Joplin's Ghost (55 page)

“This piano once belonged to Scott Joplin,” Carlos said. It was a silly thing to say before the piano changed hands, but it popped out before he could think. He had to tell someone.

“No shit? Who says? I read Joplin had a Steinway.” Carlos knew he shouldn’t be surprised Burnside knew that, given his job, but he was. True music lovers were sages.

“It’s just a theory. A hunch,” Carlos said, and left it at that. “How would I know if this one’s a Steinway? I didn’t see a label.”

“The label’s faded with the wood finish, but you’ll see all the manufacturing details if you open the cabinet up top,” Burnside said, although he made no move to do so, and the idea of touching it made Carlos feel sick. “It’s a German company. She’s a Rosenkranz.”

Rosenkranz
.

The torrent of relief that broke loose in Carlos’s chest killed his fear cold.

M
ost often, she traveled as light. A speck was all she needed.

She had learned that it took time and energy to appear as a person, to claim so much space; and every time she did, Scott said he did not see her for several days afterward. Skin and hair had its advantages, because nothing seemed to make Scott happier than to lie beside her in his bed, to embrace the substance of her, to explore her with his hands. The touching was nice, if only because it awakened memories, but the skin she wore here was only a covering. Skin didn’t feel the way she remembered; sometimes when he touched her, she felt nothing at all.

Mostly, she was happy just to be in the room with him, flitting from place to place without thought or effort. In one instant, she was in his lamp; in another, she was floating across his ceiling, or gliding up and down his walls. In the process, sometimes she knocked his lampshade askew, or bumped the wardrobe so hard that the door fell open. The piano was easiest to visit, a lure, so often she appeared inside the gleam of its rosewood case, even when it made her feel trapped. Sometimes, she bounced on the high-G key while everyone in the boardinghouse was sleeping, laughing herself silly.

Scott’s room was her favorite place—probably because the piano was there—but she ventured to the hall, parlor and kitchen to prove her independence. She got in trouble this way. Once, she was amusing herself with the current of water from the kitchen faucet when Lottie walked in, and it was too late by the time she shut the water off. Secretiveness was instinct to her—she was only a guest, after all—but if Lottie Joplin hadn’t seen her that day, it was only because she refused to.

Lottie knew someone else was in her house.

For one thing, Lottie heard Scott talking to her. Scott didn’t try to hide her from Lottie, no matter how sick Lottie looked when Scott got to talking with his ghost and stubbornly refused to glance Lottie’s way. He didn’t talk to Lottie nearly as much as he talked to her, or with the same tenderness. She was mostly a memory, after all; Lottie wasn’t at the same safe distance.

But she understood Lottie, even if Scott didn’t. She didn’t blame Lottie for being in Scott’s room today, slowly packing his clothes into an old brown suitcase that seemed too small to hold the remnants of a man’s life.

“I knew you’d never come to nothin’, Lottie Stokes. That’s your name, you know.
Stokes,
not Joplin,” Scott said, slumped on his bed as she packed his things. Scott chose cruel things to say at random, trying to escape his fear. He was afraid all the time.

Lottie didn’t glance at him, intent on her task. Lottie pulled out the spotless white suit hanging in the wardrobe, but she didn’t fold that one to pack. Lottie ran her fingers across the shiny fabric, a small smile surfacing on her lips as she remembered how dandy and successful he’d looked when he wore it. In Lottie’s mind, this was the one suit proclaiming that this man was Scott Joplin, the Ragtime King. When Lottie replaced the suit and closed the wardrobe door, her smile had become a tear in her eye.

“Yessir, you’ve always been Lottie Stokes,” Scott said again, one last attempt to hurt her.

“I know my name,” Lottie said, giving him a wan smile. Most people had trouble understanding Scott’s slur, but Lottie understood better than she wanted to. “I know who I am. So do you.” Lottie’s smile was so brave it was heartbreaking.

You stop that, Scott,
she whispered.
Try to see past your own pain. Lottie’s hurting nearly as much as you, as much as anybody outside your skin. She’s been wanting to come in here and pack your things for two weeks, and she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She lets the music play late in the parlor, but she cries herself to sleep. You call her by her true name.

