APRIL 8th, 1994, SEATTLE, WA
FOR THE FIRST time ever since working at DGC, Reagan was glad that people knew who she was. The whispers that had floated around her, regarding her as the wife to Dave Grohl, had once irked her to no end, but that day she was grateful for her reputation.
People kept their distance, halting the frequent knocks that usually rapped upon Reagan's office door. In the hallways, eyes followed Reagan but flitted away when she happened to look up. Everyone had seemingly taken ten giant steps back from her and for that, she couldn't have been more relieved.
Kurt's ongoing disappearance had not taken the forefront of each passing work day, but there was still plenty of hushed gossip going on about it, murmurs exchanged over cups of coffees and in the confines of cubicles.
Reagan knew what her coworkers wanted to ask her. They wanted to know the same things that her family wanted to know, the same answers that she could not give. It was as if she'd become a witness to an awful crime without any evidentiary support to what had happened. She was on trial under questioning with no idea what had even happened.
She was in the dark. The same as everyone else. Kurt was the only person who knew what was going to happen next. The power rested in his hands.
Walking back to her office from a bathroom break, Reagan kept her eyes level with the dark gray carpets of the hall. She smoothed her hands down the front of her pants, listening to the sound of her own breathing, whooshing in and out through her nose. She was afraid to look up, afraid to see the questioning gazes wheeled in her direction.
Half the time she wondered why she'd even shown up for work. There was, by all technicalities, a family emergency going on. But she'd made her way to DGC's office every day, forced herself to sit behind her desk and listen to tapes and make tedious phone calls and either crush the dreams of the bands she came across or make miracles happen for them.
Dave had encouraged her to go to work. It will keep your mind off of it, he'd insisted. That statement had turned out to be nothing short of a cruel joke.
If anything, Kurt was the only thing on Reagan's mind as she sifted through the stack of mailed tapes in front of her and reviewed footage of potential talent. In every lead singer's voice, in every grainy image of a guitarist skittering their fingers across taut strings, she saw Kurt.
Reagan committed every one of these up and coming bands to memory, stashing away individual members' names in the back of her mind.
Do you really want to do this? she wanted to ask them. Are you sure this is the life you want?
The thought made her stomach curl. Of course those musicians would answer 'yes.' They didn't know. Foreshadowing into a rosy future came easily for them, especially when their hearts were in the music.
Kurt's heart had been in the music too, as far as Reagan was concerned. And now he'd vanished because of it — he could have been strung out, dead in a ditch, living under a new identity. She couldn't begin to rationally guess which outcome it would be, but she did know that it had all started with the music.
She took a deep breath when she got to her office, shutting the door and pressing her back against it. Her fingers grazed the smooth wood as she pushed her hands down to her side, closing her eyes.
Reagan was living a nightmare. She wouldn't deny it any longer, or try to sugarcoat the truth with hopefulness and distractions. The bubbly, joyful world she'd been living in was crumbling, blackening as the sun that it orbited around vanished.
Was Kurt the sun? Reagan was sure that he wasn't. Dave and Gracie were the equivalent to her sun. But Kurt . . . he was the force of gravity that had kept them rooted. Everyone in Reagan's life had their assigned roles, from shooting stars to the cloudless blue sky that had hung overhead in her perfect world. Kurt had just happened to be the gravity.
Reagan's ears perked to the sound of the radio she kept on her desk. She'd left it on, its volume dialed to a low setting. The radio deejay was speaking and in between snatches of fuzzy static, Reagan heard Kurt's name.
"Kurt Cobain, still apparently missing as of today, though-,"
Reagan took two strides to her desk and aggressively switched the radio off, cutting away the buzz of the deejay's skeptical voice.
She wanted to hurl the radio out the window. It was ridiculous to her that the media had latched on to news so quickly, squirming like worms into Kurt's personal life again. It was inevitable that they'd find out eventually, but it didn't stop Reagan from wanting to stand outside of the KNDD station and scream at the top of her lungs.
Didn't any of them grasp that they'd driven him to it? That their hovering, like sharks fresh on a blood trail, had made him want to fall off the face of the earth?
Reagan slumped into her chair and pressed her fingers to her temples. It was time to work. Time to stop fretting about Kurt and all the things she could not control, so that she could have some vestige of a life. But in so many twisted ways, it was like the universe was laughing at her. Maybe it was selfish to think so, but Reagan felt that she'd been challenged.
Get everything you could ever want — a talented, funny, wonderful husband and a beautiful child and a great job in the music industry — but lose a friend in return.
That was the price of her happiness. Kurt was the price to pay. Reagan couldn't have her supposedly amazing life and keep Kurt in it at the same time.
It was either that or the old saying that nothing was ever perfect.
Stilling the slight tremble in her hands, Reagan reached for the stapled stack of papers that she'd been scanning earlier. It was an outline for a meeting that she had later in the day. Most of the black text blended together as she read. None of it was particularly interesting — mostly housekeeping points that her bosses would harp on. She thought about where she'd rather be.
