Songbird

by Lisa Samson

  “Myrtle, you need to get your book bag together. Your brother is coming to pick you up.”

  I shook my head. “Why?”

  “Well, there’s been an accident.”

  “What happened, Mr. Jackson?”

  “I think James should tell you.”

  “Is everybody all right?”

  “Well, no, honey.”

  He whipped his head around at the knock on his door. “Yes?”

  It opened a crack and I saw his secretary’s nose peep through. “James is here, Mr. Jackson.”

  “Thank you, Pat.”

  He turned to me, took my hand and tried to stretch his mouth into some sort of reassuring smile. “Go ahead, Myrtle. Go get your things.”

  He stayed in his seat, his forehead now in his hand, as I left the room.

  What a moment. That spiked heartbeat. That clammy skin. That thickening inside me. That horrible, burning claw of inevitability sticking in my throat.

  And there stood James.

  “James!” I cried out and ran over to where he stood in front of the secretary’s desk.

  I haven’t really described James yet. Tall, and just an average-looking guy, he sported black hair and Mrs. Evans’s pansy eyes, but darker blue, and he wore his clothing as neatly and comfortably as an orange wears its skin.

  His face just then bore a far different look than his pressed khakis and blue button-down shirt called for. Something had swept across him earlier, leaving red eyes and blotched skin. James hugged me to him tightly and just cried and cried.

  “It’s Mama,” he said a minute later.

  Then he pulled away.

  “There was an accident out on Fort Avenue, Myrtle. This little Datsun pickup pulled out of the cemetery drive. He pulled out in front of a dump truck that swerved into the oncoming traffic.”

  “Right into Mrs. Evans?”

  He nodded.

  “Is she all right?”

  “Well, the ambulance has taken her to Lynchburg General. But it doesn’t look good, Peach.” He cleared his throat and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Go on and get your stuff,” he said again.

  I ran out of the office and down the hall as though my head and hair burned with an intense fire. I had to get there. To the hospital. I had to tell her. I had to tell Mrs. Evans I loved her. I had to tell her.

  Please God, I prayed and prayed. Please, please, please, please, please.

  13

  Mrs. Evans died before I made it to the hospital. Even all these years later I’m still upset at the Lord for not answering that prayer. How much would it have taken for Him to have let my foster mother hang on just a few more minutes, regain consciousness in a miraculous manner as I drew up close to the gurney? Just for a few minutes so I might have lifted her dying hand to my breast and said, “I love you, Mrs. Evans. You loved me more than anybody ever did. I know that. I want you to know I know that.”

  I just wanted to tell her.

  Would that have been so hard?

  Was that too much to ask?

  Mr. Evans sat there in a nearby lounge, holding a can of Sprite and not sipping. He stared down into the can, just shaking his head. The girls cried together. James sat next to his dad, wiping his eyes with the back of his left hand again and again, his right hand limp, curling upward on his knee.

  I pleaded with the nurses tending to Mrs. Evans. “Please let me go in! Please let me see her.”

  Nobody came to my aid, so lost in their own sorrow. Nobody heard my pleas, the hurricane winds of grief drowning out all sound.

  “We can’t honey. We’re tending to the body.”

  “Please!”

  Every bit of tissue in my body wailed, beating itself blue with frustration and anger and loss, bursting all my capillaries, but instead of blood, tears exploded out.

  So I sat by the door of her room, hunched like a mouse into a little ball, listening to the hushed voices of the nurses. I watched Pastor Fred approach, I saw his brown wingtip shoes stop in front of me, felt his hand smooth my hair, watched his feet move on toward the Evanses.

  I sat by the door as the morticians came.

  I sat by the door as the gurney rolled by, the sheet falling down from the square frame like a tablecloth.

  I sat by the door as the gurney rolled back out, the sheet falling in graceful scallops from the pressure points of Mrs. Evans’s dead body.

  I sat by the door and watched the Evans family shoes shuffle by. Stacy’s Keds stopped in front of me.

  “Let’s go, Peach, honey.”

