A Million Heavens (39 page)

As soon as he began playing, he recognized the song. He was writing the song but also remembering it. It was the song he'd begun just before his death, that he'd been working on in his pickup that hazy, not-quite-hot day. The notes were there for him, he only needed to give them safe landing. The breeze that had been soothing Reggie picked up into a dry wind as he played. It ruffled Reggie's hair and raised an eerie wail as it passed through the harmonica over on the bureau—a sound like the cry of a cornered animal. At some point Reggie had decided and then gone on assuming that he was in dusk rather than dawn, but now the hall filled with light, pinkish and strengthening, and Reggie felt a longing to see the moon again, the standoffish white sliver of it or the jolly yellow face. Above him the gray clouds had grown heavy, churning faster with the gusts. Reggie's shirt blew off the piano bench and out of sight. He kept his feet planted on the pedals, his back straight. He was farther into the song than he'd written in life, more than halfway through. He didn't allow
himself to drag the song out. He harbored no folly. He didn't play louder or soft. He looked at his hands and they did not look familiar. A fly buzzed around Reggie, bothering his eyebrow and then trying to cling fast to the empty music stand. And then it was gone, lost in its own ordeal. The clouds were lower now. If Reggie had stood on the piano and reached he could've touched them. He heard the wind tinking the liquor bottles in the bar, and then heard one of the bottles crash to the floor. Book covers were flying open in the library.

Reggie knew that the pinched calm that filled the spaces between the notes was the sound of eternity. He knew an immediate future awaited, an extended present, and the rest of the song would fill it. He did not hope for unrippled bliss. He did not hope to hear the voice of a god. He did not want oceans or mountains. He was a single note and he only wanted to ring.

He parted the blinds with a thumb and still the girl wasn't out there. The last one. It was past the time when the vigil normally began, and even last week, alone, the girl had shown up promptly. The sun had tipped out of sight, leaving a sloppy wake of flesh-colored sky that was fast disappearing. Soren's father pulled away his hand and the blinds closed up. He fetched the wastebasket from the bathroom and scraped the table near the window clean. He hadn't eaten a proper dinner, but he'd polished off five cups of Jell-O. The cups tinked down into the can and then the plastic spoon after them. The only other thing in the trash was a disposable razor Soren's father had used that morning. There was so little straightening up to do in the room. Usually Soren's father had coffee around this time. He didn't want any today.

He moved the orange-upholstered chair right next to the window and drew the blinds enough to see out. He didn't want the vigils to be over. He didn't want cars to reclaim that area of the lot. Whether he wanted to notice or not, that portion of ground, that ration of blacktop, had assumed a sacredness, and Soren's father didn't want a bunch of cars all over it. Soren's
father was mildly relieved and mildly lonely now as he accepted that the girl was not coming, and he was capable of letting these reasonable feelings inhabit him. This wasn't a loneliness that would eat at him—instead, one human simply missing other humans. He missed Gee still, and he knew he would hear from her in time and looked forward to that. He missed the last vigiler, the girl. And the relief he was feeling was as much for the girl as for himself. The vigilers had been a target for his frustration, and had also been something reliable to hang his weeks on. None of them had been happy that his son was in a coma. They hadn't been seekers of relief. They were people who longed to be decent. Who knew how to be decent anymore? Soren's father leaned forward in his chair, his face close to the window. No sign of the girl. Nothing but the chollas, in full bloom now. They seemed to glow burnt yellow in the new dark, as if they'd been collecting the sun's power all day.

Soren's father had stopped wishing for Soren to awaken, at least stopped wishing it in a selfish way. He'd wanted Soren to return, all these months, because it would've made him happy, because it would've benefited the father, not the son, would've saved him from grief and confusion. Soren was in no apparent discomfort. Soren's father wanted his son to be in a good place and to come to no harm. That was his pure desire. Whether his son was special was beside the point, but for him to presume that his son was just like everyone else because that would be easier was as wrong as calling him an angel or a prophet. If Soren was special, Soren's father could deal with that. He didn't have to understand everything. Soren's destiny was as open as anyone's, and Soren wouldn't be afraid of that destiny the way his father had always been afraid.

Soren's father stood. Housekeeping had left a vase of fake flowers that matched the orange chairs, a gift from the clinic that every patient had received, a gift from the corporation that owned the clinic really, a gift from no one to anyone. Soren's father plucked it off the little side table and rested it down on the floor where he couldn't see it. He went and raised the blinds all the way. They hadn't been all the way open like that since Gee had visited the room. Soren's father gazed out at the barren territory
beyond the parking lot and the neighboring streets, the expanse beyond the precarious civilization, the harsh province that was his homeland, and it looked finished. There was nothing broken, nothing wanting.

She pressed the UP button rather than the DOWN button, held her breath until the doors were closed, and then the elevator jerked subtly and she began to rise. She hadn't been in a tall building since she could remember. The clinic wasn't tall compared to the skyscrapers downtown, but it was tall to Cecelia. The elevator was huge inside, a whole room. Cecelia moved to the back corner. She'd paid respects to Soren for five months and had never been up against the prospect of seeing him. There were healthy elements to her nervousness—awe and pride. No music was playing in the elevator, but Cecelia could hear something. There was other noise. She knew what was happening. She was getting another song. Now. She'd been sure they were through, that she'd received them all. She could hear the first notes being unchambered, finding their marks. She felt a pinch in her temples, a churn in her stomach. She was dry-eyed. Another fucking song. She settled her weight evenly down through her feet. She was out of practice but she could feel the skill returning to her, the skill of receiving. She could do it again, could usher this song into an out-of-the-way wing of her mind and go about the business of confronting Soren. She wasn't going to bail on this mission. Reggie was still not at peace and she wasn't going to be either, but she was going to face down this kid. Cecelia still had to grapple with Reggie, her ally and her illness, but she would do it later—had to wonder whether he was still writing these songs or whether he was dead and gone and the songs were outliving him, had to wonder if the songs had existed always and Reggie had come along to free them and had screwed everything up by dying too soon. She was losing the threads of her thoughts before they were even unspooled. She was thinking too darkly. Reggie hadn't screwed anything up. The songs were love songs. The songs were Reggie's and Reggie loved her.

