A Million Heavens (2 page)

Soren's father was losing weight already, but it wasn't because of the hospital food. Everyone complained about the food, but Soren's father was used to eating from his truck—a soft, odorless sandwich or half-stale apple fritter or limp hot dog. He'd always fed Soren well enough, taking him down to the fancy grocery store with the hot bar and letting him point out what he wanted, but as for himself, he couldn't see wasting the leftovers from the truck. He was accustomed to eating in traffic, so when he ate his dinner in the clinic room his chewing sounded monstrous against the quiet. He was eating as much as he ever had, so it must've been pure worry that was taking the pounds off him. There'd been a scale in the room and Soren's father had Lula take it away.

It was hard to know what to do with the quiet. Soren's father couldn't get used to it. The quiet was impure, same as if you were up in the woods
somewhere. The woods had chipmunks and falling pinecones and tunneling beetles and in the clinic there were machines beeping and whirring and nurses shuffling around in their chunky white sneakers and the rattling of carts. Soren's father had never watched much TV and Soren, back when he was awake, hadn't shown any interest in it either. Soren's father used to try putting cartoons on their living room set and Soren would stare at the screen suspiciously for a minute and then move on to something else. Soren's father had long since stopped trying to watch the news, which was both depressing and uninformative. He was a reader of science fiction, a habit he'd picked up to fill downtime between stops on his route, and now he read in the room, occasionally aloud, wanting Soren to hear his voice. Soren's father's interest in interstellar goings-on was waning, but with a paperback in his hands he was not completely at the mercy of the clinic's busy, endless hush. He could put words into his mind and, when he felt like it, into the still air of his son's room. One of the characters Soren's father was reading about had been cast into a trance by means of a dark art that was part science and part magic, and Soren's father had begun to skip those passages. He didn't want to reach the end of the book, where the noble young trooper would predictably awaken.

It was Wednesday, and evening now, so the vigil had begun. Soren's father hadn't heard them gathering but they were down there. Soren's father's mental state was one of being acutely aware that he was in a fog, and the vigils weren't helping clear that fog. He parted the blinds. This was the third Wednesday and their numbers were growing. They were far below, most of them bowing their heads, and it disconcerted Soren's father that he couldn't see any of their faces. They were like those schools of tiny fish he remembered from boyhood filmstrips that moved in concert like a single inscrutable organism. They seemed practiced, experienced, but where would they have gotten experience at this sort of thing? Nurse Lula said there had been vigils at the clinic before but it was usually a one-time thing. She remembered last year a cop had been shot in the abdomen during a traffic stop and a crew of folks in uniforms had come one night with candles and had each slurped down one bottle of the cop's favorite beer.
These people showing up for Soren didn't light candles and they didn't drink. Soren's father didn't know how he was supposed to feel about them. He worried that they knew something he didn't, that they had access to a gravity of spirit that was beyond him. And the vigilers made him feel exposed too, onstage, so whenever they were gathered out there he stayed hidden behind the meticulously dusted blinds.

Soren's father had seen them arriving that first Wednesday, before he knew they would become a vigil, when they were merely a half-dozen people loitering in the corner of the parking lot. A security guard had approached that first week and looked them over and elected to leave them be. Last week, with close to fifty people in the troop, a news van had rolled into the lot and a girl in an orange scarf had tried to talk to the vigilers. She didn't get a thing out of them. Not one word. They didn't stay long, the news folks. Nobody was beating drums or getting drunk or holding signs. No one was crying. Nobody was doing anything that could be readily mocked.

The lie she had come up with was that a library branch on the other side of town was screening old monster movies each Wednesday evening. She couldn't tell her daughter she was going to sit outside a defunct flea market half the night, watching people a football field away as they vigiled. Her daughter wouldn't understand vigiling and she certainly wouldn't understand spying on a vigil from the high ground of an adjacent lot. And she also couldn't tell her daughter she wanted to be near the boy. The piano teacher had climbed into the car her daughter had given her as a hand-me-up, a high-riding silver station wagon, and had sat at swaying red light after swaying red light and crossed Route 66 and now she slowed passing the clinic, which was out of place here on the edge of town, the only tall building in sight. The vigilers huddling in the parking lot were like cattle awaiting a storm.

