The Song Reader

by Lisa Tucker

  “Sorry,” I told him, but I took his hand and forced a smile. “I’m sure it will be soon.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “I told you I’m sorry.”

  “It doesn’t make sense.” He paused. “Why do you need so much time anyway?”

  I blinked. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  He looked out the front window. “I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but it does seem screwed up. How could you be with that moron, and you don’t want to be with me?”

  “You’re talking about Kyle?” I shouldn’t have been surprised. The whole school had to have heard the gossip. But why hadn’t Mike ever mentioned this before?

  “You were what, fourteen then? How can you say you’re too young?”

  The truth was so embarrassing; I almost wished I could just let him keep believing that Kyle and I had done it. At least that was a normal thing, mature even.

  “Forget it,” he said. “I’ll just have to pretend all this makes sense.”

  “Guess so,” I said, and I was out of the truck before he could say goodbye.

  After dinner he called but neither of us said much. He did manage to throw in a quote: “Do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.” I told him it sounded like it belonged on a pillowcase—or in a Styx song. His voice was a little cold as he informed me it was Benjamin Franklin.

  I wanted to tell him what really happened with Kyle. I knew it might be easier on the phone than in person, but I could hear his mom in the background. She was talking to one of his sisters, and I could feel myself getting mad again. Of course I was glad his mom was doing better but I was also intensely jealous that he had his family back while my family had become squatters.

  Talk about making no sense. How could it be that Holly was happier than she’d ever been in Mike’s whole life, according to him anyway, and my sister was languishing in some psych ward? Where was the fairness in that, when it was Holly’s fault that my sister crashed in the first place?

  Holly’s fault, Ben’s fault, I didn’t really care, as long as it was somebody’s fault. Nobody’s fault was like a tornado or a lightning bolt. Nobody’s fault was too close to nothing you could do and nothing you can do if it ever happens again.

  After the nightly vitamin and television routine, I headed down to the basement to work on a paper for school, but I just couldn’t concentrate. I ended up looking through another pile of my sister’s records instead. All of Mary Beth’s albums were down here, fourteen boxes total, lined against the wall opposite the window. The history of her relationship with music, that’s how I thought of them, and I’d always been good at history—until now.

  The movers had boxed the records in the same order they were on the shelves. They weren’t arranged by artist or type of music, like most people arranged albums. They weren’t even arranged by year. They were arranged by topic, like books in a library. Mary Beth used to call it a musical Dewey Decimal system.

  Ben used to tease her that this was no system at all, this was chaos. At the time, I didn’t have an opinion; I had my Walkman and my tapes and I rarely had to find an album. Now I knew what Ben meant. When Mike mentioned that Neil Young’s Harvest was one of his favorite records, I decided to listen to it. But first I had to locate it, and of course it wasn’t with any other Neil Young or with albums that started with H or even other folksy rock albums. It was sandwiched between the soundtrack for Oliver and a Diana Ross Greatest Hits. And there was a Bob Dylan nearby. And next to that, the Stones’s first album.

  I spent a long time trying to figure out what topic all these records could possibly have in common. At first I thought the problem was that there was no meaning, but then I realized there was way too much. Most of the records had a song about a parent—was that the topic? Or was it change and the passage of time? Death and loss? Love—no, it couldn’t be that, since damn near every album she owned had a love song. It was the same situation with every pile of records I examined. True, I didn’t know where one topic began and another one ended, but no matter how big or small the pile, I couldn’t see one clear meaning.

  That night I had records all over my bed, all over the floor, before I realized this wasn’t helping my mood. I wasn’t my sister and I never would be. It was her gift to do this: she found the meaning for people just like she did for albums. She could take a customer who had all kinds of problems—poverty and family quarrels and lost love and even illness—and point her finger at the one thing they really cared about, the one thing that, if they found it and dealt with it, would give them the strength to handle all the rest. Sometimes it was as simple as erecting a memorial for a brother dead for decades. Or even bringing home a cat or dog.

