Part I
Life was quiet now. Aside from the sea and the crashing waves beyond the cliffs.
Yet Elizabeth was far away now, and the anchor that had moored Lloyd in place was gone. Cathy came undone just a little, then a sudden twinge in her belly changed all their lives forever.
Ovarian cancer. Surgery. Chemo and radiation. Elizabeth flying home to be with her mother and for a brief while a sense of calm returned, and with that quiet certitude suddenly firmly in mind, Harry Callahan finally understood just how much he had come to rely on a precious teenaged girl's soul to hold his own son's life together.
Only now there was a little voice in the shadows that kept whispering to him. "Keep away. Don't get too close to him. You'll just push him away..."
Because, perhaps, Harry Callahan had arrived at that station in life where he was beginning to doubt everything he had ever taken for granted. Principally, that he was a good man. That his motivations were pure. No, now he was almost possessed by the idea that all the women he had ever known had rejected him for cause, that he was - somehow - evil. He thought back to all the family disturbances he had responded to and a nauseating parade of angry men flashed through his mind's eye, men ultimately helpless when he pistol-whipped them into submission, leaving them beaten and bloody on the living room floors of all their broken dreams.
He was standing in a surgical waiting room with DD and the Doc, looking out a window at stands of eucalyptus trees in golden afternoon light. The air on the other side of the glass was thick and yellow-gray, the Stanford campus awash in autumnal smog, the temperature almost hitting triple digits, yet the only woman who could hold him to the present was in an operating room having her belly cut open...
He drifted to thoughts of Fujiko-san and all her silent rejections and he knew those had hurt most of all, that those cuts had been deepest. He could always disappear, however. He could run from the pain, so he had. To work. On the streets or in the air. And for a while, he had tried to talk with his old man, but because some things never change that had never come easily, not even at the end. And so it went. He thought about Fujiko and the failure she represented and that naturally enough led him to thoughts about his father and how he had, ultimately, failed him as a son...so what made him think he was even remotely capable of being a father to his son...?
DD came up to him and handed over a cup of coffee, which for some reason reminded him of burnt acorns, and in the next instant he was thinking about Todd Bright and The Song...because didn't everything happen now because of that rock and rolling fiasco?
+++++
Bright was going to play Candlestick, so of course, they had invited Harry and his family to come see the show. Then word had filtered down; Todd wanted Lloyd to perform their song on stage. Live. In front of seventy thousand people, playing with the group.
This was a Big Deal, and Harry knew it. Yet he was against the very idea of his son up on a stage playing with a nascent super-group, potentially becoming some sort of teen idol, or worse, and without the mental framework to handle that kind of sudden fame. Yet Elizabeth had intervened, had promised to be there with Lloyd when he stepped out into the spotlight, and more importantly, to be there after. And that was, what? - four months before she left to head east for college?
So Harry had relented.
The Song was slated to be the group's second encore that night, because that was the song everyone in the Bay Area wanted to hear most...so make 'em wait for it, right? Hit 'em when they're all up on their feet and screaming! Yeah! And so...that was the plan.
So Harry and Cathy had watched the concert unfold from their seats, while Elizabeth and Lloyd had looked on from backstage - yet from the beginning even Cathy noticed that Todd Bright was a little too juiced that night. His playing was forcefully loud but too many times he was off the beat or he messed up a chord, and soon a lot of people noticed. The other members of the group noticed then. And then Todd Bright noticed, too.
So, after one of their older anthems Todd called Lloyd out on stage and he handed over his guitar.
"I'm gonna handle the vocals," he said to the eleven-year-old boy standing there. "You play lead."
And Lloyd had simply nodded. "Got it," he said, and when Bright launched into material from the new album Lloyd gave what every music reporter in attendance regarded as a virtuoso performance. By the time the second encore was finished everyone in the stadium knew who the best guitarist on stage was, and Todd Bright was ecstatic with his latest creation.
Because that had been the plan all along. Lloyd was going to be the bridge. The bridge...to draw in a new generation...and it had worked. Bright's Candlestick performance was news, and the rest of the tour suddenly sold out, album sales off the charts.
And suddenly Lloyd Callahan was a very wealthy young man - who it just so happened wanted to tour with Bright.
+++++
So Elizabeth had come up with a kind of compromise solution. After her high school graduation ceremony, she said, she and Lloyd would join the group in Seattle and tour with them over the summer. In August she would head to college and Lloyd would return home, and it would all be the adventure of a lifetime. Harry had been against the whole thing but first Elizabeth, then Cathy had gone to work on him and, in the end, he realized he had never really had an even chance, because while he had faced the enemy to meet them head-on, those closest to him had simply moved-in and out-flanked him.
But the truth of the matter was stranger still, for Lloyd had already achieved a rare kind of celebrity: when he walked down a street in the city people knew who he was. Girls stopped him on sidewalks and asked for his autograph and soon enough even going to a restaurant became an impossible nightmare, yet classmates at the little Sea Ranch Lakes elementary school hadn't quite figured out how to deal with Lloyd yet, because they all still regarded him as something of an asshole. Still, fame is fame, but there was no fame quite like the status an emerging Rock-God had in California back in the day.
