by John Brandon
“Like in a good way?” she said. “Or creepy, like in a Christian coffee shop or something?”
Mayor Cabrera didn’t know about Christian coffee shops. “No, not in a good way,” he told her. “It was like they knew something about me.”
“Sinister grins?”
“You could say that. And they were all standing really still.”
Something dashed against the windshield, a large insect or a tiny bird.
“Sorry, fella,” Cecelia said.
“The farther away they were, the creepier it was. I saw one guy grinning at me from all the way across a parking lot.”
“Were you at a mall?” said Cecelia.
“It’s possible.”
They turned onto a different two-lane road, this one running quickly through an isolated development that had been abandoned half-built. A few folks lived in it, wondering if they would ever have neighbors. Farther up the road were homes that had always been there, shabby but permanent. There were donkeys in the yards.
“Thank you for the studio,” Cecelia said. “It’s really nice. The car and then the studio. You can stop now. I get the point.”
“Well,” said Mayor Cabrera. He knew Cecelia had been over there, because he’d left the key with her mother and then checked back on the studio room each evening. The other day he’d found the equipment shifted around and a gum wrapper in the wastebasket. He hadn’t wanted to mention it until she did.
“Is it big enough?” he asked.
“It’s plenty big. It’s perfect.”
“Any songs you write in there, I get to hear it first.”
“It’s a deal,” said Cecelia.
Mayor Cabrera reached over and let the glove box open and pointed to a bag of pistachios, offering them to Cecelia. She shook her head. He didn’t want any either, he supposed. He thought he could see the lights from the rooftops of the downtown skyscrapers, but maybe they were just tower lights from one of Sandia’s foothills, or low stars appearing. He wasn’t driving fast, but he slowed a little.
“What do you think is the best way to woo a woman?” he asked. “In your opinion.”
“Did you say ‘woo’?”
“I don’t know what it’s called anymore.”
Cecelia let the glove box back open and shut it again. “Who are you planning on wooing?”
“I don’t want to say yet.”
Cecelia crinkled her face. “Fair enough,” she said.
“I’m so out of practice.”
“Yeah, but being out of practice can be an advantage,” Cecelia said. “Depending on the woman. Sometimes if you’re not smooth, that’s good.”
“That’s a relief to hear.”
“Do it the old-fashioned way. Don’t get creative. That’s one of the problems with the world. Millions of people want to be creative and only a couple dozen of them are good at it.”
“Which old-fashioned way?”
“Flowers. Overrun her with flowers. Don’t get cute, just bombard her with mass amounts of bouquets.”
“Right. I can do that.”
“Leave them in her yard at night. Put them in her car and in her mailbox and hire some neighborhood kids to knock on her door every hour.”
Mayor Cabrera didn’t know if there were any kids in Dana’s complex. When he thought of her front walk and her door and the hall that led to her kitchen, he didn’t feel anxious. He’d wooed Cecelia and her mother, hadn’t he?
“How about chocolate?” he asked Cecelia.
“That may be too old-fashioned. A lot of people have funny diets.”
“Perfume?”
They rose out of whatever valley they’d been in and were suddenly crossing numbered streets.
“Does she use perfume usually?” Cecelia asked.
“Yeah, she switches every few months.”
“I don’t know about perfume, but I know clothes wouldn’t hurt. For you, I mean.”
Mayor Cabrera looked down at his button shirt. The pocket had a fish embroidered on it. “Like a suit?”
“Sure, a suit would be good. A suit and a haircut.”
“I just got a haircut.”
Cecelia looked over, right at him. “Your part makes you look careful.” Mayor Cabrera laughed. He checked himself out in the rearview mirror.
“I burned down a barn,” Cecelia said. “Some people’s fancy barn in their back yard. I dumped gasoline on it and burned it to the ground.”
Mayor Cabrera made an effort to not appear concerned, which probably wasn’t working. “You burned down someone’s barn?”
“I’m an arsonist. The kid whose barn it was covered it up. He wanted to have a fair feud.”
“A fair feud?”
“And I also trashed his band’s equipment. And I lied to a cop.”
