by Matt Dean
Chapter 27
Music began to play. It was his mother’s voice, familiar and unmistakable, but also strange—thinner and more shrill than he was used to. The recording had to be an old one, from her coloratura days. Her youthful soprano, half arioso, half fire alarm, shoved long vowels and burred consonants up the stairs and through his bedroom door. He went to investigate.
In the study, his father’s laptop sat on the desk, streaming the music through a pair of blocky little speakers. Dad lay on the couch, legs crossed at the ankle, hands clasped behind his head, eyes closed. He was still in his boxers, of course, for what was this household, if not a stew of gap-flied men? He didn’t stir when John Carter came into the room, or when, a moment later, the doorbell rang.
Without a thought for the sidelight or the peephole—or for the fact that he was wearing pajama pants and a Buzz Lightyear T-shirt at noon on a Friday—John Carter went to the door and opened it. Scott Cable was standing on the piazza.
“Hey,” Scott said, waving. He glanced at his own hand, seeming to notice for the first time what he was doing with it, and let it fall to his side. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Thank y—”
The you transmuted into an oof, because Scott abruptly grabbed him by the sleeve and drew him in for a long hug. Into John Carter’s ear, he said, “Do you need anything?” He let go and stepped back. “I could help with the music for the service. “Have you ever heard the Pie Jesu from John Rutter’s Requiem?”
“Mama didn’t really believe in Jesu, I don’t think.”
“But she definitely believed in John Rutter. We could put something together. Just say when and where.”
Ben had brought their mother’s ashes home from the Cremation Society. The urn, a cube of black marble, sat on the console table in the entryway. There was talk of a burial—but so far it was only talk. No one knew what Mama would’ve wanted. Even if the plain truth of it was that she simply wouldn’t have cared, no one could imagine her sealed up behind a polished slab, slotted into some dank cubbyhole like a wheel of cheese. And so nothing had happened, nothing had been planned. John Carter suspected that nothing would continue to happen, until the absence of a plan became the plan.
He said, “I guess we’re, um, still deciding?”
Scott tugged his beard. “Can I come in? I wanted to…”
John Carter stepped back and bumped the door open with his hip. The chirpy aria was still playing in the study. As he came into the entryway, Scott cocked his head one way and then the other, like a puppy hearing a sound for the first time.
“Maria Callas?”
John Carter shrugged. “I guess. Maybe. I don’t know.” He thought of his dad—or actually of his dad’s open fly—just on the other side of the entryway wall. Backing down the hallway toward the kitchen, he said, “Do you want something to drink?”
Scott followed him. “Sure. Yes, sure. Whatever you’ve got.”
“There’s orange juice. People brought us a ton of stuff, but Ben kind of ate it all. Somebody brought a whole chicken—no kidding. I’m pretty sure there are multiple lasagnas in the freezer.” He frowned. “What was the question?”
“OJ is fine,” Scott said.
In the kitchen, John Carter poured two glasses of juice and set them on the island. Scott pulled out a barstool, then put it back. He took a drink and wiped his mouth with his thumb. He stroked his mustache with his fingertips, smoothing the hairs, pushing them out to either side. In the study, the music continued to play. In full shriek, Mama hit a remarkably high note with the brass blaring behind her.
“What’s it about, Maria Callas?” John Carter said. “Is it based on Shakespeare or something?”
“Shakespeare?” Frowning, Scott tugged his beard. His eyes cleared. “No, John Carter. Maria Callas is the singer. I think it’s”—he tilted his head, listening—“Il Pirata.”
“But it’s not—”
“What am I saying? I know it’s Il Pirata. I used to have a mixtape of mad scenes, including this one. I also had Beverly Sills singing Anna Bolena. Joan Sutherland from Lucia. Waltraud Meier as Kundry.” He sipped, wiped, combed. “Whenever I needed to relax, I used to smoke a bowl and play it over and over.”
John Carter sucked a bit of pulp from his knuckle. “Scott, I think—”
“I should not have said that.” Scott wagged his finger. “Don’t. Do. Drugs.”