  I knocked some of the records to the side and sprawled out on the bed as I wondered what my one thing was. I was so tired of the bad dreams, so tired of waking up with my jaw clenched. I loved the idea of a pet myself, but Juanita already said she was allergic to cats and dogs.

  When I heard the door creak open at the top of the stairs, I was almost asleep. Dad was saying my name.

  “Just a minute,” I yelled. In all the weeks we’d lived at Juanita’s, he’d never come down here. I jumped up with an energy that I later realized was anticipation. He was doing so much better. Maybe he finally wanted to talk to me. Not a heart-to-heart chat necessarily, but something.

  I pushed aside the sheet hanging from the beam and saw him hovering over by the basement stairs. And then I knew why he was down here. He had Tommy’s art smock clutched in his arms.

  “Shit,” I muttered. I’d forgotten all about that smock. Tommy had already gotten in trouble last week. The teacher had sent a note home asking us to please make sure he had a clean one for the next art class on Thursday, tomorrow. And the laundry was my job. My only job now. I picked it because it seemed like the natural thing, since I was down here anyway.

  I walked over to Dad and stuck my hand out. He looked confused.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I know it has to be done.”

  He clutched it tighter. “Your light was still on.” He was looking at his feet. “I didn’t want to startle you.” His voice was quiet as a cat’s step. “I’m just going to wash this.”

  “I can do it.”

  He looked up, but not at me, at the wall behind me. His “no” was a breath. “It’s late,” he whispered. “You need your sleep.”

  “Okay then.” I wasn’t going to argue the point, though I was sure I wouldn’t be able to sleep with him messing with laundry.

  I was wrong. I heard him opening the top of the washer and turning the wash cycle knob and after that, nothing. I didn’t even hear the knocking of the agitator during the spin cycle (usually loud enough to hear outside). I did wake up for a moment when he moved the smock to the dryer, but I didn’t open my eyes, I just rolled over and kept dreaming. It wasn’t a bad dream, for a change, or at least it didn’t start out bad. Mary Beth and I were in a big field, walking and laughing. By the time I realized she was gone, I was so deep in a forest that I couldn’t take a step without vines and branches cutting my legs.

  Then the dream changed into one of those running dreams. I was running so fast, I thought my lungs would explode, trying to get out of that forest. I must have been whimpering or calling out because Dad came into my half of the basement. I opened my eyes to see him leaning over my bed, repeating, “It’s all right.”

  His hand was poised in the air halfway to my face. That’s what struck me. He was going to touch me, but only if he had to. Only if he couldn’t bring me out of my nightmare any other way.

  And that’s when I started to cry, not a normal teenage cry, but the wail of a brokenhearted child. His face looked so kind whenever he looked at Juanita and Tommy. He gave a shy smile even to Darlene and Mike. But with me, he always looked nervous. With me, he looked like he wanted to escape.

  Within minutes my entire body was shaking with sobs; I felt like I would never stop. I remem
bered when I tried to show him that list I’d found in the car, the one with all my birthdays written on it. He’d flinched like I’d showed him an overdue bill. Maybe that’s the way he thought of me now. A bill he could never pay and so preferred not to see at all.

  And it wasn’t just Dad, of course. It was Mary Beth. Ben having that woman friend whose name I didn’t even know. My friends saying I was lucky. Mike never saying he loved me. He wanted to have sex, but he hadn’t said those words yet. I wasn’t sure if I loved him, but I needed him to love me. If he didn’t, I’d be completely alone.

  Poor Dad. I can still see him standing there in the blue sweater Juanita bought him, messing with the neckline until the thick cotton finally relented and rolled forward like a pouting lip. I think it must have taken everything he had to reach across the airspace and put his arm around me, but he did it, and there was something else, too. He called me Leebee. He said, “Don’t cry, Leebee,” and I was so surprised I couldn’t have kept crying if I’d wanted to.

