Joplin's Ghost (56 page)

Carlos picked up the telephone at Phoenix’s bedside, which was so cold that he felt the warm pads of his fingertips cleaving to it. He didn’t hear a sound, no matter which buttons he pushed on the keypad. He knew his cell phone would be useless before he pulled it from his back pocket, but he checked anyway:
Searching for signal,
it said.

“Fuck.”
Carlos rubbed Phoenix’s hand, then her frigid cheeks. It
had
been a mistake to bring the piano here! Something had happened. Something
was
happening. “Oh,
Dios
. Don’t do this, Phee. Come back. I
know
you can come back.”

Carlos disentangled Phoenix from her IV tube, ignoring the droplets of blood that spattered her pale arm when he pulled the needle from her skin. Then, he bundled her into his arms, surprised that she weighed so little, almost a ghost already. The lyrics to Nana’s favorite gospel song beat through his veins with his rushing blood:
I was standing by the bedside of a neighbor / Who was just about to cross the swelling tide, / And I asked him if he would do me a favor; / Kindly take this message to the other side.

He scrambled around the corner and through Phoenix’s room, every fiber in him leading him toward her door. Yet, Carlos stopped himself midway across the room, glancing over his shoulder because he felt someone watching him from behind.

The Rosenkranz, of course. The piano was the first thing he saw when he turned his head.

The piano’s cover was down again, but Carlos wasn’t interested in the cover anymore. He was so steeped in fear that he no longer felt it, a calm he welcomed as he held the woman he loved and tried to decide how best to save her. Carlos closed his eyes. What now?

Phoenix had to be near the piano, or she would never be free.
Punto.
That was what the psychic had said, in her own way, and that was what he had known when he asked Burnside if the movers could bring it to Phoenix right away. He could not take Phoenix away from the piano. Maybe a psychic’s heart was buried in him, but Carlos knew that one thing like nothing else.

As Carlos’s adrenaline burned off, he realized his arms were tired from carrying her. She was heavier than he thought. Two steps took him to the Egyptian-style sofa, and he rested her gently there, easing himself onto the space beside her. He touched her cheek again, and the lifelessness of her skin brought tears to his eyes.

“Phee, listen to me. Come back,” he said, leaning closer to her. He kissed her forehead, her nose, then her lips, very lightly. “Stay with me, sweetheart. Stay.”

Carlos’s forehead brushed Phoenix’s lips as he nuzzled her, and he froze. Her lips already seemed warmer than they had been when he kissed her the moment before. Startled, he tested her lips with his index finger.

Yes.
There was warmth. Phoenix’s soft bottom lip was hoarding warmth at its core, and Carlos felt the warmth strengthen when he nudged his finger against her lip. There was life in his touch. “Phee?” he said. “I know you’re there. Come back.”

Carlos kissed her lips again, pressing harder now, with a mission. The warm core of her bottom lip answered him, flaring. When he nibbled her top lip, he felt heat flush that one, too.

Suddenly, Phoenix’s staring eyes seemed intent on him alone. Carlos beseeched her with his own eyes:
Come back, Phee. I’ll help you through. You know I’m not going to leave you.

Phoenix’s newly dampened lips pulled apart, slowly. Willfully.

“Phee?” Carlos said. “Talk to me. I’ll hear you, hon.”

“Tuhh…”
she whispered, a cool draft from her lungs.

He lowered his ear until her lips brushed his skin. “What, hon? Please tell me,
linda
.”

Then, he
did
hear, two words meant only for him.

“Touch me,” Phoenix said.

S
cott was dying.

Dying was much worse than its outcome, but how could she expect him to know that? No one should have to die in a madhouse, she thought, even if there were ways in which a madhouse was the perfect place to watch the world unravel before your eyes.

Manhattan State Hospital would be recited by biographers forever as the place where Scott Joplin drew his last breath. Considering that, she thought the hospital ought to be better up to the task. The Graphophone in the dayroom had no needle, the first of many flaws. The young man crying on the floor looked filthy, as if he hadn’t been washed in days, and his gown smelled of urine. The sanitarium attendant was patronizing, which annoyed her because she could remember a time to come when
Uncle
was no longer an acceptable name for a man not related to you.

But to her, the worst injustice was that Scott was suffering so close to spring, knowing it was too early for one last sight of the peonies, irises and roses in bloom. This hospital on Ward’s Island had lovely grounds—right along the East River, where excursion boats would be passing soon—but Scott had never been well enough to enjoy the view.

In the end, Scott caught her in a moment of confusion and pity. He was a scarecrow sitting at his Rosenkranz in an asylum, and she felt sorry for him. She loved him, which was reason enough. Her heart was multitudes. She had loved his soul before, and she would when they met again. She loved him now as much as she would when he took a new name, a future face. They belonged.

She could not resist him in the moment he needed her most. She never could.

As soon as her image appeared, his eyes clawed for her. He had prayed to see her.

“F-Freddie…” Scott begged from his chair, struggling to speak as he looked up at her, his longing not yet dead in his eyes even if his body was frail. “Take me.”

She was glad Lottie had sent the piano. The piano would have come to him whether Lottie sent it or not, but the gesture meant more this way. It didn’t matter that Scott couldn’t play; Lottie wanted to know something was there to remind Scott of what his life had looked like.

She shimmered for him, showing him a glimpse of his light to come, but she could not escort him. Leaping was always done alone. That was the way of it. The
alone
part was the reason no one wanted to go.

