by Anne Valente
“I just wanted you to know,” Dad says, and I don’t know what to say so I just keep eating my macaroni. He’s not crying exactly, but he sits for a few more seconds without moving, then he picks up his fork and we finish the last of our dinner without talking.
That night I don’t call Mom, and I don’t do my homework. But before bed I set my alarm to wake up early and gain back the time I’ve lost doing nothing all night when I could have been practicing. It takes me a while to fall asleep, but when I finally do, it’s because I’ve made myself think of molecules, vibrations, the passage of ships.
On Friday, the night before the show, Chris and I sit on his roof and look out toward the football field. Two teams play a scrimmage game, some peewee league sponsored by our junior high, but we watch the players dart across the field anyway, their helmets gleaming in the floodlights.
“Barnstone’s face is kind of fucked up.” Chris exhales a cloud of Pall Mall smoke, the pack he stole from his dad’s sock drawer. It’s the second time I’ve seen him smoke, something he must think rock stars do.
I shrug, and neither of us speaks for a while. We watch a small crowd cheer on the field’s metal risers, and I wonder if those are parents, siblings, moms rooting for their sons.
“You know, I think we’re ready.” Chris flicks his glowing cigarette off the roof. “You don’t have to worry.”
I know he’s right. We’ve been practicing all night, not even taking a break for dinner. But now, looking out across the field at the tree line just beginning to brown and fade, I wonder if we’re not ready at all, if maybe we never were.
“Your mom’s going to be fine,” Chris says, the first time I’ve ever heard him say it. But he avoids my eyes, assures only because he should. “How’s she doing, man? You never really talk about her.”
Chris’s face looks strained, as if he wants to say more. But he doesn’t, and I tell him she’s fine, and we sit for a while without talking. Out on the field a whistle blows, and we watch the players huddle in for halftime.
“Do you ever wonder if something totally crazy could happen?” I stare out toward the field, away from Chris.
“What, like Lila suddenly falling in love with me?” Chris laughs. “Sure, man, I wonder all the time.”
“No, I mean something ridiculous,” I say. “Something totally unreal.”
“Playing lead with the Crue? I think about shit like that, sure.”
Chris pulls another cigarette from his stolen pack, and my chest suddenly feels heavy. I think of Dad, probably sitting in his armchair watching the Friday lineup alone, and I tell Chris I should head home, get some sleep.
Chris stays up on the roof to finish his cigarette and maybe watch the start of the second half, though neither of us cares about the game. I bike the five blocks to my house and for the first time the night air feels bitter, like autumn has arrived sooner than I thought.
We arrive at Moss Regional an hour early, but there are patients already seated and waiting, maybe some of Mom’s friends from her floor. The ward has arranged chairs in a horseshoe pattern in a small lounge just past the floor’s elevators, and my dad helps us set up the tiny drum set, Mr. Winchester’s guitar, even a microphone the hospital’s chapel let us borrow. Once everything is in place, Dad leaves us alone, says he knows we need time to prepare. I watch him head down the hallway toward Mom’s room. Maybe they need time to prepare too.
“So I don’t see Lila,” Chris says. The room has started filling up, and I’m glad I don’t recognize anyone from school.
“It’s for patients, Chris. What did you expect?” Though I don’t have to look at him to know we’ve expected different things. I tell him we can schedule another show, another time, somewhere people will actually want to go. Someplace he can shine, I think, but I stop short of saying that.
Just then I see Dad down the hallway, wheeling Mom toward us and the lounge. She looks tired, and I know she’s too weak now to stand. But for some reason I think of her pushing her way toward Robert Plant, and I think of her laugh when she told me the story again on the phone, and suddenly she looks so pretty. A memory floods me from nowhere: second grade, my Cub Scout leader telling everyone I’m too short to ride horseback on the trail. Mom escorted me to the next meeting, told him I’d do anything I damn well pleased.
“Oh, sweetheart, you look great,” she says when they reach us, and I bend down to hug her. Chris hugs her too and she pats his head, like she’s trying to absorb the light reflected in his hair.