“I won’t,” Scott said, a stubborn child. “She’s casting me out.”

She can’t keep you by herself.

“Well, she ought to try. This is
my
room.
My
house. This is
my
piano.”

“Bellevue has a piano, Scotty,” Lottie said. “Don’t worry.”

“Nobody’s talking to you,” Scott said. “This piano’s
mine,
you hear? Nobody better touch it. Not Sadie, not Sam, not none of them. It better be right here when I come back.”

“It’ll be here,” Lottie said. She chuckled. “Thought you weren’t talking to me, Scotty.”

Music came through the wall from a neighbor’s flat, a thumping piano bass line that sounded like a boogie-woogie, even though nobody called it by that name yet. The piano was probably old, because it was badly out of tune, but the player had found a few good notes to bring joy to it. People always made music with whatever they had. The happy, rousing sound erased the cruel lines from Scott’s forehead, but fear shrouded him again. When Lottie stood closer to his bed, Scott reached for her hand.

But Lottie didn’t offer her hand right away, withholding. “Say my name,” Lottie said.

“Lottie Joplin,” Scott said. He’d even made the effort to speak slowly and say it clear.

“I sure as hell won’t never forget that, and I’ll make sure nobody else does neither,” Lottie said, clasping his trembling hand between both of hers. “It’s all right, Scotty. Now tell me where you went and hid that symphony. I won’t get mad.”

Instead of answering her, Scott began to sing through an exaggerated grimace.
“Oh, I wish I was in the land of cot-ton…”
His voice was ruined, bitter, as he sang “Dixie.”

Lottie ignored his singing, speaking over it. “That symphony could make you a great man, Scotty. And that ‘Lenox Avenue Rag,’ I bet that’s good, too. Tell me where they’re at.”

She decided to try to help Lottie, to enlist Lottie as a partner. Weren’t they both wedded to Scott? It was hard to make yourself known to people who didn’t want to see you, but she tried. Riding the wings of a horsefly, she threw herself against the bedroom’s windowpane, tapping hard. If Lottie went to the window and stared straight down, she might see a page or two of music in the alley below. As soon as the snow started yesterday, Scott had taken an hour to pull himself out of bed, open the window, and toss out the pages of
Symphony No. 1,
hoping to bury it in ice, not ashes.

But Lottie wouldn’t look at her even when a corner of the window flared. Lottie must have thought the light was from a streetlamp; either that, or Lottie was determined to pay her no mind. Some women couldn’t stand knowing that their man had loved before.

Sam Patterson came to the doorway. Louis’s spirit stood behind Sam, except more quiet, at a distance. Louis preferred to visit Scott in dreams, although he rarely made time for visits. Not everyone liked to visit. Sometimes they waited. The wait was never long.

“We got a car downstairs, Lottie,” Sam said. “When you’re ready.”

Lottie did the things for Scott a spirit couldn’t: She found a pair of socks and slipped them over Scott’s cracked, dry feet. Next, she fit his feet into his shiny black shoes and tied the laces, making sure they were even at the ends. Lottie brought in a spiffy overcoat, and while Sam held Scott up, she put the coat on over Scott’s sleeping clothes, buttoning it to the top. Last, she combed through his hair, patting it until he was neat. The sight of Scott looking so good nearly made Lottie change her mind. She had turned him into Scott Joplin again.

“Please come with me, Freddie,” Scott said. “Stay with me.”

My name isn’t Freddie,
she thought. When she was here with Scott, she had no name.

“You know that ain’t my name,” Lottie muttered, weary. “I’d rather be called Stokes.”

“You don’t need the piano to follow me,” Scott said. “The piano brought you, but now that you’re here, you can stay with me forever. The Rosenkranz will keep us together.”

Lottie lifted Scott under one arm, and Sam the other as they slowly made their way out of his room. They all knew it was the last time Scott would see the room, but they didn’t linger.

“He talks on about that piano,” Lottie said, shaking her head. “Wish we could take it.”

“He don’t even play it no more,” Sam said.

“I think he does, late at night. I hear it sometimes.”

Panic rose in Scott as they drew farther from his bedroom, closer to the door to the hall and the cold waiting outside. His legs scrabbled weakly against the floor as he turned around, looking for her. “Freddie? Are you coming?”

