to a severe baby face, and had been assigned by Obie to be the Nerdlys’ protégé for the duration of the recording and mixing process. Troy was an eerily smart guy, long on knowledge and with a good ear for music, but short on actual experience at his new profession. He was typical of the engineers that Obie employed.