by Laura Bickle
And I began to play. The song was formless, without direction from paper. The sound resonated throughout my skull and my body, driving out the fear for my father. For that time, it pushed away my despondency, the claustrophobic sense that my past was closing in around me. The fear welled up inside me, the knowledge that my future, my hopes were slipping away...
I broke off mid-note, tears streaming down my cheeks. The last note echoed through the forest, followed by a dull, ringing silence.
I set the violin down, rubbed at my eyes with the heels of my hands. I took a deep breath and looked up at the moon, willing its wobbly image to steady.
Something bright streaked across the sky. My breath snagged in my throat.
A meteor, I thought, watching the red flare burn. It was as if the sky was cut open, and a gash of light only hinted at by the shimmering Milky Way was released.
I held my breath as it arced overhead. I assumed that it would burn up in the atmosphere, that nothing would survive, not even the melted rock my father had once found. But this was close, so close I could hear tree leaves crackling, feel the heat on my face as it swooshed overhead. I had the impression of flame and a shadow of darkness behind it. I clutched at the neck of my violin with a sudden stab of fear.
The falling star receded behind the tree line. A distant thud reverberated through the ground, up into the tree in which I perched.
I snatched up my bow and stowed the violin in its case. I scrambled down the tree, bits of sparks and ash drifting down from the sky like fireflies.
Something had landed.
CHAPTER 2
I RACED THROUGH THE FOREST, briars slashing at my hands and legs. The star had fallen just south of the Big Dipper’s handle, and I chased that straight line. I sloshed through shallow puddles, plunged through poison ivy, and tripped over rotten logs, searching for the site.
I hoped to find a big meteorite or a piece of a satellite, something large and valuable that belonged in the sky—something someone with money would pay to have. Money would definitely be the key out of my current situation, maybe get me back to college, and my father some decent physical therapy...
But when things happened back home that were out of the ordinary, they were generally bad. Like blown-out tires. Lightning strikes. And my dad’s accident.
I wanted this to be something good. Something wonderful and magical.
It wasn’t.
I skidded out into a marshy meadow. Tall grasses reached up past my knees. I smelled smoke and singed grass...and something familiar: cooking meat.
Three does surged past me, rushing from the meadow. The whites of their eyes and the flick of their tails glinted as they leaped into the shelter of the forest.
I turned back to the meadow, waded into the grass. Grass burned at the center of the field. It wasn’t a large fire, and the damp tassels were already guttering, but the light was enough to disturb my night vision. I squinted against the glare.
A dark shadow swept over me, and a sudden gust of wind knocked me to the ground. I reflexively clutched my violin case to my belly. Rolling over, I scrabbled to my hands and knees. Smoke swept into my face, and my eyes teared up. I thought I saw a wobble of darkness whoosh past the moon. But it could have just been smoke.
I climbed to my feet and walked to the edge of the circle of fire. The grass was blackened and tamped down, like some kind of odd crop circle. I covered my nose as the smell of singed meat crept into my sinuses, and my stomach pitched into my throat.
In the center of the smoldering grass was a deer. Well...half a deer. Its hacked-off hindquarters stretched out in the tangle of black grass. The last time I’d seen something like that, a semi-truck had struck a doe and smeared it all over the highway.
But there were no semis here. Nothing but darkness and fire.
I turned and fled. I ran as fast as my feet could carry me, back to home and the safety of artificial light.
*
I didn’t tell anyone about what I’d seen.
It seemed surreal. Not part of the day-to-day existence of the old, worn-out world I knew. This thing seemed too big to fit inside it. Too strange.
So I had go back and convince myself that the extraordinary existed as I’d seen it, this time in the cold light of day.
I slipped out again early the next morning, before the sun had seeped into the gray of the valley. Dew soaked my shoes and the hem of my jeans as I walked into the forest, past the familiar paths. The birds were awakening, the coo of mourning doves and the sighing of feathers reassuring me that the sun would come soon.
