The Song Reader

by Lisa Tucker

  It wasn’t a long letter. I told him we were doing fine, that I was in the fifth grade and my favorite subject was history. In the last paragraph, I told him about Mom. I almost didn’t, figuring it would come as such a shock, but I worried that if I didn’t, he might not write back. I signed my letter, “All my love. Your daughter, Leeann.”

  I circled the date I mailed the letter on the calendar, Tuesday, December 5, and calculated how long I would have to wait for a response. I figured for sure I would hear something by the fifteenth, but when the fifteenth came and went, I decided he hadn’t written because he was going to just show up for the holidays and surprise us. I wished I’d asked him what he wanted for Christmas. I had to get him something, but I didn’t know what he liked or his size or even his favorite color. I settled on a one-size-fits-all acrylic sweater from The Men’s Place in bright blue and violet stripes. My favorite color was blue, Mary Beth’s was violet. I figured our father had to like one of those colors at least a little.

  Mary Beth knew I was buying Dad a present and she didn’t try to talk me out of it. “It’s sweet of you. If he doesn’t come here for Christmas, we can always mail it to him. But what’s really important is what you want for Christmas. You haven’t told me yet, you know.” She sighed. “I want to make this holiday as normal as possible. I think it’s what Mom would want for us.”

  I didn’t really care about presents, but I made a short list. On Christmas morning, it was all there: a pair of jeans, a Sony portable radio, and a set of fancy drawing pencils. But Dad didn’t come. Of course. His sweater, wrapped in green and yellow snowmen, stayed under the tree in the back, almost out of sight, until New Year’s Day when Mary Beth and I packed up the ornaments and put the tree out in the street with the trash.

  I stuffed the present under my bed, where it was safe, and where I wouldn’t have to see it every day. I stopped thinking about Dad. I knew I’d have to keep trying, but I didn’t know where to begin. But about a month and a half later, I came up with a plan. I would go to Kansas City to deliver the sweater myself.

  This time when I told my sister there was no smile. She was watching One Day at a Time and filing her nails. She said it wasn’t a good idea, and turned up the volume on the TV.

  “Come on, Mary Beth,” I said. “I’m sure we could get there in a few hours. It’s not that far.”

  “It takes about five hours, but that’s not the problem.” Her voice was flat; she was concentrating on the edge of her thumb. “Think about it. He knows exactly where we are, and he hasn’t ever come back to see us. There has to be a reason for that.”

  When I pressured her to tell me what that reason could be, she shook her head. “I’m not up to discussing this right now. Please, Leeann, just leave it alone.”

  But I couldn’t do that. Every night that week after she got home from work, I begged her to change her mind, and every night, she told me to drop the subject. I tried everything, from promises of good behavior to persuading her latest boyfriend, Nick, to take my side. Nothing helped. My promises were sweet, she said, but they didn’t change the situation. And Nick’s advice was meaningless. What would he know about her family and her life?

  He wasn’t the first guy to hear that from my sister, and he wasn’t the first (or last) to be dumped when he tried to interfere. She told him not to call anymore after she found out that he’d offered to take me to Kansas City himself one Sunday when she had to work. I felt bad for him, but I had to tell her. I knew it would be just the thing to make her realize she had no choice in the matter.

  I didn’t want to go with Nick; I wanted to go with her.

  And it worked. She said we could leave in a few weeks, as soon as she could arrange a weekend off. I hugged her and thanked her. I said it would be an adventure, a real-life long-lost-loved-one kind of meeting like the ones in the movies.

  “Maybe,” was all she said.

  When the Friday evening finally arrived, I packed up the present and my nicest skirt and knitted beige sweater while Mary Beth threw together some of her stuff. The drive took almost exactly five hours, and I was so tired when she pulled into a Travel Lodge motel in Independence that I fell asleep immediately, with my clothes still on, when I lay down on the stiff motel bed.