She knew Scott wasn’t only inviting her with him to Bellevue, or to the one last place Lottie would send him after that. He wanted her to be with him when he made his Leap, because Leaping alone was terrifying. She had told him it only took an instant, and he would think his fear was silly as soon as his Leap was done. She had told him she couldn’t hold his hand at the end, because she didn’t belong with him yet. The part of her that
wasn’t
Freddie had a bit more to do somewhere else, and the longer she was gone, the harder it would be to find her way back.

“Please, Freddie?” Scott called, his voice nearly shorn by a sob.

She landed on his nose and made him itch, so he would know she was there. She couldn’t stand to see him so broken and afraid.
I’m here, Scott,
she said.
I’ll go with you.

Scott has a powerful but famished spirit, she thought. He was like the drowning swimmer who would pull his rescuer to her own death.

N
ever thought I’d see
this
thing again.” Gloria stood over the newly arrived piano with her arms folded tight, bracing against a blast of cold. “This is an ugly effing piano. I got it right when I saw it the first time.”

Es verdad, chica,
Carlos thought. But it was worse than ugly. The hair on his arms stiffened as Carlos gazed at the Rosenkranz against the wall, replacing the psychics’ dining table.

The piano looked worse in the gentle lamplight of the room, without shadows to hide it. The piano’s key cover was down, concealing the keys, so it was easy to forget that it was a piano instead of an oversized, misshapen piece of furniture with no natural use. The twin candelabra, which were probably brass, were black with age. The cracks in the cabinet’s finish were magnified in the light, making it look more like a reptile than an object made of wood.

Carlos had almost given up on the Saturday delivery he’d been promised when the movers called at six, saying they were on the way. They complained incessantly while Carlos signed the paperwork: They’d gotten lost three times. The piano had slipped off the ramp and almost crushed their feet. Their elevator stalled while they were bringing it up. Ordinarily, it would have sounded like excuses or stumping for tips. Ordinarily.

“I don’t like having it here,” Carlos said, his voice low.

“Hey, I don’t like it either.” Gloria sighed. “But what can I say? My instincts have been wrong about this whole thing since day one, so I want to trust the psychic, you know? She said to bring it here. She wouldn’t leave unless I promised.”

Phoenix’s room had exhausted the team of psychics. Johnita Poston and Heather had left for much-needed rest right before the movers called. Even Finn was gone, since his cold had worsened and he’d decided to get a hotel room for the night. As always, his camera remained behind, watchful. When Carlos realized the piano would be arriving tonight after all, he’d called every number he had for Heather, Finn and Johnita Poston, but he got voice mail everywhere.

He wasn’t going to reach them, he knew. That, apparently, already had been decided.

Everyone else was gone tonight, too. Leah, Serena and Gloria’s parents had caught an afternoon flight for Atlanta for Marcus Smalls’s funeral tomorrow, waiting as long as they dared before leaving in case Phoenix’s condition changed.

“You can still try to fly out tonight, Gloria,” Carlos said, although the last thing he wanted was to be alone with Phoenix and the piano.

Gloria murmured, nodding. “Yeah, I just got a message from my travel agent, and she said she can get me on a flight from Newark at ten. Last-second opening.” While Gloria talked to him, her eyes never left the piano. “I’d just feel bad leaving you.”

And believe me, I’d feel bad getting left.
“Go on with your family, kiddo. Phoenix would want you with her mother and Serena. Somebody needs to help them manage, especially if there’s press. Tabloids will be there looking for Phoenix and G-Ronn. Bet on it.”

Gloria nodded, half-shrugging. Her lips thinned. “I know the shooting happened, and I know Sarge died, but…it’s not real yet. The background music was so loud, we couldn’t tell what was going on from the audience. A guy behind me said he heard gunshots, but I was like, ‘Yeah, right.’ The next thing we know, cops are everywhere.
Bam,
just like that. That’s why Phoenix won’t wake up, Carlos. She doesn’t want to see Sarge put in the ground, so it’ll never be real.”

“That’s part of it,” Carlos said, but now that the Rosenkranz was here, he was certain the piano
was
responsible for Phoenix’s condition, somehow. That knowledge filled him with dread, but there was hope nestled there, too.

