When Mockingbirds Sing (9781401688233)

by Coffey, Billy

  She buried her head back into Mary’s chest, who proceeded to rub the space between Allie’s pigtails and offer only a simple, “I see.”

  “What are we gonna do, Momma? We need to tell Daddy. We gotta leave town.”

  Allie’s head moved up and down with her mother’s chuckle. Mary moved away and cupped her hands around Allie’s chin, lifting it up into the sunshine. The gold cross around Mary’s neck glimmered.

  “Well, before we go and do all that, why don’t you tell me what you said to Leah just before she told you that.”

  Allie sniffed and rubbed her nose. What came back was sticky and hot on her forefinger. She wiped it on the grass beside her momma’s pink tennis shoe. “I told her she shoulda told me about that picture before she showed everybody, and then I said you didn’t think we should be friends no more.”

  “So you told Leah that I didn’t think you two should be friends, and that’s when Leah said I’m going to die. You don’t think that sounds a little fishy? Like maybe she said that because she was mad at me?”

  Allie hadn’t considered that. Then again, “Leah said the Rainbow Man told her.”

  “The rainbow man,” Mary said. “And you’re sure there’s a rainbow man? Not just sure in your heart, because in your heart anything can be true. But I mean true in your head too? For a thing to be real, it has to feel that way in your heart and your head both. Everything that’s happened with you two this past week, every bit of it, can be laid onto something besides a rainbow man.”

  “Not Mr. Barney’s numbers.”

  “Which aren’t there,” Mary answered. “And who knows, maybe Mr. Barney saw something on that page. But if Leah had painted something, don’t you think it would still be there?”

  Maybe. Maybe that was true. Besides, if God wanted to give Mr. Barney a miracle, Allie thought He’d want everyone to see it. Because if something was real it had to be in the heart and the head at the same time, but it also had to be in the eyes.

  “What about the mockingbirds, then? Leah painted that, and I was right with her when they came fallin’ outta the sky, Momma. I don’t know if you know that or not, but it’s true. They were like clouds. That was right after I dunked Leah in the pool and drowned her in the Spirit.”

  “You did what?”

  “I baptized her. At least I kinda did, I guess. That was after Miss Mabel passed. I thought it would help.”

  Mary said nothing to this, though it looked to Allie that she wanted to say a lot. Instead, she said, “What’s so special about a bunch of mockingbirds? There’s no charm in that, is there? Birds go crazy in the head sometimes. Remember awhile back when all those sparrows took a nosedive into the parking lot of the Super Mart in Camden? Besides, I don’t think it was the mockingbirds Leah’s painting was talking about, it was the numbers. And we all know how that turned out. Just like you said she tried to save Miss Mabel and couldn’t. Because Leah’s just a little girl, Allie. Just like you. Nothing more than that.”

  She looked at Allie and smiled again. It was the same smile she’d offered after cleaning up all those yellow jacket stings and covering Allie’s arms and legs with Band-Aids (they were SpongeBob, Allie remembered, and that made her cry again because for reasons she could not recall, SpongeBob gave her the willies), the same smile that had always nursed Allie back to health whenever she got the flu or the croup, the smile that proved Mary Granderson was the most beautiful and good woman in the whole wide world.

  “Whatever magic might have brushed up against Leah is gone now, if it was ever there at all. I don’t abide by what Reggie’s done to Leah and her folks, but I do agree that she’s just a confused little girl who got in over her head. And if you think with your mind as much as you’re feelin’ with your heart, I think you’d believe the same.”

  Allie closed her eyes to the sun and contemplated her next words. They would be serious words, ones that would likely get her into not a little bit of trouble, but ones that needed telling. Because while her momma may have been right about everything she’d just said, there was still one thing that stood in the way. Something no one else could possibly know.

  “I let Zach Barnett kiss me.” Allie spewed those words as fast as she could—IletZachBarnettkissme—thinking the speed would dull the pain, like when you yanked off a SpongeBob Band-Aid in one clean pull.

  “You did what?” Mary asked.

  “Ilethimkissme. Or maybe Iaskedhimto, I don’t know. But that’s not the point, Momma, and I hope you ain’t mad. The point is that Leah knew it. I asked her to prove the Rainbow Man was real, and that’s what he told her.”

