The Song Reader (8 page)

I let out a scream that was so earsplitting, he jumped right off me and off the bed, stumbling to his knees, yelling “Shit!” It wasn’t planned, or even part of my desire to escape—I couldn’t help myself. Darlene had said the first time hurts a little, but this wasn’t some pinch, this was like being cut open without an anesthetic.

He panted for a moment, then he leaned down and handed me my clothes. He mouthed, “Sorry,” but I didn’t say a word. The pain had sobered me up and all I wanted was to go home. When I was dressed, I told him I had to leave right now and then a lie I wished was the truth: my sister was expecting me.

On the way out, he gave a “thumbs-up” to a group of guys when he thought I wasn’t looking. I heard some snickering but I didn’t turn around. I grabbed my jacket off the kitchen table. A crowd of kids were watching Maniac Mike standing by the stove, stirring a pot of something that smelled awful. They were all giggling hysterically. When he saw me he said, “Want to join us in a little kitchen chemistry?” and I shook my head and moved to the door.

Kyle and I didn’t say anything as we got in his car and headed down the street. The cold night air had hit me like a slap in the face—and made me wonder how on earth I could have been so stupid. I’d almost lost my virginity with a guy who didn’t know my birthday or my parents’ names. A guy who’d never even asked if I had a favorite song.

I had no idea how he was feeling, and I didn’t particularly care. He’d almost raped me and one “sorry” wasn’t going to change that, especially after his thumbs-up crap. Of course I would never go out with him again. Fighting him off at the river bluffs was bad enough, but this was damn near a crime.

“You know what you should be when you grow up, Leeann?”

His voice was all cocky, and I was taken aback, but I said “What?” before I realized I didn’t want his answer.

“A nun.”

I turned to look at him. He was grinning and I could see the perfect alignment of his teeth, the product of years of braces. Another benefit of his father’s money, like this car and his expensive Nikes.

“A nun with giant boobs.” He laughed. “What a waste.”

“Shut up.” My voice was a spit. “You said you were sorry. Don’t say anything else or—”

“Or what?” He stuck his hand on my thigh. “You’ll report me to the other nuns?”

What happened next is still unclear to me. I remember pushing him off, and I remember how mad I got when he kept putting his hand back, each time a little higher, but I don’t know if the shove I gave him was the reason he strayed into the other lane. He’d been drinking, too. My sister said if the cops had been doing their job, they would have arrested him. He should have gotten a DWI. He should have been put in jail for what he did to me.

Of course she didn’t know about that shove.

The other car was an ancient Chevy, pale green, with fins and a giant hood that only rippled in the crash. An old man was driving, but we didn’t know that until the police showed up. The old guy wasn’t hurt but he didn’t move until they opened his door. Maybe he was too busy watching us.

Kyle had started yelling before we’d even skidded to a stop in the ditch. His door was dented but he forced it open and jumped out cursing and screaming about his car. The front wasn’t really there anymore. The grill and the hood and the engine had all been squished together like a sandwich under a spatula.

He wasn’t injured, at least, not in the accident. By the time the police arrived, his knuckles were bleeding from punching the trunk and the driver’s door and a piece of the metal bumper he picked up from the street.

The underside of my chin was bleeding, but my ankle was the main problem. Kyle had a barbell under the seat and it had rolled up and hit my left leg. The throbbing pain was so sharp it brought tears to my eyes. I was out of the car, and trying to stand when I realized the queasiness in my stomach wasn’t just nerves. I grabbed my hair and bent over just in time to vomit all over the gravel.

The paramedic could tell my ankle was broken just by looking at it. He also said the scratch below my chin would need stitches. He never gave me a choice about the ambulance, and he ignored all my babbling about how upset my sister would be. “It isn’t that serious,” he told me. “I’m sure she can handle it.”

Of course he was long gone by the time she came running into the emergency room. She was a little out of breath—and a near perfect model of unreadable: flat eyes, bland expression, mouth a straight line. Even her hands refused to give away anything. They weren’t clutched or wringing or even curled, but lying palms down against her side.

She was alone; she’d called our landlady Agnes to sit with Tommy. The police had already told her I was with Kyle. They’d also told her the accident took place on River Road, not a half mile from the entrance to Highway 61, and the intersection where Mom had had her accident.

I felt a rush of guilt and pity. “I’m all right,” I said, and watched her eyes move from the five stitches to my ankle, purple and black and swollen to the size of a baby’s head.

