A Million Heavens (3 page)

With the loss of Reggie, Cecelia had lost her band. She had been in a band and now that band did not exist. It was no more. No more rehearsal. No more arguing with Nate, the drummer. No more going to the tragic little gigs. Cecelia's ears would ring no more. She would sing no harmony. She wouldn't wear that men's dress shirt with the wide collar that she always wore to shows. Was it a big deal, no more band? She couldn't tell. Was school a big deal? Or the shell her mother was retreating into these days? Cecelia was a dormant guitar player. She was probably a dormant daughter.

The upholstery sagged down again, and this time Cecelia pushed it back in place with both hands, pressing upward on the roof of her car and pressing herself down into her seat. She pressed until her arms began to quake.

The piano sat in the center of what Reggie was calling the main hall. The room was spacious, but still the piano dominated it. The piano looked disapproving, dauntingly formal, like pianos often did in unfamiliar places. The instrument was ancient and well kept, of a dark but faded wood, and its bench was upholstered with leather the color of a radish. There was no ceiling to the hall Reggie was being kept in, or else it was too lofty to be seen. The place was blanketed in uniform shadow. It seemed alive, the hall, or at least not dead. If Reggie held his breath there was true quiet, pure of electricity running its course, of insect industry, of breezes.

Reggie had a mat to lie down on, even though he didn't sleep. He rested, like a great fish might. There was no way to track time, so Reggie rested when he felt tired of not resting. He remembered real sleep, back in life, black and hard and oblivious to everything but dreams. He
remembered waking full of unhurried purpose. His mat was right down on the floor, like a monk or a drug addict. It smelled worn and tidy.

After Reggie had been in the hall what felt like a couple weeks, a library appeared. It didn't contain a desk, so it was a library rather than a study. It was attached to the main hall but the light was cleaner in the library, bright enough to read comfortably. Reggie didn't read, though. He sat bolt upright in the library's grand, creaky chair, which was covered in the same red leather as the piano bench, and flipped backward and forward through the ornate volumes, listening to the pages and smelling the bindings. He didn't have what it took to read one of the books. It wasn't a crisis of energy; it was that Reggie knew none of the books could help him. Reading a book seemed local and desperate. And the fact that people had sat down and
written
the books instead of doing pretty much anything else with their time on earth—taking a walk with a friend, eating chocolate, tinkering with a weed whacker in an oil-smelling shed—made Reggie sad. The thought of all the songs he'd written made him sad. All any writer could do was either document what was known or speculate. Reggie didn't need to imagine a different world because he was in one. He didn't want to celebrate or complain about the world he'd been snatched from, which was now so fathomable. It was easy for him to see now that the living world had always given him what he needed. This new place had no idea what to do with him. He sat in the big chair and ran his fingers over the rough cloth of the book covers. He shuffled through the pages with his thumb, picking out random words. When he needed to break the quiet, he snapped the books shut.

Reggie didn't believe he was being punished, but it was possible he was awaiting punishment. He wasn't religious, but of course he was aware of purgatory, familiar with the concept of the afterlife utilizing a waiting room. He didn't think he'd committed any acts that warranted eternal justice, that warranted Hell or whatever, but he also knew sometimes you broke rules without knowing it. Or sometimes you were supposed to do something and did nothing instead, a sin of omission. And now and then, he wouldn't have been surprised, your paperwork got lost or the person
you needed to speak to was on vacation or whoever was in charge just didn't like the look of you. At least this particular waiting room wasn't cramped or foul-smelling. It didn't matter how long he had to wait, Reggie reasoned—it wasn't like he had to be somewhere. It wasn't like he was going to be late to band practice or run out of daylight working on a yard.

The trouble was the solitude. In life, Reggie had never minded being alone, but this was different. Back in life, solitude was temporary. Even if a person was in jail, not that Reggie had been, there were guards and other inmates. If you were driving across the empty desert, you were on your way to see someone. If you were a child banished to your bedroom, you would accidentally fall asleep and before you knew it the morning was underway and here was Mom making pancakes. There was no waking up for Reggie because there was no sleep. There were no other inmates. No pancakes. No map on which to track his progress.

Reggie walked laps around the main hall, managing at times to feel like he was strolling instead of pacing. He felt he had very little peripheral vision, though he couldn't be sure about this. He had no aches or itches to ground him, no hunger that could rise up and concern him. He still had his scars. He could feel that his tooth was still chipped from when an edger had shot a pebble up at him. He found himself fretting over the yards he'd tended back in the living world. He imagined them growing dumpy. It took more skill to keep a desert yard presentable than to run a mower over a lawn of St. Augustine grass. Not many people knew what they were doing with desert yards. Most guys dumped weed killer everywhere and plopped down some pots. Most guys did whatever was quickest and cheapest.

Once in a while Reggie stood in front of the piano and wondered if he felt like playing it. He didn't. He didn't want to play. He hadn't even sat down on the bench. Reggie existed in a gray area and the keys of the piano were the whitest and blackest things he'd ever seen. He rested his finger on a low B-flat and pushed it down so gently that it didn't make a sound.

His town was dying and its last best chance, it seemed, was a group of religious yahoos headed by a guy named Ran. Ran had told Mayor Cabrera over the phone that the group had 170 members. More importantly, they had enough money—their endowment, Ran called it—to build a facility and then sustain themselves in that facility for a hundred years. They were going to erect one plain building that would include housing, worship space, a gym, a cafeteria. Not being fancy was important to Ran's group. Mayor Cabrera didn't understand their religion. They started with the Bible but had no problem revising it whenever science proved it wrong. They thought one should be devout for moral reasons, not to cash in on everlasting life. They considered confession childish. They thought talking about Hell was wrongheaded. They never, under any circumstance, recruited. It was the opposite, Ran had told Mayor Cabrera. If someone wanted to join the group, that person had to be voted in. That person had to convince the members that he belonged, then survive a probationary period. These people were going to make their home either in Lofte or in some town in Oklahoma.

