by Joni Rodgers
“I—I just want to say that I never meant to hurt my little sister. And—”
“Axvww” the audience derided, blasting gales of it toward the stage.
“I didn’t!” Kit turned to the clinical psychologist, pleading for some support. “Tell them I didn’t. Tell them I wanted to hurt myself, not her.”
“Kit, we have a special surprise for you today.” Ricki referred to her hand-held cue cards. “Let’s welcome to the show Mrs. Vivica Smithers, Kit and Kiki’s mother!”
“No!” Kit blurted aloud, startling herself awake, sloshing bathwater onto the floor.
It had gone cold, but rather than try to warm it up, she got out and sat on the bathroom rug, arms wrapped around her legs, her legs tight together, trying to breathe evenly, trying not to remember how she let him climb on top of her like that.
The things he was saying that night gave her the same scalp-crawling sensation she’d felt listening to the backwash of looped blue movie voices. She had resisted when he came up behind her and slid his hands inside her shirt and then down. The bourbon on his tongue tasted acrid as the vomit that now scratched at the back of her throat. He was skinny and workish, not large and warm, like Mel. He was the Anti-Mel. There was no trace of human comfort in his carefully groomed physique, in the technique he substituted for touch—only proclivity and function and the smell of beer.
He pierced into her like the lancing of an abscess: disruption, injury, but an end, or at least, a different brand of infection. She knew she’d be left blood-rusted and ruined, but no longer, at least, what she had been. There was no need to struggle anymore. A wooden feeling, a great leaden sadness she’d been fighting for a long while now, went to her hands, and they dropped to her sides, and he mistook this for the seduction of her.
Lying inanimate between his writhing and the clean kitchen floor, Kit observed the broken dark of the bay window, the hushed ticking of the sunflower clock. From there, she could see accumulated deposits of grease and grime on the underside of the range hood that looked so shiny clean from the usual upright perspective.
She focused on the endless turning of the ceiling fan, the imperfect tulips stencilled on the doorjamb, a glass tumbler that teetered at the very edge of the table. It wobbled slightly in response to the repeated pulse of her knees, pushed apart, apart, apart like a mechanical butterfly between the table leg and the white wainscoting.
More than the possibility of loss, it was the suspension Kit found unbearable; watching the glass hang there at the edge, knowing it must eventually hit the floor, must explode, expel. The only thing that could prevent it now was the end of the world. But it held there, against the laws of nature.
As Wayne groaned and jerked his final spasm, Kit grasped the bottom of the checkered tablecloth and wrenched it toward her. The tumbler tipped and gratefully gave itself to gravity, turning in the air, milky-hard ice and cold-stung water spiraling outward like the cataclysmic birth of a galaxy. And then, such relief at the sound of shattering.
A jagged crescent skittered across the linoleum, and Kit closed her hand around it, letting her blood, losing her innocence, breathing again.
The droning motor of the tour bus lulled Kiki to a nodding doze as it lumbered down the highway toward Tampa Bay’s Azure Club and her twenty-sixth gig in thirty days.
She lay across two seats, dreaming of Oscar and Chloe, catching brief glimpses of them as they dove and tadpoled between the surface of the water and the fathoms of her fitful sleep. She wished she could float up from the bottom of Vivica’s pool to surface beside them, kiss them over their air mattresses, taste the chlorine on their cheeks, feel them hugging back in their clammy, neon-colored swimsuits. From underwater, she could see Vivica coming out onto the patio, bringing them juice boxes and animal crackers, her pink lips chatting at the cell phone, telling someone how her daughter pulled off a kamikaze audition with a stroke of musical genius and a bit of bathroom reverb.
“Kiki?”
Xylo’s soft calling drew her deeper until the water pressure became one with the droning of the motor. She didn’t open her eyes yet. She wanted him to call her again. Maybe even bend down and touch her shoulder. She felt guilty for wanting that. She was still a married woman, after all; Wayne hadn’t yet responded to her lawyer’s fat envelope of paperwork. She was a mother. She was about to become another mother. She was trying to make her way in the world for the very first time in her twenty-nine years. She had to set priorities.
