Behind the Song

by K. M. Walton

  Elodie walked by cages and animal accessories, noticed the dogs and cats, stopped to greet a few, but was clearly on a mission. When she got to the back, she saw her oldest sister Birdie cleaning out a small cage. “Where’s Ava?” Elodie smiled.

  “Hello to you too!” Birdie smiled back.

  “Hello, Birdie, how are you today? Where’s Ava?!” Elodie giggled.

  Birdie gestured to another nearby cage and Elodie walked toward it. “She’s still here, nobody bought her,” Birdie was pleased to report.

  Elodie was simply enamored with Ava, the canary. Elodie tried to visit her at the pet store almost every day since she arrived two weeks ago. This was her canary, she thought. She just had to convince her parents of that fact. “Please don’t let anyone buy her, she’s mine,” she said, almost trance-like.

  “You know, Mr. Harrison won’t allow me to do that. Besides, Mother and Daddy said we can’t have any more pets.” Birdie reminded.

  “But Birdie, if you talk to Mother, I’ll talk to Daddy; we could wear them down. Mother will listen to you.” Elodie pleaded. Elodie knew that although she held a special place in her parents’ heart, it was Birdie who actually got the hard things done. She was only two years older than Elodie, but she had always been like a third parent. She was the firstborn girl, reliable, responsible. She could fix anything around the house; she was solid and determined. She could, in fact, convince her mother that a canary might be nice. But would she? Elodie had her work cut out for her, she thought.

  Little did she know that on her birthday, the day she returned from her night away at Frieda’s and the concert, the canary Ava would be home too, to greet her. The family had secretly agreed to give Ava to Elodie as a birthday present. It indeed had been hard work for her sister Birdie not to spill the beans that day, but even harder work later that evening for Elodie to try to bend the conversation with her father around to Ava on the car ride to Frieda’s. “You know, Daddy, I stopped in to see Birdie at work today. There’s a canary there, I named her Ava. She sings so pretty. I love that bird,” she said pensively.

  Her father smiled to himself, staring straight ahead so he would not break. “Are you sure it’s a she? Male canaries are the best singers.”

  Confused, Elodie said, “I think it’s a she. Anyway, I named her Ava,” she retorted.

  “Hmm, that’s nice,” he said as he pulled into the parking space in front of Frieda’s house. She was convinced that her dad had no intention of reconsidering his position regarding Ava. The drive from Pittsburgh to Clearfield was two hours and thirteen minutes; she had not sealed the deal. In fact, Elodie wasn’t certain that he even heard her. When she kissed him on the cheek and exited the car, she decided to let it go and focus on the fun at hand.

  Her friends Frieda and Belle met her at the door with hugs and shrieks of laughter. It had been so long since they were all together. Two years. School days seemed to be a forever away. Life had taken hold. Frieda was engaged to Elliott Peaks, her high school sweetheart, who was now a Marine. She was knee-deep in wedding planning for her big day in June. Belle was a supervisor at the Hartford Insurance Company. She’d moved up the ranks quickly and was one of their youngest agents.

  At first hug, it was as though the girls had never skipped a beat. They still fit. Childhood friends since they were six and seven years old respectively. Their parents and their grandparents, the 400s of Pittsburgh, were all connected in some way. Frieda’s parents worked for city government; Belle’s mother was a doctor and her father a lawyer.

  Their chatter continued nonstop as they made the mad dash to Belle’s car. She was the oldest of the girls at twenty-one and had had her driver’s license for three years now. Traveling to work in Philadelphia and returning to Pittsburgh to visit family for holidays never caused her to fret. The thirty miles it would take to reach the concert was nothing compared to the 300-mile hauls she had normally driven.

  They reached the Big Barn Concert Hall where the show would take place in less than a half hour. Clearfield was in Allegheny County and mostly country, so the fact that the concert would be held in a barn was fitting, Elodie thought. When they ran up to the box office window to see a “closed” sign, they were not surprised. The concert would not be for another two hours. It was early yet, and Elodie wanted a pop. Elodie reminded the others that they’d passed a roadside store on their way to the barn. It’d started to snow, and brisker air descended. It was colder than usual for October. Elodie was glad she’d brought her coat, grabbed it, and threw it over her shoulders. It would be dark soon; the sun was setting. With time to kill, the girls barreled back into the car and trekked higher up the mountain for pop.

  After leaving the Clearfield General Store, the girls lingered in the parking lot, playing music on the radio, dancing, and drinking pop. More than an hour had passed; they hadn’t noticed. It was a beautiful night, pitch dark. The stars cut through the midnight sky as the car headed back down to the barn. “Wake Up Little Susie” was on the radio, and the girls moved in place in the front seat to the beat. They were finally headed to the concert. No words, just glances and smiles. This night was special and would go into the history books. That was the unspoken. The car too seemed to move like a dancer, down the mountain as the snow fell. White dust assaulted the windshield relentlessly. The wipers brushed and made new with each stroke.

  The vehicle drove down and then around one curve, down then around another. Then down again and then around another. It seemed like poetry, felt like dance, movement to rhythm.

  But something tripped. Skipped.

