The Song Reader

by Lisa Tucker

  We got back to Tainer about noon and he was still at church with Juanita and Tommy. (This was another thing Juanita had added into our lives. I didn’t mind; I figured our family could use help from any quarter.) Instead of going downstairs to my room, I plopped down on the couch to wait. I’d decided to tell Dad as soon as they got home. I didn’t want him to spend another moment feeling guilty for something he didn’t do.

  Juanita was there when I told him. Tommy had run into his room to play, and naturally Juanita wanted to hear about my hospital trip, too. I thought about waiting but then she was pouring Dad his coffee and she had her hand on his shoulder the way she always did and I realized she might be able to help if he took it too hard. No matter what he thought about Mom, it couldn’t be easy hearing that your eldest daughter would do this to you. I worried he might even have one of his “fits” as Juanita called them, so I went very slowly.

  Neither of them reacted anything like I expected.

  When I was finished, Juanita said, “I got to make a phone call,” and disappeared down the hall to her bedroom. Dad was crying a little, a noiseless pitiful cry, but not for himself. Not because he’d been betrayed by his wife and his daughter.

  “Poor Bethie,” he said.

  “You feel bad for her?” I was sputtering, but before I could say more, Juanita was already back in the kitchen.

  “Come on,” she said to me, “we’re going on a little trip.”

  “Where? I just got home.”

  “It won’t take long. Henry and I were talking about it last night and we think that doc treating your sister needs to know about this.”

  “About what?”

  “Get in the car and I’ll tell you what. You come too, Henry. I’m taking Tommy over next door to play with little Brendan.”

  Dad and I did as we were told. We got in Juanita’s Plymouth, Dad in the passenger seat, me behind him in the back. After a moment, he said softly, “She did it for her mama.”

  “So?” My voice was too harsh; he stopped talking.

  When Juanita got in, I asked her where she was taking us. “To the old house. The one you were born in.”

  “I’ve seen it.” Mike and I had driven by once, just for curiosity. It was way on the east side of town, near Denise’s house. The jungle gym Dad had built for Mary Beth was gone, but the porch swing was still there. “I don’t get why we have to—”

  “You never been inside have you?”

  “No, but—”

  “Okay then. I already called the woman who owns it and she said it’s fine for us to come on over.”

  I sat back for a minute, impressed as always by Juanita’s ability to make things happen. How did she know this woman anyway?

  After a while I said, “Why exactly are we doing this?”

  My voice sounded irritable but Juanita didn’t seem to notice. “Mary Beth painted the walls of the basement. One summer when she was a kid. Henry told me about it a few weeks ago, and I went over to see it last week, after work.”

  I flashed to all the home improvements my sister had done after my car accident. No wonder she’d known how to paint already. I looked out the window and tried to imagine how this could be worth driving across town. Maybe she painted each wall a different color. Maybe she’d even put cork on one wall, like she did with Tommy’s room.

  Or had she painted words all over the walls. Is that what they were trying to tell me?

  On the way there, Juanita talked nonstop about Mary Beth. “The kid was what? sixteen? seventeen? And here she is in this awful spot, with her mom asking her to do something like that. I’m not saying it was right, it wasn’t. But I got to tell you, I feel sorry for your sister. Dammit if her whole life hasn’t been people asking her for help.”

  “I know,” Dad whispered.

  “But—” I began.

  “Did you know your mom didn’t even want Mary Beth to go to college? Henry and I were just talking about this last night. I knew Mary Beth when she got out of high school, she was already working at the restaurant but she could have done anything. You know how smart your sister is. But your mom said she needed her here.”

  I thought about it for a moment and realized I’d never known Mary Beth wanted to go to college. She always talked about me going to college, but never about her. When I said, “She didn’t seem to mind working at the diner,” Juanita looked in the rearview mirror and frowned.

  “She played the hand she had, like people always do. And once your mom died, she really didn’t have no choices. She had to take care of you, and then little Tommy came along with nobody but Mary Beth to love him. But why else do you think she was so interested talking to Ben about all his big-shot science stuff? She ain’t no simple little gal, your sister. I mean, hell, have you ever thought about why she started her own business doing those readings? It was so she could have something that was just hers, something where she would get to think and dream rather than wear a uniform and kiss business-suits’ asses all day.” Juanita sighed. “She wanted a lot of things. Everybody does I guess, but especially Mary Beth.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t help thinking yeah, and I wanted a father growing up. I wanted to be in a normal family, where I wouldn’t be lied to and used by my own sister and mother.

  The house was in a subdivision of ranch homes, street after street of little boxes, mostly white or brick, a few green or brown. Juanita drove into the driveway of our old house like she owned the place, and when the woman who did own the place came to the door, Juanita greeted her like an old friend.

  The woman was holding a chubby baby and there were three other kids running around, driving her crazy, the woman said, and smiled. She invited us into the living room. It was a mess, but it was a colorful mess, and the chubby baby was looking at me and opening and closing his pink hand, like he was waving hello.

