“Yeah,” I said, like my voice belonged to somebody else. What else could I say? Please, please don’t die the way my daddy did?
“Where’s Clara?” Ray’s hands twitched, casting around in his bed like Clara’s leash might be laid across the hospital sheet somewhere.
“She’s safe. I promise. She’s at your house. Queenie’s making sure she has food.”
Ray relaxed back into the bed. “Thanks, child. Don’t know what I’d do without that old dog.”
Would Ray even be able to take care of his dog when he got out? How long could Queenie keep going over to his place to feed and walk Clara while Ray was in the rehab center?
“You been practicing?” Ray asked, the tiniest hint of a smile on his face.
I shrugged. “Kinda. Monday afternoon when you weren’t there, I played on the piano while I was waiting. I tried playing the way you always do. My music.” I blushed. “Somebody even clapped after I was done. And it made—” I waved my hand in the air in front of me. “Lights. Like yours does.”
The hint of a smile turned real, stretching out under the oxygen cannula like the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. “You musta opened up your heart pretty good for that to happen.” Ray reached out and patted my hand, his skin thin and dry as the leaves on the forest floor. “You make me proud.”
“I just wish I’d found you sooner.”
“You found me in time, Annie Lee. I owe you my life.”
From the doorway, Mama cleared her throat. “We’d better go, Annie Lee.”
Ray turned his head slowly to look at Mama, his smile beaming out even brighter in that dark hospital room. “Now, Annie Lee, who’s this lovely young lady you brought with you?”
Mama’s mouth pressed into a thin line, but her eyes were soft. Mama wasn’t big on people who tried to flatter her, but it was impossible not to warm to Ray—you could tell that he was the kind of person who didn’t say things just to make noise. Like his music, his words came straight from his heart.
“Ray, this is my mom. Joan Fitzgerald. She’s the one who helped me get the ambulance to you Friday.”
“Well then,” said Ray, “I suppose I owe you my life, too, Miz Joan.” He nodded, a gesture that somehow manage to be almost regal, even from a hospital bed where he couldn’t hardly lift his head. “I appreciate it greatly. I expect you’re real proud of your daughter, too. She’s a good girl—and has the makings of a great musician.”
“Hmm,” said Mama, casting me a hefty dose of side-eye, and I knew that however much she might’ve liked the recording of my piano playing, it’d be awhile before I was forgiven.
I stood, reaching out real quick to squeeze Ray’s hand, wishing it wasn’t so bony and light-feeling. “I’ll come back if I can.”
“I’ll look forward to it, Miss Annie Lee.”
“You just get better, okay? You better get better.”
Ray chuckled. “I’ll do my best. I’d be afraid to do otherwise, with you around.”
As we left Ray’s room, the door swinging closed behind us, Mama put her arm around me. “You doing okay?”
I nodded, though I wasn’t really sure. “I just want him to get better.”
“I know, honey.” Mama squeezed my shoulders. “I’m still pretty mad about the tricks you’ve been pulling this year, the risks you’ve taken. And I’m still not completely on board with your relationship with Mr. Owens. But I can see that he’s a special kind of friend.”
“Yeah.” My voice split a little. “Really special.”
Mama pulled me closer to her. “We’ll do everything we can, Annie Lee. I promise, we’ll do everything we can.”
43.
I couldn’t get Ray out of my thoughts the next morning. I sat on the bus alone, since Mitch had already been sharing a seat with Kavya Lahiri when I got on. Mitch’s jaw was set and her eyes studiously avoided mine while I looked for a place to sit.
I leaned my head against the cold bus window, replaying over and over in my head what it had been like to find Ray lying on the kitchen floor, barely breathing. When Mama talked to Queenie Saturday night, Queenie had told her that Ray had been finishing up replacing a lightbulb that had gone out when he lost his balance on the stool and fell. He hardly remembered anything after that; nobody was even positive how long he’d been there on the floor before I’d found him.