  It was the name he’d used when I was little. I hadn’t thought of it for years. But even as he said the word, I heard the echo of the hundreds of times I’d heard it in the past. His voice had aged, but the music was still there. The music was unmistakable.

  chapter

  eighteen

  My father took care of me when I was little. Day in, day out, from the time he lost his job when I was two months old until I started kindergarten. I’d always known this, but I’d never really thought about what it meant—until those weeks at Juanita’s house, when winter was ending, and I started to remember.

  At first it was just colors. Brown for the elf costume Dad had safety pinned on me when I was three or four. Bright pink, the color of my first bicycle, the one Dad taught me to ride. Creamy yellow and blue for the blanket he used to cover me with when I took my naps. Green like the leaves when he would put me up in the tree in Agnes’s backyard and hold out his arms for me to jump to him.

  The process of remembering felt very natural, like going back to a place you know well rather than some big revelation. I saw him opening the door when I came home from kindergarten one day, holding a windup turtle I’d lost. I could hear him singing, spinning me around in the living room, dancing to “If I Were A Rich Man.” I could smell the calamine lotion he put on me when I had the chicken pox the summer I turned four. I could taste the lumpy pancakes he made on Saturday mornings.

  We were alone a lot back then. Mary Beth had school and her job at the pizza parlor. Mom worked long hours as manager of homeowners’ claims. Dad took care of me—and often let me get away with murder. I got to eat cake for dinner, skip my bath, crawl in bed with my clothes on. When it stormed, he even let me sleep on his lap. I remembered waking up, droopy and warm, snuggling into the old wool jacket he always wore, waiting for the noise to end.

  “He missed you every minute of every day,” Juanita said. We were clearing up dishes after another of her fine meals: corned beef and cabbage and brownies for dessert. “It broke his heart to leave you. He told me that himself.”

  “Then why did he?” I said.

  “I wanted to ask him that, kiddo, but I was afraid it’d bring on one of his fits. Nina at work says them fits your daddy has are like nervous overload. Her brother used to have them. It’s something in the person’s wiring. It shorts out just like a light circuit.”

  This was one of the many explanations Juanita had proposed for what was wrong with Dad. Her other theories included a vitamin deficiency (of course), not enough sleep, something having to do with his high IQ that she couldn’t exactly specify—having never known anyone who was a genius—and her favorite explanation and the one she kept coming back to: that he hadn’t been loved enough to get him over all the hard parts.

  A few days later, when I asked Dad if he remembered how afraid I was of thunder, he said he did.

  I was sitting across from him at the table. He was addressing envelopes, as always, but I’d gotten in the habit of doing my homework up here since that night he hugged me.

  “You know, I still don’t like storms,” I said. I looked up from my calculus book to find him smiling that shy smile.

  Now that his smile was directed at me, I could see why everyone thought my dad was so sweet. It wasn’t just that his face looked a hundred-percent sincere, but also the barely perceptible surprise playing around his lips, the feeling you got that his happiness was a discovery, something he’d seen in you that no one else had.

  The thought crossed my mind that my mother had married him for that smile. Or maybe it was his handwriting, all loops and curls and perfectly crossed t’s.

  I was thinking a lot about my parents’ relationship. I imagined it as a wire that stretched from the first time they looked at each other to the day he left. Even if I would never have the whole story, I had to understand the endpoints: why they got together, why they broke up. I knew from math class if you know the behavior at the endpoints, you can infer all kinds of things about the rest.

  It was one of those afternoons when Dad and I were working at the kitchen table that I decided I had to know if I was even right about when he left. All I remembered clearly was being out with Mary Beth and coming home to find that Dad had disappeared. Mom and Mary Beth said he’d left town; they didn’t say why. My secret fear was that he’d died, though I kept reminding myself that his old suitcase, the brown one with the plaid lining, was gone, too.

