The Lost Songs (22 page)

The voice tapered away, as if Saravette were leaving the phone and the room. Or hoping Lutie would pick up.

“Been remembering the list,” said Saravette. “Mama singing on the porch. Been thinking of the soft one, where birds have nests and foxes have holes, but little Baby Jesus has no place to rest.”

Lutie’s face was wet with tears.

Saravette spoke the words, using the rhythm but skipping the melody.

“I gotta say good-bye, baby girl,” whispered Saravette. “You ever heard the good-bye song from the Laundry List? Bet
you didn’t. Mama didn’t like it. She didn’t want to say good-bye. But I didn’t give her a choice.”

Saravette’s voice was thick with grief and thin on notes. But she sang.

She was right. Lutie didn’t know this one.

Then there was silence.

And then there was nothing.

Doria held that last chord just about forever, savoring how rich and huge it was. When she lifted her hands and feet, the sound kept swirling. Even the silence was big.

And in the silence, in the motionless emptiness of the church, she knew absolutely that she was not alone. Her body lost its sophistication, its musical skills, its coordination.

She was an animal and there was a predator out there.

She did not breathe in and she did not breathe out.

She grabbed her purse, slid off the bench, leaped backward to the little side door, through which a groom came for his wedding, or the pastor for the service. She flew through a narrow back hall with a restroom, a flower room and a drinking fountain, raced up the back stairs, ran down a connecting hall, and took the elevator into the day care center.

The cleaning staff was there.

“Oh, hi!” she said, her voice brittle. “Hi, how are you?”

Two women and a man regarded her doubtfully.

“Um. I was practicing the organ?” she said. “And I got panicky. Do you think—could you walk me to my car?”

“Where you parked? Wudn’t another car here when we came in.”

“Out front.”

“Oh. We’re at the side by the playground. You know, you didn’t ought to be by yourself in there at night.”

She couldn’t count the number of people who had told her that. They were right.

Aunt Tamika came out of the kitchen. “Lutie, baby? You crying?” She rushed to the sofa, dropped beside her, held her tight and rocked her. “Tell Aunt Mika. What’s wrong? I haven’t heard you cry like this in years, baby girl.”

Lutie handed over the cell phone. Aunt Tamika listened to Saravette’s message.

Then she listened to it again and sighed. “I used to love that one. ‘Where’s My Place to Rest?’ ” Aunt Tamika sang it softly, every sweet verse, taking Baby Jesus all the way to the manger.

Lutie lay against her aunt’s generous bosom. It was warm and soft. Their heartbeats merged. “I don’t know the other one. ‘Slow and Slower Still,’ ” said Lutie.

“That’s because you learned the list from your grandmother, but
we
three girls learned it from
our
grandmother. Our grandmother, she sang ‘Slow and Slower Still.’ But my mama—your MeeMaw—she purely didn’t like that one. I can’t remember the verses. But it’s about the hill of life, and Mabel is tired of climbing. Your MeeMaw, she wanted to believe that Mabel Painter never fell down. I don’t think my mother ever sang ‘Slow and Slower Still.’ I haven’t thought of it in years. I’m kind of touched that Saravette remembers.”

How gentle her voice was. As if it wasn’t only duty that
made her check on Saravette. As if she really did love her sister.

“Does Saravette mean she can’t keep going either?”

“Could be. Saravette is always boxing herself in some corner. I suppose next week I better try to find her and listen to what the struggle is now. I never know if I’m loving her or enabling her. I hate that word ‘enable.’ It is just not a word my mama would have used.”

Lutie braced herself. “Aunt Mika? The other day Saravette called me real early, and she never calls me, and I was sort of excited and proud. She begged me to come to her. She begged like she would die if I didn’t. So I skipped school, and I went, and it was awful. Everything about her is awful, and the place we met was awful, and the most awful thing of all was, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to listen. I wanted to run.”

Her aunt took a minute to recover from this news. But she didn’t yell. She said sadly, “I feel that way a lot of the time. She’s so hard, honey. Seeing Saravette is not rewarding, except it’s the right thing to do. What did she need from you?”

“She didn’t tell me. But she said she’s broken all the commandments now. It was a throwaway sentence. I don’t know if she knew what she was saying. But I knew. One of those commandments is ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Oh, Aunt Tamika, all I can think of is
Did she? Did she kill?
”

Lutie’s full weight pressed on her aunt, like a toddler falling asleep. She felt her aunt’s muscles tighten, felt the stillness of her lungs, felt the shudder of those lungs filling at last. But Aunt Tamika said nothing.

