The Lost Songs

by Caroline B. Cooney

  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.”

  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.

  “Like me, O Lord.

  Where’s my place to rest?

  You holding it for me?

  There a manger for my head?

  O Lord, I need some rest.”

  “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.

  “Slow and slower still

  Lord, I struggle up this hill.”

  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 eng
ine 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.