My ears were buzzing with memory, the surface of my eyes dry from not blinking.
“And you loved it,” Dominic said very quietly.
“What?” I looked up, startled.
“Singing. You loved singing.”
“Oh, yes. Yes, I did,” I said, calmer now. At first I thought I had heard him say, “And you love me.” I wasn’t altogether sure how I would answer that question. The one he had actually asked was much easier to answer.
“That day, on the way home, I made a decision,” I added. “I was determined to do whatever it took; though I can remember being nervous, because our family’s interests and activities had always revolved around academics, rather than the arts. I wasn’t sure how they would feel about me pursuing music. I took every preemptive measure I could think of.”
“Like what?”
“Um.” I cleared my throat. “A pie chart and diagram outlining why an extracurricular would be beneficial to my education.”
I was ready for his laughter, already smiling sheepishly.
“You’re kidding me. At six?” He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, and shook his head. “Figures,” he intoned, giving me a look that was more affectionate than it was mocking. “I was learning to tie my shoelaces and you were using Microsoft Word to draft up documents. You’re probably the baby behind Baby Einstein, aren’t you?”
“Of course not. But it was Excel, actually. Not Microsoft Word,” I said, playfully.
He scowled at me. “I still don’t know how to use that program. Never mind, please continue with your story before I start feeling really bad about myself.”
“Well, it turns out it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it might be,” I told him, stretching my legs in front of me, and allaying an itch on the top of my foot with my big toe. “My mom was ecstatic about the idea, and found me an instructor for private lessons. She also enrolled me in a children’s choir that met three days a week. I think she had hopes I would make some friends. I did—or almost, anyway. To be honest, I don’t think they thought of me one way or the other, until one day a group of little girls were talking about how much they wanted the new My Little Pony, and I told them that, if they wanted, they could come over anytime and ride my little pony. I was so excited and started to babble, telling them all about Valentine—I gave him that name because of his unique auburn col—”
I glanced up and found Dominic’s face pinched, a fist pressed to his lips, smothering laughter. It came out of his nose instead. “You’d never heard of My Little Pony? That’s right; no T.V.,” he added quickly, answering his own question. “Okay, don’t take this the wrong way, but I think it’s adorable you had no idea what they were talking about.” He smiled, angling his head as he gave me a comprehensive examination. As always, it had me nervously fidgeting to be gazed upon so closely. “I can just picture you,” he murmured, his tone thoughtful. “All that big hair and huge green eyes. You had to have been pretty cute.”
I smiled, but struggled to find something to respond with and resorted to shrugging.
“My sisters were obsessed with all that Care Bears and Barbie stuff,” he complained. “They watched those shows incessantly, and since the odds were kind of against me, I had no choice but to go along with it when I babysat them. They were awful. Mostly Dru and Daniela; those two would gang up on me, with their sharp nails and hair pulling. Daniela once gave me a bald spot right here.” He raised his hand, pointing to the left side of head. “I’m not kidding, you could see my scalp.” I was shocked, but laughed when he did. “It was so bad, I had to shave my whole head.”
“That’s terrible!”
He chuckled. “Yeah, hurt too,” he admitted. “I had my ways of getting even, though. One time, the three of them were laying in front of the T.V. watching another stupid show, and I told Deanna she needed to come help get dinner ready. But actually I was just getting her out of the way, so I could shoot the T.V. with my BB gun.”
“You shot the T.V.?”
“I absolutely shot the T.V.,” he said proudly, and grinned. “I couldn’t take it anymore. And if I had to watch one more episode about how Tender-Heart Bear hurt Sunshine Bear’s feelings, I was going to go insane. Anyway, what happened with those girls?”
“Well,” I said sighing, still a little embarrassed even with more than ten years between then and now. “After that, they stopped talking to me.”
“What? Why?”
“I think . . . I think like you, they thought it was strange that I didn’t know.”
