The Lost Songs (21 page)

MeeMaw. On the little porch, with its bright red flowers in their blue cans, and the meadow stretching out. Be you still alive? she had cried to the dark sky and the dark unknown. Be you coming home?

Lutie wept. “And did Saravette come home when MeeMaw was still alive? I don’t ever remember her being around.”

“Once.”

“Was I there?”

“No.”

“Were you there?”

“No.”

Lutie touched the slender rectangle of her cell phone inside her pants pocket. She had not answered Saravette’s phone call an hour ago, but Saravette had left a message. Why couldn’t you have sent messages to your mama when she needed you? Lutie thought, hating Saravette. Why were you so mean?

“Run on in,” said Miss Veola, and Lutie knew that the old woman needed to cry. Whether for Saravette or Eunice or the world, Lutie did not know.

Lutie let herself into the house. Saravette had come home
once
? How cruel. But maybe it had been a good visit, and that was why Saravette had stayed in the area.

The garage door opened. Lutie was so glad not to be alone anymore. Aunt Tamika and Uncle Dean were back from a satisfying Saturday of shopping. “You have a good day?” said Aunt Tamika, kissing and hugging her and hanging up plastic dress bags.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Anything happen?” asked Uncle Dean.

“No, sir.”

“I got a text this afternoon from Miss Veola,” said Aunt Tamika. “A professor wants to record the Laundry List? Sounds to me like something happening.”

Lutie felt the strong women in her life and history calling to her. Do something with your life! Sing! Study! Star! Get your ticket out!

How envious she was of girls who were not trying, who let life puddle around them while they laughed, and did their hair, and had boyfriends.

“Here’s how I look at it,” said her uncle. “You make a name for yourself with the songs. You use the recordings to get into a top-tier music conservatory.” He set packages on the kitchen counter and admired the shopping bags. “On the other hand, I’m not sure I want you majoring in music. You have to think of jobs, Lutie, and a decent income. Expertise in science might be a better ticket. You can always do music on the side.”

It’s Saturday, thought Lutie, and the professor drove away from Chalk. He could maybe come back tomorrow afternoon and cruise around, song-hunting on a Sunday. But he has to be at work Monday through Friday. That gives me a week, anyway.

Her aunt harped on the Laundry List. “You know, Lutie,”
she said, “to whom the Lord has given much, from that girl much is expected.”

“I’m giving a ton,” snapped Lutie. “I’m getting terrific grades. I’m winning prizes. What more do you want? Anyway, Saint Paul was not referring to music.”

“Wow,” said her uncle. “Maybe nothing was happening today, but all that nothing sure got you stirred up.”

“What do you want for dinner?” asked Aunt Tamika, trying to make peace.

“I ate. I had a plate from Miss Kendra.”

“Now, there’s a strange woman,” said Uncle Dean.

Lutie wanted to tell them what the professor had said to Miss Kendra and what Doria had said back. But she had never mentioned Doria to her aunt and uncle, and Doria took a lot of explaining. Meanwhile, the cell phone in her pocket weighed so much with its silent hovering message from Saravette that Lutie thought maybe her pants seam would rip.

She flopped down on the sofa to text everybody and see what they were doing tonight.

Miss Kendra drove Doria back to the CVS where Doria’s mother’s Honda was parked. “You were the best volunteer, Doria. You worked hard, you were cheerful and you made friends with little kids. I’m going to use what you said in our newsletter. ‘The temperature of being neighborly.’ ”

“I had a good time,” said Doria. She had had a profound time, but you were not supposed to say things like that. Although maybe with Miss Kendra you could.

Miss Kendra waited in her car until she heard Doria’s engine turn over, then honked her horn in farewell and drove away.

Doria drove out of the CVS parking lot. When she reached her driveway, she remembered that her parents had joined First Methodist’s revolving dinner club. Tonight was their turn to bring the main dish, and her mother had labored over it as if the future depended on what she brought.

What
does
the future depend on? wondered Doria.

The day had been so full, so busy—yet it was only seven o’clock on a Saturday. Everybody else in the world was doing something interesting. Movies. Parties. Friends.

Friends like Nell and Stephanie. Failure to text was failure to care. They had shrugged about violin and shrugged about French horn and now they were shrugging about her.

The friends of this afternoon—if they had been friends—had evaporated like a puddle in the road. Now she had to sit alone in an empty house, where solitude would slap her in the face. Doria turned the car around and headed back to Court Hill to practice.

First Methodist was dark and silent.

Doria parked and got out of the car. The heat of the day had not dissipated, and the dark had a warm enveloping feel. She let herself into the church and locked the door behind her. Her footsteps were silent on the carpeted aisles.

A show-offy mood came over her. She didn’t want to learn new notes; she wanted to hear herself shine. Prove she had something to offer.

