by Lucy Ferriss
Thinks he can sing, Mum always said. Thinks he can afford to idle his time away la-la-la’ing like some retired banker. He smiled wanly at the thought of his mother’s barbs. He’d seen Mum yesterday, at Gerry’s new house in the South End, where he’d taken Meghan to play with her baby cousin Derek. Mum and Kate had stayed inside to clean up the Sunday lunch dishes while the brothers sat reading the Sunday paper on the patio, Gerry with a beer and Sean with iced tea. The day had been warm but damp—a storm had blown through the night before, the tail end of a hurricane down south, and fallen branches lay like pick-up sticks below the big maple at the back of the tiny yard. He’d been telling Gerry about the Evangelist when Mum’s voice had come through the screen door. “It’s the la-la-la!” she’d said, like always. You figured her for deaf until something came up she didn’t like to hear. “Wants the attention!”
That was when Meghan had started climbing the tree, he remembered now. She’d come out from the house, saying that Baby Derry was down for his nap, and she’d scaled the wood fence at the back of the yard to hoist herself onto the lowest branch of the maple tree. He’d told her to be careful. Gerry had asked where Brooke was, why he was getting stuck with the kid even on his weekends. It was to avoid that question that Sean had gone inside, claiming he needed to take a whiz, could Gerry keep an eye on Meghan. The women had finished in the kitchen by then. The afternoon sun was shining on the lemon tree in its huge pot by the bay window, the tree Brooke had chosen for Gerry and Kate, eight years ago. Two fat lemons weighed down its branches. As he took in the sight of the tree—still bearing fruit, he thought, like everyone but him—his mother stepped into the kitchen and headed straight for the cupboard where Gerry kept his whiskey. “Can I get you something, Mum?” Sean had asked.
“You can get me a new life,” she said, pouring. “She won’t even let me hold my grandchild.” Mum’s eyes signaled the living room. “’Fraid I’ll drop him.” She gave a harsh chuckle. Ice cubes plinked into her glass—one, two, three. “Only dropped one, and that was you. Scrambled your brains, I think.”
“Knocked ’em right out of my head.”
Mum turned to face him. Hers had been a small, pretty face in old photographs. Not sixty yet, her features seemed to draw in toward themselves, like a drying apple. Her chin was reduced to a tiny knob. “Your father used to sing,” she said unexpectedly.
“Nonsense. Dad yelled and groaned.”
“Before you were born. Used to get paid for it, down in Brooklyn. Weddings, funerals. Sang at my sister’s wedding. That’s where we met.”
“You never told me that, Mum.”
She sipped her whiskey. Tears sprang to her soft eyes. “He tried, you know. With the music.”
“What d’you mean, tried?
“La-la-la for money. You know.”
“He sang professionally?” Sean felt his senses quicken, down to the hairs on his arms. “No one ever told us this. He always worked at the tool and die.”
“When I had Fanny,” Mum said, “I put my foot down. I said, ‘It’s lovely sounding, Derek, but it won’t feed a brood.’ He stopped, then and there. Said he’d never sing a note again.” When she slugged the whiskey, she looked ready to bite the glass, just to keep the tears from coming. She set it down on the counter and glared at Sean, as if the story she was telling had been his fault.
“And he never did,” Sean said.
“No. And he was never a happy man again. Not till he was brought to his rest.”
Not, Sean thought as his mother topped off her glass and left the room, until he drank himself to death. Stunned, he started back out to the patio. From the back of the yard he heard Meghan’s voice, calling to him, “Look at me, look at me, Daddy!”
“Where the hell is she?” he’d asked Gerry.
Gerry looked up from the paper. That was when Sean had seen the branch sway in the maple. Had seen Meghan’s pink sneaker between the leaves, reaching from one wet limb to the next. Had moved his legs, dreamlike, across the expanse of muddy grass. Had seen one sneaker lift off the branch. Then the branch on which she balanced had cracked with a sound like tearing paper, and like a wide receiver going for the football, arms out, Sean had lunged. He’d caught his daughter’s flailing body, all knees and elbows, and they had both rolled through the leaves and mud. His knee—he took the weight off it now, as he stood in the line at the chorale—had twisted under him. Be a couple weeks healing at best. But his daughter, bathed in mud, had suffered no more than a scare.