  Like a needle on vinyl.

  Like there should have been an “around,” when there was a “straight down”—or maybe it was the opposite. Even so, when the car left the mountain into the air, that too was like ballet. Like a dream. Like pas de chat, “step of the cat,” a leap in ballet, one of the most difficult ballet leaps to perform. The car would not land well, Elodie knew this.

  With eyes closed tight, and breath held, she had one thought: “It will all be over soon.”

  They were out in air, flying one hundred yards, the full length of a football field. The car crashed into the one lone tree on the side of the base of the mountain and hung there, right before the depths of the river.

  When Elodie woke the radio was still playing, “Wake up little Susie, we gotta go home.” Confused, she attempted to assess the situation. She turned the radio off.

  It was quiet and so cold and dark.

  “H-how do I get out?” she panicked.

  Then, in a way she would take a lifetime to articulate, she heard something. It was automatic. She had a thought. As she thought, the answer to her question arrived.

  God spoke to her: “Elodie, I will make a hole in the floor of the car. Pull Belle and Frieda out.”

  She was talking to God.

  She would later tell police and newspaper reporters and her parents what God said to her in that car.

  Their car sat suspended by the tree, battered doors jammed in, no broken windows, no openings, no way out. And then before another thought, before her eyes, a pothole-sized opening was in fact there, cut perfectly.

  She pushed the girls through the hole and they all landed on cold, wet, slippery ground with a thump. They’d lost their shoes, and now it was Elodie’s task to get everyone up the hill to safety. With superhuman strength, she pulled one girl a few feet forward up the mountain and returned for the other girl, lifting her semiconscious body up to the place she’d landed the first girl.

  The girls moaned but could offer nothing more as she dragged their full weight back and forth. One hundred yards of steep incline, seven steps at a time up, advancing, then back seven steps, to repeat. It took hours and Elodie was weary. This was too hard. She hurt. She couldn’t do it. They were almost at the top when she decided to leave and go get help.

  Elodie didn’t want to wake the
girls—she didn’t have the strength—so it was quite shocking when Belle woke, groggy, grabbed her leg with a strong tug, and screamed, “You’re not leaving me!” Like tumbleweeds, all three girls rolled over each other, back down the godforsaken mountain.

  They were back where they’d started.

  Elodie’s unforgiving trek would begin again. She carried, again, what felt like dead weight. Up and down. When they reached the top, Elodie flagged a car. It was an elderly white couple, who, when they pulled in close to Elodie, debated aloud whether picking up the black girls would make them late for meeting another couple for dinner. They apologized to the girls and drove away.

  This night was neither amiable nor auspicious. It was heavy and dangerous. In the hour that followed, another car stopped. The driver, a middle-aged black man with two teen daughters himself, helped them into his car and escorted them to the hospital, only to have the girls released on questionable grounds. Mercifully, he took them to a second hospital that admitted them.

  Belle and Frieda would have multiple surgeries over the next several weeks for a variety of injuries: broken collarbones, and fractured ribs, concussions, cuts and gashes. Elodie, however, was released within days with no internal injuries, a sprained ankle, and something no one was talking about: her face. It burned a lot. The doctors had applied salve, removed her bathroom mirror from her hospital bathroom, and informed her parents that there was not much more that could be done. They’d all have to wait it out.

  Elodie was not comfortable with amount of attention her accident was getting. She had to tell her story to seven separate officers and two news reporters. They all kept asking how she got out of the car. They insisted on correcting her, saying, “You fell out at the top of the mountain, right?”

  Elodie would later learn that the stumbling block for the officers and reporters was that there was no way to get out of the car they had found against the tree.

  There was no hole on the floor of the car.

  It took the fire department to get the car doors off. No one girl, no three girls could ever have opened it. It took an entire construction crew. The windows were shattered but not broken. There was simply no way out or in. Elodie told the officer God had made a hole in the floor. After the third retelling, in private her mother admonished her sweetly, “Elodie, maybe when you tell the story you can leave out the part about God opening the car. I believe you, but these people will think you’re crazy.” It was on that day, Elodie decided to never tell the story in that way again.

  After the accident, it would be five days before Elodie would return to her home in Pittsburgh. She received a warm welcome from family and friends, many of whom dropped by throughout the day, Mrs. Kooperschmidt included. The biggest surprise of all was Ava, the canary, the birthday present that was late getting to her. Her birthday had been four days ago, although she never remembered it coming or going that year.

  She also barely noticed that the mirrors in her house were covered like in the hospital. She knew her face was injured, but she mostly felt fine. She was still on bed rest when her mother and sister Birdie came to lay in bed with her. “Don’t you love Ava?” Birdie smiled. “You know we left the door wide open and she never flew out. We think she likes it in here.” She laughed. Ava was allowed to fly free in the home, her cage door left wide open. The family’s newest tenant was quite well adjusted.

  For weeks, Elodie would spend hours talking to the bird about whatever popped into her thoughts. Sometimes Ava would sing back. It felt like a conversation to Elodie. Ava almost never did that to anyone else.

  Three months since the accident. She counted.

