by T. Greenwood
So I gave him what he needed. “No, Daddy. I’m okay. I’m doing okay.”
The woman he lives with wants me to love her, though, and she sends thoughtful little cards and gift certificates for things I would never buy myself: massages and facials, manicures and pedicures. Before I got sick, I never had such pretty feet and hands.
I hate my father’s cowardice, but I don’t fault him for his lack of valor; I come from a family of cowards. I am not brave either, never was.
Becca fell in love with Mr. Hammer the second day of rehearsals. I could see the pain of it in the way she wrung her hands and shuffled her feet. Her longing was tangible. It had a scent, loud and insistent, like drugstore perfume.
I watched her watching Mrs. Applebee, who pressed herself against Mr. Hammer at every possible opportunity. Charlene Applebee had a way of pushing herself into small spaces if it meant being closer to Mr. Hammer. I’d been bumped out of the way myself.
Her singing voice was shrill and wavery, like wind in the tops of trees. She didn’t have any control over it; it could get away from her sometimes. I watched Becca wince with each misplaced note, with Charlene’s frightening falsetto during “The Sound of Music.”
Becca would play Brigitta, the middle girl. Marta and Gretl, the littlest ones, were going to be played by two girls from Quimby Graded. Becca wasn’t much bigger than they were. Even wearing the navy blue pumps she’d found at the bottom of a bin at Boo’s, she was still under five feet tall. She looked up to Mr. Hammer, eyes wide and hopeful. He rested his hand on her soft strawberry hair, forgot her name, and allowed Mrs. Applebee into those tight spaces. But Becca forgave him this.
We convinced Mr. Hammer to play the part of the Captain. Only three boys tried out for the play, and two of them were cast to play Friedrich and Kurt. The third boy, Howie, was a freshman and his voice was subject to whim, at one moment deep and sonorous and then suddenly as shrill as Mrs. Applebee’s. He would play Rolf. Mr. Hammer seemed the natural choice for the Captain; he even looked a little like Christopher Plummer. This thrilled Mrs. Applebee to no end.
By the time we got to rehearsing “Edelweiss,” I was aware of how painful all this was for Becca. His words had the power to crush; she was breaking into pieces.
“Edelweiss” was the only song that Mr. Hammer had to sing.
This is the moment in the play in which the Captain softens, when he lets down his guard and allows music to move him backward through time to the painful places. It was the only part of the movie that ever made me cry. I thought it was so strange that you could possibly feel pain and joy at the same time. For me, at fourteen, these feelings had always been mutually exclusive. And when Liesl joins him, the harmony of her own loss intertwined with his, my heart strained as tight as Sleep’s collar at the end of his run.
“Edelweiss” was my favorite song in the whole play, even more than my duet with Rolf, which I always thought was sort of pathetic. All that “I’ll let you take care of me” business.
Normally when we started working on a new song, Mr. Hammer would have everyone who wasn’t in the scene sit in the recesses of the auditorium, but this time he asked everyone but me to leave.
“We’ll do the blocking for the other children and Maria tomorrow,” he said. And everyone left. Becca pointed toward the door and mouthed, “I’ll wait for you outside.”
Alone on the stage, I worried for a brief moment that he’d decided against having me play Liesl. I’d been less than enthusiastic about the duet with Rolf. I’d tried to hide my disgust at Howie’s sweaty palms on my back as we danced, and the way he spat right into my face when he sang, but I wasn’t a very good actress. I knew this.
Mr. Hammer dragged a chair across the stage and sat on it backward, his chin resting on his hands. He smiled. I stood in the middle of the stage, awkward, and I had never felt so tall. I shrugged and said, “Should I sit down?”
“No, no. Please stand.”
I put my hands in my pockets and looked at my feet. Instead of buying new boots with Daddy’s money, I’d bought Quinn a pair of ski goggles. My old boots were scuffed and made my feet look huge. I blushed.