  I was pretty sure it was late February, early March. Ten years ago, almost exactly.

  Dad said that was about right. “It was a Friday.” His pen didn’t stop moving. “Lot of traffic going out of town.”

  “That’s when you went to Kansas City?”

  He nodded. After a long moment, he added, “I always wished I’d waited and told you goodbye.”

  I glanced at him, but I didn’t say anything. I was dying to hear more, but I knew Dad thrived on silence like other people thrived on encouragement.

  “I just hope you can forgive what I did,” he finally said. His voice was a whisper. His pen had stopped moving.

  “I do forgive you,” I said firmly.

  “I’ve been ashamed all these years. I thought I’d never see you again, and that’s what I deserved.”

  I was trying to work up the nerve to say how much I’d missed him when the phone rang.

  It was Ben, but before I could be annoyed, he said he had news. He’d been telling me for weeks that Mary Beth might be doing better, but not to get my hopes up. But now Mary Beth’s doctor was asking to see someone from her family. Ben said this was a good sign.

  The doctor’s first choice was Dad, but I told Ben—after I moved to the basement phone—that I didn’t think it was a very good idea.

  “He gets really upset when other people are upset.” I took a breath. “He’s doing so much better, Ben. I don’t want him to freak out again.”

  I heard Dad walking around, probably pouring himself another cup of coffee. He drank it all day long, from a huge mug, like water. Juanita wanted him to stop but she hadn’t pressured him. She said she’d learned from her second husband, the Arrested, that pressuring men was like handing them a challenge to do worse.

  “All right.” Ben paused. “How about you?”

  “I thought you had to be eighteen to go there.”

  “That’s not a hard and fast rule.”

  “Okay,” I said, thinking, now he tells me. “But I have to get to St. Louis somehow. I’m not going to drive that far with only a learner’s permit.”

  “You’re such a pragmatist, honey.” He laughed gently. “I can pick you up. Don’t worry about that.”

  “I’m not worried. I think my boyfriend will take me. I just have to ask.”

  My tone was a little offended, but he didn’t seem to notice—nor did he ask about Mike. He gave me the details of when I needed to be there, and we agreed to talk later in the week, to confirm. He was getting ready to hang up when I realized I hadn’t asked him Juanita’s ques
tion.

  She wanted to know Ben’s opinion of what was wrong with my dad. That’s how I put it, and it was true. Juanita wanted to know—not me. I didn’t want to hear his son-of-a-shrink diagnosis.

  “Nothing’s wrong with him,” Ben said. “If someone is mentally ill, that doesn’t mean something is fundamentally wrong with them.”

  “Come on. If he had cancer, you’d just blurt it out.”

  “It’s much more complicated than that.”

  “Now you sound like my sister.”

  He laughed, and that’s when I realized something had changed. It was his old, noisy laugh. Maybe Mary Beth really was doing better.

  “I’m not a doctor, Leeann. I have a Ph.D. in biochemistry, not medicine.”

  “You must have an idea. I mean, why would you say he was mentally ill if you didn’t have an idea?”

  “I didn’t say he was, I said he could be. And yes, I think it’s likely from what I’ve seen, but whether that illness is chemical in nature or some kind of reaction to trauma, I have no way to know.”

  “Reaction to trauma? Is that like a hard life?”

  “Yes, I suppose you could look at it that way.” His voice sounded like a smile. “It’s usually more discrete, a single event we call trauma, but perhaps that’s because our measurement tools aren’t sophisticated enough to capture the wide-angle view.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, so I told him I had to go. Later, when I related all this to Juanita, she repeated her conclusion that Ben was nice but a real egghead.

  Mike suggested we stay the whole weekend in St. Louis rather than just drive there and come back. He had some money saved; he could pay for a really nice hotel downtown. We could go up in the Arch and see the zoo. He thought it was really weird that my family had never toured the city. I could imagine what he’d say if I’d told him we’d never been on vacation, period.