La-la-la, he thought now. But only if you can afford it. Yesterday he’d had a job to complain about with his brother. Today he was a man adrift. He stood frozen to his spot on the wood floor while other chorale members passed around him and took their place in the line.
“Sean. Hey, Sean,” he heard finally, as if everything in the room had gone silent for a moment while Sean’s thoughts roared.
He turned. “Geoffrey,” he said.
The chorale director cocked his head at him, as if Sean were an interesting zoo animal. “Better stage presence without the whiskers, I think,” he said. “You ready to help us with the first movement tonight?”
“I don’t know, Geoffrey.” Sean’s eyes skittered around the room. Thad, the accompanist, was running lightly through the fugue. Suzanne was inclining her head toward the alto next to her—Betty? Bridie? They’d sat together as long as Sean could remember, and long ago when he dated Suzanne he used to glance over and Bridie would nod her head approvingly at him. They had not spoken since that time. “I’ve—ah—had some stuff going on recently.”
“We can use piano cues for tonight. No sweat.”
“No, I’ve got the part down. It’s not that.”
“Good. Let’s talk at the break, then. Hey, you’re not in this line, are you?”
“Well”—Sean gestured at the row of good-hearted volunteer singers now snaking around by the windows, waiting to pay—“that’s just the thing—”
“Because I thought I told you. Didn’t I tell you? You don’t pay dues as a rehearsal soloist. In fact I think we’ve cooked up an embarrassing honorarium, I don’t know, five hundred bucks maybe. So should I call on your voice tonight, or—?”
Sean let out his breath. “Well, I don’t know, Geoffrey, I’m not sure…” he began. Then, as if Geoffrey had sent a delayed broadcast, he heard what had been said. No dues. Five hundred dollars. Which meant nothing, of course it meant nothing, he was a man without a job, without his wife. Still. He began to return Geoffrey’s genial, questioning smile, and tears rushed into his eyes. “I can sing,” he said quickly, turning his head away. “Better find my seat.”
In most ways the music worked its usual magic, rearranged Sean’s molecules the way it always did so that by the break he was knit together as a person again, even if he was a person with troubles heavier than he would be able to bear. But there was more. When he stood as the Evangelist and began the legato line, Und da die Engel von ihnen gen Himmel—and as the angels were gone into heaven—his voice at first felt shaky and thin, as if the tears he had managed not to shed had watered it down. But then the tenors came in, and the basses, all going to Bethlehem, and he felt himself borne aloft. When he sat again, the rest of the chorale burst into a round of applause, but it wasn’t the clapping that touched him. Rather he felt the urgency of it, the way he had thus far only understood the man who reaches for the next bottle, as if a voice inside were chanting, Do this again, do this again, you have to do this again.
When rehearsal ended most singers dashed from the hall, but a few lingered—the dutiful, the lonely, the gregarious. Stacking the chairs, Sean stopped to rub his knee above the joint. A bruise or tendon pull maybe, nothing bad. Meghan would have broken a bone at least. And Gerry, father of four, sitting there with the sports section. What a kinky way life had of doling out gifts.
With the room in order, he sat at the piano with Henley and another tenor, a retired podiatrist named Dick Peltier, and they plucked out the tricky pas
sage in the fugue. If they could hear it in their heads, Sean explained to the two men, as bi-de-bi-de-bum even as they ran the arpeggios on a sustained ah, they could get more articulation. Dick still ran flat when they tried it again, but the pace was better. As Sean shut the piano and prepared to leave, Geoffrey came over from the last cluster of choristers gathered at the door. He nodded at Dick’s square frame exiting. “You ought to collect a fee,” he said.
“He’s fine,” said Sean. “Tendency to scoop the note, but that’s most of us.”
“You get what you pay for. Mostly. Sometimes you luck out.” He clapped Sean on the shoulder. “You sounded great tonight,” he said. “Intonation, pitch, everything. I’d put you before an audience if I could.”
