The Song Reader (24 page)

T
hat Ben was still in love with my sister was obvious, and not just because he was spending all his time—and going deeply in debt on his Visa—flying to St. Louis to see her every weekend. That could have been brotherly love, even a desire to help a friend in need. But if she was just a friend, he wouldn’t have checked his face in the rearview mirror and stuck a breath mint in his mouth before he got out of the car. He wouldn’t have closed his eyes when she kissed him, no matter how playful the kiss. He wouldn’t have offered her his arm pretty much constantly, as if he was dying to touch her even for a minute.

Even though it had been two years now since she dumped him, he was still in love with her. We were sitting in a bar near Washington University, the last weekend in April, when I decided to ask him why.

It was my fourth visit to St. Louis, and the first time in my life I’d ever been in a bar. We were in a small booth across from the pool table. A Van Halen song was playing on the jukebox. We’d just come from the hospital, and Ben was leaning his head in his hands. He still had the long drive to Tainer ahead to take me home, and then back to his parents for the night, before he flew to Philadelphia tomorrow.

I liked the darkness of the place. It made it easier to say what was on my mind.

My faith in romance was at an all-time low. It had been bad enough hearing the relationship woes of Mary Beth’s customers, but knowing about my own mother’s affair, knowing the terrible thing she did to my dad, it was enough to make me lose hope. And Mike and I weren’t doing so well, either. Since our weekend in St. Louis, he was always busy. He swore he wasn’t mad about what happened—or didn’t happen—that night. He said he understood. Nothing had changed, he insisted; he was just really, really busy. Too busy to come over or go out.

Tonight was the prom, and instead of being home getting my hair and nails done with all the other lucky girls, I was sitting here. It was my own fault. Mike was still willing to go, but I’d told him to forget it. I told him he was right, it was nothing but a waste of time.

Ben was on his second beer, and I was devouring a ham and cheese sandwich. I could never eat before I went to the hospital; my stomach was too jumpy. He didn’t seem to mind that I asked why he loved Mary Beth, but he hadn’t answered yet, either.

“You’re what,” he finally said, “sixteen now?”

He was guessing but he was right; I’d just turned sixteen on Monday. Juanita had covered the cake with candles and joked that I was sixteen going on a hundred. It felt true. The strain of trying to understand my sister was taking its toll. Of course I never said no when Mary Beth asked to see me, even though she was damn near impossible to talk to. Everything was funny to her now: the weather and the shows on TV and what she had for lunch and you name it. Even when I told her I’d seen the forest she painted at the old house, she laughed and said, “Oh yeah, I’m a real Pea-Ca-So. Move over Mike Angelo, here comes Mary Beth Norris. Cathedral smathedral, the basement is what’s really tough. You have to paint behind both the washer and the dryer, and don’t get in the way of any boxes!”

Every time I left the hospital, my mouth was sore from forcing smiles.

Ben took a big gulp of his beer. I looked at him. “I hope you’re not about to say I’ll get it when I’m older.”

He smiled weakly. “I was considering that.”

“You don’t have to tell me. It’s none of my business anyway.”

“I’m not trying to be evasive. It’s very complicated.”

Two women walked by, giggling and talking, and took a long look at him. He was facing their direction, but for all the notice he took, they might have been ugly old men.

“She’s beautiful, is that it?” It was another mystery: how she became prettier every time we saw her. That day she’d been wearing her own clothes, blue jeans and a violet shirt, Keds sneakers, hair pulled back in a ponytail. Nothing special, but even I had trouble looking away from her. Ben didn’t try.

“She is beautiful.” His voice was wistful, but after a minute he shook his head. “But no. That’s not why I love her.” He wiped his hand across his eyes. “Christ, I should have a ready answer. I’ve been asked this question constantly in the last few months. My mother, my father, Rebecca, most of my friends.”

His beer was empty and he nodded when the waitress asked if he wanted another one. I was worried about him driving but I figured he needed the break.

After a while he tilted his head to the left side. “Did your sister ever tell you about Aaron?”

I was about to say no, but then I remembered. Aaron was the guy who died in the biking accident with Ben. The reason Ben was depressed when Rebecca brought him to my sister. I told him yes, and then listened while he went on and on about how brilliant Aaron was. The finest mind in the biochem department. The potential to be one of the finest scientists in the world. Something about nonredundant protein sequences, neurotransmitters, biogenic amine something or other…a bunch of stuff I couldn’t have followed even if I’d tried, which I didn’t. I was too tired.

“And he was your friend?” I finally said, hoping to move us back to the topic.

“Yes. We worked together, but he was also my friend.” Ben’s voice was quieter. “The best friend I’d ever had.”

He paused for a while. I looked at my hands and wished I could have a beer, too.

“All right. Did Mary Beth ever tell you what she and I did on our first date?”

“No.”

“When Rebecca first told me about song reading, I didn’t think much of it. I was being a snob. I thought it was like astrology or tarot cards or any other bullshit. When I told your sister I wouldn’t be coming back, this was in her office that first morning, she said fine. But then she said she’d never gone out with a graduate student. She was looking straight at me. Her eyes were a challenge. And then she elaborated; I believe her exact words were: ‘I’ve never slept with a graduate student. Is it any different?’”

I was pretty shocked but I grabbed a potato chip and chewed, casually, maturely.

“What could I do?” Ben laughed a short laugh. “I was depressed but I wasn’t dead. Of course I asked if she wanted to go to dinner.

“I don’t remember how she got me talking about Aaron that night. I hadn’t talked to anyone about it since I left school, and there I was, sitting with this gorgeous hick at some greasy spoon in the middle of the country, spilling my guts. After our dinner, we drove to the river. She was very friendly. I thought this was a prelude to—”

“I get it.” I was still bristling at the word “hick.”

