by Karen White
I watched, suspended between this world and the next, as my mother bent over Eve’s body, my sister’s legs bent in ways they shouldn’t have been. Two paramedics worked on her, trying to push my mother away, while another noticed me, my body nearly hidden in the thick underbrush by the side of the road. When he squatted next to me, his fingers reached for the pulse in my neck. I felt none of this. I watched passively as if I were a spectator in a movie theater.
I noticed that the paramedic was young, with thick blond hair on his head and muscled forearms, which reflected the sunlight and reminded me of the sweetgrass. I was studying him so intently that I didn’t realize that he’d begun to perform CPR. Still, I felt nothing. I was more focused on my sister and on my mother, who hadn’t looked in my direction yet. I hadn’t really expected her to.
And there was Glen, tall and slender and strong, moving between Eve and me, helpless to do anything, his frantic pacing only stirring up dust.
I heard my name called, and I thought for a moment it might be my father come to take me away; away from the two broken girls and screaming mother and the air that moved in hot, thick waves. Flies buzzed and dipped over the thin trail of blood from my open mouth, but I couldn’t hear them or feel them. I was thinking somebody needed to swat them away when I noticed for the first time the wooden church set back behind the trees. When Eve and I had walked our bikes down the dirt road just a short time before, giggling like the little girls we had once been, I hadn’t seen it. It seemed impossible that I couldn’t have.
The bright whitewashed walls and tall steeple shone like a benediction in the relentless sunlight. The words PRAISE HOUSE were hand painted over the top of the arched red door, a fence with a rusty gate swinging as if spirits were passing through. It made no sense for the church to be where it was, nestled between the giant oaks and bright green undergrowth. But the white paint glowed in the sun as if brand-new, the wood steps leading up to the front door smooth and worn from the tread of hundreds of feet. Seated on the bottom step was a large woman with skin the color of burnt charcoal, her fingers working her sewing bone through the strands on a sweetgrass basket. She wasn’t looking at me, but I was sure it was she who’d called my name.
“Who are you?” I wanted to ask, but all I could do was watch her and her fingers and the grass as it was woven into the pattern of the basket.
Grasping the basket in one hand, she stood and began walking toward where I lay. She stopped for a moment, looking down on me, her shadow blocking the sun from my baking body like an angel of mercy. Slowly, she knelt by the paramedic and leaned toward me. He didn’t seem to notice the woman as she bent close to my ear. Her words were clear, and I thought I could feel a cool breeze on my cheek from her breath as she spoke. “All shut-eye ain’t sleep. All good-bye ain’t gone.”
The pain struck me like a fist as I was pulled back toward earth, down into the body I’d inhabited for seventeen years, and gasped with one long, icy breath. I opened my eyes, meeting the blue eyes of the startled paramedic. I turned my head, searching for the woman, but she was gone. Only the sound of a rusty gate and the lingering scent of the heat-scorched sweetgrass told me that she’d been there at all.
I heard my mother crying out my sister’s name over and over as I stared up at the clear blue sky, where a white egret circled slowly overhead. All shut-eye ain’t sleep. All good-bye ain’t gone. I didn’t know what she had meant, but I reasoned I’d been given another lifetime to figure it out.
Almost fourteen years later, I was still trying.
CHAPTER 2
Glen was waiting for me as I struggled up the peeling porch with the grocery bags, the change from my bus fare still clutched in my hands.
“You’re late,” he said softly as he walked toward me, his long legs and movements graceful as a dancer’s.
It was those long legs that had saved Eve’s life—and probably my own—on that hot summer day all those years ago. He’d run for help on those legs, which had made him a track star in high school and the first two years of college. He’d never been mine, even back then. From the first moment Eve saw him at Carolina’s sipping a Coke with fellow Citadel cadets, he’d been hers.
I smiled at him in the falling light. “Mr. Beaufain needed me to finish a project for him before I left.”
