The Ballad of Ami Miles

by Kristy Dallas Alley

  “Why, yes, ma’am, we have. Hey, Ami.”

  “Oh good!” Miss Jean said. “Well, I’ve got books to shelve, but you couldn’t get a better guide to this room than Jessie. She’s in here more than anybody.” I was still behind her, blocking the doorway, so she stepped around me and was gone. Then it was just the two of us.

  “Hey yourself,” I said back. I took another step into the room and looked around. When we came in, she was sitting on the floor in the corner, looking at something that looked a little like the children’s books but even flatter and more square. After Miss Jean left, she stood up and took a step toward me but then stopped and looked down at the floor. We both stood there not knowing what to say, listening to the sound of rain hitting the roof high above our heads. Then there was a flash of lightning, and thunder boomed quick behind it. We both jumped a little and then laughed.

  “Hey, listen, I wanted to say I’m sorry,” she said.

  “About what?” I asked, confused. Far as I could remember, Jessie hadn’t done anything she needed to apologize to me for. She looked up at my face like she was trying to tell if I was serious.

  “You know, about yesterday. I shouldn’t have run out like that. We were having a good time, least I thought we were, and you told me all about your family and everything. It was just … that stuff Hanna was sayin’ made me so mad, and I…” She crossed her arms over her chest and looked up at the ceiling, and it looked like she was about to get mad all over again.

  “Yeah, I could tell,” I said, stepping closer and dipping my head to get her to meet my eyes. She looked back at me and grinned. “But that wasn’t nothing you need to apologize to me for. That’s between you and them. We don’t need to get into all that again right now.” The truth was, I was curious, but Ruth always said curiosity killed the cat, and right then I wanted to get back to how things had been between us yesterday a lot more than I wanted to hear about Teenie and her baby. That could wait. She looked relieved, and I took that as a sign that I was headed in the right direction.

  “What is all this stuff, anyway?” I asked, looking around the room again. “Miss Jean said you would be my guide. Better not make a liar out of her.”

  “Oh, better not,” Jessie said with pretend seriousness. She made her voice sound a lot like Miss Jean’s. “Now, this room has the records and record players, along with old electronic things that don’t work anymore. You can see these little signs that say what they are.” We walked around the room, picking up folded cards that said funny names like COMPUTER, SMARTPHONE, TABLET, and GAME CONSOLE.

  “The computer can even turn on if it’s plugged in, but it don’t do much besides light up blue and show a few words and pictures scattered around the screen,” Jessie said. “Miss Jean thinks it’s a waste of solar power, so she keeps it unplugged most of the time. The record players are unplugged, too, but she lets me plug one in whenever I want.” I could see that it was those record players that kept Jessie coming back to the artifacts room.

  “This is the best part!” she said, sounding like herself again. She was bouncing up and down on her toes as she tried to decide what to play first. I didn’t understand how the record player worked or how music could come out of those flat, shiny black circles.

  “I don’t exactly understand it either,” Jessie admitted, “but it’s something to do with these grooves, see?” She held a record out toward me and I stepped closer, suddenly aware of the little bit of space still between us. “They just look like little lines going around to us, but Miss Evelyn, that’s Jean’s sister, she says if we could shrink down to the size of ants and walk around inside the lines, we’d see a lot of bumps and stuff, and somehow that’s what holds the music. Then the needle on the record player reads those bumps, and the speaker plays the music. It’s science.” I still didn’t understand, but she said that luckily I didn’t have to understand for it to work. Jessie finally decided on a record and showed me the cover. It was all bright blue-and-orangey background with a picture of five women wearing nothing but towels wrapped around their bodies and another on their heads. Something white covered their faces except for their eyes. Nothing about the image made sense to me, but I kind of liked it for some reason.

