The Song Reader (13 page)

“Jesus,” I mumbled.

“You damn right Jesus. This is one big-ass mess.”

We sat there silently for a moment or so until we heard a noise in the living room. Mary Beth had left her chair; she was standing by the window now, and tapping her foot so loud it occurred to me the noise would wake Tommy.

I went over and tried to put my arm around her, but she shrugged me off. “I’m all right.”

“I’m so sorry, Mary Beth.”

“What for?” Her voice was airless; she hadn’t turned around to look at me.

“For what they did to you. Holly’s parents.”

Mary Beth laughed harshly. “Of course they feel that way about me, right? It’s obvious, isn’t it? Why they would?”

“Well, yeah, maybe, but—”

She spun around and stared at me. “Is it obvious to you or not, Leeann? Think about it and tell me the truth.”

I pretended I was thinking but I wasn’t really; I was too confused. Finally I said, “In a way, I guess. I mean, I don’t know what—”

“And so when Holly confronted them this afternoon, they probably screamed at her too, right? Told her it was a lie, and she was sick for even mentioning it.” Mary Beth smacked the side of her head, hard. “Think! Isn’t that exactly what you’d expect?”

I didn’t want to answer; she was being so weird it scared me. I looked at Juanita for help but she shrugged and then nodded like, go ahead, humor her.

I glanced down at the floor. “I guess her dad wouldn’t just admit what he did. Especially if the whole family was there, or his wife or whatever. So yeah, he’d act mad. He’d probably go off on her. That’s what I’d expect.”

My sister burst out laughing, but the laugh was horrible: high-pitched, squeaking—it hit my ears like a scream. Juanita went over and told her to relax; then she went into the kitchen. When she came back, she held up a glass of water to Mary Beth. “It’s okay. Drink this, then we can talk about it.”

She barked out no, still laughing that horrible laugh, but when Juanita moved the glass closer, Mary Beth pushed it away and it spilled down the front of Juanita’s sweater. “Shit,” Juanita muttered, but Mary Beth ignored her.

After a while, her laugh lost its air and become a strangled, desperate, choking sound, which scared me even more. I took a step towards her. “I don’t get this, Mary Beth. It’s not your fault. It’s her father’s fault, for being so mean.”

“Right. He’s a mean guy. Very mean. Terrible.” Mary Beth slumped down in the window chair. She wasn’t laughing anymore, but she was wringing her hands and blinking so hard she looked like she had a tic.

“I need a smoke,” Juanita said. She stood up and went into the kitchen. When she returned she was holding an empty soda can and flicking ashes into it.

We were all quiet for a while. Finally, Juanita dropped her cigarette in the can and walked closer to Mary Beth. “You have to forget about George. He’s an asshole. Hell, I won’t set foot in his store. Not after the time he tried to feel me up when I asked him to find a Philips head screwdriver.”

“He is an asshole, isn’t he?” Mary Beth whispered, as she looked over and glanced into my eyes. “And anyone who isn’t stupid should have expected he’d be horrible to Holly.”

Then I tried desperately to backtrack. I said lots of people wouldn’t expect it, because who can predict the future, and somebody who’s mean can be nice later, people change after all. I babbled on and on about how tough it is to know anything about anyone until I realized Mary Beth wasn’t even listening. She’d turned her face to the wall and pulled her knees up; her body was curled in a fetal position.

Juanita knelt down beside her. “Come on, Mary Beth. You can’t let this bastard do this to you.”

“Don’t you see? Leeann sees. She understands what I did.”

“Leeann just told you that you didn’t do anything. It’s George’s fault, all of it.”

“But I did.” Her voice was so soft, it was hard to hear her. “I did a terrible thing. And it is my fault Holly took those pills. It will be my fault if she dies.”

Juanita cursed several times before she turned to me. “Tell her that isn’t true, Leeann. I don’t know where she’s coming up with this crap.”

I glanced at the violet star in the afghan hanging on the wall and took a breath. “She thinks it’s her fault because she told Holly to talk to her family.”

Mary Beth shook her head. “No. It’s more than that. You know it is.”

I was thumbing the scar under my chin at a furious pace. I stood up and walked around the room, looking at Juanita kneeling by my sister, looking at Mary Beth staring at the wall.

And suddenly I found myself thinking about Mike sitting in the hospital right now. Scared to death his mom wouldn’t make it, but putting on a stone face, according to Nancy. Because he couldn’t let anybody see him cry.

