Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  “As our new Little Miss Emlyn Springs takes her place of honor, we’d like to make a special surprise presentation to one of our judges, and a former pageant winner.” Hazel smiles at Larken in a way that makes her extremely nervous. “Come on up, dear,” she says, off-mic. Larken ascends to the stage with dread.

  “As many of you know,” Hazel continues, putting her arm around Larken’s middle, “Larken’s chair was lost.” She glances at Larken and gives her an extra squeeze; there are tears in her eyes. “But,” Hazel sniffs, “thanks to the efforts of our town archivist, Myrtle Burchett—Myrtle, stand up back there—we were able to locate a photograph of Larken that was taken when she won the crown.” Hazel holds up the photo. “Between this photo and a collective stroll down memory lane, we were able to create a facsimile.” Hazel looks offstage. “Gentlemen?”

  Larken is mortified. This can’t be happening.

  Onstage the men come: Bud Humphries, Alan Everett Jones, Glen Rhys, and thank God Gaelan because if they really mean to hoist her one-hundred-and-seventy-eight-pound bulk and that chair—

  “No,” she protests, “Please, you don’t have to—” but before she can say anything more, she is taken aloft.

  None of them struggle or grunt or falter. It doesn’t seem to cost them anything to carry her, these men.

  They do it easily, as if she weighs nothing at all.

  “What is it you’re trying to tell me, Jon?”

  She has to shout; the band is an electric/Celtic group. They’re in the basement of the Masonic Lodge—a location for many of Emlyn Springs’ wedding receptions, proms, and community dinners like this one, where there’s live music and need of a big kitchen and a dance floor.

  Jon has been working hard all night to earn something from her; what that is, she can’t quite figure out. Trust maybe. She’s not sure she has that to give him any longer.

  They’ve interlocked their arms, making a seat for Esmé between them, and are swaying to the music. All night Esmé insisted that the three of them dance together, and now, noisy and crowded as it is, she’s fallen asleep. She shifts in their arms, yawns. Her eyes flutter and then she goes back to sleep. Jon looks down at her.

  The musicians come to the end of the tune—a frenzy of dueling fiddlers—and the dance-floor crowd cheers and applauds.

  “Mia and I,” Jon replies once the room has quieted. “We couldn’t put it back together. It’s over.”

  “What?” Larken asks.

  “We’re gonna take a short break now, folks,” the singer announces through the PA system. “We’ll be back in fifteen minutes so don’t go away.”

  “Listen,” Jon says, “there are some things I need to talk to you about, a lot of things, actually.” He takes Emsé into his arms. “I’m going to take her over to Viney’s—she said she’d watch her for a couple of hours.”

  “Why?”

  “So we could have some time alone.” He leans in to kiss her on the cheek, but Larken pulls away.

  Jon smiles ruefully. “Just don’t disappear, okay? See you soon.”

  Larken stands in the middle of the dance floor, mentally reviewing Jon’s revelations while people jostle past her and head back to their tables.

  She heads to the bar for a glass of cheap Chablis. Bonnie joins her.

  “Don’t you love the way all the kids dressed up?” she asks, scanning the room. “In tuxedos and formals and everything? Like it’s prom night or something.”

  She’s never looked more beautiful, Larken thinks. She’s never looked more like Mom. Beset by a sudden boozy sentimentally, she blurts, “I love you, Bon,” takes Bonnie by her shoulders, and pulls her close. “I’m really, really happy for you. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. Listen, all these people, the noise, and the heat are getting to me, so I’m gonna say good night.”

  “You want a ride?”

  “No thanks, I’ve got my bike.”

  “Your bike? Honey, you’re five months pregnant.”

  “I’m not infirm, Larken. I’m having a baby.”

  Larken sighs. “Okay.”

  “See you in the morning.”

  Larken watches her sister join Blind Tom on the piano bench. They talk with an intimate ease, laugh, kiss. In another part of the room, Bethan and Gaelan have their heads together, their bodies forming a portico-like space, a softly peaked Romanesque arch; they, too, are talking intently about something.