After several excruciating moments, he stood up and disappeared into the wings. He came out carrying a guitar. He turned the chair around, sitting down in it the right way, and started to pluck at the strings, tuning it. His fingers were long and narrow.
“My mother used to play the guitar,” I said.
“Really?” he asked, his fingers continuing to move across the frets and keys, adjusting.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Did she teach you to sing?” he asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t remember.” Though I did remember those afternoons, our pockets filled with glass, when she asked me to sing for her. I also remembered the battered guitar without a case that she kept in the shed. She tried to teach me the names of the notes I was making, but I could never connect the colors of my voice with the letters she gave me.
“We should get started,” he said, looking at me again, his expression puzzled. It made me feel like a mystery.
“Okay,” I smiled. “I know the words already. I think.”
“Good, good,” he said. “This is my favorite song in the play. I don’t care one way or the other about the rest.”
“Me neither.” I sighed, relieved. Lately, since I’d started rehearsing the scenes between Liesl and Rolf, I hadn’t been feeling so fond of any of the songs. Howie was always trying to get next to me. Luckily, he wasn’t in most of the scenes.
“Well, then, this is our lucky day,” he said, and looked down at his hands, which had already started playing the opening cords.
His voice. His voice felt like wind across a field of small white flowers. I closed my eyes and saw all the colors of edelweiss, like the blankets of Queen Anne’s lace that fell softly across the banks of the Pond. It had the fragrance of flowers, but was the color of snow.
My voice. Once, my mother and I borrowed a small rowboat and paddled out lazily to the island in the center of Lake Gormlaith. We took off our shoes and wandered through the trees, looking for glass. She thought we might find something special in this remote place. She was certain there would be some sort of treasure here. But in the middle of the lake, on the perfect island, the shores were empty of broken things. Pristine. Instead, we found blueberries. We might have walked right past them if we hadn’t been so attentive to the ground. But my mother’s fingers reached into the green below us and plucked one perfect berry. She turned it over in her hand, the same way she inspected the fragments we found, and then held it out to me. This is the way my voice felt. A perfect and small berry that I offered him like a gift.
At the end of the song, he set down the guitar and looked at me inquisitively.
I looked at my hands.
He was quiet for a long time, and then he said softly, “I’m not sure where we go next.”
I looked up, scared but strangely thrilled. “What do you mean?”
He smiled and looked at me hard, like a question. “I…” he said, “… I only meant that I think we need to get you somewhere to study. That it would be such a waste not to pursue this talent of yours.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling the blue turning red, red.
“We’ll talk about that more later,” he said and picked up the guitar. “One more time?”
“Sure,” I said, and fell into his voice like a field of edelweiss or snow.
I never told Becca about our conversation or about the way my voice found its way through the field he made. I thought it would hurt her feelings; I knew how much he was crushing her. I didn’t tell her because I was a coward. I was just like my father. I was afraid that to tell would make it real. That articulation was a dangerous thing.
The words have changed. Diagnosis, treatment, recovery. These were the stones I would need to cross this river. Now the words lack certainty; the stones are strewn, confusing my steps. I don’t know which direction to g
o. Time, possibility, prayer. These are the slippery ones.
The night after the doctor tells me that the cancer has spread to my lungs, Boo offers to find my mother. Over dinner at her house she says, “She’s not far. It wouldn’t be hard. For her to come see you.”
Boo’s house looks exactly as it did when I was growing up. Not a picture on the wall has changed. Sometimes when I visit her, I feel like I’m stepping backward back into my childhood. The smells of meatloaf or tuna casserole or a New England boiled dinner are the same as when I was small. Even Boo has only changed slightly: the color of her hair, the lines around her mouth and eyes. She can still win at HORSE.
“Why didn’t you ever offer to find her before?” I ask. “When I needed her then?”
Boo looks down at her plate, rakes her mashed potatoes with her fork. “I couldn’t.”
I think for a minute what it would be like to see my mother again. When I close my eyes sometimes, I can still see her purple Indian blouse, little mirrors sewn into the fabric, reflecting me as a child, clinging to her knees.