“All that matters now,” I said slowly, “is if Holly is okay.” I was standing over by the bookcase. “So what if you made a mistake? It’s too late to care about that.”

“But she didn’t,” Juanita stammered. “What the hell are you saying?”

Mary Beth sat up straighter and looked at Juanita. “I told Holly to talk to George. I didn’t think of how cruel his reaction might be. It’s so obvious, but I didn’t prepare her. God, I acted like all she had to do was open her mouth and everything would be fine!”

“It ain’t obvious,” Juanita said, but she didn’t sound like she believed her own words.

“Yes, it is,” Mary Beth said flatly. “And now Holly could die because of me.”

“Cut it out, Mary Beth,” Juanita whispered, leaning back and shaking her head.

After a moment, Mary Beth jumped up and paced back and forth. I stood very still, mesmerized by her jerky movements, listening to my breath coming in nervous gasps.

“I can’t take another minute of this,” my sister finally said, as she walked to her room. “I have to sleep. I have to.”

As soon as she closed the door behind her, Juanita said she had to leave or she’d be late for work. She did call the hospital, though, and they said Holly’s condition was unchanged.

When Juanita had her jacket on, she stood there for a moment, mumbling stuff about what a jerk George was, but how well liked he was around town. “This could get ugly.” She looked at me. “If it does, your sister is going to need you to be there for her. You understand that, right?”

“I understand,” I said, but of course I didn’t. Not yet.

T
he next morning she woke up at five-thirty, got up and showered, put on her uniform, fixed her hair up with the brown hair clip, woke Tommy and made him breakfast, pleaded with him to brush his teeth, begged him to hurry and get dressed, and finally, yelled to me to wake up right before they walked out the door. Same as always, the only difference was I was already awake, listening for these familiar sounds. Comforting myself with how routine it all was.

I didn’t find out until I got to school that Holly was still unconscious. I overheard some girls talking about it while I was in the bathroom. One of them was Wendy Spritz, a rich kid, whose dad was a doctor. Of course Mike wasn’t in school, but I still felt like defending him from all this gossip. When Wendy whispered to another girl that Mike’s mom had to be nuts to do this, I burst out of the bathroom stall and told her she didn’t know what she was talking about.

Wendy was a friend of mine, sort of. Mike was right in a way when he said I was popular, because almost everybody was casual friends with me. But deep down, I always knew why: because I rarely caused any trouble, rarely told anybody they were wrong.

Wendy rolled her eyes and asked what my problem was. I said, “I just think it’s stupid to assume Holly Kramer was, I mean, is, nuts. You don’t know what her life was like.”

“What’s stupid is what she did.” Wendy turned back to the mirror and started combing her long blond hair. “Life is always worth living. You can’t just throw it away.”

“Always worth living?” I said, as I washed my hands. “What if you were in terrible pain, like had cancer?”

“But she didn’t have cancer.” Wendy put her hands on her hips. “You have to get your facts straight.”

“Maybe her mind was in pain, did you ever think of that?”

“Whatever,” she said, and turned to Megan, her best friend, and smirked. “Leeann is getting all deep on us.”

“I am not getting all deep.” The paper towel bin was empty and I had to wipe my hands dry on my jeans. “I’m just thinking.” When they were still smirking, I couldn’t resist adding, “Maybe you should try it sometime.”

“Well, up yours, grump,” Wendy said.

“Same to you,” I muttered, as I watched them walk out. Then I stood in the bathroom until the bell rang for class: part of me wishing I’d kept my mouth shut, the other part wishing I’d kept going, tried harder, convinced them.

The rest of the day was no better. Everybody was blabbing about Mike’s mom, how weird she had to be to do this. Some people threw in rumors about him, to prove he was just as weird. The only good thing: they didn’t seem to know about my sister’s part. When the final bell rang, I ran out of school and hopped on my bike, relieved to be away from all this gossip. Mary Beth arrived home on schedule at four-thirty, with Tommy. The evening was ordinary enough: Tommy watched some TV, Mary Beth made dinner, and I had lots of homework. Everything was all right until seven-thirty, when the first call came. Mary Beth was putting away some of Tommy’s toys so I answered.

It was Dotty Summerton, and right away, I knew something was wrong. She asked for Mary Beth, but her words were clipped and angry. Within a minute of picking up, Mary Beth went pale and slumped against the wall. Her responses were mostly weak yeses and nos; once she said, “That is not true” more firmly, but then she said, “Fine.” As soon as she hung up, I asked her what that was about.