  All day it seems that time has been rewinding, flowing backward. Larken expects to see her mother and father sitting at one of the tables, chatting and laughing by candlelight. With very little effort, she does see them, imagine them. And Viney, too, because that’s how she’s come to imagine her parents: one father, two mothers.

  She sips her wine, plucks a cube of ice from an abandoned glass of water on the bar, and applies it to her wrists and neck. It’s really stuffy in here.

  She pictures Jon outside, carrying Esmé asleep in his arms through the streets of her spruced-up hometown to Viney’s place.

  The lights flicker and go out. The teenagers make ooh-ing sounds. Thirty seconds later, the power is back. It must be windy out.

  The band returns. Larken watches her brother dance with Bethan. Jon might be heading back now; she imagines him walking along Bridge Street, walking faster now—(would he be? now that Esmé is no longer in his arms?)—yes, he’s walking faster. He has things to talk to her about. A lot of things, actually.

  The power goes out again, and stays out.

  Larken notices the hurricane lamps on the dinner tables; the candle flames have lengthened and attentuated; they start to shimmy in sync, as if a door upstairs opened and a corridor of air has found its way to the basement. In her mind, she checks in with Jon’s progress back to her. She can’t see him anymore, can’t locate him.

  Mayor Humphries gets up on the stage in front of the band. “Listen up, folks,” he announces. “I just peeked upstairs, and it looks like we’re in the middle of a big storm out there. I’m gonna ask everybody to stay down here where it’s safe and wait it out.”

  Big storm, stay in the basement, where it’s safe.

  People start muttering names, the names of the absent, the newly departed. How long ago did they leave? Were they headed straight home? Can I use your cell phone? Does anybody have a flashlight?

  They wait. They listen. The air around them becomes strangely pressurized.

  Half an hour later, the power comes back on. They climb the stairs and push open the heavy doors to outside.

  Half the town is gone.

  Chapter 29

  Fever of Love, 1978

  It’s well past midnight and Llewellyn Jones is coming home.

  Driving alone in the country at night can be an unreal experience, the sky so black, like velvet, without the bleaching effect of artificial light arising from cities that never sleep, the lone lights of farmhouses here and there—where someone might be up paying bills, tending to a sick child, or just plain worried and unable to sleep—like wayward suns unaligned with any planetary system. Black sky and black earth seem to merge; the demarcation between above and below disappears, giving Llewellyn the sensation that he is flying through deep space.

  His nurse often accompanies him when he travels to far-flung locations, but tonight one of her daughters is in town for a rare visit, and so he is alone. Llewellyn thinks of Viney primarily in her professional capacity, although their relationship is also characterized by physical intimacy and deep affection. Llewellyn would never have envisioned that his intimate personal relationships would be so complex; he has his wife to thank for that.

  His late arrival at his farmhouse is not unusual. What is unusual is that, in addition to the small lamp on the telephone table that his wife habitually leaves on for him, there are lights on in the back of the house, in the kitchen, suggesting that someone else is still awake.

  “Larken?” he calls softly, as he settles his medical bag on the chair by the lamp and
proceeds down the hall. “Gaelan?”

  Because of his wife’s illness, she tires easily, goes to bed early, and so Llewellyn assumes the night owl is one of his children. He’d welcome some time alone with them; he sees them so rarely. There’s an element of wishful thinking involved in this assumption as well, for Llewellyn Jones is not eager to encounter his wife tonight.

  When he looks through the kitchen, where the overhead fixture casts a buttery glow upon the walls, which Hope painted years ago in a daffodil-dense yellow, he sees her through the open screen door, sitting just beyond on the back porch in her wheelchair. He cannot see her face—her back is to him—but he suspects she is looking at the full moon rising above the fields in that direction.

  “Hello, Llewellyn,” she says over her shoulder, pivoting her head just slightly, isolating the movement so that there is no residual muscular involvement anywhere else.

