***

I tossed the batch of letters onto the passenger’s seat, setting Google Maps to lead me back to the hotel. Down Mulholland. I closed out of it and locked my phone. I knew how to get there. The letters sloshed around as I started the car and turned to go down a side street. There would be less traffic off the main roads. It could be more leisurely. No reason to deal with the traffic and exposure out there.

The houses on the small, residential side streets were perfect. Their manicured trees and two-story facades undoubtedly lead back to equally perfect backyards. Our house had been like that, in years past. Tim and I climbing on the rubber tree in the backyard, while Ethan sang in the den with the window open. I took another left.

I looked off at the far-left corner of the next intersection. There was a Norms diner, its obnoxiously tall sign towering over everything else at the corner. This was Hurley Street. It was the same Norms that Ethan and I had breakfast in after he got out of the hospital, still wearing the neck brace and sling. He had walked slowly from the car to the door. I stayed a few paces ahead. We didn’t talk much that day, and certainly not about how a few nights earlier he’d gotten coked out of his mind with Tim, driving a hundred down Mulholland into a pole. I hated him too much. Tim’s funeral was the next day. We knew everything without saying it.

I drove across and past the Norms, down more back alleys to the hotel. After I parked the car, I bunched up the letters again to take to my room. No one said anything to me as I crossed the lobby, no doubt looking sad and ungainly. I wondered if any of them recognized me or knew that Ethan had died. If they did, it couldn’t be worse than when someone far too ardently asked that day at Norms if this meant that the band was broken up permanently.

The room was small, with a queen bed, a desk, and a TV. I set the envelopes down on the desk and lay down on the bed. I wasn’t going to read them. They were all just more Norms conversations.

I cried when I heard Tim had died, and I cried even more for Ethan. I can’t believe what you’re going through. My thoughts and prayers are with you.

I remember when I first heard Feels Like That. It took me out of a dark place. I hope it can do the same for you now.

I always loved the three of you in ETG and will always remember your songs. I hope you’re doing ok. And if you ever do any solo projects, I’ll buy all your songs to support you.

They were all a bunch of people who had no idea who I was, trying to assuage their fears that a part of their past was ending. Why would they cry when he died? Because they liked his songs? He wouldn’t cry if they died. I wouldn’t. I wasn’t crying. They didn’t need to. They didn’t know him.

They weren’t there when he dragged us into it, enlisting mom to give me piano and Tim guitar lessons, the prima donna that he was. They didn’t see how he took Tim down into his world, trying to live like he thought he should, with vodka and blow. They didn’t try to pull Tim out, writing Ethan off as a lost cause. Or need to walk away. Or see everything come to fruition on TV, helicopters hovering above ambulances.

He killed Tim and then himself. He wasn’t worth tears, theirs or mine.

And yet they felt like they cared, for a day or so. However long it took them to write and send the letter. Then their lives moved on. Now I had to get these stupid letters full of vapid thoughts and pointless concerns. We were the dead men they imagined us to be. There was nothing else for them to know.

When they would look up at me onstage, they would only see what they imagined me to be. I would jump and run around, at least in the early years, and they would say that I loved being onstage playing music. That wasn’t entirely true. I loved playing with Ethan and Tim, but making music was never my thing. Sometimes I could forget the crowd and it would be just us, hanging out and running around.

I never wanted to be a musician. I liked math back in high school. Maybe I could go to college somewhere after Ethan’s funeral to get a degree and do that. There was always that hidden part of me different from what people saw onstage. But for Ethan, there was no offstage self, with other hobbies and interests. The on and offstage selves became one. That’s why I couldn’t play at his funeral. If I played there, someone would record it, and the video would get shared, and it would go viral, and someone would pay me a ton of money to play at a charity event for heart disease, and a producer would tell me I should make a solo album, and I would resist for a time, before finally caving because at that point what else could I do? If I didn’t fight it, any chance of being a separate person from the music, from the persona and songs, would go away, like what happened to Ethan. I needed to stay myself while I still could, before the stage came and swallowed me up.