The Song Reader (19 page)

When I drove up to our house, I was in such a hurry to get in I barely noticed the BMW parked across the street. I was inside, trying to get up the stairs even though my legs were aching and uncooperative, when I realized Dad was on the landing. He was hunched down, with his hands twisted together, pacing back and forth. I called his name and when he looked up I realized something was very wrong. His face had that same panicked expression it’d had at the mall.

“What are you doing out here?” I said. My eyes felt hot and itchy; the walls behind him seemed to glisten and sway. When he didn’t answer, I said, “Come on,” as gently as I could manage. I took his hand and led him back inside, to the couch. I was about to sit down with him when I heard what sounded like a dresser drawer opening in my sister’s room.

“Is she up?” My voice was incredulous. Unless Dad had already told her about Holly, how could she be up and getting dressed? Had Holly herself called?

He shook his head and mumbled, “Him.”

“Him?”

I turned to her door when I realized it was true. Someone was in my sister’s room. I heard the footsteps myself. Heavy, angry, male.

It flashed through my mind that it was George, Holly’s father, here to kill my sister or even all three of us. I started down the hall. Mary Beth was in there. I would protect her or die trying.

I let out a huge sigh of relief when I saw who it really was. Ben. Just Ben. Naturally I was surprised to see him, but it was pretty easy to put together what must have happened. The BMW was Rebecca’s. Rebecca must have told him all the rumors about Holly and my sister.

I might have asked him what he was doing here if he’d said hello or even looked at me. And if it hadn’t been so obvious what he was doing. He had a grocery bag and he was throwing underwear and pajamas from Mary Beth’s drawer into it. He was packing her things.

I was still so relieved it wasn’t George that I slumped down on my sister’s bed and just watched him. He seemed much more grown-up. His hair was so short that if he ran his hands through it, it wouldn’t leave horns sticking out like it used to. He was wearing blue wool pants and a nice, thick gray sweater. No jeans and no sneakers. I’d never seen him without sneakers. I didn’t even know he owned leather shoes.

Of course he was angry, and that might have made him seem older. His voice sounded like a teacher’s, except teachers never talked this way to me, only to the unruly kids, the bad ones.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on here? Dammit, can’t you see how she looks?”

I really wasn’t sure what he was asking. Of course I could see she’d lost a lot of weight, anyone could see that. She was so weak now; whenever she had to go to the bathroom, she swayed and crawled along the wall like an invalid. I could certainly see her hair looked like a rat’s nest, but I also knew how she whimpered whenever I tried to comb out the tangles.

I watched Ben remove a pair of hose from the hook of one of her bras. He threw the bra into the bag, even though she’d always hated that bra. It was the underwire type and it would really poke her now that she was so skinny.

Was he talking about her skin? It did look pretty bad, flaking around her knuckles and nail beds, but I applied that medicated lotion every chance I got. Dr. Dunham hadn’t been over since his wife had a stroke, but on the phone he told me the raw sores around my sister’s mouth and nose would definitely clear up after a few more days of her antibiotic.

Actually, the stuff that worried me most Ben couldn’t see. She hadn’t had a period since the night of Holly’s party. She’d been constipated for weeks, and the Metamucil I kept putting in her juice wasn’t helping. And that mole on her shoulder had a thick hair growing out of the center. I shaved it off every time she took a bath, but it bothered me because I didn’t remember it being there before.

Ben used to call that mole her beauty mark.

I tried to swallow back a cough but it didn’t work. It exploded in the quiet room. She moaned and rolled over and I was about to tell him he had no right to talk to me like this when he looked up and I noticed his eyes. They were puffy and pink as a wound. It hit me that I didn’t know how long he’d been here. He might have been crying for several minutes or even hours before I got home.

No wonder Dad was panicking. I could still hear him roaming around the living room, like he couldn’t wait to get back to his usual chair by Mary Beth.

“Why the hell didn’t you call me?” Ben’s voice was a hiss, but I didn’t bother defending myself. Of course he was upset, but it was almost over now.

“Holly is better,” I said, and sat up straighter.

“What?”

“She came out of her coma. She’s awake.”

He blinked as if I’d just told him I finished a paper for school.

“Don’t you see? Holly Kramer is the reason Mary Beth is like this. Didn’t Rebecca tell you?”

He still didn’t respond. He shut the drawer and went into the bathroom. I heard him rumbling around in the medicine cabinet and then heading down the hall. I thought about following him, but I was ready to tell her. It was probably the only way to make him understand anyway.