Sean shrugged. He could feel the snug knit of the music already loosing, letting in the sorrow of his life like a cold draft. “I’m glad it helped the group,” he said.
“You know, I really don’t get it.” Geoffrey folded his music stand and set it in the corner. He turned to face Sean, hands on his heavy hips. “You’re a printer, right?”
“Was.” Sean plucked his jacket from the back of a chair. “Until this morning.”
“What, man? You lost your job?” Geoffrey frowned, came close. Sean liked the guy. He was a great musician, and he wasn’t a prig like others Sean had seen. But he’d stuck to the narrow path—music lessons, music school, teaching at a conservatory, music director at a church, the chorale—and didn’t know much about how the rest of them grubbed their way through the world. “What’ll you do now?”
“Too soon to tell.” Sean rubbed the back of his neck. What was he supposed to say? He’d thought about drinking himself to death but changed his mind? “Printers are hard hit. You’ve got desktop publishing, these young guys designing websites. I’m thirty-seven. I’m an old man.”
Geoffrey gave a bass snort. “You’ve got to be kidding me. You’re just ripe for a career change. You ever think of going back to school?”
“I’ve got a family to support, Geoffrey.” Even as he said it, Brooke’s yawning absence wanted to swallow him up. “I’ll figure something out.”
“Sean, I don’t know if you’re dense or just stubborn.” Geoffrey drew close. His eyes, small and bright blue, narrowed at Sean. “I’ve been trying to tell you for months. Years, maybe. You have a gift, man. Now, you may like the smell of printing ink—”
“It was a job, okay? It paid twice a month. I had a good eye for graphics.”
“All right, all right. I’m not knocking the paycheck. I’m sorry they cut it. I’m just saying. Carpe diem.”
Sean pursed his lips. He was tired. He was grieving. He wanted a drink. The Evangelist had floated away, on his angel wings or whatever transport he used. “I only speak the Latin they put to music, Maestro,” he said.
Geoffrey put his hand on Sean’s elbow. “Seize the day. Maybe not to be an opera singer, but Christ. You could teach. You like teaching?”
“Teaching’s a gas,” Sean said, which was the truth.
“Well, you could do that. You could perform locally, you could make this work. Not many people can say that.”
“I’ve got to go.”
But Geoffrey didn’t release him. “Let’s talk more about this, okay?” he said. “You’ve got some severance?”
“Six weeks.”
“Let me get to work on some stuff. Okay? Will you let me do that?”
“I don’t think so, Geoffrey. I don’t even know if the chorale—”
“Oh, no. No no. We’re not talking about that. You are not quitting this group.”
“Man, please.” Sean loosed his arm, held up his palm. “Not that I don’t appreciate.”
“All right.” Geoff nodded. “Don’t mean to push. Just—talk to me next week. Okay?”
“Sure,” Sean said, and they shook hands, as if they had some kind of deal. He headed out into the windy night. Geoffrey was a kind guy, he thought, but things had gone easy for him. He didn’t understand how things could go hard. At the sidewalk he stood for a moment, feeling the events of the day like clothing he would somehow, eventually, have to fit to his body. He had lost his job. His daughter slept safely across the street from their house. He had sung the Evangelist. He had lost his wife. He needed a drink. Just one. A whiskey, dry and burning.
A car drew up, the passenger window rolled down. “Hey, stranger,” came a soft voice. Sean leaned into the open window. It was Suzanne. Her pocketbook, brimming with knitting, sat on the passenger seat; two booster seats filled the back.
“What’re you hanging around for?”
“Wanted to congratulate you.”
“Well, thanks, but—”
“And to ask why, whenever the tenors aren’t singing, you look like you just got handed a death warrant.”
Ruefully he smiled. “Is it so obvious?”
“Only to someone with eyes. Can I take you for a drink? Celebrate your solo? Drown your sorrows?”
He dipped his head into the private space of the car. It smelled of spilled milk and the chemical pine scent of the cutout dangling from the mirror. In the yellow light of the streetlamp, Suzanne’s features welcomed scrutiny; her smile dimpled a shadow, and her flattish bone structure offered no threat. He nodded toward the back. “Aren’t your kids expecting you?”
