Jane looked up at the cloudless blue sky and let the sunshine warm her face as she strolled along the shoulder of the empty country road. She hadn’t particularly wanted a day off from her nanny duties, and she’d been a bit taken aback when her boss pulled into the driveway this morning with some woman from town who’d agreed to baby-sit for the day. But her contract called for one day off each week, and she was glad now that she’d taken it. As much as she adored spending time with Adele, keeping up with the little girl’s endless chatter could get exhausting after a while.

She’d been making good progress with Adele, she thought with a satisfied smile.  She’d even gotten the little girl to help pick up all her toys at the end of the day before bed. Her boss had come in and found them cleaning up together last night. Jane felt her cheeks heat up now from more than the sunshine as she remembered the way he had nodded at her in approval.

The trick with Adele was music, she’d discovered. Adele loved to sing, and the music seemed to help keep her attention from flying all over the place. They’d watched another DVD from her collection of musicals, Mary Poppins, and Jane had adopted one of the songs as their theme song whenever it was time to clean up. She had the words hopelessly stuck in her head at this point.

In every job that must be done

There is an element of fun.

You find the fun and snap!

The job's a game.

And every task you undertake

Becomes a piece of cake.

A lark! A spree!

It's very clear to see that a…

Spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,

The medicine go down, the medicine go down.

Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down

In a most delightful way. 

It was that same Julie Andrews – the one from the other movie, The Sound of Music. She seemed to have made a career of playing irritatingly cheerful nannies. Right now, though, the idea of reaching Julie Andrews’ level of childcare proficiency didn’t seem quite as remote as it had when Jane first started this job. Things were going rather well, in fact.

And not just with Adele, either – with her boss too. Jane felt like she was beginning to understand him better now. She still didn’t follow half the things he said, but at least she understood that he wasn’t making fun of her. More like teasing her. And he seemed to enjoy it whenever she teased him back.  

It had become something of a game between them, sitting in the library after Adele was in bed, trading playful insults while she read and sipped her cup of tea and he worked on his laptop and drank his wine. She’d worried at first that she would go too far and offend him, but it seemed like the more she needled him, the more he laughed. And then she’d get to see the way his eyes crinkled at the corners when he broke into a genuine smile. She couldn’t suppress the smile that crept onto her own face every time she thought of it.

Of course, it was a relief that she no longer felt the need to stay shut up in her own room every evening, but she admitted to herself there was more to it than that. She actively looked forward to seeing him now, even going out of her way sometimes to bump into him when she heard him puttering around the house during the daytime. And at night after he’d gone off to his bedroom and she’d climbed into her own twin bed, she would lie awake and go back over the conversation – trying to make sense of all of his clever remarks and thinking of all the witty comebacks she should have said in return.

She’d been slowly piecing together little bits of information about him and his past. She’d found out the name of his former band and surreptitiously listened to a few of the albums while he was out of the house. She recognized She Will Be Loved as the song from their trip to the train station, and Goodnight Goodnight was the lullaby he’d taught Adele. The music only raised more questions in her mind though. Why had he stopped recording? Why had he moved out here to the middle of nowhere? Did it have to do with what happened to Adele’s mother? How long ago had she died? The questions went on and on, and Jane didn’t quite have the nerve to ask any of them, as much as she was longing to know the answers.

She was still humming the Mary Poppins soundtrack as she once again turned the questions over in her mind, but she broke off suddenly at the sight of the old mental hospital in the distance. She’d thought it was farther from the house than this, but it couldn’t have been more than half a mile. It looked like there was someone parked outside the gates. She squinted against the sun to get a better look.  Was that her boss’s truck? She picked up her pace and walked toward it briskly, wondering if he’d had some sort of car trouble.

***

Adam stretched out his legs and crossed them at the ankles, trying to think of something interesting to say to his wife. It could be a bit of a drag, these one-sided conversations, and sometimes he wondered if there was any point to them at all. The doctors insisted that the stimulation of hearing his voice would be good for her. But, then again, they were doctors. What did they know.

With a stifled sigh, he cast about for a topic that might interest her. “The new nanny seems like she might actually work out,” he said after a moment. “Adele really seems to love her.” He smiled to himself remembering the sight of the two of them yesterday evening, singing at the top of their lungs while they cleaned up the playroom.

“I mean, she’s young,” he continued. “She’s only 22. And she’s got a mouth on her,” he added with a chuckle. “She’s actually got an amazing set of pipes, Jane. Kind of insanely good. I don’t think she even realizes.” He laughed again. “Half of me wants to fire her as a nanny and sign her to the record label instead.”

It wasn’t the worst idea, but he wasn’t quite prepared to follow through on it. Why was he so set on keeping her around? Because Adele liked her, right? Well, it was more than just that, he admitted to himself. He'd be lying if he said he minded having another adult in the house to joke around with in the evenings.

“Anyway, she’s funny," he said to the motionless figure in the bed. "She makes me laugh.” He reached out and picked up Jane’s limp hand as he spoke. “Not to give you a hard time, Jane, but your conversation hasn’t really been up to its usual standards lately.”

The song that had been playing on the iPod came to an end, and he recognized the opening synth hook from Love Somebody. He paused in his monologue and sat listening for a moment. He’d recorded it for the fourth Maroon 5 album, back in the days when the band was at its height of popularity. The fourth and final Maroon 5 album, he silently amended.  They’d had a fifth album in the works until the shit hit the fan with Jane. But the music had all come to an unceremonious halt the day Jane closed her eyes and never opened them again.

