Disclaimer: I do not own Moonlight or anything vaguely related to it. This is my own what-if imagining.
They say it never rains in Southern California. They would be wrong. It does, but rarely, and that's good, because when it does, bad things happen. Never mind that we aren' in Southern California anymore. It rained that day and the only thing I could think of while watching the rain outside our window was how much I missed LA. Truth be told, I wouldn't have left if we didn't have to, and if it were only myself, I probably would have toughed things out. Beth was the deciding factor. There was no way she could be safe if we stayed, and so we left.
We. Still a word I'm getting used to. After decades of being a me, it's a tricky transition to being an us again. Granted, being an us with Beth is an entirely different animal than it was with Coraline. I know I'm not supposed to compare one wife to another, but some comparisons are natural. Such as the fact that Beth isn't a vampire. Will she ever be? Not if I have any say in the matter, but we both know it might not be up to me. We don't talk about it if we don't have to, and today, we haven't have to. Unpacking tends to dictate the conversation. Combining households wasn't an easy thing in the 1950s and a few decades later, it isn't any easier. The kitchen, though, is all hers, except for the one shelf saved for my special needs.
Josef says it gets easier to start over. I haven't had that experience, but he's had more practice. The country he comes from doesn't even exist anymore. I don't know what that would be like. I do know that when our plane took off from LAX, it was with the knowledge that we wouldn't be back in what mortals would count as this lifetime. What is a lifetime for Beth.
She says it's a good thing that we're starting over somewhere else. New York's a good place. I don't think I could live far out in the country. I'd miss the city noises, even if it is a different city. Things move faster here. I'm not used to that yet. New York was the obvious choice. Not only for the opportunities for Beth, though that was a big factor. Or that no real New Yorker would so much as blink at the thought of a vampire living in their building if word ever got out. The real clincher was a private one. We'd been there together. Not for long, not for pleasure and I won't soon forget that Beth ditched me there to go back to Josh. It was still a place for us.
Finding this apartment wasn't as hard as it's cracked up to be. Here's a hint; have a friend buy the building you want to live in and you'll be able to take your pick. So far, so good, but we've only been here less than a full twenty four hours and the two bedroom one and a half bath apartment is a maze of boxes. Some hers, some mine, a few of Josef's -he'll pick those up later- and a couple that might have been put there by mistake.
We do have rooftop access. Beth told Josef that was non-negotiable. He's smart enough to know not to cross her. Maybe when it stops raining, we'll venture up there and learn the city lights. If it stops. Right now, I have my doubts.
"Where do you want this?" Beth's voice cuts through my thoughts. I have to blink. She's holding a guitar. Not only a guitar. My guitar. I didn't remember packing it, unless I wanted to count several decades before.
"In the pawn shop where I left it sixty years ago." Still, I take it when she holds it out. My fingers run over the strings without my thinking about it. I can't hold it for long, though, and lean it against the windowseat. "I didn't pack this. Where did you find it?"
She indicates a shipping carton with my name and our new address on it. "You didn't order it?"
"In the entire time you've known me, have you seen me play guitar even once?"
Her mouth curved into a frown I knew could only mean trouble. Beth always could lock onto the smallest piece of information and not stop chasing it until she got the answer she wanted. I am eternally the pork chop to her pit bull. Not that I usually mind, but this time is different. "But you used to," she says, her words slow enough that I hear the gears in her head turning. "When did you stop?"
"A long time ago."
"After Coraline? Because of Coraline?"
Yes to one, maybe to the other. Neither of which I want to talk about at this time. Or any other for that matter. "Can we drop this?"
"No."
What could I say? That music had changed? That I'd changed? That there was nothing more to sing about once Coraline turned me into a vampire? "What kind of answer do you want?"
"The true one."
"Then that's easy. I don't know that it was any one thing. Some things have their times and when they're over, they're over."
Her eyes narrow. "So one day you're a professional musician and when you wake up the next day, you don't want to do music anymore, ever?"
"Pretty much."
"Sounds like Coraline to me. "
She had me there. I'd tried, after, well, after. The whole thing about vampires having no soul is a crock. I held the guitar, warmed up with some chords and then there was nothing. I knew the words to every song I'd ever learned, every note, every progression, but the connection was gone. It wasn't the vampire thing. I thought it was for a while, but even then I kept the guitar under my bed. I thought it would be different after I left Coraline. After the divorce. After the vampire divorce. After a new town. After a year. After five. After ten. After that, I accepted that there were a lot of parts of my life that were over. That was one of them. I pawned the instrument and set my sights on a more reliable way of earning a living. Now that thing was back and I didn't have the slightest idea what to do with it.
"Can you still play?" Beth's eyes spark with interest.
"I'd be rusty." An understatement if there ever was one.
"But you could. You'd remember, right? Like riding a bicycle?" She wasn't being figurative. Two bicycles hung from racks on the hall that led to the bedrooms. Double purpose, she called them; transportation and decoration. "You could try if you wanted to."
"If I wanted to." I'd give her that much, and truth be told, part of me did want to hold that bit of my past. Another part wanted to send it back where it came from. "What's the return address on the shipping carton?"
