Bone Music (11 page)

The Present

The night after Lisa came alive for the third time, her mother told her it was time she got herself back to school.

Lisa never liked school, and she never liked kids, either. She didn’t want to go.

“Oh Mama,” Lisa said, “I can’t go to school! They don’t have schools for babies.”

Lisa’s mother frowned.

“Child,” she said, all frustrated and flustered. She didn’t like it when Lisa talked back, but she abided it. She liked it even less when Lisa was right.

“I’ll go to school when I get big again,” Lisa said. She looked up at her mother with her wide and tiny baby eyes and pouted like she had to cry. “I promise I’ll go then, Mama.”

Her mother crossed her arms and gave Lisa the eye. “You’re mistaken, young lady,” she said, “and you’ve got a lot to learn.”

“I’m not! I don’t!”

“Say that if you like,” her mother said. “But you’re going to school. I’ve made arrangements with a day-care center. You start tomorrow.”

And Lisa got so mad.

So mad!

“Mama! You can’t send me to nursery school! I won’t go.”

“You will,” her mother said. She sounded like she didn’t want to hear another word about it.

“No,” Lisa said, “I won’t.”

And suddenly her mother’s eyes went wide with indignation, and she swore under her breath. “That’s enough from you, young lady. To your room! I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

Lisa did as her mother said, but she didn’t like it, not one bit. She stumbled toward her room on her tiny baby legs that still felt so uncertain under her.

When she got there she closed the door behind her, climbed up on the bed that still stunk like Lisa dead and rotting even though her mother had spent all day laundering the bedclothes. The whole room stank, and it probably always would, no matter how her mother scrubbed the floors and washed the walls, no matter what she took down to the laundry and wrung through the machine.

“I hate you, Mama,” Lisa whispered. That was how mad she was, hateful mad, like she wanted to hurt everything she could wrap her tiny hands around.

But the moment she heard herself say those words, I hate you, Mama, she wanted to cry. Because they were so ugly, so untrue. She loved her mama. She’d always love her mama!

But she still felt hateful mad.

She didn’t know why she felt that way, but she felt it so intense, sharp as vinegar when you drink it from a cup, but commanding like she had no choice. She felt a lot of things she didn’t understand and didn’t even mean — she’d felt a lot of things like that ever since she died.

Sometimes Lisa thought she got those things from the music. All her life she’d heard the music of the world inside her head, but since she’d died the song had been a thing consuming her. Enfolding her, leading her — and saving her, too, because there were times when the music was the only thing that kept her from doing something awful.

Awful.

Really awful.

Sometimes Lisa got a want to do something so terrible she couldn’t stand herself.

When her head was clear she didn’t want to do those things. But other times the desire was on her like a demon she could not deny.

And sometimes she thought: Of course I feel those ways! I’m a zombie girl, and zombies are dead things that do the worst things in the world.

Lisa never meant to be a zombie. She never meant to die, she never meant to live and die and die again; she never meant to become a thing that looked like a baby with a devil in her heart. But she became all those things, or they happened to her, or however you want to think about it.

Lying in her stinking bed still and quiet as a dead baby staring at the ceiling, Lisa swore she’d never be angry or cruel ever again. But it was a false promise, and Lisa knew that even as she swore it to herself: I’m a monster, she thought. She couldn’t change what she was any more than a tenement could be a mansion.

After a while she began to cry, and swore she wasn’t any monster, wasn’t wasn’t wasn’t, she was just a little girl with hopes and fears and dreams, aspirations and afflictions, and the terrors that suffused her weren’t anything she meant to become.

But she became them all the same, and Lisa wasn’t wrong when she called herself a monster.

Someone screeched outside her window, and then the screech turned into laughter. It was those girls again, those teenage girls who thought it was so funny to scream to see who noticed. Lisa never understood why they did that, but she’d known girls like that all her life — it was a common thing for teenage girls in Harlem, screaming for the joy of it to see who’d look out at them. It never bothered her when she was alive, but when she’d died something had changed inside her ears, and the sound of the girls screaming was a thing that made the bones rattle in her head. Lisa hated that so bad.