  I arose. “Where’s Grandma Sara, Stacy?”

  “She stayed home to make phone calls.”

  “She didn’t want to see Mrs. Evans one last time?”

  “Grandma knows better than to think that body is really Mama.”

  I felt rebuked in a small way.

  “Are you okay, Peach?” Stacy and I caught up with the others.

  I nodded, still unable to speak my heart.

  I hope Mrs. Evans knew how I felt. I hope that somehow she could tell because she was so wise. But I can’t be sure. And now, I’ll have to entertain regret for the rest of my life. Trying to get things right the first time.

  When we came home to the house after the funeral I sat with Grandma. The ladies from church laid out the food for the guests and I heard their gentle hum of conversation in our kitchen.

  Women like Mrs. Evans are supposed to live forever because they’re the ones the earth needs. They’re the food, the water, the sun, and the air to regular humans who just haven’t gotten it yet. They’re the ones that show us, in human form, how it’s done.

  No one could believe it.

  “What’s going to happen to you now, Grandma?”

  Her frizzy beehive hair vibrated as she shook her head. “I guess I’m going to have to go into the home up there on Langhorne Road.”

  “What about the others?” What about me?

  “I don’t know, Peach. I just don’t know.”

  So, after Stacy graduated from E.C. Glass in June, Mr. Evans put the house on Rowland Drive up for sale. When it sold in August, he bought one of those apartments up near the Cavalier Grill. James returned to UVA, found a job for Frances near the campus, and she moved in with him. Stacy left for Word of Life Bible Institute in upstate New York at the end of August and they shuffled me into the foster care system.

  “I can’t take care of you with my traveling, Peach,” Mr. Evans said that day he told me the news, “and the others are too young to do it.”

  I drew blood on the inside of my lip as I looked down. “When will they come to get me?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  I nodded and turned to Grandma, who stood there crying. “Well, I don’t have too much to gather, I guess.” I looked up. “Can I take a willow plate with me? Just one?”

  She nodded. “That would make me happy, Peach.”

  “And my pillow?”

  “Of course,” Mr. Evans said.

  That fast, it all fell apart.

  I was back to eleven years old. Only now, I had a life worth losing. And it was gone.

  Part Two

  1

  Strike up the band. Get out the baton. Find your seat, the parade is about to begin.

  The thing about parades is that usually the features and floats get better and better. Take the Tournament of Roses Parade, for example. Just when I think I’ve beheld the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen, along comes some lacy, white float, with twirly flowers and a real waterfall. Unfortunately, real life seems to go downhill. At least sometimes. Nobody ever quite compared with Mrs. Evans. Even now, all these years later, I still talk to her.

  I know that sounds crazy. But Mrs. Evans didn’t really die. She’s just with Jesus, probably leading a choir of little children that died early, taking care of them as they grow to whatever kind of maturity we reach in heaven.

  “Mrs. Evans!” I called sometimes. “You’d understand about this. This boy in my class …” I neve
r talked to my mother after she left the way I talked to Mrs. Evans.

  Ten months in foster care at the Campbells’ began my circus train of homes. Then the missus had a baby and didn’t want to take the chance I’d cause trouble and harm her real daughter. We never bonded anyway. I didn’t want to.

  At all.

  And then the three months at the Wagners’ practically wore my fingers to the bone as they merely wanted a maid they could actually get paid to work like a dog. However, I did learn the value of a clean bathroom, and if I scrubbed in there, I didn’t have to listen to Mrs. Wagner’s incessant bellyaching about ridiculous matters like the new carpet in the family room, which began pilling on day one, or that large crack down the middle of the patio out back. Oh, she was a sight, too, in her platform shoes and tight jeans and pale lipstick. She chain-smoked all day, sitting there on the screen porch reading true crime books and magazines. Mr. Wagner worked all the time, and who could blame him? They ended up moving back home to California.