  The next morning we had to get our bearings in Kansas City and find the downtown area, and then go south, like the map Mary Beth bought at the motel told us to do. When we finally got close to Dad’s, however, Mary Beth decided we couldn’t go yet since we hadn’t had lunch, so we headed farther south, to the Plaza. I complained a little but I really didn’t mind. Just seeing his neighborhood had made my throat go dry and itchy.

  We ate and hung out at the Plaza, looking in store windows, trying on clothes we couldn’t afford. Finally, Mary Beth said we’d better get going, and we headed back up to Harrison Street.

  We found the address quickly. It was a three-story, dark red brick apartment building, run-down looking, with an overflowing Dumpster on the side, and two yellowing plastic chairs sitting on the front lawn. We opened the door, and I swallowed hard when I saw Henry Norris printed neatly on a white card above the middle of the six buzzers.

  Mary Beth rang the buzzer. No one answered so she rang again. Still no answer, so she rang the buzzer on the left, underneath the card that said Landlord.

  A woman in a purple housecoat and silver-sequined slippers opened the door. She looked us over without any expression. “Who’re you looking for?”

  Mary Beth said, “Henry Norris. I see his name here, but he doesn’t answer his buzzer. Do you have any idea when he might return? We’re sorry to bother you, but we’ve come a long way, and we can’t wait too long.”

  “I wish I knew. He lit out of here two weeks ago without so much as a goodbye. He didn’t owe me no back rent, but he left the place in an awful state. My nephew came over last week and took one look and told me he’d have to give it at least two coats of paint before I can advertise. In the meantime, I’m losing money, and I can barely make ends meet as it is. So I’m not real happy with Henry Norris right now. Are you related?”

  “Yes,” Mary Beth said. “We’re his daughters.”

  She looked us up and down again, but she didn’t say anything. I figured she was waiting for us to go, but I wasn’t about to do that. This was as close as I’d come to him for five years.

  “I want to see the apartment,” I said quickly.

  The landlady shrugged, but Mary Beth shook her head.

  “Come on,” I said, grabbing my sister’s arm. “Maybe there’s a new address or something. It’ll only take a minute. Please. We can’t just leave without trying.”

  “Okay, okay.” She turned to the landlady. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

  The woman shrugged again. “Maybe you can figure something out from the mess he left behind.”

  We walked up one flight of narrow, creaking stairs. “It’s up here,” the landlady said, pulling a ring of keys from her housecoat pocket. “Be careful,” she added, looking at me. “This place ain’t no playground.”

  She opened the door. “I’ll be downstairs. Let me know when you’ve finished so I can lock up.”

  It was a one-room apartment. Over on the left was the living room area, with a small green couch, an old TV with bent rabbit-ears antenna, and a wobbly, wood-veneer coffee table. The kitchen area was in the back corner, with a plastic tabletop and two metal chairs with sticky brown rubber cushions. The bedroom area was by the window and was the smallest of all, just a three-drawer dresser and a twin bed that came out of a closet. The landlady was right, it was a mess, but I hardly noticed the trash even though a couple of times I had to kick away crumpled paper and old cans. I didn’t really pay attention to the smell, either, although it reeked of spoiled food. It was the walls I noticed. They were covered with words, filled with big square letters. Someone—it took me a minute to realize it must have been Dad—had actually written on almost every available inch of the walls with a thick black pen.
On the wall behind the couch, he’d written “EVERY MORNING” in large print, and then underneath a list numbered from one to fifteen. Many of the words were smeared and illegible, but I made out:

  Brush Teeth

  Wash Face

  Bowl of Cereal Juice Coffee

  Bus #9 leaves from corner at 7:42

  Pack lunch FIRST!

  Get three quarters from drawer for bus there, three quarters more for bus home: total of six quarters needed.

  Coat! KEYS!!!