Glen took his time taking one of the bags from me, his fingers lingering on my hand. He was close enough that I could smell his scent and see the damp tendrils of his dark hair, which touched the collar of his shirt. He still wore his tie, and I wondered if he’d even gone inside yet or had sat here waiting for me.
“How are you, Eleanor? How are you really? It seems I barely see you anymore.”
I glanced nervously at the windows. “Don’t,” I said, the word as familiar and sharp as a razor’s blade.
His voice was quiet so as not to be overheard. “I’m not doing anything to be ashamed of, Eleanor. I would never dishonor you that way.”
“Don’t,” I said again, turning from him and feeling the stain of his touch and the slow burn of his gaze on my back.
My mother jerked open the door. “We’ve been worried sick. Where have you been? Your sister is just about starving to death, and I can’t take my medication on an empty stomach.” She took the last bag from my hand as I stole a glance at Glen, who gave me a sympathetic shrug.
Eve sat in her wheelchair in front of the bay window, where the grand piano had sat for a short time. When we’d lived on Edisto Island, my favorite place had been sitting on the piano bench next to my father, who had smelled like the ocean and whose hands had been coarse and roughened by shrimp nets and ropes. But his fingers had had an elegance to them, holding within them the magic to translate the music from mere piano notes to flesh and blood—a living thing. Without any formal training himself, he had taught me how to see the music in my head, to create food for the soul from black marks on a page. He had bought books so I could learn how to read music, but his lessons had taught me so much more. While my mother had traveled with Eve to pageant after pageant, our father had made plans for me to attend the Julliard School in New York.
Eve glanced up at me. “Hello, Eleanor. We were beginning to wonder if you were going to come home at all.”
I slid off my jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. I didn’t answer her, afraid to let them know that I had thought of little else as I rode from downtown Charleston with my old friend and coworker Lucy Coakley in her ancient Buick Regal and then the swaying, lurching bus for the second leg. “I’m sorry. I got held up at work.” Lucy would refuse, but I’d insist on paying her for waiting two hours. I wouldn’t tell them that, either.
A delicate furrow formed between Eve’s brows. “You should tell Mr. Beaufain that you expect to be paid overtime if he wants you to work past five o’clock.”
I thought of my boss, not much older than myself, with serious slate gray eyes and a quiet manner, who sometimes brought me lunch or who accepted my early departures or late arrivals without question. He knew I took my sister to her doctor’s appointments, and although I knew nothing of his personal life except that he was divorced and had a young daughter, he seemed to understand everything my absences implied.
“I’ll try and remember to tell him,” I said, my eyes avoiding hers as my gaze strayed to the bay window behind her. It faced the rear garden once cultivated by my mother until her arthritis had become too bad. It had gone mostly wild, and I found I like it that way—liked the way the untamed vines crept around the bowed and chipped lattices like a child clinging to its adoptive mother. It was a symphony of unexpected colors, the bastardized floral arrangements of the uncultivated garden creating new chords that had never been heard before. When I stood in their unplanned perfection, I almost imagined I could hear their music.
My gaze returned to my sister’s pale perfect face as she lifted her mouth for Glen’s kiss, her tiny hand with its gold band on the third finger gripping his arm. She was a china doll with porcelain skin and vi
olet-colored eyes, hair as black as our mother’s had once been, her limbs long and elegant. She wore a lavender silk housedress—made over by Eve from one of her pageant dresses—that set off her eyes and creamy skin. Most people only saw the beauty and the wheelchair and the delicate ankles and useless feet. It made them overlook the steely determination in her eyes and her unforgiving nature. But perhaps I saw them because I was the only one allowed to.
My mother disappeared into the kitchen, her voice trailing behind her. “Eve will need her bath tonight. She’s had a headache for most of the day and I know she’ll enjoy one of your good head massages, too.”