So late one May day Harry and Cathy put their kids on an airplane and then they looked at one another as the enormity of what had just happened hit them both.
+++++
The next afternoon Harry went back into the city to look over a new property DD had found, then he dropped by the Rosenthal Store to meet with the staff and go over some new tech just in from Yamaha. There were two new transfers from the Copenhagen store working there now, an older fellow, an accountant, and a woman in her twenties named Ida. Everyone gathered around Callahan and listened intently to his halting description of Lloyd's bravura performance at Candlestick, then stood back and in mute appreciation watched as he banged out a Gershwin tune on a new Clavinova.
"Better send one of these up to the studio," he said as he worked the keys.
"The action is pretty good, isn't it?" Ida said as she watched the way his fingers moved on the keyboard, though Harry seemed to ignore her, only nodding vaguely after the fact.
He turned to the current store manager then, a brilliant jazz pianist named Aksel. "Have your delivery crew pick up the old unit when they come, would you?"
"Of course. And are you liking the new Korg?"
Callahan nodded. "It came in handy laying out tracks on the new album," he said quietly.
"Oh?" Ida said. "What album is that?"
And Harry looked at the woman and sort of smiled. "The new one - by Bright."
"Really?" the woman replied, her eyes sparkling with fresh interest. "So, this new album was a family affair..." Yet she remembered thinking in the moments after she said those words that it looked like Harry Callahan wanted to kill and dismember her.
"We all saw Lloyd at Candlestick!" Aksel stated - and then more than unnecessarily he added: "He was outstanding!"
Callahan's glance was withering, but then he seemed to catch himself before he retreated a little. "I'm meeting Cathy for dinner in an hour. Are any of you free to join us?"
It turned out everyone was, so, hiding a minor grin, he called Trader Vic's and reserved a small room. This revenge, he reasoned, would be very sweet indeed, because he knew just what he wanted to do...
+++++
DD came up from behind and put her arm around his waist. "It's only been an hour," she sighed.
"I was hoping... Well, I was hoping they wouldn't find anything. But the word is the longer they're in there, the longer they have her open, that means the more they've found. Like more cancer they have to remove."
"You don't know that, Harry."
"When does Elizabeth's flight get in?"
DD looked at her watch. "Three hours and change. One of the guys will fly her right up here."
Harry nodded. "Thanks for taking care of all that."
"What about Lloyd? Why didn't he come?"
"Said he couldn't handle it. He was balled up on the floor, hiding in a corner. Looked like he'd been crying all night."
DD nodded. "When you get right down to it, Harry, Cathy has been the only real mother he's ever had. This has got to be rough."
"I keep thinking about Frank. Maybe she just wants to go be with him now, you know?"
"Maybe," DD sighed, "yet I don't think I've ever seen her happier than she has been the past few years."
"I'm not sure I can go on without her, DD. And I'm not really sure I can handle the boy without her."
"He needs you, Harry. And he'll really need you now. More than ever. You're going to have to step up and get the job done, because this may be the most important thing you ever do."
Callahan sucked in a deep breath and straightened up when he realized he'd been slouching a little, but it struck DD as a little comical, too...like he was getting ready to shoulder the extra load.
A nurse came out into the waiting room and walked over to the doc; he pointed at Callahan and the nurse came over. "Sorry," she began, "but this is going to take longer than expected."
Harry nodded and he tried to meet her eyes, but he turned away and resumed staring out the window - looking across Lasuen Grove toward the stadium - and if anything the smog looked worse now. Almost, he thought, like burnt orange. He put his hand out and touched the glass, feeling the heat on the far side of this air-conditioned cocoon, and then his eye was drawn to a 747 departing SFO - spewing even more crap into the atmosphere - and he shook his head at the wonder of it all.
"What have we done?" he sighed
When he turned back to face the room DD was sitting with the doc again - and that was his reality now. This room. These friends. Because he could feel it now...Cathy would be leaving him, and soon.
He turned back to his reflection in the window, but this time Frank was waiting for him...and he didn't know what to say...
+++++
The group from the store filed into Trader Vic's and met Harry and Cathy in the bar; there were six of them so Harry had a huge corner booth set up and ready for them. Appetizers were already on the way, he said, and he recommended everyone start off the evening with a round of Suffering Bastards. Cathy had looked at him and rolled her eyes, but everyone followed Harry's lead and ordered one - and then, being musicians one and all, the group got down to talking about the only common ground they shared...
Lloyd and the Bright concert at Candlestick.
Cathy cringed. Because she had seen the change that had come over Harry in the days after the concert. It wasn't really jealousy, or so she'd thought at first, but now she really wasn't all that sure that it wasn't...yet the very idea that a man of Callahan's broad accomplishments could be jealous of an eleven-year-old boy was frankly ludicrous.
Or...was it, really?
But then Cathy had focused on the blond Dane sitting across from Harry. Ida something. Cute as hell, incredible blue eyes more like huge, cobalt spheres that never seemed to focus on anyone but Harry. Was she smitten or just another opportunist out on the prowl?
But no...it turned out that she was a serious student of music and had long ago taken up the challenge of learning Imogen Schwarzwald's body of work, so, Cathy thought, it was only natural the girl direct her attention on Imogen's son.
