Bone Music (13 page)

Lisa didn’t want to think what those people had to say to Mama to make her think this place was wonderful. Such a strange idea! Like Mama was suddenly blind or something.

When they got to the waiting-room counter there was no one behind it. Mama tapped on the half-open window, and touched the counter bell, but no one seemed to hear it. After a while she leaned across the counter and called out for help.

For a moment Lisa thought that would go unanswered, too, and Mama would have to take her back home and call in sick to work and stay home with her —

And then the girls came through the door on the far side of the counter.

The dark girl and the light one. The girls from the dance around the fire; the girls who tried to beat Lisa senseless and would have killed her if they could’ve.

But Mama didn’t see that. She greeted the girls warmly, as though she’d known them for years. “I’m Emma Henderson,” she said. “This is my daughter Lisa. I spoke to —”

The dark girl smiled. “We’ve been expecting you,” she said.

Lisa tugged three times on her mother’s skirt. “I don’t want to go here, Mama,” she said. “Mama take me home please take me home.”

But Mama didn’t listen, no more than she listened before.

“You’ll be so happy, Lisa,” Mama said. “I promise you you will.”

“Mama, I’m afraid.”

Mama lifted Lisa in her arms and gave her baby such a hug!

“Hush, little darling,” Mama said. “There’s nothing here to scare you.”

And then she set Lisa back down on the ground. And just as quick as that she hurried out the door — so fast that she was gone before Lisa had the time to scream in terror for fear of being left alone in the hands of girls who meant to kill her.

“Mama. . . !” Lisa screamed, but it was too damn late because Mama was already gone and the door slammed shut behind her. “MAMA!”

She bolted for the door, but before she could reach it the dark girl had grabbed her by the arm and stopped her in her tracks.

“Don’t try it,” the dark girl said. She swung Lisa around and pushed her toward the counter. Lisa tried to catch herself, but she couldn’t find her balance, and fell headfirst —

— headfirst into the —

The light girl caught her before she hit her head.

She lifted Lisa in her arms and looked her coldly in the eye.

“We know who you are,” the light girl said. “We’re watching you. We aren’t afraid.”

And then she set Lisa down.

Lisa ran, terrified, in the only direction there was to run.

Which was behind the counter, and through the door on the far side of it.

On the far side of the door there was a corridor lined with offices and classrooms; at the far end of it there was a door that opened to the outside. Lisa ran for that door as though her life depended on it, and maybe it did.

But if it did she was lost anyway — because a high smooth wall surrounded the yard on the far side of the door.

Lisa paused as the door closed behind her, looking around her, trying to find an escape. But there was no escape from that place; nothing at all but the yard and the wall and a woman standing on the far side of the grounds, surrounded by children.

“Oh!” she said. “You’re Lisa Henderson, aren’t you? — Your mother told us all about you yesterday.”

“I’m Lisa,” Lisa said, still trying to catch her breath, still looking around and around the walled yard, trying to find a way to escape.

“Why don’t you join us here, Lisa, and I’ll introduce you to the other children?”

Lisa scowled. “I don’t want to,” she said. She sulked away from the door, wandered toward the yard’s far wall.

“Suit yourself, then, Lisa,” the woman said. “We’re here when you decide you want company.”

Lisa ignored her. Of course she did! She wasn’t going to change her mind, not for a minute. Lisa didn’t want to be in that awful place, and if there was a way out she was going to find it, and in the meantime she didn’t want a part of it if she could help it.

So she found the corner of the yard, and she sat down in it, and she put her head on her knees and covered it with her arms.

After a while she fell asleep. She didn’t mean to, but she did.

And for once she slept and there were no dreams — just the blackness of her own heart, suffusing her; and the quiet that comes when the waking world is a million miles away; and somewhere out beyond the endlessness of that distance there were the sounds of children playing in the yard, and the woman calling after them, and now and then a siren sound like you always hear in Harlem in the daytime — maybe it was a police car, or an ambulance, or a fire truck, who could tell when it wasn’t right there in the middle of the emergency?

As Lisa slept.