  “Okay, this isn’t an old one like the songs I sang the other night. I mean, it’s old, but not old-old like the ballads. This is an all-girl band from the 1980s, and it’s something called rock music. Get ready to rock, Ami! I promise you have never heard anything like this.” She slid the record out of the flat cardboard cover, set it carefully on the player, and gently dropped the needle into the outer groove. Instantly sound was raining down over me. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that flood of so many different sounds all stacked and piled on top of one another. There was something that sounded a little like Jessie’s guitar but lower and more solid, and it was playing the same seven notes repeatedly and really fast. There was another sound like someone hitting something with a stick that reminded me of the way we had all kept time by clapping during “Good and Greasy.” And then someone started singing, maybe one of the women wrapped in a towel on the record cover, and her voice sounded kind of sped up and sharp but also happy, and she sang about people walking down the street in time because they got the beat.

  At first, Jessie just watched me and laughed at my stunned reaction, but after a few seconds, she grabbed my hands and started jumping up and down, dancing me around the room. I couldn’t help but follow her lead. It was like the music got inside me and made my body move. I felt like I would burst with the energy of it all. Then that song ended, and the next one was slower. It reminded me a little of the sad ballads, but Jessie picked the arm of the player up and over to the side, then replaced that record with another one that had a laughing brown-skinned man on the cover. This one had us dancing again even though I was puzzled by the man proclaiming that he had soul and was super bad. Didn’t everyone have a soul, and wasn’t being bad, well, bad? I couldn’t think about it too hard, though, because Jessie had let go of my hands and was doing a funny shuffling dance all around me, swinging her hips and turning in circles. Without her lead, I just stood and kind of swayed in time to the music, but my eyes followed her everywhere.

  She went on playing songs, sometimes letting one record play through several songs, sometimes changing them after just one song. Everything she played was fast and rhythmic, and we kept on dancing. There was something called jazz, and some of it was slow, but she played me swingy songs on a record by a man named Oliver Pleasant, who looked old on the cover but sounded young. Finally, we were too tired to keep it up, and she chose a record with a plain white cover that folded out wide because there were two records inside instead of just one. She studied the list of songs carefully and set the needle somewhere near the middle of one of the black discs, and then she sat down on the floor and patted the space beside her. The song that came out was as simple and spare as the others had been complicated and busy, just a quiet guitar and one voice singing about a blackbird flying away on broken wings. It made me think about my flight from Heavenly Shepherd—in the dead of night, just like the song said. Had I been waiting for that moment all my life, and I just hadn’t known it? Or was it this moment, here in the library at Lake Point with Jessie, that I’d been waiting for? The answer felt like yes. I knew that I had never felt more awake and alive than I did in that moment.

  Jessie seemed to know what I was thinking, because she reached over into the small space between us and took my hand. She didn’t squeeze it or even look at me when she did it, almost like she didn’t even know she was doing it. Her hand in mine felt like the most natural thing in the world. We were connected, Jessie and me, in ways I still couldn’t understand but that I knew were real and true, so holding her hand just seemed to confirm that connection in a physical way. I searched my mind for another connection like ours but couldn’t find it. Even though we’d just met a few days ago, I felt like I had known her for a long time. I trusted her enough
to tell her the whole story of why I was there, and she repaid my trust by listening and responding in just the way that I needed.

  When that song ended, Jessie pulled away just enough to kneel by the player and jump the needle forward to the groove closest to the end of the record. It was another quiet, slow song, and the man singing was telling someone named Julia that his words were meaningless, but they were just for her because she’s an ocean child with seashell eyes and floating sky hair. I figured he was right about the meaningless part because I couldn’t picture the girl he was describing at all, but I still liked the song. After that, she took that record off and put it back in its case, then scanned the shelves thoughtfully, looking for something.

  “Yesss, here it is,” she said mostly to herself. The record she held was mostly black, with a photograph of a brown-skinned woman near the bottom. She had some kind of paint around her eyes that made them look big and pointy at the edges. I saw that her name was Nina, just like the Nina here at Lake Point. I wondered if her mother named her after the singer. Jessie put the record on, then set the needle down carefully and sat back down in her place next to me.