“About the barn?”
“No. It was a white lie.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“I also mugged a rich kid.”
“You mugged someone? For their money?”
“Not much money.”
“When?”
“Over the holidays.”
This was what uncles were for, Mayor Cabrera knew. This right here. People could tell their uncles things. That was the function of a proper uncle. You couldn’t tell an uncle every single thing maybe, but you could tell him a lot, and he had to take it like an uncle. Cecelia knew. She knew how to be a niece.
CECELIA
They had to wait almost forty-five minutes to see Mr. Fair. The wound specialist was in there with him. He had just been moved from the ER, and Cecelia and her uncle sat in the hard molded chairs and succumbed to that exhaustion that always set in as soon as you sat still in a hospital. For the first time, Cecelia was inside the clinic, which of course felt odd because she’d stared at the outside for so long. She felt like a little girl inside a dollhouse. The clinic wasn’t cozy like she’d come to imagine. It wasn’t especially high-tech. It looked like all medical facilities, only cleaner. When Cecelia and her uncle were called in, Mr. Fair wasn’t really cognizant. He grinned a little when he realized he had visitors, but he was elsewhere. Tubes were hanging out of both his arms, pumping him with fluids and probably painkiller. His right arm was bandaged neatly.
Cecelia’s uncle got comfortable. He made no move for the TV. Cecelia was already late for the vigil. This would be the second week she’d be all alone out there. She wondered how long was polite to stay in Mr. Fair’s room, seeing as he was oblivious, and after about ten minutes she cleared her throat and said she was going on down. “Take your time,” her uncle said.
She was free to arrive at the vigil any time she wanted. She would have the parking lot to herself, no one to witness or judge her. In another way, she wanted to keep observing the rules. That corner of the parking lot was sitting vacant and Cecelia was the only person who had the right to change that. If she was going to vigil, she was going to do it correctly.
She took the monotonous hallway toward the elevators, thinking of being outside, of completing another week, fulfilling duty, of breathing the night air, which this evening had been strangely humid as it had rushed in the windows of her uncle’s car. A few rooms from the end of the hall a woman wheeled out from her doorway and called to Cecelia, her wheelchair almost bumping Cecelia’s leg. Cecelia stopped short and the old woman pinched the sleeve of Cecelia’s sweatshirt.
“Can you find me a blanket, sweetie?”
Cecelia looked up and down the hall. Not a soul. She couldn’t tell what kind of face she was making at the woman.
“I need a blanket and a cola,” the woman said. She opened her eyes as wide as they would go. “You can’t say no to a cold, thirsty old lady.”
“I guess that’s true,” said Cecelia. “I bet that line works every time.”
The old woman dug through a small bag hanging from the arm of her wheelchair. She smelled sick and sweet, like a dessert that had been left out. Her gray hair was thick and lustrous. She tugged a rumpled dollar bill fla
t and handed it to Cecelia, then explained where the vending machines were. Cecelia was wondering why the woman didn’t call her nurse. She probably wasn’t allowed to have soda.
“I like you,” the woman said. “So far.”
“I’ll be right back,” Cecelia answered.
She stopped by the nurses’ station first and asked for the blanket. There was only one nurse behind the desk. She squinted up at Cecelia and said she had to finish typing a note, that she couldn’t save the note halfway through with this new computer system. She didn’t know why they’d changed the system again. She hunted and pecked at the keyboard, Cecelia leaning forward against the counter. Cecelia was going to be an hour late for the vigil, she saw. A full hour. She was ready to feel panicked about this, but the panic wasn’t arriving. Cecelia could detect run-of-the-mill annoyance at unexpected chores, but even this was not strong. It was mild annoyance. She wanted to help the old lady out. She wanted to exercise patience with this rundown nurse as she dealt with her computer.