“You two ready?” she asks, and she smiles extra big, like something in her face might crack if she doesn’t.
Chris nods, but then his dad steps off the elevator and he leaves us, just Mom, Dad, and me. For a second none of us speak. I scan my brain for something to say.
“I can’t tell you how much this means to me,” Mom says. She gestures toward the others gathered in the horseshoe of chairs, as if the show means something to them too, but she doesn’t say anything more. Just then the head of the oncology ward waves me over, and Mom and Dad move to the edge of the horseshoe, waiting for us to start.
Chris and I have prepared three songs, mostly because they’re all we know, but also because the hospital told us not to play much more, the patients would need their rest. We move to our makeshift stage, a couple of instruments gathered in a corner, and I stand before the chapel microphone. I cough out an introduction, something stupid that draws a few smiles and blinks. Then I turn back to Chris, and he nods the signal. We start to play.
We sound rough at first, filtered, the slow strain of Play-Doh through clenched fingers. Chris has brought drum brushes, not drumsticks that would drown out my guitar in this small space, and the scratches keep time with my voice, a voice that now sounds cracked as I gasp out the first few lines of our opening song. We’ve agreed on “Patience,” my favorite Guns N’ Roses ballad, followed by Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”—Chris’s pick, and one I’ve agreed on. But Chris has let me decide on the last song, and I’ve chosen one just for Mom—the Beatles’ “Across the Universe.” The chords aren’t easy, and Chris and I have spent days mastering their progression. But Mom has always loved the song, and if I was ever to learn its notes, now was the time.
We falter through the first song, a warm-up at most since our audience doesn’t react, and my voice is hoarse but not in the way that Axl Rose might have wanted. My face flushes as we proceed straight into our second song, but when I look up for the first time, I can see Mom and Dad off to the back. They’re both smiling at me. The rest of the small crowd— maybe ten patients, and a few people who look like family members, plus three nurses and the ward director—they all look half-interested at best. But their faces suddenly fade into nothing. I know why I’m here. I have little more than a song left to get this done.
My voice rises, maybe not in volume, but in some degree of strength. Chris notices the change, his percussions grow in zeal, and by the second verse our instruments are belting out Pink Floyd, and I start to imagine what this noise might do. I picture sound waves floating from my fingers, my voice, Chris’s hands. I picture them billowing from this room, down the hall, into Mom’s room and inside her monitors and tubes. I picture them infiltrating her veins right here in this room, a surge like a quiet explosion through her brain, her brave heart, her small, pale hands.
And then we are to the last song, and I look up and she is smiling. She is smiling so large bright tears well at the corners of her eyes. Dad is smiling too, like he once did, before everything broke. And that is when maybe I know it has happened—that the world is just like the story said, that for once these notes and chords can inject life straight into our chests, just like the stick figure I drew, just like a ship setting sail toward the sky. I glance back at Chris long enough for him to look at me and grin, and for one perfect moment all is right, we are here, we are all alive in this room where sound and waves and molecules oscillate beneath the steady rhythm of these drums, my voice, our hearts al
l pounding as one.
And then it is over. Our last song peals a final cadence of notes, and for a second the room falls silent. Mom claps first—she claps so loud that she stands to support the movement of her hands, and Dad stands too, partly to clap, but also to watch her so she doesn’t fall. I see Mr. Winchester to the left of them, and he’s clapping and smiling too. Chris and I both take awkward bows, and we smile back at the audience. But our moment is over, leaves as quickly as it came, and the room is just a hospital room, the ward like any other on this earth.
I know what will come. I know that the patients will trickle back to their rooms, that Chris will leave with his dad, that when my dad and I pack the equipment back into the van and drive home, he will whisper over to me, his eyes still on the road, you know, Mike. You know she’s not going to make it. And I know my mom will pull me aside in her room, once we’ve tucked her back into her bed and Dad has ventured off to use the men’s room, and she’ll look at me in a searching way and say, sweet, is that why? Oh, honey, it’s just a story. Didn’t you know?
