a feeler, checking to see if I’d forgotten what he’d done yet.
I hadn’t forgotten. I’d forgiven, because again, my best friend had taught me a thing or two about being a good human. And what was the point in being angry forever? That would only hurt me anyway.
But I was never going to forget that shit.
Sure, there was a time when I would’ve replied to his text. Marched straight into battle. Told him in scathing, colorful detail where he could shove it, how fast and how hard.
I used to be tough, angry, and snarky as hell.
I used to be a broken girl from a fucked-up home, with a real knack for biting back when I was bitten.
But that was Taylor 1.0.
The new, improved Taylor, the more mature Taylor, the Taylor who was turning thirty at the end of this year, didn’t go there anymore. Nope.
This Taylor simply deleted the message, because it was unwanted. And moved on. Instead of arguing with my ex over something that would never change no matter how much I fought with it or told it that it was an asshole, I went online.
And I searched “Cary Clarke.”
The first page of Google hits was a revealing smattering of what the world—or at least Google—seemed to think you urgently needed to know about the man. One glance at that page told you that Cary Rylan Clarke, aged thirty-two, was, in the eyes of the world, 1) a famous musician, 2) a famous hermit, and 3) a famous hottie.
The hottie thing I looked past, because that part was self-evident. I didn’t need a bunch of social polling sites to tell me how high he’d scored on the bangable celebrity meter.
Besides, I’d already looked at plenty of pictures of him online.
But I hadn’t read about him.
On the musician thing and the hermit thing, I scanned the articles on offer, skipping to page two of the search results, then page three. Other than the first few legit articles from music magazines talking about his musical body of work, there really didn’t seem to be much written about him in recent years that was of any substance.
There were those words again though, repeated often.
Recluse. Workaholic. Shut-in.
But it was all just gossip. No one who actually knew him was quoted saying things like that in the articles I scanned. The musicians who spoke about him in interviews said other things.
Outstanding musician. Incredible artist. Genius.
There was an article that caught my eye, something in Rolling Stone about the end of his band, Alive. I clicked on it, and I scanned what it said about Alive’s bassist, Gabe Romanko, dying, and the band going on hiatus mid-tour; speculation about whether or not they would complete the tour. The article was written several months after Gabe died, but it didn’t go into detail about his death.
No doubt there were many, many articles about that, closer to the time it happened.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to read them.
I’d definitely heard about it. It was big news in Vancouver when it happened. I’d read a bit about it back then; at least the headlines. But that was five years ago. Danica had also told me the sad story, months ago, after she heard it personally from Courteney. At least, the parts that Courteney had told her over drinks. I didn’t really know any details about how it happened. A hotel fire or something? That’s all Danica had said.
It was publicly accessible information now, of course, but the idea of reading about the death of Cary’s bandmate, and other people’s two cents about how it had affected Cary, felt too much like spying on Cary.
Plus… what if the articles got it all wrong?
I really didn’t want to form an opinion about the circumstances surrounding the man’s grief based on what other people had to say in some online post that might be complete fiction. Danica had already schooled me on this. On how much shit people said online about her rock star husband that wasn’t even true.
Instead, I checked out the career stats on Cary’s Wikipedia page. I figured those would at least be verified by the community of his supporters, and based on things like album sales, not gossip and hearsay.
Apparently, he’d played lead guitar in a few local Vancouver bands, one of which had released an album with a major label out of Seattle before he and Gabe split with the other band members, then formed Alive with Xander Rush and lead singer Dean Slater. Since