She rolled out of bed, stumbled to her window. Climbed up onto her toy box she kept in front of the window and pushed the window open. Leaned out into the child-guard to get a look at the girls.

“You be quiet out there,” Lisa shouted, and she saw one of the girls look up at her agog. “It isn’t nice to scream without a reason.”

The goggy-eyed girl turned to her companion, who was staring up at Lisa now, too. “What is she?” the girl asked. “Babies never talk.”

The girl laughed fearfully. “Some kind of freak,” she said, and the girls stared at one another for the longest time, wide-eyed and terrified and fascinated until one of them suddenly went running away down the block, leaving her companion alone with Lisa who stared at her angrily and for just that moment the girl stared back —

— and then she screamed.

And took off running after her companion, running like her life depended on it even though her scream metamorphosed to laughter before she was gone halfway down the block.

There was a noise behind Lisa, and she turned in time to see her mother push open the bedroom door.

“What’s going on in here?” Mama asked.

Lisa lied.

“Nothing, Mama.”

But her mother saw the open window; she could figure out what happened.

“I bet nothing happened,” she said. “Child, someone’s going to have to teach you how to tell a lie. But it won’t be me.”

Lisa tried to go to sleep when her mother closed the door, but it wasn’t any use. She was too angry. Too mad! She wanted to find those girls and wring their necks, she really did.

After a while she sat up and looked out the window. And heard the sound of screaming somewhere in the distance.

I’m going to hurt those girls, I am, I swear I am, Lisa thought. She pushed herself off the bed, stumbled toward the window on her baby legs too small to walk too stumpy to balance too new to understand. When she got to the window she climbed up on the toy box and peered sidelong down the street trying to see as far as she could around the edge of her window. She kept thinking that if she could just see a little farther she’d find the screaming girls.

But they were nowhere in sight.

They’re in the park, I bet, Lisa thought. The north edge of Central Park was three blocks south of them; when Lisa looked as hard as she could she could just barely see the high edges of the tallest trees. I bet I know exactly where they are.

If Lisa would’ve given it a little thought there’s no way she would have started after them. The whole idea was crazy — little baby Lisa wandering off into Harlem without the protection of an adult!

But she didn’t think. She just got up onto the toy box, pushed her window the rest of the way open.

Climbed out onto the fire escape and into the world.

I’m going to make those girls so sorry, Lisa thought. She really really was.

Down the fire escape, onto the sidewalk. It was late, now, and Lisa’s part of Harlem was all but deserted; there was no one on the street as far as Lisa could see in either direction.

They went to the park, Lisa thought. I know they did.

She hurried awkwardly toward the park, stumpling on her bowed and wobbly baby legs. It wasn’t a good walk. Twice she saw eyes watching her from the shadows of abandoned buildings, and once she heard a feral dog growl at her from a direction she wasn’t sure of.

She didn’t let herself be scared.

Maybe she should have. If she’d been afraid she would have been more ready for what she found when she reached the park.

Across the wide night-empty street that ran along the north side of Central Park; through the thicket that was supposed to wall off the north edge of the park. Into the trees that seemed in the darkness deep as primordial forest; and the world closed around her like the darkness at the end of life.

The screaming girl screamed from someplace close but impossible to see. The sound of her scream frightened Lisa — terrified her.

I shouldn’t be here, Lisa thought. I should be home in bed where my mama left me. She felt so stupid, just like she really was a baby all over again, and she hated that so much. . . !

The brush grew thick around her again, and now suddenly it cleared away to show a crowd of two dozen teenagers dancing around a bonfire.

They shouldn’t start no fires in the park, Lisa thought. It’s against the law!

And that was stupid, too, because everybody knows teenagers don’t care nothing about the law.