I paused at the foot of my sanctuary tree, peering up at its branches. Fog obscured the topmost ones, hiding any evidence of singe. I frowned. I knew I hadn’t dreamed it. But the land was determined to hide its secrets.
I balled my hands into fists, continued on to the meadow.
That thick mist clung to the grasses. I waded in, feeling the moisture on my palms as I walked, arms outstretched, the tall tassels of grass whispering against my palms.
I wanted to believe that something extraordinary had happened. I’d searched for those small things throughout my childhood: a stream that ran northeast to southwest, instead of northwest to southeast. A peculiar covered bridge where one could put the car gear in neutral and the car would roll uphill, as if pushed by ghosts. “Light as a feather, stiff as a board” had been one of my favorite party games, when the girls at slumber parties would implore spirits to levitate a giggling victim. I was forever looking for things that would make this place special.
That was the child me, seeking wonder. Now, I felt a new identity unfurling in me. One that pulled fear into a droplet of sweat running down my brow. One that feared risk. Adulthood.
I blew out a nervous breath, seeing a circle of blackened grass. Vindication rippled through me. I passed through the border of the circle, and my sneakers crunched on something sharp and crystalline, like broken glass on a highway after an accident.
I squatted down and picked up a piece of sparkling black glass, figuring it to be a busted bottle burned in the conflagration. I rubbed at it with my fingers, expecting the carbon to flake off. But it didn’t. As I looked more closely, I could make out pieces of it, melted into the ground. Obsidian. And lots of it.
I turned my attention to the rest of the baked scene. The carcass of the deer was gone.
I paced the diameter of the circle three times, but couldn’t find it. All I saw were deep scratches in the earth, swirls around the deep stain of blood in the red-yellow dirt.
I’d been willing to believe some strange form of lightning had torn apart the hapless deer. But now it was gone. Coyotes would scavenge, to be sure, but they couldn’t carry away anything that heavy. Humans, if they’d found it, would have no interest in stale venison of questionable provenance.
I remembered the impression I’d had of wings churning in the smoke and shuddered.
My fingers closed tightly around the piece of obsidian, hard enough for the edges to chew into my palm and summon drops of red.
I left before whatever was lurking in the pearly mist smelled blood.
*
“What are you going to do today?”
Loaded question.
Juggling hot toast on a saucer, I glanced at my mother. She was sitting at the kitchen table, counting out my father’s pills. Stress crackled in her voice. I knew what she wanted me to say—that I would sit in the living room with Dad, listening to his snores and the ticking of the grandfather clock. Sit, and wait, and listen to time move.
A bead of sweat prickled on the nape of my neck. I didn’t want to be trapped here. I felt guilty for feeling this way. But the atmosphere was too thick.
“I thought that I would go see Grandpa,” I said, with as much evenness as I could muster.
My mother paused in the rattling of the pill bottles. I counted four beats before she spoke. “He’ll be glad to see you. Take your violin and your transcript. He’ll want to know how you’r
e doing in school.”
I stuffed a piece of toast into my mouth and made a mmmph sound. That was for children. I was past the age at which he’d give me a dollar for every A. Maybe for good. Maybe there would be no more report cards.
My mother couldn’t read the thoughts flitting across my face. Somehow, in my time away from home, I seemed to have developed the ability to hide from her.
She continued, oblivious: “Tell him about the classes you’re taking in the fall. About the music program, about first chair, and...your internship…”
She faltered when she mentioned the internship that I’d just left to come home to her and Dad. A coveted spot with the West Virginia Symphony Orchestra, participating in Copland’s Appalachian Spring. My instructors had pulled a lot of strings to get me there, and I’d attended exactly two practices before this happened. They’d replaced me within hours.