She was still leaning against the wall; her face was unreadable. “Dotty doesn’t want me to tell anybody I did her chart.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know,” Mary Beth said softly. “I only know what she said.”

“Which was?”

“She was a God-fearing woman and she didn’t want to be associated with something like this.”

I frowned. “What does God have to do with it?”

“Don’t ask me to explain,” Mary Beth said, standing up straighter. “I can’t talk about it right now.” Then she went into Tommy’s room and continued cleaning, but now she was throwing toys in the box. When Tommy told her to be careful, she stormed out of the room and told him to do it himself.

I went in to make sure he was all right.

“Mama’s tired,” he said. He didn’t seem upset, but he wasn’t cleaning. He was playing with his Legos, perhaps more intently than usual, but I figured he might as well distract himself.

The next few calls Mary Beth answered, so I didn’t catch their names. But each one upset her; that was obvious from the way she acted when she hung up: nervously pacing back and forth in the kitchen, then stopping to stare at nothing for several minutes, then more pacing. By ten o’clock, when Juanita and another friend from the diner, Sherry, came by, she was lying flat on her bed, looking at the ceiling. I’d asked her over and over if she wanted to watch TV or talk; the first few times, she’d mumbled no and finally she’d whispered, “Please, Leeann, just leave me alone.”

Sherry and Juanita were both in their waitress uniforms; they were due at work at eleven. But they’d been by the hospital and they had news. Not about Holly, who was still in a coma (the doctors had given up predicting when she would regain consciousness—if ever), but about George and Betty.

The way Sherry talked, Holly’s parents had been holding a press conference. Of course they hadn’t; we only had one newspaper here, a weekly called the
Tainer Shopping News,
which only covered decidedly unracy things like Cub Scout car washes and library fund drives. But they were “spreading the word,” according to Sherry, that Holly’s depression and suicide attempt were all my sister’s doing. And they were accusing Mary Beth of pretending to be a shrink when all she really was was a waitress.

While Sherry was relating this to me, Juanita was in the bedroom talking to Mary Beth. I had one eye on the bedroom; so far, Mary Beth hadn’t moved.

“There were like twenty people there,” Sherry said. “You know, who’d come by to see how Holly was. He was standing in the middle of the hall, holding his hand against his chest.” Then Sherry put her own hand on her chest and lowered her voice to imitate George. “Mary Norris pretended she could help my daughter and she brought her to this. She calls what she does ‘song reading.’ She convinces people she knows things about them their families don’t. Then she uses these things she sees in her little crystal ball to show they should turn on their own flesh and blood.”

Sherry was breathing fast, like she was upset, but also excited. I didn’t blame her. She was the youngest waitress at the diner, only a few years older than me, and although she was the bearer of bad news, she was also the bearer of big news.

“He even called it black magic,” Sherry continued. “Said maybe the church should investigate this blankedy blankedy song reading.” She smirked. “Here he is cursing right in front of her kids and talking about the church in the same sentence.”

I was concentrating so hard it hurt, trying to understand what was going on here. It was all happening so fast. Just two days ago, at the party, my sister had been surrounded by grateful customers, people who loved her, people who credited her with saving their lives. Now, the whole town was being told she was a quack, and obviously, some of those same customers were buying it. Dotty Summerton, at least. And probably those other callers, too.

Mary Beth. Mary Beth. I kept saying her name in my mind as I looked into the bedroom, hoping I would see her get up, move around, smile at Juanita, tell her it would be all right. And tell me it would be all right, that was the main thing. Tell me to go on to bed, don’t worry.

But no one said go to bed and no one said don’t worry. Actually, Sherry was expecting some kind of response from me. She’d stopped talking and was peering into my face, as though I had an answer for all this.

“Holly’s dad is horrible,” I said.

“Yeah.” Sherry leaned closer and whispered, “Did he do something to her? Is that what this is about? I overheard Betty bragging that George was always a good father, loving to all three of his kids. Incapable of doing anything like what Mary Beth said.” Sherry paused. “Is it something awful? Like, you know…”

I told her I didn’t know. I felt like I still had to keep Holly’s business private, even though it didn’t seem likely to stay that way. “But whatever it was,” I threw in, “Mary Beth didn’t make it up. Holly said what happened and my sister just listened.”