But she couldn’t help it.
When Xylo said her name like that, it made her feel silky all over.
“Kiki?”
She smiled, and her smile made the sound of “Hmm?”
“Zeke wants to know if he should pull into the rest area.”
“Y’all don’t have to blame me for every rest stop.” Kiki sat up and pushed her hair away from her eyes. “Doesn’t anyone else ever use the bathroom around here?”
Xylo folded into the seat next to her, sitting cross-legged like Oscar would or Gandhi or a Hopi medicine man.
“The Brethren have been known to do some prodigious micturition, particularly subsequent to some legendary libationary intake,” he told her proudly. “However, we are sensitive to the diminished bladder capacity often associated with your delicate and oh-so-womanly condition.”
“Okay,” Kiki laughed. She had no idea what he’d just said, but she loved the sound of his language. It made her think of when her mother used to read to them from the old Bulfinch’s Mythology or the heavy brown Complete Annotated Works of William Shakespeare that spread open across their three laps and featured elegant etched illustrations protected by a layer of tissue paper.
“In other words,” Xylo said sideways, “does the lady got to pee?”
“No, I’m OK.”
“Hallelujah. It’s a miracle.”
“I’ve been trying not to drink anything. It wasn’t my intention to put anybody out.”
“No such thing, Miss Kiki.” Xylo rested his head on the seat back. “Don’t you go depriving yourself. We’re most pleased and privileged to be put out by you. And adequate hydration is essential to vocal strength.”
Kiki rested her head back, too, so that if they were living on a plane of reality tipped perpendicular to this one, they would be lying down together.
Up front, Reuben was bar-chording a rumpled rhythm with his guitar, spreading it out like an unmade bed under Albert’s restless flute. The reedy melody tossed and turned, tangled itself in the sheets. When Zeke swerved to miss a bump in the road, it made Xylo’s shoulder lean against Kiki’s, and neither of them moved to make it not be so.
Two days unshaven, the gray in his beard had become more evident. Kiki studied the lines at the side of his eye, the etching at the corner of his mouth as elegant as the images of the Old Globe.
Reuben eased into a minor key, and the tangled bedclothes spread out over them, the surface of the sound rising and rolling with the motion of all the life that lay below. When Albert laid his flute aside to pick up his clarinet, Xylo hummed and scattered a line that quietly crossed and countered the alto strand, though he kept his voice low, a voyeur at the keyhole.
He turned to Kiki, his mouth close to the curve of her ear.
“You see it, don’t you?” he whispered.
“What?” Kiki whispered back.
“Mazzini called music ‘an echo of the invisible world.’ But some people see it. You see it, don’t you, Kiki?”
Silky, silky, silky as her red spaghetti-strap gown swaying back and forth on the costume rack.
“I see it, too,” Xylo nodded. “Always did.”
“Even when you were little?”
“It was my destiny. My mama knew it the day I was born. She made me take piano and play organ in church, but I wanted to play brass. I wanted to blow like Louis or Dizzy. I thought blowing a note like that would feel like flying. I thought I’d hit that note someday, and my feet would leave the earth.”
“Why d
idn’t you?”
“That was not my destiny,” he shook his head. “Adam and his kind, we got to reach out to the hand of God and allow the light to guide us.”
“Why’d you start playing the xylophone?” she asked him, and he smiled.
“You sound like Oscar.” Kiki took that as a compliment, even when Xylo laughed and parroted Oscar’s inquisitive tonality. ‘“Why’d you start playin’ that xylophone? Why you got such black dark eyes? Why you got that scar on the side of your face? Why you not married when you so old?’”
Kiki laughed too, but then she said again, “Why?”