She woke up easily. Maybe she wouldn’t wake up for him, but she did for me. I moved over next to her, said her name firmly and she opened her eyes. She even made a motion to sit up, the way she always did. Expecting me to tell her to eat this or drink that or take this pill. Waiting to see what I wanted now.

Ben would be back any minute, so I had to rush the news. I told her all the good things the doctors said about Holly’s condition and I was just about to get to the “All is forgiven,” when he came in holding a blanket and her coat.

“You can’t possibly think you’re going to say a few words and she’ll snap out of this?”

It did sound ridiculous the way he put it. But it wasn’t ridiculous. Mary Beth herself used to say words had magic powers. Words could change the world, she insisted. We hold these truths to be self-evident. I have a dream. I love you.

I grabbed her cold hand and told her. She was looking right at me, but she couldn’t have heard because her face remained expressionless. Even when I repeated “All is forgiven,” all she did was yawn.

I was just getting ready to tell her again when he snapped, “This is insane.”

I glanced at him and he shook his head. “She’s going to a hospital. Christ, she should have been in a hospital weeks ago.”

He told me to stand up and move over, so he could get her coat on her. I was still mumbling “All is forgiven,” but he was already bending down, pushing her arms into the sleeves, getting ready to take her away from me.

My ears felt like they were under water suddenly. The room was changing colors, becoming bright yellow, nauseating. I could barely see Dad standing in the doorway, crossing and uncrossing his arms. He seemed so far away. My own voice sounded far away, begging Ben to leave her here. Please don’t take my sister from me. Please. Please. Please.

“You’re a kid, Leeann. You did your best.” He stood up and gave me a quick, awkward hug. “Dammit, I shouldn’t have yelled at you.”

“All is forgiven,” I whispered.

“Okay,” he said, and exhaled. “Don’t cry, honey. Okay. All is forgiven.”

I
t was as if that baseball bat she kept under her bed had protected Tommy and me from nightmares, too. Or maybe it was our apartment, small, more than a little run-down, but the only home either of us had ever known. We didn’t cry as the movers hurried back and forth, lugging the dismantled pieces of our happiness. We’d been told it would all be put back together again once we got to Juanita’s, and it wasn’t untrue. Tommy got the sewing room, after Juanita stuffed her old Singer into a closet and pushed her boxes of patterns back on the shelf to fit his puzzles and board games. I got a section of the basement separated from the washer and dryer by a bedsheet hanging from a steel beam.

The very first night I heard Tommy yelling. There was no need for me to run up the wooden steps; Juanita and Dad were already there, quieting him down, offering water and the comfort of another trip to the bathroom. I heard their tired footsteps and muffled voices again and again: that night, that week, that month. In the mornings, Tommy always said he couldn’t remember anything about the dreams except they were scary. I suggested monsters, ghosts, mean kids, but he said no, scarier. I wondered aloud what could be scarier than a monster even though I knew the answer. After all, my dreams didn’t have monsters in them, either.

I had one of the worst nightmares only a few weeks after we moved to Juanita’s. We were back in Agnes’s house in the dream. The house was bigger, four floors instead of two, with a giant attic. The stairs were different: dark wood, each step wide as our kitchen table. I had to broad jump from one to the other while holding the rail tightly so I wouldn’t fall through the huge cracks. I was hurrying because I thought I heard my mother yelling.

When I opened the attic door, I saw Mary Beth sitting in the middle of the room, surrounded by people I didn’t know. They were staring at something on the floor. It was my old tape recorder, the one I’d thrown away when the battery box rusted, but it was shiny black again, and I heard Mom’s voice coming out of it louder and clearer than when the thing was new.

A large woman with orange hair told Mary Beth it was time for her to go with them. I said she had to stay here, but then I looked around at the strangers; they were all murmuring “no” and shaking their heads. The woman grabbed my sister’s arm, and all the others started grabbing her, too, pushing her toward the doorway. Mary Beth looked back at me and started crying, and I could hear Mom’s voice even louder than before. I woke up with my face smashed into the pillow, gasping for breath.

There was only one window in my makeshift bedroom, a little rectangle near the ceiling, but I’d pushed my dresser against the wall so I could climb up and look out. After one of these nightmares I would sit huddled on the dresser, shivering in the stark cold of the basement, staring at the sky. That winter wasn’t particularly cold, but there was a lot of snow, and the night air always seemed so still as the moonlight spilled across the blank white ground.