After a while she heard the noise get closer, and then she felt a warm moist hand resting on her shoulder. Someone was trying to wake her, she realized, and for half a moment she thought that meant the day was done and her mama had come back to get her —

Only it wasn’t like that at all.

Because it wasn’t her mama’s face Lisa saw staring at her when she opened her eyes.

Far from it.

It was a boy — he looked like he was what, four, five years old? A little boy who was bigger than Lisa, four or five times bigger than she was. And he had a stupid expression on his face, all slack and rolly-eyed, like a brain-damage retard or something.

“You got to wake up,” the boy said. “It’s not nighttime! Sun’s out! You got to wake up!”

The woman should have kept this boy away from her, Lisa thought. And maybe she would have, too, but there were children shouting at each other on the far side of the yard, and she was too busy watching that to even notice how the boy harassed Lisa.

“Go away,” Lisa told him. “Leave me alone.”

The boy looked stricken. He started bawling. “‘Leave me alone,’” he whined. “I don’t like you! Got to get up! Can’t sleep all day!”

Lisa didn’t have the patience for it. At all. “Leave me alone,” she said. “Right now.”

She didn’t bother to see how he’d take that, because she knew how he’d take it. She buried her head in her arms and tried to pretend she was a million miles away again —

— and the boy grabbed her by the arm, and pulled Lisa to her feet.

“No sleep!” he shouted. “Wake!”

And Lisa just couldn’t take it anymore.

Just couldn’t take it.

“Get your hands off me,” she said, but the boy didn’t hear. “Let me go.”

The retard didn’t let go. He shook Lisa like she was a rag doll. “Wake! Wake!”

Lisa managed to get a grip on his t-shirt with her free hand, and pulled herself close to the big stupid child.

Pulled on his shirt with all her strength — pulled so hard she forced the boy to stoop.

That surprised him so bad he lost his grip on her other arm —

And Lisa couldn’t help herself.

She just couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t think; she couldn’t feel; she couldn’t hardly see what she was doing. She just started hitting the boy with the fist of her free hand, pounding him over and over again. In her mind’s eye his face was a nail and her fist was a hammer, and she had to pound the nail flush with the rest of the world, and she couldn’t stop, and she couldn’t think, and if she’d stopped to think she would have heard the boy screaming in abject terror, shrieking in shock and rage and agony indignation, pleading for his life as she pounded and pounded him with her tiny fist as hard and mighty as a sledge, pounding and pound —

After a while the woman and the dark girl and the light girl got to her, and pried her off that awful boy. But there was blood everywhere by then, and the boy was all twisty-looking and mewling like a cat half-run over by a truck, and the girls screamed and the woman swore and someone called an ambulance.

Maybe someone called the police. There were a lot of sirens.

Everything got confused after that. Someone forgot to keep an eye on Lisa, and she wandered away from the day-care center. But not for long. She couldn’t go long, or far, she realized; she had to be here when Mama got back from work to pick her up.

She went three blocks through the battered parts of Spanish Harlem, and then she went back to Escuela Santa Angelica. When she got there there were three ambulances parked in front of the place, and there were people hurrying in every direction, and no one even noticed Lisa.

Lisa didn’t care. She didn’t want them to notice.

After a while half a dozen medics carried a bloody stretcher out the front door of the school. Lisa didn’t watch them. She didn’t want to see. She didn’t care! That awful boy deserved just what he got, he damn well did, she knew.

But she didn’t feel good when she thought that. And maybe it was wrong.

She turned away from the school, and there before her was one of the ambulances, its wide back doors open into shadows so much darker than anyplace should ever be in the daytime. Why was it so dark in there? Lisa stepped up to the edge of the ambulance, peered into the shadows — and saw the Lady cloaked in darkness, waiting for her.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him, Lady,” Lisa said. “He was just a little boy!”

The Lady didn’t say a word. She lifted Lisa in her arms, enfolding the girl in her cloak.

And carried her away.

Lisa closed her eyes in the darkness of the Lady’s cloak, and she kept them closed for the longest time.

