All Rhodes Lead Here Read online

  I lifted my hand and hoped his dad had disappeared. “Hi.”

  The kid looked at me and froze too. “What happened to your face?”

  I kept forgetting I was scaring people. “Nothing bad, no one hurt me. I’m fine, and thank you for worrying.”

  The same color eyes as his dad’s bounced around my face, and I wasn’t sure he heard me.

  “I’m okay,” I tried to assure him. “Promise.”

  That was good enough for him because his expression finally turned a little anxious. “Did it… bother you?”

  I scrunched up my face and then winced. “Are you kidding me? No way.”

  His dad was right, he didn’t believe it. I could feel his soul rolling its spiritual eyes.

  “I’m serious. You’ve got such a great voice.”

  He still wasn’t buying it.

  I had to go at this at a different angle. “I recognized a couple of the songs you were playing, but there was one in the middle… what was it?”

  That got his face to go red.

  And my gut went off. “Was it yours? Did you come up with it?”

  His face disappeared, and I moved over to look into the garage. Amos had only taken a couple steps back. His attention was focused on the floor.

  “If you did, that’s amazing, Amos. I…” Shit. I hadn’t planned on saying it, but… I was here. “I… used to be a songwriter.”

  He wouldn’t look at me.

  Oh, man. I should have been sneakier. “Hey, I’m serious. I don’t like to hurt people’s feelings, but if I didn’t think you were good—your voice and that song you sang—I wouldn’t bring it up. It is really good. You’re really talented.”

  Amos lifted the toe of one of his sneakers.

  And I felt terrible. “I’m serious.” I cleared my throat. “I, uh, a few of my songs have been… on albums.”

  The toe of his other sneaker went up.

  “If you wanted… I could help you. Write, I mean. Give you advice. I’m not the best, but I’m not the worst. But I’ve got a good ear, and I usually know what works and what doesn’t.”

  That got me a peek of a gray eye.

  “If you want. I’ve sat through some voice lessons before too,” I offered. Sat through more than “some” to be honest. I didn’t have a naturally great voice, but I wasn’t totally tone deaf, and if I sang, cats wouldn’t howl and children wouldn’t run screaming.

  His throat bobbed, and I waited. “You’ve written songs that other people sang?” he asked in sheer disbelief.

  It wouldn’t be the first time. “Yes.”

  Both toes went up, and it took him another second to finally get out, “I had a voice teacher a long time ago”—I tried not to smile at what he might consider to be a long time ago—“but that was the last time I had lessons. I’m in choir at school.”

  “I can tell.”

  He slid me a look of total bullshit. “I’m not that good.”

  “I think you are, but I’m sure Reiner Kulti used to think he had room to improve.”

  “Who’s that?”

  It was my turn to slide him a look. “A famous soccer player. My point is… I think you are talented, but someone once told my… friend… that even natural athletes need coaches and training. Your voice—and songwriting—are like instruments, and you have to practice them. If you want. I’m usually bored upstairs, so I really wouldn’t mind. But you should ask your dad and mom for permission first.”

  “Mom would let me do whatever with you. She says she owes you her life.”

  I smiled, but he didn’t see it because he was back to focusing on his shoes. Did that mean that he’d think about it? “Okay, just let me know. You know where I am.”

  Another gray-eyed gaze met mine, and I swear there was a small, small smile on his face.

  There was a smile on mine too.

  Chapter 13

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  Sitting with one leg crossed over the other in the camping chair of Mr. Rhodes’s garage, I eyed his son. He was sitting on the floor with a cushion he’d pulled out of somewhere with his writing notebook propped on a knee. We’d been going at writing advice for the last hour, and I wasn’t going to say we were arguing, because Amos was way too conservative around me, but it was about as close as he was capable of. He had yet to roll his eyes too.

  This was our fourth session together, and honestly, I was still stunned he’d knocked on the door about two weeks ago and asked if I was busy—I hadn’t been—and if I could check something he’d worked on.

  I couldn’t remember ever feeling so honored.

  Not even when Yuki had laid on her guest room bed beside me and whispered, “I can’t do this, Ora-Bora. Will you help me?” I hadn’t been sure I could, but my heart and brain had proved me wrong and we’d written twelve songs together.

  Plus… he was a shy kid, and that alone touched me.

  Satan couldn’t have dragged me away from helping Amos.

  So that was what I’d done. For two hours that day.

  Three hours two days later.

  Two hours almost every day after that.

  He had been so shy that first time, listening to me rambling mostly, then shoving his notebook in my direction and we’d gone back and forth like that. I took it seriously. I knew exactly what it was like to show someone something you’d worked on and hope they didn’t hate it.

  Honestly, it humbled me that he had taken such a huge step.

  Slowly but surely though, he’d started to open up. We discussed things. He was asking questions! Mostly, he was talking to me.

  And I loved talking.

  Which was exactly what he was doing then: asking why I thought that him writing a real deep love song was out of his league. It wasn’t the first time I’d tried hinting at it, but it was the first time I straight out said maybe not to.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you wanting to write this song about love, but you’re fifteen and you don’t want to be the next Bieber, am I right?”