“Huh? No, I meant—”
“Other people’s delusions used to make me feel sane, especially if they were deluded in Italian.” Scott nodded toward the hall. “Nobody’s better than Maria Callas, though.”
“But this isn’t Maria Callas. This is—was—is my mother.”
Head turned, jaw slack, Scott stood and listened. Like a man drawn by a hypnotic suggestion, took a few steps down the hall. When he came back, he looked as if he’d witnessed something horrifying or inspiring or both. “She was…”
Screechy? John Carter thought. Annoying? Ear-piercing?
Hands out, stumbling forward, Scott returned to the island and now, finally, sat on a barstool. “Ravishing,” he said. “I really thought I was hearing Maria Callas. All year long, I was down the hall from this voice and I never knew it.”
The mad scene ended. They fell into a fragile silence, holding their breath for the next aria, the next bit of madness. But there was no other music. A minute passed. Ninety seconds. Two minutes. John Carter wanted—needed—to say something, but the only word he could summon was lasagna.
Having drained his glass, Scott set it gently on the counter. He blotted his mouth and fixed his mustache. “About this semester…”
What about this semester? What about the missed classes, the skipped lessons, the unfinished papers, the untaken finals? “Talk about a mad scene,” John Carter said.
“Do you still have that book of Brahms pieces I gave you?”
John Carter nodded.
“Beautiful,” Scott said. “Is it here?”
“I’ll get it,” John Carter said.
He hadn’t played since before Thanksgiving. He imagined the piano cowering from him, a rejected lover shrinking from his gaze, but when he walked down the hall to the music room and looked in, there was nothing to see, really. It was the same old place where he’d spent half his waking life, a space as familiar as his own thoughts. The piano gleamed in the halogen light, mute but not at all unwelcoming.
He walked in and opened the bench. The Brahms lay on top of some other stuff. When he turned to go back to the kitchen, he had to stop short. Scott was standing in the doorway. He reached out his hand, and John Carter passed him the book. Scott flipped through the pages as if looking for signs of defacement.
But no. That wasn’t it at all.
He opened the book to the second piece—Intermezzo, Andante teneramente—and laid it open on the piano rack. “Here,” he said. “How ‘bout a run-through on this bad boy?”
John Carter narrowed his eyes. “What are you trying to prove?”
“Nothing.” Scott grinned. “I happen to like Brahms.”
“This feels weird.”
“Just do it,” Scott said, his eyes widening.
With a sigh, John Carter sat on the piano bench. A scum of dust covered the fallboard. He wiped it with his sleeve. Opened it. Stared at the keys.
“Tenderly,” Scott said. “Teneramente means ‘tenderly.’”
“I remember,” John Carter said, more crankily than he’d intended.
He laid his fingers on the keys. He lifted them again, mustered his courage, and played. The first few bars were perfect—not too loud, not too slow, as tender-sounding as anything he’d ever played. The damper pedal warmed swiftly under the touch of his bare foot. Starting halfway down the page, there was a series of short phrases, each marked with a crescendo and decrescendo. He took pleasure in making them sing. He imagined them as a string of affectionate whispers, endearments between lovers.
Everything was marked piano or pia
nissimo, but the dynamics kept getting away from him. With his fingers drumming the keys, the felted hammers might have been the mechanism that powered his own heart. The piano might have been a calliope. The room might have been a fairgrounds, a carnival, a circus. The instrument’s full-throated voice filled the whole house—the whole city, for all he knew—with joy.
At the end of the piece, he nearly went back to the start—anything to keep playing, playing, playing—but Scott touched his shoulder. John Carter stopped, finally, and looked around, blinking.
“So.” Scott wiped away a bit of dust that clung between a pair of keys. “That was the second time you played that, ever, right?”
John Carter nodded.
“And you didn’t hit a single wrong note. You maybe have a lot to learn in life, but how to push down piano keys and make notes come out isn’t one of them.”