“Wait a minute,” he said, dropping his chin to give me pointed look. “‘Adorable’. I said it was adorable. Horses that talk and fly—that’s strange. And those girls sound like jerks.”
His fierce loyalty made me smile. “It’s okay; I wasn’t there for social purposes, anyway,” I said, and it was the truth. “I just really wanted to sing.”
He was stretched out on his side, one arm relaxed down the length of his torso, fingers curled loosely on the side of his thigh. The other arm was bent, the hand propping up the weight of his head.
“So.” He smiled, and I thought noticed me watching him. “Where does you singing The Star Spangle Banner come into the picture?” he asked.
“Oh, our neighbor, Mrs. Murdock—she found out I had taken an interest in more than just the piano and came over one day, asking if I wouldn’t mind singing the Star Spangled Banner for Roxbury’s Little League game that weekend. The girl who usually sang it was sick, and they didn’t have a replacement. I wanted to do it, but I was very shy, and wouldn’t agree right then and there. It took some coaxing from my mom, but I was young enough that I . . .” I paused, searching out a safe way around that particularly sore subject. “I still—”
“You still believed in yourself,” he finished for me.
I nodded, adding brightly, “It was an amazing time in my life. My parents were very supportive; they recorded all of my performance on tape and video.
“I would have loved to see you at that age,” he said softly. “Weren’t you nervous? To sing in front of so many people?”
“Surprisingly, no,” I replied and laughed. “Not after that first time.” It was so very strange how those things could change. “It was the opposite, actually. I began to anticipate those events; the energy, the way all the noise suddenly dropped out and vanished, like someone turned down the volume.” My eyes wandered back to the tape recorder, another memory rippling to the surface. “Most of all,” I added, my voice subdued with anamnesis, “I liked being able to share myself without fear. I knew only joy in those moments singing. There wasn’t room for anything else. It wasn’t about being the best, or trying to make people like me. It was just about . . . singing.” I opened my eyes, not realizing I had closed them. My chest felt tight, the small space crowded by happy memories turned sad. “It was a long time ago,” I concluded, and smiled weakly.
“Not that long ago,” Dominic said. He reached out, grazing the top of my foot with his fingers. “Maybe sometime we could watch one of those videos together?”
“Sure. Sometime . . .” I said vaguely, watching him draw lazy eights on my foot.
“Foster.”
I raised my eyes with reluctance. I didn’t want to have this conversation. Not right now. Not after all we’d already been through this evening.
The blue eyes staring back at me were loud. It was an estimation that, before Dominic, I had never made about one’s eyes. But whether Dominic’s words acknowledged, corroborated, or refuted what came from his lips, his eyes always spoke first.
So when he said, “Would you mind grabbing us a couple glasses of water, please?” I understood there was much he wasn’t saying to me.
~
Despite the haunting memories I had somehow managed to suppress for the last ten years, over the next few hours we made advantageous headway on our song. I did sing for him. Getting out the first few words hadn’t been easy, but soon that bubble of music enclosed around me, and my awareness bega
n and ended with ivory and flesh.
Listening to Dominic sing for the first time was surreal; flickers of light and shades of color—this was the only way I could attempt to describe the sound of his voice. Goosebumps rose up on my arms and legs as if lured by voracious shivers, and continued in recurring waves of awe. More than once, I thought perhaps we should switch roles; I could play the piano and he could sing. I knew better than to suggest this to him, of course, but if I believed there was any chance he might agree, I wouldn’t have hesitated to ask.
Note after note, he painted with his voice. It was a sunset, unfolding in layers—ribbons of color, the brilliant mixing with the bland, shocking pinks and flaming reds merging with the soothing peaches and creamy oranges. His guitar playing was exceptional, adding depth and texture to the richness of his voice. At one point I realized that not having the guitar accompany this song would have been a mistake. It suited the slow-weaving tempo with its relaxed, rhythmic cadence. Whereas the piano breathed and gushed—made me want to swim—the velutinous guitar notes crawled under my skin, seeped through my pores and levitated me.