“It has to take me dying to get her here?” My hands and voice are shaking. “Isn’t it a little too late now?”
Boo sets her fork down and reaches across the table for my hands. Part of me is waiting for her to reassure me, to say, Piper, you’re not dying. But instead she says, “She wants to see you.”
“I don’t want to see her,” I say, tears rolling hot down my cheeks. I can’t even remember her face. “It’s too late.”
I try to imagine what my mother might have to say to me after all of these years. All she’s had to offer me are broken things: envelopes with scattered postmarks, filled with glass. I’ve wished her back so many times. I think briefly that maybe my prayers are just now reaching God. That they have only been delayed like a letter without a correct zip code. But the thought of seeing her hurts more than the fact that she is gone. Hurts more than never knowing why she left in the first place.
“Boo, I can’t see her,” I say. “It’s too much.”
Too late. Metastasized. Futile. These are the ridiculous stones, too far apart to use as a bridge.
Blue Henderson started hanging around after school, waiting for me. It was inexplicable, this new interest of his, in theater. In me.
“How were rehearsals?” he asked, ramming his hands into his pockets, walking quickly to keep up with me.
“Fine,” I said, mystified.
Becca was walking on the other side of me, equally confounded.
“Hey, you wanna go grab a cup of coffee at the diner?” he asked, and then motioned to Becca. “You too?”
“My brother’s waiting to give us a ride home,” I said.
Blue nodded. “That’s cool. No big deal. Maybe tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Becca said, skipping ahead of us. “We don’t have rehearsals tomorrow because Nick has a faculty meeting.” Becca and Mrs. Applebee were the only ones who had taken to calling Mr. Hammer by his first name.
“Great,” Blue said. “Fantastic!” And he walked away.
“Becca,” I said. “Jeez.”
“What?” she asked. “He likes you.”
I met Blue alone the next afternoon after school; Becca suddenly and conveniently had a terrible headache she couldn’t shake and left after fourth period. Blue and I walked to the diner together, kicking rocks and trying to make conversation.
“I heard you singing,” he said. His eyes looked like small brown pebbles under water.
“Really?” I asked.
“I snuck into the auditorium last week.”
“Oh,” I said.
It was cold outside, and I’d forgotten my mittens.
“Are your hands cold?” he asked.
I shrugged.
“Here,” he said, pulling off his ski gloves and offering them to me.
“Thanks,” I said. They were too big; my hands swam inside.
At the diner, we sat in a booth by the window, and ordered coffee and apple pie. I’d never ordered coffee before, never been to a restaurant without my mother or father before.
“So Quinn’s your brother?” he asked, tearing three sugar packets at the same time and pouring the sugar into his coffee.
“Yeah,” I said.
“He’s an awesome skier. My brother’s on the team, too. He says Quinn might place at States this year.”
I nodded. “He wants to get a scholarship.”
“Hey, are you going to the football game on Saturday?”
“No.”
“Oh,” he said, staring into his coffee cup.
“We’re having Saturday rehearsals. ’Cause we missed today. I could meet you after. Maybe we could go see a movie or something?” I couldn’t believe the words coming out of my mouth. They didn’t seem to belong to me.
Blue’s face brightened, and he set his coffee cup down. His hands were huge. “That’d be awesome. Cool.”
Saturday afternoon, after rehearsals, Mr. Hammer asked me to stay on to practice our duet. Becca said she could call her mom for a ride, and she whispered, “Have fun on your date,” in my ear on her way out.
“I have to be somewhere at six,” I said. I was sitting in the front row while Mr. Hammer cleared away the props. I had to keep pretending that I hadn’t felt that startling thrill the week before. It was the same kind of feeling you get when you put your tongue to cold metal. Like the pleasant sting of getting my ears pierced.
“That’s fine,” he said. “We’ll be finished by then. I’m actually keeping you here because I wanted to talk to you about something.”
