Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  “I can’t drop earth on my father,” says Rainey. Which surprises Tina. Because it does sound like Rainey to do the hard thing. The heart thing.

  “I’ll go first,” says Tina. He was mine, too.

  Rainey sniffs hard. “The hell you will,” she says. She takes the shovel from Leah, plunges it into the pile of dirt, and fights it out again. Standing above the grave, she shakes off Flynn’s protective hand and weaves slightly. She can’t seem to release the earth.

  “I don’t think you’re allowed to do that,” says one of the Howard cousins, eyeing the shovel. She has a narrow chin with a kerchief tied under it, which satisfies Tina immensely.

  “It’s our grave.” Tina bends back a corner of the card in her pocket. Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost things, of lost clarinets. Tina’s head keeps floating as she works a fingernail along the edge of the prayer card. She wants to send something of herself into the grave. Howard took her teenage years, but he gave her so much. Do your scales, Howard had said. Music will teach you how to live. Zelosamente, zealously. Appassionato—she knew that one. Acceso, on fire.

  Howard was an adult. That made it wrong. Tina knows that now. But things were different in the early seventies. Howard was menacingly cool. Tina could get high with him in his room, and he would unbutton her top so slowly that the floor tipped on its axis, and what they were doing would be almost normal, and soon it was normal.

  Tina telegraphs to Rainey mentally. I am standing beside you. Heart with you. Rainey flashes her a look, tilts the shovel, and drops the earth into the grave. Hitting the casket, it rumbles. A sheen breaks out on Rainey’s forehead. She looks stricken, Tina thinks.

  Tina closes her hands around the shovel. She’s not being solicitous. She wants a turn. Rainey pulls it away. She teeters to the mound of earth on her high heels, fills the blade, turns back, and drops more earth into the grave.

  Intervals, Howard had called them: distances between the notes. Some intervals, he said, are so small the human ear cannot detect them. What is the interval, Tina wants to know, between staying silent and telling the truth?

  “Rain,” says Tina, as Rainey goes back for thirds, like she has a hunger for it. Rainey ignores her and fills the shovel a fourth time, a fifth, making a fight of it. She breaks into a sweat. Her eyes fill. This might be bad for you, Tina thinks, exertion and despair. What is her obligation? She wants to protect Rainey, and she wants to let Rainey bury her father, and she wants her own turn at the grave. She wants to tell Rainey: Take it easy, babe—you might have your father’s heart. Howard’s beautiful, crazy, fucked-up heart.

  In a slow-motion vision that comes to her, Rainey stops stabbing at the earth, turns, culls the long, stray strands of hair from her face and says, looking straight at Tina: I know everything I need to know about my heart.

  The vision ends. Rainey hands Flynn her peacoat. Again and again she goes back to the dirt, and Tina shadows her, partly to offer some bodily comfort, partly to find the right moment to drop in her card so that Rainey will not spot it. Pebbles and clumps hit the casket like a drumbeat of rain. There’s rhythm, almost.

  More like arrhythmia.

  Words reverberating in her head: I need to know about my heart.

  Tina palms the Saint Anthony card, readies it against her coat. “Gentlest of saints,” the prayer calls him. There was nothing gentle about Howard. Still. It’s the right card, and she is ready to let it drop.

  She has every right.

  Yet it is true that if Rainey sees it fluttering from her hand, or glinting in the grave, it will be as if Tina stepped back into Howard’s room.

  Tina follows Rainey as she circles the grave, laboring, creating an even tapestry of soil that slowly drapes the casket. She ignores Leah, who paces, watching. She ignores Gordy, standing apart as if he were an island with his grief; at home, his room is full of half-packed boxes. She hears distantly the cousins calling their farewells. After a while, the gleam of the casket is no longer visible.

  Listen to every part of the music, Howard had said. Jazz has an inner voice, a melodic line between the melody and the bass.

  First, define harm.

  Tina slips the Saint Anthony card back in her pocket. Howard’s watch is warm against her wrist.

  She remembers Rainey saying in a moment of crisis, I’m great—I have every single thing that I need. And she wonders what, if anything, she will tell her closest friend.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts for the Fellowship that supported this work.

  To Joy Harris and Rob Spillman: guardian angels.

  To Jim Krusoe, for reading first. To Dean Baquet, for reading last. To Tara Ison and Claire Whitcomb for reading with rare generosity and skill. To Natalie Baszile, Michelle Brafman, Susan Coll, Pia Ehrhardt, David Groff, Anne Horowitz, Mary Otis and Janice Shapiro: extraordinary, gifted readers.

  To Heather Sellers, who read multiple drafts of everything with love and wisdom. “Arrhythmia” is dedicated to her.

  To everyone at Soho Press, in particular Bronwen Hruska, Meredith Barnes, Rudy Martinez, Janine Agro, and the surgically brilliant Mark Doten. I’m so grateful to have landed here. And to Judith Freeman, for the introduction.

  To Lisa Lenz. To Lisa Skolnik. To Jenny Krusoe. To Jonathan Weaver, M.D., for literary medical advice (any errors are mine). To Laurent Besson, and Adam Reed.

  To my son, Ari Baquet. To my mother, Erica Landis.

  Finally I am honored to acknowledge these artists: the late Jeffrey Cook of New Orleans, whose sculpture inspired Rainey’s shoe-and-bible sculpture in “I Know What Makes You Come Alive;” Duke Riley of New York, whose work inspired the tattoos of historic New York in “Trash;” and Stephanie Kerley Schwartz of Los Angeles, whose paper quilts and use of metal scraps inspired Rainey’s tapestries.