Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  How?

  You can feel middle C with your hands.

  What do you mean?

  Close your eyes now, and feel. Can you tell the difference?

  Bonnie’s fingers explore the key. It’s not flat.

  That’s right.

  It’s like a spoon, or the inside of a seashell, or a dish.

  Yes! It’s worn there, by people’s fingers, can you believe that? This piano has had a very long life and been played by many, many people. And they all started as children, just like you, learning how to find middle C.

  Our middle C is special.

  Yes, Hope laughs. It is.

  “Tell me your name,” Bonnie says. He doesn’t answer, but she can hear small, irregular intakes of breath, receding. She has the feeling now that he is backing away from her. “Stop,” she commands, “stop moving please.”

  Sliding quickly around the piano’s contours, her hands note scratches in the sleek, oiled finish, deep gouges in places, evidence of old scars, sustained injuries.

  She continues feeling her way along the curved edges of the piano’s flank—its top is open, its strings are exposed—until she finds him and brings her hands to his face.

  “Why are you crying?”

  “I forgot,” he says. “It’s been so long since I started working on it. I let myself forget.”

  “Forget what?”

  “That it’s for you. All along. From the beginning. I’ve been doing it for you.”

  Pulling his face toward her own, she feels the passage of years, a future lifetime unfolding, one that will be filled with this gesture and others like it.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she whispers, and when she kisses him, she realizes that the last artifact is not even this piano—her mother’s piano, conjured into rebirth by this man in this place and that is a story she will ask him to tell—but no. It is not even that.

  The last artifact she will ever need to cherish is her body with his; the last miraculous discovery, one flesh.

  Hope’s Diary, 1975:

  The Indians Say It’s a Scouring

  There was a tornado in Omaha this week. Horrible destruction. A malevolence that seemed to possess consciousness. It cut a straight swath down a major street. And in a city. Tornadoes usually give the impression that they prefer small towns like ours, but if they do decide to visit more densely populated areas, they stay on the fringes, picking off the mobile-home dwellers, the poorly built structures, the marginalized abodes.

  They are snobby and elitist, these tornadoes. They have a cruelty that seems class-driven.

  The Indians used to say that a tornado appeared because a cleansing was needed, a scouring. No one knows what causes them. There are theories, but no real answers.

  When L. and I went up to Omaha last month, the specialist asked many questions about my birthplace and then chattered on about latitudinal forces. Did I experience much illness as a child? Was I prone to fevers?

  The truth is I’m not interested in being the subject of research. I don’t give a good goddamn about the other people who contract this disease in the future. I have three children and I want help now.

  “You have the relapsing-remitting form, as we’ve discussed,” the specialist said, and then added cheerily—as if I needed a dumbed-down translation—“You’ll have good days and you’ll have bad days. Just like the rest of us.”

  If something happened to one of them (oh say what you mean, you coward), if one of them died, I would see them everywhere: in the bits of gravel they bring me and dying bouquets of clover and dandelions (“This is for you, Mom”)—I align them along the windowsill, these gifts, along with rocks that look gorgeously colored in the rain but become ordinary in their dried-out condition, but I can’t bear the children to know, so I periodically spritz them with the laundry sprinkler; their drawings, their stray socks. Even if the house were scoured of all traces, the absence of them would scream incessantly.

  So when I imagine my own death, I imagine the traces I’d leave for them, things that would take on significance beyond what they would normally have.

  I have a terrible impulse during the day—when Larken and Gaelan are gone and Viney’s daughter is watching Bonnie and there’s nothing to distract me from the clutter, the chaos, the chores I’m too tired to do, the visual reminders everywhere that I have failed, failed, failed to go about with a large bag and start emptying the house of everything. Throw it all away.

  Erasure, that’s what I long for. If I leave nothing of myself behind, mightn’t I lessen their grief?

  If I could, I’d just disappear, evaporate. Poof! A magic trick! I don’t want them looking for me after I’m dead. I don’t want them remembering me with the assist of scrapbooks or photo albums. I want them to carry me in the air they breathe.

  When I think of baby time—and it wasn’t that long ago—my mind relaxes. Even last week seems simpler and less cluttered than this one. One minute ago the mountain of laundry was smaller, the stack of dirty dishes didn’t tower so. Piles of clothes and toys and books and papers and bills and envelopes and lists and toys. So much clutter. I feel myself becoming walled in by all of it, and yet I have no strength to tear it down. Ironically, a counterbalance to all this acquisition is taking place within my body. The insulation is coming off. The equivalent of shedding skin except it is nerve ends that are being exposed.

  Maybe I could train my eyes to stay firmly focused on one small spot, one tiny area of the house that needs tending. One pile. One stack.

  L. keeps asking me if I don’t want him to hire a cleaning lady. I keep refusing.

  I am still angry at him. I will, I fear, always be angry at him.

  And so even though one part of me wants the house to reflect this inner condition, to be as bare and denuded as my nerve cells, another part of me wants my husband to walk in the door every single day on his two perfectly functioning finely turned legs and be reminded that his wife is wasting away from a disease that he hid from her for years.