  Llewellyn has noticed that his wife has become very thrifty in her movements lately. Perhaps it’s efficiency. Or it could be that she has to focus all of her reserves of energy upon one simple gesture in order to accomplish it. She could simply be tired, or lost in thought. Or she might be having a bad day and the rest of her body is incapable of further participation. When it comes to Hope’s physical abilities and the cruel, fickle nature of her disease, there are numerous possible interpretations.

  He leans down and kisses her on the top of her head, noting the martini pitcher and the chilled glass on the table next to her.

  She notices him notice, smiles up at him, and says, “It’s always Happy Hour somewhere.”

  “How was your day?” he asks, pouring his martini.

  “It was a good day. Yours? Were you able to save that boy?”

  “Yes,” Llewellyn answers tersely. “He’ll be all right.”

  “I’m so glad,” she says, without bitterness.

  There are many reasons why Llewellyn is tight-lipped when talking about his patients. It is not solely because (as Hope believes) he’s rigidly adherent to the code of patient-doctor confidentiality, it’s because every time he recounts the story of some success, some disaster averted, a life saved, the unspoken truth rears its head and shames: His wife is one person he cannot, has never been able, to save.

  They stare at the moon, the top-lit cornstalks in the distance, the children’s sandbox, the laundry on the clothesline, lowered so that it’s within Hope’s reach. The bottom edges of the sheets don’t ripple freely in places, but are stilled by the smallest contact with the earth.

  Llewellyn holds to this comforting silence. As long as they are silent their world can stay the same.

  “Do you remember the picnic we had on this porch?” she asks. “When you first brought me here?”

  The tone in her voice reassures him. It is light, conversational. They are simply a married couple enjoying cocktails and conversation on the back porch of their home while upstairs, their children are sleeping. “God, we were young.”

  “I wanted you to ravish me out there.” She sounds happy. “But you were so upright. Such a pillar of propriety.”

  “It wasn’t as easy as you think,” he says, “keeping my hands off you.”

  They fall silent again. A slight breeze stirs the wings of Bonnie’s whirligig.

  “Oh!” Hope says, lifting one of her hands—Llewellyn sees at once that it’s limp and quavering—and making as if to reach into her cardigan pocket. “The pictures came back.” She fumbles around for a while. “Damn,” she mutters.

  “Here, Hope, let me—”

  “I’ll do it!” she snips, and tries again. She succeeds in stuffing her hand into the pocket, but either she can’t make her fingers close around the packet of photos or she can’t get her hand out again. She closes her eyes and sighs. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

  The photos were taken two days ago, at the end of Fancy Egg Days, when their oldest daughter was crowned Little Miss Emlyn Springs.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” Hope asks, looking on. “She remembered everything when she recited that poem, every nuance, every meaning. Everything we talked about.”

  Llewellyn regards each photo: Larken center stage during the Talent competition—and without a doubt she was the most talented girl there—standing with Don Parry while he held the microphone out to her and she extemporized her answer to the question: “How do you imagine that small-town life is different from living in a city?” walking down the runway in the dress Hope and Viney made—purple is such a pretty color on her—the moment they announced the winner (he was so proud of her, none of that shrieking and jumping up and down and bawling you see sometimes at these things), then the crowning and the chairing.

  “Doc Williams really outdid himself this year,” Llewellyn remarks. “What an artist he is. Those birds. It’s like he knew she was the one who was going to win.”

  “Hmmm,” Hope murmurs.

  “These came out nice,” Lwellyn goes on. “We’ll have to make a special scrapbook for her.” He looks through more photos: Larken being carried through the room in her chair, Larken with her best friends Stephanie and Peggy, with the mayor and Don Parry, with her brother and sister.

  When he gets to a group photo, Hope reaches out slowly and points. “That one,” she says. “Look at that one.”

  It’s the photo Llewellyn had Bud Humphries take of all of them: Larken, Gaelan, Bonnie, Viney, him, and Hope. Hope is in the center, sitting in her wheelchair, holding Bonnie in her lap, while everyone else is lined up around her.