But in my head—right now, while we’re still standing here—it sounds better.
In my head, I am still singing, even as the energy leaves this room, even as the oncology ward becomes just what it was. In my head, I am still singing; I am playing guitar better than I ever could tonight, maybe I’m even playing the violin, a meaningless difference now.
In my head, she is not in bed hooked up to IVs, she is not so weak she can barely stand, she is nowhere near this wasted floor. She is somewhere else, I don’t know where, but she’s with me, and she is safe. She is somewhere I can keep her, and we are taking flight, up, away from this place, so far up I can no longer see the ground.
TERRIBLE ANGELS
Sometimes they’re there, sometimes not. Tonight they are, standing next to the television set, a distraction as Francie watches Wheel of Fortune with her dad, a bowl of popcorn between them on the couch—light butter only, to protect the ticker, he always says—and she knows he can’t see them, he’s oblivious, shouting vowels and consonants at the screen.
‘A, you moron, just buy an A!” he yells, the couch cushions sinking beneath his weight as he leans forward. “Jesus Christ, Francie, am I the only one in the whole goddamn world who knows it’s aardvark?”
He’s not. She knows it too. But she’s lost interest in Pat Sajak’s clever jabs, the way his subtle goading provokes the contestants to buy more and more vowels. She’s watching her grandparents instead, who have been standing by the television for over five minutes. They never speak when they appear, and sometimes it’s just one of them, her grandfather or her grandmother, though tonight they’ve come together. They look just like she remembers, not aged to the way they’d look now, if they were still alive.
“Well, look at that, Francie. Mr. Bowtie Surprise finally solved the puzzle.”
Francie forgets her grandparents for a moment, just long enough to cringe at her father’s habit of assigning people arbitrary names, of labeling them according to clothing, or mannerisms, or the type of sandwich they eat for lunch.
“His name is Ron, Dad.”
“Well, old Ron there is wearing a mighty big bowtie.”
Her grandfather laughs, though no sound comes out. He’s always liked her father, though she can see her grandmother scowl, roll her eyes. Her mother would have too, if she were still around. But she’s not, and Francie wonders sometimes, when her grandparents appear in the back seat of her car, or next to her in line when she’s picking up a pack of cigarettes at the 7-Eleven down the street, if the ghost of her mother might ever come as well, and if it did, whether her own ticking heart would burst and cease.
“How ’bout those SATs, sweet? Tell me again when you’re taking those.”
The game show has cut to commercial break, her father’s attention on her now. He picks at the bowl of popcorn, stuffs a few puffed kernels in his mouth.
“Two weeks.”
Her grandmother looks up when she says it, frowns.
“You ready? Nervous? Lying awake in anticipation?”
“None of the above. I haven’t really thought about it yet.”
It’s the fall of her senior year and she’s taking the SATs for the second time, later than most. She had signed up the spring before but failed to show, the test only three weeks after her mother died. She’d told her dad she was going, but picked up Marcus instead and they’d spent the day lying in a wheat field, smoking pot, identifying tricycles and snow globes in the clouds above.
“I’ll drive you to the test myself.” He grabs another handful of popcorn, smiles at her, pats her hand. “We can even do some flashcards, you know, verbs, nouns. Isosceles triangles. All that brainy shit.”
Francie knows he’d have offered this before, that he’s not just making empty promises, trying to be the dad he never was now that her mother is gone. He’d helped her study the first time around, though now she thinks maybe he’d been distracting himself too, a way to forget the world as it was.
The game show returns, her father sits forward again on the edge of the couch. Ron has advanced to the bonus round and stands before the five letters of the word WHEEL, ready to choose the hidden prize.
“Pull the L, Bowtie!” her father shouts, then lowers his voice. “The L is always the RV, Francie. The L is the one we want.”
Francie tries to feign interest, tries to pour every ounce of her brain into which letter Ron chooses, to ignore her grandparents’ presence. But as Ron pulls the second E and her father winces and mutters Good job, Bowtie, her grandfather lets go of her grandmother’s hand and floats over to sit in the armchair beside Francie. She gasps a little, puts her hand over her mouth so her father won’t see.