By day, I told myself it was a relief being here. Juanita had a much bigger place—and apparently boundless energy to glue all the cracks in our family. She took over Mary Beth’s schedule at the diner so she could pick up Tommy after school. She cooked us real hot meals every night: good stuff like fajitas and roast beef stew. She hooked Dad up with a cousin of hers who ran a mail order business, and every week a big box of envelopes would arrive for him to sort and address. Dad had beautiful handwriting, and he didn’t seem to mind spending the day writing down names of people he didn’t know, and streets and cities he’d never see. Even when his right hand cramped up from holding a pen so long, he’d just change to his left.

Juanita said a lot of geniuses are ambidextrous. She also told me Dad had a really high IQ. I didn’t ask how she knew that, but later that night, I tried writing with my left hand. The result looked worse than the scribbling of some kid in Tommy’s kindergarten.

Dad turned over his weekly check to Juanita. I’d already given her our bankbook. She said she wanted to spend as little as possible of my mom’s life insurance, but it would come in handy. Her house was from her first marriage and paid for, but she had four mouths to feed now. Four people to keep in toothpaste and soap and especially vitamins.

Juanita had a thing about vitamins. Every night before we all sat down to watch TV, she would call us into the kitchen and pass around the little plastic bottles. Tommy got the chewables but Dad and I had to swallow an assortment of colorful pills: calcium and zinc, super Cs, iron and magnesium, a bright red multi-B horse choker.

“They’ll make up for the stuff we’re missing,” she would say. She meant fruits and vegetables and iron-rich liver, of course.

I could taste those things for hours. Even when Juanita gave us cookies to take away the taste, I still had the vague vitamin flavor when the cookie was gone.

Dad took an extra pill that Juanita’s doctor had prescribed for him, sight unseen. I didn’t know exactly what it was for. One night when Darlene was over, she joked it was something to make him want Juanita. A love potion, or in this case, a time-released love capsule.

My sense of humor was at an all-time low. I gave Darlene my most withering look and hissed that Juanita probably heard that.

I knew it wasn’t true. She was upstairs, watching television with Dad and Tommy. Darlene and I were sitting in my basement room, listening to the stereo. I had the stereo and all the records and a good portion of our furniture down there. Darlene thought I was lucky. The room was like my own apartment.

“Come on, Leeann, you know she lusts after your father. I mean, it’s pretty damned obvious.” Darlene shrugged. “Why not? He’s not that much older than she is, and he’s so freaking sweet. He’s like Linus, you know? He even looks like an old Linus. All he needs is that blanket.”

“People don’t lust after Linus.” I leaned back on my elbows and looked at a spiderweb hanging from the ceiling corner to the lightbulb. “That is so stupid, Darlene.”

“Think about the choices here. Charlie Brown is bald. Pigpen stinks. Schroeder’s like such an egomaniac. Who wouldn’t pick Linus?”

I finally laughed then, but after she left I found myself thinking how weird it was that Darlene thought Dad was sweet. A Linus of all things. Of course she didn’t get to know him until after Christmas when we moved in here. And he was so much better here. Whether it was those pills Juanita gave him or Juanita herself, he acted like a regular person most of the time. He didn’t talk that much—and not at all to me—but he listened and smiled at the right moments and helped out with everything from the dishes to the snow shoveling. He certainly looked a lot more normal in the jeans and pullovers Juanita bought for him.

It did cross my mind that he was better because Mary Beth was gone. He never mentioned her name, but then nobody brought up the topic of my sister if they could help it. Even Darlene figured out not to ask how long we expected her to be in the hospital. She knew I only knew what Ben told me and that wasn’t much. He’d gone back to Philadelphia, to work at his new job. He was flying home on weekends when he could, but so far, my sister had refused to see him. I acted like this was upsetting but the truth was, I thought it served him right.

Sometimes my anger at Ben was so big it literally hurt my throat to swallow it back down. It wasn’t just that he’d taken her all the way up to St. Louis, miles away, to a hospital that didn’t allow anyone under eighteen to visit. It wasn’t that he was going about his business, doing his research, writing papers, even sleeping with that woman who’d answered his phone, I was almost positive—since she still answered often enough that I hesitated to call. (She was just a good friend, he told me, but that only made it worse. How could he sleep with someone who was just a friend? Did I know him half as well as I thought?) All of this was unnerving, but there was something even worse. His father was a psychiatrist. He’d told me his father was a college professor, and he was—a professor of psychiatry. Dr. Theodore Mathiessen. He’d even been on staff at the hospital where my sister was. This was before he became a professor, but big deal. He still knew everybody there. He was a shrink, no two ways around it.

I felt completely cheated. I told Mike it was as if Ben just looking at our family had changed us into a bunch of nuts. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it wasn’t nonsense, either. After all, it was Ben who told my sister Dad was mentally ill. Wasn’t that the beginning of all this?