In time the nurse sighed and hit the ENTER key with finality. She rose and slipped into a back room, and when she returned she handed Cecelia a blue blanket folded in a sharp square. Cecelia tucked it under her arm and went down a side hall to the vending machines. She found the one that sold soda and fed the old lady’s dollar into it and the machine promptly spit the bill back out. Of course it would. The thing was about as limp and crinkled as a dollar could get. It looked like it was going to fall apart completely in the next week or so, a tiny portion of the world’s wealth lost. The price for a can of soda was eighty-five cents. Cecelia dug into her pockets and came up with two quarters and a dime. She draped the blanket over her shoulders and squinted at the vending machine. She could go back to the old lady and ask if she had other dollar bills. She could find the nearest open door and ask whoever was inside to borrow a quarter. She had an impulse to just leave the blanket on the floor and escape this floor of the clinic via the stairs, which were at the opposite side of the building than the elevators. This was Cecelia’s most familiar impulse, but she wasn’t going to follow it. She was going to get this lady her damn soda. She felt in no rush about the vigil, still felt no anxiety as she grew later and later. She had nothing against the old lady or the nurse or her uncle’s slow driving. She had nothing against anyone. She had stepped inside the clinic for the first time tonight, and being inside this place, where lives were fought for and won or fought for and relinquished, it made the outside, the vigil, feel like a farce, like make-believe. The vigil was comfortable, Cecelia knew. She’d convinced herself it was some kind of test, but it was a comfortable place where real life was not allowed, where you didn’t have to face anything. It would have been easier for Cecelia to descend to her smoothly paved sanctuary, and suddenly she was washed with the anxiety she’d been awaiting. She pulled the blanket snug around her. Letting the vigil slip away was not a matter of worry, but what she had to do instead was. She had to go up and see Soren, had to set eyes on the boy. As she stood in front of these dull-lit vending machines she was breathing the same air as Soren. He was two floors above her. The blanket on her shoulders might’ve warmed him some recent night.
REGGIE
As soon as he began playing, he recognized the song. He was writing the song but also remembering it. It was the song he’d begun just before his death, that he’d been working on in his pickup that hazy, not-quite-hot day. The notes were there for him, he only needed to give them safe landing. The breeze that had been soothing Reggie picked up into a dry wind as he played. It ruffled Reggie’s hair and raised an eerie wail as it passed through the harmonica over on the bureau—a sound like the cry of a cornered animal. At some point Reggie had decided and then gone on assuming that he was in dusk rather than dawn, but now the hall filled with light, pinkish and strengthening, and Reggie felt a longing to see the moon again, the standoffish white sliver of it or the jolly yellow face. Above him the gray clouds had grown heavy, churning faster with the gusts. Reggie’s shirt blew off the piano bench and out of sight. He kept his feet planted on the pedals, his back straight. He was farther into the song than he’d written in life, more than halfway through. He didn’t allow himself to drag the song out. He harbored no folly. He didn’t play louder or soft. He looked at his hands and they did not look familiar. A fly buzzed around Reggie, bothering his eyebrow and then trying to cling fast to the empty music stand. And then it was gone, lost in its own ordeal. The clouds were lower now. If Reggie had stood on the piano and reached he could’ve touched them. He heard the wind tinking the liquor bottles in the bar, and then heard one of the bottles crash to the floor. Book covers were flying open in the library.
Reggie knew that the pinched calm that filled the spaces between the notes was the sound of eternity. He knew an immediate future awaited, an extended present, and the rest of the song would fill it. He did not hope for unrippled bliss. He did not hope to hear the voice of a god. He did not want oceans or mountains. He was a single note and he only wanted to ring.
SOREN’S FATHER
He parted the blinds with a thumb and still the girl wasn’t out there. The last one. It was past the time when the vigil normally began, and even last week, alone, the girl had shown up promptly. The sun had tipped out of sight, leaving a sloppy wake of flesh-colored sky that was fast disappearing. Soren’s father pulled away his hand and the blinds closed up. He fetched the wastebasket from the bathroom and scraped the table near the window clean. He hadn’t eaten a proper dinner, but he’d polished off five cups of Jell-O. The cups tinked down into the can and then the plastic spoon after them. The only other thing in the trash was a disposable razor Soren’s father had used that morning. There was so little straightening up to do in the room. Usually Soren’s father had coffee around this time. He didn’t want any today.
