Out of Tune

Chapter Thirty

I think it's so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist five minutes ago. You can write something that no one's ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips — Michelle Branch

The music notes swayed on the page in front of Lennon – little black dots that moved in and out of focus as she stared at the sheet of music. She blinked slowly, heavy exhaustion ladening every movement.

Sleep. She should be sleeping.

But it just wouldn't come. Lennon had been lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling unable to make the descent. It had been the quietness keeping her awake today – the numbness spreading throughout her body.

Lennon didn't need to consult Jenna to know why it had crept up again, the first time in weeks it had done so. Her therapist wouldn't be able to tell Lennon anything she didn't already know.

She glanced at her phone, sitting atop the music stand next to the sheet of music Lennon was revising. It was seven minutes to midnight on July twelfth. Her eighteenth birthday was only seven minutes away.

When the quietness had driven Lennon from her bed a half-hour earlier, she'd crept into the basement at Spencer's house and had gone straight to her guitar. Not to play it – certainly not at this hour when the rest of the household was sleeping but to just hold it.

Lennon had run her fingers across the wood and the strings, savouring the feel of her father's guitar. Remembered the last night she'd spent with him when he'd still been alive.

They'd been playing and writing in their tiny little apartment, tossing ideas and corrections back and forth to each other as they'd worked. He'd been at the kitchen table and she'd been on the couch where she'd eventually fallen asleep.

When she'd woken in the morning, she'd still been on that couch, but covered in an afghan that her father had no doubt thrown over her before he'd gone into his bedroom where she'd found him an hour later in his bed. Gone.

And she'd processed that. She had. Lennon had even made substantial progress in therapy sessions for not burying her grief. Jenna had been teaching her to tackle it, to face it head-on, and Lennon had felt herself getting better. Slowly but surely.

At least, she had been before she'd found herself staring at a torn bit of fabric on the roof of the interior of her father's guitar case. She'd run her fingers over the hole and through it had felt, oddly, sheets of paper. It had taken only a moment to peel back the fabric, and less than a second after that for the papers to come tumbling out.

Sheets of them. Pages filled with half-written songs, thought up strumming patterns and chord progressions.

Lennon had been rifling through the pile of music, her eyes tracing the familiar handwriting of her father. The little marks on the page were in a language all his own, a dialect that he'd taught her to read.

Until she'd found the folded set of papers upon which he'd written 'For Lennon.'

The rest of the papers had fallen away at that point, completely forgotten as Lennon read the music that her father had written for her. The last song that Elijah McCormick had ever completed – dedicated to his daughter.

She'd been staring at that song for nearly twenty minutes. The notes and chords ringing through her head in spite of her exhaustion. Though her father had only written the guitar and vocal line, Lennon already knew how this song would sound once played with bass, piano, and drums. Knew it because it was her father's music and she knew that even better than she knew herself.