Between the Notes (21 page)

“D
oes this answering machine work?” I held up the ancient device and shook it against my ear, to see if anything rattled. Mom had resurrected it from a cardboard box in our Westside basement so we could cancel the answering service through the phone company and save money on our phone bill. “Has anyone actually received any messages?”

Mom pulled it out of my hands. “Yes, it works.” She pressed the
PLAY
button. Molly’s voice blasted our kitchen, “So, about the Halloween party. I can only fit three people in my house and you can probably fit about seven. Can we have it in your yard? Do you think Carla will mind? Call me!”

“Party?” My mom looked at me and raised her eyebrows.

I grinned sheepishly. “Oh, right.” That’s how my parents learned that we were hosting a Halloween party. Once Molly and I assured them our costs would be minimal—we’d make lemonade and serve chips—they agreed to it. Honestly, I think they were just happy I’d made a friend here and was no longer begging to leave.

But it had been more than a week since James had left and still no call. I’d sent him a paper invitation and countless letters. I phoned Ida to see if she’d heard anything, but her answer was always the same: “Nothing, dear. I’m sorry.”

Molly had made the invitation to our party, cutting words out of magazines and taping them together like a ransom note. Then she snuck into the office at school and made photocopies on that hideous orange-yellow copy paper they use for notices they don’t want parents to ignore.

“Goldenrod,” Molly clarified. “It was the Halloweeniest color I could find.”

“Weeniest,” Rigby said, snickering.

Molly handed us each our allotment. Rigby was an honorary cohost of the party. “Don’t invite any douche bags,” she said to him.

I took one and wrote in the margin above the
COME AS YOU ARE
heading:

I addressed it to James in New York and dropped it in the big blue mailbox at the entrance to our neighborhood. I mailed one invite every day, in different kinds of envelopes. I always included my email address so he could reply more quickly. But I was
careful not to print a return mailing address on the outer envelope. Maybe one of them would get through.

On my way back from the mailbox one day, I saw a woman with salt-and-pepper hair come out of Lennie’s front door with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She fast-walked toward an old Honda Civic that was parked in the grass on the other side of their house, ducked into the backseat, and shut herself in. Her head dipped to the side and she disappeared from sight. I slowed my pace to see who would follow, if Lennie or his dad would come out and drive her away.

But nobody came.

Then I noticed that the car had a flat tire and one of the taillights was out. I walked along the hedges between our houses and knocked on the door to Lennie’s shed. He opened it a crack and peeked out.

“Hey.” He smiled and nudged the door wider when he saw it was me. “Come on in.”

I stayed outside and gestured toward the Honda. “No thanks. I just . . . There’s a woman hiding in that car. Do you know her?”

He sighed and his shoulders dropped a bit. “That’s my mom.”

“Oh.” I looked toward the Honda again. “Is she okay?”

He wiped some grease from his hands with a rag. “Probably just hiding.”

“Oh,” I said again.

Lennie held up a finger. “Wait here.”

He strode over to the car and tapped on the back window. The
woman sat up and rolled it down. I couldn’t hear what they said, but she reached a hand out and stroked his cheek. He nodded and turned back to me.

“Is everything okay?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Can we talk later? I—”

“Yeah, sure. No problem.” I backed away toward my house, lifting my hand in a little wave. “See you later.”

“Thanks.” He locked up the shed and went in the back door to his house.

I found my mom in our kitchen, chopping onions. “Have you met Mrs. Lazarski?” I asked.

“Couple times,” she said. “She’s very quiet.”

I hadn’t even thought about Lennie having a mother, to be honest. I’d never seen her before. “What does she do?”

Mom shrugged. “Takes care of her husband, I guess. Why don’t you ask Lennie?”

“I will,” I said.

The tenderness between Lennie and his mom made me wonder about James and his mother. Rebecca had been all “Daddy this” and “Daddy that,” barely mentioning their mom. But James had looked like he’d been punched in the gut when he’d heard she’d been crying.

I opened the obituary of his grandfather on my computer again and stared at his mother’s name.
Sheila Wickerton.
She’d grown up here, in a family that went fishing and bowling. Had she turned her back on that long ago, immersed in her high-society life? All
I had to go on was a hunch that she had a soft spot for this place, and for James. I took out a sheet of paper and wrote
her
a letter.

I told her how James and I met, how we’d gone to the cemetery and left daisies on her parents’ grave. I told her how much I liked her son, that there’d been a misunderstanding and if she could give him a message for me . . . I very much wished he would call.

When I carried the letter to the mailbox fifteen minutes later, Lennie’s house was still quiet. I hoped everything was okay in there.