I followed her into the kitchen, already rolling up my sleeves. I wouldn’t have time to change and hoped the smell of frying chicken wouldn’t cling to my work clothes. I had two good skirts, which I rotated with five blouses, and I couldn’t imagine that the smell of fry grease would be familiar or welcome at the investment firm of Beaufain and Associates.
I began to mix the flour, salt and egg for my batter as Mama washed the chicken in the chipped porcelain sink. I was humming quietly to myself, keeping rhythm with the symphony that always seemed to be playing in the back of my head when my mother shut off the faucet. She dabbed the chicken dry with a paper towel, her eyes focused on her task. “Are you playing at Pete’s tonight?”
Dip, flip, roll. I concentrated on covering the chicken with the batter, hoping to hide the slight shake of my hands. “Pete hasn’t called me. I guess they’ve found another piano player who could come more regularly. Besides, Eve needs her bath.”
The grease popped in the fryer as she blew away a frizzy clump of graying hair from her face. It was only April, but the heat of a Charleston summer had already begun to lay its stifling hand on the city.
“Eleanor, since when do you wait for him to call you? Just show up and play for a couple of hours. He pays good money. And you can help Eve with her bath in the morning before you leave for work.”
I wiped my forearm across my forehead, feeling the beads of sweat. “I’m real tired today, Mama. I don’t know.”
Her silence shouted all the words that hung between us, everything about a hot summer day fourteen years ago and how I’d killed Mama’s dreams.
“You can take the car,” she said, as if I’d already argued and lost. Which, in a way, I had.
Dip, flip, roll. “Yes, Mama,” I said, placing the first chicken leg into the fryer and watching its skin bubble in the heat.
After a nearly silent dinner, I cleared the dishes, then retired to my room to change. I slid on the red satin sheath dress that hugged my body and nestled too low between my breasts. My mother had it made from another one of Eve’s old pageant dresses when she’d discovered that Pete’s Bar in a nearby North Charleston neighborhood was looking for a piano player on weekday evenings, somebody who might encourage the down-at-luck crowd to buy one more drink.
My mother was washing dishes in the kitchen as I came down the stairs, Glen and Eve sitting next to each other on the couch watching television. Eve had her hand on Glen’s arm, and they both looked up at me as I walked to the front door.
Glen jumped up. “I left my jacket and wallet in the front seat. Let me get those before you leave.” He stood and took the car keys from the hall table.
Eve’s eyes glittered as she watched Glen escort me out the front door. He followed me down the front steps to the curb where he’d parked the car, being very careful not to touch me. He handed me the keys.
“You don’t have to go, Eleanor.”
Does he know? I stared up into his earnest eyes. “It’s only for a few hours.” My gaze skittered down to my hands, to the closely cropped nails I still kept short even after all of these years.
“You don’t have to go,” he repeated, his words almost too soft to hear, and I felt certain that he did know—knew that when the music died from the piano, I would look for somebody to give me what he could not. I hated myself for my weakness, for my inability to take my just punishment and live the life I’d been given. But I’d never forgotten the music my father had given me or the dreams that refused to die. I had once been like Icarus, flying too close to the sun, and in those nights in the smoky bar with the piano and the men with their sad, admiring glances, I could allow myself to believe—if just for a short while—that I was still flying.
The scent of Confederate jasmine flitted stealthily in the night air, sending a wave of fragrance before snatching it away like a serpent’s tongue. I put my hand on the door handle of the car as Glen took a step closer. I held my breath at his rapid movement, his arm rising before he brought his hand down in a stinging slap on my forearm.
We both looked down in surprise as he lifted his palm to reveal a mosquito, dead and bleeding my blood against pale skin. Glen took a handkerchief from his pocket and held my arm carefully as he wiped away the mess, his gentle touch as startling as the sting from his slap.
I reached inside the car and brought out his jacket, the front pocket heavy from the weight of his wallet, and handed it to him. Our eyes met, and I wondered if mine looked as resigned as his did.
“It won’t always be this way,” he said softly. “I’ll have my degree in a couple of years, and can start making real money. Things will change.”
