The Dragon's Playlist

by Laura Bickle

  THE DRAGON’S PLAYLIST

  Laura Bickle

  ¶

  PRONOUN

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  More by Laura Bickle

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

  Copyright © 2017 by Laura Bickle

  Interior design by Pronoun

  Distribution by Pronoun

  ISBN: 9781537891965

  CHAPTER 1

  Anyone who says you can’t go home again never had to.

  I stood on the doorstep of my house—my parents’ house, I reminded myself—with a duffel bag from the Army surplus store slung over one arm. My violin case dangled from my sweaty fingers. Behind me, the radiator of my ancient Chevette ticked and boiled in the gravel driveway. The buzz of cicadas surrounded me. Funny how I’d never noticed that sound before. Now, it penetrated my skull like a jackhammer. I guess I’d been used to it, once upon a time.

  Above me, a June bug zinged into the glass pane of the porch light. It slammed against the glass and bounced back three times before landing on its back, squirming, on the cement step. Persistent. Or stupid. I stared at it, the cicadas filling my head. I nudged it with the toe of my boot, turned it back over. But it promptly flopped onto its back, buzzing.

  There was no saving it. This was its destiny: to slam up against that glass wall, into the light, over and over, until it pulverized itself. It slowly righted its chubby body, flinging itself into the air for another attempt.

  Beyond the screen door was darkness. My hand hesitated on the handle to open it and go inside, but I took it back. I didn’t live here anymore. Like a stranger, I rapped on the aluminum frame. The knock rattled into the back of the house.

  Shadows moved inside. I swallowed hard as one approached. The door opened, and I was enveloped by that shadow that smelled like rosewater.

  “You’re home,” my mother said.

  I nodded against her shoulder, afraid to speak. My eyes burned. They’d burned and leaked a lot on the long, winding drive here, through sunlit hills and shady valleys. Those valleys seemed to suck up the molten sunshine, gathering darkness into their crevasses. In astronomy class, I’d learned about black holes, how not even light or sound could escape their terrible gravitational pull.

  I understood.

  My mother held me at arm’s length. She seemed thinner and paler than when I’d last seen her, the skin around her eyes dark and loose. Her hair was gathered back in a ponytail, ashy tendrils creeping loose.

  She ran her hands over my shoulders, as if trying to confirm that I was indeed real, standing on the threshold.

  “You cut your hair.” Her voice sounded tinny, a bit too high and sharp.

  I found a thread of my own voice. “Yes.” No longer long and blond like my mother’s, it was short and streaked blue. She didn’t comment on the color, and neither did I.

  Mom brushed a strand of the cobalt blue away from my eyes. “It was good of you to come, Di.”

  My voice clotted in my throat. How could I have done anything different? I was what I’d always been. Di. Short for Diamond—the jewel of my parents’ eyes.

  I set my bag and violin case down on the floor with a thud. I let my hair swish over my cheek to hide my face.

  “Do you want to see him?” my mother asked, her voice wavering.

  I straightened, nodded, but I was still unable to meet her gaze.

  Her cool hand enveloped my clammy one. I felt the ridges of her nails and the calluses of her palms against my soft flesh and smooth silver nail polish. She led me through the dark kitchen. Tomatoes perched on the windowsill, ripening slowly. A pilot light glowed blue in the bottom of the stove, and the familiar scent of pine cleaner suffused me. A cricket chirped somewhere beneath the hum of the refrigerator, stilling at the sound of our footsteps squeaking on the linoleum.

  Light shone beyond in the living room: the yellow of a reading lamp and shuddering blue of the television on the ceiling. The faded floral sofa bloomed in the same place it always had, facing the television. The wood-paneled walls seemed closer somehow, smaller. The volume on the television was turned down very low, the news droning softly.

  They’d been expecting me.

  My father sat in the recliner before the television. His back was turned to me, and all I could see was the top of his balding head over the back of the chair. An oxygen tank perched in a cart beside him, a clear tube snaking away to the chair. I could hear a faint hiss if I closed my eyes and concentrated.

  I swallowed, hard. I needed to face this with eyes open.

  My mother drew me around the corner. I dimly fixed on what the newscaster was saying about an earthquake half the world away: “...casualties make this the worst disaster since...”

  My father was not what he had been. He’d always been larger than life: a tall and bulky man, with arms like tree trunks that enfolded me against his barrel chest. When I was a little girl, the bass drum of his heart had been the most soothing rhythm in the world, and his ready smile of approval every time I made an A on my report card or climbed a tree made me squirm with pride. His eyes sparkled glass blue, like mine. His hands were broad, and square, and stained at the cuticles with the black ink of the coal mines, no matter how much pumice soap he used to wash them.

  Now, the only familiar thing about him was his hands. They lay on the arm rests, covered in a fine spider web of black. The rest of him was curled in on himself, as if the broad and booming spirit I’d known had been drained right out of him. His arms had shriveled to pale saplings, and his head hung forward. Oxygen lines extended from his nose. His cheekbones had sunken in, and he’d developed jowls, thin like a deflated balloon. From the neck of his t-shirt, a bandage protruded. He was sleeping, a string of drool slipping from his lip.

