Joplin's Ghost (57 page)

Scott had not made his Leap. His dying was horrible in its endlessness.

Lottie sat at Scott’s side, primly dressed, reading her
Harper’s
. She was already wearing her gloves, because the doctors had phoned to tell her Scott wouldn’t make it to morning, but the doctors had been wrong again. Scott had a stallion’s spirit.

But Lottie knew this was the day. She and Lottie both knew.

The duet on the Rosenkranz had tired her too much to show herself to Scott in a flesh form—and that wouldn’t be polite, not with Lottie here in her place as the grieving wife—but she brushed herself across Scott’s hand so he would feel her. Touching was its own language. The visit was easier now than it had been at the piano. Scott was so much closer to where he was going, she reached him with barely a thought.

Because he was so close to his Leaping, Scott’s spirit spoke to her while his eyes and lips remained closed. They were more alike than different, now.

I’m sorry, Freddie. The piano won’t let you go. You’ll have to burn it.

A bold idea, but it was impossible, of course. She could no more burn up his Rosenkranz than she could make the roof of his dying place fly away, or make Lottie walk across the ceiling. Hands with skin were needed to burn a piano.

But that wasn’t all of it. As long as Scott’s soul was restless, the Rosenkranz was his. The Rosenkranz would remember Scott’s sorrows long after his flesh was gone.
She
had made the decision to play the piano with him, to tangle their souls. She had known the risks.

“It might let me go if you weren’t afraid,” she said.

I’m sorry. I don’t know how to stop being afraid, Freddie.

“I’ve told you about the laughter? And the light?”

They’ve forgotten me already, and I’m not even gone.

No matter how much she tried, she couldn’t force him to dwell on the next place, only the last. That was sad, but she tried to indulge him.

“Didn’t I tell you about Broadway and the Pulitzer? The biographers?”

Why couldn’t I have seen more? Why did I have so little?

“This was your ride, Scott. Everybody’s is different.”

But Freddie…does it matter? Will we matter?

The source of Scott’s desperation became so obvious to her that she was angry with herself for taking so long to think of it. How could she call herself a gardener and not remember?

“I can let you hear,” she said, elated.

She knew exactly how to do it. Someone else, not Scott, had given her the same elixir when it was the only language that could reach her. She remembered a rolling voice, a shining scalp. She remembered the loving and healing. Part of her remembered Sarge very well.

Where in the world would she begin? How should she season her stew?

She didn’t use Scott’s ears, because his ears were failing him. She gave Scott
her
ears,
her
future memories, searching in lightning speed. The soul could hear so much better anyway. Especially music. The soul heard music best.

She gave him Miles Davis and Duke Ellington. She gave him B. B. King, Otis Redding and Marvin Gaye. She gave him Mahalia Jackson and Shirley Caesar, Miriam Makeba and Jelly Roll Morton, Sly & the Family Stone, Gil Scott-Heron and Louis Armstrong. She gave him Dizzy Gillespie and James Brown. She let him hear Paul Robeson singing “Ol’ Man River,” and Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit.” She let him hear “Respect” sung the way only Aretha could. She gave him Earth Wind & Fire and Arturo Sandoval, Al Green and Eric Clapton, Ray Charles, George Gershwin and Ella Fitzgerald.

She added a few Sarge hadn’t thought about, because she had her own tastes: She spiced her elixir with Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Nina Simone and Lauryn Hill. She let him hear Tito Puente, Mario Bauzá and Celia Cruz. She gave him Hossam Ramzy, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Carlos Santana and the Black-Eyed Peas. She gave him Bob Marley, Baaba Maal, Wynton Marsalis, Led Zeppelin and the Mississippi Mass Choir. Because he loved opera, she gave him Roland Hayes, Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price and Kathleen Battle. For fun, she threw in Run-DMC, Alicia Keys, OutKast and Robert Randolph & the Family Band.

It grieved her to neglect so many others, but there wasn’t time for everyone. The rest could wait. He would know all of it soon enough.

Last, she let him hear Phoenix. That music came from a different place in her memory, because most of it had yet to be written. But she heard it, and so did he.

Scott Joplin’s face didn’t change, but she felt his soul’s glow.

“You matter, Scott,” she said, a whisper.

Five days from now, the United States would enter the Great War, and James Reese Europe’s Harlem Hellfighters would spread their orchestrated ragtime marching style like apple seeds, showcasing Negro music to the world. Jim Europe would survive the bullets and gas of the war front, but Herbert Wright would stab him to death with his penknife a few years later, in a dressing room back home. Such things happened sometimes; buds were cut down before they fully bloomed. But a bright, scrappy fifteen-year-old boy in New Orleans who loved Scott’s rags even if he would never meet him was already gaining a reputation with a cornet he’d learned to play after he was sent to a home for wayward boys for shooting a pistol in the air to celebrate the New Year.

Scott knew things about the boy’s future the boy could not, so when Scott heard that trumpet about to be loosed on the world, Louis Armstrong clarified everything. The living world wouldn’t hear the song for more than a decade, but to Scott, Armstrong’s feisty horn on “West End Blues” was Gideon’s clarion call.

Suddenly, Scott could make out laughter down the way, where he couldn’t see past all the light. He was close, and he was ready. At last. Hallelujah.

She was ready, too. She could Leap with him to his light and sacrifice some of her own. Didn’t people in love do that every day?

Do you feel me where you are, Phee? I love you. Come back to me.

Somewhere, she still had skin. Somewhere, her lips were afire. And her neck. Someone was calling her. A voice was calling her name. Music was calling her.

Do you feel this, Phee? Or this?

“Find the kerosene, Lottie,” Scott said, as best he could. “Burn that piano to Hell.”

With one last gasp of sweet oxygen, Scott Joplin made his Leap.

A
ll of the terrain Carlos’s fingers and lips grazed on Phoenix’s body grew warm, her blood surging to her skin’s surface to meet him. He watched color return, creamy brown chasing the trail of his fingers across the pale snow of her neck, her collarbone, her chest. Digging her out. He hadn’t realized how pale she was until he began repainting her with his hands.

“I’m here, Phee. I hear,” he said, propping her upright. He unzipped her gown and let it fall across her shoulders while she dangled in his arms. Her eyes were no longer open, her eyelids resting in a different kind of sleep. Her eyes had thawed, too.

Phoenix tasted freshly bathed, new. Carlos suckled her neck, then her shoulder, and her skin flared beneath him. With one eye on the Rosenkranz, Carlos laid his palm on her cool breast as her gown slipped to her waist. Her nipple nudged against his palm, swollen. Warm again.

Carlos didn’t like the piano watching as he touched her, nor the camera, but he would not risk her life because of discomfort. He lay Phoenix to rest, his mouth sliding over her breast as his head fell against her. He moistened her with his tongue, then he sucked as if he were nursing, gathering as much of her skin into his mouth as he could. Her breast nearly vanished inside of him. He warmed her other breast with his hand, gently kneading, his thumb pondering the solid ridge at its peak.

“Do you feel this, Phoenix?” he whispered in her ear.

Phoenix’s mouth didn’t respond, but her nipples spoke for her. He turned her on her stomach, massaging her graceful tracts of skin, feeling the spots across her ribs where her bones were extruding more than they should, her pliant thighs, the dense mound of her buttocks. Every part of Phoenix that Carlos could see, he touched and tasted. He took his time.

He didn’t think about his own arousal until his jeans pinched, painful. His arousal felt urgent in a way it never had. She needed him, and he needed her.

“Phoenix?” he said.

Phoenix moaned, from far away. She still wasn’t back. Not quite.

Easing his hand between her thighs, Carlos tested Phoenix gently with his index finger, only halfway inside her, and found her damp and ready. She also felt too cool, because he had missed a spot. Knowing she was waiting for him, Carlos felt his crotch tighten into a knot.

“God help me, Phoenix, tell me what to do,” he said. “Tell me.” He was unsnapping his fly, relishing the relief of easing pressure his zipper gave as it fell, tooth by tooth. Freeing him.

“Tell me what to do,” Carlos said, but there was no sound from her. Phoenix’s sleeping face made him doubt. He saw a naked girl unconscious in his arms, forbidden again.

But Carlos’s body commanded him, even if Phoenix could not.

Carlos knew, body and soul.

H
e was making love to her. She felt his heat inside of her; exploring, sowing.

Each time she forgot him, the tide of sensation rolled back over her, rocking her. Each time he touched somewhere new, she remembered. When his heat draped her from her head to her thighs, reminding her of how precious her skin was, she almost remembered his name and gasped it aloud. She almost opened her eyes again; to see, this time, not just to stare. Almost.

The wall was the only thing keeping her from him. The wall appeared with the sound of her own voice, from forever ago:
Was it okay?

She didn’t want any knowledge beyond those three words, so she retreated.

Until she felt him inside her again, tilling and plowing. He wouldn’t let her run away. Now, his fingertips were kneading her scalp, pulling her closer still. Closer.

He stretched her to her capacities, forced her body to meld itself to him, hugging tight. He flooded her, drained her and flooded her again. Her nipples and clitoris dueled for her attention beneath his touch, then they joined forces to take her deeper into her skin, a maelstrom.

Was it okay?

She had not Leaped with Scott. She was expanding, floating nowhere near the laughter and light of his transformation. What was her name this time? Why was she so afraid?

“I love you, Phee. Can you hear me?”

Carlos. She knew his name, then, unalterably. She missed him. She nudged the wall to see how much it would yield without crushing her.

You like Magnums, motherfucker?
The words jolted her, made her try to flee again.

But this time, Phoenix’s body would not allow her to escape for even a blink. She soared, her body piloting her, afire in too many places to count.

The truth came when she heard her own voice in a whispered roar.

Daddy’s gone.

The truth kicked her senseless, and there was no respite now. No solace.

Daddy’s gone.

While Carlos’s weight bucked and quivered on top of her, the truth made Phoenix’s eyes fly open while she wailed to raise the dead.

S
omething was pinching Phoenix’s lungs, forcing her to gasp for air, and every breath was a sob. It was the worst feeling she had ever known.

“It’s all right, Phee. It’s all right, hon. I’m here. I’m here,
linda
. I’m here.”

Carlos’s nakedness was hot on top of her. Seeing Carlos erased her confusion and pain for an instant, and she was so grateful that she hugged his neck hard enough to nearly fling them to the floor. His striking crown of dreadlets rested across her chest as he held her.

He pulled his flesh out of hers, very slowly, and she smelled a potent blend of cologne, perspiration and their bodies’ shared juices. Despite everything else, her stomach flipped. Just as she had promised him, she remembered every glancing touch. Phoenix kissed Carlos’s hair, clinging to it. She kissed his neck. Her skin sang with his memory, soothed. Her skin’s pleasure dulled her grief enough so she could catch her breath.

“How long?” she whispered.

“Five days. We’ve been worried.” Carlos looked older, with lines by his eyes. He looked more like Scott now, the way she remembered him.

“He’s dead?” A sob nearly overcame her last word, because she knew.

“Yes, Phee. I’m sorry. Kai, too. I’m so sorry.”

Phoenix succumbed to her sobs. By the time she remembered Carlos again, he had said nothing but
I’m sorry
for twenty minutes, sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish.
Lo siento, Phoenix
. Sometimes he sobbed, too. Carlos’s face was shiny with his tears as he reminded her of the things she should be grateful for. Serena and Ronn were fine. The kids from the choir were fine. She might have lost more of her family that day. Sarge died knowing she was safe.

When she nearly threw up, he forced her to take sips from a protein drink. The bitter chocolate taste made her feel sick, but she drank it because Carlos wanted her to. He didn’t know she didn’t like chocolate yet, but he would learn. Besides, she needed the protein, because she felt too weak to stand. She had nearly died, after all.

“Where were you?” Carlos said. “With Scott?”

“He’s gone now,” she said. But she couldn’t mourn Scott, because his leaving was long overdue. Not like Sarge. Her father was gone early, ripped away.

“Will you stay here, Phee? Is it over?”

Phoenix was about to say
I hope so
when she saw the Rosenkranz. The blighted piano had been mauled by its journey, trailing her. It had never given up.

Tremors took control of her limbs.

“The psychic, Johnita, told us to bring the piano to you,” Carlos said, wrapping his arms around her more tightly. “I’m sorry to scare you. She said you would know what to do.”

Phoenix almost laughed, but it came out as a sob. She was so tired, the idea of
doing
anything made her cry. How gracious of the Queen Pychic to make that decree! Phoenix knew what to do, all right. She just doubted that she had the strength, or that the piano would allow it.

“If it scares you, I’ll take you where you can’t see it,” Carlos said.

“My bed, please.” That would be enough, for now. All she wanted was rest.

“I don’t think we should go back there, Phee. It was so cold—”

“That doesn’t matter. I’m here now.” She should have died in that bed, but she hadn’t. She could die anywhere. The bed wasn’t to blame. She needed to lie down beneath her sheets.

Without further argument, Carlos lifted her until her bare feet dangled over his arm. He took her closer to the piano at first, and she closed her eyes when they walked past because the sight of it exhausted her. She didn’t open her eyes until she felt Carlos take her around a corner.

This was a bedroom, and except for the flypaper, it was lovely. The Rosenkranz was safely out of her sight.

After Carlos helped her put on her gown to keep her warm, he picked up the telephone and pushed her buzzer, trying to reach someone. Phoenix held Carlos’s hand so he wouldn’t consider leaving her room. He wouldn’t like what he would find if he went searching for her doctor, or for her nurse.

“This is bullshit. I haven’t been able to reach anybody since that piano got here,” he said, frustrated. “I’m trying to catch Gloria. She’s on her way to the airport.”

“Where’s Gloria going?” Phoenix said. She missed her cousin. She remembered things from where she’d been, but the here and now was beyond her. Every small detail was a mystery.

“Atlanta.” Carlos held her face. “Your father’s funeral is tomorrow, Phee.”

Phoenix didn’t know how much time she lost to sobbing after that. The word
funeral
made it impossible to think of conversation, even about the piano. Especially about the piano.

Sleeping was the only way to stop crying, so she slept between her questions to Carlos and his gentle answers as he lay beside her in the tiny twin-sized bed, holding her. While Carlos stroked her, she sipped at the knowledge, then slept to forget. This went on for hours, but the time passed as minutes to her.

When Phoenix woke up again, she was shivering.

Her fingers flew to her forearms, where she pinched her biceps and skin, clinging to them.

You like Magnums, motherfucker?
The memory of an explosion rang in her ears, fresh as new, and old tears she hadn’t shed before falling asleep reemerged, still warm. Phoenix wiped her face with her tears and held her cheeks a long time, stifling a sob. Her throat hurt. Crying made its own pain, and she was tired of hurting. She was too weak to hurt like this.

She saw Carlos’s sleeping face across from her, at the edge of her pillow. In sleep, his assuring mask was gone.

Phoenix leaned over, lightly kissing his lips. “Rest, baby,” she whispered.

She didn’t want to wake Carlos. Bless him for being here, but she needed time free of his stroking and coddling. As hard as it was to return to her skin and the memory of the Osiris, she had other things to remember. More pressing things.

You’ve got to be about the revolution, Phee
.

It was 4:00
A
.
M
., the digital clock on her night table said. Six hours since Carlos had woken her up the first time. Six hours wasted.

Moving gently, Phoenix slipped from beneath Carlos’s arm and climbed from the bed, her bare feet sinking into the carpet. She felt all of her blood rush to her legs, and they tingled, nearly buckling at the knees because she hadn’t walked for days. When dizziness made her sway, she steadied herself with her hand against the mattress, her eyes squeezed shut.

Please let me go. Not now. Please let it be over.

Carlos had forced down that protein drink, but she was still unaccustomed to her skin, she realized. Doubt and hurt tried to force Phoenix back into bed with Carlos, but she made herself keep standing. She might already have slept through her chance to be free.

Once Phoenix took her first unsteady step, the others came more easily as her legs remembered how to walk. She made her way lightly across the floor, soundless, batting away the hanging flypaper that brushed the side of her face. Flies always came where Death was near.

All of the pieces were in place: The New York asylum. The Rosenkranz. Her beloved alone at her bedside. Her death would follow Scott’s, a coda. If she didn’t change the last of her destiny the way she had changed Scott’s on his deathbed, today was her dying day.

Carlos had interrupted the momentum of her dying, but today was the day. Her obituary was already written somewhere:
Eccentric rocker-turned–R&B singer Phoenix Smalls, dead from shock at twenty four after seeing her father gunned down, clipped before she could fly.
Such things happened with musicians, since their music took them so close to the laughter and light.

Not that she was afraid to die. She’d been places she didn’t have words for that made all that drama silly, even if knowing that couldn’t keep her from hurting over Sarge. The dying part wouldn’t bother her the way her death would bother Carlos. And Mom. And Gloria and Serena.

She had to keep on living to spare them the pain. Her family had enough tears.

And mostly, her dying felt
wrong
. Scott didn’t need the piano anymore. Scott’s ghost was gone. She’d felt Scott Leap, and the Leap was clean, not halfway. He was free, like Sarge. Scott had breathed out his anger at the end—she’d felt it expel in a hot wind—so whatever anger was still locked in his Rosenkranz didn’t belong here. It was a relic that didn’t know its curse was gone. Like all antiques, the piano had outlived its owner.

Her escape should be clean, too. It was only right.

Holding the wall for support, Phoenix peeked around the corner to the other side of her suite. The piano hadn’t moved, a dark spot against the wall. Even moonlight didn’t reach it.

Without the spell of its novelty to draw her to it, Phoenix felt repelled. The piano didn’t give off any odor she could detect, but it
should
. This piano was rotting in a way other pianos didn’t, and it wasn’t just the wood going sour. The Rosenkranz was rotting because of what lived inside of it. The Rosenkranz had been born angry, before Scott ever crossed its path.

No wonder she had recognized it when she was so young! It had been sent to find her, still trying to wed her to Scott, in death. Still hunting the glimmer of Freddie that lived in her.

But not after tonight.
Ashes to ashes, amen.

Phoenix saw Gloria’s pearl-colored lighter on the coffee table and snatched it up.
You’ve always got my back, cuz,
she thought. But she would need more than a lighter.

Dropping the lighter into the large pocket of her gown, Phoenix fumbled with the doors in her suite, opening a closet, then the door to the empty hallway before she found the bathroom hidden in an alcove. When she flipped on the light switch, the makeup mirror’s brightness dazed her. Slowly, the room unveiled its marble floor, modernist sculptures and well-maintained plants, Ronn’s gift to her. Sanctuary.

Phoenix glanced at herself in the mirror, but only once. She was so glad she remembered, she didn’t mind that her hair hadn’t been combed in days and that she could hardly see Sarge in her face because the lights made her so pallid. She was here, and she remembered.

I’m Phoenix Smalls.
The knowledge was electrifying.

The cabinet under the sink was empty, but her family members had left things on the counter she thought she could use: Nail polish remover. A small bottle of alcohol. A brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
Something
would work. She had options now.

When Phoenix went back to the dark living room, she was glad the piano was waiting. Disappearing was the least of what it could do.

“If you’d been gone, I would have found you again,” Phoenix whispered. “Believe it.”

Something scuttled inside the piano, barely plucking one of the strings. The high G.

Plaintive, almost simpering.

Phoenix stood over the piano, gazing at the gaps where keytops were missing on the keys, brown as coffee. In the light from the bathroom, the piano’s case looked flaky to her, like it could rub off on her hands. She would have to touch it, to move it. She couldn’t burn it here.

Pushing the piano was an ordeal. Phoenix was so enamored of her newly restored muscle and skin that she’d forgotten she was five-foot-seven and 130 pounds, so the piano outweighed her. People her size did not move pianos alone, she remembered.

Not that she would let that stop her.

Phoenix leaned her back and tailbone against the end of the piano, pushing off the wall with her bare feet. The piano ignored her. It
couldn’t
be this heavy, could it? Could it treat her like she wasn’t here, like the spirit she’d been in Scott’s world? Phoenix gave another push, throwing herself back hard against the piano.

The piano inched forward. The carpeting in the living room wasn’t as plush as the carpeting in her bedroom area, or she would have failed before she began, but she felt it move. Apparently, there were wheels hidden down there, and she’d given them some momentum.

Already panting, Phoenix gazed across the length of the suite, which seemed to have grown. The expanse between where she stood and the door to the hallway—the
carpeted
hallway, she remembered—looked like an odyssey. Not to mention the journey to the elevator, which could take twice as long. At this rate, she would be moving this piano until daylight.

So you’d better get effing started,
she thought, and pushed against the piano again.

Phoenix’s crawl across the suite with the piano took twenty minutes. Her body had felt weak before, but there were times now she nearly fell. Her wet skin clung to her gown’s Egyptian cotton. She was breathing as hard as she would be if she were running. But the piano was moving. She wasn’t supposed to be able to move it, but she could.

“Phee, what are you doing?”