  Weekly doctor’s appointments became ritual. After one appointment, her mother decided it was time for someone to say the hard thing. She recruited Elodie into the house.

  Birdie discreetly grabbed a small object off the sideboard, holding it firmly at her side, hidden as they proceeded down the hall. They hoped that Ava’s presence in the house would soften the blow, make the news bearable. Elodie sat on the side of her bed. Her mother started, “You know doctors don’t know everything. You had a divine experience. You said God helped you in the accident. Well, the doctors say you are badly injured and that maybe you will not ever heal. They don’t think they can do more for you, but I believe you will heal.”

  Elodie was so confused, she mostly felt fine. Her face hurt and she didn’t like the treatments, but, other than that, she felt okay. Elodie questioned, “Well, what’s wrong with me?”

  Her sister took the mirror she was hiding behind her back and said abruptly, “You look like a monster right now. They say you got a third-degree burn and no matter what, you won’t heal. The skin is too damaged. You will always have scars is what they say. Me personally, I don’t believe it.”

  Elodie hadn’t heard a word. She was transfixed by her own reflection. She hadn’t been in front of a mirror in months. There was simply nothing left. No face. She was gone. She wasn’t ugly, she thought.

  She was alien.

  Her face looked extraterrestrial. She was confused. She didn’t understand when this happened. She didn’t remember scraping her face in the accident. Was she in shock? By now, Belle and Frieda were home healing and back to life. Elodie had saved them, helped them. Stories had twisted and blame between parents had been tossed so rapidly that by now the girls barely spoke.

  The accident was Belle’s fault; her heel had gotten stuck in the gas pedal.

  It was Elodie’s fault; it was her suggestion to go get pop.

  It was Frieda’s fault; she’d planned the night and was playing the music too loudly in the car. She had been distracted.

  As parents searched for answers to alleviate their respective daughters’ pain, the verbal blows to each other caused irreparable damage to their lifelong friendships. It would be several years before they all would be able to put the event behind them and resume the decades-long friendships that had been the cornerstone of each of their lives.

  Time seemed to just pass for Elodie. Days into weeks into months passed. And over that time, like clockwork, every Saturday morning Birdie would come to Elodie’s bedroom and snap a photo. “Don’t take my picture!” Elodie would reprimand.

  Birdie exclaimed, “But, we have to have it for when you heal. You’re going to be as good as new.” Birdie’s behavior was either in tune to something undefinable, like faith, or entirely insensitive and rude. Elodie was still on the fence regarding which it was.

  All the while, Ava sang her through it. Ava seemed to sing through most moments. She sang through the monotony of Elodie’s days. She sang through that first fall. She chirped through winter. Ava serenaded Elodie through spring. She peeped Elodie out the door to doctor visits, a thing she abhorred.

  She simply dreaded the once-a-month checkups. Nothing changed, so what was the point? Seven months after the accident, she was in less pain, but hated leaving the house. It didn’t matter if her mother or Birdie were escorting her. Doctors’ visits were useless. Plus, she didn’t want anyone to see. She’d have to pass her billboard en route to the hospital. She’d see her face before the accident smiling down at her. It felt like cruel and unusual punishment.

  Still Ava sang her through it all.

  Elodie’s bright spot was Ava. Something in Ava’s song reminded Elodie of the morning and hope. Ava seemed always happy and content. In spring, doors and windows opened on sunny days, but Ava, like Elodie, stayed put.

  The day she caught a glimpse of something in the mirror that looked different, she was surprised. It was there on her cheek. The skin was smoother. It almost seemed new. Her parents noticed it too and accompanied her to the doctor who told her, it really couldn’t be explained. “Her burn is third degree. In my practice I’ve never seen skin restore itself after a burn like this. It is impossible.”

  Within a year and a half, the skin on Elodie’s face had returned with no
traces of a scar except on a small area beneath her chin. It was an inch-sized tag, not noticeable at all. The photos Birdie took were indeed useful later, because without them there was no other evidence that something had ever occurred.

  On the day Elodie received a job offer to return to modeling, Ava flew away right out the window and never returned. Elodie saw it as a sign.

  It was now her turn to fly.

  • • •

  It would take the story of Ava and all of the events around it to bring my mom Elodie through the losses that barreled through the Octobers of her adult life. She knew, if she could be with the story of Ava she might find peace. She was right. So much of life had pushed forward in the years and decades following my mom’s accident.

  Octobers then, now, and forever hold a place in my family’s lives. Our loved ones chose to say their goodbyes in a way we would forever remember, with a kiss, near our October birthdays. How dramatic.

  After the trio of Octobers that happened in my youth, I observed my mother Elodie go in and retrieve the truth of her past, what happened the night she actually landed at the bottom of that mountain. When she embraced the fact that she experienced something miraculous her hope returned. Like salve, she reapplied miraculous hope where needed.

  God, inexplicably and undeniably, came to her, as crazy as the story sounded even to her. Despite what others thought, even contrary to the instructions of her own late mother, who was simply trying to spare her own daughter ridicule, Elodie learned to embrace her truth.

  Like the pet bird in her youth, she freed herself and soared to new heights and then inspired me, her daughter Kingston, to do the same.