  This was not my father.

  My mother leaned over, tenderly touched his cheek. “Dan. Wake up. She’s here.”

  The man in the chair snorted and burbled for a moment, startled awake. His toes twitched, and one of his slippers fell off his foot.

  “Di,” he whispered. His voice was a reedy ghost of what it had been.

  My vision blurred. I leaned forward and kissed the bald spot on the top of his head. It had gotten larger. I knelt before the chair and took his hand, feeling awkward.

  “Mom said that...there was an accident. At the mine. But...” I hadn’t understood the full magnitude of what had happened until I saw it for myself. She’d taken her time telling me, not wanting me to worry. But all truths come out, eventually.

  He blew his breath out in a small puff. “The crew was working the new mountain. Sawtooth Mountain.” He had to take a staccat
o little breath between each short string of words. “We were setting supports when the tunnel collapsed.”

  It was a miner’s worst fear—and his family’s.

  “It could’ve been a lot worse,” Dad said. “They got us out fast. Weren’t more than a few dozen yards into the new dig. Nobody got killed.”

  Not yet. But I chewed down that flash of anger and asked him, “How are you feeling?”

  He smiled at me, and it was the same as I remembered. “I’m chugging along, dear.”

  “Are you in a lot of pain?”

  He shook his head. “Not really.” He gestured at the TV tray table beside him. The top was covered with a neatly-arranged line of pill bottles, tubes of antibiotic ointment, and a pill container with the days of the week listed on the lid. “Doc gave me some good meds.”

  My gaze lingered on the pharmaceutical array. “That’s the company doc?”

  “He’s a good guy.” His speech slurred a bit on the s. His head began to drop forward. “It was good of you to come, Di.”

  I gingerly wrapped my arms around his brittle shoulders, fearful of disturbing the oxygen line. I closed my eyes and pressed my ear to his chest, hoping to hear the drum of a heartbeat I knew from childhood.

  But it wasn’t there. Instead, all I heard was a thin, uneven tapping. A sob snarled in my throat. But my father didn’t hear it; the sound was drowned in a snore.

  I stayed with him, listening, until my knees ached and the news was finished. I carefully disentangled myself and headed back to the kitchen.

  My mother sat at the table in the dark. I knew she didn’t want me to see how upset she was. She’d always been proud like that. I don’t ever remember her crying or yelling. She always cloaked herself in silence or shadow.

  I pulled out a chair to sit beside her in that silence for a few minutes. My eyes adjusted to the low light, but I still couldn’t make out my mother’s expression. She stared into the cup of coffee between her hands.

  “Would you like some coffee, Di?”

  “It’s worse than you said.” I tried to say it without accusation.

  She stirred sugar into her coffee, the metal spoon scraping the rim. “I thought he would be better by now.”

  “Is that what the company doctor said?” My voice was tight.

  “No. It’s what I hoped.”

  The raw sadness in my mother’s voice shamed me.

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s got a crushed pelvis. They wired his back vertebrae together. And there’s lung damage.”

  “Why isn’t he in a hospital?” My hands balled into fists under the table so hard that my right knuckle popped.

  “He was. He wanted to come home.”

  “He’s going to get better, right?” My voice sounded high, like a small child’s.

  She wiped a droplet of coffee from the rim of her cup. “I hope so. But I don’t think he’ll work the mine again.”

  I stubbornly refused to believe that my dad wasn’t immortal. “Take him for a second opinion. Take him to the university...”

  Mom shook her head. “There’s no point in doing that. The doctors here are fine.”

  I could tell when my mother was trying to talk herself into something, trying to cover mud with sunshine and fairy dust.

  “He needs another opinion.”

  She blinked, and the veil of glitter parted. “We can’t afford it.”

  “The company surely owes you money for this.” I stabbed a finger into the next room, where my father slept. Anger burned the back of my throat. I couldn’t be angry at my dad, or my mom, for this. The easiest thing to lash out at was the mining company, because it wasn’t in the room.

  My mother’s contralto voice remained low and even. “He doesn’t have disability insurance. No life insurance. The company will pay the doctors. And if he can’t work again, maybe they’ll settle with us.”

  “Maybe?” I echoed. “Get an attorney. Any of those jackasses in suits advertising on television.”

  She sighed. “We can’t hire one.”

  “They say they don’t get paid unless—”

  “Di. Don’t you think I thought of this?” Her words sharpened. “We can’t afford a long legal battle. I talked to three lawyers already. None of them will take the case. The company will cut off the care he’s got if we do that. They have more lawyers who can fight longer and harder than anybody we can get. There’s no winning—and even if we did, a percentage of zero is still zero.”

  “This isn’t his fault,” I insisted. “It’s not fair.”

  “I know. But it’s like your grandpa used to say: You can fight your luck and change it. There’s no way to fight destiny.”

