Unfortunately, today, even the grand couldn’t soothe her troubled thoughts. She stroked the keys lightly and forced herself to play a few chords, but nothing came out. She gave up on the piano and tried the guitar. Then the violin. She even tried the ukulele, for god’s sake. Nada.
Sighing, she found her little cannabis stash in the kitchen and rolled a joint. Maybe a mild high would calm her down a bit. She turned on her speakers and cranked up some old-school reggae. Yeah, it was cliché to smoke weed and listen to reggae, but she really needed to chill out, damn it.
Half an hour later, she was sitting on her couch with her sketchbook on her lap, filling up the pages with drawings of bat and raven wings, ugly gargoyles, and some luminescent angel wings too. She’d been sketching with the same fevered obsession for the past two days like she was hoping that if she drew enough of what she’d seen, it would start making sense.
After another half hour of that, Thelonious jumped on her lap, sat directly on top of her sketchbook, and looked at her.
“Hey,” she scolded, slumping back against the cushions. “You can’t sit there. I was using that.”
He blinked. She swore she couldhearhis disdain.
“Yeah, well you try dealing with the amount of confusion going on in my head right now and see if it doesn’t drive you to this.”
Thelonious flicked his tail.
She sighed. “You’re a jerk, but you’re right. I need to talk to someone. Enough wallowing.” She picked up the sketchbook and cat simultaneously and set them on the sofa when she stood.
It went without saying that as soon as she wasn’t interested in the sketchbook anymore, neither was Thelonious, and he leapt down and stalked away. Eva grabbed her phone from the coffee table and did what she should have done the moment she got home from the club two days ago:
She called her mom.
Her parents were not typical parents. They were simultaneously the most awesome and most embarrassing parents to have ever lived. To say they were hippies was an understatement. To look for anything remotely normal about them was an exercise in futility. And yet, Jacqui and Dan were the most stable, dependable people she’d ever met, and she wouldn’t have traded them for the world.
The phone rang a few times before her mom answered. “Eva, baby, how are you?” She sounded distracted. “Hold on, let me just grab my robe.” She moved the phone from her ear and called out, “Eva’s on the phone, honey! I’ll be right back!”
“What are you guys doing?”
“Oh, well, you know that photographer friend we made at the art show in Paris last spring? The one doing that nude series calledReal Bodies?”
“Yes...” She was starting to regret asking.
“Well, your dad and I thought we would contribute some—”
“Say no more! I’ve heard enough. And please do whatever it takes to ensure I never have to view those photos.”
“Sure, honey, but they’re just bodies. We all have them. It’s wrong how our society has taught us to recoil from the sight of our own skin unless we’re shaped like an underfed model who has to maintain an unhealthy exercise regime to—”
“Mom, I know.”
“Right, sorry. What did you want to talk about?”
“You know that club I DJ at once a month?”
“Of course. How’s that going?”
Weird though her parents were, they were also very successful artists. When not traveling around the world, showing their work at major galleries, they lived in a gorgeous oceanfront house on Vancouver Island, off the coast of British Columbia.
Montreal was a long ways away, but Eva had dreamed of being a musician since she was a girl, and in her opinion, there was no better place to be in Canada. After high school, her parents had encouraged her to follow her passions, so she’d moved a few years later. She’d been there seven years now and didn’t dream of leaving, though she missed her parents. Luckily, they were free to travel a lot because of their work, and they saw each other at least once a year.
“It’s great. But um...” Damn, she should have told them about the gunfire incident right after it happened. It wasn’t like they would have found out on their own—getting her parents to read the news was like trying to give Thelonious his deworming medicine. “There was actually a sort-of shooting at it last weekend.”
A pause. “Awhat?”
“Yeah.”
“A shooting? In Montreal? What is happening! Are you okay? I can’t believe this—”
“It wasn’t that bad, Mom. Not one was hurt.”