The changes he had made on his own, during my sickness with the flu, weren’t crucial, but certainly ameliorating. The ebb and flow of the melody and the slow build had felt slightly rushed to me in the original composition. The bridge and the bars between the first chorus and the second elongated the natural pacing, providing succor to the vacillating rhythm. I closed my eyes, both hands automatically climbing up and down and side to side on my legs. The soul was in the strength of restraint, I realized, in the gentle phrasing and the moment just before the song reached the cusp of its breaking point. Knowing when the notes were exhausted and when they were exhilarated, kept it alive.
It was a conversation I hadn’t wanted to have with him. I saw no way around it, though. For Dominic to interpret the instrumental, he must be told what the song was about, beyond what was obvious to him.
The song, at its core, is a tragedy. It was about the consequences of fear—how it slowly wages war, intelligently playing to its strengths until there’s nothing left but emptiness. A fearful person loses the will to try, to care too deeply about anything that holds the potential of being lost or taken from them. The result is a heart rendered paralyzed, frozen in fear and too scared to move or stay—thus does neither, but vanishes altogether.
The result was me. Or, it would have been if not for him.
I wrote this song a few weeks prior to meeting Dominic. The plan was always to use it for the Senior Piece. There were parallels, of course, that if someone knew me well, it might be fairly obvious I was writing about my life. Since that wasn’t a possibility—at the time—discretion wasn’t important. Dominic, more than anyone else, did know me. He knew me well. This made listening to my heart’s darkest secrets painful. And had the song ended right there, reeking of despair, I may have let the tears gathering at the corner of my eyes fall. Knowing what I did, I contained them, determined to wait until they fell in the name of celebration, not pain.
Together, Dominic and I had given the song the one thing it lacked: hope.
When the last note fell from his lips, and when the tips of Dominic’s fingers remained white, pressed to the taut strings, he opened his eyes and found me. He smiled. Only then, while strummed chord hung on resiliently, did I give the tears permission to fall; the corners of my mouth drew upward, catching the salty drops. There was no denying the song’s beauty, nor its power and the journey it took the listener on. Still, a child of uncertainty, and unsure how people were going to react, I couldn’t help but ask, “You don’t think it’s too real? Too . . . messy?”
And that look, that incredibly loud look burst into the blue eyes. This time, though, his words were shadows of corroboration.
“I do,” he replied solemnly, the conviction in his voice undeniable. “It’s supposed to be real and messy, Foster, because life is real and messy.”
He put the guitar down gently, laying the neck to rest against the piano bench. Then he moved to the carpet where I was sitting, and on his knees took my tremulous hands.
“Foster. I know you wrote these thoughts because they’re yours, because this was the only way you could say things without really saying them. I know that because it’s what I’ve done. They belong to you, but you aren’t the only person they’ll mean something to. You’ve written about heartbreak, loss, fear—these are all things everyone goes through. And at the end . . . there’s hope. But the messy—the messy is what makes it great.”
It was close to midnight when, with great reluctance, I said goodbye to Dominic. He insisted that I not walk him out, muttering something about declining will power. He’d held me tight in his arms for a too-short moment, before seeing me up the staircase while he watched from the bottom, smiling up at me with what might have actually been the closest thing to a quiet look he would ever produce.
Emotionally spent in that extremely gratifying way, I fell into bed after discarding my dress for a tank top and soft cotton shorts. I was asleep within minutes, my dreams full of him.
Chapter Thirty
I was one of those strange people who could sometimes sense when they were dreaming.
I had no input when it came to either prolonging or concluding the dream, but at times it was comforting to know the difference between reality and fantasy. Tonight was not one of those nights; I was unclear as to whether I was dreaming or not, and I was not one bit comforted.
The beginning carried much promise, as any state—real or imagined—was preferential if Dominic was involved.