  My mother withdrew her shaking spoon from the coffee cup with a clatter. Whether it shook from anger or sadness, I couldn’t tell.

  *

  My old room was how I’d left it.

  Sort of.

  The same field of wallpaper roses stretched across the walls. My mother had picked that out when I was ten, to match the pink calico quilt my grandmother had made. Stuffed animals sprawled on the bed, ones I’d been too embarrassed to take with me to the grown-up world of college. My fingers roved over my old rock and mineral collection, curiously free of dust on a shelf full of cubbyholes—a shelf that used to hold my grandmother’s thimble collection. I touched an obsidian arrowhead, fiddled with a melted piece of iron rock my father had given me, suspecting it was a bit of meteorite. I’d always intended to take it to college to have someone in the geology department look at it, but I never seemed to have the time.

  The white dresser held a collection of porcelain unicorns I’d packed away when I left for college. My mother had apparently taken them back out and arranged them in front of the heavy mirror. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe she thought she was being welcoming. But the room seemed smaller, cluttered with treasures from a former time, relics from someone I used to be. I felt like a snail, outgrown its shell. The air stuck close, thick beneath the popcorn ceiling.

  I’d been in this room only minutes, but it was already too cloying. Stifling. My mother had gone to bed. I should’ve done the same. But I couldn’t.

  I shoved the Battenburg lace curtains apart, pulled open the creaky window. Old paint made it difficult to budge, as it had melted and frozen over the seasons. I succeeded in getting it up a couple of feet. And that was enough for me to wriggle through with my violin case dangling from my shoulder by a strap I’d made years ago from a seatbelt.

  I reached into the dark and slung my arm over a tree branch. I swung up, clasped my legs around the thick branch, and scuttled away into the rustle of the leaves. Since I was a child, I’d always thought of trees as keepers of secrets—this leafy sentinel had been my escape route hundreds of times over the years.

  I shimmied down the trunk, keeping a watchful eye on the house. No lights shone in the living room or my parents’ bedroom, and I turned my attention away to focus on the tree. Consciously, I’d forgotten where the foot- and handholds were in the old tree. But my feet and hands remembered, carrying me down as effortlessly as they had when I was eight.

  I jumped silently to the ground, my violin case bumping against my hip. Summer grass was cool and slippery beneath my fingers, and I stared into the darkness. It was well before the early hours of the morning: the cicadas still sang, the fireflies still swarmed, and I could hear the voices of the bullfrogs reverberated from the creek deep within the woods. The forest had its own music. Not the organized compositions I’d learned to play at college, sitting primly in a chair with my ankles crossed and following black and white notes across the page.

  This was wilder.

  This was like the fiddle music my grandfather had taught me, without score or burdened by tempo. It swelled for a moment in me—sad, and tangled, and obliterating that bigger world I’d tasted beyond it.

  The fireflies blurred in my vision. Like a little girl, I ran. I plunged across the gravel driveway into the forest.


  The woods had always been the place I went to get away from the house and the expectations of my parents. When I was small, I pretended that the forest was the realm of fairies. It was, at various times, a castle, a pirate ship, rehearsal studio, and my fortress of solitude. The property was only partially my parents’—the acreage was bounded on one side by a nature preserve and on the other by the mining company that owned my father. It had been promised as land for “future development,” but the craggy valleys and rocky streams had made it inhospitable to the building of forest roads. So far.

  But in all other senses of the word, it had always been mine.

  The familiar darkness closed around me. A gibbous moon tangled in the treetops. Stretching above me, the Milky Way glistened in a river of stars. I’d forgotten that it was so bright and luminous out here. Artificially humming light bathed my college campus at all hours of the day and night. Walking back to the dorm from practice or night class, I could barely make out the Big Dipper.

  I stopped running when the breath whistled in the back of my throat, and started following deer trails over familiar dips in the ground. I sighed when I reached my destination, hitched the strap of my violin case higher on my shoulder.

  The red maple murmured above me, the black leaves sliding against each other in a soft sloughing. From deep within its black branches, a barred owl whistled in a solitary cadenza. An ancient tire swing hung motionless from one of the lower branches. It had taken my twelve-year-old self many hours to roll the tire back here, to hoist it up with the rope. I’d spent many a summer listening to that rope creak against the wood, careening into the green until I was nauseous.

  I clambered up into the tree’s dark embrace, settled into my favorite perch: a few weathered boards I’d nailed to a couple of parallel branches, to allow me to spread out my sheet music.

  But there was no sheet music to be had tonight. I pulled my violin from its scuffed case, tucked it under my chin. I’d grown up with it, making the instrument the vessel for my hopes and dreams. This violin was modest, the best I could afford, scuffed and worn in places. But it was mine. My fingers closed around the bow, and I shut my eyes. I listened to the music around me: the trees whispering, the frogs and the crickets, my own breath. I drew the bow across the strings in a clear, pure note that vibrated through the fillings in the back of my teeth.