The Lost Songs (8 page)

Kelvin’s last class was also chemistry, but he was not in the honors section. He liked science, but not enough to get involved. He was, he decided, a C-plus person all around. Just a fraction above average, and happy to be there.

When the bell rang, Kelvin didn’t race out of the room like everybody else. Kelvin was never in a hurry. He moseyed along, enjoying the scenery, which was all he ever did.

But suddenly Train blocked the corridor.

Not good. Everybody knew that Train was under orders from DeRade to go off the track. Kelvin did not want to be there when it happened. He sensed desperation in Train’s hot jittery presence. Train probably felt cornered. He needed to catch up to DeRade or else surpass him. What surpassed blinding somebody? Kelvin didn’t want to go there.

He thought of Nate, who had only one eye. Maybe he had a glass eye. Maybe the dead one was still there but drying up. Maybe they’d sewn his eyelids together. Maybe Nate had a hole and a patch.

Ignoring Train or walking around him would be like challenging him to a duel, so Kelvin said pleasantly, “Hey.”

“You know that girl Doria?”

“Sure do,” said Kelvin, since there was no point in lying.

“She in that church alone every night?”

Kelvin didn’t have the slightest idea what church Doria went to, never mind whether she went there alone, but he said, “Nah. That’s the busiest church in town. They got Eldercare and Alcoholics Anonymous and a day care and softball teams and a women’s club and Bible studies and I don’t know what all. Parking lot’s always full.”

Kelvin half saluted a farewell and sauntered on, making a mental note to tell Doria to watch herself, but forgetting by the time he’d reached the end of the hall.

S
chool ended.

Lutie never took the school bus home. Buses left within two minutes of the last bell, and she refused to sprint out of the building and throw herself into some smelly old vehicle. She liked to hang out, see what everybody planned to do next, have a Coke and then decide on a home. Which one did she want today?

Lutie considered going to Aunt Grace’s for the night, because she felt like a restaurant, and Aunt Grace always felt like a restaurant, and they might try one of the new ones in the new shopping center, with the new menus and the new flavors.

But Aunt Grace was a suspicious soul. You didn’t run a successful Department of Motor Vehicles if you were naïve. Lutie did not want Aunt Grace to find out that she had gone alone into the worst part of the city, let alone that she had gone to see Saravette. When her sister’s name came up, Aunt Grace always turned her head, as if she couldn’t even face the sound of the name, never mind the person who wore it.

Aunt Grace was less likely to deal with Saravette than Aunt Tamika.

Saravette would call Tamika’s cell phone. Aunt Tamika would sigh, long and low, and fish in her purse for the bottle of aspirin she kept there. When the call was over, she would sit for a minute and gather herself. If Lutie asked what Saravette had said, Aunt Tamika would shrug. If Tamika drove into town to deal with Saravette, Uncle Dean usually went with her.

Sometimes it was police who called.

Aunt Tamika would be exceptionally polite to them, as if she were interviewing for a job. Then she would go off by herself and when she came back, her eyes would be red.

There were never explanations.

If Lutie presented a form for school where “parent or guardian” had to be filled in, Aunt Tamika would write her name and Uncle Dean’s in such big square print that it filled the space and the margins, to prove there was absolutely no room for the name Saravette.

Lutie really did not know what Aunt Tamika would do if she found out about Lutie’s trip uptown today. Her aunts and uncle had never said so—they never would—but their ruling fear was that Lutie would follow Saravette’s steps instead of theirs. They were always worried about crime, which at any minute could sweep a person up because that was what crime did. “Crime is a wide broom,” said Aunt Tamika, “and those little straws on the edge catch everything.”

Aunt Tamika and Uncle Dean had excellent jobs at the headquarters of a national bank. They had a big beautiful home in a big beautiful subdivision called Willowmere, the prettiest word Lutie had ever heard. They dressed wonderfully. Lutie was always eager to see what neat stuff they had bought. Aunt Tamika had fabulous shoes and scarves, lots of handbags and terrific jewelry, all big, bright and spangly, like
Aunt Tamika herself. Uncle Dean had been a football player in high school and college, but now his broad shoulders were covered by fine suits in navy or charcoal, and he looked exactly like the men on television business reports, and talked like them, and worried about the same things.

Lutie loved Aunt Tamika and Uncle Dean, and she loved their house and her bedroom there, with every possible comfort times ten. It was a million miles and a million dollars from Chalk, where Tamika, Grace and Saravette had grown up.

Lutie dragged her thoughts from Saravette.

Outdoors, it rained like an upside-down river. The lobby was packed with kids waiting for the rain to end or their mothers to arrive in cars. Lutie lifted her closed umbrella. She was the only person who had one.

“Whoa, Loot! You brought an umbrella? You scared of water, girl?”

