Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  Larken and Gaelan smile and listen. Their sister is infinitely loveable. It is so hard not to be disarmed by her. Having never left the landscape of her childhood, Bonnie has never abdicated it; this is why it’s next to impossible to reason with her as if she’s an adult.

  “As for the shop,” Bonnie shrugs. “I actually got the idea a while back, before any of this other stuff happened, and then it just all fell into place. Like it was meant to be.”

  Who can argue with It was meant to be? In their sister’s worldview, the ridiculous, the impractical, the hopeless—all acquire an a priori authority.

  “So,” Bonnie concludes, arms outstretched, making a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, “what do you think?” She ends up stationed directly beneath the fluorescent light and hanging wheel, which Larken notes with alarm are both swaying slightly. She has to grab Gaelan’s arm to keep herself from running at Bonnie and pushing her out of harm’s way.

  “You’ve given this all a lot of thought, Bon,” Larken remarks. It’s a harmless statement, and true, and at the moment it’s the best she can do.

  “I mean, about that,” Bonnie said, pointing up. “That’s what really started it all.”

  “What?”

  “The wheel. I found it, remember? The day we buried Dad? That’s why I didn’t make it to the cemetery.”

  “Ah.” It would be useless to remind Bonnie that we didn’t bury Dad, that she’s explaining her behavior four months after the fact, and this is completely new information.

  “You know how businesses frame their first dollar bills sometimes?” she goes on. “Put them on display? I decided I’d display my wheel.”

  “That’s great, Bon.”

  Bonnie’s expression darkens. “You’re not even looking at it.”

  “Okay,” Larken says slowly, looking pointedly at the wheel. “I see it, Bonnie. It’s … wonderful. A wonderful idea, I mean, to keep it hanging there. It’s the perfect symbol for what you’re hoping to do here.” Whatever that is.

  “You don’t see, do you? You just don’t get it.”

  I am not going to fight with her. Not today. Not on Christmas, not on the day before I have to get on an airplane. “See what, honey?” Larken says in the most conciliatory tone she can manage. “Get what? What is it?”

  “Nothing. Forget it.” Bonnie turns away and gets busy corralling cardboard boxes into a corner of the room. “Thanks for coming, anyway. I know you’re in a rush, so if you have to get going, I understand.”

  Larken checks her watch. “Yeah, I should probably start back. Are you guys staying here or what?”

  “I have to collect the mice,” Bonnie mutters.

  “Collect the what?”

  Gaelan pipes up. “I’ll stay and help.” He gives Larken a look, his subtext clear: He’ll see if he can get any more information from Bonnie and then report back to her.

  “I love you, Bon,” Larken says. “Merry Christmas.”

  “I love you, too.” Bonnie allows herself to be hugged and then goes back to work.

  “Drive safe,” Gaelan adds, “and call when you get to Lincoln.”

  Larken starts trudging back through the snow, setting her feet into the indentations she and Gaelan made on the way here; they’re already losing their definition; it’s starting to snow again, fine and light: confectioners’ sugar sifting down from the sky.

  Without the buoying support of her brother’s arms and her sister’s enthusiasm, the trek seems overwhelming. She might as well be crossing the Russian steppes. Maybe it will take the rest of the day and all night to get to Viney’s. She’ll miss her plane and that will be that.

  The snow makes everything so quiet.

  As she becomes aware of a familiar gathering tension in her chest, Larken hopes that she hasn’t just seen her siblings for the last time.

  Twenty-five years is a ridiculously long time to spend on a single instrument; Blind Tom has restored other severely damaged pianos in as little as fifteen months. But those projects were undertaken for monetary reasons; either his efforts were commissioned by the instruments’ owners or he was laboring with an intent to sell.

  This piano is different. It is not spoken for. No one awaits its return. It will never be put up for sale.

  Blind Tom isn’t even sure that this project qualifies as a restoration, strictly speaking, since he is not concerned in this case with returning the instrument to its factory-perfect condition, but to its status as the functioning but idiosyncratically flawed instrument it was when it was carried into the sky. After all, this piano produced music—magnificent music, surely—right up until that moment.

