All for a Song (20 page)

And Lynnie breathes fresh air—something she’s rarely afforded the pleasure to do since she’s “moved on.”

Birthday or not, she would have known it was mid-October. The humidity of summer has released its grip, and the air holds a burning crispness like a candle has just been snuffed.

Lynnie holds her face up to the sun, its warmth touching her like a welcome caress. Her mother used to say that the sunshine brought her freckles out to play. She brings her hand up to her own face and touches the thin, cool skin, too fragile to bear the weight of such spots.

Charlotte maneuvers the chair with a confident stroll over the winding concrete slabs that snake along the grounds.

“It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it?” she says, and then launches into a song she’s far too young to know. “‘Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy. . . .’”

Lynnie was already an old woman when she first put that album on the turntable in the den. Still, this girl sings with a low, throaty voice, perfectly suited to the turning leaves, and soon tears gather in the corners of her eyes and spill down one by one, feeling cool in the slow-strolling breeze.

“I wanted to have a chance to be alone with you,” Charlotte says in place of the second verse, which is a shame because it’s always been Lynnie’s favorite. “Before everybody else comes because, you know, they don’t exactly know me.”

Lynnie does her best to crane her neck—
Who is this girl?
—hoping a piercing glare might ask the question for her, but she manages only a glimpse to the left, where a bright-eyed squirrel stares at the nonthreatening parade of two passing before it.

Leaves crunch as they walk and wheel. Charlotte hums the John Denver tune, and Lynnie knows it will cycle endlessly through her head for the rest of the day. In fact, she calls up a few notes herself and almost moves them past the corner of her throat where all sounds seem to stop. Suddenly, Charlotte’s face is right next to hers, so close she can smell the scent of the girl’s neck. She’s never known anybody who smelled like pears before. “Do you like that song?”

Lynnie nods.

“I do too. Music today is useless. Dad says nobody’s written a decent song since 1976. Except for Dolly Parton. I watched a
Behind the Music
special about her. She kept the rights to all of her songs. She’ll be making millions even after she dies. Isn’t that smart of her?”

It’s one of the rare times when Lynnie is glad to be free from the burden of speech.

“But you know something about that, don’t you?”

They’ve come to a place where the walkway blossomed out to a wide, round slab with a trio of benches gathered in ever-present shade. Charlotte wheels her in, sets the brakes, and comes to the front, shrugging a well-stuffed backpack off her shoulders and plopping it on the bench before sitting down beside it.

She leans forward, her elbows on her knees, and takes Lynnie’s hands in hers. “Do you even know? About your song? What’s happening?”

Lynnie shakes her head with all the vigor she can muster.

“Typical.” Charlotte hauls her backpack onto her lap and holds it there, bouncing her knees. “I really was arrested once, you know.”

Lynnie has no doubt.

“But that’s not why I’m here.”

No doubt there, either.

“Do you know what I was arrested for?”

Perhaps Charlotte has forgotten she’s already told this story to Kaleena back in the room. Or more likely, she assumes Lynnie has forgotten, not realizing there’s hardly a day from the previous century that Lynnie cannot recall with almost-certain detail. It feels wonderful to have
a new voice talking to her—not yelling overly cheerful platitudes, but simply talking, as if Lynnie could somehow equally engage.

Unless, of course, Charlotte hadn’t told Kaleena the truth. Maybe she was arrested for shooting helpless old ladies. A knot of panic suppresses a silent scream when Charlotte digs into her bag and begins rummaging around, though it unravels with a band of silent chastisement when the girl produces not a gun or a knife, but some sort of flat-screened gadget.

“It’s an iPad,” she says, as if that explains anything. “The newest thing.”

She hums quietly as she taps her fingertip on the screen. First here, then there, then she swipes and swipes, bringing her finger and thumb together, then producing a sort of soft, flicking motion.

“Here.” She moves along the bench until she’s sitting on the edge, holding the screen under Lynnie’s nose. “Can you see?”