It was Train. Lutie did not want to deal with him. He had been so sweet, back when he and Lutie and Kelvin and Rebecca and Jenny had been in kindergarten together. He could still be sweet if he wanted something enough. You had to be careful. Charm could be as vicious as a knife.

Train nodded at the kids milling around, texting and phoning and begging for rides. “You seen Doria?”

Although she had just watched Doria walk out into the rain, Lutie peered intently back into the building. “I don’t see her,” she said. She did not risk a friendly smile. There was no telling what Train would do with a smile. Instead she lifted her phone. Texting came in handy. Nobody was offended if you texted while they were talking to you.

Lutie texted Aunt Grace, and then Aunt Tamika, and by then, Train had wandered off. He had been at the top of the class in first and second grade, especially in spelling. But now he had as much interest in academics as a flea.

There was never a good time to be on Train’s GPS. But if Lutie warned Doria to be afraid—be very afraid—Doria might tell her parents. Her parents might call the school. The cops might stop by the high school to chat with Train.

The last person to discuss one of the Greene brothers with the cops was now blind in one eye.

Better would be to make sure Doria did not practice alone in the dark.

Outdoors, rain swiped Doria like the flat of some great wet hand. She turned her face up and let the rain drum on her skin.

School was so hard. Not classes; classes were easy. But school itself: that shocking clump of kids and conversation, society and loneliness, noise and silence. Most days when the push and shove of school was over, Doria would text Nell or Stephanie, for the relief of old times.

Stephanie had beaten her to it. Sweet Steph was texting Doria now, right on time.

Doria and Stephanie had met in elementary school band. Stephanie played French horn. But music was not Steph’s love. She wanted to be an engineer. Her doodles were architectural and airy, spun with trestles and spans. In high school, Stephanie quit band to take more math classes. The band teacher was distraught. Horn players were scarce.

Stephanie, like Nell, had shrugged. She had other goals.

Doria felt better about her lonely day. Nell would have texted Steph and told her that their old friend Doria had a crush on K in chorus. Nell would have found not only the chorus’s Facebook page, but she would have identified Kelvin and gone to his page too. Doria braced herself for Nell’s analysis: “He boasts about doing nothing. If he’s the best your school has to offer, move back here.” Doria loved that old
refrain—move back here!—but she would ignore it to defend Kelvin. He isn’t the best at school, but he’s the best to be around.

But Stephanie’s message was generic.
WUWH. WUZup
. Wish you were here. What’s up?

Normally Doria loved all the after-school walking she did, each trek a little interlude between places and activities. Today the short hike to First Methodist seemed insuperable. She hardly had the energy to hoist her shoes over the puddles and the mud.

On a gloomy day like this, little light penetrated the stained glass and entered the church. Doria did not usually turn on the lights that hung from the soaring ceiling, only the lamp over the music rack. She really would be alone in the dark.

Her actual church job was at St. Bartholomew’s, twenty miles north. She didn’t have her own car to drive there and in any case wouldn’t waste time going back and forth. She practiced at her parents’ church instead. The thing with pipe organs was, you certainly didn’t have one at home to practice on.

The first Sunday after they’d moved to Court Hill, the Bells decided to try out the handsome brick church in the center of town. Her father bragged to the minister, “My daughter Doria is a brilliant organist.”

Word went out. The very next week, she was asked to sub at a little country church called Wesley Chapel, way out on Lonny Creek Road. Right away her parents were suspicious of the Carolina countryside. A church in a field might have rattlesnake handlers and three-hour sermons given by crazed men with spittle around their mouths.

But Wesley Chapel was a charming church, tall and thin and tiny, with black shutters and plain glass, and pine trees right up against the windows, as if they wanted to come in too. Literally every person in the congregation came up to say
hi (actually, they said “hey”) and to tell Doria how wonderfully she had played and wouldn’t she be their permanent organist?

You have a crummy little electronic organ, about as musical as a coffeepot, she didn’t say out loud. I don’t want to play it ever again. I don’t want an organ job at all, and certainly not here, where everybody’s a hundred years old.

She found an organ teacher through an online search of local college music faculty. Their first lesson went on until Doria was too tired to play, which had never happened before, and Mr. Bates said, “I know of an excellent job opening. You’ll audition. We’ll drive up Wednesday.”

So there she was, in Mr. Bates’s car the following Wednesday. Her parents had insisted that she text them constantly with updates, but Doria forgot. She loved the instrument the minute she sat down. Three manuals. A rich mellow sound with bright exciting mixtures. She played a toccata, her fingers flying over the keyboards, flinging the chords from one hand to the other. She got the job.

The following Sunday, she discovered that she was the youngest person in the choir loft by twenty-five years.