22: Let the Music Play
"I felt like a boy chasing after a butterfly—running, daring to leap, trying."
(Last time, Charlie made it back home.)
“I’m back,” I called as I swung open the screen door.
Two weeks can change so much. The second-hand red sofa no longer seemed like a prisoner’s pallet. Leaning against the mantle over the chipped fireplace, the photo of my vovo no longer seemed to stare down at me in scorn. Instead, she was smiling at me again.
My parents greeted me with hugs. “Great to have you back, kid,” my father said. It’s weird to find out that you’ve missed a bristly mustache.
My mom squeezed me so tight. I had missed her perfume, too—the kind I went looking for at Filene’s Basement every Christmas. Then she stepped back and held onto my arms as she inspected me. “Oh, Carly. There’s a light in your face again.”
“It’s been a wild trip, Mom.”
I sat down at the kitchen table and started to tell them about our adventures when the phone rang.
My dad picked up the phone. “Pat? You want to talk to Charlie?” He held out the phone to me. “He says it’s urgent.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“He’s here.”
With the frenzy of a boiling-over pot, Pat explained. Mickey Kent was there. At Kentstock East. Somehow, he had heard about it and was making a surprise appearance. Like it had been doused in gasoline, the Mickster phone tree was burning with the news.
“So you gotta come. It’s at the Playhouse, like usual. You know how to get here?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
I could almost hear his waiting smile on the other side of the line. “And one more thing. I think she’s here, too.”
The breath pounced in my chest like a panther. “What?”
“It’s the red minivan, with the bumper-sticker and everything.”
“Are you serious—are you serious?”
“Dude, it doesn’t have to be serious to be true. She’s here.”
The kitchen suddenly seemed to open around me. “Mom, Dad—I think I have to go.”
I grabbed my keys and jumped over the front step. As I drove my old gray hatchback, I felt like a boy chasing after a butterfly—running, daring to leap, trying.
Travel Journal Entry #11
Is it weird to hope again?
Talk about middle school!!!! Maybe there’s something about the journal format that makes everything so melodramatic. Like when I was accused of talking during a “silent lunch” how I filled pages with anger at the injustice and the barbaric (was it Soviet, 1989 Bonnie?) unfairness of silent lunch as some kind of collective punishment in the first place. You spend all this time on words words words and me me me that every little hiccup becomes some grand and wild drama.
But—if I can be a DRAMA QUEEN—I think I do feel hope again. The lovely, open-ended kind of hope. You don’t know what today will bring. But it could be something wonderful.
Last night, I practiced Janacek. The sonata is like rubbing steel wool on my brain. G-sharp, E—every note just grinding away every spot of anxiety or worry. You can’t doubt. You can’t second-guess. You can’t recriminate. You can just race race race race. You’re skiing the notes—that’s what you’re doing.
So I put down the bow, sign onto AOL, and then I see that e-mail…
Lana thinks I’m crazy. Worse, naïve. “I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”
Oh, thanks, mom. But you know what I said to her?
“I have not yet begun to be naïve.”
Here I was. Getting out of the car, I felt the air upon my face—sparkling, like wet diamonds, like I hadn’t felt it in so long.
The letters on front of the theater’s sign were jumbled: Kentstock East all askew. The t dangled upside down.
I jogged toward the doors. The gravel parking lot was full of empty cars. I followed the path to the rickety steps, with their grain warped and twisted like the topology of a canyon network. Two pineapple-shaped lights attached to the double doors cast a pale yellow glow upon the cracked and peeling gray-painted wood.
My hand slipped around one of the brass door knobs, the metal washed with the night’s dew. I opened the door and stepped inside. In the box-office area, the tables cluttered with Mickey Kent collectibles were unmanned. The hallway was cramped, wooden, and dimly lit. The years had scuffed and scraped the boards beneath my feet and trod through their finish. I had last been here as a boy, on a school field trip to see some retelling of Snow White.
No one was around. My steps fell with hollow plunks as I walked down the hall. A hum of song called me.
Hardened drops of blue clung to the wood of the door to the stage. In the upper corners, chipped mermaids frolicked on the rocks and in the sea. A silvered echo of song came through the paint-encrusted wood, through the distance of dried, heavy colors.
I pressed my hand against the painted door. I pressed my ear against it, to make clear that jaunty melody. I held my face flush against it, my cheekbone driving against the wood.
