When Mockingbirds Sing (9781401688233)

by Coffey, Billy

  “I’m tired of you hidin’ all the time, Leah Norcross, and I won’t abide by you keepin’ secrets. Know what my momma said to me last night? She said I can’t be friends with you no more unless we fix this. Now, you tell me why you had to make a picture showin’ something so awful.”

  “B-because the R-rainbow M-man told me to,” Leah said. She propped herself up on her elbows and hiked down her dress.

  “No,” Allie said. “I don’t believe that. The Rainbow Man’s good”—if he’s real, she did not add—“he’s good, Leah, and no good Rainbow Man would tolerate you hurtin’ Mr. Barney like that.”

  “B-but that’s what he wuh-wanted,” she whimpered. “Duh-don’t you believe me?”

  “Why wouldn’t you let me see that painting?”

  Leah stood up and shook her head.

  “Why’s there a storm coming?”

  “I duh-don’t know.”

  “When will it get here?” Leah shook her head again, and Allie screamed, “Why ain’t you tellin’ me stuff? Can’t you see I’m tryin’ to be your friend?”

  Leah’s lips trembled. Her throat went tight/loose/tight. She screamed in a voice so grieving that it sounded primal—“Your muh-mommy’s guh-going t-to duh-die.”

  The words struck Allie with such force that they robbed her of breath. She thought Leah had become confused, that she’d misspoken, that in the stress of the moment she’d listened to something the Rainbow Man sang and translated it the wrong way. But Leah said it again—“Your muh-mommy’s guh-going to duh-die”—and this time it was softer and slower and Allie could hear it plain.

  Leah’s voice cracked beneath the weight she carried. Her face was contorted and her eyebrows bunched as if saying it hurt just as bad—worse, even—as hearing it. “I truh-tried to t-tell him to do suh-humething, to move the stuh-storm away. I buh-begged him, Allie, but he wuh-won’t. He suh-said some things have to ha-happen and there’s no chuh-changing them no muh-matter how we wuh-wish them so.”

  Allie slowly shook her head. The corners of her eyes began to burn.

  “That ain’t true,” she whispered. “You stop that, Leah.”

  Leah bit her lip to fight back the tears. “I’m s-so sorry, Allie.”

  “You said if we do what the Rainbow Man says, we’ll be okay.”

  “But nuh-not her, Allie.” Leah reached out for her like a drowning person for a life preserver. “It duh-doesn’t m-matter what happens, your muh-mommy’s going to duh-die.”

  “You’re lyin’!” Allie screamed. “You stop it.”

  “I cuh-can’t.” The tears were coming now. They flooded down Leah’s cheeks like tiny rivers that glistened in the sun. “I cuh-can’t stop it, Allie.”

  Leah closed the distance between them with a juddering stumble. She stretched out her arms, reaching for Allie, for the life preserver that had kept her from sinking.

  Allie launched her fist forward and connected with the side of Leah’s cheek, sending her sprawling backward into the grass.

  “I hate you!” she screamed, and when those words drew tears, Allie screamed them again. “You’re a liar, Leah Norcross. You’re a liar and a fake and a rhymes-with-witch.”

  Allie stormed off, leaving Leah splayed in the grass. There were cries of please-don’t-go and I’m-so-sorry and you-said-you’d-never-leave. Allie ignored them all, did not turn back. Nobody worth their bones wants anybody seein’ them blubber, that’s what Marshall Granderson said.

  Miss Ellen came out onto the back porch and called out, “Leah?” She ran down the steps, not knowing why her daughter was crying and bruised, only that she was. “What happened, Allie?”

  Allie did not answer. She only wiped her eyes and whipped her head in Leah’s direction.

  “I hate you!” she screamed. “You got a black heart, Leah Norcross. Black heart! And we ain’t friends no more.”

  Allie Granderson pedaled home as fast as her legs could take her.

  4

  “What’s gotten into you this morning?”