Beth climbs over a stack of books and the parts of what would be the case that would eventually hold them. "Upstairs."
Josef. Of course. Leave it to him to decide it was time for me to rediscover an old hobby. Or yank my chain. "I'll deal with Josef later."
"You'll have to. He'll want this." Beth lifts a crystal decanter from its nest of packing peanuts. "Not that I think for a minute this wound up in our stuff by mistake. I should put orange juice in it and leave it right on the kitchen table." She holds the decanter to the overhead light. "Maybe a nice bouquet of daisies. What do you think?"
What I'm thinking at that moment has a lot more to do with the fact that she's dressed in one of my t-shirts, her hair stuck up in a bun held by an old yellow pencil and she looks better than anything I've seen in decades. What I actually say is, "Daisies. With baby's breath. He'll hate that."
Beth picks her way over the wadded newspapers on the floor on her way to the kitchen and comes back out with two glasses. Juice for her, and for me, well, the obvious. "Break time." She hands me my glass and shoves a pile of towels off the couch before settling into one corner. "I promise no prodding about the guitar. You want it out of here, it's gone."
"I do appreciate that," I tell her, "but that won't stop you asking about why I don't play. I know you too well."
"And you love me exactly the way I am." She rests her head on my shoulder.
I pull the pencil from her hair and combed through it with my fingers. "As long as you don't stake me with one of these." We sit there for a long time, not saying anything, listening to the rain, until her eyes drift shut. I don't dare move. I don't want to. She's soft and warm and Beth.
She leaps to her feet, scrambling over books and boxes when the phone rings. "Yes, this is Beth ." I smile at that. I love that she took my name. "Yes, this is a good time to talk." She cradles the phone between ear and shoulder and disappears around the corner, as though I can't hear both sides of the conversation if she moves a couple of feet away. One of the perks of vampire hearing that we agree not to mention.
I do the only polite thing and return to unpacking, tuning out the conversation and opening a box at random. Of course it had to be CDs. Beth's CDs. Living in a major city exposes a person to a wide variety of music, some of it welcome, some of it not. My own tastes haven't changed much. Jazz, blues, some lounge. All with connotations, though, most of which involve Coraline and the resulting disaster. I'd put that part aside and never found a replacement. If I hadn't found it in any of the musical movements since then, I didn't think it would be found in what Beth brought with her; men who wore eyeliner and women who didn't. I shelved the CDs on the rack next to the player in the same order she'd packed them.
By the time I get the empty box broken down, Beth is back, dressed in a lot more than a t-shirt, hair back in the bun, this time held by a fancy stick. She loops her arms around my neck and looks up at me, her eyes shining. "Congratulate me."
"You got the job?"
"I got the job. That's the good news. The bad news is, they want me to come in now."
"Things really do move faster in New York."
She grins up at me, eyes wide. "I know, but the site has to go live by noon and they need all the editors they can get. I have to go."
"Then go. I'll put the bookshelf together and not touch your books."
She kisses me again, then whips a lipstick out of her pocket and paints on a coat of red. "My hero. I'll be back as soon as I can. But seriously, you get my books out of order and I will stake you."
"I know. Go." I watch her bounce out the door and listen to her footsteps down the hall until the elevator comes.
#
"Mick?"
My fingers still on the strings at the sound of Beth's voice. That isn't my first indication that I am no longer alone, and I'd meant to stop, meant to put things exactly as they should have been if I'd been doing what I told Beth I would, but that didn't happen. It wouldn't have mattered. She would have known. She knows me that well.
"No, don't stop. Pretend I'm not even here." She perches on the edge of the couch and mimes zipping her mouth shut.
There isn't much else I can do but press on. I know what it must look like to her, me on the windowseat, the floor blanketed with printouts of chords and lyrics. I'd settled on "Beth" by Kiss, for obvious reasons. My fingers tangle and I mangle as many lyrics as I get right, but she gives me a standing ovation anyway.
She unzippes her lips. "Encore."
I shake my head. "Not now. About what you asked earlier," I take in a deep breath. It's time. "I didn't stop playing because of Coraline," I set the guitar aside with a twinge of regret. "I stopped because of me. When I reached into the part of me where the music was," I let the words hang on a ragged breath.
"There wasn't anything there anymore?"
If only it had been that easy. "No, there was something, but it wasn't anything I knew. Nothing I could recognize. It scared me." Scared wasn't the word. It's hard to explain what it's like to recognize that you need to consume blood, that you will for years to come, no end in sight. That nothing will be the same ever again. To wonder if you'd seen some kind of sign and chosen to ignore it.
"Mick." Only my name, soft and quiet. "You don't have to say anything else."
I take her hands and lead her to the couch, pulling her next to me as we sit together. "I don't have to, but I want to. What happened to me is never going to be over. There's no reason to shut off parts of myself because another part changes."
"So does this mean you're going to join another band and hit the club scene? Or the wedding and bar mitzvah circuit?"
"More like the living room and fire escape circuit. At least for now." For now, it's enough to be here, now, with her. The rest of the world, natural and otherwise, is going to have to wait.