The piano teacher passed them by and rolled onto the grounds of the
market. She didn't feel she was superior to the other vigilers, and in fact observed the rules she knew they followed—didn't speak during the vigils, or turn the car radio on—but she was more than a vigiler. She was one of the forces that had
put
them in the parking lot of that clinic. She could do what they did, could open her windows and endure the chill air rather than running the heater in her car, but the vigilers could never do what she'd done, which was to halt a miracle. The others, hugging themselves loosely in the sand-swept parking lot, were hoping to gain something, but the piano teacher was only hoping to feel sorry enough.

So here she was in the dark in a part of town she wouldn't have visited in a hundred years. The moon was strong and the piano teacher could see the writing on the market stalls, all in Spanish, cartoonish drawings of vegetables and shoes. Between the market and the clinic was a used car lot full of tall gleaming pickups. From this distance the clinic looked like a spaceship that had run out of gas. Or like a miniature of itself, a toy.

The piano teacher had thought for sure she'd seen something moving in the shadows, and now she saw a creature ambling across the parking lot that must've been an enormous coyote. He was big for a coyote. The creature seemed male, though the piano teacher wasn't sure why. He moved with a strut. The piano teacher watched him pick his way along the fence, which he probably could've jumped at any time. He came into the moonlight and passed back out of it and was gone in one complete moment, and the piano teacher, after the fact, thought of rolling up her windows. The piano teacher could not have said what color the animal was, one of those dark shades of the desert that was more a feeling than a color. He hadn't even glanced at her. The piano teacher looked at the sky, at the clinic, down at her hands, at the buttons that locked the doors and ran the windows up and down. The boy had really played that music, had written it or channeled it or who knew where it had come from. He had played his soul, without ever having previously touched a piano. If he'd stayed conscious there would've been calls coming in from all over to hear the boy play, from the wealthy craving a novelty and maybe even from conservatories wanting another prodigy. But the boy didn't know how to
play. The boy had played what he'd played but he had no idea about piano. He was in a coma now, so instead of a prodigy many thought of him as some sort of angel, though they were afraid to use that word. He didn't know how to play piano but he was an instrument himself, they believed. And of course many were firm that there had to be a medical explanation, folks who would cling to their practicality to the end. And none of these people had even heard the music. They knew it had been played and that experts had deemed it original, but only about a dozen people had heard the music and the piano teacher was one of them, and she was the only one who'd heard it that first time, who'd heard the boy play it live. If anyone knew the truth it was the piano teacher, but she knew nothing. She was a dumb witness. There wasn't a thing wrong with Soren physically, the newspaper had been clear about that until they'd finally let the story drop because there were no new developments. There was nothing at all wrong with him except he was not conscious.

The piano teacher had decided she would always depart last. She would remain until every last vigiler down in the parking lot was headed back to regular life. She would wait for the exodus that would occur between one and two in the morning, and after the last car had left the clinic and the wind was the only sound again, she would turn her key and leave the market and steal the last faraway glance at Soren's blank window up on the top floor.

She stayed in line with a convoy of cars leaving the clinic until the interstate loomed up. Car after car pulled onto the west ramp, heading toward other parts of the city, and only Cecelia broke off and climbed the ramp going east. She was already on the outskirts, and after she cleared the jutting foot of Sandia she would be clear of town entirely. She lived out in Lofte, a stagnant outpost on the once-lively Turquoise Trail, about a twenty-minute drive into the desert and then another ten minutes on the state road. She had a stop to make before home, at the cemetery that served
Lofte and the other basin towns—Golden, Hill City, Cromartie. There were few other cars on the road this late, and they either screamed past like rockets or drifted around in the right lane. Though it was nowhere near morning, light was bleeding up from the corners of the sky.