Gracie was the first face to pop into her mind. Of course Reagan would have rather been with her daughter, perhaps taking a walk in Pike Place Market, buying Gracie a hot chocolate and blowing ripples across the top so that she wouldn't burn her tongue. Dave would be there too, a ratty baseball cap on his head and his arm around Reagan as he laughed cheerfully at Gracie's squeals. The best way to spend any day . . . a perfect day . . .
Before Reagan knew it, an hour had passed. Something in her conscious shifted and she blinked, staring down at the paperwork in her hands. She couldn't believe that she'd actually been sitting there, staring at her work while daydreaming for an hour, but the wall clock in her office indicated that she had.
As she began to lay the papers down, there was a knock at her office door. Reagan immediately straightened in her chair and cleared her throat, feeling like a kid that had been caught doing something against the rules.
"Come in," she called out.
The door opened and Todd walked in. He closed the door gently shut behind him and when he spun around, Reagan didn't recognize his face.
It was strange, as Todd had always been the most jovial, carefree person in a room since Reagan had met him. He was on par with Dave in that way, constantly coaxing smiles out of everyone without ever really meaning to.
Todd looked ashen. His face was unnaturally white, blanched of color and dominated by a grave set of eyes that bored directly into Reagan's.
The meek smile that she'd prepared for him faltered. Slowly, Reagan's hands fell into her lap and she twisted them together. Her first assuming thought was that she was in trouble. She wondered with a sudden flash of worry if she'd somehow missed the meeting, but that wasn't possible. It wasn't set to start for another hour.
"Todd," Reagan said. "What's wrong?"
Todd squeezed his eyes shut for a second that seemed to last a lifetime. He opened his mouth and then closed it, his sentence lost somewhere in the distraught expression of his face.
Reagan was about to stand up, hesitantly extending a hand to Todd as if to catch him if he happened to teeter on his feet, when her office phone began to trill.
She waited a beat, listening to the commanding ring with her eyes on Todd.
"Excuse me," she mumbled. She grabbed the phone out of it's cradle and raised it to her ear, forgetting the polite introduction that she always used when answering calls at work.
"Hello?" Reagan asked. Her mouth was growing dry, making her wish that Todd would stop looking at her the way he was then. It was ratcheting up her anxiety.
"Reagan." Dave's voice crackled over the line, though it wasn't the voice that Reagan knew and loved. It was a ragged whisper, twisted between lips that Reagan imagined were pursed to keep from crying.
"Dave?" Reagan asked shakily. "Are you okay?"
"Reagan, come home. I need you to come home right now."
Reagan's heart made a stuttering jump in her chest. There was only one reason on that day as to why Dave would call her at work, demanding that she come home. It didn't have anything to do with Gracie or his own well-being. No explanation was needed, and yet Reagan vied for one. Her lungs screamed for one, protesting that they would not satisfy her with another breath until she had an answer.
"What happened?" she whispered.
"Just come home. Can you do that?"
"I . . ."
Reagan glanced at Todd. His jaw was locked and when he caught her eyes, he nodded, giving her silent approval for the request she'd yet to ask.
He knew something. Something that Dave knew as well.
She started to have flashbacks to a day not long ago, a day when similar events had unfolded. The day of Kurt's coma.
Kurt's coma.
Kurt.
Kurt, Kurt, Kurt.
"Yes. I can come home," Reagan finally uttered, her voice breaking.
"Can you do me a favor? One thing?" Dave whispered again.
"Yes."
"Don't turn on the radio."
Reagan's blood froze to pure ice in her veins.
"Why? What's happening, Dave?" The truth was there, hiding behind her growing denial, but Reagan would have preferred to envision some other catastrophe befalling them. An alien invasion, or a high magnitude earthquake.
"I'll explain everything once you're home."
"Why can't you explain it now?"
Dave waited a moment before he answered, choking out the words in a voice that sounded nothing like his soft, sweet lilt.
"It's not something I want to talk about on the phone," he said.
Reagan inhaled, though the action brought no relief to the fiery flames lapping in her chest. Her blood was cold, but her body had been swept into a raging inferno.
"Okay," she said. "Okay."
"Reagan," Dave whispered.
She waited, thinking he was going to break down and explain everything to her, but the line went dead. That single utterance of her name rang like an echo in Reagan's ear.
Robotically, Reagan lowered the phone away from her face and stared at it, doubting that the entire conversation had been real. She very well could have been asleep, whipping up her nightmarish reality into something worse than it really was.
"You should go," Todd said. He spoke in a flat monotone, slipping both hands into the pockets of his slacks.
"I should," Reagan replied, unsure if it was a question or statement.
She was suspended in time and fate had temporarily stopped. The knowledge of what was coming, of what Dave was about to tell her when she arrived back at their house, was rearing its head in her thoughts.
Reagan forced it away. Her primary goal was getting home safely. Once she was through the doorway of her house, that's when she would allow herself to crumple.
She gathered her things, leaving her desk a mess as Todd held open her office door for her. Reagan granted herself one quick scan of the office before ducking her head. If the world was ending, it would have surely been evident on people's faces.