“I signed up to play the cornet in the marching band at George Washington Carver Junior High School on 87th Street in Detroit, Michigan. And when I arrived for the first day of summer band practice, I walked into that beat-up, high-ceiling, paint-crackin’-off-the-walls band room, and I saw a beam of sunlight streamin’ in between the metal bars on the window, fallin’ down in a golden ray that exploded into a long row of silver streaks like the fingers of angels all lined up shining on the keyboard of God’s piano. And that was the xylophone. Layin’ up there on a big ol’ wooden box in the percussion corner. All the sticks and mallets and screws scattered on the floor. All kinds of ‘fuck you’ and ‘shit’ and ‘Delbert love Loretta’ and ‘white man die’ was written all over the tympani and the trap set, and they scratched up, dented up, kicked in the old glockenspiels and wood blocks and hanging chimes. But that xylophone—that was like the Ark of the Covenant. They never dared to touch it. I stood there like I was Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the finger of God reaching down to me, telling me, ‘Zephaniah Haines, you gonna live or else. You gonna get on outa this bad-ass neighborhood, and you gonna build your mama a decent house, and you gonna play this thing to the glory of God until the day you die.’ And right then and there, I traded in my cornet, and I took my place high up in the far corner of the percussion section. And the moment I lay my hand on that radiant silver surface, I knew I was touching the hand of God. I knew I was to become an instrument of His peace.”
“Your destiny,” Kiki murmured.
“I surely did know it. I went home that day and told my mama, ‘I am going to be a blues impresario.’”
“I wonder what my destiny is,” Kiki said, settling deeper into the seat cushions.
“To sing ...,” Xylo traced the curve of her throat with his fingertips, “to have babies ...,” and touched the swell of her stomach. “To be innocent...” He pressed his lips to the back of her hand, “and beautiful...,” and kissed the front of her wrist. “To love ...,” he nuzzled her cheek, “and be loved.” He brushed his soft, full lips against hers in a gesture too gentle to even be called a kiss. “To feel joy.”
When Xylo breathed the word against her mouth, Kiki could almost feel herself speaking it and believing.
The music soaked up the last of the moonlight, leaving a vacuum that drew flat against the tinted windows everything that is always just before dawn. The bus rolled on toward the coming day, and Kiki rolled with it, yearning toward the newly perceptible nearness of her Creator, striving to open her eyes wide enough to allow the light.
“Shut that light off!” Kit croaked, squinting and shielding her eyes with her hand, but the sudden shaft pierced straight through to her gray matter.
“Mom?” Cooper ventured.
“What do you want? Get out of here. Go back to bed.”
She pulled the blankets over her face.
“There’s somebody at the door,” Cooper whispered. “I was watching ‘George of the Jungle,’ and somebody knocked on the door.”
Kit’s hand emerged from the wadded sheet and dragged the alarm clock into her floral cocoon.
“Six seventeen on a Saturday morning,” she moaned. “What kind of Neanderthal jackass—”
“It’s Mr. Anderson,” Cooper said.
“What? Are you sure?”
“I pulled a chair up to the peephole.”
“Oh, goddang!” Kit threw off the covers and clapped her hands over her face. “Coo, be my big boy for me? Go on down there and tell him—just tell him... oh dang.” She kicked out of the bedding and ran for the bathroom. “Tell him I’ll be right down.”
There was nothing for it.
He was down there at the door with his carpenter’s hands and his blue eyes and his lilting mouth. Kit caught a glimpse in the mirror. Good. She looked like complete and utter hell. He couldn’t want her like this, and that would make it easier. He would be revolted and draw back and never return. She pulled Mel’s bathrobe over her dowdy sleep-shirt to make it even dowdier, splashed cold water on her blotchy face to make it even blotchier. She pulled on some socks from the laundry basket and shuffled down the stairs.
Ander stood in the entryway, talking with Cooper about the Houston Rockets’ shot at another NBA title. When he saw her, he smiled in a way that encompassed his whole head.
“Kit,” he said. “Ah, Kit.”
“Cooper, go on in and watch TV now,” Kit said, wishing for both their sakes she’d taken a moment to swish some Scope through her mouth before she left the bathroom.
“Ah, Kit,” Ander said again when Coo had disappeared back into the family room. “Kit. Hello, Kit.”
“Hello, Ander.”
“Ya. Ya, hello, Kit. Hello.”