  Tom had the vague notion that someone somewhere was talking and thought that distant voice Rita’s, but his mind was too preoccupied to answer. Despite his years of first plumbing and then unraveling the inner workings of the human essence, he was faced with the incontrovertible fact that he had no idea what he was doing sitting behind his desk. Why was another matter. Tom knew why. In the irony of ironies, he had decided to stay home from work to please Leah and was now at work because that was what she’d wanted instead. Even after Reggie had interrupted an otherwise decent morning to basically say the town no longer welcomed his family. As if they ever had.

  He looked up. Rita stared at him through the thick glasses on the tip of her narrow nose.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Lots going on.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  Tom’s eyes wandered to the windows that led to the streets below. The morning heat gave the illusion of ripples in the air. Sunlight glinted off passing cars. Horns blew. In the distance, a siren.

  “I wanted to stay home today,” he said. “All this stuff with Leah that you’ve no doubt read about in the paper but are just too nice to bring up? It’s true. She really does think she has this invisible friend, and she’s spent all week begging me to stay home from work. I didn’t, of course. Because of . . .” Tom nodded toward the waiting area. Meagan was probably out there by now, and by now probably in a wheelchair like Mabel’s. If she was lucky. “Know what I think, Rita? I think Leah’s always had a father, but she’s never had a dad. And I think she needed a dad so much that she had to go and invent one. This rainbow man isn’t just a figment, he’s the me I never was.”

  He waited for Rita to speak. She didn’t.

  “And now all these things have happened, one right after the other, like a snowball flying down a hill getting bigger and bigger, and it’s smacked right into Leah. So I was going to stay home. Was going to call and tell you to cancel all my appointments, even Meagan’s.”

  Rita raised her eyebrows at that last point, which was more emotion than he’d seen from her in months. As much as it pained him, Tom had to admit the little old lady in front of him was the one anchor he had in his life. She was the constant. He never knew when Ellen would be happy or sad, in the bottle or not. Never knew when Leah would hide inside herself or for how long. But he could always count on Rita to be Rita—aloof, cynical, and on the cusp of a fit. That seemed a sad way to live, but then, Tom realized, it was also a supremely stable existence. If Leah was right, and Tom’s problem was that he loved too much, Rita’s means of constancy lay in loving too little.

  “So?” she finally asked. “Why are you here, then?”

  Tom leaned back in his chair. “Because Leah told me to leave. She wasn’t mean about it. There wasn’t anything hurtful like, ‘Get out, Pops.’ She just said it was okay if I went to work. She said I needed it.”

  “Well, maybe you do.”

  “You don’t understand. Leah gave up on me this morning.”

  “Maybe she just wanted you to come to work and help someone, because that’s what you’re good at. Speaking of which, Meagan will be here soon. I’ll leave you alone. Listen for the buzz.” Rita patted the back of the chair and walked toward the door. Halfway there, she turned and said, “If Meagan doesn’t come, go home. Just go home, Tom. I’ll cancel the rest of your appointments. Your family needs you, whether they say so or not.”

  Tom nodded. The door clicked shut, and the room was left in a silence that magnified the voices whispering in his mind—Reggie begging for Leah to just stop, Barney mourning Leah’s lies, Allie weighing the either/or of the rainbow man, Ellen telling Tom to take the world off his shoulders. He heard himself say that some people loved too much and others not enough, but either way it took courage to face this world. He heard a mockingbird call and the office phone buzz. That one, at least, was real.

  Tom picked up the phone. Rita’s voice was clipped and pondering.

  “She’s here,
Tom. Plus one.”

  “Plus one?”

  “Yep. He’s either the cabbie who brought her over here or someone she has on the side. Can’t blame her for that, I guess.”

  “He’ll have to wait outside.”

  “That’s what I said. He seemed okay with it. She didn’t.”

  Tom sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Fine, I’ll tell him.”

  He hung up the phone and made sure the wastebasket was by the sofa and a new box of tissues was ready on the coffee table. Tom’s hand hesitated on the knob and then opened the door. Meagan stood just outside. A faint but nervous smile was on her lips.

  Beside her was the biggest man Tom had ever seen, easily six six or six seven, easily three hundred pounds. The man was not heavyset; all the weight centered itself in his midsection but was equally distributed through a chest that seemed almost inflated and arms that were thicker than Tom’s legs. He wore faded jeans over a pair of black work boots. A red T-shirt was stretched to nearly bursting across his back.