  Mary sat silently in the grass—Allie noticed her momma’s hand was no longer atop her own but fingering her pink Nikes—and thought a moment. She smiled and said, “Leah was up on that little hill for the whole party until you brought her down, right?”

  “Yes’m.”

  “I would imagine a body could see most everything there is from up there. All the house and yard, clear on down to Mr. Broomfield’s house.”

  Something sparked in Allie’s mind at that notion. She did her best to roll back through the memories of what she and Leah saw during their many stays in their secret place under the pines and found it was true. Leah could have seen them plain and in fact had. Allie wondered at her own stupidity.

  “We don’t have anything to worry about, do we?” Mary said.

  “No’m,” Allie said.

  The smile that came through her drying tears was one not as beautiful as her mother’s, not as supremely good. Not yet. But it would be one day. Everyone in town would say so.

  “Good,” Mary said. “And we’ll not mention your dalliance with Zach Barnett, especially to your father.”

  Allie thought that settled things, though a small part of her (head or heart, she couldn’t tell) believed there was still plenty to worry about—that a big scary something was sneaking up on them all to say boo. But by then her momma’s hand was back atop her head. In the end, that was all that mattered.

  6

  Tom didn’t realize he’d just crossed the town line, nor did he understand that he’d done so at forty miles over the posted speed limit. The world had tunneled along with his mind. Trees and houses blurred past while he himself felt unmoving, as if the yellow Victorian were coming to him rather than he to it. But of course such a thing was impossible. Contrary to the immutable rules of the universe. And to upend those rules would be tantamount to, what? A miracle?

  “There’s no such thing as a miracle.”

  He uttered those words as if trying to speak their truth into existence and dispel the doubt that had now taken root inside him. Leah was just a little girl. Little girls aren’t supposed to guess winning lottery numbers and convince strangers to confront their deepest agonies.

  But Leah had been at the mall that day and had gone missing at that very time. The girl who spoke to Harold had black hair—maybe. Leah had black hair.

  But the girl hadn’t stuttered. Which meant it couldn’t have been Leah

  (Could it?)

  because she would have most certainly stuttered to a man like Harold Gladwell. Leah would have been spluttering like Porky Pig.

  Tom thought yes and then he thought no, and all the while the doubt inside him grew like a vine around his heart.

  Ellen walked out onto the porch as he parked by the garage. A dish towel hung limply from her hand. Her face was drawn, her eyes like two dim holes. She regarded Tom with a look he had seen each time a new patient sat upon his sofa and reached for the box of thick tissues on the coffee table. It was a look of surrender. A look of What now?

  “Why are you home so early?” she asked.

  Tom climbed the steps and took hold of Ellen’s arms. The dish towel smacked absently against her leg.

  “Where’s Leah?” he asked. “We have to talk to her. It’s important.”

  “Locked in her room,” Ellen said. Her words were thick, but Tom smelled nothing but coffee on her breath. “S
he won’t come out, Tom. She just . . . won’t. She and Allie had a falling out this morning.” The towel smacked harder against her leg. Ellen was shaking like an engine about to sputter and die. “Allie hit her, Tom. With her fist. I saw it myself. I don’t know what’s happening, and I can’t stop it.”

  Tom looked inside the house. He wanted nothing more than to walk inside to Leah’s room and ask her—even if it had to be through the door—what had happened at the mall. Ellen sank into the hollow of Tom’s chest, her heaves muffled by his shirt. He held her as they stumbled to the swing in the corner like two beaten fighters. Ellen’s weeping was soft, childlike. Her hand curled around the collar of Tom’s shirt and held him there. Leah’s window was directly behind them; even closed, Tom thought she could hear whatever they said.

  A thought struck Tom then, one that seemed equal parts absurd and impossible and felt like an itch deep in his ear that he couldn’t scratch. He wondered for the first time if everything had perhaps been engineered according to some kind of design—if Lilly Wagoner was supposed to sit beside Ellen at that party so Ellen was supposed to get tipsy enough to divulge secrets she normally would not, because Tom was supposed to partition his life and lose himself in his work so they would move to Mattingly, because Leah was supposed to have her party so she could get her easel, because Barney was supposed to buy his ticket so Reverend Goggins would deliver his petition, because Tom was supposed to run away with his family to the Longview Mall so Leah could confront Harold Gladwell so Tom could be so torn, so utterly confused between doubt and belief, that he would be sitting there at that moment holding his wife and about to do the one thing he swore he would never do again.

  Because maybe Barney had been right—it was all connected. Everything and always.

  “I have a patient,” he said. “A woman. Not much younger than us, really. I’ve been seeing her for a while now. She isn’t getting better.”

  Ellen’s tears lessened. Tom thought she understood the magnitude of what she heard. The grip on his shirt grew tighter.

  “Her husband abuses her. She’s pregnant with his child, but he accused her of infidelity and then raped her. He’s a monster, Ellen. I never really believed in monsters until I met her. I’ve told her to leave him over and over. I don’t normally do that, but when a life’s in danger—and in her case it’s two lives—safety comes first. But she wouldn’t go. She kept saying God was going to save her.”

  Tom paused there. He had to breathe before he said more.

  “She actually thought God would save her. I guess you can believe that, maybe. Not me. I’ve never believed such things. I guess I still don’t. I felt so helpless, sitting there listening to her. I was watching this woman die right in front of my eyes, and there was nothing I could do about it. That’s why I reacted to Reggie the way I did at Leah’s party. It’s a reason, but not an excuse.”

  Ellen began to cry again. Tom thought these tears were different—shed not out of pain, but of being included in his secret life once again, however sorrowful the story he told.

  “I saw Leah in her. They look alike, but it’s more. Deeper. They’re both small, not just on the outside, but on the inside too. Her husband came in with her today. Just like that. I know a lot about people, Ellen. Stuff like that just doesn’t happen. So I asked him what brought him there, and he said . . . he said God spoke to him through a little girl he met at the mall yesterday afternoon.”

  Ellen’s head shot up with such force and speed that it nearly clocked Tom square in the jaw.

  “Yesterday afternoon?” she asked.

  Tom nodded. “Around the same time that Leah ran off. I asked him to describe the girl, but he couldn’t. He said everything was hazy.”

  “Leah, Tom? You think that was Leah? Because if it was . . .”

  Ellen didn’t have to finish that sentence. Tom knew full well what it meant. It meant having to change everything he believed in and didn’t.

  “That’s why I came home,” he said. “To ask her.”

  They rocked. Tom gave Ellen enough time to gather herself and process what she’d just been told. When he thought she was ready, he said, “You can come out now, Leah.”

  The screen door squeaked open just enough to be heard.

  “Hey, Puh-Pops,” Leah said. “Didn’t think you h-heard me.”

  “Why don’t you come out here for a second.”

  The door opened wider. Leah stepped through. Her steps were cautious at first, but grew bolder as she closed the distance between them.

  “Did you hear what your mother and I were discussing?”

  “Yuh-yes, sir.”

  “Is that why you wanted me to go to work today?”

  Leah shrugged and asked, “Is it important?”

  “It’s very important,” Ellen said. “You won’t get into trouble either way. I promise. We just need to know the truth. Where’d you go at the mall yesterday, Leah?”

  “D-do you want the real t-truth or the t-truth you wuh-want to hear?”

  “The truth, Leah,” Tom said. “No more playing. Just tell us where you went.”

  Leah’s eyes fell to the wooden planks beneath her. She kicked at a wayward acorn, sending it skittering off the porch. A hot breeze gathered and played with the ends of her

  (black, it’s black like the little girl’s)

  hair. Her eyes tried to find something else to kick, something else to look at, anything that would keep her from having to answer. But the porch was bare, and all she could do was lift her head and say, “Nuh-no.”

  “What?”

  “Nuh-no,” she said again. “I’m nuh-not saying. Maybe I just wuh-wanted to run away b-because I was t-tired of everyone luh-looking at me like a fruh-freak. Or m-maybe the R-rainbow M-man suh-sang to me because s-someone else needed muh-magic. Muh-maybe giving that muh-magic was the only wuh-way you would ever buh-lieve.”

  “Believe in what?” Tom asked.