  “That’s a nice one of all of us,” he says, propping it up against the martini pitcher. “We should get a frame for this one.”

  “No,” she says sharply, staring at the photo. “Look at me. Look at my face.”

  “What?” he says. “You look fine.” His voice isn’t convincing even to himself.

  She stares at him, silent.

  “Hope …”

  “Did you bring me something? Did you do what I asked?” Her voice now is ruthless, demanding, even though her demands are framed as questions. “I think you owe me a little something. I think I’ve paid for it.”

  He busies himself with the photographs, stacking them neatly, aligning their edges, sliding them back into the envelope and then placing them on the center of the table, all the while aware of her eyes on him, aware of the millions of precise neuromuscular commands his brain is issuing to his body, allowing him to complete this simple sequence of movements. It took no more than a few seconds.

  “We need to talk more about—”

  “No. I’ve done all the talking I’m going to do. You owe me this, Llewellyn.” She pauses, looks away from him, clenches down so hard on her teeth that he imagines the dentin in her mouth starting to crumble, like chalk. “It’s my choice. Viney understands.”

  “Viney shouldn’t have anything to do wth this.”

  She turns to face him. “Viney has everything to do with this. Do you think I’d even consider this if she wasn’t part of our lives? I love her. The children love her. You love her.”

  He’s finding it hard to speak, to move, as if the force of her will is stripping the insulation off his own nerve cells. “I can’t.”

  “I can,” she says in her stony voice. “Did you bring them?”

  He nods.

  “All right then.” She holds out her flaccid hand; weak as it is, it receives the small paper bag he extracts from his jacket pocket and greedily, triumphantly, snatches it away.

  Wrapping both of her hands around the bag, she gives it a shake and smiles happily—as if she’s a gambler about to roll double sevens. It’s cruel, that’s what it is, her frivolity.

  “Let’s see,” she says delightedly, bringing out the small cylindrical containers and dropping them in her lap. “Ooooh, there are so many advantages to being married to a physician.”

  He has a sudden impulse to slap her; instead, he stares at the moon, aware now of its shadowed craters (it’s gone dingy, like filthy bulldozed snow at the end of winter) and
drinks his martini.

  She squints at the labels. “All these pharmaceutical companies with their gifts. Don’t they realize how foolish it is to publish all these contraindications and warning labels? They’re like blueprints, aren’t they? So that what not to do becomes the very thing to do.” She turns to him, her expression no longer teasing. “Thank you.”

  They sit in silence for a while longer before he realizes that he’s started to cry.

  “I’m not going to tell you when,” she says, her voice low, soft, kind. “I’m just not. It won’t be tonight. It might be years. It will be some day of my choosing. And when I do, you won’t have to worry about the … I’ll make sure that”—her voice starts to tremble—“I’ll make sure the children are …”

  He takes her hand.

  “No. Don’t.” She utters the words as if they’re weapons, and yet she is crying now, too. “I won’t be this. I won’t be the Black Queen in my own daughter’s fairy tale. Look at this,” she insists, snatching the photo off the table, mangling it. “Look, Lllwelyn! Look!” She holds it out to him and he sees her as she sees herself, sunken and sneering, bitter on the day of their Larken’s triumph.

  He takes the photo from her, plucks the pill bottles from her lap and puts them on the table, kisses her temples, her eyelids, her cheeks, her lips, starts undoing the buttons of her cardigan, her blouse, easing her legs out of the stirrups, her body out of the chair, and then—as if they were young and in love and had just finished a picnic lunch on a fine, clear-skied, earth-warming spring day, and pulling one of their bedsheets from the clothesline as they go—carries her into the fields.

  The following morning, Hope is alone in her house, having wheeled herself to her writing desk. She is sitting with the peculiar silence that ensues in the wake of her children’s departure.

  She’s not sure why she feels compelled to make one more entry in her diary when she’ll soon be burning it, along with all the others. Habit, perhaps. She’s done this kind of talking to herself for years.

  This will be a short entry and a typed one; she must conserve her strength for the most important writing she has yet to do: