The Midwife’s Playlist: A Now Entering Hillford Novel

by Lennox, Piper

  Our neighborhood was really beautiful, after sundown. If I ignored the eyesore that was Ford’s bedroom, I could peek past the roof and see our other neighbors’ homes, lit up down the street like a ribbon of stars. If I leaned out far enough and looked up, I could see the real ones.

  “...fucking funny? Huh?”

  Reese’s voice splintered the air between our houses. Usually, he was soft-spoken and observant, the kind of man everyone called “private” as though he were a hermit, even though we saw him frequently around town, pulling out dead trunks with his winch for spare cash.

  Now, though, that soft voice laced with smoker’s breath came at me like a sonic boom. I recoiled after I heard it, hitting my head on the window.

  And then I heard Ford’s voice, echoing his father’s in some kind of challenge.

  I could see their shadows on the kitchen floor through the lower window. One looming and black as ink, the other shorter, quicker to react when the taller one would shift.

  A sharp crack filtered through their window screen. I heard glass jars or bottles rattling against each other.

  Then, it was silent.

  I shut the curtains. My heartbeat bleated through my ears; my fingers were numb. It felt like my blood was gelatin, stuck in my veins.

  I heard their porch door slam.

  The yard was dark. When I could be sure the figure I saw, as I peeked through the split between the panels, was Ford and not his father, I grabbed my bathrobe from the hook and snuck downstairs.

  My parents were already on the sleeping porch for the evening. Talk about hypocrisy: when I dared complain that my room was too hot, they called me dramatic, but here it was barely June, and they’d been sleeping outside for the better part of two months.

  The porch was on the other side of the house, so I knew they hadn’t heard what I heard. I crept through the kitchen, bare feet clinging to the tile, and slipped out the back door.

  He was in my tire swing.

  “Ford?” I kept my voice low. Lower than the kick of his heels through the dirt, worn into the grass because I always skidded myself to a stop. Lower than the crickets in every tuft of weeds around us, quieting as I passed.

  He stopped swinging. But he didn’t leave.

  I put my hand on the rope and turned him to me, until his face was bathed in moonlight. He kept his lips pursed as I sat on the ground by the swing.

  When he relaxed, I saw the split at the corner of his mouth, the skin around it already eggplant-purple.

  Ford stared at me. His breath was fast and deep, so different from the doll-like stillness of his limbs. Even the wind seemed like it stopped.

  “Does he do that a lot?” I grabbed a stick and dug the old soda caps out of the dirt. Every time one flipped up to the surface, it flung a puff of dust across my feet.

  He licked the cut and winced. “More since Mom died.”

  “Does he hurt Caroline?”

  “No. I’d kill him if he did.”

  I nodded. I believed him.

  “We can call the police.” I flipped a bottle cap up into the air with my thumb; Ford caught it in his hands with a clap that shattered the silence, down to the street like a shot.

  “No. They’d put me and Caroline in foster care, like what happened with the Blanchard twins.”

  “Foster care would still be better than getting beat up, I bet.”

  “You think they’d keep me and her together, Easton?” Ford sneered, but I was too caught up in the fact he’d said my name—the first time, in all the years I’d known him. “People want babies and little kids. A family would come and get Caroline right away, and I’d get stuck in an orphanage. Or wherever they put the kids nobody wants.” He turned the cap between his thumb and forefinger, then held it up and squinted, pretending to block out the moon. “I wouldn’t be able to keep her safe.”

  I noticed another bruise, deep yellow on the inside of his arm. “You’d rather stay here with him? Even if you’d both be better off in different places?”

  “It wouldn’t be better.” I shrank back under the glare he gave me, that cut on his mouth like a single black stitch. “Not if Caroline and me aren’t together.”

  I nodded quickly, but still didn’t understand. Maybe it was because I didn’t have any siblings.

  “Do me a favor,” he said, hopping out of the tire, “keep this between us, okay?”

  Again, I nodded. I’d already been planning the best way to break the news to my parents, but I knew there was a decent chance they wouldn’t believe me. They liked Reese. Everyone did. And they still didn’t believe me that Ford flipped me off, the day he moved in. Hell, they didn’t even believe me that my old curtains were just fine.

  “What was he like back then?” I asked. “Before your mom....”

  Ford did a sort of double-take my way as he hitched up his pants. They were too short in the legs and too wide in the waist.

  Then I realized, no: Ford was just too tall, too thin.

  “Whenever he got drunk, if I made him mad? He’d just give me the belt or something, but, like, worse than normal. Mom would yell at him to stop and he’d drive off for a while, come back the next morning, and pretend it didn’t happen.” The breath he took in his silence made my chest hurt. “Now she’s gone, so I guess there’s nobody to stop him.”

  I bit my lip, unconsciously choosing the same spot as his split. I wanted to tell Ford that, if I could, I would stop his dad. But I didn’t know how.

  “I’m sorry your mom is gone.” I stood, shaking the dirt from my bathrobe. “She was real nice to me.”

  “Nice to everybody.” He kicked the tire swing and put his hands in his pockets. “She liked you a lot, you know.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah. Always going on about what a sweet little girl you were.” Ford scoffed, but I wasn’t offended. In fact, his words made me blush.

  “It’s awful that she never even got to hold Caroline,” I whispered, and suddenly felt a deep, burning kind of sadness in my chest for Ford. At his mother’s funeral, just days after Caroline was born, I’d felt sad for him—for all of them—but it was nothing like this. Sudden and shattering, like a chisel right to my ribs.

  Ford watched the tear skate along my nose, but he didn’t speak.

  We walked back to our houses slowly: him on his side of the fence, and me on mine. Our fingers dragged along the boards with a staggered schip-schip-schip sound, bare feet combing through the grass, until we got to our kitchen doors.

  “Ford?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You remember when we were little, and you asked me what color your voice was?”

  His tongue tucked against his cheek as he smiled. “Yep. Brown.” His eyes flashed to mine in the moonlight. “Like shit.”

  My face grew warm. “I lied. It was blue-green, kind of teal when you were loud. But when you were quieter, it was more of a mint color.”

  We reached the gate. He toyed with the latch and said, “‘Was’?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, and it felt like chicken wire in my throat. “I can’t see sounds anymore.” It still hurt to tell people I’d lost my ability. The doctors warned my parents it was likely; age six, seven, all the way to ten, the colors and shapes faded. While every other girl in my grade was worried about menstruation and shaving, I prepared myself for the worst change puberty would bring: the day my colors were gone for good.

  “Not even music?” His head tilted. I must have imagined it, the way he looked sad for me.

  “No. But…but sometimes I can still kind of catch it, if there aren’t any other sounds in the background, and my eyes are closed.”

  “Then let’s try. I’ll sing something.” He drew his lip between his teeth, thinking, then nodded. “Okay, I’m ready. Close your eyes.”

  Let’s try. My entire life, the ability was mine. Mine to own, mine to explain—mine to lose. Doctors told me it was up to me to cope: first to find a way to live with it and then, when I finally did, a
way to live without it.

  Not once had someone used the words, “let’s,” “we,” or anything that indicated I wasn’t in this alone.

  I shut my eyes.

  Ford’s voice shook when he started, low and so soft, I didn’t recognize the song until the second line: “Hallelujah.”

  Concentrate. I wanted to see something so badly—for myself, to know it was still here. And for Ford, to somehow atone for that lie I told him, all those years ago.

  For the rest of my life, I would wonder if I imagined the flash of hunter green that appeared as he reached the chorus. But maybe it didn’t matter if it was real or not. Just that we believed it was.

  “Deep green,” I said, as soon as he finished. I opened my eyes to find him blushing all the way to his ears. “It...it was faint, but I think I saw it. Your voice is deeper now than it used to be.”

  Smiling, he swallowed and let out a breath.

  “You sing pretty good, you know.”

  His blush darkened as he waved me off. “Mom always wanted me to join the church choir. I hate singing in front of people.”

  I wanted to ask why he didn’t mind singing in front of me, but couldn’t. I wasn’t sure what answer I wanted.

  “Your mom,” I said suddenly, as a warm wind pushed my hair over my face and pushed his off his forehead, “hers was bright purple. Like the sign in front of Owens Drugstore.”

  Ford’s gaze seemed to grow hazy. It was hard to tell, because mine did, first.

  “Did you ever listen to ‘Hallelujah,’ the Jeff Buckley one? When you could still see colors really well?” I nodded, and he hesitated before asking, “Could you tell me what it looked like?”

  “Um...it was a lot of different things,” I began, pulling the memory from the tangle of songs and shades in my brain. “I used to be able to see instruments and stuff, too, so it—it was really big shapes that would move and blend together. Like smoke, but it all had color. Orange-y, reddish yellow, like...peaches.

  “Brown,” I continued, “like dark chocolate, and a burnt-looking red. Where our road turns into dirt? It was that color. And a kind of sweet-tea brown, too, like when you leave a glass sitting in the window, right in front of the sun.”

  Ford was quiet, breathing heavily, but evenly.

  “And that was just the music. His voice? It was this bright, bright blue, I guess cobalt. It looked so beautiful with all those colors behind it.” My smile, vague as it was, surprised me. Recalling how vivid music used to be brought me nothing but sadness lately, thinking of all I’d lost. But in that moment, remembering “Hallelujah,” I felt a spark of happiness. At least I’d seen it for a little while. At least I’d remember the colors, no matter how much they faded.

  “My mom loved that song.” Ford flicked the latch to the gate again, and my sadness for him flooded back. For his sister, too, and even their father. If slowly losing my colors felt like torture to me, I could only imagine the hell the three of them were still going through, losing someone like her so quickly.

  Tears gathered in the bridge of my nose, tingling like static. I sniffed.

  “’Night, Easton,” Ford whispered. He draped his arms over the gate and smiled at me. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen him do: smiling at me, for one; using my name again, for another; and, to top it all off, managing to look completely fine in the wake of whatever had just happened. And here I was, devastated for him, feeling like my heart was held together with Scotch tape.

  I held my door open by its screen, feeling the mesh bow out against my palm and tug at its staples. “Goodnight, Ford.”

  He went into his home. I went into mine.

  We never talked about that night again, but something changed. We were no longer enemies.

  We weren’t really friends, either: while the name-calling and glaring over the fence stopped, it wasn’t like we chatted at the bus stop, or sat together at lunch. Honestly, nothing on the surface seemed different at all.

  It was only on nights like that one—when I heard what no one else heard, or saw what no one else saw—that Ford and I interacted beyond a passing nod. If it was warm, I could find him in my tire swing; he’d scoot to one side and I’d take the other, our backs eventually meeting in the middle when we got too tired to sit up on our own. And when it was cold, I could find him in his garage, lying in the bed of his father’s truck with a camping lantern by his head.

  We rarely talked about his father, or their fights. I’d ask him if he’d seen whatever movie kids at school were raving over that month; he’d ask how my 4H work was going, or what book I was reading. Sometimes I’d read it out loud for him.

  Once, he fell asleep. I only noticed when his leg twitched, the heel of his foot clanging hard against the metal.

  For a minute, I watched his chest rise and fall, his brow scrunch up like he was dreaming something unpleasant.

  By then, we were thirteen. I was starting to feel more and more like a young lady every day, even though I still didn’t know just what that meant.

  I traced the curve of his lower lip with my stare and wondered what it would be like to kiss him. If I’d be able to feel that thin scar in his lip, or taste the cigarettes he and Tanner smoked by the creek during gym class.

  “Ford.” I hit his shoulder, hard. I wasn’t sure why at the time. Later, after I was shivering back in my own bed, I would realize I rushed to wake him because I was afraid.

  Afraid I would kiss him. Afraid that, if I got close enough, I wouldn’t be able to help myself.

  “What?” He cracked his eyes and glared at me.

  “You fell asleep.”

  “So? It’s my garage, I’ll sleep here if I want to.” He sat up, anyway, and rubbed his face with his shirt. It lifted; I could see his back, broad and sinewy overnight, and had to look away.