  This song started out with just the woman’s voice, which was richer and deeper than the woman’s on the first song we listened to. She sang slow and deliberate about birds in the sky knowing how she feels because it’s a new day for her. Then the music came in behind her, not guitars but something harder and different-sounding, dropping deep notes that made me picture stair steps going down. Her words were about feeling free and starting new, but something about the way she sang them and the music behind made me think that freedom was being said like a threat to someone who didn’t want her to have it. It was my favorite of all the songs we’d listened to, and I closed my eyes to hear it better. At the end, the woman sang a bunch of nonsense sounds strung together, but somehow they made sense as part of the song.

  Finally, I opened my eyes and saw that Jessie had scooted around so she was facing me. We both sat with legs crisscrossed and folded onto themselves, and our knees were as close as they could be without touching. I was self-conscious realizing she had been watching me while I was listening so intently, and I felt the red-hot flush creep up my neck and over my face. I gave an embarrassed little laugh and looked down at my lap, but when I looked up again she was still watching me.

  “Ami,” she said, but no words followed. I felt overwhelmed by the music and the newness of everything in this place, but also, I couldn’t deny it anymore, by Jessie and the closeness of her body to mine. Our eyes were locked onto each other, and it almost felt like some thread ran between us that was pulling us in closer to each other until finally there was no way to stop it and our lips touched. It was a simple kiss, just stillness and pressure, but there had never been anything warmer or softer than Jessie’s lips on mine. All my life, I thought, I was only waiting for this moment to arrive. And that thought lasted exactly as long as the kiss did, until Jessie pulled away just a little and I opened my eyes and saw her beautiful face so close to mine, and I panicked.

  Seventeen

  “Ami?” Just my name again but this time loaded with questions, and before I knew it, I was up and running. I could hear her calling after me, but I didn’t look back or slow down. I had to cross the width of the big room, but luckily the library rooms were up near the front door, so there was no one in my path. I kept running down the hallways and up the stairs until I finally reached my room. Once I was inside, I leaned back against the door like I expected someone to come break it down. Was I expecting Jessie to follow me? Was I hoping she would? My heart was pounding from running as much as it was from panic, and I was breathing hard. I slid down to sit on the floor while I waited for my body to calm down and get back to normal. My mind would not stop racing, though.

  What had I done? I wasn’t sure if I was more upset that I’d kissed Jessie or that I had run away. Why did I kiss Jessie? Or did she kiss me, or was it both of us at the same time? Who had ever heard of such a thing? Who had ever done such a thing? I was supposed to be here looking for a partner, a husband, so that I could be the godly woman Ruth raised me to be! I needed a husband if I ever wanted to be able to go home again. If I ever wanted to go home again. Maybe that was the real question, the real reason I felt so scared and lost. How much had changed in just a few days? When I stopped believing my mother could help me and that new Ami was born, what happened to the old Ami? Was she still me? Did I want to be that old Ami anymore?

  Running away and getting to Lake Point all by myself was the beginning. Being on my own and taking care of myself, making my own choices about the best way to get myself where I needed to be, had shown me how strong I really was. I never would have thought I was capable of any of that, but I was. And then being here, meeting all these new people, finding kids my own age who could become friends, seeing how much bigger the world was than I had ever known—it was all just so big! And it all made Heavenly Shepherd look mighty small. How could I fit myself back into that little closed-up life?

  And then there was Jessie. Had I really only spent a few hours with her? That day in the garden, just then in the library, and the other night around the fire—that was it. But in the spaces in between, I’d thought about her almost constantly. How could I feel the way I felt about her after such a short time? I didn’t even understand how I felt about her, but I did know that it was strong and would only get stronger.

  Without meaning to, I thought about the kiss. When I closed my eyes, I could still feel her soft lips on mine. I could still see her eyes opening so close to mine and hear the way she asked my name like a question, and I did not feel like I wanted to run away from her at all. Even though my mind said that I should and that kissing her was wrong, my heart and my body wanted to get that close to her again as soon as I could. But I had run away from her, and I was afraid she’d be mad or worse, hurt. Maybe this was as confusing for her as it was for me. I had to go back.