She sat down next to me and stroked my hair while we waited for them to do the cast. I was bracing myself for her to say I told you so about Kyle. I was bracing myself for her to yell or cry, something. Instead she was just very, very quiet. Even when I tried to apologize, she put her finger to my lips and said I wasn’t to worry about anything but feeling better.

When we got home, she helped me pull my pajama top over my head without hitting my chin, and gave me extra pillows so I wouldn’t be tempted to roll over and bump into the stitches or the cast. I fell asleep wondering why I’d expected her to freak out, when obviously the paramedic was right, she could handle this.

I woke up at first light of morning, suddenly aware that she was in my room, kneeling on the floor by my window. I had no idea how long she’d been there. Maybe all night.

“Mary Beth?”

“Can you see it?” she said quietly, without turning around.

“See that orange streak over there? In just a few minutes, it’ll fill the sky and the night will just disappear. And it always seems to happen so quickly. Like no matter how closely you watch, you can never point to the moment it changes.” She leaned forward and put her hand flat on the window. Her voice sounded fragile in a way I’d never heard it before. “Sometimes I just wish it could stay like this, you know? Sometimes I wish it didn’t always have to become another day.”

I
’d only had my cast off for a few weeks when Ben’s graduation announcement arrived in the mail. The envelope was creamy beige, heavy, with a seal of gold. Too important looking to just wad up and toss, though I was sure my sister wouldn’t see it that way. He had finished his Ph.D., and, for reasons I couldn’t fathom, his parents were inviting our family to a dinner in his honor. The restaurant was outside St. Louis, a good two hours from here. The dinner was set for a Thursday evening the second week of May: very inconvenient since Mary Beth would have to be up early on Friday for work. And Tommy would never be able to sit through it. He hated any restaurant that dared to serve food without free toys.

There were a lot of little reasons not to go—not to mention the really big reason that Mary Beth and Ben hadn’t even spoken for a year. So imagine my surprise when my sister ripped out a piece of notebook paper from her pad and immediately wrote Judy Mathiessen, Ben’s mother, to say she and I would be there. “I’ll have to find a baby-sitter for Tommy,” she told me, “but there’s lots of time.” When I just stood there, staring at her, she exhaled. “Is that all right with you?”

“Sure.” I wasn’t going to pry or even ask what was going on—I was afraid she’d change her mind.

The Ds thought maybe they would get back together. I said maybe, though I really didn’t hold out any hope for something that good.

My optimism had pretty much disappeared since the car accident. School was part of it. I wasn’t surprised that Kyle had lied about what we’d done, but now I had to deal with girls shooting me sympathetic looks—since they assumed he’d dumped me after he “got what he wanted”—and boys smirking and whistling and even occasionally trying to push me in a corner and feel me up. I couldn’t complain to my sister though, like I always had before. Home was the other part of the problem, and the part I was really worried about.

If only Mary Beth had punished me. Grounding me would have been easy, and so normal. Instead, she decided to focus her energies on our apartment. She called what she was doing “spring cleaning,” but I’d seen spring cleaning at friends’ houses, and I knew this wasn’t it. For one thing, friends’ mothers didn’t paint the living room at two in the morning. For another, friends’ mothers didn’t keep going for weeks and weeks like my sister did, never satisfied, moving the couch to the left one day, and to the opposite corner the next.

Mary Beth had what seemed like a zillion projects. Stapling sheets to the fresh painted walls, because she thought it would give the kitchen “a fresher look.” Taking down the old living room curtains, and then putting them back when she didn’t like the bamboo shades she’d shopped for all over town. Letting Tommy take apart those same bamboo shades, and then spending hours threading them together again, in case they would work in the bathroom or her bedroom. Covering one of Tommy’s walls with cork, “for when he’s older,” she said. Covering his other wall with a teddy bear pattern wallpaper that was so babyish it embarrassed him.

Even when my cast was off, she wouldn’t let me help her. “I love doing this,” she’d say. “I’m not tired,” she’d insist, when I’d wake up and find her “taking a break” from her constant song reading with her constant quest to make our apartment better. Removing all the dishes from the cabinets, to repaper the shelves. Cleaning her closet, or mine, or Tommy’s, or the medicine chest. Rearranging the furniture again and again and again.