I sounded confident even though I was wracking my brains to remember how it went. Of course I remembered the Gordon Lightfoot song. I also remembered Mary Beth saying Holly was the “missing piece” of her theory about music and memory, but she never told me what that meant.

“Oh no,” I said, when Juanita came out of the bedroom without Mary Beth. “She won’t talk to you, either?”

Juanita was frowning. “She ain’t up to it, that’s what she says.”

“But we have to do something.” I sounded like I was pleading with them and I was. They both had to work soon; I didn’t want to be left here alone with my sister like this.

Juanita exhaled. “There’s nothing we can do. Wait it out. And stand behind Mary Beth.”

Before they left, Sherry put her hand on my arm. “Tell her we’re all thinking about her. Tell her we know George is full of shit.”

“Yeah, I will,” I said, as I looked into her bedroom. She heard it already, I was sure. And it didn’t make any difference; she still didn’t move.

But she kept trying. The next day, she went to work. All that week, she went to work. And it wasn’t all bad. For every phone call we got like Dotty Summerton’s, we got another one from a customer who said they’d heard the gossip and thought it was crap. Mary Beth wouldn’t come to the phone anymore, but I relayed all the good messages to her, with some editing. I told her the part about them believing in her, but I left out any criticism of George, knowing it would take her right back to square one: she should have known he was a jerk, and prepared Holly for how hard it would be to confront him.

The problem was, none of these messages seemed to make a bit of difference. She’d listen, but she wouldn’t respond, not even with her eyes; it was like she had gone somewhere where none of this mattered. The only thing she wanted to hear was that Holly was all right. She called the hospital every evening, sometimes two or three times, to see if there was any change. I watched her face during these calls; I could tell from how lifeless it was the answer was no.

When she called on Saturday, they told her Holly had been moved to a rehab hospital about ten miles outside of town. We found out the details from Nancy Lyle, whose husband had heard that Holly was moved because there was nothing else they could do for her in the ICU. She was breathing without a ventilator, her body was basically fine. But she was still unconscious, and they feared she’d suffered major brain damage.

Nancy made a special trip to our place to tell us, and to bring us a loaf of her potato bread. She was on Mary Beth’s side, not because she didn’t like George, but because she thought Holly was a grown woman and responsible for her own decisions. “You didn’t hold a gun to her head,” she said to my sister. “You didn’t hand her them pills. Nobody did.”

When it became clear Mary Beth wasn’t going to chat, Nancy made some excuse to leave. I was sorry to see her go. I was glad somebody was finally saying what I’d been thinking for a while. Sure, I felt very sorry for Holly, but I also felt mad at her for showing up at my sister’s birthday party with all her sadness and problems. Holly was almost ten years older than Mary Beth; she should have known what to do—or not do—with her own family, no matter what my sister said.

It was eleven-thirty in the morning when Nancy left. Tommy was watching the Incredible Hulk cartoon; I was sitting on the couch with him. Mary Beth went into her bedroom. It wasn’t until the show was over that I realized she’d gone back to bed.

But still, it couldn’t get much worse. That’s what I kept telling myself. Sure, it was weird to walk by her door and see her lying there, wide-awake, staring at the ceiling, but motionless, almost like she was in a coma, too. And sure, it was even weirder when she told Tommy I’d have to make his lunch and take him to his friend Peter’s house for their afternoon play date. “Leeann’s in charge, honey,” she whispered. “Just do what she says.”

I’d followed him into her room. “How are we going to get to Peter’s?”

It was on the other side of Tainer, way too far to walk, even if it wasn’t so cold you could see your breath. It was only a few days until November. The tree outside my sister’s window was already stark and leafless.

She pointed to her dresser, and the car keys.

“You want me to drive?” My voice showed how surprised I was. I had my learner’s permit, but I wasn’t supposed to drive without an adult. If I got stopped, I might get arrested.

When she didn’t answer, I picked up the keys. I prided myself on my good driving. Obviously the only solution was to avoid getting stopped.

“Is Mama sick?” Tommy said, when we were in the hall. Maybe it was my imagination his little chin was quivering. Maybe he wasn’t as worried as I was.

“Yeah,” I said. “But she’ll be all right.”

I went into the kitchen to start hot dogs for lunch. He followed me. “Does her ear hurt?”

He’d just had the operation to put the tubes back in his ears a few weeks ago. I leaned down and gave him a quick hug; then I said that was probably it before distracting him with what toys he wanted to take to Peter’s house.