  “In the Maybe, Puh-Pops. In what’s ha-happened and what’s guh-going to happen. I can’t tell you where I wuh-went because then you’ll nuh-know, and that’s nuh-not faith. Faith is buh-lieving in a thing you’ve n-never seen but’s only been pruh-promised.”

  “Leah, what are you talking about?”

  “About the R-rainbow M-man. He wah-wants you to buh-lieve in him, Puh-Pops.”

  “Tell me what he looks like, Leah,” Ellen said. “Describe him. Give me a picture to see.”

  Leah shook her head. “It’s too huh-hard.”

  Tom said, “When we were at church, Leah, you kept looking at that picture by the door. Is that what he looks like? Is that the Rainbow Man?”

  She only said, “That’s not his fuh-face.”

  “Then what’s his face look like?” Ellen asked. “Tell us that.”

  “It luh-looks like you, Muh-Mommy. And you, Puh-Pops. Allie and Mr. Buh-Barney. Miss Mabel. It looks like Ruh-Reverend Goggins. His fuh-face is everyone’s. Everyone who’s ever buh-been and even everyone who’ll ever buh-be.”

  For reasons Tom did not understand, Ellen began to cry. She rose from the swing and went to her daughter.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Please. I’ve helped you. I’ve done things for you. I want to believe, Leah.”

  “Could I have duh-done that, Muh-Mommy? Puh-Pops? Could I have guh-gone up to that muh-man and suh-said what was tuh-told to him? It duh-doesn’t m-matter if it’s certain or even likely. Is it puh-hossible? Don’t answer with your huh-heads. Answer with your huh-hearts.”

  “Yes,” Ellen said, and the tears came one last time. “My heart says yes.”

  Leah smiled at her mother and turned to Tom—“Puh-Pops?”—who felt the vine that had choked his heart now bursting it open. The squeak from the swing was louder, the sky clearer, the air fresher. In a way he could not fathom, everything around him seemed bigger and more alive. Was it certain? Likely? No.

  Was it possible?

  Was it maybe?

  “Yes,” he said. “Maybe.”
r />   “Will you huh-help me, then? Buh-both of you? I don’t think we huh-have m-much time.”

  “Help you do what?” Ellen asked.

  “C-come to my room. I’ll shuh-show you. I’ve been wuh-working on it all duh-day, since Allie went away. I was guh-going to g-get her to huh-help me, but now it has to b-be you. It’s going to be huh-hard, and the R-rainbow M-man says he’s suh-sorry for that. But he says we huh-have to.”

  Ellen took Leah’s hand as they walked to the door. The two of them waited there for Tom, who joined them despite the voices in his head.

  7

  Oak Lawn Cemetery was a gated span of stately trees and manicured lawn that encompassed nearly ten acres on the southern end of town. Among the hundreds of earthly remains interred there were those of Zedekiah Almarode, Mattingly’s founder, and Nathaniel Cohron, who in 1864 had pulled together a ragtag collection of farmers and shopkeepers and chased a contingent of Yanks back over the mountains where they belonged. Now the town gathered to sink another of their dearly departed into that dark soil, rendering to the earth what belonged to it now that God had taken what belonged to Him.

  Barney pondered these things as he sat in the first of what seemed a hundred rows of metal folding chairs and stared at Mabel’s coffin. He wondered, if his wife’s body belonged to the ground and her soul belonged to heaven, what exactly was there left for him? Nothing but memories, he reckoned. And one empty wheelchair, three boxes of diapers, and a single strand of snowy hair in his pocket. Even surrounded by so many people, even with Reggie’s voice near and Allie Granderson’s tiny hand squeezing his knee, Barney had never felt so utterly alone.

  “Amen,” Reggie said, which was followed by a smattering of echoes from the crowd. Barney hadn’t realized everyone was praying. He hoped God wouldn’t hold that against him and thought He probably would anyway.

  There followed an a cappella rendition of “To God Be the Glory” that Barney endured as best as he could. The gray shade over his mind still flapped (he had tried pulling it down several times since seeing the 26, 26, 26 on the answering machine but had finally given up). Just when the need for numbness was greatest, Barney saw and felt everything. He didn’t know if that was by chance or design, and chose to believe the latter. It would help him to say what needed to be said.