He was fidgeting with his hands, as though they wouldn’t do what he wanted them to. Or he wouldn’t let them do what they wanted to.
“Ander, what are you doing here?”
“Oh Kit. I—I am... ah Gott. This is so good to see you.”
“Ander, I told you before—”
“No! Yes, I know, but I—I am only coming to—to be bringing this to you.”
He pulled a letter out of his pocket. It was stamped and addressed to Kit in Ruda’s handwriting. It had obviously spent several days in the pocket, knowing full well it was morally obligated to a mail box, but unable to resist fantasies of hand-delivery.
“Is your pay,” he said, thrusting it forward. “For the last week of working and ... and the extra for the—the painting of—of... that day.”
“Yes. Okay. Fine. Thank you.” Kit took it and pulled the door open without looking at him. “Goodbye, Ander.”
“Kit—”
“Goodbye.”
He sighed heavily and dropped his chin down to his chest.
“Ya, okay, then. Goodbye, Kit.”
He stepped past the door, but when she started to close it after him, he blocked it open with his outstretched hand.
“Kit—” His face was earnest, but he wasn’t pleading, only telling her. “You are very beautiful lover to me, beautiful, beautiful Kit. And I am never forgetting you forever. I am very much remembering you. Nothing can ever be same for me any more.”
Kit allowed herself to look at his eyes, blue and brimming as the fjords. She nodded and tried to swallow the burning in her throat, but her voice came out scratchy and staccato.
“I know. I’m sorry, Ander. I never meant to—”
“No. No, of course not. And I never did also.”
They stood for a long moment, recognizing how that didn’t change anything.
“Goodbye, Ander.”
“Goodbye, Kit.”
She closed the door and went back upstairs.
She stood crying in the shower a while, then pulled on her bathrobe, sat down on the bed, and picked up the phone.
“Hmm... mm-hmm?” Vivica murmured.
Kit realized a moment too late how early it was and was about to hang up, but her mother said, “Kit?”
“Hi!” Kit said cheerfully, trying not to show how it weirded her out when her mother did that. “Did I wake you?”
“No, I had to get up and answer the phone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a joke! Really, it’s all right. I’m a steroid insomniac these days. My eyes look like empty wallets, but I’m getting a lot of paperwork done.”
“How are you, Mama
? Are you okay? How’s the—the chemo... thing?”
“Worse than the dentist, not as bad as the IRS,” wisecracked Vivica.
Kit laughed for her and tried to make it sound genuine.
“All in all, I think we’ll make it.”
“I know you will, Mama.”
“They say that which does not kill us makes us stronger. I’ve decided to go with Plan B.”
Kit found herself waiting for the rim shot when Vivica delivered this sort of stand-up comic line, but it was getting harder and harder to be the appreciative audience.
“Mama?”
“What is it, Bitty Kitty?” Vivica sounded concerned or maybe just tired; Kit couldn’t tell.
“Well, I was just thinking. You know, if you need me to, I could drive down there and stay for a couple weeks. To help out, you know?”
“You’re sweet, Kitten, but I’ve already got Kiki here, honey. I’m not sure I’m up to having any more help than that right now.”
“Oh, right,” Kit said, “I just thought—”
“Is something wrong, sweetheart?”
“No, of course not. Everything’s fine.”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing! Nothing is going on, Mama. Why would you think something is going on? Isn’t it possible that maybe I just wanted to come down there and—and be with you and help you get through this and take care of you?”
“Well, don’t get upset, Kit. I’m just being concerned.”
“Well, I’m just being concerned about you! And I think I’ve got more reason to be concerned about you than you’ve got reason to be concerned about me being concerned ... about you.”
Kit listened to herself protesting too much, knowing her mother could see right through it, hating it that neither one of them could come right out and say so.
“Mama, I—I should go. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Honey, wait—”
“Mama, would you tell Kiki to call me when she gets up?”
“Actually, she’s out of town for a couple days. Tampa Bay through the weekend. I’m lining her up in some delicious venues,” Vivica confided, “and she is in good voice, Kit. Very good voice.”