The more she did, the guiltier I felt. I was almost positive it was all my fault—especially since she only seemed to start new projects when I wasn’t home. It took me a while to realize this connection, mainly because I rarely went anywhere now. But it fit perfectly. And if I was even one minute late, she’d be at it so furiously when I walked in the door that she wouldn’t even remember to say hello.

She wouldn’t admit she was worried about me. She said she still trusted me as much as ever. It made me feel like dirt.

The one and only time I was really late, when Darlene’s car ran out of gas and we couldn’t find a pay phone, my sister took all the furniture from my bedroom and moved it into the hall. When I finally got home, she was pulling up the carpet, even though below it was a hideous gray speckled floor. It turned out to be the only one of her projects that she had to pay someone to come in and change back the next day.

Ben’s invitation arrived while the carpet man was still there, working on my room. Of course I wanted to go to the party—I wanted Ben to check out my sister. I wanted him to tell me what to do to make things all right again.

When the Thursday evening arrived, Mary Beth’s friend Juanita picked up Tommy. I got dressed and then sat at the kitchen table, drumming my fingers, while she took a shower, washed her hair, blew it dry and brushed it a hundred strokes, painted her nails, applied her makeup, and put on a brand-new dress she’d bought at a spring sale and her best pumps. At some point I asked her if she wanted me to wrap the present but she said no, she would do it. She didn’t want me to look at the map, either. She’d only gone to this restaurant once when she and Ben were dating but she insisted she remembered the way, no problem.

Our present was a leather wallet. Mary Beth said the one Ben had was unraveling at the flap. I nodded, but I wondered if she was remembering the obvious—we hadn’t seen him for a year. Who’s to say he didn’t have a new wallet?

Even with my sister’s lengthy preparations, we still would have been on time if she hadn’t gotten off Highway 270 at the wrong exit. As it was, we drove into the restaurant parking lot at eight forty-one, so late I was starving and worried the eating part might be over. We rushed inside and let a waiter lead us back to the banquet room. It was bigger than I expected. There were eight or nine tables, and probably thirty-five people. The only ones I recognized other than Ben were his parents and Rebecca.

Rebecca was playing hostess. She gave air kisses to me and my sister and took our present before leading us to a table across the room from where Ben was sitting with his parents and some girl. Everyone was eating, but we’d barely sat down when a waiter arrived with plates of steaming London broil and vegetables for us, too. Ben glanced in our direction but he didn’t come over to greet us. He didn’t even wave.

The situation was unbearably awkward from my perspective. I was so nervous for my sister I was afraid to look at her. But she didn’t seem to mind. She started eating and talking animatedly to the guy on her left, another graduate student named Gary. I heard him ask how she knew Ben and she said they were old friends.

When the toasts started, she held up her glass and smiled through all the talk of Ben’s accomplishments and the funny stories about his years in grad school. She was still smiling when Ben’s father stood up and said that Ben was twenty-seven years old now, high time he started his life. “In my day,” Ben’s dad continued, “we had families at your age. What do you think, Catherine?” Ben’s dad smiled at the girl sitting next to Ben. “How long’s it going to be before you and Benjamin are ready to settle down?”

I glanced at Rebecca as if her face could tell me how this happened. What about that shrine to my sister? The pathetic Ben, who couldn’t get over Mary Beth?

This Catherine person had reddish brown hair, a little button kind of nose, big brown eyes. She looked cute in a bookish way. “What a question,” she said, but she laughed with Ben’s father before leaning over and giving Ben a quick kiss.

I counted backwards to November, when I ran into Rebecca at the crafts fair. Seven months. A lifetime ago. Before I started dating Kyle, before we had the accident. Before my sister became so incomprehensible that I had no idea what she was thinking or feeling or even why she came here tonight.

The toasts weren’t even over when Mary Beth stood up. She whispered, “Stay here,” and made her exit as gracefully as possible—considering that she was damn near running. I figured she was going to the bathroom and of course I was going to follow. I had to make sure she was all right.

She wasn’t in the ladies’ room. I checked the hall by the pay phones; I even went out to the parking lot, to see if she was sitting in the Ford. I had a moment of cold white panic that she’d simply vanished before I remembered I hadn’t gone the other way down the hall. There were three banquet rooms; one of them was empty and half dark—and that’s where she was.

I didn’t see Ben until I was already in the room. He must have walked in a second before I did, because Mary Beth was just beginning to congratulate him when he cut her off.