I listened to my stereo, loud, each time he called to give us an update. Juanita had hooked me up a phone line downstairs. As soon as she yelled, “It’s Ben,” I’d twist the volume knob before picking up the receiver.

A lot of the conversation was spent with me asking, “Huh?” and him shouting whatever I’d missed. Once he asked if I was purposely trying to drown him out.

“I know this is hard for you to deal with,” he’d say.

“What?” I’d shout, even though I’d heard him.

“I just wish I had better news, honey.”

He called me honey whenever he felt like it these days—no doubt because I’d cried in front of him that afternoon he took Mary Beth. I wished I hadn’t done that. I wished so badly I didn’t feel like crying every time he called.

“Are you doing all right?” he always asked before he hung up. And I always said I was fine, though I had to resist shouting: What will you do if I say no? Cart me away to the hospital, too?

I thought Mike would understand. After all, he knew as well as anyone how things could look one way and be another. And all those shrinks hadn’t helped his mom much. When I tried to talk to him about it though, his response was maddeningly reasonable.

“Ben didn’t make your sister sick,” he said.

“Well, I guess your grandfather didn’t make your mom do what she did.”

It was meant as a low blow, but he nodded. “He didn’t, it’s true. Even Mom knows that.”

“Yes he did!” I was so irritated I felt out of breath. “He was mean and cruel and so awful to her, she felt like she couldn’t live anymore.”

Mike was blinking with confusion. “Are you saying Ben was mean to your sister?”

School had just let out and we were in his truck, parked out on River Road. We’d been kissing when I brought up the topic. I already had my bra unsnapped and Mike, who was working very hard to keep his eyes on my face, seemed determined to avoid an argument.

But I was just as determined to have one.

“What if I told you your dad was crazy? Wouldn’t you call that mean?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded distracted. He moved to kiss me again and I pulled back.

“You think my dad is crazy, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, guess what? It’s true. My whole family is totally loony tunes.”

“You aren’t crazy.”

“What makes you so sure? If my dad is and my sister is, why not me?”

“Because you’re not.” He put his hand on my arm. He looked like he was trying not to smile. “You couldn’t be crazy even if you wanted to.”

I was more relieved than I expected to be, but I said, “Like you know,” before grabbing the ends of my bra and snapping it closed.

He lowered his voice, “Why are you doing this?”

“I just think it’s more complicated than you seem to get. It’s like all the people who think your grandfather is fine and your mom is nuts. They don’t see what really happened. They don’t have a clue.”

He sat up straighter. “Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

“Don Quixote,” I said, and exhaled. “I remember.”

“It’s true. My grandfather may have driven my mom crazy, but being crazy is better than being like him. He’s evil, and crazy and evil aren’t the same at all.”

Mike had quit working for his grandfather weeks ago, at his mom’s insistence. His family wasn’t even speaking to George, and tongues were wagging all over town but I turned a deaf ear. I had my own problems to deal with.

He opened up the glove compartment and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. It was his new way of dealing with stress. He pushed in the lighter and opened the window a crack. The heater was on, but it was freezing outside.

I watched him smoke for a while. When he asked if I knew what was bothering me, I mumbled no and looked away.

It was only four-thirty but the winter sun was low, the trees were throwing shadows on the ground. “Maybe you should take me back,” I finally said. “I have a lot of homework.”

He put the truck in gear. Neither of us talked on the drive to Juanita’s. The radio was on, and I found myself thinking about Mary Beth, wondering if she had a radio in the hospital. I made a mental note to ask Ben. She had to have music. That was one of the things I’d done wrong. I’d turned on the stereo for her, but I’d snapped it off every time she fell asleep. It wasn’t just that I thought she couldn’t hear it, I was mad at her.

I was always mad at someone. Sometimes I wondered if being mad could become a permanent condition, a part of my personality.

Mike pulled into Juanita’s driveway, but I didn’t get out. I was thinking about apologizing when he cleared his throat and said he was really disappointed.

I turned to look at him. He sighed loudly. “All day, I was hoping tonight could be it.”

Of course I knew what he was referring to. We’d only discussed it a hundred times. We’d even agreed upon the place: my basement room, because his house was out of the question with his mom’s private duty nurse awake all hours. The only motel for miles was a sleazy dump off the highway. The truck wasn’t even a possibility. At school, people might label us Maniac and Brainiac—my new name, to rhyme with Mike’s, and a lot better than cold bitch or whore, so I wasn’t complaining—but we thought of ourselves as Romeo and Juliet. Romeo and Juliet would not have sex in a truck.