After a while the sounds of the city faded around them, and everything grew still as stone. When the quiet grew deep enough to hurt her ears, Lisa opened her eyes and saw the Lady, carrying her with one arm as she held her bright fiery sword in the other. They were in the corridor, again, the passageway between life and death that led one way to Heaven and the other way to Hell, and the bright sword kept the darkness of that awful place at bay.

It’s over now, Lisa thought. The world is done with me.

But when she heard herself think those words she knew they weren’t true.

“Where are we going?” Lisa asked.

The Lady turned and looked at her, but she didn’t answer.

Lisa wondered if she should be scared. What would they do to her, she wondered, after they judged her? — and then she thought about the rolly-eyed boy, and how she hit him so much she put him in the hospital, in the hospital so bad she maybe even killed him. And she knew there was a place for people who do things like that to little retard boys.

And she knew that place was Hell.

I’m going to go to Hell, Lisa thought. And she tried not to be afraid, but part of her was terrified; and part of her just thought it was the right thing because she deserved it. That part wasn’t afraid, but it was very sad.

The Lady looked sad, too.

Now they crested an incline, and suddenly the gates of Heaven and Hell appeared before them.

Both gates were closed — bolted home and sealed. Between them there was a fountain, and below that fountain was a reflecting pool.

The pool was glassy-still despite the burbling gush at its center, and it reflected everything around them as clearly as if it were a mirror.

Perhaps even more clearly — for that pool caught the essence of the things around it as no ordinary mirror could; and when Lisa looked at it she knew things about the nature of Heaven and Hell that she didn’t want to know.

As if she had a choice!

The Lady carried Lisa to the edge of the pool and set her down beside it — and for the first time Lisa saw her own reflection in that water.

When she looked in that water, Lisa saw herself in perspective. She saw how tiny and insignificant she was — not just among grown adults seven times her size, but before a world infinitely larger than she was, too.

And in the mirror of that water she saw the things about herself she didn’t want to see, like the retard-boy’s blood that covered her hands, and always would; and as she saw that dried and crusted blood she rubbed her tiny hands against one another, trying to clean them. It was no use, because the boy’s blood was a part of her reflection, now, and it always would be, but even so tiny flakes of scabrous matter dusted away from her hands as she rubbed them.

When those flakes touched the water of the pool, Lisa’s reflection shimmered, dissolved, and faded away; and then suddenly the water shone as bright as day, driving away the darkness of the hall.

For a moment Lisa thought she’d somehow set the pool afire. But then she saw an image coalesce on the day-bright surface of the pool, and she knew what was to come.

It started like this: she saw an awkward little boy waddling across a yard, watching a baby asleep curled up in a tight little ball.

That’s me, Lisa thought. He’s watching me.

When the boy got close enough to touch the baby, he hesitated a moment — stood hovering above the smaller child, staring at her intently. After a moment he began to drool, but he didn’t seem to notice — not even when a long slidey droplet of his drool drizzled down to spatter on the baby’s leg.

He spit on me, Lisa thought. That ugly retard spit on me.

“Wake up, baby,” the boy said. His voice was hardly more than a whisper.

The baby didn’t hear him.

“Wake up, baby!”

And when the baby still didn’t wake, the boy put his warm sticky hand on the baby’s shoulder, and began to shake her.

“No!” Lisa shouted. “I don’t want to see!”

But the vision continued. As the baby grumbled at the boy, asking to be left alone; as the boy persisted, badgering the baby —

Lisa grabbed the Santa‘s cloak, pulled on it as insistently as she’d yank her mother’s skirt. “Make it stop, Lady. Please? — I don’t want to see again. I can’t stand to see it, please?”

The Lady frowned. She didn’t answer.

Below them on the water the boy yanked the baby to her feet, and the baby responded by hitting him — again and again and again.

It was so much different, seeing it this way. At first when Lisa’d hit the boy she was just trying to protect herself, and then she sort of lost track of everything. The only time in all of that she really saw him was right at the end, as the teacher grabbed her and pulled her off the boy — for that tiny moment she looked down and saw all that blood, saw the boy looked like something made of pulp, and she ached for him, and she screamed —

Screamed!

