The Liar's Wife (Adam Levine Dark Romance)

Chapter 24: Let Go

Flash Forward: July 2063

“Wake up!”

Jane heard the voice penetrating through the layers of her slumber, and she struggled for a moment to place it. Her mind was still foggy from the sedative she’d taken earlier. She floated inside her head, pushing herself upward toward the surface of consciousness, and for a moment she wasn’t in her own house, in her own bed. For a moment she was in a hospital bed in Idaho, fighting desperately to open her eyes. For a moment, that voice didn’t belong to her younger daughter, Avril – but to someone else entirely.

It wasn’t her of course. Couldn’t have been her.

“Mom, are you OK?”

Avril, Jane realized. It had only taken a month or two before Avril had started calling her Mom. Children adapt so easily at that age. Their love is so transferable. If only we could all attach ourselves so easily, Jane thought – and unattach so easily, when it’s time to say goodbye.

Avril had been three years old when she came to live with them. They hadn’t even known of her existence until they got the call from the lawyer, out of the clear blue sky one sunny day in September. It was the week after the story had broken in the papers. Amy Winehouse had gone to sleep one night with a bottle of tequila in her hand – closed her eyes and never opened them again. Adam hadn’t attended the funeral, but he had to go for the reading of the Will. It had raised more than a few eyebrows when he was named guardian of Amy's little girl.

“We should get a paternity test,” Jane remembered saying to him at the time. The lawyer in her had wanted legal proof, she supposed. But Adam had refused. “You don’t know, Adam,” she’d protested. “You don’t know who else she could have been sleeping with.”

“She named her Avril,” was all he’d said in response.

Jane hadn’t known what it meant. They were in the old house in Beverly Hills, in the library. He hadn’t explained further. He’d just gone over to one of the shelves and pulled out a CD, and Jane had barely caught a glimpse of the cover before he slipped out of the room. Avril Lavigne’s debut album: Let Go.

He’d taken it and disappeared. Jane still remembered that day – standing outside the closed bedroom door, uncertain whether she should go in to him. She’d heard his muffled grief and the sound of that Avril song on repeat. 

I'm standing on a bridge.

I'm waiting in the dark.

I thought that you'd be here by now.

It wasn't a song she'd she'd ever heard him play before. She stood hesitating outside the room, listening as he hit stop and rewind, replaying the song's refrain over and over.

Isn't anyone trying to find me?

Won't somebody come take me home?

It's a damn cold night,

Trying to figure out this life.

Won't you take me by the hand?

Take me somewhere new.

I don't know who you are,

But I... I'm with you.

I'm with you.

In the end, Jane had left that door unopened. It wasn’t a song that had ever belonged to her.  

Adam hadn’t bothered with the paternity test. He knew the truth, and Jane had never asked him to elaborate. She could guess the way the story went. The little girl that came to live with them was three years old, but she looked like she was closer to two. She was always small for her age – at the bottom of all the growth charts. From the alcohol exposure, the doctors had explained. And she had trouble in school. Adele had the natural intelligence to make up for a short attention span, but Avril struggled. It was music that saved her – the only thing that allowed her to focus her mind. She was her father’s daughter, in that respect. Or on second thought, maybe she was her mother’s daughter too.

Jane remembered how Adam and the girls always used to sing in the car, even when Avril was still a tiny little thing. Adele always insisted on the same song - a round in three parts. “Daddy, you sing the hard part. I’ll sing the goodbye part. Avril can sing the pretty part.”

Adele had been seven years old when Avril first came to them. Jane had worried at the time how Adele would react, having a new little girl in the household, but she needn’t have been concerned. Adele had bounced all over the house in her excitement when they’d told her the news that she was getting a little sister. And not just any little sister, either. A curly red-haired little orphan to take under her wing and adopt for her very own, just like in her favorite movie musical.

That hair. Avril had covered her hair with a black scarf at the funeral this morning. Jane had caught sight of her out of the corner of her eye and nearly fainted from the shock. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost,” someone had said to her. Maybe she had. Take away the red hair, and there she was – a mini-Amy Winehouse, come back to haunt her.

“Are you OK, Mom?” Jane knew she should open her eyes. The concern in Avril’s voice was growing.

The music was still playing. Jane could hear it filtering into the room from where the guests were gathered downstairs. That tribute playlist. Avril must have been the one who put the playlist together – all of Adam’s old songs, all the other artists whose careers he had launched. But there was one album it was missing, Jane knew. Not an album that Adam had produced, but perhaps the most successful one he’d ever inspired. Five Grammy’s. Millions of records sold. "We only said goodbye with words. I died a hundred times—"

Jane gave her head a shake and forced her eyes to open.

A different song was playing downstairs. Jane recognized it now. “As I sit watching her eyes close, I slowly open mine.” It must have been 40 years since she had listened to those lyrics, but she would never forget the last time she heard them sung live.

It was that old Maroon 5 song, Story. The one Song About Jane that the other Jane had stolen.

Dear Readers,

Yes, I suppose I have taken a few liberties with the Amy Winehouse story (by “taken a few liberties” I mean “completed changed beyond recognition.”) Please don’t sue me. To be fair, Amy did covers of Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow and Heard It Through the Grapevine, so you really should have guessed.

What do you think of this twist? Please let me know in the comments!