The Lottery (22 page)

But the odd creaking noises had already stopped. Now Tauni was sitting silently, her eyes closed, moving her mouth tentatively, as if making sure everything was in place. Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes and turned in Sal’s general direction.

“Damn vocal apparatus,” she said, her voice wobbling. “No coordination. I hit overload and can’t get the words out. Can’t speak, and then I can again.” Shrugging, she gave another loud laugh. “Doesn’t help that speech is a foreign language. Actually, sound is the second language and speech is the third.”

“What’s your first language?” asked Sal.

“I can’t explain,” said Tauni, a delicate sadness crossing her face. “Not in words.”

Autistic. Sal had always associated the term with zombies, spaced-out people. Perhaps it fit the girl she’d talked with in the library study carrel, but the person sitting next to her now was verging on genius. Why was Tauni Morrison so different from one moment to the next?

“But you go to school,” Sal said. “You read books, you won an award last year. And you’re talking to me.”

Tauni nodded furiously. “Of course I read books. I’ve read so much about autism, I know more than most pro
fessionals.” Wrapping her arms about herself, she started a gentle rocking motion. “Autistic means you’ve got perceptual and motor difficulties. Your brain is physically different. I’m high-functioning. Most of the time I look normal, so people expect me to be normal. Then when I’m not, they get angry. Things like fluorescent lighting are a major problem — all that buzzing and flickering. I hit overload, the world explodes in my face, and people blame it on my attitude. My parents are the worst.” She laughed again, loud and long. “They tell me I should play sports and go to school dances. Dances are chaos and loud. They expect you to touch and be social.” A pained grimace took over her face. “And how am I supposed to play sports when I can’t find my feet? Sometimes, when I’m really fried, I can’t climb stairs. Stairs are evil.”

“Oh.” A vague disappointment settled over Sal. She hadn’t realized there would be a label to explain the girl with the black lips — she’d been looking for mystery, not psychology. “I just noticed,” she said slowly, “that you seem to hear things other people don’t. Like music that comes out of nowhere. Singing.”

Tauni’s rocking slowed until she sat motionless, staring across the park.

“I’ve been trying,” said Sal, then stopped. How did she explain what had no words, how did she describe her search for the blue voice? But whom better to discuss this with than the girl who experienced speech as a third language, the girl who couldn’t find the mouth in her face?

“I’m trying,” she began again, “to find a voice, a voice that sings only inside my head. The voice is blue. I heard you singing once, and I was wondering if you could help me find it. Will you listen if I try playing my clarinet?”

There was a pause, the wind twisting a long moan through the grass, and then Tauni nodded. Carefully, as if lifting secrets out of the air, Sal took her clarinet case from her knapsack and assembled the instrument. The reed bled its familiar bitter taste onto her tongue — it was new and would probably squeak. Nervously, she screwed the ligature into place.

“I don’t really know what I’m doing,” she said, flicking a glance toward the girl at the other end of the table. “I’m looking for something that got lost a long time ago.”

The wind writhed through her jacket, leaves whipped across the park, and Tauni continued to sit motionless, staring at nothing. Who knew what she was thinking, if she was listening or had gone off somewhere unreachable in her head? Sal knew about those unreachable places, how they could take you in and feel like home.

Then a tremble crossed Tauni’s face and she sighed, her eyes slanting sideways at Sal. “I know about lost things,” she said softly.

Something caught in Sal and held, a note waiting to be sung. Hesitantly, she fit the clarinet between her lips and blew into it. As she’d expected, the sound was breathy. The reed squeaked and an ache filled her, so immediate she almost cried out. Who was she trying to kid? The blue voice would never come to her again, it had moved on long ago, in search of better hearts.

“Ah, forget it,” she muttered, groping for the clarinet case.

Tauni shifted, turning slightly toward her. “Don’t stop. Try to find it,” she said, her voice creaking with effort.

Sal paused, the clarinet case open before her like a wound. What if she tried and it didn’t work? Could she
bear another whiplash of loneliness? On the other hand, what was one more? She’d survived all the others, and the girl watching her from the other end of the table had certainly kept trying when her voice had stalled, squeaked and acked. Slowly, Sal raised the clarinet to her mouth. The sound she was seeking needed more faith, she thought, more gut, more of her. But how did she let go of the fundamental disbelief she had in her own worthiness? How did she lean into herself with hope, with trust?

