The Lost Songs (14 page)

Doria took them on a tour so they could see what
extra-cost options had been put in the kitchen and how their window treatments compared.

“Doria, your house is beautiful,” said Pierce. “It’s so different from ours. My parents are IKEA people. We’re always going up there and finding something new.”

“I want to cuddle up on all these great chairs and sofas,” agreed Azure Lee.

“It’s kind of a sanctuary for me,” said Doria, and immediately regretted her choice of word.

“People who need a sanctuary are on the run from something,” said Pierce. “They gotta hide in a safe place.” He was smiling at her, and it was a warm soft smile, the kind anybody would want directed at them, but Doria was shocked. Was she on the run? Hiding? Was life on the piano bench actually a sanctuary from other kids?

If so, she had to quit sitting on benches. She had to move into groups, into the middle, among friends.

“You’re trying out all the chairs, Azure Lee. Like the three bears,” teased Pierce. Then his voice changed. “What is this?”

“A physics textbook,” said Doria.

“You’re not in physics,” said Pierce, who was.

“No. I couldn’t fit it into my schedule.”

“So you’re doing it on your own?”

“Well, kind of. I’m taking an online course.”

She watched their faces as they mentally clicked through what they knew of her schedule: precalc, honors chemistry, honors English, third-year Spanish, music composition … and for fun, physics in her spare time at home.

Pierce and Azure Lee practically tripped over each other getting to the door.

It was fine for Azure Lee to go beyond the boundaries in basketball. Everybody loved that she spent hours every day in
her driveway, her only company the net above her garage door. Everybody loved her ambition to become a pro. But a thirst for knowledge was not the same. If you went beyond the boundaries there, you were exiled.

Azure Lee reached the safety of the front entrance. “Doria, with your grades and all this stuff you do on the side, you could probably skip senior year, graduate with Pierce and me in May and go straight to college.”

“Pick a big school,” added Pierce, “where they have everything.”

Azure Lee and Pierce reached the sidewalk. They exchanged glances, but not with Doria.

For a long time after the late bus disappeared, Train stood by the side of the road, immobilized. Prissy pale Pierce had made a school bus stop in order to remove Doria from Train’s presence.

It was several minutes before Train remembered that this was what he wanted: to be feared.

He received a text.

Stop
.

It was from Miss Veola, of course. Woman didn’t know when she was beaten.

Train deleted it.

Aunt Grace’s text said,
Spend the night with me?

Lutie almost always spent school nights at Aunt Tamika’s. Perhaps Aunt Grace had been delegated to tan Lutie’s hide for cutting school.

Aunt Grace lived on the other side of town. Two malls, two parks, another high school, a bunch of factories and nine miles
away. Lutie texted that she’d wait at the library until Aunt Grace picked her up. Wouldn’t be a long wait. They’d killed a lot of time at Miss Veola’s.

Aunt Grace ran the local Department of Motor Vehicles, the only completely courteous DMV in the nation. The employees were polite to the public because they were afraid of Aunt Grace, not because she set a good example. Aunt Grace did not smile; she intimidated. When Lutie stayed with her, they sat silently at the kitchen table, Aunt Grace staring while Lutie did homework. If Lutie closed her books and said she was done, Aunt Grace would say, “Study is never done. It isn’t bedtime yet. Keep at it. This is your ticket out.”

A ticket out. That was what you were supposed to want if you lived in Chalk.

Yet in the laundry songs, Mabel Painter never asked for a ticket out. She asked for a way to make her own place grand. She wanted the Lord to show up in her front yard and rock on her porch.

And had he? Silently, Lutie worked her way through the songs, to see if there was one that celebrated the day the Lord showed up. At the edge of her mind a few notes wavered and a bit of melody teetered. She tried to float on the scraps of music and remember the rest of it.

It wouldn’t quite come back to her.

Lost songs, Mr. Gregg and Professor Durham had called them. And sure enough, she had lost one.

It was disturbing. Lutie was the keeper of these songs, not the loser. They do have to be written down, she thought. Or recorded. I do have to cooperate with somebody, somewhere.

She had seldom been in a less cooperative mood.

She went outside the library to wait for her aunt. Then the storm came. Lutie sheltered under the overhang and watched
the lightning. A few more notes came to mind, and some of the words.

Doria Bell never cried. It gave her a headache and accomplished nothing. She stood in her silent house, refusing to give in to the desire to weep. Her best shot at friends, two beautiful people who lived on the same street, and she had owned up to being a nutcase who studied physics for fun.

And then she heard what Azure Lee had said:
graduate early
.

Court Hill can be temporary! she thought. I don’t have to worry about making friends! I’m just marking time here. It’s the first week in November. School ends in May. Seven more months and Court Hill can be history.