  Tom gathered himself so that his voice neither cracked nor gave any hint of intimidation. It took effort.

  “Good morning, Meagan. Ready?”

  “Yes,” she said. The smile was still nervous but now more there, like a secret about to be sprung. “Dr.— Tom, I’d like you to meet my husband, Harold.”

  Tom’s training, all those years of school and real-world experience, had inoculated him from anything resembling surprise. When it came to dealing with secrets and regrets and pains so deep they seemed woven into one’s DNA, shock was anathema. Shock could drive a hurting patient back on the street, never to return. But what Tom displayed was shock nonetheless.

  “Harold?” he asked.

  The man nodded. He offered a deep, gravelly, “Right.”

  The three of them stared at one another, and Rita stared at all of them. The pilot light in Tom’s mind had been snuffed. He couldn’t remember why they were all there or what they were supposed to do next.

  “Why don’t you two come on in,” he finally managed. “Let’s talk awhile.”

  Meagan and Harold entered the office—Harold had to practically duck and turn sideways through the doorway—as Tom and Rita exchanged looks of complete wonder. Meagan guided her husband around to the sofa, told him where to sit. She patted his gigantic knee. Tom saw all of this and realized that at least here in this space, she was in charge. He also saw that Harold was frightened out of his mind. Meagan’s smile was full-blown by the time Tom sat in the chair in front of his desk.

  “Well . . .” He looked at Meagan and then Harold and wondered at the weight discrepancy between them. A sudden and absurd picture flashed through his mind of the leather sofa seesawing and Meagan shooting through the ceiling. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Honestly, I’m just a little . . .”

  “Surprised?” Meagan offered.

  “Yes.”

  Harold remained silent. His hands were in his lap. He looked around the office and met Tom’s eyes. His jaws worked, rippling the muscles in his face.

  “It happened,” Meagan said. “It finally happened, Tom.”

  “What happened?”

  “My miracle.”

  She looked at Harold and poked him in the ribs with an elbow that was still overlaid with black and green bruises. Those welts reminded Tom of the heavens in Leah’s last painting. It looked like the sky that was swallowing the town.

  “Go on,” she whispered to him.

  Tom crossed his legs. His left hand went to his chin, his right cupped an ink pen that rested upon a pad of paper.

  “I know you’re a little . . . overwhelmed, Harold,” he said. “I understand that, I really do. And I think it’s wonderful that you’re here.”

  The words had the opposite effect than Tom had intended. Harold winced. Meagan’s hand tightened on his knee, no doubt reminding him of some promise he’d made. Tom didn’t think that would work (he was pretty sure Harold had broken his fair share of promises to his wife), but then he sighed and cleared his throat.

  He said, “God spoke to me.”

  Oh no, not him too.

  “God,” Tom said.

  “Spoke to me,” Harold finished. “Meagan told me you wouldn’t believe that. That don’t matter. It’s the truth.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Yesterday.”

  Tom wrote Yesterday on his pad of paper.

  “Okay. Tell me about that, Harold. And this is all confidential. None of it leaves this room.”

  The big man winced again. Tom understood. Harold was the sort of man who was used to yelling instead of talking, and the only things he ever shared were his fists.

  “I was at the mall,” he said. “It happened at the mall.”

  At th—was all Tom managed to write down. The rest of the words somehow ended up in his stomach, where they swirled and gave him chills. He looked at Harold.

  “The mall here in town? Longview?”

  Harold nodded. “That’s right. I was down at Sears, getting stuff to fix the crapper. Stupid thing’s never worked right, and we don’t have no money to fix it. That’s why I was mad. I’m usually mad, I guess. I imagine Meagan’s told you as much.”

  Meagan took her husband’s hand in a gesture that said, Don’t worry about that, honey, everything’s going to be fine now, our time’s come.

  “So I’m coming up the mall toward the lot, and I see this girl.”

  “Girl?” Tom asked.