It started with him standing bare-chested in a wheat field. The feathery waves came up to his knees, leaning submissively to one side, a strong wind blowing inexorably. The wide, open land went on for miles, nothing but a sea of gold, bending and swaying in the breeze. A cloudless blue sky overhead glowed without any help from a sun. The light instead seemed to flood through the pores of Dominic’s skin, out through the tips of his fingers and toes, illuminating him and his surroundings solely by his body. He was incredibly bright, his eyes impossibly bluer, his face beatific. He smiled incandescently, with a joy reserved for angels. And though I was nowhere to be seen, I felt my body respond to his laugh. It was a sound unhindered by worry. How I knew it was a laugh was beyond me, because in actuality it sounded like water hugging boulders, clapping the hewn sides with foamy fingers. This jarred me, made me think for an intuitive second, and wonder if any of this was real. I had very little time to question the authenticity, however, because rapidly approaching was a gray shadow, rising up in the distance from a flat plateau gleaming golden in Dominic’s sunlight. It floated closer, coming to a stop and looming ominously over him.
His serene face etiolated, went pale as a bleached birch tree.
He looked upwards, regarding the mysterious dark cloud with painful recognition. Immediately, he tried to outrun it; but no matter how fast he ran, how many leaps or turns he took, the shadow pursued, never further than a foot above him. Sweat glistened on his forehead, pink exhaustion flushed his cheeks. Though he must have known there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide in this exposing vat of land, he ran with determination. Or maybe it was something worse than determination.
I tried to locate myself then. I needed to help him get away from this creature. I knew I was here. I could see all this happening, but it was like I was sitting in a theater, with everything taking place on the huge screen fanned out before me. My perspective was limited—just the screen was visible—offering me only a forward viewpoint. I couldn’t make myself appear. I watched as he—beyond exhausted—fell to his knees and landed with a thump. Straying wheat and dust swirled up around him. His chest heaved up and down with each breath, the nostrils flaring and mouth parting as he fought for oxygen. He turned his head from side to side, searching the field, looking for something.
He’s looking for me . . .
Again I pushed, stretching my muscles, forcing my body to become animate. Nothin
g happened. I couldn’t appear. I became angry. What was this thing and what did it want from my Dominic? Involuntarily, he upturned his face to the shadow, so that I could no longer see his face—only his throat and below. When that happened, Dominic’s light began to dim, growing fainter with each second. The horrible evil shadow seemed to coagulate, becoming a corporeal thing; it writhed and vibrated, wickedly happy and drawing its strength from Dominic’s waning resistance. It changed its shape, shifting into a long murky stream, hovering directly over Dominic’s open mouth. Slowly it descended, sinking into him like wet cement into a hole.
I was screaming now.
My cries, born of horror and outrage, screeched plangently in the vast openness. This was the extent of me. I was a scream . . . completely useless. His body lifted stiffly, though not by his will, and he remained on his knees. Dominic began to convulse, arms shooting rigidly out from his sides, fingers splaying and head still tossed back. Whatever this thing was, it was hurting him—it was killing him.
And then it was gone.
I screamed his name. I still couldn’t see myself, but the sobs in my throat were loud and burning. I continued to call out to him, knowing somehow that he was in pain and still in danger. You need to get to him before it’s too late, I heard a voice say. Too late for what? His arms fell to his sides lifelessly just before he sunk back to the ground. With his head still upturned, he swallowed once, his Adam’s apple moving up and down. I shouted and flailed my invisible body, trying to attach life to it. I screamed his name again, needing to see his face—see his eyes. Slowly, he began to lift his head up, so that it was no longer hanging behind him.
But . . . it wasn’t him.
It wasn’t the same person who’d been standing carefree in the wheat field, lighting up the world with his joy. This Dominic was broken. This person had the weight of the world resting on his shoulders, the sorrow of a thousand tortured lives. There was no joy in these eyes, no life at all; just grief and regret. He was no longer golden and bright, but a pallid, stale gray—death’s color.
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