“Can we go visit again this week?” I’d asked Mama earlier, while she waited with me for the bus.
“I don’t know, Annie Lee. I think you need to focus on school for a while, all right?”
Mama had been so busy being mad and freaked out Friday when she found me at Ray’s that she hadn’t even realized I’d missed my egg-drop presentation until this morning. When she’d put two and two together, she’d looked at me with the strangest expression on her face—anger mixed with sadness, but blended up with love, like she was seeing me clearly for the first time since June.
“Things are going to be different from now on,” she’d said at the bus stop. “I don’t know exactly how it’s all gonna fit together yet, but we’re going to make some changes. We’re going to build us a new life, okay, Annie Lee? And once we have some of those pieces figured out, we’ll think about how Mr. Owens fits in.”
Now I stared out the window at the streets whizzing past. Saturday, sitting on the bathroom floor with Mama, I’d thought of love like a two-sided coin: sometimes you have to hold on, sometimes you have to let go.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to let go of Ray.
School that day felt like a hurricane of noise, with me as the quiet eye, the invisible center around which everything else swirled. I’d saved a seat for Mitch at lunch, but it had stayed empty the whole twenty minutes, except when Juan Diego Herrera accidentally dropped a granola bar onto it.
It was a worse kind of loneliness than what I’d felt at the beginning of the school year. At least then, I hadn’t known any better.
I tried all day to catch Mitch in the hallway between classes, all the apologies I wanted to give pounding their way through my brain, but every time she saw me she set her jaw hard and disappeared into the crowd of students hurrying to their next periods. She wasn’t even on the bus after school ended. Was she really so dead-set on avoiding me that she’d found another ride home?
Mr. Barton cleared his throat as I walked into the science room the next afternoon. “Miss Fitzgerald, a word, please?”
Dread poured its way from the crown of my head all the way down to my toes. From the desk next to mine, I could feel Mitch’s glowering eyes on me. I dragged myself up to Mr. Barton’s desk.
He steepled his fingers together under his chin as he looked up at me. “I understand from Miss Harris that you had a family emergency Friday.”
I nodded.
“She had to present alone, as I didn’t have enough advance notice to pair her with another student or team.”
Another nod.
“Have you talked to her about what happened?”
I shook my head.
“I suggest you do that. She seemed considerably distressed.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Did we fail the project?”
“No. The two of you will have an opportunity to make the project up in private Thursday afternoon. You’ll need to stay after school for one hour. Will that be possible?”
“I think so,” I said, hoping it was true. Last night at dinner, Mama had laid out the new after-school rules: I had to go to Mrs. Garcia’s apartment as soon as I got off the bus. Evidently Mama was less worried about taking advantage of a neighbor she didn’t know that well now that the alternative was leaving me alone. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere else, or even be in our apartment by myself, without calling Mama on the phone and getting her express permission first. She was hoping that as soon as the term for the cosmetology program started, she could get enough money in scholarships and government grants that she could cut way back at Mary’s Maids—maybe even stop working there altogether—and be h
ome in the afternoon with me.
“I will plan to meet you and Miss Harris here, in the classroom, as soon as school has let out on Thursday,” said Mr. Barton, and then his stern expression softened. “I hope everything is all right with the circumstance that required you to be absent from school last week?”
I thought of Ray in his hospital bed, the oxygen cannula threaded across his face.
“I hope so,” I said.
I slid into my desk right as Mr. Barton stood to start the class. I thought about taking his advice and slipping Mitch an apology note, but it only took one look at her, ignoring me like she was being offered a million dollars to pretend like I didn’t exist, to think better of that. Instead, I caught up with her as she ice-queened her way out of class after the bell had rung.
“Wait.” I grabbed her sleeve right before she could disappear into the hallway crowd.
The look Mitch gave me turned every bit of me into water. If only, like water, I could’ve washed myself away down the classroom floor and found a convenient drain to die in.