Doria picked up the TV remote and surfed the music channels. Dance came into her feet, like a pedal part on the organ, and she danced into the kitchen, around the island and through the pantry, circled the dining table and shifted into the sunroom.

College would save her. At college, she would find exclusively kids who loved to learn.

Well, of course, Stephanie’s older brother and sister were now in college, where they made friends only with kids who loved to drink, party and skip class. And they were at colleges famous for academics. So even at college, Doria would have to hunt around. Pierce was right. Pick a big school. Forty thousand students, say. If five percent were as driven as Doria, she’d have two thousand to choose from.

“Holy smoke,” said her father, coming in the garage door.
“Pop Latino? Did
you
put that on?” He had bought Chinese.

He set little white boxes with rich scents and strong sauces all over the kitchen counter.

Mom was right behind him. She checked out the video on the TV screen. “Did it come on by itself? Do we have a glitch? Or did our actual biological daughter put it on?”

“Research,” said Doria.

“Do I believe that?” said her father. “Or are you undergoing a personality change? Doria, you are sparkling. Something great happened, huh?”

Her mother was already separating chopsticks. Her father was already squishing rice onto his plate. Her parents came home starving, like little kids after school. Now she really wanted to weep, seeing them wash their hands at top speed, throw dishes onto place mats, shove glasses under the crushed-ice spout in the freezer door, and drop into their chairs.

A family is a specialized calendar: birthdays, landmarks, school years, Christmases, graduations. Drop a year? Just let it fall out of the family plan? Not graduate with her own class? Abandon her parents in a town and a state she barely knew? Go have her own life, whatever that was?

A year they had all counted on, without even knowing it. Her senior year. Lost.

Graduating early would be a door slammed in her parents’ faces.

Doria told her parents about Miss Veola instead. Miss Elminah. The four-year-old and the glasses of tea and Lutie singing to the sky.

“Chalk sounds so charming,” said her mother. “And you’re volunteering on Saturday. Who else is going?”

“I don’t know much yet,” said Doria. “How was work today? Anything interesting happen?”

Doria’s mother thought everything was interesting, so she started right in. Updates on pesky colleagues, thoughts on intriguing romances, worry about maddening deadlines and vanished perks, photos of somebody’s new baby.

The move here had not been anybody’s first choice. Her dad, a research scientist at a pharmaceutical company, had been laid off. Her mother, a school librarian, had also been let go. Dad was crushed. He had thought he was vital to the team. He lost weight, began having chest pains and went back to smoking, twenty years after he’d quit. Her mother was so hurt that her posture changed, as if the school board had knifed her. Her shoulders got round and she gained weight and hated herself and hated her clothes and didn’t want to see anybody.

They went through their savings in half a year.

And then her father was offered a job here. Doria hadn’t wanted to move, but her parents said, “We’re out of money, there’s a job in Court Hill, get in the car.” And before they even found a house, her mother walked into a library job at an elementary school only a half hour away.

Dad loved his new job because it was a job. Mom loved her new job because she loved books and kids and libraries, but also because nobody here had known her when she was slender. No one was wondering exactly how many pounds she’d put on.

Not only did Doria Bell live in a different world now, she lived with different parents. Her parents were careful, as if there might be snipers in the area, taking out jobs, and they had to keep their eyes peeled and their sleep light. No matter how valuable you were to your employers, you weren’t that valuable.

Her parents wanted friends and allies. They were counting
on church, and church was coming through. They were so proud of Doria, getting that organ job at St. Bartholomew’s. But they didn’t want to drive all that way. They wanted to get to know their neighbors, and that meant First Methodist.

Can I do that too? she wondered. Give up the church job and the money and the applause and that great organ? Give up accompanying, the pleasure of it and the respect I get, and the responsibility? Can I get off the bench to join the crowd? Should I?

“Is there anything besides lemon chicken?” she said. “The sauce is too sweet for me. What else did you bring, Daddy?”

“Shrimp and scallops with ginger.”

“Sold.”

They cleaned up together, although with takeout, it was mainly filling the trash bag. Doria did a quick pass on the kitchen floor with the Swiffer, her mother started a load of laundry and her dad studied fridge and freezer contents, hoping for dessert.

Then Doria went to her room, to be alone with her laptop.

It took a minute or two of Googling, since she didn’t know how to spell DeRade and she hadn’t known there was an “e” on Greene. But the local newspaper site revealed all. DeRade Greene. Five-year sentence for wrapping a thirteen-year-old in barbed wire and blinding him in one eye.

Azure Lee believed that Train wanted to do that too?

Going off the track, she thought. It’s possible. When I was standing on the sidewalk with him, first Train had a face and a laugh, and then he didn’t. It’s all in the timing, I guess. You don’t want to be there when the tracks split.

She went back and forth between Nell and Stephanie’s Facebook pages and got no closer to knowing what to say to them. If anything. What was a lost year compared to lost friendships?