Lynnie looks at the image; it’s like a photograph in a frame. In the foreground is a hand-lettered cardboard sign that says
Let Jesus Feed You
. Charlotte sits next to it, dressed as she is now, in tattered jeans and a snug, short-sleeved shirt, but in the picture she’s wearing a knit cap like a bulb tugged over her dark hair, and she has a guitar nestled in her lap. It’s a beautiful instrument, deep red with what looks like birds etched to take flight from beneath the strings. Lynnie’s own fingers itch to strum it, and she unclenches her grip from the armrest of the wheelchair and brings it, trembling, toward the image. At her touch, the small Charlotte on the screen comes to life, looks straight out, and says, “Are you ready?” Her voice, though tiny, carries the weight of a private joke.

“My friend J. D. did the video for me,” the real Charlotte is saying, tilting the screen away from Lynnie’s startled fingers. She taps it, until gradually the volume is increased and the first few chords emerge.

“I can’t believe this,” Charlotte whispers, and Lynnie notices that the girl’s face has gone pale, and a tremble has taken possession of Charlotte’s hands.

Believe what?

“I can’t believe I’m sitting here with you. About to share this with you.” She takes a deep breath, and her hands steady.

Surprisingly clear and strong, music emerges from the screen. It’s immediately familiar, and Lynnie feels a chill at the base of her spine. It spreads up and up, flashing out across her shoulder. She wants to reach out her own trembling hand, to make it stop, at least long enough so she can catch the breath that seems to be knitting itself around the cold within her, but she remains immobile, unable to take her eyes off the small screen.

And then, the small Charlotte of the iPad sings.

Jesus is coming!

Are you ready

to meet your Savior in the sky?

The phrasing is slightly different, as Charlotte’s singing voice possesses a sandy quality that scoops each note from a place of warmth. But it is, undoubtedly, the same song Lynnie sang in the Strawn Brothers Music Store a lifetime ago.

Her head fills with questions.
How?
And
who?
She poses them with a simple turning of her head from the girl to the screen and back.

“I call it evangelizing. The city calls it busking. But whatever. I didn’t have a permit, so I got a citation. It was either pay a fine or do community service. I did my hours in a nursing home back home, and that gave me the idea to come here.”

She turns to Lynnie with a huge smile—the first she’s seen from the girl all day. It beautifully complements the delicate silver loop pierced through her lower lip.

“Isn’t God amazing? Because I didn’t know—honestly didn’t know you were here. I didn’t know anything about you. I just loved that song from the minute I bought the CD, and then everything started fitting together and . . . wait.” Charlotte tilts her head, as if gathering up all of Lynnie’s questions. “You don’t know any of this, do you?”

Throughout, Lynnie’s song has been playing like a reanimated specter between them, but it comes to a sudden halt as Charlotte taps the screen
one, two, three times. Now the image is of another young woman with long, dark-blonde braids.

“She was on
American Idol
a few seasons back. Didn’t win, but she released an album of gospel bluegrass, a bunch of old—” she sent an apologetic glance—“sorry,
classic
songs. And this one . . .” Charlotte taps the screen again, and for the second time in more than half a century, Lynnie’s song fills the air, this time sung with a fresh-from-the-farm twang wrapped in guitar, fiddle, and the trill of a mandolin.

It is pure and sweet and perfect, and its creator’s lips open and close in silent mismatched timing with the lyrics. Charlotte’s voice joins in, creating dulcet harmony, and Lynnie imagines the three women are a trio, not unlike the Andrews Sisters, who had been such a favorite of Ma’s before she died.

“It won a Country Music Award last spring,” Charlotte says quietly during an instrumental bridge in which the fiddle’s bow weaves the melody through the strings of the guitar. “You probably don’t know that, either. I was watching the show, and I saw your name on the screen credited as the writer. And I thought,
I know that name. . . .
”

They are looking at each other again, the girl’s eyes full of trepidation and mischief. As the pretty blonde sings the final chorus in the background, Lynnie is determined to hold Charlotte’s gaze—her only means to answer for herself the question that’s been nagging her since the first hours of the morning. She knows this girl. Knows her and yet doesn’t. She’s a forgotten third verse, the
la-la-la
of momentarily lost lyrics. The hair, the clothes, the piercings—all bearing testimony to what the world has come to during Lynnie’s century of life.

But the eyes.

Strip away the liner, ignore what is clearly a smattering of tiny purple stars bursting from the brow, and look at the eyes. Those are the eyes of Lynnie’s earliest memories.