She wished he could use her memories to help him know what the Leap was, afterward. He would laugh at himself. Most people knew to laugh, at the very end, even if they had never believed there was laughter where they were going, but Scott was too mad at life to let go an inch of it. He should have left weeks ago.

The beautiful piano had brought him the joy Lottie intended, but it aroused his anger, too. He might live two or three weeks on his new anger. His dying would be all the longer.

“Do you want me to help you play?” she said.

She spoke the words of her own accord. She knew she shouldn’t, but she did. If he played, he would be laughing sooner, and she wanted to see her beloved laugh. That was all.

And the
look
in Scott’s eyes! Rapture. He might have looked this way when his mother pressed her rough palms over his eyes on the porch and said she had a surprise waiting for him in the house. A
special
surprise, she said, which had made Scott dream as big as licorice or a new pair of shoes. When you were poor, a new pair of shoes was Christmas Day. Their family had been poor as far back as anyone could remember.

Head bent down, Scott had peeked beyond his mothers’ fingers and seen tracks across the packed-dirt floor. Even then, he couldn’t let himself imagine it. Mama had bought him a
piano
. A part of Scott Joplin would always be stuck in that day, because his mother had changed his life. The old Scotty had died, and a new one was born. His mother had resurrected him.

She
would be Scott’s mother today, she decided. She would change his life, at the end.

“Yes. Yes, I w-want to play.” Scott’s desire to play baked from him.

The sanitarium attendant, a not-unpleasant man named Garth Mobley, wanted to move Scott back to his room and hush all the racket near so many insane and dying. Why torment an old cripple with an instrument he can’t play?

But she wouldn’t let him interfere. She was tired of Garth Mobley’s interruptions, well-intentioned or not, so she dashed to him on a dust mote and whispered just enough to preoccupy his mind with worries about his father’s worsening cough. She made Garth Mobley remember how much his father had given him, and Mobley was so overwhelmed by his love for the old man that he vowed to be a better son. For a precious moment or two, the attendant forgot about the man sitting at the piano and wandered away to mop up the pool of urine on the floor.

She and Scott were alone, for a moment.

She leaned over Scott, her gentle warmth draping his shoulder. She took one of his gnarled hands into hers, then the other, and raised them back to their berth on the piano keys. Scott knew, then. She felt the dribble of awareness come to him. He understood that the Rosenkranz had no heart of its own, only blind devotion. If he played this piano with her as one, she might not be able to untangle herself in time. The Rosenkranz would do its best to pull her down with him when Scott took his Leap.

But she was not afraid to be bound to another’s soul at his Leap. Love in death was the truest form, and death was nothing new to her. She had been visiting Scott here so long, she had forgotten their other names, their other times. A gnawing sense of duty and propriety had kept her from entangling herself with Scott, but one must always question the concept of duty. Or propriety. Or order. What did those concepts have to do with her? Had they ever?

She was
here
now. That was enough.

“Freddie…wait,” Scott said.

His unselfishness only made her more determined.

“Shhhh,”
she said. Her flesh form melted as her hands slipped inside of his, a feeling like wading into lukewarm water. No, not water—
jelly
. The feeling was not entirely pleasant, because it was not natural. She would not be able to stay long. She felt his body trying to expel her, instinct. His body choked her. “Play, Scott. Use my hands to play.”

Scott was infatuated with his fingers, wiggling them before his face like an infant. “Dear heart…how…?”

Phee, I know you’re there. Come back.

“Play, Scott.
Play
.” She hurt, suddenly, and she hadn’t felt pain in a long time. She couldn’t tell if the pain was from being crowded inside Scott, or from somewhere else. Without skin, it was hard to judge where pain came from. The pain
might
have come when she heard the phantom’s voice calling for someone named Phee.

Finally, Scott played. He played more crisply than she did, more slowly. He held his hands higher, more rigid in his adherence to form and technique. Even now, when he was engaged only with himself and his dying, he played with an audience in mind.

And the music! Music was the only language the living and the dead shared in common. Scott played one note for every joy that had escaped him in life, and the sound of his joy became hers. His playing made her remember hearing “Maple Leaf Rag” for the first time, riding her bicycle past Mr. Garrison’s farm in Little Rock, and how it had made her skid to a stop to listen through his open parlor window.
Those rags are the devil’s music,
Papa tried to tell her, the first time she knew with certainty that her father didn’t always know the truth.

Scott should have Lottie play this at his funeral. He should make Lottie promise.

“That’s
old
. I’m tired of that one, Uncle,” the attendant said.

The attendant had escaped her notice because of the music, but the sound of his voice so jarred her concentration that Scott’s hands nearly cast her out. Scott raced on to
Treemonisha,
and her effort to follow him that far was heroic. She was slipping away from him.

She was weak, she remembered. This was the price for appearing to him in a woman’s form, manipulating the lights and shadows to create the effect before his eyes. She had to leave him now. In a blink of his eyes, his Leap would be done.

“I’ll be back soon, Scott,” she said.

And she was.
Soon
arrived immediately.

She felt the passage of time, but not in minutes and hours and days. She felt her
absence
dragging behind her, and it unsettled her. Two weeks or more of Scott’s time may have passed, and she had never been freed. She was still tethered to Scott and his waiting.

She should not be here. She had another place to go.

This time, when she saw Scott, he was lying in his bed in the hospital room he shared with a man continuously reliving the Battle of Gettysburg, the journey he’d made as a young man to the true gates of Hell. Today, the second bed was empty. Scott was mostly unconscious, muttering occasionally, but otherwise still.