  Nothing is hiding now. It’s all out in the open. The whole damn mess.

  What’s easiest, though, is not to scour everything away or be angry but simply lie down—and that’s what I’ll probably do—and sleep, and then reanimate, like Sleeping Beauty, when the children come home.

  Company is becoming unbearable. Of course, intentions are good and worthy and of the highest Christian caliber, but still, the dynamic of normal social interaction has been obliterated by this stupid, stupid disease. Conversation—any attempt at small talk—is overtaken by context, the context of me, dying, albeit slowly and beautifully.

  “But you don’t look sick!” is the favored refrain from my visitors. They all arrive at this pronouncement, sooner or later. Who can blame them for their confusion? Aren’t dying people supposed to have an unsavory smell, manifest a certain toxic green tinge around their parameters, like bad beef?

  I say that I crave normal social interaction, but that’s a lie. Once we manage to get beyond the “how are you feeling is there anything I can do for you” litany, there’s not much left but for me to listen. And then, whenever someone tries to tell me honestly about their life, about whatever challenges they face—and we both sense it—I can’t help but become uppity.

  “Your husband’s arthritis makes it impossible for him to mow the grass?” I want to scoff. “Your son is failing algebra? Your daughter is smoking marijuana? Oh come on. Don’t waste my time. Come back when you have REAL problems to talk about …”

  I hate being this way but in most instances it’s true: I do have it worse than almost anyone who comes through the front door. Sometimes I long for the company of a cancer patient, a Vietnam vet. I’d enjoy sitting in an ICU with someone who’s brain-dead. At least we could coexist honestly.

  The children are the only ones whose problems are bigger than mine. To live with the foreknowledge of your mother’s death, what could be worse than that?

  “Why do we need to tell them?” Llewellyn imp
lored, when I insisted that we not keep it to ourselves any longer. “Can’t we wait?”

  “Wait until what?” I countered, pulling that card that is always in hand. “Until I’m dead?”

  Talk about uppity. He’ll never have anything to trump the fact that he lied to me for years. It is a wonderful, terrible thing, having this kind of power in a marriage. I’ve grown into a villainess, a pickled caricature, emasculating my husband by refusing to forgive him.

  “Wait until you can reinvent me however you please?” I went on. “Until I’m not here to contradict you, to speak for myself? Wait until I’m so far gone that I have no sight, no words, no ability to explain myself?”

  You jest. You joke. You are so full of shit.

  How far I’ve come in these pages from Dear Diary and cooing over my sweet babies.

  Poor me, poor me.

  And so we told them. We did it together one night last week after dinner—and believe me, I made sure the phone was off the hook that night! We presented a unified front, although I was the one who did all the talking and I’m sure that fact did not escape the children’s notice. They see everything.

  The thing is—and maybe I sensed this, maybe this is the real reason I wanted them to know—the children are the only ones I can really talk to about the illness. They haven’t yet been spoiled by the veneer of civility. Their emotions on the subject of death are still raw and untempered. They don’t spare my feelings. They don’t pussyfoot around my disability or pretend that having a sick mother isn’t the biggest pain in the ass imaginable. I’m still Mommy.

  Bonnie even still has the residue of my actual flesh and blood swimming around in her tissues, and will until she’s eight. I read that somewhere, or heard it.

  “When are you going to die?” Larken asked. Their questions, and their respective styles of inquiry reveal so much about who they are.

  “I don’t know. Sorry. I wish I did.”

  “Will I have to cook for everybody when you’re dead?”

  “Probably. Even before that, maybe. You and Gaelan.”

  “And pay bills and do laundry and stuff like that?”

  “I expect so. That’s one of my jobs, and some days, you know, my hands don’t work so well.”

  “That stinks.”

  “I agree.”

  Gaelan has been mostly quiet this past week, observant. He likes to fix snacks for me, bring me glasses of water.

  “Read to me,” I ask him.

  “What do you want to hear?”

  “How about the comics?”

  He pins me down with those soul-deep eyes, ignores my request, and instead reads to me of medical miracles, human interest stories.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Bonnie said last night. “I won’t let you.”

  Crack goes the heart. The crack heard round the world.

  Chapter 26

  Bar Mitzvah

  It’s been easy to avoid her since that night back in January. He’s changed his running route so that he no longer passes their farm. If he sees her car—at the grocery store, say, or the bank—he simply executes a covert about-face.

  His continuing ability to give her the slip has ceased to be a relief, however, and instead becomes a worry. He’s realized that success at this kind of long-term evasion wouldn’t be possible in a town as small as Emlyn Springs unless she, too, is successfully employing evasive tactics; the likelihood that she doesn’t want to see him as much as he’s pretending to not want to see her is depressing.

  All of this means that when he answers the door one rainy afternoon in late May, the last person he expects to see is Bethan Ellis.

  “I’m returning books to the library, that’s why I’m here,” she announces.

  “Okay.”

  “That’s why I’m in town.”

  “You wanna come in?”

  “No thank you,” she says, but then she casts a few nervous glances over her shoulder as if she’s afraid someone might see her. “At least, not to stay.” She steps into the living room, but doesn’t venture off the doormat. “Is Viney home?”