  “Yeah. And she won’t get out of my way, see? So we just stand there looking at each other. I tell her to move, but she won’t.” The words were coming easier now. It was as if what had been pent up in Harold was kinked like a hose, and that hose had suddenly been laid flat. “I was hot. Don’t nobody do that to me. But then she steps up to me . . .”

  He trailed off. The words wouldn’t come. Tom could nearly see them lodged in the upper part of Harold’s chest, stuck there by embarrassment or anger or whatever else. Meagan reached over and took a tissue. Harold slapped it away. Being in a counselor’s office was pansy enough, Tom supposed. Having to bawl into a tissue would be even worse.

  “. . . and she touches me.” Harold pointed to his chest, where the words had been stuck. “Right here. And she says, ‘You hated him, but now you’re him. You don’t have to be him.’”

  Tom wanted to write that down, but by then he’d forgotten the pen in his hand. He felt his cheeks flush and tasted the salt in the sweat that had gathered above his lip. He asked, “What’s that mean?”

  Harold shook his head and said, “I ain’t saying. Maybe someday, but not today. But I swear on a stack, Doc, what that little girl said was something only God could know. It changed me. I went home so scared I was shaking, and that scared Meagan

  (“It sure did,” Meagan said, and then she smiled in a way that made her beautiful)

  but then I calmed down. That’s when she told me she’s been coming here getting counsel. I shoulda been mad at that but I weren’t, and that scared me all over again. And now I’m here. I don’t know why, but I am.”

  What Tom said next blurred the line between proper and not (at least professionally speaking), because it was asked not to provide insight into Harold’s situation but to give light to a notion Tom could no longer dismiss.

  “What time did this happen yesterday, Harold?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “’Round four. Maybe a little after.”

  Now the sweating was accompanied by a trembling that drew Meagan’s eye. Tom’s bowels tightened. He thought he might have to excuse himself.

  “This girl, what’d she look like?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Was she short, tall, skinny, heavy? Black hair? Blond?”

  “I don’t know. Black, maybe.”

  “Did she stutter?”

  “No, she didn’t stutter,” Harold boomed. Meagan’s hand left her husband’s knee. She shrank back until her hip met the end of the sofa. Tom’s pulse quickened. His bowels, once
tighter than a drum, now became like warm Jell-O.

  “I’m sorry,” Harold said. “I get a fire in me sometimes. It’s all hazy.” He looked at Meagan, beckoning her to return. She didn’t. He looked at Tom and said, “Ain’t it enough that I’m here?”

  “It is,” Tom said. “I’m sorry, Harold. Let’s keep talking, okay?”

  And they did. For the next hour Tom asked vague questions he could not remember and received clumsy answers he did not hear. Home was all his mind could focus upon—home and Leah.

  5

  She did well as she traversed the shadow-speckled lane past the ranch houses and old Cape Cods, past the park where the carnival was about to begin, past the post office (where she even managed to wave and good-morning Sheriff Barnett without him seeing the tears leaking out of her eyes), up the big hill and down the other side, and then left at the old white clapboard church and up the second driveway on the right, but when Allie saw her momma tending the flowers in the front yard, the steel countenance proper for a Granderson shattered into a spasm of muted pleas and bottomless sobs. She let her bike topple into the browning grass and ran to Mary, who did not bother to ask what had happened or what was wrong but only closed her arms around her daughter and held on tight. Allie poured her fear and brokenness upon her mother’s breast, all the pain and rage, and then collapsed into her until they both went to the grass.

  No words passed between them. The only sound was the gentle Shh that followed what new tears Allie could summon. Mary slowly rocked her back and forth, just as she’d once done when Allie had stumbled into a yellow jacket nest the summer before. The result had been twelve stings that had not hurt nearly as much as what hurt now.

  “Leah said you’re gonna die.”

  Allie pulled away just enough to look into her mother’s eyes, just as she’d wanted to look into Leah’s when Leah had said the Rainbow Man was three biggers than her small and had eyes like clear pools. She watched to see if her momma’s mouth gaped open in shock or her eyes widened in fear. But there was only a smile.

  “She did now, did she?” Mary asked.

  “She said there ain’t nothin’ anyone can do about it, that some things just are and can’t be changed none.”