A bell dinged as the elevator passed by the fifth floor. There was a poster for a children's gymnasium on one wall and a poster for a seafood restaurant on the other, a big lurid lobster on a mattress of parsley. Cecelia wanted more time, but she wasn't going to get it. She heard the bell again. The opening of the song in her head, which was straightforward and elegant, was intact already. The song was ready to shift into gear, or at least turn a soft corner. Cecelia stepped off the elevator into an empty foyer area. The fourth floor hadn't had a foyer. Cecelia could see down the main hallway. There was no one but a janitorial worker, all the way at the other end, dropping bags down a garbage chute. There was a window in the foyer and Cecelia looked toward it. The lights from the ceiling were glaring off the glass and Cecelia couldn't see anything outside, just her own reflection. It looked right. It looked like her. It looked like a girl who could go through with things.

Cecelia advanced up the hall, stepping stiffly to keep her sneakers quiet. The floor was polished and the walls were bare. The first doors she passed were closed, and Cecelia could somehow sense that the rooms were empty. She walked by a room in which an old couple and some small children were cleaning up from a party, then three rooms that all had TVs going, all tuned to the same program. She knew approximately where Soren's room should've been, from staring up at it. It was nearly all the way at the other end. Cecelia would have to pass the nurse's station.

She tried to appear confident, or at least absorbed in her own business, which she certainly was, and she strode past a few more almost-shut doors, the people behind them negotiating final burdens Cecelia couldn't plumb and her with her own troubles no one anywhere knew, and then straight through the nurses' area, which was occupied only by a young female doctor who paid no attention to Cecelia. Once the nurses' station was behind her, she came up to the staff worker she'd seen before, who passed her by, nodding curtly, and then there was nothing but wide vacant hallway. Cecelia had Soren cornered and she was cornered too. There was nothing she could say to Soren's father that wouldn't sound crazy.

The very last door was a utility closet, so the one next to that had to be
Soren's room. The door was open but not enough to see anything inside. Cecelia had to knock. She had to knock and present herself. The door was going to open and she was going to see into this room that for so long had been the border of an eternity of night sky. She wanted to flee, but she held herself in place. She didn't want Soren's father to hear her breathing, to hear a noise from her sneaker and pull the door open and see her standing like a scared ghost. She was hearing the song now as an echo, as if someone in another wing of the clinic were playing it and it was reaching her through the heating ducts. The music had no cousins. It was sad music that didn't know it was sad. Cecelia raised her hand and rapped it against what felt like painted steel, not quite knocking hard enough to push the door open any farther.

The light changed in the room, a lamp clicking on. Cecelia heard the creaking of a chair and then footfalls, manly and even. The door receded and Soren's father was standing in front of Cecelia. He didn't seem surprised to see her. His face was hardly even questioning, as if Cecelia were a small girl who'd shown up at this home with a fundraiser catalog. He had good teeth and a nondescript haircut and he looked manly in a way that matched the reliable sound of his steps on the linoleum. Cecelia was frightened, but less so than she'd been a moment before.

“I'm Cecelia,” she told him.

His face didn't harden. Cecelia glanced up the hall and it was thankfully still empty. She didn't want an audience. Soren's father let go of the door and stood taller. “I know who you are,” he said. “I didn't know your name was Cecelia, but I know who you are.”

Cecelia couldn't read him, and she couldn't bring herself to state her desire of laying eyes on his son. She'd gotten this close and she might get no closer. That was the new fear.

“I wanted to wish you the best,” Cecelia said. “And I think I wanted to apologize too.”

Soren's father looked at the palm of his hand and then put it to the back of his neck. “I appreciate that,” he said. “I don't accept your apology, but I appreciate it.”

“I wasn't helping anything out there,” Cecelia said. “I wanted something I could love that had nothing to do with me.” Cecelia knew she needed to be truthful. She said, “There are a handful of people I care about. I care about you and your son. I care about you guys, not that I expect it to mean anything.”

Soren's father blinked slowly. He looked back at the window, toward the parking lot, then reached his hand out and rested it on Cecelia's wrist, a gesture more tender than a handshake. “I never knew what to think, but you were there instead of not there. You were there, and not asking for anything. It
does
mean something.”

Cecelia looked into his face and could see that his soul had been whipping in the desert winds for a long time. He had little left but kindness. Cecelia didn't know what to say next. She didn't want to upset or disappoint him.

“I need to stretch my legs,” he said.

Cecelia waited. Soren's father was wearing a stiff button-up shirt and it occurred to Cecelia that she was underdressed for a visit like this. She'd dressed for a vigil, in a sweatshirt and far-from-new shoes.

“Would you keep an eye on him for a minute?” Soren's father gently tugged his collar. “Could you do that? Could you watch over my boy while I step out for a quick stroll? I'd appreciate it.”

He'd taken his hand off Cecelia's wrist. Her gratitude was like a liquid rising inside her. She was being trusted.

“Of course,” Cecelia said.

Soren's father leaned toward the hallway, showing he wanted to get by, and Cecelia made way for him. She didn't thank him and he didn't thank her. He slipped past her and with that same even stride made his way down the hall. Cecelia watched the back of him. She didn't feel ready to be without him, like she'd been poorly trained for an important duty. Soren's father didn't glance back at Cecelia. She watched him until he reached the nurses' station and turned a corner.