The Tide Gate Sessions

The taxi dropped me at the end of the crushed shell road a little after four in the afternoon, and I stood there with my guitar case and my duffel bag, looking at what was supposed to be the next ten days of my life. Rodney Marsh, forty-four years old, recently divorced, standing on a causeway in Indonesia staring at a decommissioned tide gate with a recording studio inside it. The tide gate part was real, all rusted steel gates and concrete chambers, and the sound of the sea came through the structure as if the building itself was breathing. I'd been married for eighteen years and single for two, and I hadn't recorded with anybody new in over a decade, so mostly what I felt was that I'd shown up at a party where everybody already knew each other.

Mackenzie Sikes came out of the annex door first, a short woman of thirty-two with headphones around her neck and a clipboard she clearly used as a weapon. "You must be Rodney," she said, shaking my hand like she was checking my grip strength. "Guitar, right? Tate said you'd be tall. He's usually wrong about things, so it's nice when he's not."

"Tate would be the bass player," I said, and she grinned and led me in.

Inside, the big central chamber had been gutted and treated, foam panels and bass traps bolted to concrete that still had tide lines on it, pale stripes showing where the water used to sit for decades. It smelled like salt and rust and, weirdly, a little like dried flowers, which I didn't understand yet. Tate Brandt was already set up in the live room, forty-seven years old and built like a dock piling, tuning a bass without looking up. "Hey," he said. "Food's in the kitchen at six. Don't be precious about your amp settings, Mackenzie will change them anyway."

"That's true," Mackenzie said, with no shame at all.

They put me in the annex, a long low building beside the main structure with bunk beds and a shared kitchen and windows that looked out over fields of marigolds running right down to the coast. The fields went on forever, orange as far as I could see, and I remember thinking that my ex-wife would have loved it here and being glad, for once, that the thought didn't hurt much. Two years of being on my own had taught me to notice things like that.

* * *

The next morning I found out where the flower smell came from. I was in the control room nursing coffee when the side door opened and a woman came in carrying a canvas sack the size of a pillowcase, which she dumped on the mixing desk without ceremony. Petals spilled everywhere, orange and yellow and a kind of deep rust color I'd never seen on a flower before.

"Those are for the color chart, not the console," she said to herself, and then noticed me and stuck out her hand. "Vicky Bloom. I make the marigold petal color charts for the farm up the road, and I sing backup on two tracks if Mackenzie can twist my arm hard enough. You're the new guitarist."

"Rodney. Marsh. Both of those, yeah." She was thirty-nine, she told me later, with ink-stained fingers and a laugh that came out sideways, and she treated the studio like it was her second kitchen, which apparently it was, since she'd been recording her charts and her vocals here on and off.

"The color chart thing," I said. "That's a job?"

"It's a real job," she said, gathering petals back into the sack with both hands. "Every batch of petals gets dried and graded against a chart, and the chart gets rebuilt every season because the soil changes. It's exacting and nobody's heard of it, which is sort of my whole life story." She said it lightly, but I heard the edge under it, because I'd been saying versions of that sentence about myself for two years.

"Can I help?" I asked, and she looked surprised, like people didn't usually offer, and then shrugged and handed me half the sack.

We spread the petals out on the studio floor in the big empty chamber, because the light through the old gate slats came in clean and even in the morning, and she needed rows. So there we were, the two of us on our knees on a concrete floor, laying out hundreds of marigold petals in long gradient rows from pale yellow down to that dark rust, and she'd call out a color name like "sunset rust, that's a four" and I'd shuffle petals around like I knew what she meant. My knees hurt and my fingers turned orange and it was, honestly, the best morning I'd had in a long time.

At one point we were both reaching for the same petal, which sounds made up but happened, and her fingers landed on mine and stayed a half second longer than they needed to. She didn't yank away or make it a thing, just said, "You've got petal hands now, sorry," and kept sorting, and I kept thinking about that half second for the rest of the day like some kind of idiot.

"So how does a color chart maker end up singing backup on a rock album," I asked, "on an island, in a tide gate?"

"Well," she said, sitting back on her heels, "I did the chart for the farm that owns this place, and Mackenzie came out to look at the light for some video thing and heard me singing to the drying racks. Which is embarrassing, but she basically trapped me. And I'd told myself that at thirty-nine I should do the scary thing at least once, so here I am." She looked over at me, shading her eyes even though we were indoors. "What's your scary thing?"

I hadn't expected the question and it landed harder than it should have. "Showing up," I said. "Being new somewhere at forty-four. Everybody in this band has ten years of history and inside jokes and I've got a duffel bag and a divorce."

"Hey," she said, and her voice changed, got plain and kind. "I've got a duffel bag too, metaphorically. We can be the new kids together." Then she grinned and flicked a petal at me. "Also your rust gradient is crooked."

We worked through the whole morning like that, and when the rows were done she stood and surveyed them with her hands on her hips like a general, and said she'd photograph them at noon when the light was right. Then she looked at me sidelong and said, "You know the tide comes up through the old channels at night and the whole building hums. It's the best sound on the island and nobody ever stays up to hear it."

"Maybe I will," I said.