But now she saw every moment of it. Every tiny blow the baby’s sharp hard fists jabbed the boy. She saw how he first began to bleed the third time the baby hit him in the mouth; how his arm twisted funny when he fell, trying to get away from her; how she hit his nose three times and after that the shape was different.

She heard him scream, and scream again; and then he begged her not to hit him anymore.

The scene transfixed Lisa. She gaped at it; without even realizing she leaned out over the water to look at it more closely. “Stop it!” she shouted, trembling as the baby battered the soft stupid boy. “I told you, stop it!”

But the baby didn’t stop. How could the baby ever stop, so far away in time?

“I’m warning you,” Lisa said. “I warn you!”

As the baby jabbed and jabbed and jabbed, and now the boy’s nose began to gush with blood.

And Lisa just stopped thinking.

Just stopped thinking.

And she lashed out at the image on the water, reached for the baby’s throat to tear her away from the boy and throw her out across the hall —

But of course she couldn’t do that.

The image on the water was just an image, not the scene itself; Lisa couldn’t grab the baby girl who beat and beat and beat the idiot child — because the baby wasn’t there. And neither was the boy. All Lisa could do was slap the water, splash the surface; send droplets of that water flying everywhere.

The splashing water spattered all across the pool, but it didn’t disturb the stillness of the water. No more than the fountain did.

Lisa didn’t care. She hardly even noticed. When her hand came away from the image holding nothing but the droplets of water that clung to it, she struck again and again and again, screaming in rage and frustration, and she felt the same rage consume her that had consumed her as she’d beat the retard half to death, and if she’d been able to get her hands on the baby or the boy that moment she’d have killed them both —

— killed them both —

— and in her rage she forgot herself entirely.

Forgot where she was, forgot what she was doing, and lost her balance.

And tumbled headfirst into the reflecting pool that rests between the gates of Heaven and Hell.

Lisa almost drowned deep down in the stillness of that water. She would’ve died if anything could die in a place past life and death.

This is what Lisa saw as she thrashed and gasped and coughed and choked deep beneath the imperturbable surface of the reflecting pool between the judgment gates:

She saw her mother, worried out of her mind for her missing daughter and the mayhem and the end of their new life;

She saw Robert Johnson, somewhere down in Hell, playing his guitar;

She saw Santa Barbara standing above the pool, watching Lisa, waiting for her to find herself and save her soul from the rage that wanted to drown her;

She saw the open gates of Heaven, and the pearly haze that lay impenetrable to light beyond.

I’m going to drown, Lisa thought. I’m going to die.

She tried to remember how to swim, but it was so hard! She was so terrified — panicked by her circumstance, blinded by her rage. And all she knew about swimming was from a few days that summer years ago, when the lifeguard lady at camp taught her how to paddle and when to hold her breath, but she couldn’t remember, not for nothing, and everything she did remember didn’t work because she’d already breathed in more water than she’d drink in a week.

“Help!” Lisa shouted, trying to get the Santa to lift her from the pool and save her life. “Help help!”

But her words got lost in the coughing and the choking and the water and the Santa didn’t hear or didn’t listen, she stood above the pool as Lisa thrashed and gasped and suddenly lost hold.

Grew weak as a kitten, and tired. As the blackness faded in around her and she died.

Lisa didn’t really die, of course. No one can die when she stands in that place that’s neither life nor death. Instead she lost her grip on where and when she was, and the currents of the world swept the girl away.

When she woke she lay soaked and broken in an abandoned lot three blocks northwest of Escuela Santa Angelica.

As she woke she heard the Santa whisper in her ear.

“You need to let go of your rage, child,” the Santa said. “If you don’t let it go it will destroy you.”

Lisa turned to face her, to confront her, to accuse the Lady of abandoning her child to the waters that would drown her.

But the Lady was nowhere to be seen.

“Come back!” Lisa shouted. “You come back here!”

“You need to let go of your rage.”

Lisa whipped around to face the direction from which the voice had seemed to come — and saw nothing.

“Don’t leave me alone!” Lisa shouted — and as she said the word alone her shout became a wail. Then she was crying, bawling like a baby or sissy or some big soft old retard boy.