Even muffled through the wood, I could tell—it was still his voice. It had thinned with age, but it still carried that half-smiling-eye-winking coolness that was only Mickey Kent’s. It coasted along with the strumming bass and made merry with the tapping drums and splashing cymbals. The horn blared.
Take my hand, love—hold it tightly. Take my hand, love—hold it tightly. Come with me and let’s go lightly... Say, say, say the words.... ...come dance with me... ...if only... Then I could hold you. And you’re the one with that razzamatazz, That whatchamacallit and all of that jazz, You’re the one who makes my heart pitter-pat, You’re the one and I like it like that. I like it like that— My heart pitter-pat— You’re the one and I like it like that.
I drank in the words. They swirled syllable by syllable through my skull. The drums raced like an exercise bike straining at its limits. The hammers of the piano danced from string to string. The voice, drawing out the long final note, reaching on it, savoring it with infinitesimal reverberations. The voice, through the trembles of noise, holding onto breath, keeping true in time, reaching up into the harmonies that move the spheres. Crescendo.
Lapping applause and then silence. The patter before the next song. I heard a shake of laughter. A few drum-taps—the convulsive starts of a heart. And then, the voice again. And the music. And the swell of applause as the audience recognized the song. And the voice.
And I thought I was falling in love... ....but it was only a trip...
My fingers felt the globbed dots of paint, the texture of the woodgrain where the paint had flecked away, the minute cracks running through the solid frame. My hand drifted down to the heavy brass doorknob. Its curve reminded me of a seahorse. The door seemed heavier, the fullness of sound thicker.
...in the sunlight... As the stars die.
With a swallow, I leaned into the door.
Oh, but...oh... But...
I stepped back. Should I wait? Try another door?
I took a breath.
The painted door swung open.
Opening
Sometimes, we wake from a dream of death with a gush of wind. Our eyes spring open, and the sweet air—breath—greets us.
All our words perch curled and happy on our lips. We swallow—is this really my throat?—tracing our muscles’ contraction and extension.
Sometimes, what seems surprise is the deepest recognition, and we do not flinch at the dazzling days.
It was her. She was alone, her lips bent. It was her.
I swallowed as our eyes met.
She was here. And I was here. Here, where I could see her. Here, at that very instant. Here, after all those miles.
She stood so still. I stood still, dancing with fire.
“Charlie.”
I did not now blink but met the wind rushing to my eye. “Bonnie.” That was all I could say. It reached all the way down my throat to deep within my ribs. And then, the air was at my lips, which stretched back into a smile. All my face seemed wonderfully alive.
She walked. I walked. Foot followed foot. It was like a spring had renewed, and every metallic wind allowed for a happy leap, as steel pressed against roll of steel.
“I saw your friends in the audience,” she said, “and I knew.”
I fumbled her handkerchief with its white swirls out of my pocket.
“You have that on you?” Joy colored her voice.
“Of course. After all that time. I couldn’t forget.” I swallowed and held the handkerchief out to her. “Well, do you want it back?”
She took the square of fabric, reached forward, and put it in the breast pocket of the worn sport coat. The corners hung out like the curling tips of a star. “You keep it.” She patted the pocket. “It looks good on you.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Not giving up. Hoping.” She laughed. “My dad had heard through the phone tree that Mickey Kent would actually be here—that Kentstock had been cancelled. So I figured I’d come, because you never know what can happen.”
“So did you get what you were hoping for?”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
My heart swung forward, and I brought my lips to hers.
Sometimes, two notes stumble together, and they realize a harmony in their crash—deep as the heart of the waves. The instant unfolds and reveals a celestial harmony, joining the course of years and the span of stars. The heart pounds forward as though each beat is a discovery. The dead weight quickens, and your flesh tingles. And the surge—the jubilant wash and rush—rises. The rivers merge in their flow. The ocean roars.
“Do you hear it?” she asked, and smiled.
The sun and the moon and the far-ranging stars weave the ocean, whose waves echo the pulse of your blood, that heavy thunder of your heart. The waves are filled with joy.
I knew just what she meant. “Let the music play.”
I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ancient theater. We walked down the stairs as the mists of night, reminding of the mists of morn, rose up to greet us. The shadows parted, and light swept in. The wind etched the road opening around us with a glinting white stream. Moonbeam and starlight shone there, and the moonbeams bore the reflected glory of the sun. And I believed, as we took those first few steps together into the silver-tinctured mist, that we would not walk alone.
THE END