  Then came the Biggs. Let’s just say I knew how to keep a bedroom door closed without a lock. I lasted three days there because it wasn’t hard to see what was coming. I may sound cavalier about it all these years later. I just choose to remember my God-given strength at that time and am quite proud of the fact that man ended up in jail without my virtue in his pocket.

  End of story, okay?

  May of 1975 brought me, my willowware plate, and my pillow to the fourth stop on the post-Evans rail line. The home of Mrs. Cecile Ferris and her husband Clarke. Now Clarke, independently wealthy with some long-dead ancestor’s money, spent his mornings eating breakfast over at Bill’s Country Kitchen, his lunchtimes at the Cavalier just down the street from his three-story, pillared Greek temple of a house, and his cocktail hour right at the Oakwood Country Club up the road. Dinner usually saw him back at home with his wife, after another cocktail hour, of course, in the game/music room at the side of the house. Clarke Ferris could play the piano like Liberace and we had us some good times. They were more than happy to get my voice lessons going again and he taught me all sorts of tunes. Cole Porter. The Gershwin boys. Hoagie Carmichael. Rodgers and Hart. Rodgers and Hammerstein. Louis Armstrong and Count Basie. Lerner and Lowe.

  Oh, the music from Camelot just spoke to me! I can’t imagine being Guenevere and having a man like Lancelot singing that “If Ever I Would Leave You” song to me. Even though it’s hopeless, and their love is forbidden, I get the feeling that he’d lie across train tracks for her, or more to the point, swim an eel-infested moat.

  Cecile Ferris, swathed in buttercup or robin’s-egg blue chiffon, her mother’s jewels, and real silk stockings, hair pulled straight back, always sat on the sofa. She sipped on Harveys Bristol Cream and hummed along.

  I filled the role of showpiece. And made the Ferrises feel good about themselves. Grandma Sara and I still enjoyed each other when I visited Wednesdays after school talking about Cecile’s clothing and the Ferrises’ funny ways.

  2

  Cecile found me in my room on an evening early in December just before my fifteenth birthday. The rain had been sluicing Lynchburg for over a week. Cold, winter rain that flowed like Rio Grandes of depression, clearing out the delusion with which I normally consoled my aching heart. I found myself getting irrationally angry at inanimate objects, hurling them against the wall. My nose, bleeding again, did so with greater frequency and I found myself oversleeping more than I should have. Life felt so imposing and important. Too important, if that makes sense. Too serious. Too overwhelming.

  Head in my math book, I had been thinking just how ridiculous geometry was for a girl who only wanted to sing. Unless I decided to go into acoustics, I saw no value in all of those angles and theorems. I did however appreciate being on the honor roll, and since I had skipped a grade I realized that I did have some sort of reputation to uphold. Even if it was just for myself.

  Right then, more than ever before, I kept to myself at school. Tenth-grade schoolwork was hard enough without all the social dilemmas. I doubted anybody would have wanted to hang out with me anyway. I had nothing to offer them.

  See, what I had realized that past year at the Wagners’ and the Biggs’ was this: Mama really wasn’t coming home. I thought I had realized it earlier, but then I fell back to my old habit of hope like a dog to an old, familiar vomit, a vomit that had stopped tasting bad a while before because that’s all it had fed upon for years.

  Some days it seemed the Evanses had never existed at all.

  So a nocturnal pastime developed that I dubbed, “The Disappearance Theory Hour.” The latest sign of my inner distress was insomnia. Now, I don’t know much about much, but I say insomnia is truly a trial! I’ve heard of people not getting a wink of sleep for years on end. Of course, I believe in the traditional theory of Hades as hellfire and brimstone or else why would God make His precious Son go through all of that pain on the cross for nothing? That would be a monstrous thing, I believe. And you know, I think even some of those radio preachers would agree with me. My husband Harlan does. And he’s even been to Bible college. But I think that persecution by insomnia should entitle you to skip hell altogether, because lying there night after night, watching the moon, each car that slips down the avenue, each tiny feathering of the leaves by an errant wind, lying there like that—it’s misery, pure and simple.