I
knocked on Lennie’s shed door after school the next day. I’d been half expecting to see an ambulance or a hearse drive up, as quiet as it had been around his house. There hadn’t even been any customers.

Lennie opened the shed door and pulled out his earbuds. “Hey, come in. Sorry about yesterday—my mom and all,” he said as I shut the door. He moved back to the far counter and fiddled with a pile of bolts.

“What happened?” I’d been worrying about it more than I cared to admit.

“Ah, nothing, really. My dad was having a bad day. Mom needed a little break is all.”

“Oh.” We stood in awkward silence for a few seconds. I noticed a little section of his shelves that had books instead of engine parts, so I went to peruse. They were mostly automotive manuals, but also some paperbacks. A thesaurus and a Spanish-English dictionary, a copy of
The Great Gatsby.
I pointed
to it and said, “Summer reading?”

He nodded.

He had all the same books that used to sit on my shelf, from English class. The books that made you look like you were serious about literature.
The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath.
Howl
by Allen Ginsberg. There were copies of
Jane Eyre
and
The Outsiders.
I stroked its spine. Couldn’t seem to get away from reminders of James.

I hadn’t been to our secret room for a few weeks now. What was the point? James was gone, my secret of living in Lakeside was out. But looking at these books made me miss it a little. I shook my head and turned, nodding toward Lennie’s iPod. “What were you listening to?”

He stepped closer and held the earbuds out. I put one of them in and handed the other back to him.

“So you don’t totally blast me out,” I said.

We had to stand really close to share the earbuds, shoulder to shoulder. He glanced sideways at me. “You might not like this.”

“You’d be surprised.”

He smiled and tapped
PLAY
. The song started out in Latin, with eerie church choir voices, and I quickly realized the lyrics were all words for Satan. “. . . Behemoth, Beelzebub . . . Satanas, Lucifer . . .”

My eyes widened. “Oh, my God. What is that?”

Lennie just bobbed his head to the beat as drums and electric guitars came in. Then he grinned. “Swedish metal band, Ghost. Cool, huh?”

“I guess . . .” I gave him a wary look. The music was cool, actually, though I didn’t usually get into metal. Or Satan.

He laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m not a Satan worshipper . . .”

“You just play one on TV?”

“Gotta keep up appearances.” He flexed his tattooed arm and gave me the badass scowl I recognized from the old days, before we ever met. Just as quickly, he shrugged it off and turned back into the kinder, gentler Lennie I was getting to know. “They’re not really Satanists. The band. It’s just their shtick. The lead singer dresses like a cardinal, with skeleton makeup. They all wear hoods and capes and their concerts are like a horror show.”

“You’ve seen them in concert?”

He nodded. “In Philly once.”

“Nice.”

We started talking about bands we’d seen live, or wanted to. He played a song from another favorite group. I recognized it immediately, because I’d been totally obsessed with them for a few months last year. I loved the way they mixed piano and symphony and choral music into a hard rock sound.

“I’m teaching Brady how to play the ukulele,” I said.

Lennie scanned his music and pulled up a ukulele recording. “Jake Shimabukuro. You know him?”

I shook my head and listened for a moment. “Is that ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’?”

“Yep,” said Lennie. “Dude is amazing.”

“I always thought of the ukulele as a wimp of an instrument,
something to use in a pinch if you didn’t have anything more substantial. But I love it now. And this guy really is amazing.”

Lennie smiled and let me scroll through his music selection while he went back to work sorting through a box of odd parts. I played a few more Shimabukuru tunes. (“Ave Maria” on ukulele? Bach’s Invention No. 4 in D minor? Crazy.) I found lots of heavy metal, too, but also stuff like the Beatles and Bob Dylan. Then I saw something that really surprised me.

“No way.” I bit my lip so I wouldn’t laugh.

“What?” He tried to grab the iPod from me but I held it out of his reach.

“The sound track to
Titanic
?” I said through giggles. “Céline Dion?”

Lennie groaned. “She only sings one song. The rest is instrumental. You know in the movie when the musicians are performing right up to last moment before the ship sinks? That stuff is on there, and . . .”

I held up my hand. “It’s okay, Lennie. I won’t tell anyone about you and Céline.”

He shook his head, smiling. “I hate you.”

“Trust me. You’re not alone,” I mumbled.

He narrowed his eyes at me for a second, then went back to his gadgets. He was photographing each of them on a white background. I offered to help, and soon we had a rhythm going where I stood behind the camera and took the pictures while he positioned one item after another.