  Piano technicians—not unlike vintage car enthusiasts—are notorious for acquiring bits and pieces of pianos in the hope that someday they’ll get around to using them. Sets of ivories intended for piano keys—brought into the country before such importations became illegal in the 1970s—have been bought and sold for years, passed from one piano technician to another, through estate sales or e-Bay auctions, by technicians who just never quite got around to using them. Blind Tom imagines that the deathbed confessions of piano technicians often involve the location of secret stashes of contraband ivory.

  He is extremely fortunate in that he inherited just such a set from his predecessor, and he makes withdrawals from it to replace those ivories that were lost or too ruined to reuse. If he chose, he could use ersatz ivory—Yamaha makes a very good facsimilie that has none of the plastic feel of other brands. But for this piano, he prefers to use the real thing.

  Another bit of luck: The white keys of a piano are not—as one might assume—made of separate blocks of wood, but of a single piece, usually sugar pine, which is cut with a band saw–like tool; thus, if any part of that single piece of wood is damaged, one must start from scratch. The keyboard of Blind Tom’s special project piano survived intact.

  With all his restoration projects, not just his special one, Blind Tom likes to parse out the work in a way that lends significance to the process. Since the piano alphabet only goes from A to G, this limits the possibilities, but not much.

  For example:

  He might affix an A ivory on Advent, All Saint’s Day, the Autumnal Equinox, or the birthday of Clarence Acox.

  Luckily, there’s a happy abundance of notable musicians with names in the prescribed parameters: in addition to the obvious ones—Bach, Beethoven, Borodin, Brahms, Britten, Chopin, Copland, Debussy, Dvok, Elgar, Fauré, Grieg, et cetera—there are also many of Blind Tom’s personal favorites:

  Adderley (Cannonball); Bernstein (Leonard); Brubeck (Dave); Bennett (Tony); Cassidy (Eva); Clooney (Rosemary); Carmichael (Hoagy); Desmond (Paul); Ellington (Duke); Fats (Waller); Forbes (China); Getz (Stan); Gershwin (Ira and George); Grappelli (Stéphane), and so on.

  A D might get its ivory crown on St. David’s Day, an E on Easter or Epiphany.

  He likes affixing Fs on full moons, and Gs on any day there’s a Gymanfa.

  On Christmas Day, then, the choice is easy.

  But on this Christmas he’s not just affixing the ivory to any old C, but to the Northern Star of the piano keyboard, that key from which all pianists’ earliest orienteering efforts begin.

  Furthermore, this ivory displays what piano technicians call “dishing”; that is, its surface, through years of wear, has developed a subtle concavity. In comparison to its neighboring keys, this dishing is obvious and distinct—to the hand if not to the eye. Were this bit of ivory to be left outside in the rain (and indeed it was, in 1978), a small shallow pool would form in its center.

  Along with all the other ivories belonging to Blind Tom’s special project piano, this one was carefully removed, cleaned, and cataloged, and has been waiting patiently, without complaint, with utter faith, as other ivories have been reattached to the keyboard. There is no more perfect symbol in the world for patience than an unattached piano ivory.

  Today, the flawed ivory in Blind Tom’s vest pocket will finally return it to its original h
ome: at middle C, on the sugar pine keyboard of Hope Aneira Jones’s 1918 Steinway baby grand.

  “Gae?”

  “Yeah, Bon?”

  “Do you think I’ll ever have children?”

  This without any conversational preamble: Following his sister’s lead, Gaelan has been working in silence, first flattening cardboard shipping containers and bundling them together with twine, then gathering up small, green-tinted Plexiglas boxes from around the fringes of the room and placing them into an old wooden crate. The boxes contain rodents in varying degrees of distress. Gaelan has been intently studying an especially glum, resigned-looking fellow, which is why he asks Bonnie to repeat herself.