  Amos pressed his lips together and shook his head a little too rapidly considering the former teen pop star was a bazillionaire.

  “I think you should write about something close to you. Why can’t it be about love but not romantic love?” I asked.

  He scrunched up his face and thought about it. He’d shown me two songs, both of which weren’t ready; he’d made that clear about a dozen times. They had been… not dark but not what I’d been expecting at all. “Like about my mom?”

  His mom. I lifted a shoulder. “Why not? There’s no love more unconditional than that if you’re lucky.”

  Amos’s scrunched-up face went nowhere.

  “I’m just saying, it’s more heartfelt if you feel it, if you experience it. It’s kind of like writing a book; show don’t tell. Like there’s this… producer I used to know who has written a lot of hit love songs… He’s been married eight times. He falls in and out of love in the blink of an eye. Is he a scumbag? Yeah. But he’s really, really good at what he does.”

  “A producer?” he asked with way too much doubt in his tone.

  I nodded. He still didn’t believe me, and it made me want to smile.

  But I preferred that than him knowing. Or expecting something.

  “Maybe that’s why you’ve been struggling so much trying to write your own music, Stevie Ray Junior.”

  Yeah, he wasn’t biting. But I had learned he got a kick out of me using certain musician’s names as nicknames. I missed having people to pick on, and he was such a good kid.

  “Okay, tell me, who do you love?”

  Amos sneered in this way that made me feel like I was asking him to take a nudie and send it to a girl he liked.

  “Okay, your mom, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your dads?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who else?”

  He leaned back on one hand and seemed to think about it. “I love my grandmas.”

  “All righ
t, who else?”

  “Uncle Johnny, I guess.”

  “I guess?” That made me laugh. “Anyone else?”

  He shrugged.

  “Well, think about that. About how they make you feel.”

  His sneer was still there a little bit. “But my mom?”

  “Yeah, your mom! Don’t you love her the most?”

  “I don’t know. The same as my dads?”

  I still hadn’t gotten any further with the “dads” thing. “I’m just throwing out ideas.”

  “Did you ever write songs about your mom?” he asked.

  I’d heard one of them playing at the grocery store a week ago. I’d ended up with a headache behind one eye by the time it had finished, but I didn’t tell him that. “Only almost all of them.” That was an exaggeration. I hadn’t written anything new since I’d spent the month with Yuki. There hadn’t been all that much to inspire me since, or a need. Personally, writing used to come so easily to me. Too easily according to what Yuki and Kaden used to say. All I ever had to do was sit down and words just… came to me.

  My uncle said it was why I talked so much. There were always too many words bouncing around in my head and they had to come out somehow. There were worse things in life.

  But I hadn’t heard the words that had come to me so randomly for most of my life in forever. I wasn’t sure what it said about me or where I was in life now that the absence didn’t scare me. Especially not when I knew for sure that at some point, it would have been terrifying.

  Looking back on it, the words had tapered off over the years. I wondered now if that should have been a sign.

  “I feel like my best songs were the ones I wrote when I was between your age now and twenty-one. It doesn’t come as easily to me now anymore.” I shrugged, not wanting to tell him more.

  Part of it, I thought was that I had been younger and more innocent. My heart had been more… pure. My grief more rabid. I’d felt so, so much back then. And now… now I knew that the world was split about fifty-fifty, if not seventy-thirty with assholes versus good people. My grief, which had been what consumed so much of my life, had tapered with time.

  I was pretty good from twenty-one to twenty-eight, when I’d been at my peak in love. When things had been great—not as great now that I thought back on all the things that had been said and done that I had brushed off. But I’d thought for sure I’d found my life partner. It hadn’t come as easily, but I’d still felt the words there, lying right under my heart, ready.

  Back then, I’d still woken up in the middle of the night with strings of words on my tongue.

  Except for the one album I’d written with Yuki, while I’d been grieving the loss of my relationship, with the emptiness of accepting that some things weren’t forever so fresh, I’d pulled even more words out of myself. We’d gotten that album done in a month while both of us had broken hearts.

  It was some of my favorite work.

  Nori had written some of it with us, but she was a machine of music who pushed hits out like she shit out rainbows; she took words and brought them to life. I was the bones, and she was the sinews and pink fingernail beds. It was amazing. A gift from God.

  But I couldn’t and wouldn’t tell Amos any of this. Not yet. It didn’t matter anymore.

  All I had left anyway was a box full of old notebooks.

  “I was thinking about taking a class…,” he started to say, and it was hard for me not to scrunch up my nose.

  I didn’t want to talk him out of doing anything he wanted to do, even if I thought it was pointless. Writing songs wasn’t math or science; there wasn’t a formula in the world for it. You either had it or you didn’t.

  And I knew Amos did because the two songs he had shown me, humming them quietly during our last session, were beautiful and had so, so much potential.

  “Why not?” I said instead, plastering a smile onto my face so he couldn’t read my mind. “Maybe you’ll learn something.”

  He gave me another one of his dubious looks. “Do you think I should?”

  “If you really want to.”

  “Would you?”

  I was busy trying to come up with some polite way of saying no when Amos sat up straight and his eyes went wide.

