“By the way,” Paige says, “thanks for helping Joan with her song. She normally relies on her father for that stuff. We really appreciate you doing that.”

  “No problem. It’s been sort of fun. I haven’t worked on music in so long.”

  I stare off into the night. From here, Manhattan’s soaring towers look quaint and manageable. My mind returns, as always, to him. “Can I ask you something? I was talking to Joan and she said Sydney last came here in January.”

  “That sounds right. Why?”

  “He was supposedly back in New York in February and April. Did you see him then?”

  She searches her mind. “No. I didn’t even know he was in town.”

  “That’s what’s strange. I’m not sure he was.” Just saying this stuff out loud makes it more real. “The reason he kept coming back was that he was working on some project. That’s what he told me. He had so many things going on at once, I can’t even remember what the project was. But the weird part is, I spoke to his assistant and she said Syd didn’t take any business trips to New York this year. As far as she knows, there was no project.”

  Her forehead wrinkles with more than her usual concern.

  “And there’s something else,” I say. “I specifically remember him telling me that he saw you in April and he took you out for your birthday.”

  Paige has always had the entire world’s worry in her eyes. But when faced with a tangible problem, she, more than anyone, can be relied on to provide a level-headed solution. “No,” she says. “That never happened. Ollie was supposed to take me out for my birthday, but we had to cancel. I got sick.”

  That’s what Joan said. I was hoping these many discrepancies could be explained away as nothing more than an innocent misunderstanding, but that seems like wishful thinking at this point.

  “When he was here in January, did he mention anything about work?” I say. “Do you remember what you guys talked about?”

  “I’m not sure,” Paige says, still processing it all. “I know he wanted to look at some property while he was here. I don’t know if he did.”

  That’s not surprising; we often spoke about moving back east. But what I can’t fathom is the blatant deceit. It just seems unthinkable that my gray-haired man lied straight to my face.

  I stare off. The city glows in the distance.

  “What are you thinking?” she says.

  “Nothing,” I say, because I don’t want to have to explain what I’m feeling. I can’t prove it yet, but I know it in my heart: He’s out there, Sydney, some leftover impression of him. And I really have no choice anymore. I have to give chase.

  13

  I’m lying on my bed in the middle of the day, using the Gibson as a pillow instead of an instrument and hugging my journal instead of writing in it.

  Gavin told me to make my song more about me and my memories, so that’s what I’ve been trying to do, but it’s the hardest thing. I’ll be thinking about one sad memory, like the day Pepper went to sleep in 2009, and I’ll be back there in the lobby at the veterinarian’s office while Mom and Dad are in the room with Pepper and the lady at the desk gives me a lollipop. And just seeing that lollipop sends me to another memory of being at camp in 2011 when I lose my lollipop and I find it stuck in Harper’s hair. And that memory makes me smile and I come back to today and I realize that the contest deadline keeps getting closer but I still don’t have a song that can spread around the world and be a reminder for everyone.

  But I can’t quit because Dad always tells me that he knew I’d be a musician when I was just a baby. He would play me songs on his guitar and I’d sit in my jumper and stare at him. I’d reach for the strings and he’d make different chords and let me strum. Dad says he realized back then that I had the music bug in me, the same bug he had and his mother had. I was too young to remember all this myself but I’ve heard him talk about it so many times, it’s almost like one of my own memories.

  But Dad can’t help me now and I’m not getting anywhere on my own. I take my journal and grab the Gibson and walk past the kitchen, where Mom is busy teaching a boy, and I go down to the studio. Gavin’s door is open so I walk right in and turn on the light. His naked arm is hanging off the bed.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know you were sleeping.”

  He sits up in bed and gives his blackbird hand signal and then he falls back down like he just used up all his energy.

  There’s a box of photos on the floor and on the top there’s a girl I know looking up at me. “Is that my mom?”

  He rolls over and sticks his face off the bed and tries to see the photo. “Yes.”