  When I got back to the library, though, she was gone. I didn’t know how much time had passed, but I didn’t think it had been long enough for her to get very far. I realized that I wasn’t sure exactly where Jessie lived, so I couldn’t go to her room. The rain had stopped sometime during all the music, so I figured she might have gone outside. On a hunch, I crossed the big room to get out to the patio and walk down toward the lake, but I didn’t see her. Instead I saw Will, and before I could turn around and pretend I hadn’t, he saw me.

  “Hey, Ami. Looking for somebody?” He smirked as if he already knew the answer to that question, but how could he?

  I reminded myself that no one knew what had happened between Jessie and me, though my cheeks burned at the thought. Will watched my face turn red and laughed.

  “Nope, just taking a walk. What about you?” I refused to let him get me flustered.

  “Just takin’ a walk, seein’ if that storm did any damage. Want to walk with me?” I didn’t know why I always felt kind of on edge with Will, but I did. It was still strange for me to be around any other kids my age, but it seemed easier with the girls. A little voice in my head was whispering that Will was a boy my age, a potential mate, and that I should try to get to know him. Especially after what happened with Jessie, it felt important for me to push forward in the search for someone I could choose. Someone who was a boy. What did I really know about him and Hanna, after all?

  “Okay,” I said simply. He looked surprised but then happy.

  “Have you been around to the cabin side yet?” he asked. I shook my head no, and he nodded like he thought so. “There are the cottages right around the lake, which are newer than the cabins but, you know, still old. They were designed to be a little more fancy and nice when the resort was trying to get more rich folks to come here. But they’re also smaller. We live in one of the bigger cabins since there’s four of us. But we’ll pass the cottages on our way. I want to show you something.” I glanced over to see if I should be worried about the something he wanted to show me, bu
t I couldn’t judge his expression. Will, the golden boy. He always seemed so sure of himself, of his rightness. I wondered what that was like.

  We followed the path around the opposite side of the lake from where the gardens were, and soon we came upon a long row of cute little cottages. Each one had a peach tree in front of it, loaded with ripening fruit. Most of the peaches were still green yet, but soon they would be bursting with sweetness and juice. My mouth watered a little just thinking about it. I loved peaches.

  “These are Miss Hillie’s babies. Sam helps her, but it’s Hillie who gives the orders. Did you know a peach tree can only bear fruit for about twelve years? They grow new ones from the pits in a little nursery over by the greenhouses so they can keep the line going. By the time these stop producing, there’ll be new ones to take their place.”

  “Kind of like people, I guess. Or like people used to be,” I said. “We have some peach trees back home, but they grow wild. Nobody takes them down when they stop producing, so they just get old and gnarled until they finally die. But they drop more fruit on the ground than we can gather, so new trees spring up on their own anyway.” We just stood there, thoughtful, looking at the trees loaded with fruit.

  “I guess the government thought they could fix things by cultivating us like these trees,” Will said, “but it didn’t work like that. People ain’t trees; I guess they had to learn that the hard way. But it looks like we’re more like those wild ones of yours, coming back anyway. At least some of us.” It was easier for me to talk to Will when we didn’t have to look at each other. We looked at the trees.

  “My papa … my grandfather told me that there used to be chemical companies that messed with the seeds of different crops so they couldn’t reproduce,” I said. “They wanted all the farmers to have to buy seeds instead of saving them from one year to the next the way they had always done. He figured that might have had something to do with why we stopped being able to have babies. Like the chemicals worked too much or something, maybe. But then he would say the barrenness was God’s judgment on us, so I’m not sure if that meant God made the chemical companies mess with the food or what. I tried to ask him, but he would just say the Lord works in mysterious ways and ours is not to reason why. He liked to say that a lot.” I let my voice trail off. How had I ended up rambling about Papa Solomon and God from a conversation about peach trees?