“Will they?” I asked before slipping into the driver’s seat. Staring through the windshield, I could still see Eve’s wheelchair and my mother’s sad eyes. There were some things in this life that could never change.
“Don’t wait up,” I said as I closed the door, knowing that he would lie awake in his bed next to Eve, listening for my footfalls on the front porch, imagining he could smell another man’s scent clinging to my skin.
I pulled away from the curb without looking behind me. I listened to the thrum of the tires against the pavement, hearing again the words of the Gullah woman. All shut-eye ain’t sleep. All good-bye ain’t gone. With a crushing sense of defeat and frustration, I realized that I was no closer to understanding what she’d meant than I’d been the day I’d touched the sun and been sent crashing down to earth.
CHAPTER 3
In the back corner of Pete’s Bar, I sat on the piano bench, sipping my third scotch and soda, and felt the edges of my life begin to blur. I never got so drunk that I couldn’t play, just drunk enough. The bar had begun to empty, leaving behind the stale air of loneliness and a haze of cigarette smoke that swirled under the ceiling fans like confused ghosts looking for the way out.
Draining my glass, I placed it on the piano before spreading my fingertips over the white keys. My fingers were long, like my father’s, and I’d been able to reach an octave since I was seven years old. Unlike the rest of me, my hands hadn’t changed much in the years since, except for the small scar near the top of my right index finger, as if I needed another reminder of what I’d done to Eve.
A middle-aged man with sad, red-rimmed eyes sat at a nearby table, his gaze never wavering from me. His collar was dirty, his tie stained, but as I began to play, the music transformed us into the people we had once dreamed of becoming.
I played “Summertime,” a Gershwin standard that didn’t require too much of me or my audience. Sometimes when I played it, I’d have a drunk make his way to my side to sing half-remembered lyrics. But I was left alone this time, just me and the music and the man with the sad eyes who’d shredded the label of his beer bottle and was now rolling up the little pieces of paper. He was building up his courage to approach me, I knew; I’d seen it enough times to recognize the signs.
I returned my focus to the music, in my head hearing my father’s rich baritone as he sang to a younger version of my mother, a mother who’d not yet lost her beauty or dreams and still remembered how to smile. I felt my own smile curve my lips as I played the last chord as a slow arpeggio, each key separate and singing until the final note. I held it down with the pedal, allowing the sound to fade like the smoke from a blown-out birthday candle.
As soon as I lifted my fingers from
the keys, I felt his presence beside me, smelled his breath full of beer and cigarettes and a hastily chewed mint. I turned to meet his eyes, noticing that he had probably once been a nice-looking man. But life and all of its burdens were clearly marked in the deep ridges and lines of his face, like text on a written page in which each word had been carved with force.
The second thing I noticed was that Pete’s wasn’t as empty as I’d thought. Another man sat on a stool at the bar, the glare from the piano light hiding his face in shadow. But there was something familiar about him, in the shape of his head and broad shoulders. I blinked hard, annoyed that I couldn’t see. He wasn’t a regular—I knew that much. His back wasn’t hunched with defeat, and his pants were pressed with a neat crease down the middle, his shoes burnished to a dull shine.
A throat cleared beside me. “Excuse me.”
I looked up and smiled, remembering the distant feeling of skin against skin. “Yes?”
He cleared his throat again, his own smile shaky. “You’ve been playing for a while, and I was wondering if you might be hungry. If you, that is, if you are if you’d like to go with me. To get some food.”
Tilting my wrist to read my watch, I saw that it was nearly midnight. Underneath the scotch and soda, my stomach was empty. “I’m done here, and, yes, I’d like that.” I picked up my purse from beneath the bench and stood. I had to grab hold of the piano to steady myself, then picked up the tip jar and carefully upended the contents into my purse. Keeping my smile intact, I said, “I just need to go powder my nose, if you’ll excuse me for a moment.” I touched his arm, and his eyes met mine in understanding.