They don’t care much about baby girls, either, and Lisa should have thought about that, too. But she didn’t. Where she should have turned away and run for her dear life, she crept toward the fire, moving as quiet and as careful as she could. When she got close she realized she could hear someone singing, playing the guitar, and she looked around to see a boy with pitch-dark skin playing music —

Real music. Music like she heard sometimes deep inside her heart when she dreamed about the lady with the sword.

He’s beautiful, Lisa thought, but she wasn’t sure if the beautiful part was his music or his self. She thought, I want to hold him, but she didn’t know why. The idea of touching him made her uncomfortable.

The screaming girls stood before the bonfire at the center of the dance. How could they dance so close to the flames? Lisa was certain that the darker girl’s hair was going to catch fire, go up in a fury of flame that would burn her till she died. But no matter how Lisa expected it, the girl never caught fire. None of them did. It was like they couldn’t burn, but that couldn’t be, could it? Everything can burn, people not excepted.

Now the singer’s tempo began to pick up, and he slapped the face of his guitar rhythmically to mark the lines of his song.

Lisa found herself caught up in the song, wanting to dance, but she knew that wasn’t wise. They’ll see me if I dance, she thought. They’ll see me if they don’t already know I’m here. And sudden as she had thought she was certain the guitar man knew just where she was. He knew everything about her, Lisa thought, and in his way he loved her even if he meant to see her dead.

They won’t kill me, Lisa thought. I’m not afraid.

That was a lie; the truth was she was terrified.

But it was too late to be afraid. The music had found its way inside her, and she no longer had a choice: she had to follow the song where it led her, and follow until the music set her free.

She inched toward the fire, still hoping to keep herself out of sight until the bluesman finished his song and she could run. And inched closer and closer until she stood among the dancers, crawling among their legs as the music reached deeper into her, until finally she stood up on her wobbly legs and began to dance wildly, manically, dance on her tiny awkward legs that rolled out from under her and sent her falling toward the fire —

Into the fire and crashing down among the embers. She struggled to get free of the flames as her pajamas smoked and sputtered, searing hot melting sputtering rayon into her skin, but her arms and legs betrayed her — when she tried to stand, to run, to push herself out of the embers all she managed to do was flail among them until she covered herself with char and ember and fiery debris, and Lisa screamed —

As the screaming girls saw her flail below them, and forgot their dance to shriek in horror and surprise, and one of them shouted, It’s her, it’s her, it’s the freak from the window, I told you didn’t I, I told you what she’d do!

And the music stopped and people ran in all directions as Lisa struggled uselessly to push herself out of the fire. She was going to burn to death, why didn’t they help her, why didn’t they help, did they want her to burn alive? But they didn’t help, no help, no help at all and Lisa screamed in fury and frustration as she rolled twice over the hottest part of the fire, crashed over the stones that ringed the fire’s edge and came to rest on the far side of the flames.

I’m burned I’m burned I’m going to die, she thought, rolling in the grass among the terrified teenagers. Her clothes were still afire, and her hair smelled like a rat fried on the third rail in the subway, and she could feel the embers clinging to her skin, clinging and burning and she knew her skin was seared and scorched and ready to peel away from her flesh and bones —

As she came to an abrupt stop.

At the feet of the bluesman still playing his guitar.

And suddenly everything went quiet, and the world was just Lisa and the bluesman and the music — the music and magic and fire shimmering the air around them.

Lisa sat up, and saw that though her clothes were all but burned away the flames had hardly touched her skin. Even where the embers still clung to her they didn’t seem to burn her. She could feel the heat, she could feel the fire burn and blister her, but no matter what she felt she couldn’t see it happen.

“I don’t understand,” Lisa said, and the bluesman smiled at her.

He didn’t answer by talking, the way Lisa would have expected. Instead he sang to her: “You don’t have to understand,” he sang. “If you knew you would forget.”

“I wouldn’t,” Lisa said. “I was dead, and I remember all of it — I remember the Lady, and the hallway, and the door that led back into the world. How could anyone forget those things?”

“At the end there are two doors,” he sang. “Nobody knows them both.”