“I can imagine the stories people will tell at the funeral,” Gloria said. “Everybody has a Sarge story. You don’t know the half of it. But he loved Phee more than life, he kept me in line when nobody else could, and I’m so mad about how he died, I feel like I need to kill somebody. You ever felt like that, Carlos?” Her voice was husky.

Carlos shook his head. He’d lost his grandparents to old age, a twenty-year-old roommate at Stanford to an unexplained cardiac arrest and three musician friends to AIDS, but he had never felt angry about death. Baffled sometimes. Sad, always. But never angry.

Gloria’s eyes burned with fury as she gazed at the piano, as if she blamed it for Sarge’s murder. “I hope you never do. I hope you never lose somebody to something as sick as this, because nothing will make this go away. No wonder Phee is so fucked up.” Suddenly, Gloria was crying with clumsy, silent sobs, her face red. Gloria did not cry often. He could see that.

Carlos held her, but he didn’t urge her not to cry. He would never understand why people told mourners to stop crying when crying was exactly what they needed. “She’ll be back,” Carlos whispered, but their mantra sounded like an empty phrase, an outright lie like the ones people always told when death left them with nothing else to say.

“What’s that word in Spanish you always say to me? Be careful?” Gloria said, sniffling.

“Cuidado.”

“That’s the one.
Extra
careful, Carlos. I’d keep my eye on this piano, if I were you.”

Gloria sounded just like Phoenix then, the way sisters mirrored each other’s cadences. It made him miss Phoenix more. “I will. Go catch your plane.”

Carlos escorted Gloria out of the room, standing halfway through Phoenix’s doorway while he watched her walk to the elevator. Carlos realized the hallway was empty. Where were the bodyguards? The guards switched off at night, but there was usually someone on watch. He didn’t remember seeing the bodyguards when the movers finally arrived. He didn’t see any staff, either. There were only closed doors on either side of the dignified hallway. Carlos fought off the idea that if he went from door to door, he would discover that no one was here except him and Phoenix. That idea cut too close to a reality he didn’t want to know about.

When the elevator door hissed closed, Gloria was gone, too.

As soon as he was back inside Phoenix’s room, Carlos’s eyes went to the Rosenkranz, which was still where he’d left it, a relief. But he stared longer than he’d planned, because something was wrong already. The piano hadn’t moved an inch from the wall, but…

Something
was
different, as soon as he’d turned his back. What?

Then, seeing the discolored piano keys, he knew: The piano’s key cover was raised! The piano’s stained, dirty keys were bared at him like teeth.

Carlos’s cross fell to the carpeted floor without a sound. “Phee?” Carlos called, his heart prepared for either terror or jubilance. Could Phoenix be awake? Had she found it already?

Holding his breath, Carlos ran around the corner to the bedroom. There, Phoenix was still in bed where he’d last seen her, fully reclined. With a sheet pulled up to her chin, she looked like she could be sleeping. Except for those wide-open eyes.

“Shit,” Carlos whispered. He turned back to the piano, a quick
gotcha
pivot. The key cover was still open, the horrible keys still visible.

Carlos tried to remember if he or Gloria had opened the key cover. Every time he concluded that neither of them had touched the piano—why
would
they?—his mind faltered. Had the cover always been open, then? Memory was tricky. An open key cover wasn’t like Burnside’s claims that the piano hopped from building to building, but the idea of the piano moving behind his back made Carlos’s heart barrel.
This is going to be a long night if you’re already having a meltdown, Carlito,
he thought.

The red recording light atop Finn’s video camera near the door gave Carlos an inspiration. Still watching the piano from the corner of his eye, Carlos went to the video camera and checked the viewfinder. He saw a tiny black-and-white image of the Egyptian sofa, the love seat, the suite’s window, shades pulled closed—and the piano, key cover up.

Carlos rewound, his heart drilling his breastbone, and he stopped when he saw himself hugging Gloria beside the piano. This time, he couldn’t see the cover because they were blocking the camera’s view. Carlos fumbled for the headphones dangling from the camera so he could hear the sound. “…I’d keep my eye on this piano if I were you,” Gloria’s voice said.

“I will.” Carlos repeated the words in unison with his videotaped image.