I jammed more toast into my mouth, turned to the sink to rinse the crumbs from my dish. I always flinched from the pride in my mother’s voice. It filled me with a jumble of emotions. Sometimes, I felt as if she lived too much through me. As if my accomplishments were somehow hers. As if she’d appropriated this thing that was mine, and mine alone. The music.
And I knew she wanted me to stay here for the summer. As much as she seemed to love gossiping about my accomplishments, it always felt as if she were drawing me back to this place unconsciously. Sure, she talked about how Dad would get better, and I would go back to college. Life would go on as planned. Somehow, money would materialize, and I’d be back in the school orchestra by September. But I felt the push and pull. The pride and the leash. I resented both, in equal measures. And felt guilty for that. Ashamed.
Both Mom and I knew that the idea of me going back to school was a lie. A beautiful, white lie of hope. I had a partial scholarship, but the rest of the money had to come from somewhere, and there was no way I could take it from Dad’s care. He needed the money more than I did.
I bent to give my mother a kiss on the cheek. She broke off, mid-sentence, enumerating my victories. She paused and looked down at her hands. They were scarred and rough—hands that waited tables, and held hot dishes, and burned when they canned tomatoes in the summer. Hands that would someday be mine.
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you, too, Di.” She pulled me down and kissed me fiercely on the forehead.
Beyond, my father was stirring, snuffling as he awoke. I snatched up my keys and violin case, slipped through the hissing screen door.
I sat for a moment behind the wheel of the Chevette and had myself a good cry where no one could hear me behind the rolled-up glass. When the tears dried into hiccups, I scrubbed my sleeve across my eyes, put the car into gear, and headed down the gravel road.
By the time the house was well and truly behind me, I clutched the steering wheel and screamed in formless fury.
*
The black ribbon of road unwound before me, curling sharply in switchbacks along the shaded ridge. The Chevette engine groaned like a lawnmower, but I didn’t bother turning on the radio. I knew each curve by heart, but I rarely managed to reach the posted speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour. That was for drunks and morons, my father said, people with too little sense and nothing to live for. Here and there, white crosses decorated with names and plastic flowers and teddy bears sprouted at the sides of sharp turns, testaments to that wisdom.
The nearest town, Coldridge, had barely changed from the last time I’d seen it in the fall. Then, I’d been excitedly provisioning for college, buying notebooks from the discount store. I remembered the blank pages that I couldn’t wait to scribble full of the exciting new life spread out before me.
Now, the store was advertising pool toys on brightly-colored signs perched in the windows. Pool noodles spilled forth from a cardboard sidewalk display like a pastel chthonic beast determined to snag the soul of a little boy toddling by. The boy was still in diapers, stumbling along on bare feet beside his mother. My mother always hated to see children in public without pants or shoes—it was guaranteed to set off a ten-minute-long rant.
I passed the gas station, the bar, and the pizza parlor. I tooled past the fast food hamburger stand where my high school friends and I had hung out after midnight on weekends. There were few other places for teens to hang out. Not after the bowling alley had closed. I drifted past the newsstand where I’d bought comic books and paperback thrillers.
This was the stuff of my life. Ordinary. Unchanged.
Cherry Blossom Hills, like most retirement homes, didn’t really live up to its name. There was a hill looming behind the complex, but that didn’t belong to the home. A carefully-cultivated weeping cherry stood between two crabapple trees on a grassy island. The crabapples, a native species, were flowering in brilliant fuchsia. The weeping cherry, an import, seemed sickly and short, with anemic pink flowers. The parking lot had been freshly blacktopped, smelling sharply of tar. It was entirely too large for the facility, empty spaces stretching from the road to the doorstep. I never knew if that was because they wanted to keep down the landscaping costs, or if they’d expected more visitors.
The inside of the facility didn’t smell like flowers or tar but like yellow gravy and Mr. Clean. If I ever got to visit Florida, I’d be shocked if it didn’t smell like this, only with the addition of suntan lotion. I signed in at the front desk, trudged down terracotta-tiled halls that made my sneakers squeak. The walls were painted a soothing salmon, punctuated here and there by a niche holding a defibrillator machine or a vase of brittle dried flowers.