  But I’d lie there in my room, the green room with a distinct guest-bedroom feel (except for the framed pictures of the Evanses, my own pillow, and my willow plate), looking out at the night sky through the leaves of the big sugar maple tree outside the window and I’d theorize.

  I made a list of the possible happenings of Isla Jean Whitehead.

  1. She just plumb forgot about me.

  2. She didn’t forget, but figured I’d be all right one way or the other.

  3. She was having so much fun she hadn’t realized how the time had flown.

  4. She had other children by now and to bring me into the big, beautiful house in Washington, D.C. would just be confusing for everyone involved.

  5. She tried to come back to get me but that snazzy man wouldn’t let her, and so she’d been checking up on me in secret all of these years for her own sense of satisfaction. She’d known I was doing all right.

  6. She was dead.

  That’s why I didn’t want to admit anything beforehand, before I really gave her enough time. Because I knew that any mother who really loved her daughter would come back when she said. So Mama either didn’t love me anymore, an evil thing to do, or she was dead.

  Either one, take your pick, broke my fourteen-year-old heart. I decided that day dead was better than evil.

  Isla Jean Whitehead died that day.

  And my goodness, almost four years after her disappearance, it was time for me to let her go. At least for a while. I had things to do. A life to get on with. I had breasts, small ones, but breasts, nonetheless, menstrual periods, and hopes for a scholarship to William and Mary someday. Isla Jean Whitehead, just go on and die, and leave me to grow up without your ghost getting in the way.

  Not that you were even all that nice when you left.

  So when Cecile Ferris breezed into my room around 10:15, drink in hand, chiffon fluttering, I was trying to memorize theorems.

  “Myrtle, dear. How is your homework coming along? Isn’t it late? Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

  Cecile always asked questions in threes. Like some people sneeze three times, every time.

  “Just memorizing theorems for a geometry test tomorrow. It is late, yes ma’am, but I couldn’t sleep, so I decided I’d redeem the time and study a little.”

  “What a good child. Now, guess what? Did you know we always have a big Christmas party here? And would you like to sing for us that evening, with Clarke on the piano, of course?”

  Immediately, I thought of what a party here might be like. I pictured an old movie. Lots of swirling gowns, waiters hoisting trays of little foods, the pop of corks, and an underp
inning of laughter and conversation.

  “Okay. I will. I like singing with Mr. Ferris.”

  “Perfect! I’ll have my seamstress come and fit you for a gown tomorrow after school. You don’t mind, do you? What’s your favorite color? And would you be opposed to having it full length?”

  “That sounds fine. I like yellow, and I’ve never had a full-length gown, but I’ve always wanted one.”

  “Perfect, then. Clarke says he’ll practice with you after school each day. Do you mind learning some new songs? Will your voice teacher mind? Do you think you can learn enough new old tunes to fill an hour?”

  “It all sounds fine to me.”

  That was the thing about Cecile. All of her questions kept her from being overbearing. She never wanted to force me to do anything I didn’t want to do. I sometimes think wealthy charity-minded folk who would even consider taking in a foster child don’t quite know how to handle the situation. So they don their kid gloves and hope for the best.

  Lucky for her she got me, a generally genial teenager with a focus on greater things, cause she could have ended up with some horrible girl who’d sneak out and take the car night after night, and poor Cecile wouldn’t have possessed the hardware needed for a do-it-yourself project like that!

  The next day I sat next to Clarke at the piano and sang “That Old Black Magic.”

  I liked Clarke. A boyish quality still lightened his overall demeanor, putting an innocent twinkle into his eye, enabling him to appreciate a meal around a breakfast booth with farmers, truckers, and mechanics and still hang out with the blue-bloods at Oakwood Country Club.

  I’m suspicious of most rich people, I’ll say that right up front. Not a good thing for someone in the business of living off others’ donations. Harlan many a time has said, “Look, Charmaine. It’s the only way we can minister to all the regular folk. Just because they’ve got a lot to give doesn’t make the gift any less valuable to us or their motives any less pure.”