Closing her eyes, Sal breathed and sent herself into the beginning of sound. At first she didn’t know where to go — an ocean of possibility was opening on all sides and she was a mere ripple arcing through it, a tiny swimmer questing an endless watery blue. Where was the path she was supposed to follow, what was the right note to play? Then it came to her like a quiver of light riding the deep. There was no right path, only possibility. And that possibility was waiting for her, it wanted and needed her to make itself real.

A gladness leapt through Sal, a sighing ache, and then sound began to unfold like a dream coming awake. Slow notes flowed from the clarinet, a kind of conversation, a speaking that came from a deep wounded part of herself. This part had no words, only sound and the song that came out of that sound. Swimming deeper and deeper into the song of herself, Sal rose and fell on an ocean of notes until she forgot she was holding a clarinet, forgot she was anything but a long singing wave of blue. Sound lifted directly from her body — it was blue, it was honey and blush pink, it was a vivid scintillating flash of orange. Then it was black as Tauni Morrison found the mouth in her face and began to sing, voice pulsing from her in wave after wave of endless, wordless, merciful blue.

How long they sat together, floating on the blue voice, Sal didn’t know. Suddenly the air changed, the song vanished, and she found herself back on the picnic table, the clarinet hesitant and squeaky in her hands. Ack, Sal thought. Ack. Her lower lip throbbed and she tasted blood. When she slid the clarinet from her mouth, she discovered the reed was stained a blotchy red. Looking up, she noticed the spot where Tauni had been sitting was empty, the girl with the black lips now halfway across the park.

“Hey,” she called, “what’s the matter? Where are you going?” But the girl headed on into the cold complaining wind. Bewildered, Sal stared at the clarinet in her hands. Dizzying snatches of the music she’d been playing shifted through her head. Why did beauty come and go like that? And why did she need someone else — Tauni or Willis — to touch that kind of sound, when all she wanted was to keep it deep within herself where it would never leave her, never go away?

But maybe this was what the blue voice was telling her — it wasn’t a keepsake, it was a relationship that played itself out between people. Did she really want to spend the rest of her life holed up alone in her room, drooling onto her pillow, holding her most meaningful conversations with herself? What about the conversations she’d shared with Willis, and her talk yesterday afternoon with Dusty? Neither she nor her brother had released their deepest secrets — there was obviously something Dusty hadn’t told her about his experience with Shadow Council, and she hadn’t told him the mean things she’d been forced to do, the truth of Diane Kruisselbrink or Chris Busatto. Still, it had been a beginning, and when she’d woken this morning she’d felt as if a new place had opened inside, there was more space to move and breathe and know herself.

Thoughtfully, she pulled the cleaning swab through the clarinet’s gut and dismantled the instrument. The clarinet lay in its case, its parts separate and silent as the secrets she kept within herself. What if she brought them together, what if she let them sing for someone else? What kind of music would that be? Could anyone stand to listen?

Shoving the clarinet case into her knapsack, she rode the acid wheels of her stomach toward Saskatoon Collegiate.

The phones rang, a three-way echo in the quiet house. Sprawled on the livingroom floor, Sal listened for the click of the answering machine in the front hallway, but the chorus continued. She’d asked her mother to turn on the machine before leaving for her evening board meeting, but she must have forgotten. With a sigh, Sal listened as the phones went into their fourth and fifth rings. Why should she answer? No one had phoned her in a month. If she didn’t pick up and her mother missed an important call as a result, it was her own fault for forgetting to turn the answering machine on.

The phones stopped ringing and Sal drifted listlessly back to A Separate Peace, a novel she was reading for English. It was a good novel, as far as novels went. She wasn’t really into reading but she could sure identify with that moment in the tree, Linda Paboni poised for a dive into the river while Sal stood next to the trunk, jouncing the branch . . .