  “I’m getting out of here,” he sighed. I thought he meant the garage, until he looked down at the latest bruise. It was on his chest, just off-center, like his dad meant to knock his heart right out of him. “Soon as I’m old enough, I’m gone.”

  He’d said it before, out on the tire swing. I just nodded along, same as always.

  But for the first time, I was sad to hear him say it, and even sadder to pretend I didn’t mind.

  Seven

  “Do you ever talk about it with him?”

  I close the hood and motion for Easton to get in. In a slight twist, she hands me the keys. I can’t help but grin like a kid as I get in the driver’s side and she takes the passenger’s.

  Then I feel my smile drop, because I realize she’s still waiting on an answer.

  “No point.”

  “No point? Don’t you want an apology? Aren’t you pissed at him for how he treated you?”

  Instinctively, I run my tongue across the scar at the corner of my mouth. It’s thinner than fishing line, so I’m not sure I actually feel it. I just know it’s there.

  “There’s nothing he can do to take it back, and there’s nothing I can say to erase it. All it would accomplish is making him feel like shit.”

  “And? I think he deserves to feel like shit for a little while.”

  “His liver is destroyed, Easy.” I flex my hand on the gearshift. “I don’t need to make him feel like shit. Karma did it for me.”

  She gets quiet, so lost in thought she doesn’t even call me out on using her nickname. Maybe it’s progress.

  Not that it matters. My mantra is the same now as it was the last time I lived in Hillford: as soon as I get the chance, I’m gone.

  “Car sounds good. Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it. I couldn’t let you take it back to your grandma like that.” I debate my next sentence before deciding I don’t have anything to lose: “So. You had just left Barkley? Surprised we didn’t cross paths.”

  She shifts on her seat, uncrossing her legs and then switching them. She’s got these old jersey shorts on. They ride high, and I hate that my brain’s recording the sight for future use.

  �
�I hadn’t just left Barkley. I was there a while ago, then...you know, ran some errands. Oh, God, I hope the milk is still cold.”

  While she twists in her seat to rummage through the grocery bag in back, those little shorts creeping even higher, I will myself to focus on the road. “Cut the shit,” I tell her, forcing a laugh. “I saw you at the auto shop.”

  She freezes. Her ass has now bumped my elbow twice, and I remember exactly why I didn’t go find her the minute I got into town. Reason One: I suspected she hated me.

  Reason Two: I couldn’t trust myself not to grab that perfect body and hold it against mine like an ice pack.

  “Sit down,” I tell her. “Seatbelt.”

  Maybe it’s because she’s still stalling her answer, but she doesn’t protest.

  “I get it,” I tell her, when the road ends and we’re facing a T-shaped intersection. One way leads to Filigree, my old hometown; the other, to the city. “You wanted to avoid me. I would, too.”

  “It wasn’t to be mean,” she says softly, picking at a thread in her shorts. Jesus, what I wouldn’t give to see them unravel down to nothing.

  “I know it wasn’t. Not that I wouldn’t deserve it.” I sit back and pull up the parking brake, wiggling the gearshift in and out of neutral. We listen to the engine. She rolls down her window and the smell of cut grass hits us like steam.

  “Why did you kiss me, last night?”

  I look at her. At first, I think she’s staring out her window at the field beside us. Then I realize she’s staring at herself in the side mirror.

  “You don’t want to know,” I whisper.

  “Are you....” She pauses, swallowing, and turns her head, staring at my hand on the shifter as it unscrews and re-screws the knob. “Are you still in love with me?”

  As soon as her eyes land on mine, I look away. Back at that T-shaped choice in front of us, the two options that don’t even matter: we both know, in just a few minutes, we’ll turn this car around and go right back the way we came.

  “How could I not be?”

  It’s the first time I’ve admitted it to myself since I left: my heart doesn’t just ache when I think about her because I feel shitty for leaving. It hurts because that’s what happens, when you’re in love with a person who hates you. When you love someone you can’t have, ever again.