  “My kids love that forest,” the woman was saying. “No lie, it was a big part of the reason we took this house. It seemed lucky somehow.”

  Forest? I thought, but Juanita nodded and Dad didn’t bat an eye.

  Juanita said, “Okay, I gotta run by work and make sure the weekend girls got their paychecks.” She looked at Dad. “You know where it is.”

  “You’re leaving?” I said.

  “I’ll be right back, kiddo.” She leaned closer to me. “I think this is something your dad and you need to do alone.”

  It was hard to imagine how Dad and I could be alone with this woman and her kids still here, but when we got to the basement, it felt like we were all by ourselves—it felt like we were on another planet even. I heard the footsteps of the kids and the crying of the chubby baby, but they seemed as far away as a dream. All that mattered was me and my dad, looking at this wonderful thing.

  The basement was the forest. This is what my sister had done. She had spent all her free time, the summer when she was eleven, almost twelve, turning the gray concrete into a kid’s version of a tropical paradise. And she did it for Mom. That’s what Dad said. He was standing next to me with his hands shoved in his pockets (his new habit, so he wouldn’t fidget). He said Mom was depressed that summer and Mary Beth was trying to cheer her up.

  “Bethie was always trying to make Helen happy.” Dad cleared his throat. “From the time she was a tiny girl.” He paused for a moment and lowered his head. “Helen had been saying that her life was over, she’d never see the world. So your sister gave her this.”

  The shock for me was that I didn’t even know Mary Beth could draw. Sure, I’d seen her draw pictures for Tommy and they were always really good, but this would have been good for an adult, and it was just incredible for a kid. The colors didn’t seem to have faded at all and it was so intricate, so rich in details. There were trees covering all four walls, with moss-covered branches and dark green vines and broad fan leaves, and there were furry little animals, some brown, some gray, hanging off the vines and peeking out playfully from behind the leaves. There were birds flying all over the ceilin
g: some with long red tails, others with stubby dark yellow beaks, and one with a wing span as wide as my arms. There was even a waterfall in the corner, with fish leaping out between the splashes of crystal water, and turtles and frogs and a swarm of butterflies—orange, pink, blue—hovering at the water’s edge.

  I walked around the room slowly, several times, taking it all in, and about the third time I passed by the water, I noticed a large rock reflected in it. I turned back to the right wall, where the rock was painted, and I saw all these colors on the flat surface so I moved closer to get a better look. When I got right up to it, I started laughing, I was so surprised. Mary Beth had painted a tiny version of her whole forest on that rock: the water was there, and the animals and the trees, and even the rock itself, and the order of everything was exactly the same, in miniature. I started out thinking she’d done the rock first, as a kind of master plan for the rest, but then I decided she’d probably put it in after the whole forest was finished. Maybe she wanted to see her design in a smaller form, so that one picture in her mind could hold it all, or maybe she’d just loved it so much, when she was done, that she’d decided to paint it all over again.

  When Dad heard me laughing, he laughed, too. He was walking around himself, looking and becoming more relaxed with every minute we spent in the basement. Later, I often thought Mary Beth’s forest cast a kind of spell on Dad and me. We stayed down there until Juanita came back. We didn’t talk about what had happened to our family or anything that was sad; we just looked at the forest and talked about how beautiful it was. Dad even hummed a little as I moved across the floor, looking up at the birds in Mary Beth’s sky and smiling at the idea that those birds could fly forever just like this. They would never have to go wherever birds go when it rains; they would never have to travel hundreds of miles south to escape the bitter cold of winter. The birds could stay right there, the trees would never lose their leaves, the water would never dry up, the fish would never swim away; nothing would have to change at all, so nothing would ever die.

  It had to be a spell, because as soon as we got back in Juanita’s car, I realized that the summer Mary Beth was almost twelve was also the summer after I was born. Mom was depressed; Mom had said her life was over when I was what? Two months old?

  “Did it work?” I asked Dad. We were waiting at a stoplight downtown.

  “What do you mean?” Juanita said.

  “Did it make Mom happier?”

  Dad said no, but he didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask him to because he was messing with a wad of loose thread he’d pulled from the pocket of his new church pants. Juanita had already told him to stop. “You’re going to ruin that pocket, Henry.”

  I closed my eyes and thought about what Juanita and Dad were trying to tell me by taking me to our old house. That Mary Beth would do anything for Mom. Okay, I got it, but it made no sense. It didn’t help; it didn’t make Mom happier. And neither did the other thing my sister did for Mom, I realized with a start. That guy Mom had the affair with, Mr. Stanley, got transferred to the home office in Chicago the summer after Dad left. I remembered this because Mom’s new boss, a fat bald guy named Mr. Treecher, had a daughter Francine, the new girl in our first grade class, who had two raincoats: one the ordinary yellow slicker, and another reversible one, pink on one side, baby blue on the other.

  Mom probably thought she got what she deserved. The world was hard and you had to be hard to survive it.

  Or you could be crazy.