The phones were ringing again, the clamor of the hall phone overlaid by the electronic burble coming from the coffee table to her right. Sitting up, Sal glared at the living-room phone. The damn thing was a replica of the Canadian flag, the speaker a long-stemmed maple leaf. Each ring gave
out the first four notes of “O Canada.” Dusty had bought it in a fit of patriotism during a grade eleven history trip to Ottawa, and they’d been stuck speaking intimate and intricate things into a red plastic leaf ever since.

The phones went into their seventh ring and she reached, groaning, for the maple leaf. She would be polite, but that was all she owed her mother’s friends — no long, involved discussions about school, her social life, current boyfriends, etc., etc.

“Hello?”

A long pause came back at her. Great, someone with strep throat.

“Okay,” she bargained with the silence at the other end of the phone. “I’ll count to ten, and then you have to tell me the biggest darkest secret of your life or I’m hanging up. One, seven, five, two — ”

“Sal?” The voice was frayed with nerves, but familiar.

“Who is this?”

“It’s me. Brydan.”

Her mouth opened like the ripple after a stone is dropped, the circle of shock widening without end.

“You still there?”

She could hear him, heavy — breathing into the other end of the phone. “Sort of.”

“Yeah, me sort of too.”

They waited, another silence stretched taut between them.

“Okay,” Brydan said finally. “Here goes. I never knew I could be such an asshole. I always thought courage would come easy, like eating apple pie — y’know, feel-good stuff. Well, it’s more like swallowing Javex. I’ve never felt so nauseous in my life.”

“You’re saying it makes you feel nauseous to call me?”

“I get sick just thinking about what Shadow’s going to do to me.”

“I never asked you to drink Javex for me. Maybe you should just hang up.”

“Sal, no.” Brydan’s voice arced with desperation. “I’ve thought every day about making this call. D’you realize it’s been a month today? Every single day for a month I’ve been breaking into a cold sweat thinking about calling you. God, I know I’m an idiot, but I want to explain. I want you to know why.”

Sal sat, the plastic maple leaf pressed to her ear, drinking her own Javex. “Okay, so why?”

“I knew,” he said hoarsely. “That afternoon we cashed my lottery tickets, I knew you’d won.”

“Lost,” said Sal.

“Okay, lost. But I thought I could handle whatever pressure Shadow would dish out. I thought it’d be apple pie and glory, you and me coasting in my wheelchair through the rest of the year.”

“I can walk on my own two feet.” She wasn’t going to let him off easy, overwhelm him with gratitude. She hadn’t asked him to call and make her feel like cleaning fluid.

“Geez, just hand me another cup of Javex, would ya?”

“Yeah, well I’m feeling somewhat nauseous talking to you too.”

“They threatened me.” Brydan spoke quickly, spitting static into the phone. “Someone must’ve seen us at Shoppers Drug Mart and reported to Shadow. That evening they showed up at my house and took me for a long ride in a van.”

“So what happened?”

“They bought me a Slurpee, then drove around and talked about no-brain stuff — the Roughriders, TV. You know.”

“They didn’t mention me?”

“Only at the very end, when they dropped me off. That was when they told me to give you the three-fingered salute at band practice or my tires would be slashed every day for the rest of the year.”

She didn’t need details, the scene was playing clearly in her head. “Who was there?”

“Marvin Fissett, Linda Paboni, Larry Someone-Or-Other. Rolf de Regt. A couple other guys I don’t know.”

“Was Willis there?”

“Willis was driving.”

Another dropped stone, another circle of shock widening into forever. “Brydan,” she said quickly. “I never blamed you, not really. If this had happened to you instead of me, I probably would’ve done the same thing.”

“But I want things to be different!” he exploded. “I want to be friends like we — ”

“We can’t,” she said. “Nothing is like it was. They’ll murder you if you hang around with me, and then they’ll murder me.”

“But — ”

“But maybe,” she said carefully, “we could make up a secret code, y’know — for talking? Hand signals, gestures. That’s what they do.”

“Who does?”

“Shadow.”

“I don’t want to be like them, Sal,” Brydan said quietly. “Not anymore.”

Frightened admiration blew through her. “So what’s your suggestion?”

“Actually,” he said, stumbling over the words, “d’you want to meet for lunch tomorrow?”

Tomorrow was Friday. “I can’t,” she wailed. “I can’t explain, but that’s the only time I’m ever busy.”

“What about after school?”