When Cecelia reached the grounds of the cemetery she couldn't help but feel like she was trespassing, like she was going to get run off by a rent-a-cop, but the gate was wide open and the streetlights along the lane were burning. She pulled around a curve, assuring herself that she was using the cemetery precisely as it was meant to be used. No one could say what the right or wrong time was to visit the dead. The place was absolutely still. Going this slow, Cecelia could hear her engine gargling and hacking and she felt rude. She let the car cruise without touching the gas or brake. She didn't hear any birds, didn't hear an airplane in the sky. The place likely didn't have a night security guard and Cecelia didn't see any cameras on the lampposts, and in short order she went from fearing surveillance to feeling too
un
watched. She wasn't being monitored and she wasn't being looked out for. She could do anything, but what she was going to do was absolutely nothing, just like the last time she'd been here. When she'd come to Reggie's funeral almost a month ago she'd lost her nerve and stayed in her car, and the same thing was happening tonight. She had the same feeling, helpless and unhinged. She parked at the curb in the same spot as before and wound her window all the way down like before. She tipped her head toward the sky. There was no weather, not even the ambitious little clouds that had been blowing over the vigils.

There was a modest hill between Cecelia and the gravesite over which, the day of the funeral, she'd seen the tops of the tall men's heads—Reggie's father and uncles probably, men Cecelia had never met. The funeral party had been partially shaded by the cottonwood trees. The cut grass sprawling in every direction had struck Cecelia as the greenest thing she'd ever seen, the fresh flowers around the headstones jarring bursts of color. Even with the engine and the radio off, she hadn't heard anything that was said about Reggie, any of the eulogy. She'd heard only a reasonable daytime wind that had little to whistle against. She'd been unable to raise
herself from her car that day, unable to shut the door as gently as possible and blend into the group at the gravesite to cry and pray like everyone else. She'd sat behind the steering wheel in a black dress she'd picked up that day at a consignment shop. When the ceremony was over and the bereaved had begun descending toward the parking lot, Cecelia had fired up her engine and fled. And it had been only a couple hollow days later that Cecelia found herself at a vigil for a boy in a coma, part of a mild crowd hungry for unspoken rules.
That
she knew how to do. She knew how to vigil. She knew how to sit passively. She'd logged hours and hours down below the sixth floor of the clinic but after a month had still not laid eyes on her friend's grave.

Reggie sometimes didn't seem gone. He did but he didn't. Cecelia had never met anyone like him and she had thought that even before he'd passed away. When Reggie had been doing nothing he never seemed to be wasting time, and when he was doing a lot he never seemed to rush. He'd spent his energy and his money and his mind at the correct rate, never hoarding or throwing to the wind. His temper was rare and expertly wielded. And yes, Cecelia had admired his hard-earned tan and his loose-limbed mannerisms and his arresting jawline. She had watched him with more than the curiosity of the bored as he did everyday tasks like making coffee or changing his shoes, and she'd listened with more than a bandmate's professional interest each time he'd shared a new song in rehearsal. She was glad she and Reggie had never succumbed to any demoralizing trysts or clumsy grope sessions. Truly. Now that he was gone, she was grateful she'd be able to miss him in a straightforward way, as a fallen ally. She didn't know how to grieve him, only how to miss him, as if he'd only moved away rather than died.

Cecelia breathed the night air, smelling neither flowers nor cut grass. She smelled her car. She didn't want to go home yet, didn't want to face her mother or the stupid chickens her mother kept in the yard. The chickens were all her mother cared about any more. Her mother wasn't well. Mess around with chickens and watch television, that's what the woman did. She didn't do anything else. Cecelia didn't want to think about it,
didn't want to walk into that house that always stank of the elk stew her uncle liked to drop off on the doorstep. Chickens. TV. Elk stew. Cecelia squinted. It was the middle of the night but she could see everything around her, like the whole cemetery had moved off and left a shadow of itself. The upholstery was sagging from the roof of Cecelia's car and she reached and pressed it back into place.