Lutie sat up straight. “She did kill somebody, didn’t she? And you know who.”

Tamika dusted herself off and stood. “I got to stir the sauce. Probably burned by now. That’s just Saravette’s way of talking. She could always get a person’s attention. She got
yours. Well, I know you don’t like salmon. And you think asparagus is disgusting because it makes your pee smell funny. So what do you want to have? The refrigerator is spilling over. You name it, we’ll cook it.”

“If my mother murdered somebody, I need to know.”

Uncle Dean was standing motionless under the arch that separated the kitchen from the family room. He held a platter of grilled salmon. It was tilting dangerously but he seemed not to notice.

Lutie clicked on her cell. She did not often play one aunt against the other, but it was time.

Aunt Grace picked up on the second ring. “Hey, girl.”

“Aunt Grace, I know Saravette killed somebody. Who was it?”

The aunt in the room and the aunt on the phone were silent.

Uncle Dean said, “Lutie, Saravette could have done a thousand bad things that we don’t know about and it’s not helpful to guess.”

“How do you know?” demanded Aunt Grace over the phone.

“Saravette told me Thursday. When I cut school.”

“You
saw
Saravette?” screamed Aunt Grace. “This wasn’t over the phone?”

“Lutie, believing anything Saravette says is fatal,” said Uncle Dean.

“I agree. Saravette caused a fatality. She’s my mother. I want to know who she killed.”

Doria used the automatic garage-door opener clipped to the visor. On went the interior garage lights and up went the door. She drove in, cut the engine and shut the garage doors behind
her. The lights stayed on in their watchful way, giving her a full two minutes to get inside the house before they went out.

The house was still empty.

The night would stretch on forever and tomorrow morning she would get up and drive into the city, and play two Sunday services at St. Bartholomew’s. Many adults would compliment her and many teenagers would walk past.

Her cell phone rang.

It would be her parents, checking on her.

She was dutiful. She answered.

“Dore? It’s me, Nell.”

“Nell,” said Doria, feeling disoriented.

“I was just thinking that we haven’t talked in about a hundred years. I miss you.”

Still standing in the archway, losing his grip on the salmon, Uncle Dean said, “I know. We’ll order pizza. Lutie, you love pizza.”

On the far side of town, Aunt Grace shouted into the phone and Lutie’s ear. “Let me talk to Mika!”

Aunt Tamika corrected the tilt of the salmon platter. “Lutie, your uncle is right. We cannot run around taking Saravette seriously. She’s just a sad crazy junkie.”

Uncle Dean and Aunt Tamika managed to get the salmon to land on the kitchen counter. Uncle Dean said, “I’m usually very careful about fat intake, but let’s indulge. I’ll refrigerate the salmon. Lutie, what do you want on your pizza?”

Lutie screamed into the phone. “Aunt Grace! Who did Saravette kill?”

Uncle Dean said he really wanted sausage; it’d been far too long since he’d had sausage. Caramelized onions. Maybe bacon. Definitely mushrooms.

Aunt Grace screamed that nobody was to say a word until she got there. If it had to be told, they all had to tell it. But she was opposed to the idea and felt Tamika had mishandled everything.

Aunt Tamika snatched the phone out of Lutie’s hands and said she had handled everything just fine. It was Saravette who’d screwed up, the way she always did, slicing apart other people’s lives without giving it a thought.

“No, I’ll pick up the pizzas,” said Uncle Dean into his own phone, although he hated to pick up pizza. The whole point of ordering pizza was that they delivered it.

He wants to get out of here, thought Lutie.

Next to her, Aunt Tamika was crying. From Lutie’s cell phone came Aunt Grace’s voice, and Lutie suddenly grasped that her aunt was already on the way over, which was amazing and rather frightening. How fast was she driving? Aunt Grace! Who lobbied for laws to prevent people from talking on cell phones while they drove!

“Well, I’m off!” said her uncle, as if he planned to fly to Europe and would see them in a few weeks.

Aunt Grace was shouting, “Put Mika on the phone. Ask her should we have Veola come over?”

They all know, thought Lutie. They’re all in on it. My aunts, my uncle, my pastor. They all know.

So three things are true.

My mother is Saravette.

Saravette is a murderer.

I am the daughter of a murderer.