It was nice, comfortable. I didn’t think about Reesa or James. We just played music and worked in silence. After a few minutes he said, “I don’t really hate you.”

I looked up and smiled. “I know.”

We continued to work for another hour, logging the parts I had just photographed into his online inventory. He read off model numbers and descriptions and I keyed them in.

“I should pay you something,” he said.

“It’s okay.” I could use the money, but didn’t feel right taking it from Lennie.

“Why not? You’re cutting my workload in half. At least.”

I shrugged. “I like doing it. It takes my mind off . . . other things.”

He finished labeling a gear and slid it onto the shelf. “Like that guy James?”

I stayed quiet. I never did find out what James had said to convince Lennie to give him my address.

“He, uh . . . seemed to like you a lot,” said Lennie. “Whatever happened to him?”

That achy feeling that came to my chest whenever I thought about James started to flare up again. It got worse with each day he didn’t call or email. I was starting to lose hope.

But I didn’t want Lennie to know how thoroughly I’d been dumped. “He’s visiting his father,” I said. “In New York.”

“Oh.” Lennie looked down at the label he was marking and put the item on a shelf.

“He should be back soon,” I said. “Any day now.” I’d given up lying, but was it really a lie if I sincerely hoped it to be true?

Lennie held my gaze for an awkwardly long time. “That’s great,” he finally said.

He read the model number of a tractor gasket, and I keyed it in. When I looked up for the next item, his face was dead serious. “Ivy,” he said, “I have a confession to make.”

I swallowed hard. “About what?”

His voice dropped to a whisper. “Promise you won’t tell?”

“I promise,” I whispered back. My heart started racing.

“I lied to you. About Céline Dion.” He broke into a crooked grin. “I love that song.” He put his hand to his chest in that pained-heartbreak sort of way and started belting it out. Really, really off-key.

I almost peed myself laughing.

We kept working and laughing, and every time my giggles subsided, he’d sing another little bit of a Céline Dion song he knew. It was horrible.

And wonderful.

A
n envelope.

In the mailbox.

Addressed to me.

The handwriting looked familiar. Not the cursive James had used to write the snippet of a sonnet on the drawing he made for me, but his printing—the way he’d jotted notes in the books in our secret room.

I tore it open, my hopes lifted at the prospect of a message at last. Please, please,
please
don’t hate me anymore.

But it wasn’t a letter. It was a flyer for another open mic night at the King Theatre. Whoever sent it had circled the part where it said,
SHARE YOUR TALENT
! But there was no note. Not even a scribble in the margin.

There was, however, a little starburst shape in the bottom corner announcing a cash prize to be awarded to the winner of this month’s event. It didn’t say how much, but there were four dollar signs and a couple of exclamation marks. So it had to be more
than a few dollars. Maybe fifty or a hundred? It was
something
, though. A trip to the grocery store. New shoes for the twins.

“What’s that?” Mom stood at the top of the attic stairs, holding freshly laundered sheets.

“Nothing.” I shoved it into my backpack.

I had told James about open mic night, how Molly wanted me to do it with her. And he’d encouraged me.
Show up and sing to the tombstones,
he had said.
Do it for yourself.
And a cash prize
?
That was an even better incentive, since my job hunt wasn’t going so well. I started to fantasize that maybe it was even more than a hundred dollars. Maybe two hundred. Two fifty. Five hundred? Mom wouldn’t have to worry about day-to-day expenses for a week or two.

“Everything okay?” Mom dropped the sheets on my desk chair.

I smiled, my heart racing. “Sure. Everything’s great.”

She flicked a quick glance toward my backpack, then reached over to strip my bed. Mom had employed a maid when we lived in Westside. Now she held a job and did all the housework, too. The apartment was small, but I swear she cleaned it three times as much as our old house. Or maybe I just noticed it now. It was surprising how much I hadn’t noticed before.

I took an edge of the clean sheet.

“Thanks, sweetie,” she said.

When we finished (she insisted on hospital corners), I waited for her to disappear down the stairs before retrieving the flyer.
Maybe Molly had sent it. But why would she be so secretive? We’d talked about working on a song together, maybe trying our back-and-forth duel between piano and clarinet. She had no reason to send an anonymous flyer. She would’ve just walked down the road and shoved it into my hand.

It had to be James.

I folded and unfolded the ad, tracing my fingers over the words he’d circled:
SHARE YOUR TALENT
! Would he be there? Or watching somehow? If this was the way to reach him, if it would prove to him that I cared, there was only one thing to do.

It just happened to be the one thing that terrified me most.