  “No, she’s taking a class at the community center.”

  Bethan nods.

  Gaelan indicates his appearance. “Sorry I’m so … I’ve been working out.”

  Her face hardens.

  “You sure you don’t want to sit down?” Gaelan adds.

  “I’ve really struggled with this,” she begins, eyes downcast, arms folded in a way that makes her look like a truculent, unrepentant school-girl who’s been sent to the corner for no good reason. “He’d be so upset if he knew I was here.”

  “He who?”

  She works her lips against her teeth for a few seconds, clearly expressing some inner mind-versus-body conflict before finally coming out with it:

  “Are you going to audition for the play?”

  “What?”

  “Eli’s play. Our Little Wales. The one they’re doing for Fancy Egg Days. The one he’s been talking to you about since Christmas. Are you going to try out?”

  Gaelan has been imagining a number of reasons to account for her presence, scripting possible exchanges. For example:

  B: How is your shoulder feeling? Have you been doing your physical therapy?

  G: I have. It’s feeling really good.

  Or possibly,

  B: Do you remember what I asked you in the ER waiting room? Can I tell you about my marriage now?

  G: I do. Absolutely.

  Or finally,

  B: Do you still want to sleep with me?

  G: Yes. Yes. Yes.

  He’s not prepared for this.

  “Gaelan,” Bethan says. “A simple yes or no is all that’s required.”

  “No.”

  She bites her lip. “Okay. You need to tell him.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because he’s twelve years old, that’s why. Because his father is inconveniently dead at the very time he’s trying to understand what it means to be a man. Because he obviously wrote the role hoping that …”

  She’s been accelerating in volume and intensity, but with another exertion of will, she brings herself to a full stop.

  “Because he signed you up,” she concludes. “This Sunday at four-fifteen.”

  “And I was going to learn about this how?”

  She sighs. “I don’t know, Gaelan. He doesn’t really talk to me all that much these days. Maybe he was going to call you. Maybe he was going to come over here again. Maybe he was planning an abduction. I have no idea. I only just happened to see a copy of the audition list on his desk when I brought his laundry into his room.”

  “I’m sorry,” Gaelan begins, “I wish I—”

  “Listen,” she breaks in, “you don’t have to do the play, that’s not what I’m asking. But you do have to give him an answer, Gaelan. Being evasive … it’s just not what he needs right now, or even understands. So please, just look him in the eye and tell him that you can’t do it. Say whatever you want about why—you’re too busy studying, you don’t think you can do the role justice, being on stage is different from being on television, whatever—just tell him. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” he says, even though he doesn’t think he can.

  “Thank you. That’s all I came by to say really.”

  Turning up the collar of her raincoat, she starts to leave, but before she can step off the porch she turns back to face him.

  “Here’s what you should know. I think he’s trying to do gemilut chasadim.”

  “A what? What does that mean?”

  “He’s studying to be bar mitzvah, you know that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  She smiles for a moment, accessing some private memory. “He and Leo used to talk about this a lot … One of the things being bar mitzvah means is that you can’t just do nice things for people when you feel like it; once you’re a man, you’re commanded to do good deeds, mitzvot.”

  “How do you know all this?”

&nbs
p; “I converted. You didn’t know that, I guess.”

  It’s not phrased as a question, but he answers anyway. “No,” he says, beginning to take in the extent of what he doesn’t know about her.

  “Anyway, one type of mitzvah is called gemilut chasadim—acts of loving-kindness—and one of those acts involves visiting someone who has lost a loved one. It’s the mitzvah of nichum aveilim. The mitzvah of comforting mourners. So all these visits to you, these overtures, they’re his way of … I don’t know. Just let him know about the play, okay?”

  She hurries off the porch and into her car before he can make a reply. It’s only after he watches her drive away that he wonders if anyone is performing this loving kindness, this mitzvah of comfort, for her, or for her son.

  The school year nears its end. Arthur has recovered his speech and partial use of his left side—although he’s still using a walker. He’s been home for several months. Larken hasn’t yet been invited to visit—recovery from a stroke is surely a long, laborious process, one that precludes social visits—but Arthur and Eloise have started putting in an occasional appearance on campus, so she sees them there.

  She’s still teaching Arthur’s classes, but with the return of his strength, he’s offered to lighten her load by grading quizzes and exams. It’s a huge help, and clearly it cheers him to feel useful.

  Out of the hospital, their encounters have been brief. Larken stops by his office whenever she notices that he and Eloise are in residence. Eloise greets her in her usual, chirpy manner—“Hello, dear! How goes the battle? Do you have time for a cup of tea?”—while Arthur’s acknowledgments are less effusive: “Larken. Good to see you.” He does tend to speak in slow, truncated sentences, and the grandiose quality of his voice is slightly diminished—but his mind seems as sharp as ever and his eyes have regained their familiar, reassuring brilliance.

  She has not queried him on the topic of the department chairman-ship—Arthur is on the selection committee and it would be inappropriate to do so—but presumably he is well enough to have participated in the voting process. He’ll be one of the first to know the outcome.