I hear a stereo turn on, static of the tuner as Echo finds a station. A guitar chord thrums, and “Country Must Be Country Wide” by Brantley Gilbert starts. Cheyenne liked country music. I don’t know what kind of music Echo likes. Shit, I don’t know where she goes to school, what she studies. She might have a boyfriend back at school. I shake off that train of thought.
“Echo?” I call out. She peeks her head into the bathroom. “Anything in here I should set aside?”
Echo steps in, peeks into the cabinet under the sink, rifles through the makeup. “Leave the makeup. Everything else goes.”
So I toss everything, the cleaning products and the bottles of shampoo and conditioner and hair oil and face oil and body lotion and whatever else the two dozen bottles might be. The pink and white Venus razor sitting on the corner of the tub. The pink goofy sponge thing. At one point, I toss something into the garbage bag and a whiff of something erupts, the scent of shampoo from the slightly opened top. The scent hits me hard, because I have a sudden and powerful olfactory memory of that shampoo scent on Cheyenne’s hair.
I finish in the bathroom, drag the heavy bag out to the curb, and return to find Echo sitting on the couch, flipping through a photo album, tears streaming down her cheeks. There’s a stack of photo albums on the coffee table, a jewelry box, the two tackle boxes of makeup, a couple stacks of dog-eared paperbacks, a wood-handled hairbrush with fine blond hairs still tangled in the bristles.
“I’m trying to find all the…personal stuff. The sentimental things,” Echo says without looking at me. “Just so you don’t think I’m not doing anything.”
“I didn’t think that.”
She flips a page, touches a photograph with an index finger, and sniffles. “Why are you helping me?”
“It’s too much for one person to do alone.” I sit down on the couch beside her, stretching out my throbbing, aching knee. “And whatever else we may or may not be, I’m your friend. And friends help each other.”
She sniffles again. “You suck.” But she says it gently, so it means the exact opposite.
“I know.”
Echo flips the page, and I glance down at the pictures. There’s Echo as a little girl, platinum blond hair in pigtails, wearing Mickey ears, flashing double thumbs-up and a gap-toothed grin in front of the Magic Kingdom castle.
“There are pictures of me, and pictures of Mom, but none of us together.” She touches a picture of herself on a carousel horse, from the same trip, taken from the horse beside hers, I imagine. “It was just her and me for most of my life. No one to take pictures of us together.”
She turns the page, and then another, and then I stop her, pointing at a photograph. “There’s one of the two of you.”
It’s a shitty photograph, blurry, the frame tilted sideways. It looks like it was taken in the backyard of this very house. Echo laughs. “Yeah. Great-Grandpa Gene took that. He was a hundred, literally. Everyone else was inside. It was my birthday. Mom was taking a picture of me, and Grandpa Gene just took the camera and snapped this.”
“Well, it’s not a bad photo for a centenarian.”
“I think he had a heart attack a couple days later.” She glances at me. “So, what’s left?”
“Just the bedrooms.”
“The hardest part, then.”
I nod. “Yep.”
She stands up, sets the album on the coffee table, and precedes me into the smaller bedroom. Echo’s, it looks like. I wasn’t sure what I expected from Echo’s childhood bedroom, but it’s not what I find. There are posters on the wall, but not of boy bands or horses or rock bands, but rather posters of Broadway stars. I recognize Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Wicked, Rock of Ages, and there are other posters of other singers I don’t know. There’s one of Yo-Yo Ma, and there’s an artistic piece depicting the blinding lights and crowd as seen from on-stage, the back of a woman’s head and her hands cupping an old-school type of microphone, the rectangular kind.
There’s a rack of CDs between a desk and the double bed, and it’s jammed to bursting with CDs, overflowing, double-stacked and more piled on top of others. The music spans genre: I see Kenny Chesney and Garth Brooks and George Strait and the Dixie Chicks and Sara Evans and Miranda Lambert, Sarah Bareilles and Sarah Brightman and a bunch of other presumably classical singers, as well as pop artists like One Republic and Maroon Five and Muse and Train and bands crossing more into rock from the eighties, nineties, and into the new millennium. Basically, any and every kind of music possible. I even see a few hard rock albums from Korn and Linkin Park and Three Doors Down.
There’s surprisingly little else. The desk with a jar of pens and a pair of scissors, a chest of drawers, a closet, the bed with a patchwork quilt neatly tucked under the edges of the mattress.
“Impressive music collection,” I say.
Echo snorts. “That’s not even a fraction of my collection, just what fit on that little shelf.” She crosses into the room and crouches to examine the plastic jewel cases. “It is fairly representative of my taste, though.”
“You like a little of everything, then.”
She nods. “More like a lot of everything. Music is what I do, after all.”
“Really?” I try to sound casual when I’m anything but.
She shrugs. “Yeah. It’s my major: vocal performance.”
I’m not sure why just yet, but something inside me sinks. “Oh. Wow, that’s…awesome. Where—” My voice cuts out, oddly, and have to start over. “Where do you go?”
“Belmont.” She’s looking at me, now, hearing the off note in my voice. “What’s wrong?”
“Belmont. In Nashville.” There’s only one Belmont University, so the clarification is pointless.
“Doing It Our Way” by Gloriana comes on, both fitting and painfully out of place.
“Yeah,” she says, standing up and turning to look at me. “What?”
I shrug and shake my head, not willing to face what the realization has done to me, what I’m feeling and thinking. I refuse to acknowledge it. “Nothing.” I lift the bag in my hand. “So what stays and what goes in here?”
She doesn’t take her eyes off me. “Everything goes. I cleaned this room out when I moved to Nashville. Those jewel cases are empty. I have the discs at school.” She moves in front of me as I take a step deeper into the room, stopping me with a hand on my chest. “Ben, what’s the deal?”