My grandfather’s door was ajar, but I knocked anyway.
“Go away!” a voice growled from within. “I don’t want none of that damn Tai Chi class.”
I smothered a smile. “Grandpa, it’s Di.”
“Di!”
Joy glittered in his voice, and I pushed the door open. Sunlight flooded the pale yellow room, outlining my granddad in his wheelchair, pushing himself toward the door. A white smile crossed his craggy face, and I threw myself into his arms. He didn’t smell like he belonged here. His western-style shirt smelled like Old Spice and tobacco, with a hint of the Brill Creme he used to style his full steel gray hair and sideburns into a Johnny Cash-like pompadour. I caught a whiff of leather oil on his immaculately polished cowboy boots. His blue eyes twinkled behind square-rimmed glasses.
“Let me look at you.” His gaze scraped me from head to toe. He said nothing about my blue hair. “You’ve all grown up. Been happy.”
“Been trying.”
He gestured toward the violin case in my hand. “Why don’t you show me what you’ve learned?”
I grinned in relief. Grandpa didn’t talk a whole lot about unpleasant things. He’d only talked about the war in bits and pieces while we fished or explored Indian mounds. He’d told me things he’d never told Grandma, about Vietnam. About watching his best friend getting blown up right beside him by a grenade. About nearly everyone in his company being killed, the stragglers finding shelter wherever they could, hoping the enemy wouldn’t find them. When he came back, he threw away all the medals the army had given him.
My mom said he was never really right after that. PTSD. Hodgkin’s disease, supposedly in remission. Neuropathy. And other screws loose rattling around in his skull—psychoses that bubbled up and faded away. He’d done all right with my grandma around to take care of him. But after she passed, it seemed he’d lost touch with things, and was prone to fits of wandering and flights of fancy that terrified my mother. As a little girl, I’d thought it was wonderful that he’d take me on a spur-of-the-moment road trip to Kentucky. I didn’t find out until later that he thought he was fleeing aliens dressed as CIA agents. But I knew he never meant me any harm.
He’d given me the gift of music. He relished music—his mint-condition vinyl LPs of Johnny Cash’s work and classic rock were arranged neatly beside a radio and his Stetson hat on the dresser. I had inherited my music from him.
I set my case down on the chenille bedspread, pulled out my violin. Grandpa reached under the bed, returned with his own violin case and a sly look. He placed it across from mine.
Like gunslingers, we faced off across the bed with our weapons.
I let the old man shoot first. In this game, he always did. He sawed out the opening bars of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir.” I broke out in a grin. Grandpa had taught me to play the fiddle first by ear, listening to the classic station on the radio and his collection of music. And he’d taught me to be the perfect mimic, to copy whatever I heard, no matter what the instrument, and translate it to the language of the strings. I closed my eyes to concentrate, to fall into the hollow, vibrating guts of the violin under my chin.
Grandpa paused, and I played back the opening bars, note for note. We went back and forth through the song, flourishing, showboating, trying to stump each other. By the end of our session, we fell into harmony, the voices of the violins weaving around each other, wrapping, soaring...until the last note was drawn into vibrating silence.
I plucked the violin from my chin and opened my eyes. The hum still resonated in my throat, as if I’d been singing.
Grandpa nodded and smiled. “You’re doing well, Di. I can tell that you’re learning—become faster. Faster than me, even.”
Unlike my mother’s effusive praise, I beamed under my grandfather’s words. He doled his compliments out sparingly, like precious stones, and I hoarded them greedily.
A sharp rap sounded at the door. Grandpa made a sour face.
“Keep it down!” a shrill voice admonished. “We’re trying to have a Tai Chi class out here—”
Grandpa barked: “I don’t care how much I’m screwing up your cheep. Leave me alone.”