Some of Soren's clothes were hanging in the closet of the clinic room, and Soren's father pulled the doors shut so he wouldn't have to look at them. He made a point to flip back the blanket every morning and put socks and shoes on his son, and he liked to be the one to remove the shoes when night fell. It was a habit, and habits were what he'd always counted on. The sight of the tiny polo shirts in their garish colors, adorned with dinosaurs and airplanes and tractors, made Soren's father think of specific days he'd spent with Soren—at the zoo, at the plaza where the Indians sold toys, at that church where the old lady read stories—but the shoes were plain and brown and not particularly beat-up. They were any kid's shoes.

There had been days when Soren's father was convinced Soren was gaining color and had expected to return from a smoke on the secret landing to
find his son blinking into the steady pale light from the window, but that was delusion. His son was absent as ever. He was elsewhere. He wasn't recuperating. He was just elsewhere and nobody could guess when he might return. The doctors didn't have a clue. In the first days of the coma they'd been comforted by their charts and tests, their metabolic abnormalities and cerebral cortices and CAT scans and MRIs and they even had a fancy name for the fact that Soren's arms were bent at the elbows, hands resting on his chest, rather than straight down by his sides. “What does that mean?” Soren's father had asked. “What does that mean that his arms are bent?” The doctor had clicked his tongue earnestly and said, “A lot of times it doesn't mean anything at all.” They couldn't say what had put Soren in a coma. Soren's father wasn't accustomed to medical doubletalk. This was the first medical problem of Soren's life. He didn't have allergies. He hadn't even caught those ear infections all kids were supposed to catch.

Soren's father made a point not to ask the doctors any more questions. It was up to him to consider questions he didn't want to consider, like whether Soren was supposed to keep growing, how long it would take for Soren to lose all his coordination. Soren's father didn't know how much time had to pass before his son would have to relearn the alphabet and choose a different favorite animal and a different favorite food. Would he still know what an opposite was, a rhyme? Soren's father didn't even know if his son was dreaming.

He wished he'd been present when his son had fallen into his coma. Not that his presence would've changed anything, but he wished he'd seen the start of this ordeal. He felt sorry for the piano teacher. Poor woman. Soren's father didn't care a lick about music. He'd signed Soren up for piano because it was supposed to be good for a kid's brain. Soren's father never listened to music in his truck. When he'd driven his route he'd listened to the wind rasping in the half-open windows and to the sound of his tires against the road and he'd been content. Music had always seemed irrelevant to him, and the cause of Soren's coma, he had to admit, was irrelevant too. He just wished he'd been there.

She had suffered a failure of courage in the only moment of her life when courage had been called for. She had stopped the boy from playing and no one knew it. They thought he'd stopped on his own because that's what she'd told them back when she was telling anybody anything. She'd done something wrong and then she'd lied about it. And so no one faulted her. Not her daughter. Not the boy's father.

The boy, that day, had listened almost too patiently, alert and without a word to say, while the piano teacher pointed out the parts of the piano and explained their functions. She'd sat him down on the bench and they'd flipped through the primer, a resource more for study at home than for lessons, and then she went over and pulled the curtains because the sun was angling in at eye level and she grabbed a pecan cookie to bring over to the boy, a trick she always employed with new students, a simple way to start on good terms. He was toying around on the keys, hitting them at random, softly at first and then surer. The piano teacher gently set the lid of the cookie jar back in place. She stood a moment and listened to the boy's tinkering, envying him the experience of sitting at a piano for the first time. She could almost hear something organized in what the boy was banging out, an accident of the keys. She made her way across the room to him and when she was a step from the boy, holding out the cookie and reaching with her other hand to tap his shoulder, five gallant notes cut purposefully through the air and then were trampled under by a slow cavalry of low, weighted notes. The piano teacher lost herself. She couldn't tell if the music she was hearing was fast or slow, angry or sad. She'd never heard this piece of music. There was surrender in it. Surrender to forces the boy knew nothing about. She couldn't move again until the boy's hands rested, a fraught pause in the song, and it was all she could do not to slam the fall down on the boy's fingers. A breath rushed in through her nose and she smelled the pecan cookie, she smelled the boy's hair which smelled of a clean attic, she smelled the hot dust on the windowsill cooling along with the ocean of sand outside. She lurched forward, her knee on the bench beside the boy, and pressed her palms onto the backs of
his hands. The piano released a startled croak, and with that croak ringing on the air the piano teacher found herself catching the boy so he wouldn't topple straight back off the bench and bust his head.

She had not asked for this type of student. She hadn't even asked to have a
good
student. She'd been perfectly pleased with regular children who learned slowly and sensibly at thirty dollars per seventy-minute session until their parents decided they'd given piano a good enough try and let them take up high-diving or painting. She had not asked to hear music like that, the notes dragging with impotent hope. She had not asked to live in Albuquerque. She was never supposed to be in this damn desert and it wasn't her that should've been the boy's teacher. She had not asked for her gas-guzzling car. She had not asked to grow old.

In her wood-floored den, the room she'd been using for lessons, she approached the piano from a wary angle and sat on the bench without surrendering her full weight. She didn't want to press the soles of her bare feet against the pedals, and so she kept on an old pair of sandals she wore around the house. The piano teacher turned her head and gazed out the big window that looked out into the backyard. There was an orange tree that had come with the house and that had its own private sprinkler that flipped on for twenty minutes each night. The tree kept getting bigger, but the fruits it produced were tiny and sour.