Her colleagues did look shaken, but the strangest part was that all their eyes were on her. A television played quietly down the hall, but Reagan blocked the sound hastily. She refused to break down in front of everyone, smack dab in the middle of DGC.
Walking numbly to her car, Reagan steered her brain clear of anything that might have made her lose it. She thought about her siblings, recalling childhood memories she hadn't thought of in years as a means to distract herself.
She slid silently into her driver's seat, jammed the keys into the ignition and pulled away from DGC. Her hands were glued to the wheel, her eyes burning as they remained wide open and trained on the road.
Her chosen memory started with Kimberly, walking into the living room with a bundle in her arms. It was an infant Kate and although the details were foggy, Reagan remembered beaming as Kimberly had placed her sister into her arms.
They sang together, mother and daughter, to the new addition to their family.
You are my sunshine, my only sunshine . . .
Another memory came, one in which Reagan was older. Kimberly enacting the same ritual from the first memory as she placed Robbie, swaddled into his blankets into Reagan's awaiting arms. Reagan trying to get Kimberly to sing with her to Robbie, though Kimberly had walked away.
You make me happy when skies are gray . . .
The memories swirled again until they settled on a more recent recall. A teenaged Reagan, apprehensively accepting into her arms two baby bundles instead of one. The twins, squirming in her arms as Reagan eyed them wearily until her reservations slipped away and she was in love. No Kimberly in sight this time. Just Reagan, Kate and Robbie perched beside her, as she sang to her baby brother and sister.
You'll never know dear, how much I love you, please don't take my sunshine away . . .
Reagan didn't realize that she'd been muttering the lyrics to the song under her breath. The sound of her own quivering voice jolted her, but nothing rattled her heart more than her abrupt fixation on a new memory.
It was the memory of Robbie's face. His sweet, smiling face that exuded the need to be taken care of. Protected. Beside it was Kurt's face.
Reagan felt a snap reverberate within her.
She was at a stoplight when her hand twitched outwards to turn her radio on. Sound filled her car, drowning out the light patter of a passing rain shower. Reagan clamped her mouth together and waited, letting the deejay's voice become her sole focus.
"It's a sad day in the world of music, folks," the deejay said, speaking with the leisure of an anchorman reporting the five o' clock news. "The word is that Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana, has been found dead at the age of twenty-seven in his home here in Seattle."
Reagan's hand flew to her throat. She squeezed her fingers around her neck, trying to strangle the gasp that was gurgling out of her.
No.
She thought the word so loudly that she might as well have shouted it. It pounded over and over in her head like a morbid drum beat. Every part of her, every fiber in her body, was screaming.
A horn blasted from behind Reagan's car. The driver of the BMW that was tailing her threw his hand up, frustratedly gesturing to the light that had turned green.
Reagan scrambled to slam her foot onto the gas, veering into the right lane without flipping her turn signal on. With the shoulder of the road in sight, she wedged her car in between two others parallel parked by the sidewalk. It was a sloppy job finished with half of Reagan's fender sticking out, but her limbs had seized up. She couldn't have moved her car even if she'd wanted to.
She twisted the ignition off, ceasing the conversation between the radio deejay and his partner. They'd still been talking about Kurt, lamenting the loss of his talent.
His talent. The word singed like a burn mark. The masses were concerned with a loss of talent, but Reagan could not see past what she already knew to be true.
Talent had been lost, but it came nowhere near to the heavy loss of what had been a beautiful soul.
A beautiful soul, flawed in every way, but still powerful enough to glow in light of everyone it touched regardless of its talent.
Reagan wrapped her arms around herself. Finally, she gasped with force, feeling the dryness of her throat and the alternating spasms of cold and hot attacking her body.
Kurt was dead.
It didn't sound right. Even though it had been coming as sure as Seattle's thick, gray rain clouds that rolled over the city, it still sounded like a lie.
No more. No more Kurt. No more jam sessions, no more raunchy jokes traded over the seats of a van, no more feeling the cold skin of his hand when he slipped it into hers. No more watching Dave and Kurt play wrestle, no more witnessing them feed off one another's silly humor.
No more family.
How could their makeshift family exist when a hole the size of a planet had been punched through it?
Reagan threw open her car door and leaned out of it. She vomited onto the pavement, her seatbelt holding her sagging upper half as she emptied her stomach into the street. Her eyes blurred with tears and the strain of throwing up and for a moment, she felt like she couldn't breathe.
"Lady? Hey lady, you alright?"
A passerby, a man, standing in front of Reagan's car called out to her. His voice held a note of worry, but Reagan didn't look up as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
Wordlessly, she sat up and closed her door, flattening her body into her car's driver seat. There was a foul taste in her mouth, but she ignored it. Her senses had become distorted. The sound of cars blitzing by, the residue of vomit on her tongue, the feeling of her skin erupting into hot goosebumps . . . none of it could make her believe that she was awake.
Kurt was dead.
Reagan pressed her hands into her face and screamed.