  “I said, do you think I’ll ever be able to have a baby?”

  Gaelan hesitates before responding—this is a tender subject—and then, as if she, too, is scrolling through the list of possible responses going through his mind, Bonnie adds, “And I don’t mean adopt a baby, although I’ve got nothing against adoption. I’m talking about getting pregnant. The regular way. Like a normal person. You know, by having”—she stops mid-sentence—“sexual intercourse.” These last words are spoken with a grim, wincing emphasis, as if Bonnie has only just accepted the fact that babies aren’t delivered by stork. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  Telling Bonnie the truth is not always the best solution. In fact, when it comes to matters of the heart, it’s probably never the best solution. Gaelan understands this instinctively; Larken does not, and that’s why she and Bonnie fight so often. In this situation, for example, Larken would automatically deliver the truth, albeit gently. But Gaelan knows that Bonnie only seems to be asking for an honest response to a real question; what she’s really doing is offering up a bowl of bleeding viscera as currency for the lie she wants to hear.

  Gaelan finds it best to treat her like a topographical fact of nature that can sometimes, with the careful application of force and engineering, be redirected—like a river.

  “I think you’d be a wonderful mother,” he says.

  “I do, too,” Bonnie replies. She sits down on a vacant lot in the subdivision of trapped mice and starts to cry.

  Gaelan gets on the floor with her, pulls her close, waits.

  A jingling of bells followed by the sounds of feet and claws indicate that Blind Tom and Sergei have arrived in the other half of the store. Whoever partitioned Tinkham’s didn’t make much of an attempt at soundproofing; all that separates BJ’s Bikes from the piano hospital is an uninsulated wall and a hinged piece of plywood.

  Bonnie tries to get her tears under control. “Hi, Tom,” she calls out nasally. “Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas, Bonnie.”

  “Gaelan’s here, too.”

  “Merry Christmas, Gaelan.”

  “Merry Christmas, Tom.”

  Bonnie pulls a tissue from her coat pocket and snuggles deeper into her brother’s arms.

  In no time at all, as Blind Tom goes about his quiet work and Sergei settles at his master’s feet, Gaelan and Bonnie lapse into a kind of social amnesia, completely forgetting that they’re not really alone. Whatever noises there are have the quality of ambient sound—unattached to any living, sentient presence.

  “You’ve had a lot of girlfriends, haven’t you?” Bonnie says.

  “Well, I don’t know about that …”

  “Oh, come on, Gae. You know what I mean. You’re experienced. You’ve done it a lot.”

  Not lately. “Yeah, I suppose.”

  “What do men like?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What makes some women better … in bed … than others? What makes them more attractive?”

  “Those are really two different things, honey. There’s attraction, and then …” He can’t believe he’s having this conversation with his thirty-two-year-old sister. Wasn’t Larken supposed to cover this kind of thing, like, twenty years ago? “… there’s sex. They’re not the same.”

  “Define attraction.”

  “Okay, well, uh, it’s something you see in the other person, something that catches your attention, like … their face, or their body, or—”

  “I get that, silly.”

  “Well, you asked me, and in my experience that’s mostly where it starts.”

  Bonnie is dismayed. “So it’s all based on looks?”

  “No, not always. There’s …” What? He used to know this. “There’s … personality.” That’s it. “A shared sense of humor, common interests …”

  “But wait a minute. How about with you and Bethan?”

  “Me and Bethan?”

  “Yeah, it couldn’t have been based on looks with you guys, because you knew each other a long time before you had sex, right?”

  This is the risk one takes when conversing with Bonnie. One minute she’s falling apart and the next she’s shining a penlight into your inner ear, looking for scar tissue. “I don’t understand what that has to do with—”

  “It wasn’t like one day you just woke up and, wow, Bethan was suddenly this beautiful girl with this great body. You knew her forever, way before she was beautiful, from when she was a little girl and was even kind of dorky-looking.”

  “I was pretty dorky-looking back then, too, if you remember.”