I went to the secret room first thing Friday morning and opened my copy of
Jane Eyre,
almost expecting to find the page blank—that I’d imagined the whole thing. But the note was still there.

I pulled out the envelope that the flyer had come in, set it next to the note from James. There was no mistaking they were written by the same person.

I slumped into the old library chair and stared at the flyer
again. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t get up and sing in front of all those people.

But I had to. Not only for James, but the prize money . . . I had to do this.

The next open mic night was less than a week away. Next Thursday. A crazy assortment of songs raced through my mind, tumbling over each other. I needed to pick one that would speak to him. Or maybe . . .

I pulled out a notebook.

Ours wasn’t a love song. Not yet. It was a song of finding him when I needed someone. Of making mistakes. Realizing I didn’t have to fake it anymore. He’d been there for me, and I’d let him down.

I got up and peeked into the outer supply closet, to make sure nobody was there. Then I locked myself in the secret room.

It wasn’t easy without my piano. I thought about the moment James and I first met by the hedges, tried putting it into words.
“Caught by surprise, leaves in my hair . . .”

I wrote it down. More lyrics came. And along with it, a melody. I bent over my notebook and scribbled, singing along.
“. . . Rusty bicycle, you didn’t care . . .”

Soon, my pencil could barely keep up. The song fell out of nowhere onto my lips. It didn’t come out perfectly. Words didn’t always rhyme where they should, but the message was there.
“All I knew was a mistake, my world a lie, my life a fake . . .”

I wrote and erased and wrote some more. I tried to imagine the piano accompaniment. Moody and slow, eerie almost, then building faster and louder like thunder before a final calm. I couldn’t wait to lay my hands on a piano. When I’d done as much as I could with paper and pencil, I gathered my notebook and bag and ran for the band room.

The band was in there.

I laughed at myself, how making music made me oblivious to everything around me sometimes. Like the fact that school was in session.

It was nearly eleven. I’d missed my first two classes, so I scurried to my third-period trigonometry class. Took my seat in front of Reesa. She didn’t say anything but tapped my shoulder. When I twisted around, she handed me a sheet of paper.

It was an assignment from English.

“Thanks,” I said.

She nodded. It wasn’t much, but it was a start. We still were not officially talking. Our communication had advanced from icy glares to the occasional grunt or nod. I caught her watching me with Molly and Rigby, and she caught me watching her with Willow and Wynn.

I’m pretty sure I’d landed in the happier place. She kind of looked like a kidnap victim afraid to risk an escape from her captors.

Molly and I sat on the curb outside her house Friday after school, soaking up the last few rays of Indian summer sunshine. We were trying to make a playlist of music for the party.

“No Lucinda Williams,” I said. “Too depressing.”

“Yeah, but if I hear that song ‘Happy’ one more time, I’m going to scream. It’s like the song that will never die.”

“Don’t forget, Rigby is making a song list, too.” I glanced sideways at Molly and we both started laughing. Rigby had turned out to have eclectic taste in music.

“I love that kid,” said Molly, “but what was that drum-circle thing he was playing the other day?”

“I liked it,” I said, still laughing. “It felt very, I don’t know . . . primitive.”

“If you’re into that sort of thing,” said Molly. “Personally, I’ve never been a fan of the didgeridoo.”

We played songs back and forth until Lennie’s Jeep drove up to the corner. He beeped his horn and waved for us to come over.

“I’ll go see what he wants,” I said.

I jogged to the road and leaned on the open passenger-side window. “What’s up?”

“I’m making a trip to the junkyard,” he said. “Wanna come? Now’s your big chance.” He waggled his eyebrows like it was the most tempting invitation imaginable.

Lennie had promised, or rather dared me to go with him engine-surfing (his term) at the junkyard. Once a week or so, he scoured the new arrivals for parts. I made the mistake of saying
it sounded like fun, and he went on and on about the thrill of the hunt. When I busted up laughing and told him I was kidding, he said I definitely had to go. He would prove how much fun it was.

“Sounds like a blast, Len,” I said. “Really. But I promised Molly we’d get a song list ready for the party. You’re coming, aren’t you?”

“You mean to the party in my own backyard?” he said. “Yeah, I’ll probably be there.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

Lennie gave me a thumbs-up and threw Molly a salute.

I skipped back to the curb in front of her house and sat down.

“Call me crazy,” she said, “but I’d say Hypothetical Guy is plenty aware that you exist.”

“Huh?”

“Lennie. He’s Hypothetical Guy, right?”

“What? No! Why would you think that?”

“Oh.” Molly looked away with a pursed-lip smile. “No reason.”

“He’s not,” I said. “Absolutely, totally not.”