  Lock apartment door

  Lists like this covered every wall in the place. There was a list for every evening over by the pullout bed, with instructions like “eat dinner,” “lock the door,” “wash out underwear for the next day.” There was a list for each day of the week: Tuesday’s list, in the bathroom, included taking the trash to the Dumpster outside; Saturday’s longer list, by the kitchen table, included going to the Laundromat and the corner grocery store. There was another list right by the refrigerator of things to buy at the store (which seemed senseless to me until I decided he must have copied this one down on paper before he went to do his shopping). There were even reminders for specific days over by the door, such as “December 17th: Library Books Due. Library Closes at exactly 7:30,” and “November 8th, 10:30 A.M., plant physical. Shower in morning first.”

  There were so many words, so many lists, and I moved from wall to wall like a spider, taking it all in. I couldn’t stop reading, even though my mind was becoming numb and my eyes were aching from the strain of trying to read as the room grew shadowy in the early dusk of February. I kept looking for something that would make sense of it, something that would explain the why of all these words. Only after more than an hour, when I’d seen all the walls and read every legible word, did I finally fall back, bone-tired, on the couch by Mary Beth.

  Her eyes were closed, and her head was laid back, but I knew she wasn’t asleep because her teeth were pressed down, biting her bottom lip. I told her I was ready, and she stood up without saying anything and walked downstairs.

  The landlady was cooking spaghetti when we knocked on the door. The garlic smell was so heavy it made me feel a little sick to my stomach. When she opened the door, she asked us if we’d found what we were looking for and Mary Beth nodded. Then Mary Beth opened her purse and pulled out two twenty-dollar bills. “It’s not much, but it’ll help pay for the paint at least. I’m really sorry about your trouble, and thanks again for letting us go up there.”

  The woman smiled warmly for the first time. “That’s awfully good of you. It’s just too bad you didn’t catch him. Hold on. I’ve got something for the little girl.”

  She brought out a bruised apple and put it in my hand. “You’re probably hungry by now. You all take care of yourselves. If I see Henry Norris again, I’ll be sure and tell him you were here.”

  We walked to the car in the darkness. Mary Beth started down the street and twisted the radio dial until she found the rock station playing “Tuesday Afternoon.” She started humming along like nothing had happened and maybe I wanted to believe her, at least for a while. Or maybe I was just exhausted. Before the song ended, I sank into sleep and I didn’t wake up until we were at O’Fallon, about ninety miles from home.

  It took me a moment to remember where we were, why we were in the car at ten o’clock on Saturday night. As I looked out the window at the big green highway signs telling me the number of miles to places I’d never heard of and places I’d probably never go, I felt calm and grateful for the night that could hide everything from me and make the highway seem like all there was in the world.

  When Mary Beth realized I was awake, she said she wanted to talk to me, and turned down the radio. I braced myself for whatever she would say.

  “You know, I bet you can tell an awful lot about a person from the songs they sing. I don’t mean if they’re in love, it’s a happy song; if they’ve broken up, a he-done-me-wrong song. I mean something else. Something in the brain maybe, that lets the music slip past all the things you think you know, and wish you believed, to what you really are.” She glanced at me. “It’s kind of strange, don’t you think? Those same words would be ignored if someone tried to just say them to you, but when they’re in the music, it’s different—you can’t help but open up. And then you start singing them, too, and it’s like your voice is telling you something you still don’t know, but need to. Like you’re stuck on a particular song and you can’t get it out of your head for a reason.”

  I was more than a little confused. Of course I expected her to talk about Dad. “Did this happen to you?”

  “Sure, lots of times, but I’m talking in general here.” She moved into the right lane. “I’m saying if you looked at the songs people keep singing, you might find out something important about them.” She shrugged. “Oh, not every song. But a lot of times, the person could be figured out by the song, kind of like dream interpreting. You know how they say if you dream about a house, you’re dreaming about yourself. Well, I’ll bet if you’re singing certain songs, it’s the same way, and you could work out a method to figure out what it all means.”

  I didn’t know about dream interpreting, but before I could ask, she said, “Here, let me try it out on you. Tell me the last song you couldn’t stop humming, that you kept going back to whenever your mind wasn’t busy with something else.”

  The only song I could think of was “Blue Bayou.” It was on the radio when I woke up.