  In the photo, Mom’s hair is cut straight across and she’s sitting next to a guy with yellow hair. “Is that Sydney?”

  Gavin groans, which means I guessed right. I look at the younger Sydney and the younger Mom and I try to imagine what they were saying to each other when the picture was taken. But I’ll never know and that’s frustrating.

  “Dad has pictures of Grandma Joan from when she was really young,” I say. “I like looking at them but they also make me mad, because I wish I’d known her back then.”

  His eyes are squeezed thin, like he wants to see me, but the light is bothering him.

  “She was one of my favorite people,” I say.

  He nods and looks down at the photo. I enjoy telling Gavin about my memories of Sydney, but I don’t want to get into that right now because we have a lot of work to do on our song. “I’ve been waiting for a good idea to come, but nothing’s happening. I need your help.”

  Gavin lifts himself up onto his elbow and looks at his phone. He nods like he agrees with what the phone is saying and then he tosses it onto the mattress. “I can’t today. I have to take care of something.”

  He gets out of bed, as slow as an old man, and then he grabs the empty glass from the dresser and leaves.

  Now I’m all alone in his bedroom. I kick a dirty sock into a pile of clothes in the corner. On the nightstand there’s a cereal bowl, wallet, phone charger, and a few books from Dad’s bookshelf, including Songwriters on Songwriting, which is a book full of famous rock stars talking about how they wrote their best songs. John Lennon isn’t in the book. That’s what gave me the idea to write my very own John Lennon’s Ten Rules of Songwriting.

  I grab Gavin’s wallet and open it. On his driver’s license, his last name is Deifendorf, not Winters, and his birthday is March 17, 1975. He’s five foot eleven, which is the exact same height as John Lennon.

  “There’s not much cash in there,” Gavin says. He’s back and holding a full glass of water.

  I toss the wallet onto the nightstand. “I was just looking. I don’t know why.”

  He doesn’t seem to care and now I’m focused on his stomach, which looks like a waffle maker but with bigger squares. I’m noticing he doesn’t have any tattoos or hair like Dad has.

  And now I’m focusing on his face again and it looks like he might be sick. “Are you okay?”

  “I’ll let you ask me anything as long as it’s not that.” He takes a long drink of water and when he’s finished he makes a sound like he was very thirsty and the water was very good. “Sorry, I just don’t like that question.” He looks into his glass but there’s no water left. “Have you tried a change of scenery?”

  “I don’t think so. What’s that?”

  “Go outside. Take a walk. Do anything but focus on your song.”

  That probably won’t work because I have a really hard time getting my brain to think about what I tell it to think about. I guess I’m going to have to lose a whole day because Gavin is too busy to help me. I walk over to the door.

  “Where are you going?” he says.

  “I can’t do a change of scenery. It won’t work for me.”

  “Wait,” Gavin says, and he takes a big breath, kind of like when you ask the man in the ice cream truck for a Choco Taco but he tells you there aren’t any left so you sigh and order a vanilla cone with sprinkles, even though it wasn’t your first choice. Gavin picks up one of Dad’s books; I don’t know which one. “Have you ever been to Café La Fortuna?”

  “No,” I say. “What’s that?”

  I open my drawers and pull out my clothes with the best memories: Sparkly shorts from when I won a stuffed animal on the boardwalk (Thursday, August 2, 2012); fox socks from when Grandpa took me fishing and I caught a flounder and I threw the flounder back and promised never to go fishing again (Sunday, June 5, 2011); white button-down shirt from when the audience clapped for me at my piano recital (Friday, April 19, 2013). I’m being extra-picky because New York City is a special place where they have important events like basketball games, concerts, meetings, and award ceremonies for contests.

  Mom hands Gavin some money, but he gives it back, and then I grab my journal and we’re finally gone. We walk down the big hill near our house and through the town of Hoboken and each time we cross the street, Gavin holds my hand. His fingers are smooth like wet soap, not like Dad’s fingers, which have calluses from playing drums and guitar.

  We reach the train station and I want to tell Gavin that I was here once before with Sydney on Friday, May 21, 2010, but I don’t say it right now because I don’t want to slow us down. We walk down the steps and now we’re underground. Gavin slides a card into a slot and we go through the gate and walk onto the train. I copy everything he does.

  We come back up the stairs and now we’re in the Big Apple, which is a name that’s too strange to think about. There’s so much to see, like a lady holding her phone far away and yelling into it and a man wearing a Beatles shirt who doesn’t see that I’m holding up my hand for a high five and also a man who hands me a paper that says 20% Off All Apparel. I don’t know exactly what apparel is, but it seems like a good deal. Too bad we’re not here to shop. I’m not sure why we’re here, actually. We’re on a Magical Mystery Tour.

  Gavin looks down at me now with his sunglasses and his fuzzy cheeks, which are starting to look like Dad’s. “Do you know how to call a cab?” he asks.

  We stand at the corner and he lets me do the waving, but the taxis zoom by like yellow submarines.

  “Try this.” He lifts me onto his shoulders and we step into the street. I wave my hand until a taxi finally stops in front of us.

  July 16, 2013. I called my first taxi.

  The taxi lets us out at Seventy-First Street and now we’re standing on the sidewalk and Gavin is checking his phone. We head over to a little store with a sign that says HARDWARE and Gavin takes me inside. We go down a very crowded aisle to the back of the small store and then turn around and walk back outside.

  “What are we doing here?” I say.

  “We’re soaking it in,” Gavin says.

  “We just walked in that store and walked right back out.”

  “Yes, we did.”

  Now we’re walking down Columbus Avenue and Gavin is looking at his phone again and we stop in front of a store called West Side Pharmacy. We go inside and Gavin heads to the counter, which is what you do when you want to pay for your item, but Gavin isn’t holding any items.

  “See anyone you know?” Gavin says.

  I look at the man behind the counter who’s busy helping another customer. He has glasses and a few pieces of hair and I know that I’ve never seen this man before in my life. But then I see another face behind the man’s head and this face I know well because it’s John Lennon’s face. It’s on a photograph that’s hanging on the wall. The whole wall is covered in photographs and I know a few of these other faces too because they’re famous and in some of the photographs I see the man behind the counter with his arm around the famous people.

  “Can I help you?” the man behind the counter asks, and he says it like English is something he’s still learning even though he’s an old man.

  “You like John Lennon?” I say.

  He smiles and turns to the photo on the wall. “The best.”

  “He’s my favorite and he’s also my dad’s favorite.”

  “This was his pharmacy,” the man says. “We were friends.”

  “No way. You’re lying.”

  “I tell the truth.”

  “So you’re saying John Lennon was in this store?”

  He points to the floor right below me. “He stood in your same spot.”

  I look down. It’s like I stepped inside one of John’s memories, and now I’m afraid to move even an inch.

  We turn off the busy road onto a quiet street with a few city trees, which are trees that grow out of little wooden boxes on the sidewalk instead of grass. They’re nicer than the city trees we have in Jersey City because they don’t have empty plastic shopping bags stuck in their branches.

  I’m having a hard time believing that I just put my feet where John Lennon put his feet and I also met someone who knew John and his family. I ask Gavin, “How did you know that John went to that store?”

  “I read about it in one of your dad’s books. And you know that hardware store we went into before that? That used to be Café La Fortuna. That’s where John would hang out and drink coffee. He might’ve even written a few lyrics in there.”

  “That’s so cool.” It’s like we’re going through a John Lennon museum but the museum is the whole city and there are no signs on the walls telling you why each spot is important. I can’t wait to tell Dad about this, but I’m also feeling pretty confused. “How is this supposed to help me with my song?”