“Lisa!” someone called, and for a moment Lisa thought it was the Lady, returned to her, come to save her from her lonely fate in a burned-out lot in Spanish Harlem.

But it wasn’t the Lady. It was Lisa’s mother, looking frayed and frightened and defeated, like she’d spent the whole afternoon searching for Lisa and thinking the girl was dead.

“Mama,” Lisa wailed, and she opened her arms and let her mother lift her from the rubble of the broken lot, and carry her away.

Lisa’s mama made a telephone call as soon as they got home.

She set Lisa in her chair and picked up the phone and dialed Mama Estrella’s number, and when Mama Estrella answered she said, “Mama Estrella? Something terrible has happened. Yes, to Lisa. She, she — yes, please. Come as soon as you can.”

Mama Estrella knocked on the door ten minutes later.

“What is it, Emma?” Mama Estrella asked. “What has she done?”

“At the school, Mama Estrella. She hurt a boy, and then she disappeared. When I found her in the field she was — wet. Soaked to the skin with something that, that — look.” Lisa’s mama gestured at Lisa’s clothes, at her own clothes where the water from the reflecting pool had touched them.

The water had bleached Lisa’s dress white — not just white but a shade of white so blinding-bright that it hurt Lisa’s eyes to look at it. Mama’s clothes were white like that, too, everywhere they’d touched Lisa while she was still drying.

“Oh my God,” Mama Estrella said. She knelt before Lisa and began to examine her. “Are you burned, Lisa? Your skin, your eyes?”

“No, Mama Estrella,” Lisa said.

“What happened to you, girl?”

“I —” Lisa began. And then she stopped. She had to stop, she knew. She didn’t dare tell that woman what she’d seen. “Nothing happened, Mama Estrella. I just got lost, that’s all.”

Mama Estrella scowled.

“You’re lying, child. Tell me the truth.”

“Tell her the truth, Lisa.”

Lisa didn’t say a word.

“How did you get wet, Lisa?”

“Wet. . . ?”

Lisa couldn’t tell them about the reflecting pool any more than she could tell them about the Santa. She knew that. She tried to think of a lie to explain the water that’d soaked her, but all the lies that came to her were obviously transparent.

“Don’t give her that, young lady. You tell Mama Estrella what happened to you.”

Lisa looked down at her feet, pretending not to hear.

“Lisa!”

“It’s all right, Emma,” Mama Estrella said. She put one hand on Lisa’s cheek, ran the other through the girl’s hair. Her fingers found an itchy lump near Lisa’s hairline and probed it.

“Ouch!”

Bent close to examine it —

— and gasped.

“What is it, Mama Estrella?”

“Shungó.” Mama Estrella said that name softer than a whisper, as though she were afraid that speaking it out loud would call the Lady to her. “It’s Shungó’s hand behind all of this, isn’t it?”

Lisa’s mama shuddered. “I don’t know any Shungó,” she said. “And I don’t want to know any.”

“You’ve seen her,” Mama Estrella said. “The Lady in the grotto behind my store — no, not Mary, the other one. The virgin with the sword.”

“Santa Barbara. . . ?”

“Yes, Santa Barbara — the goddess who repented.”

“What’re you talking about?”

Mama Estrella scowled; she muttered derisively.

Lisa knew why. But she didn’t say a word.

“We need to go back to the boneyard,” Mama Estrella said. “We need to ask Shungó to take her mark off your daughter’s forehead.”

Lisa’s mama made a frightened little sound, like Mama Estrella had struck her with a rod, or worse. “I won’t go back there, Mama Estrella. I won’t.”

“Emma —”

“Use a little common sense, Mama Estrella Perez. Nothing good ever walks out of a graveyard — not now, not when you woke Lisa, not ever. If I want an exorcist, I’ll call a priest.”

Mama Estrella started muttering again. It sounded like she was swearing out a curse, but Lisa couldn’t hear the words.

“Can you do it here, Mama Estrella? Could you do it downstairs in the grotto?”

Mama Estrella closed her eyes, rubbed her temple. “Let me think,” she said. And then she was quiet for a while. Quiet and — faraway-looking. It almost seemed like she was praying.