“But the dynamics—”
“Balls to the wall, I know. But still.” Scott stroked his beard. “As I see it, you have two paths open to you. One. You work like a demon to raise your GPA. You take all your makeups and maybe start some of your pre-reqs all over again. Whatever it takes, you finish school so you have a shot at a career.”
“That sounds hard. What’s option two?”
“I didn’t think that far ahead. You were supposed to jump on option one.”
“I bombed out in music theory,” John Carter said. “That’s pretty crucial.”
“Between you and me,” Scott said, “Jean-Marc Archambault is not the best theory teacher I ever met.”
“Maybe I’m not the best student you ever met.”
“You’re good,” Scott said. His expression was unusually sharp. “You’re good because you love to play. You don’t get this good because your mother made you practice when you were five. If you give up on music, you’ll regret it forever.”
Just like that, John Carter’s eyes were itchy and hot, and he was perilously close to real tears. For a yeti in flip-flops, incapable of working a razor or completing a sentence, Scott had a knack for the awkward truth.
He touched John Carter’s arm. “Y’all here in the South are taught to listen to your elders, right? So listen. You have to stick it out.”
Feeling dumb in all the senses of the word, John Carter blinked and nodded. As if in obedience to some signal, they stood. Scott squeezed his shoulder and walked away. John Carter heard the snap of his flip-flops receding, and then suddenly he was coming back with a quicker, heavier tread, his footsteps a series of thuds.
“Right now,” Scott said, pointing toward the front of the house. “Hurry.” Except for two spots of color in the hollows of his cheeks, just above the line of his beard, his face was as white as piano keys. “There’s a lot of…”
John Carter pushed past him and hurried to the study, where his dad, still in his stupid boxers, lay in a heap near the desk. Scott, in his last unfinished sentence, could only have been referring to blood. There was a lot of blood.
It had pooled under his dad’s head—a lot of it, yes, but then again, once a person’s blood started coming out of his body, anything more than a little seemed like a lot. John Carter knelt at his father’s side. The air tasted like pennies. He gently lifted his dad’s head and searched his scalp for wounds. One spot felt mushier than the others—that must be it.
Scott had been hovering around outside the study door. John Carter sent him for towels, and he came back with an armload—two dozen at least, ranging in size from washcloths to beach towels. John Carter folded a hand towel into a square and pressed it to the back of his dad’s head.
“My phone,” he said to Scott. “It’s in my room. Call nine-one-one.”
Scott blinked at him but didn’t move.
“Now? Please?” John Carter said.
After a moment, Scott sprinted up the stairs, one of his flip-flops tumbling away behind him.
John Carter folded two more towels and slipped them into place under his dad’s head.
With a groan, Dad said, “My head hurts.”
“I’m not surprised. You hit it pretty hard on something, not sure what.” John Carter studied the nearest corner of the desk, thinking he might see some trace evidence—a smear of blood with some hair in it, some tiny, gruesome clumps of flesh. “Something sharp.”
But his dad had already faded out again, his mouth lolling open.
Scott returned, holding John Carter’s cell phone as if it were something stinky. “I don’t know the passcode.” He edged forward, put the device into John Carter’s hand, and stumbled back as if from a rush of flame. “I can’t…”
Holding the towels and his dad’s head with one hand, John Carter used the other to unlock the phone and dial. He asked for an ambulance. He said there was a fifty-year-old man with a head injury. By the time he disconnected the call, he could already hear the distant cry of a siren. He sent Scott outside to flag down the ambulance. This time, Scott obeyed instantly and without complaint.
The paramedics, when they arrived, were two weary-looking men in slouchy uniforms. It didn’t seem possible that two adults, a gurney, and a couple of plastic tackle boxes could take up so much space, but once the men had rolled their equipment into the study, there wasn’t a square inch left over. John Carter flattened his back against a wall.
One of the paramedics looked around. His eyelids were heavy, as if he’d just woken from a nap. “I remember this place,” he said to his partner. “Remember, Hank? Last time, he was in the kitchen.” Now he turned to John Carter. “This your dad? We’ll get him fixed up, don’t you worry.”
The other paramedic, Hank, had crouched on the floor. He snapped open one of the tackle boxes and poked around among its contents. Looking up, he said, “Hey, Joe? A little help here?”