“I keep the sitter till eleven thirty, in case we run late.”
An hour, Sean thought. What would it hurt? And this sweet woman, who had never resented him for raising her hopes, who had plugged along and brought good into the world, would listen to his troubles. She was not the sort to tell him what he ought to have done. She had a disposition to promote his good, or someone’s good anyway. His hand moved to the door handle. Then he remembered. “Thanks,” he said, “but I’m keeping to Diet Coke, these days.”
“Then drown the sorrows in Diet Coke.” She picked the pocketbook off the passenger seat and tossed it into the back, into one of the booster seats. “You look like you could use a friend.”
Sean did not want a Diet Coke. As he stood leaning into the car, he realized what—besides his wife back, his job back, his life back—he wanted. He wanted a desirous body, an eager and pliant body, to hold him tight and let him pound his frustration into her pillowed warmth. If he let Suzanne’s body be that body…it would not stop there. In her patient smile he saw her old need, lying dormant. “Just knowing I’ve got a friend,” he said, making himself smile at her, “does me a world of good.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I’ve got to get home. Got my little girl,” he lied.
“Give you a rain check,” Suzanne said.
“’Preciate,” he said. Lightly he slapped the door frame, releasing her. He stood back before temptation got hold of him. “See you next week,” he said. But she was already rolling up the window.
He regretted it almost as soon as Suzanne’s red taillights disappeared around the corner. Hadn’t Brooke probably left him, left Meghan, for this guy Alex?
No. Alex didn’t know where Brooke was. She had left because he had gotten drunk and abusive.
Then why would she leave Meghan with him?
She had left because she didn’t want him, or his child, because he wasn’t good enough for her and never had been.
She had left, that was all that mattered. And now he’d had the chance for a bit of comfort, and he had let it drive off.
Starting up his own car, he ejected the Bach Oratorio CD and put in La Traviata. He cranked it up to top volume, that tale of love and betrayal, and let the voices wash over him as he drove. Tomorrow he would register for unemployment, stop at a couple of temp agencies, push forward. Tonight he invited sorrow to drown him. When he reached the left turn off Farmington, he was tempted to keep straight, toward the Half Door. But the chorus kicked in and he turned left, and left again into his driveway. And there sat her Subaru, patient as any beast of burden. Inside the house, a warm light in the kitchen. Brooke was home.
Chapter 29
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Najda
In years to come, I’ll remember my mom’s disappearance as the day I began to understand the world. Or as the day I understood I had a family (which amounts to the same thing) because I almost lost them. How many times did Luisa bring me to the library, only to sit patiently while I ignored her, while I took not even five minutes to share with her all the things I was learning? It wouldn’t have been hard. Luisa’s happy to capture a word or phrase—like differential equations, or like that quote from Gödel, “A brain is a computing machine connected to a spirit”—to repeat when she wants to tell people what I’m learning. But before last Saturday, I despised my mom for being slow, for being as stupid as people think I am. So I punished her; I treated her to silence. When I decided I had to find another school, a real school, I never turned to Luisa. I didn’t care if she was proud of me or not. I reached past her to Ziadek. And so my mom ran away, straight into disaster.
Katarina won’t let me come to the hospital where they’ve taken Luisa. She’ll claim there wasn’t time, with the wheelchair and all. But that’s not true. Katarina’s furious with me. I deserve it, too. She’s gruff but I love her, my aunt Katarina. For years, while Ziadek was working, she stayed home with me and Luisa. She carried us all on her strong back. Now because of me, this awful thing has happened to her baby sister, to my mom.
When they’ve gone, I stay in the house and weep. Maybe I should wheel out to the short bus and go to school, just to be a good girl for a change, but I can’t. One after the other I snap tissues from the box in the kitchen to sop up the tears. My mom isn’t dead. There is that, Katarina’s said, to be thankful for. But Luisa’s been beat up—and raped. That much I know, even though no one’s told me. The way she was left in that alley, she has to have been raped. Raping Luisa is like plucking feathers from an angel’s wings. That’s what I think. Because whatever insults I’ve hurled at her, I know my mom is the soul of goodness.