“Get. Your. Hand. Off. Me.”
This was the Mitch I hadn’t seen since the first week of school—the Mitch made of stone and steel, the girl who could light the whole school on fire if she wanted to and walk away whistling as it burned.
I shrugged off the temptation to pull my invisibility cloak back on, trying to imagine that I was sitting on the shining ebony bench of the grand piano in the Brightleaf atrium with my fingers poised above the keys.
I didn’t let go of Mitch’s sleeve.
“Just give me thirty seconds,” I said. It was taking everything I had in me to keep meeting Mitch’s frozen stare head-on.
“Fine. Thirty seconds.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. For everything. I shouldn’t have ditched you like that last week. It was for an emergency, but I still shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have made you carry things for me like I did.”
“You realize it was completely humiliating to have to get up in front of the whole freaking class without my partner and BS my way through that egg drop, right? The egg splattered like Humpty Dumpty, by the way. Probably because I was so distracted I did a crappy job putting the straws together. It was pathetic.”
Just for one second it was like the ice in her expression slipped and I saw something different on her face, something that made my heart stop. It was pain, and hurt, as raw and frustrated as anything I’d ever seen before.
I thought back to what she’d looked like when she’d taken off the beanie at our sleepover. What if maybe, all this whole school year, every time Mitch looked angry or disdainful or fierce, that was as much a kind of armor as her white hat? What if, this whole time, she’d really been just as afraid of being seen as I was?
Guilt slithered into my belly. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “I’m so sorry. I can’t say it enough times.”
“I’m not your sassy sidekick, okay? I’m a real person. With real feelings of my own.”
“You’re right. And I’m—”
Mitch rolled her eyes. “I don’t even want to hear it. Thirty seconds is up, reader girl. I’ve got to go to class.”
Without another word, she whirled around and marched off down the hallway.
44.
We went to visit Ray again Tuesday afternoon after Mama’s shift ended at work.
“There’s a big part of me says I shouldn’t be doing this,” Mama said as we drove to the hospital. “Every time I think about you riding downtown all by yourself—every time I think about you having piano lessons alone with a stranger—”
“We weren’t ever alone,” I said. “There were always people coming and going in the mall. And they all knew Ray. Everybody there loves him. And Queenie’s known him about a million years.”
“Regardless, Annie Lee, you have to understand how it makes my heart freeze to think of what could’ve happened. There’s a big part of me that thinks that I should turn this car around and forbid you from ever seeing Mr. Owens again. But,” Mama went on before I could interrupt again, “I can see how much he means to you. I haven’t seen you this worked up about anyone or anything since your daddy died. I know Mr. Owens is important to you.”
“And music,” I said quietly. “Music is important to me, too.”
“I know, honey.”
“Sometimes when I play, it’s like I can feel Daddy there with me.” I thought of the thread of golden light that had come from my fingers that day I’d played the grand piano at Brightleaf.
“I know, honey,” Mama said again, and even though her eyes were fixed on the road in front of us, I could see that they were shiny with tears.
Ray was a little more alert today than he’d been on Sunday, the head of the bed raised a bit more so that he was mostly sitting up. “Miss Annie Lee!” he said as I came into his room, Mama behind me. “And Miz Fitzgerald! I don’t know what I did to deserve such a good thing two weeks in a row.”
Mama rolled her eyes, but she smiled, too.
Ray waved at the chair closest to the bed. “Sit down, Annie Lee. Tell me what’s been happening in your world. It’s got to be a far sight more interesting than this hospital room.”
I told him about how badly things had ended with Mitch and about losing Daddy’s quarter. Mama sat in the corner of the room, busy reading something on her phone with a little frown line on her forehead, not paying much attention to me and Ray.
