Chapter 11: The Drive

The hospital sent Donna home on Sunday afternoon with a bag of pills and a rule about eating cheese.

By Sunday night she was asleep in her own bed, snoring through a baseball game she wasn't watching.

I found Abel in her garage, kneeling over a laptop on a card table, with a small gray hard drive in his hand.

"What's that?" I said.

"What I should have shown you a week ago."

He looked up.

"Dax's rehearsal is tomorrow, and I'll be there. I need you to know what I'm walking into."

"You still haven't told me what that means."

"I'm trying to tell you in the only way I can."

I sat on an overturned bucket across from him.

The garage smelled of motor oil and my father's old sawdust.

My mother had never moved a single one of his clamps.

"The drive," I said.

"It's the multitrack from the first album. Every take, every channel, before mixing."

He turned it in his fingers.

"Gil told me to wipe all of them in March. I told him I did."

"Why would he want them wiped?"

"Because the multitracks show what the final record hides."

I leaned forward.

"What do they show?"

"Who was in the room, and what each of them did."

"Abel."

"If I say it in a sentence, you'll hear it as a story," he said quietly.

"I want you to hear it as a fact. Then you can decide what I am."

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