  He was looking at something behind me.

  “What is it?”

  His mouth barely moved. “Don’t make any sudden movements.”

  I wanted to get up and run, his face was that serious. “Why?” Should I turn around? I should turn around.

  “There’s a hawk behind you,” he said before I got a chance to.

  I sat up even straighter. “A what?”

  “A hawk,” he kept on whispering. “It’s right there. Right behind you.”

  “A hawk? Like a bird?”

  Bless Amos’s sweet soul, he didn’t make a sarcastic comment. He said, calmly, sounding very much like his dad from how serious he was speaking, “Yes, a hawk like a bird. I don’t know them like my dad does.” His throat bobbed. “He’s huge.”

  Slowly, I tried to look behind me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a small figure just right outside the garage. Even more slowly, I turned the rest of my body—and the chair—around. Like Amos had warned, there was a hawk right there. On the ground. Hanging out. He was looking at us. Maybe just at me but probably both of us.

  I squinted. “Am, is he bleeding?”

  There was a squeaking sound before I felt him crawl over to sit on the floor beside me. He whispered, “I think so. His eye looks kinda swollen.”

  One eye did look bigger than the other one. “Yeah. Do you think he’s hurt? I mean, he shouldn’t be hanging out like that, right? Just standing there?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  We sat there quietly together, watching the bird watch us. Minutes passed, and he didn’t fly away. He didn’t do anything.

  “Should we see if we can get it to fly away?” I asked quietly. “So we can tell if it’s hurt?”

  “I guess.”

  We both started to get up, and reasoning hit me. I patted him on the shoulder to get him to stay down. “No, let me. Maybe he’s a Navy SEAL hawk that doesn’t give a fuck, and if we scare him, he’ll attack. You can drive me to the hospital if he gets me.” I thought about it. “Do you know how to drive?”

  “Dad taught me a long time ago.”

  I eyed him. “Do you have a permit?”

  The expression on his face said it all. He didn’t.

  “Oh well.”

  I was pretty sure Amos snickered a little bit, and it made me smile.

  Not going too fast or too slowly, I got to my feet. I took a step forward, and the bird didn’t give a shit.

  Another and then another step and still, he refused to do anything.

  “He should’ve flown off by now,” Am whispered.

  That’s what I was worried about. Ready to cover my face if he decided to go crazy on me, I kept going closer and closer to the bird, but he didn’t care. His eye was definitely swollen, and I could see the discoloration of blood on his head. “He is hurt.”

  “Yeah?”

  I got two feet away from the hawk. “Yeah, he’s got a gash on his head. Aww, poor little baby. Maybe his wing is hurt too since he’s not going away.”

  “He should’ve by now…,” Am whispered.

  “We have to help him,” I said. “We should call your dad, but my service doesn’t work down here.”

  “Mine neither.”

  I wanted to ask him what to do, but I was the adult. I had to figure it out. I’d watched a show about game wardens before. What would they do?

  Put it in a crate.

  “By any chance do you have a crate in your house?”

  He thought about it. “I think so.”

  “Can you go get it?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to put him in it.”

  “How?”

  “I have to grab him, I guess.”

  “Ora! He’l
l rip your face off!” he hissed, but I was too busy being focused on him worrying about my safety to focus on anything else.

  We were becoming friends. “Well, I’d rather have a few stitches than he get hit by a car if he goes off by himself,” I said.

  He seemed to think about it. “Let’s call Dad and have him come and get it. He’ll know what to do.”

  “I know he will, but who knows how far he is, or if he’ll even be able to answer the phone anytime soon. Go get the crate, and then we can call and ask, deal?”

  “This is stupid, Ora.”

  “Probably, but I won’t be able to sleep tonight if he gets hurt. Please, Am, go grab it.”

  The teenager cursed under his breath and slowly walked way around the bird–who still didn’t move—before taking off running into his house. I kept on watching the majestic bird as he just waited around, crazy sharp eyes looking from side to side with those insane neck movements of his kind.

  Getting a good look at him… he was huge. Like literally massive. Was that normal? Was he on steroids?

  “Hey, friend,” I said. “Wait here a second, okay? We’ll get you some help.”

  He didn’t respond, obviously.

  Why my heart started beating faster though, I really didn’t get. Never mind, I guess I did. I was going to have to grab this big son of a bitch. If my memory served me correctly—from all the episodes I’d seen of zoo shows and the one game warden show—you just kind of had to... grab them.

  Could they smell fear? Like dogs? I eyed my new friend and hoped like hell he couldn’t.

  Two seconds later, the door to the house burst open and Amos was out, setting a big crate down on the deck before running back inside. He was back out another second later, shoving something into his pockets and then picking up the crate again. He slowed down as he got closer to the garage and walked way around where the bird was still standing. He was breathing hard as he slowly set it down between us, then pulled out some leather gloves from his pockets and handed those over too.

  “This is the best I could find,” he said, eyes wide and face flushed. “You sure about this?”

  I slipped the gloves on and let out a shaky exhale before giving him a nervous smile. “No.” I kind of laughed from the nerves. “If I die—”