  Gavin walks with just the tips of his fingers sticking into the tight pockets of his shredded shorts. I want Mom to cut up my jeans the same way.

  “Whenever I’m working on something,” Gavin says, “I always do a lot of research. When I got the part of Beau Kendricks on The Long Arm, Syd and I flew down to Louisiana. That’s where Beau is supposed to be from. I spent two days just walking around. Trying to see how he lived.”

  “Is that what we’re doing? Research?”

  “Sort of. I just thought it might help you to get out of your own head for a while. John Lennon didn’t just sit at home and write songs all day and night. He lived his life. He walked around. Drank coffee. Shopped at the pharmacy.”

  “He kept making new memories.”

  “Exactly.”

  I think about that for a minute. “That’s why you came to stay with us, right?”

  He looks confused.

  “To get out of your own head. That’s what Mom said.”

  “Oh,” Gavin says. “Yeah.”

  We keep walking and I watch my feet on the sidewalk and I think about how nice this memory will feel when I remember it later. But I notice that Gavin’s feet are missing. They were right next to my feet a second ago and now they’re gone. I stop and turn around and walk back to where Gavin is standing. He nods across the street at a building as big and pointy as a castle. “That’s where John lived,” he says.

  The Dakota.

  I remember when Dad first took me to Strawberry Fields in Central Park and he showed me the plaque that says IMAGINE. The plaque was covered with flowers and some of the flowers were forget-me-nots, which are my favorite kind, obviously. Dad asked if I wanted to walk over to the building where John and his family lived and I said yes, but then he told me the name of the building, the Dakota, and I changed my mind because I know all about the Dakota—it’s where the worst thing happened to John.

  Gavin takes my hand so we can cross the street, but I pull back. “I don’t want to.”

  He looks at the Dakota and then at me. The whole place makes me itchy, like when you walk through a spider web and you tear it off your body, but it still feels like it’s all over your skin.

  “Okay,” Gavin says, turning me in a new direction. “Let’s go visit Strawberry Fields instead.”

  I stand on the corner and look across a different street where the city just disappears all of a sudden. I know this place too. This is Central Park. I don’t want to hurt Gavin’s feelings because he’s being so nice, but I don’t want to go to Central Park either. “That’s one of my dad’s memories. I don’t want to go there without him.”

  Gavin does a rock-star look for a few seconds, which is when your eyes stare at nothing and it seems like you’re thinking about something important. It’s the best rock-star look I’ve ever seen anyone do in person.

  “I get that,” he says. “Sydney would be jealous when I went to this one coffee shop without him. It’s called Proof Bakery and they have the best croissants in L.A. Crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside. We spent a lot of Saturday mornings there together.”

  “I wish he were here with us,” I say, still thinking about Dad.

  “Yeah,” Gavin says.

  Now it seems like we’re both in a quiet mood and I didn’t mean for that to happen. It’s just hard to think about music stuff and not think about Dad. I really hope he likes my song.

  “He will,” Gavin says and that’s when I realize I was just talking out loud. I’m not sure which parts Gavin heard but the dimple on his cheek is making me feel like whatever I said was the right thing to say.

  Now we’re facing a whole different direction and we’re looking down a busy street with cars going both ways, but before we take just one step, someone stops us.

  “Excuse me,” says a lady with red sunglasses. She’s standing with another lady who’s holding what looks like a map, which is something we have hanging in our classroom but you hardly ever see anywhere else because everyone has maps on their phones.

  I’m thinking the two ladies are lost, but then they ask a question that has nothing to do with directions. It’s a question that makes me excited and jealous at the same time.

  The lady lowers her sunglasses so she can see better and she says, “Are you Gavin Winters?”

  We find an empty booth in the pizza restaurant and I ask, “Is this where John ate?”

  “We’re off the tour,” Gavin says. “We’re taking a lunch break.”

  “But I don’t eat pizza.”

 

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