He’d been under what felt like house arrest for weeks afterward. The publicists had managed to conceal Jane’s condition from the press, but he’d known it was only a matter of time before some hospital employee leaked it. His only choice had been to move her somewhere remote and restrict the information of her whereabouts to only the closest family and friends. As far as the rest of the world knew, Jane was alive and well, and they were all living out some fantasy life of secluded domestic bliss – the deliriously happy Levine family, basking away in the Idaho sunshine.

The band hadn’t been able to withstand his move though. They’d called it a “temporary hiatus” at first, but after six months with no change in Jane’s condition, he’d known he couldn’t ask his bandmates to wait around for him forever. It was late 2014 when he'd finally put them all out of their misery.

The fans had been growing restless by that point, and he’d gone back to LA for a one-night-only farewell concert at the Hollywood Bowl. He’d expected the emotion to be overwhelming, singing those songs in front of a packed stadium for the final time. The other guys were feeling it, he could see. They’d played Sweetest Goodbye for the finale, and Jesse hadn’t even bothered to wipe the tears away as they streamed down his face. Mickey, James, PJ… even stone-faced Mattie looked like he was getting a little misty-eyed. And Adam – he had faked it pretty convincingly. He didn’t think any of them guessed the truth.

The truth was, those song lyrics that had been so meaningful to him once just felt like empty words. He thought he’d understood pain and heartbreak when he wrote them, but it all just seemed so juvenile now. That crowd singing along with him – that feeling of being carried away on a wave of adrenaline as they screamed his name – it was the first time it had ever failed him. They were just a sea of faces. Just an ocean of strangers. He’d stood before them, pretending to wear his heart on his sleeve, pretending at the end to choke on his emotion. But it was all just an act. Just one more lie. The truth was he felt nothing. Empty inside. Hollow to the core.

I know your insides are feeling so hollow…

He chuckled to himself at the first line of Love Somebody. That wasn’t the kind of hollowness he’d meant when he wrote it. He’d meant that weightless feeling when you’re standing on a precipice, looking down over the edge at nothing but empty space. That combination of fear and excitement at the moment when you realize you’re just about to fall – the way it pushes all the air out of your chest and makes your stomach bounce around like a helium balloon in the empty cavity.

But if I fall for you, I'll never recover.

If I fall for you, I'll never be the same.

He tried to think back to the time when he wrote those words and the way it had felt, but he was having trouble envisioning it. It was only five years ago, but it felt like a lifetime. He’d been in New York City. He’d just spent the night with Jane after 11 years of separation. He was supposed to fly back to LA the next morning, but he’d lingered in New York instead, unwilling to let her go again after just one night. He’d spent the day in his hotel room trying to concentrate on prepping for media interviews, but his mind kept wandering back to Jane. He’d spent the whole day looking at the clock, counting the hours until she would return, and he’d known he was standing at the edge of a cliff. If he spent another night with her, there’d be no going back. Not so much that he would fall in love with her again – the truth was, he’d been in love with her the whole time, all those years apart. But if he spent one more night with her, he knew, he wouldn’t be able to deny that fact to himself anymore. He should have been scared. He should have been terrified. But he’d sat in the hotel room, staring out over the edge, and he remembered the sheer exhilaration of feeling something after so many years of numbness. He’d written the words to Love Somebody while he waited.

I really wanna love somebody.

I really wanna dance the night away.

I know we're only half way there,

But you can take me all the way, you can take me all the way.

Numbness. He was back to the numbness now, since Jane had retreated into this empty shell of nothingness that lay before him. As much as he missed her and the life they were supposed to be living together, he admitted to himself he also missed simply feeling anything for anyone. He had Adele of course. He loved Adele. But was that enough? He turned Jane’s hand over and began playing with her fingers one at a time. Was this all he was going to get to feel for the rest of his life?

I really wanna touch somebody.

I think about you every single day.

I know we're only half way there,

But you can take me all the way, you can take me all the way.

He tried to think back to how Jane had looked that night in New York. He’d taken her out for dinner and a night on the town. What had she been wearing? He couldn’t quite remember. He tried to picture her face, but for some reason the face that kept popping into his mind was the nanny – how she had looked that night in the library when she told him about being abandoned by her mother. She had a tough exterior, but he could see the pain behind the mask. It reminded him of himself in a way. They both knew how to hide in plain sight. He wondered what he would see if managed to chip away that mask of hers and look underneath. And what would happen if he let her see beneath his own?

He shook himself, turning his attention back to the woman in the bed. He suddenly felt like the walls of the little hospital room were closing in on him. He needed to get outside and clear his head. The song was stuck in his head now, and he heard the opening lines echoing in his mind after he had kissed his wife gently on the forehead and padded out the hospital room door

I know your insides are feeling so hollow,

And it's a hard pill for you to swallow...

***

“Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” Jane sang to herself under her breath as she made her way up to the truck parked outside the asylum’s front gates. The hood was cool to the touch. It must have been parked here for some time. She looked around for a minute, expecting to see Adam nearby, but there was no sign of him. The rusted out gates were closed, but she noticed now that the padlock had been popped open. He must have gone in there, she thought, pressing her face between two of the wrought-iron bars and peering through the gap.

She waited for a moment, listening for any sign of life and considering whether she should just keep walking. It was one thing to bump into her boss a little more often than necessary while they were both at home, but she didn’t want him to think she was following him around like a lost puppy dog. On the other hand, her curiosity was piqued. What on Earth was he doing in there? She remembered what he had said about this place the first day, when he had picked her up from the train station. “Trust me. You don’t want to poke around in there.”

The place was dangerous. He’d told her so himself. If he was in there, it was perfectly natural for her to go check if he was all right. Right? He wouldn’t think it was weird. He wouldn’t think it was because she was looking for any excuse to be alone with him.

“Oh, what the hell,” she muttered to herself. Reaching a decision, she put both hands on the handle of the heavy gate and slowly dragged it open.