The Adventures of a Scrawny Musician and a Compulsive Liar

17. What Instrument Would You Be?

            It was pretty uncomfortable that night. We still shared the same bed, but instead of Natalie wrapped around me from behind and snuggling into the crook of my neck, she was all the way on the other end of the bed on her right side facing away from me. I was on my back on the other side staring at the ceiling in this dark vacuum of space that was the hotel room with the drapes closed. A couple hours after the time we were supposed to sleep, I heard her timid, bell-like voice ask a question.

            “If I was an instrument, Laurie, what would I be?”

            The question took me completely off-guard. “What?”

            I heard rustling before I turned my head and saw her face outlined in the dark, now facing me.

            “What instrument would I be?”

            I thought for a moment and then replied, “Wind chimes.”

            I could hear the smile in her voice when she murmured, “That’s lovely.”

            “Yes.” I answered softly.

            The room settled into another one of those silences that I was slowly becoming accustomed to before Natalie spoke again.

            “That’s not me, Laurie.” She said in a voice with a slight tremor.

            “What are you talking about?” What’s not her?

            “The stealing. The lying. It’s not me. Not really. I hate it. I want it to go away. Please make it go away, Laurie, please.” It broke my heart. The way she shook. The way she rolled over, clutched my shirt and buried laid her head right over my chest so she could listen to my heartbeat. And most of all, her words. “I’m sorry, Laurie. Please don’t leave me. I don’t like it when you do that.”

            I never left her before, but at this point I had pretty much given up on trying to make sense of her jumbled, nonsensical words and settled for resting my right arm around her tiny body and kissing the top of her head. “I’m right here, Natalie. I’m not going anywhere.”

            I held her as she kept repeating, “It’s not me,” over and over again in her whispery feather-light voice. I held her when the tears overflowed her eyes and dropped onto my shirt. And I held her when she finally cried herself to sleep, shaking even in her dreams.

            Before my eyelids drifted closed, I briefly recounted everything I knew about her. She had two parents and a sister. She was hydrophobic. And she liked art.

            How pathetically short the list was.

            “Come on, kids!” Nathaniel shouted at us form outside the window the next morning as we were eating breakfast downstairs in the pastel-themed dining room. “If I push it to sixty, we might get to Dallas by lunchtime! Hurry the fuck up!”

            Damn kid.

            “Your face should hurry the fuck up!” Isobel yelled right back at him without taking her eyes off the screen of her phone. As of recently, she was texting away at this mysterious person she didn’t want to tell us about. It was all extremely seedy to me, but it was none of my business so why should I care?

            After we packed our things and settled into the bus Nathaniel put it in drive and we were off. However, about two hours into our first shift, Evan said from the front seat, “Um. Guys, I think we have a problem.”