  “Okay,” she said, “but let’s say you got stuck on it, and two weeks or even ten years from now, sometimes, all alone, you were still hearing it. Don’t you think that would be important? Like your mind was still in the car in a way, trying to make sense of everything that happened on this trip, but maybe you wouldn’t remember anymore where you were when you heard it, and why it kept playing in your head. So instead of just singing it, you decide to think about it. And then you know something about yourself, something the song was trying to tell you.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, it depends. You’d have to think about how you felt when you sang it. Do you want to cry? Or are you more angry? Or are you just repeating the words, numbly, without feeling anything? But this isn’t a real example. Tell me a song you’ve actually gotten stuck on.”

  “I don’t have one,” I said, pulling at the bottom of my sweater.

  “Oh sure you do.”

  “I can’t think of one right now.”

  “Come on, Lee. Try.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, try harder. This is important.”

  I was too tired to try harder, and when she kept pressuring me, I started to cry.

  She touched my shoulder and said, “poor baby,” “oh sweetie, it’s all right”—but now that I’d let myself start, it wasn’t so easy to quit. She grabbed a napkin from the dashboard, and kept patting me while I blew my nose several times. When a station wagon behind us started honking because we were going so slow, she yelled, “We’re a little busy here,” but she put both hands back on the wheel and accelerated.

  Ten miles down the road, when I was still sniffing and coughing, she said, “Okay, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it was your fault that Dad left. It’s not true. Trust me, honey. You had nothing to do with it.”

  I was so surprised that I stopped crying and stared at her. She was right, although I wouldn’t call what I was doing thinking. There were no words that went with this feeling. It was just cold emptiness, a blind panic. Like I’d somehow let go of my father, and he’d fallen through the earth.

  I hadn’t felt this way since I was so little. I’d forgotten I’d ever felt this way, actually—until Mary Beth reminded me. “You used to say all the time that you’d lost Daddy.” Her voice was airless. “Like he was your favorite doll.”

  She pulled onto the exit for Tainer. Neither of us spoke for a moment. Finally I said, “Is something wrong with him?”

  Mary Beth exhaled loudly. “Did I ever tell
you about Dad and me watching The Wizard of Oz together?”

  “No.”

  “It was kind of a big deal. Every year when it came on, Dad and I would sit together on the old couch, glued to the set, grabbing handfuls of popcorn. Okay, well, one year when I was about twelve and you were just a baby, Dad and I sat down to watch the movie. You were in your crib sleeping. Mom was gone somewhere, I don’t remember where. I didn’t think anything was wrong until Dorothy was halfway through singing ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ and Dad got up and walked outside. I called him back, told him not to miss the tornado part, but he didn’t answer, so when the commercial came, I ran out to get him. He was sitting on the porch swing in front of the old house, but he wasn’t swinging. He had his head down and his face in his hands.

  “He’d already lost his job. I could see the For Sale sign planted in our front yard. When I asked him what was wrong, he raised his head, but he stared off at the sky instead of looking at me. Then he lifted his hands, palms up, above his shoulders, like he was apologizing to the moon, and said something so strange I’ll never forget it. He said, ‘There’s no somewhere for me. No place far enough away. Because no matter where I go, I’ll always be there.’”

  She paused and rubbed her forehead. “We moved and things got worse and worse. I don’t know. I guess I always hoped he’d be better off; maybe that he’d even find his own rainbow someday.”

  I heard how sad her voice was, and I was trying to think of something to say to all this. But then she shrugged off her mood—and the topic—by claiming she was so tired she was starting to babble. “I’ve driven almost six hundred miles now.” She pointed at the odometer and smiled a half smile. “Me, who doesn’t even like to drive to the grocery store.”

  Yet the next morning, she didn’t sleep in like she’d said she was going to. I woke up to find her sitting at the kitchen table, downing her second pot of coffee and scribbling lines from songs on a notepad. She was so excited about her song-interpreting idea that she’d already called a friend from the diner to come over and test it out.