She started with a Handel symphony, the one in F, in which sparkling flutes danced all over the keyboard. It had a brutal pedal part. Her toes and heels darted up and down the fat wooden pedal board. The corners of each page had been turned so many times that the final measures were discolored from her fingerprints.

Then she played a huge Bach prelude, also in F, which opened with a massive pedal solo. Doria had to grip the bench to keep her balance.

The church rocked.

Now the last movement of her Vierne symphony: music to bring down a ceiling, and an audience.

Train prowled.

Night had become more comfortable than day. By day, you were on display; your body and your face and your failures were right up front, where teachers and preachers and parents and the competition could stare at you, and judge you. By night you were shadow, safe inside your skin.

In Chalk, many preferred the night. People leaned on cars and slouched on porches, visiting. Everybody seemed slow. Slow to speak, slow to move, slow to think. Train took out his knife and played with it. His own hands seemed slow.

In a vacant lot, a fire had been lit in an old oil barrel. Men had gathered around, talking softly and laughing.

Train thought of the TV clip where that kid became his own bonfire. Where the parents of the boys who’d set him ablaze kept saying into the camera, “Our sons didn’t do it!” But Train could tell. They knew their kids had done it.

Once, in elementary school, there had been a bonfire fund-raiser. Train had had his first s’more. He loved toasting that marshmallow, pressing it down with a chunk of chocolate, careful not to snap his graham crackers. He remembered how he’d wolfed down the s’more as the bonfire wolfed dry wood.

He drifted, skirting the circles of light from streetlamps. On the move, like a predator, like a panther or jackal easing through the grass in the night.

And there, in the parking lot at First Methodist, was the Honda Train had stolen earlier that day. It was the only car in the lot.

He chose a door that he felt would not open directly into the sanctuary. When he put his hands on the door, it was vibrating. Doria must be making some serious noise.

Train put his shiny new key in the lock and it turned.

He was in a windowless hallway, which was lit by
EXIT
signs at each end. A long low table was covered with pamphlets, crayon bags, name tags and a basket of markers. There was a couch for people who had to leave in the middle of a service to calm a crying baby, or who needed to cry themselves.

To his left was a big wooden door with a small square glass window. Train peeked through the window and saw that he was at the rear of the sanctuary. Pews spread down two aisles. The organ was at the opposite end, high and exposed. There were lights both under and above the music rack and at the organist’s feet. Everything else was dark.

Doria was a slim shifting silhouette, eyes fastened straight ahead on the music. He marveled that she could produce all those notes without glancing down. It didn’t look as if she could even see her flying feet because the keyboard projected out over her lap.

He cracked the door. Music flooded out, as if he had breached a dam. Immense shuddering chords assaulted him. Train eased inside and held the door carefully, so that it closed soundlessly. Not that Doria could possibly hear a door. She must be drugged from all that sound. Train blinked, getting used to the layout, and out from behind his eyes came the dead eye, the eye of Nate.

Course, Nate still had the other eye. It was probably enough.

Train was no longer hot and burning. He was shivering,
like some little kid locked out of the house in the rain. He could not reverse what he and his brother had done. His only hope—although “hope” was a pretty word, and Train had nothing pretty in mind—was to do something worse. If it piled up high, wide and ugly, the aggregate of his crimes would be impressive.

He would be the baddest.

He would fill the whole category and people would respect him.

He would no longer wake up at night wondering what it had felt like when the barbed wire pierced Nate’s eyeball.

His finger slid along the blade of his knife, but his inner vision turned again to fire, those boys tossing a little fuel on a T-shirt, and
whoompf!
A living torch running down the street.

If you were going to be the baddest, you might as well do something that would make a good video.

Aunt Tamika and Uncle Dean loved to cook. They discussed in detail whether they had the right ingredients and who would do what. Tonight they were grilling salmon. Uncle Dean went to the patio to turn on the grill. Aunt Tamika started chopping vegetables, and they called back and forth about a sauce decision.

They had one of those killer kitchens where you could really cook.

Killers, thought Lutie, feeling again the weight of her cell phone. The message she had not listened to stuck up like the tines of a pitchfork left in the grass.

Aunt Tamika and Uncle Dean were peeling and measuring and stirring.

Lutie lay on the sofa, and now at last she played Saravette’s message.

“Lutie?” Saravette said it like Miss Kendra:
Loo
-dih? With that little question mark. “I’ve done bad things, baby girl. I’m trusting Miss Veola and Tamika and Grace to be sure you don’t. Some of the bad things I meant to do, and some I’ve done a thousand times and I didn’t care then and I don’t care now and I had fun. But one of the bad things—I’m so sorry.” Saravette’s voice cracked. “It was an accident, Lutie. Or maybe not. I’ve never known. It happened and there I was. Lutie, honey, the other day, I couldn’t talk to you after all. I meant to talk. But I was scared of you. Things ain’t good for me, Lutie. But I want you to know that I want things good for you.”