“So I asked Grandpa.”

Grandpa.
Her breath comes faster and faster as she calculates.
Donny’s son? Or grandson, even.

“And he gave me a box with some things. Mostly pictures and
newspaper clippings. Stuff like that. So I scanned it.” She takes the screen away again and begins tapping, muttering something about its being a modern-day scrapbook. “There you are.”

There she is, indeed. The one they’d put in the corner of the posters outside the theater. Her hair is styled in long, lush curls rivaling those of Mary Pickford. And like the actress, she’s dressed to look more like a child than the nearly-nineteen-year-old woman she’d been at the time, with a knee-length pleated skirt and square-collared blouse. That was Roland’s idea, of course.

Charlotte swipes her finger, and a new image appears, this one less precise, with the unmistakable tint of aged newspaper. The caption reads,
Sister Aimee prays with a select group of followers just minutes before taking the stage.

Though the image is little more than a dark blur of bowed heads, Lynnie feels like she could name each of them. These were not “followers,” as the caption would have the reader believe, but staff, workmen, and even what the world would one day call “groupies.” Hangers-on who followed the evangelist from city to city, creating their own means of worship.

Lynnie is in that crowd too, though no photographer would have known to include her name in the caption, even if the picture was snapped just moments before she herself took the stage. She is there, right at Sister Aimee’s side, the woman’s long, white sleeve raised in a tower of prayer above her head. And next to her is Roland Lundi. Her shoulder grows warm, recalling the weight of his touch.

Charlotte interrupts Lynnie’s thoughts with a touch of her own. “Now this,” she says, “is something very special. The film was in terrible shape when we found it, but my friend J. D. is a film student, and he found some guys to restore it. I don’t think the rest of the family even knows this exists.”

Another swipe and the screen goes dark for just a moment before a pale, silvery, uncertain image appears at its center. The cameraman must have been stationed in the middle of the audience, though on some sort of raised platform, because the very bottom of the frame ripples with dark waves of audience. A black curtain—though in its color-life it was certainly a deep blood-red—stretches across a stage, empty save for a single microphone
and a wooden chair. Then, from stage left, Roland Lundi with those swift, confident strides.

To see him again after so many years—Lynnie’s heart seems poised to take its well-deserved final beat. She leans forward in her chair, as if doing so could bring her closer. Heat rises to her cheeks, and with it the blush of youth, she supposes. Oh, how he’d make her blush, and how quickly she’d bring her young, unmottled hands to her cheeks to hide his effects.

But she’s an old woman now, and she knows for a fact he’s dead. She’d heard his voice that day, welcome and familiar, telling her to go back. This far, and no more.

Charlotte’s giggle only illuminates the sadness Lynnie feels at the thought.

“Quite a charmer, wasn’t he?”

If you only knew.

“There’s no sound, of course.”

No sound is needed. Lynnie can hear his voice like it’s coming from the trees. Soft and deep, roughened by smoke. Introducing the last vestige of pure American womanhood, untouched by vice, unsullied by scandal. Ready to lift her voice in song and lead them in an anthem of utmost urgency.

The tiny Roland raises his arm in the direction from which he’d entered, and the real, live “Dorothy Lynn Dunbar!” wants to leap from her seat at the sight of herself.

“I think this is in Kansas City?”

She confirms with a brief nod.

A sudden gust of wind skitters leaves across the walkway, but in its stead Lynnie hears the roar of a welcoming audience, for by then she’d advanced far beyond mere polite applause. Though there is no recording to confirm her memories, she knows the exact moment the crowd disciplined itself into hushed silence—within seconds of her cradling her guitar on her knee. Tiny white hands form the first chords; the same, gnarled and cold, do likewise.

“You’ve never seen this before?” Charlotte whispers.

Never.

“But you lived it.”

It consumed me.

How could she not have known she was so very, very small? The enormous curtain loomed above her; the orchestra pit gaped at her feet. What twisted fable made her believe she wielded any sort of power? She’d been a girl with a guitar. Nothing more. “Beautiful in its simplicity,” Roland had said. “Mesmerizing,” he’d called her. “A real-life siren.”