  “You were never dorky. And then there’s Dad and Viney.”

  This is another thing: You start out feeling prepared, strong, confident, the wise older brother who’s offering good counsel and the benefit of years of experience, and then she goes off on some tangent and you find yourself in a quagmire of complete ignorance.

  “Dad and Viney,” Gaelan repeats, giving up now on trying to advise, trying only to follow the conversation.

  “I mean, how did they get together? Haven’t you ever wondered about that? She was Dad’s nurse for a long time, and Mom’s best friend, and then poof, they fell in love, or something, didn’t they?—and stayed together for the rest of their lives. What happened to make that happen? What changed?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Of course,” Bonnie remarks thoughtfully, “they didn’t have any babies …”

  How did this start? Gaelan asks himself. He can’t remember.

  “So,” Bonnie says. “You’ve never had sex with someone you weren’t attracted to.”

  Gaelan considers. “No.”

  “But you HAVE had sex with someone you didn’t love.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because … well … because I was attracted to them.”

  “But you didn’t want to make babies, or anything. You just wanted to have sex?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What was that like?”

  “What was what like?”

  “Having sex with someone you’re attracted to but don’t love and don’t have any intention of making babies with. Did it work out okay?”

  “It depends on what you mean by okay.”

  “Was it pleasant?”

  “Bon, honey, what are you asking me?”

  “I don’t know what I’m asking. That’s the problem.” Bonnie sits up and regards the mice. “We’re going to have to let them out pretty soon or they’ll suffocate.”

  “Okay.”

  Picking up one of the mouse houses, Bonnie initiates a staring contest with its resident. “Here’s the thing,” she says. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anybody and you have to promise you’ll never repeat it to anyone, not even Larken. Especially not Larken.”

  “All right.”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise.”

  “I’ve never done it.”

  Gaelan’s mind fast-forwards to a time years from now: his baby sister, the town spinster, referred to in fond but pitying tones as the Jones girl in the same way that Hazel and Wauneeta are still called the Williams girls. At least they have each other. Bonnie will have no one.

  The happy version of this future finds Bonnie living in Dad’s house (poor
thing, never married), going to committee meetings, crocheting afghans, wearing support stockings and Hush Puppies, warming up Healthy Choice microwave dinners, dying in her sleep at 114 under the watchful eyes of the staff of St. David’s Home for the Elderly.

  In the worst-case scenario, she’ll keep on living in that woodshed and hoarding roadside trash (poor thing, never married, not all there), one of those sad people you hear about, usually living anonymously in a place like New York City, in an apartment that no one has been inside for decades, and then one day there’s a ghastly smell and someone gets the superintendent to open up the door and there they are, dead for weeks, decomposing somewhere among the piles of moldering newspapers and books. (Actually, when he thinks about it, this couldn’t happen in Emlyn Springs; in small towns, for better or worse, no one is invisible. People are noticed. Dying without anybody noticing is the kind of thing that would be more likely to happen to him, although his prolonged absence from the Y might be noticeable.)

  The point is it’s easy to imagine Bonnie turning into Donna Reed in the scary version of George Bailey’s future. Without love (and sex), she’ll shrivel.

  “Gaelan, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m not thinking anything.”

  “I just don’t see the point of having sex if you’re not trying to have a baby. I know that’s weird.”

  “It’s not weird at all.”

  “Have you ever wanted to make a baby? Like, with Bethan, if you hadn’t broken up, do you think you would have had kids?”

  “That was a long time ago, Bon.”

  Bonnie considers. “I’m asking you because you more than anybody I know have had everything. You’ve had a true love and then you’ve had, well, whatever you call the other women you’ve had sex with. I’m just wondering how you find the right person. The person you’re supposed to be with.”

  “You know, honey, there are plenty of people who think that there isn’t just one person out there, one great love who’s the only one you can be happy with …”

  Bonnie sighs. “I know. I’m just not one of them. Thanks for talking about all this, Gae. It really helped.”