“Awesome kitchen,” Joe said, squatting next to Hank. “Remember? Granite countertops? Stainless appliances?”
While they went to work with stethoscopes and bandages and a blood pressure cuff, John Carter slipped from the room. The front door stood open. When he went to shut it, he caught a glimpse of Scott pacing the lawn. John Carter left the door ajar and, stepping into his dad’s gardening clogs, went outside into the gummy air. The cloudy sky seemed either very high or very low, he couldn’t decide which. An ambulance sat in the driveway, its rear doors hanging open, its red and amber lights strobing.
“How’s it going in there?” Scott asked, panting like an exhausted dog. “Blood’s not my thing.”
“We have an awesome kitchen,” John Carter said.
“What?”
“My mom picked out all the stuff. In the kitchen, I mean. The granite, the cabinets, the sink. All of it. The bathroom, too.”
Frowning, Scott reached out a hand, touched John Carter’s arm. “Are you feeling okay?”
“I remember them talking about it all. Going over everything. Together. Sitting in the study—together—looking at magazines, picking colors. They did all that together—shoulder to shoulder, like.” He paused. “Or maybe not. Maybe she picked everything.” He paused again. “Of course she picked everything.”
Behind him, the door banged open. In the entryway, a photo dropped from its hook. Even from five or six yards away, John Carter heard the glass break.
The kitchen-admiring paramedic, Joe, stood in the doorway and made a face. “Oops,” he said. “Sorry.”
The gurney nudged him from behind, pushing him through the door. He stepped aside, and Hank wheeled the gurney onto the piazza. From a distance, it was difficult to tell whether Hank was pissed off or merely purposeful. Then again, it was also difficult to tell at close range.
Hank and Joe loaded the gurney into the back of the ambulance. John Carter and Scott waited on the lawn. A drop of rain struck John Carter’s forehead. He winced and wiped it away with the heel of his hand.
Joe came over. “Riding with us?”
John Carter hadn’t dared to hope that he could ride in the ambulance. It was such an exhilarating possibility that he�
�d assumed it must be forbidden. He gave a nod. Joe opened the passenger’s-side door for him and boosted him into the seat.
While John Carter was fumbling around, looking for the seat belt, Scott knocked on the window. John Carter couldn’t figure out how to roll it down—no crank, no button, no lever—so he opened the door and leaned out.
“I’ll meet you,” Scott said. He glanced toward the piazza. “I have my bike.”
There was a bike, John Carter saw now, a bright red fixie with low handlebars and a high seat. It was leaning against the piazza railing. “Okay,” he said. “You don’t—” You don’t have to, he was about to say. You don’t have to, but then, but then— “If you don’t mind, then, yes? Please?”
“Do I need a key to lock the house? Do you have your dad’s wallet, ID, insurance card?”
“Oh, rats,” John Carter said. “I didn’t think— I’d better—”
John Carter opened his door a little way, waited for Scott to take a step back, and then swung the door wide open. Before he could slip to the ground, a hand stopped him, a hand around his biceps. It was Joe. “T minus ten seconds, little buddy.”
“My wallet’s in my room on my desk,” John Carter told Scott. “Dad’s is in the front room. Keys in the entryway.”
Scott gave a thumbs up. “I got it. It’s handled. I’ll meet you there.”
The ambulance doors closed—whump, whump, whump—and Joe cranked the engine and they were moving. It was just a few blocks, a drive of no more than four minutes. At the hospital, he followed Joe and Hank into the emergency room. The big glass doors parted with a hiss and shut again with a whoosh and thump. Faces swam by him. The bluish fluorescents hummed above him, B-natural against C-sharp.
He had no idea what was expected of him. He should do something. What was he supposed to do? He should talk to someone. It was okay to ask questions. He should ask someone what to do.
His phone chimed. Nothing important—someone had liked something on Facebook—but it was enough to remind him that he held the device in his hand. A miracle! A lifeline! He did what he should have done at the beginning. He called Corinne.