He moved the orange-upholstered chair right next to the window and drew the blinds enough to see out. He didn’t want the vigils to be over. He didn’t want cars to reclaim that area of the lot. Whether he wanted to notice or not, that portion of ground, that ration of blacktop, had assumed a sacredness, and Soren’s father didn’t want a bunch of cars all over it. Soren’s father was mildly relieved and mildly lonely now as he accepted that the girl was not coming, and he was capable of letting these reasonable feelings inhabit him. This wasn’t a loneliness that would eat at him—instead, one human simply missing other humans. He missed Gee still, and he knew he would hear from her in time and looked forward to that. He missed the last vigiler, the girl. And the relief he was feeling was as much for the girl as for himself. The vigilers had been a target for his frustration, and had also been something reliable to hang his weeks on. None of them had been happy that his son was in a coma. They hadn’t been seekers of relief. They were people who longed to be decent. Who knew how to be decent anymore? Soren’s father leaned forward in his chair, his face close to the window. No sign of the girl. Nothing but the chollas, in full bloom now. They seemed to glow burnt yellow in the new dark, as if they’d been collecting the sun’s power all day.
Soren’s father had stopped wishing for Soren to awaken, at least stopped wishing it in a selfish way. He’d wanted Soren to return, all these months, because it would’ve made him happy, because it would’ve benefited the father, not the son, would’ve saved him from grief and confusion. Soren was in no apparent discomfort. Soren’s father wanted his son to be in a good place and to come to no harm. That was his pure desire. Whether his son was special was beside the point, but for him to presume that his son was just like everyone else because that would be easier was as wrong as calling him an angel or a prophet. If Soren was special, Soren’s father could deal with that. He didn’t have to understand everything. Soren’s destiny was as open as anyone’s, and Soren wouldn’t be afraid of that destiny the way his father had always been afraid.
Soren’s father stood. Housekeeping had left a vase of fake flowers that matched the orange chairs, a gift from the clinic that every patient had
received, a gift from the corporation that owned the clinic really, a gift from no one to anyone. Soren’s father plucked it off the little side table and rested it down on the floor where he couldn’t see it. He went and raised the blinds all the way. They hadn’t been all the way open like that since Gee had visited the room. Soren’s father gazed out at the barren territory beyond the parking lot and the neighboring streets, the expanse beyond the precarious civilization, the harsh province that was his homeland, and it looked finished. There was nothing broken, nothing wanting.
CECELIA
She pressed the UP button rather than the DOWN button, held her breath until the doors were closed, and then the elevator jerked subtly and she began to rise. She hadn’t been in a tall building since she could remember. The clinic wasn’t tall compared to the skyscrapers downtown, but it was tall to Cecelia. The elevator was huge inside, a whole room. Cecelia moved to the back corner. She’d paid respects to Soren for five months and had never been up against the prospect of seeing him. There were healthy elements to her nervousness—awe and pride. No music was playing in the elevator, but Cecelia could hear something. There was other noise. She knew what was happening. She was getting another song. Now. She’d been sure they were through, that she’d received them all. She could hear the first notes being unchambered, finding their marks. She felt a pinch in her temples, a churn in her stomach. She was dry-eyed. Another fucking song. She settled her weight evenly down through her feet. She was out of practice but she could feel the skill returning to her, the skill of receiving. She could do it again, could usher this song into an out-of-the-way wing of her mind and go about the business of confronting Soren. She wasn’t going to bail on this mission. Reggie was still not at peace and she wasn’t going to be either, but she was going to face down this kid. Cecelia still had to grapple with Reggie, her ally and her illness, but she would do it later—had to wonder whether he was still writing these songs or whether he was dead and gone and the songs were outliving him, had to wonder if the songs had existed always and Reggie had come along to free them and had screwed everything up by dying too soon. She was losing the threads of her thoughts before they were even unspooled. She was thinking too darkly. Reggie hadn’t screwed anything up. The songs were love songs. The songs were Reggie’s and Reggie loved her.