“It disappeared right after you did,” I said, working my fingers through a gap between the threads of the green hospital blanket that hung off the side of his bed. “It kind of feels like there’s a hole in my heart every time I think about it. I can’t stop reaching for it, like my brain can’t seem to remember it’s gone.”
“I’ve had a hole in my own heart ever since my Margie passed on,” Ray said. He looked a little better today, and although he still had the oxygen tube strung across his face, his breath didn’t rattle quite so much. “I don’t think holes like that ever really close up all the way. But I kinda think maybe we wouldn’t want them to.”
“Sometimes I think it might be easier.” But even as I said it, I knew the words weren’t true. It might hurt less if I forgot my daddy—but not remembering him, not remembering how wonderful he’d been, would be worse.
I picked at the blanket, making the hole big enough to fit two of my fingers, then three. “Things always seemed easier with the quarter in my pocket. Like I was carrying around my own little piece of luck.”
“I reckon you make your own luck pretty well, Miss Annie Lee. And I think you oughta make up with your friend Mitch before too much water gets under that bridge. She seems like the kind of friend you want to hold on to with both your hands.”
A fourth finger went into the hole, the seafoam-colored threads rearranging themselves yet again.
“I already tried,” I said. “It didn’t work. She’d be right to keep on hating me forever.” After our makeup egg drop was over on Thursday, I wasn’t sure she’d talk to me ever again.
“Just do it like the piano.”
“What do you mean? I haven’t practiced in days. I haven’t even done the fingering work on the table like you taught me to.” I’d hardly even thought of the DPTA competition since I’d found Ray on his kitchen floor. Would Mama even let me compete at this point? Would I ever be able to practice again?
“No, child,” Ray said. “I meant that you have to take off that invisibility cloak, Annie Lee. Open your heart up a little bit and let Mitch see inside it.”
Mama agreed to let me stay after school to make up my egg-drop project Thursday. She even arranged to get off work a few hours early so she could come pick me up afterward, since there wouldn’t be any buses leaving that late.
“Maybe we’ll do something,” she said as we waited at the bus stop Thursday morning. “We could go get a movie from the library and pop some popcorn. Maybe even unpack some of those boxes.”
“We could go visit Ray again,” I sai
d.
Mama gave me a sidelong look. “Don’t push your luck, Annie Lee.”
“A movie sounds nice,” I said.
“I’ve been thinking—maybe we need some new traditions, you and me. I know I’m not always the best at being—I don’t know—fun.”
“Me neither,” I confessed.
“I think maybe you and I need to learn to get better at that,” Mama said gently. “Without your daddy here, it’s up to us. We could have a weekly movie night, maybe. We haven’t seen hardly any of the things that’ve come out this year—we could make a list, take turns choosing the movie.”
“I’d like that.”
“I love you, honey,” Mama had said as the bus pulled up, brakes hissing to a stop. “I hope you know, baby girl, you’re my whole world. Through this whole horrible year, you’ve been the only thing that’s kept me hanging on even a little bit. I know I’ve been mad at you about the sneaking out, and obviously there’s going to be some consequences for that. You’ve lost some of the freedoms you used to have in the afternoon now that you’re going to Mrs. Garcia’s. But I think—I think part of it is that we need to figure out a way to spend some more time together. We’re all we’ve got now, Annie Lee. It’s time we figured out how to be a family again.”
“I love you, too,” I said, and hugged her quick before I climbed on the bus.
As we pulled away from the bus stop, Mama waved. I thought of the morning right after school had started, when I’d gotten onto the bus so filled with anger and frustration and hurt that a traitorous little voice inside me wished it had been Mama who had died that day in June, not Daddy.
I didn’t feel like that anymore.
Mitch ignored me all day. When the final bell rang and we both went to Mr. Barton’s classroom, Mitch only looked at me long enough to ask coldly whether I had brought the thumb drive with our PowerPoint slides.
“All right, ladies,” Mr. Barton said after he’d pulled up our presentation on the projector. “You have ten minutes.”
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