He and Gloria loomed huge as they walked toward the camera, and suddenly the room was empty. Finally, he could see it: The piano cover was
down,
just as he’d remembered. The piano keys were hidden from sight. Carlos paused the tape, startled, and looked up at the Rosenkranz a few yards across the room. The cover was still up.

“Finn’s got you on tape, you sonofabitch,” Carlos whispered, pressing his eye back to the rubber viewfinder to watch the tape play. After days of psychic phenomena that yielded maddeningly little videotaped evidence, he felt starved for something indisputable. Preserved.

So far, nothing. An empty room, a closed piano. The image remained fixed. Carlos waited, his heart pounding. This
couldn’t
be right! He was only in the doorway for a few seconds, and he’d come right back. Watching the tape, he counted off:
Fifteen…sixteen…seventeen…eighteen…
He felt agitated as he watched, his feet squirming in his shoes.
Twenty-nine…thirty…thirty-one…

Was it
impossible
to capture supernatural activity on tape? If so, no wonder—

Motion sprang from the tape as the piano’s cover flew up. It opened with a
BAM
so loud in the headphones that Carlos cried out, tugging them off. His ears rang.

Mierda
. Carlos sucked in his next breath, forcing his lungs open again. He had been standing right in the doorway when the cover flew up, and he couldn’t have missed that racket. How could something have happened on the tape that hadn’t happened in life?

Carlos gazed at the Rosenkranz again, and its keys leered at him. The optical illusion refused to go away when he blinked. The piano was
grinning
.

“J-Jesus help me,” Carlos whispered, unaware he had made a sound. Carlos’s eyes swept the carpet in search of the cross he’d dropped. When he didn’t see it at first, he fell to all fours.

A noise came from deep inside the piano, like a scurrying mole, gone as soon as Carlos noticed it. Still, the unmistakable sound of long, scrabbling nails resonated across his clammy skin. Instinct made his frame tighten, ready to spring for the door. But he didn’t. He kept his eyes on the floor and looked for his cross, sure it must be close.

It was. The cross was at his feet, an inch from his soles.
Any closer and you’d trip over it, boy,
Nana would say. Hardly blinking, his eyes trained on the piano, Carlos snatched up the small, simple gold cross and tightened his palm around it. He wished the cross had been blessed by a holy man. He aimed his cross at the piano, a shield.

“What do you want?” Carlos said to the Rosenkranz.
“Let Phoenix go.”
The seven bravest words of his life. His mouth was so dry it hurt.

The piano clicked from somewhere low, near the pedals. The sound was barely audible, but it made Carlos scoot backward. “
Shit
…motherfu…” he whispered, before his breath left him.

Carlos Harris prided himself on knowing the rules for situations across cultures, but he had exhausted his knowledge of diplomacy with the Unseen. Seeing gentle, deceased
Abuela
’s dance in his aunt’s living room had not prepared him for this piano. Breathing in heaves, Carlos fought for power over his thoughts to decide what to do. Should he try to call the psychics again? Press the emergency buzzer and bring a doctor to Phoenix’s room?

Once we have the piano, Phoenix will show us what to do,
the Queen Psychic had said.

He would go to Phoenix, he decided. Phoenix had no use for psychics or doctors now, but she might have a use for him.

In the bedroom, Carlos said a prayer of thanks when he saw that Phoenix was still breathing and didn’t look worse even if she didn’t look better. He didn’t see any new flies, just the old ones that hadn’t escaped the flypaper.

But he didn’t feel thankful long. Standing closer to Phoenix, Carlos realized that her lips were as purple as her bruised jaw. When he touched her hand, her thin fingers and palm were cool. Too cool. He pressed his hand across her forehead, and her skin felt bloodless. Only then did Carlos notice that a cold spot had settled over Phoenix’s bed, precisely where she lay and nowhere else. This one spot was a meat locker.

Phoenix was fading before his eyes.

“Phoenix?” Carlos said, shaking her. She didn’t answer, not even a bob of her lips.

Carlos jabbed the red button above the bed marked
CALL
, because every instinct in him clamored that Phoenix was dying, and
right now
. Death was close.

No buzzer sounded, and no red light went on to comfort him that help was on the way.