"You should," she said. "Somebody should." And she picked up her sack of leftover petals and went out into the fields, and I stood there on the concrete with orange fingers and thought, well, ten days might not be so bad.

* * *

The mixing session ran late that night, mostly because Mackenzie wanted the third track to breathe more, which apparently meant we all sat around in the control room while she pushed faders up and down and made faces at the monitors. Tate had gone to bed around eleven, but Vicky stayed, curled sideways in a chair with her feet up on an amp case, humming along under her breath when the backup vocal came in. It was past midnight when Mackenzie finally threw her hands up and said she'd fix the rest tomorrow, and then it was just the two of us in that concrete room with the hum of the tide starting up somewhere below us.

"You hear that," Vicky said, tilting her head. "Right on schedule. Told you it was the best sound on the island."

"It's good," I admitted. "Like the building's breathing."

"That's exactly it, that's what I always say." She pulled her feet down and turned her chair toward mine, and there was a stretch where neither of us said anything, and it wasn't a bad stretch, it was the kind where you can tell somebody's working up to something. Then she said, "Can I tell you something kind of awful? I took the backup gig partly to get out of the chart job for a few weeks."

"That's the most relatable thing anybody's said to me in years."

"No, really, it's awful!" She laughed, that sideways laugh of hers. "I love the farm, I do, but I've been making petal charts for six years, and every season it's the same yellow and the same rust and the same farmers squinting at my swatches and saying they think it looks more like a seven. I wanted to be around music again. I wanted to be around people who stay up late for a reason. So when Mackenzie twisted my arm, I let her twist it a lot harder than she needed to."

"I faked a reason to get out of my apartment to come here," I said. "So we're even."

"What reason?"

"I told Tate I wanted to record again, which was true, but the bigger truth is that my apartment was very quiet and very clean and I'd been divorced for two years and I could not stand one more Friday night reheating curry and listening to the refrigerator. Eighteen years of marriage ends and suddenly the loudest thing in your life is the refrigerator. So when the band needed a guitarist, I said yes before I even checked my calendar."

Vicky looked at me for a moment, then nodded slowly. "The refrigerator thing. God, yes. That's why I sang to the drying racks, you know. Nobody to talk to but flowers."

We laughed about that, and it felt good, and then it felt like something else, the way laughing with someone at midnight can, and she stood up and said she was going to check the tide gauge out by the control panel because Mackenzie had asked her to log it, which I'm pretty sure was a pretext, and I'm pretty sure I said I'd come with her, which definitely was.

* * *

The van was parked just outside the gate, and Vicky wanted her jacket out of the back, and I went to pop the trunk for her, except the latch was sticky and I grabbed what I thought was the release and pulled. It was not the trunk latch. It was the parking brake, and the van, which had been sitting on the slight slope of the yard, rolled about four feet downhill before stopping against a coiled hose with a gentle bump.

"Oh no," Vicky said, and then she started laughing.

"It's fine," I said, "the hose broke the fall," and that was apparently the funniest thing either of us had ever heard, because she bent over double and I couldn't get a full breath, and we stood there in the dark next to a slowly cooling van laughing like fools for what had to be ten minutes. Every time one of us would wind down, the other would wheeze "the hose" and we'd go again. Somewhere in there she sat down on the bumper because her ribs hurt, and I sat next to her, and the tide hum came up through the ground under us.

"You know," she said, wiping her eyes, "you're the first person to make me laugh like that since I don't know when. Since before the chart job, anyway."

"Setting the bar on the ground, that's my specialty."

"Rodney." She said it lightly, but she turned so she was facing me. "Come here."

"Is that an invitation or an order?"

"An invitation. Definitely an invitation." And she waited, which I appreciated more than she probably knew, because I got to be the one to close the distance, and I did, and I kissed her next to the tide gate's control panel with the dials and the dead gauges rusting above us. She tasted like the mint tea she'd been drinking in the control room, and her hand came up to the side of my face, and when we broke apart she said, "Well. Took you long enough. That thing with the parking brake was clearly a seduction ploy."

"It worked on the second try, no notes."

"Come inside," she said. "The blankets in the live room are thick and Mackenzie will be asleep and the building hums better from in there anyway."

The live room was dark except for the little red standby light on the console, and she was right, the hum was louder in there, coming up through the concrete as if the whole island was a low E string. We dragged the stack of studio blankets off the couch in the corner and spread them on the floor, and then we stood there for a second like two people who had each done this before but not recently and not with each other.

"Okay, honest confession," she said, pulling her shirt over her head in one motion like she'd decided not to give herself time to reconsider. "It's been a while for me. So if I do anything awkward, we laugh about it and move on."

"It's been two years for me," I said, "so you've set the bar pretty low. Whatever you do will be world class."

"Two years?" She kicked her jeans off and stepped out of them, and she was standing there in her underwear in the red light, thirty-nine years old and gorgeous, and said, "Well then we're going to be terrible together. I can't wait." I got my shirt off and my pants down, and I was digging in my duffel for the condoms I'd brought to the island out of pure optimism and never expected to use, and she watched me do it and grinned and said, "Look at you, all prepared.