“Okay,” I said, shrugging.
He sat down at the edge of the stage and wrung his hands together. He was wearing jeans and a heavy sweater. He always smelled clean, like laundry soap.
“I’ve been thinking that you really should be getting some training. Some formal training. If you’re at all interested in going to college for music, we need to start working toward that goal right now, while you have a couple of years left, before you need to get your applications in to the schools. I’d be more than happy to do what I can. My minor in college was musical performance. I’ve taught voice and piano before. Would you be interested in lessons?”
I didn’t know what to say. I thought about singing and it seemed strange that there would be anything to study about music. It would be like studying the moon or the stars. Like studying snow.
“Sure,” I said, and then my heart sank. “I don’t have any money.”
“That’s fine. I volunteer.”
I looked at him suspiciously. “I don’t know …”
“Please don’t feel funny. It’s important to me. It really is.”
“Thank you,” I said. Feeling funny.
“Thank you.” He smiled. “Now, let’s go through the song a couple more times and then I’ll let you go.”
That night, inside the Star Theater in St. Johnsbury, where Blue’s mother had dropped us off, Blue leaned against me and reached for my hand. I let his hand close around my own, let his fingers envelop mine. I couldn’t hear a single word the actors said for the buzzing in my ears and the buzzing of my skin. For two hours, I concentrated on the fact that his hand was touching my hand, was holding my hand, was warmer than any ski glove or mitten in wintertime. At the end of the movie, my heart ached when the credits started to roll and everyone wanted to get past us to leave. It was like pulling myself from a dream when our fingers disentangled and we stood up to leave. Outside, Blue’s mother was waiting for us with her windows rolled down. She was smoking a long brown cigarette and smiling. I sat in the backseat all the way back to my house, staring at Blue’s dark curls.
At home, I thought about Blue sitting in the auditorium listening to me sing. It made me feel strange. Not violated, but like he’d stumbled across my secret. It was the same feeling I had when I sang with Mr. Hammer the first time. No one but my mother had heard me sing before. Now I felt as if every drawer in my mother’s wooden box were open and the sun
light were streaming through the window, reflecting in every piece of broken glass. Like my mother, I wasn’t accustomed to sharing the things that were broken in my life.
On Quinn’s eighteenth birthday, the week after Thanksgiving, Boo brought a package wrapped in brown paper to the house. She had carefully cut out the return address, but the handwriting that spelled out Quinn’s name, c/o Beatrice Bradley, was clearly my mother’s. Quinn kissed Boo on the cheek and set the package down on the kitchen table.
“Well, are you going to open it, or what?” she asked.
Quinn sat down and stared at it.
Boo and I sat down, too, the package like the cage of a dangerous animal between us.
“Open it,” I said, nodding.
He carefully removed the brown paper, folding it into neat squares. Then he slipped his pocketknife out to open the box, which was sealed with packing tape. I reached for the paper, touching it gently.
The box was filled with foam peanuts. He dug his hand in deep and came out holding an envelope. He tore it open, and something plastic fell out: a ski pass. A pass for the entire season at Jay Peak. Quinn’s eyes were bright. “There’s something else in here,” he said, lifting the box and shaking the peanuts all over the table. Something fell out hard. The Phillips-head screwdriver.
“What?” Quinn said, puzzled.
“She’s returning it.” Maybe I was the only one who had noticed the things that were missing.
Quinn shrugged and ran to the coat closet to get his ski parka out. He clipped the pass onto the breast pocket and stared at it.
I picked up the screwdriver and turned it over in my hands. I wondered what she had used it for. I tried to picture the way her hands would hold it.
“My turn!” Boo said, pulling a gift-wrapped box out from under her chair. Inside was a pair of ski pants that still had the tags attached.
“Boo, these are so expensive. You shouldn’t have done this,” Quinn said.
“I didn’t. Someone dropped them off at the shop. I guess they didn’t fit or something. I hope they’ll fit you.”