“I know, what a moron, right? He should’ve picked the goddamn L!”
Her father gets up to grab a beer, to return the now-empty popcorn bowl to the kitchen, to leave Francie on the couch to stare at her grandmother, at her grandfather, wondering why they are here.
In the afternoon quiet of the kitchen, as Francie sits reading her SAT prep guide, the sound of a car engine permeates the double-paned windows, roars up, settles in the driveway. Francie knows it isn’t her father, knows he’s working the second shift at the construction plant today and won’t be back until well after dinner. When she gets up and looks out the front window, she isn’t surprised to see Marcus’s hunched figure, bulked in a hooded sweatshirt and too-large jeans, moving toward the door. He’s smoking a cigarette and his face is lowered against the wind, his dark hair falling across his forehead.
Her grandparents haven’t shown themselves today. Sometimes they go for days without turning up, just long enough for Francie to pretend this is some fluke of imagination, a rare incident she’ll never have to explain. But when she opens the door and lets Marcus in, they are standing behind him on the doorstep. Her grandfather holds a jug of milk, her grandmother a bag of chocolate chip cookies. They both smile, great big smiles that make Francie’s stomach plunge.
She shepherds Marcus inside, pulls him in so quickly that maybe, she thinks, her grandparents will stay outside. But as Marcus heads to the fridge to grab himself a Miller Lite without asking, Francie watches as her grandparents move through the door, milk, cookies, smiles all intact.
“This SAT shit again?”
Francie walks into the kitchen, finds Marcus leaning over her prep guide. He’s already opened his beer, which sits on her book, as if it were a coaster.
“No more of that this afternoon.” He slides over and sneaks his hands around her waist. She can see the guide over his shoulder, a circular watermark bleeding onto the chapter she’s just begun, the one on geometry.
As she lies down on her bed and Marcus pulls off her shirt, Francie looks up to see her grandparents perched near the ceiling, elbows on their knees, hands no longer holding cookies or milk.
“Can you close the blinds?” she asks Marcus, and once he does the room swallows itself in darkness, so dar
k she can’t see her grandmother or grandfather or Marcus’s hands moving toward the zipper of her jeans.
Later, after Marcus has drunk three more of her dad’s beers and finally gone home, Francie heats up a plate of leftover meatloaf and sits at the dinner table again. She is halfway to her first bite, fork suspended midair, when she stops, sets the fork down, mouth as open as her eyes. On top of her SAT guide, where the watermark had been two hours ago, sits a plate of three chocolate chip cookies, one glass of milk. And alongside this snack—tangible, not ghostly, she touches it to make sure—is a twig-and-twine grappling hook, the kind she once made in her grandparents’ backyard.
In the car the next day, as Francie and her dad sit in traffic, she looks over at him and turns down the volume. They are on their way to dinner, someplace nice he’s said, because he hasn’t seen her since Sunday, because he’s worked the night shift all week.
“Hey, remember those grappling hooks?”
“What grappling hooks?” He’s half-singing along to Roy Orbison, an old tape he’s kept in the car for as long as Francie can remember.
“Those hooks I used to make, at Grandma and Grandpa’s.”
“Those branch and string contraptions you used to build? The ones you thought you’d catch raccoons with?”
“Those are the ones.”
“My God, Francie!” He laughs and looks over, his face like a kid’s before a glowing birthday cake. “I haven’t thought of those in years!”
“Did you keep any of them?”
“What? Oh no, France, I didn’t keep any of them. But goddamnit, now I wish I had.” His eyes settle back on the road, though his smile hasn’t disappeared.
Francie hasn’t thought of them in years either, even forgot she’d ever made them until one appeared and sat there like a question mark on her open book. Her grandfather taught her how to make them, held her hands beneath his as she tied the string tight and let the claw-shaped branches fly into the trees. Once it’s secure you can climb, he’d said. You can perch up there and wait for raccoons.