  We were back at the house and Dad was hunched over the kitchen table, scribbling away on a piece of paper, making one of his lists for the first time in weeks. I sat down next to him and tried to get started on my homework, but it was useless. My mind was too busy trying to make sense of all this, though I knew that was probably useless, too. I could lay out everything I knew about my family, make lists of every memory and every fact, but like the night sky, there would still be holes, places too far away from me to make out any light.

  chapter

  twenty

  That Ben was still in love with my sister was obvious, and not just because he was spending all his time—and going deeply in debt on his Visa—flying to St. Louis to see her every weekend. That could have been brotherly love, even a desire to help a friend in need. But if she was just a friend, he wouldn’t have checked his face in the rearview mirror and stuck a breath mint in his mouth before he got out of the car. He wouldn’t have closed his eyes when she kissed him, no matter how playful the kiss. He wouldn’t have offered her his arm pretty much constantly, as if he was dying to touch her even for a minute.

  Even though it had been two years now since she dumped him, he was still in love with her. We were sitting in a bar near Washington University, the last weekend in April, when I decided to ask him why.

  It was my fourth visit to St. Louis, and the first time in my life I’d ever been in a bar. We were in a small booth across from the pool table. A Van Halen song was playing on the jukebox. We’d just come from the hospital, and Ben was leaning his head in his hands. He still had the long drive to Tainer ahead to take me home, and then back to his parents for the night, before he flew to Philadelphia tomorrow.

  I liked the darkness of the place. It made it easier to say what was on my mind.

  My faith in romance was at an all-time low. It had been bad enough hearing the relationship woes of Mary Beth’s customers, but knowing about my own mother’s affair, knowing the terrible thing she did to my dad, it was enough to make me lose hope. And Mike and I weren’t doing so well, either. Since our weekend in St. Louis, he was always busy. He swore he wasn’t mad about what happened—or didn’t happen—that night. He said he understood. Nothing had changed, he insisted; he was just really, really busy. Too busy to come over or go out.

  Tonight was the prom, and instead of being home getting my hair and nails done with all the other lucky girls, I was sitting here. It was my own fault. Mike was still willing to go, but I’d told him to forget it. I told him he was right, it was nothing but a waste of time.

  Ben was on his second beer, and I was devouring a ham and cheese sandwich. I could never eat before I went to the hospital; my stomach was too jumpy. He didn’t seem to mind that I asked why he loved Mary Beth, but he hadn’t answered yet, either.

  “You’re what,” he finally said, “sixteen now?”

  He was guessing but he was right; I’d just turned sixteen on Monday. Juanita had covered the cake with candles and joked that I was sixteen going on a hundred. It felt true. The strain of trying to understand my sister was taking its toll. Of course I never said no when Mary Beth asked to see me, even though she was damn near impossible to talk to. Everything was funny to her now: the weather and the shows on TV and what she had for lunch and you name it. Even when I told her I’d seen the forest she painted at the old house, she laughed and said, “Oh yeah, I’m a real Pea-Ca-So. Move over Mike Angelo, here comes Mary Beth Norris. Cathedral smathedral, the basement is what’s really tough. You have to paint behind both the washer and the dryer, and don’t get in the way of any boxes!”

  Every time I left the hospital, my mouth was sore from forcing smiles.

  Ben took a big gulp of his beer. I looked at him. “I hope you’re not about to say I’ll get it when I’m older.”

  He smiled weakly. “I was considering that.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. It’s none of my business anyway.”

  “I’m not trying to be evasive. It’s very complicated.”

  Two women walked by, giggling and talking, and took a long look at him. He was facing their direction, but for all the notice he took, they might have been ugly old men.

  “She’s beautiful, is that it?” It was another mystery: how she became prettier every time we saw her. That day she’d been wearing her own clothes, blue jeans and a violet shirt, Keds sneakers, hair pulled back in a ponytail. Nothing special, but even I had trouble looking away from her. Ben didn’t try.

  “She is beautif
ul.” His voice was wistful, but after a minute he shook his head. “But no. That’s not why I love her.” He wiped his hand across his eyes. “Christ, I should have a ready answer. I’ve been asked this question constantly in the last few months. My mother, my father, Rebecca, most of my friends.”

  His beer was empty and he nodded when the waitress asked if he wanted another one. I was worried about him driving but I figured he needed the break.

  After a while he tilted his head to the left side. “Did your sister ever tell you about Aaron?”

  I was about to say no, but then I remembered. Aaron was the guy who died in the biking accident with Ben. The reason Ben was depressed when Rebecca brought him to my sister. I told him yes, and then listened while he went on and on about how brilliant Aaron was. The finest mind in the biochem department. The potential to be one of the finest scientists in the world. Something about nonredundant protein sequences, neurotransmitters, biogenic amine something or other…a bunch of stuff I couldn’t have followed even if I’d tried, which I didn’t. I was too tired.

  “And he was your friend?” I finally said, hoping to move us back to the topic.

  “Yes. We worked together, but he was also my friend.” Ben’s voice was quieter. “The best friend I’d ever had.”

  He paused for a while. I looked at my hands and wished I could have a beer, too.