“What are you doing here?” His voice was clipped and angry; I’d never heard him sound like this. I stepped into the shadows behind the busboy station. My breath was coming in short, nervous gasps and I was messing with the scar under my chin again. It was a tic I’d developed since the accident.

“Well, your mom invited me.” She paused, but he just stared at her. “And of course I wanted you to know how proud I am.” She patted his shoulder. “I knew you could do it, Ben. I just think it’s so great that you’ll be out there, doing your research. I’ll bet I’ll be reading about you in the paper before long with some important discovery.”

Her voice was a hundred percent sincere. No one listening to her could doubt that she really cared about Ben’s work. It was kind of impressive, actually, to think that she could still feel this way even though they weren’t together anymore.

Ben, however, was not impressed.

“Oh right. Now I remember. Mary Beth Norris, hurt, yet always the generous spirit right up until the end. Tell me, am I supposed to see this as noble?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You talked me into going back to finish the Ph.D. You saved me, just like you saved all the rest of them.” He faked a bow. “Thank you very much.”

Mary Beth’s voice was hollow. “Please don’t be this way, Ben.”

“All right, how should I be? Should I tell you how beautiful you look?” He stepped back and moved his head in an exaggerated motion up and down. “A new dress, isn’t it? Very nice. Very—”

“Ben, I—”

“Don’t you want to hear that? Or should I tell you how it’s been for me for the last year, wondering how the hell this could have happened?” He lowered his voice to a hiss. “Maybe I should tell you how much I wish I’d never met you?”

He spun on his heel to go, and that’s when my sister started crying. The sound was as soft as a kitten mewing, but I heard it and Ben did, too. He turned back to her, but he didn’t pull her into his arms until she muttered “Catherine.” The babble that followed was as blatantly jealous as a child whose friend has a better toy. And of course it softened Ben; he obviously still cared about my sister. The shock for me was how obvious it was that she still loved him.

“Everything is such a mess,” Mary Beth cried.

“I can’t argue with that.”

“How did this happen?”

“You threw me out, remember?”

The anger was leaving his voice, but Mary Beth was still crying. After a while, he put his hand under her chin and lifted her face to his. It looked like she kissed him first, but it might have been the other way around. It was hard to tell from my corner. I felt a little bad watching them, but I couldn’t make myself stop.

They were holding each other close now, pressed together like soaked fabric against skin. And their kissing was going on and on, like they’d forgotten where they were. In between kisses, they mumbled words like “want” and “need,” “baby” and “miss.” The whole thing was about as romantic as I could imagine. It made me feel a little sorry for myself, because no boy cared about me this way, and as far as I could see, no boy ever would. Mainly though, it made me feel a wave of calm that was so much like being tired I had to stifle a yawn. Even if I never knew why they broke up, if they got back together, it wouldn’t matter. The world would make sense again. My sister would be like she was before.

I was just wondering whether Ben would come home with us tonight—and what he would think of all the improvements around our place—when we heard a woman’s voice. Catherine was walking down the hallway, calling for him.

It was Mary Beth who pulled away, not Ben. Mary Beth who stood up straight, took a few steps back. And when Catherine came inside, Mary Beth stuck her hand out, asked questions about where she worked, where she lived. Mary Beth even told Catherine she was lucky to have Ben.

I thought for sure it had to be an act. Ben must have thought so, too, because after Catherine left the room—apparently satisfied her boyfriend wasn’t about to be stolen—he reached for my sister. And Mary Beth stepped back again.

“This is embarrassing, isn’t it?” She put her arms around herself. “Coming here, getting between you and the woman you’re with now.”

“What?” His voice was airless.

“I shouldn’t have come.” Mary Beth spoke slowly, as if she was convincing herself as well as Ben. “It was a mistake. I lost myself before, and I’m very sorry for that.”

“You can’t be serious,” he sputtered. “Lost yourself?” He was running his hands through his hair. “Don’t you mean you remembered what you’ve been denying all this time—that you and I were happy?”

I stepped out of my corner, desperate to hear how she would explain this. But all she did was whisper, “Maybe some people don’t deserve happiness.”

He looked every bit as confused as I felt, but he didn’t argue with her. That long night at Scalatti’s must have taught him it was useless to try. When he spoke a moment later, his voice wasn’t even all that angry, although I figured he had to be. I knew I would be.