“Right.” He sat up straighter. “Leeann. Sorry, honey.” He took a deep breath. “I’d already told her at dinner that I felt responsible for Aaron’s death. Everyone always reassured me that I wasn’t responsible, it was an accident, it was fate, it was bad luck—until your sister. She waited until we were at the river and then she said perhaps I was responsible. I thought she meant in some mystical boogeyman sense, like the tree being responsible for the squirrel climbing it, but she said no. Maybe I could have prevented my best friend’s death.”

“Jesus,” I muttered.

“Of course I was surprised, but I wasn’t angry. I’d believed this myself for so long. The truth is, it was something of a relief hearing another person say it. In the conversation that followed, Mary Beth insisted she didn’t want to talk about my feelings, just the facts. Place, time of day, weather, condition of the road, and our bicycles. Was I in front or behind Aaron? Approximately how fast were we going when Aaron was hit by the motorcycle?”

Ben paused and wrapped his hand around his empty beer mug. “While I was relating all this, I found myself telling her what I’d never told anyone: that I saw the motorcycle weaving. I was behind Aaron, and I remember thinking the driver had to be drunk. We were going up a hill and I was winded. ‘Stupid,’ I said, under my breath. ‘Stupid asshole.’”

The waitress picked up my empty plate. The bar was getting more crowded now. Several minutes passed when Ben didn’t say anything. Finally I asked what happened next.

“The motorcycle slammed into Aaron. He flew off the bike and crashed into the pavement, head first. The paramedics said his neck snapped. I don’t know about that. What I remember is the blood. I knew I wasn’t supposed to be surprised by it—I knew the brain has fully twenty-five percent of all the blood in the human body—but I was surprised.” Ben’s voice was flat. “There was blood all over his face and neck, pooling in the gutter, dripping down the arms of my jacket when I tried to stop it. It was the first time in my life when I would have given anything for it all to be wrong: fluid dynamics, gravity, the irreversibility of time. All of it.”

I shuddered, but I waited as long as I could stand to before reminding him, “I meant what happened with Mary Beth.”

“Oh,” he said. “Right. She told me she wanted to go farther down the river, and I drove until she told me to stop. That part of the road was an
S
, similar to the road Aaron and I had been biking on. Same forty-five-degree angle to the hill. We got out and walked for a while before she told me to fall back. Get behind her about as far as I was with Aaron. I went along; I didn’t have the energy to argue. She was screaming at me, but it was impossible to hear what she was saying. Whenever a car went by, I couldn’t hear her at all.”

I thought I had it. “She wanted you to know that Aaron couldn’t have heard you if you’d warned him about the motorcycle?”

“Yes. She was trying to prove to me that even if I’d yelled, it wouldn’t have made any difference. There was nothing I could have done. But that was only part of it.” He exhaled. “We were standing on the side of the road. It was pitch-black when she grabbed my arm, this woman I barely knew, and made me admit that the facts mattered. The truth mattered. Even if her little experiment wasn’t valid, it was only because she didn’t know how to design an experiment. But you do, she told me. ‘You’re a scientist,’ she said. ‘The real thing. And you’re too smart to act like all the things you know have nothing to do with your own life.’”

“And then you felt better?”

“On the contrary. Then I felt much, much worse, but your sister was right. I was hiding in a blame that was completely irrational to keep from accepting that Aaron was dead.”

After a minute, Ben said he also realized that night he’d been wrong about song reading.

“Had Mary Beth done your chart?”

“Perhaps, but it didn’t matter. I thought she was the most intuitive person I’d ever met, and if she believed people expressed emotions in the songs they remembered, so did I.”

It was true: Mary Beth had an astonishing ability to know how people felt. I still thought it was a gift, but Dr. Kaplan talked like it was part of the reason my sister was sick. “She needs to know that she doesn’t have to continue this song reading,” Dr. Kaplan told me. “That who she is, is sufficient. She doesn’t have to take care of everyone to be loved.”

“But she also needs to know that what she did was good,” I said to Dr. Kaplan. “It was good to help all those people.” Then I rattled off a quote Mike gave me about rainbows being miracles, not just the aftermath of storms. I thought it proved my point perfectly. “The storm would be like our family’s problems, and the song reading is the rainbow.” I crossed my arms confidently and looked at her. “Get it?”

Dr. Kaplan said it was interesting but she wasn’t completely persuaded. We argued like this almost every time I saw her now. I liked her more and more.

Ben said we should probably get going. I nodded, but before I stood up I told him I was sorry about his friend.

“Thanks,” he said. “And thanks for listening to me.” He tilted his head to the left again, like he always did when he was feeling serious and thoughtful, a habit Mary Beth once joked would make him a hunchback by the time he was forty. I shook myself to keep from remembering the way she laughed then. A normal laugh.

“I find it very difficult to convey what your sister has meant to me. Rebecca keeps insisting I have to find someone else, ignoring how hard I’ve tried. My father thinks I feel responsible for Mary Beth, and if he found her a place at St. Christopher’s, it would free me to move on with my life. It might have, if I wanted to be free.” He smiled but his eyes were sadder than they’d been all day. “Of course they don’t know her like we do, do they?”

“No,” I said, letting him take my hand as we walked out of the bar and across the street, where Rebecca’s car was parked. It was already dark, but I heard the catch in his voice when he thanked me again, adding the “honey” that I didn’t mind anymore. None of this was his fault, of that I was sure. He and Juanita and Dr. Kaplan were like innocent bystanders to the crime that was my family.

When I got home, it was after ten; Tommy and Juanita were already in bed. Tommy had had the flu for days. Dad said his fever finally broke around suppertime. Juanita was exhausted.

“Were there any calls?” I asked Dad.

“That girlfriend of yours. Darlene.”

I wanted to ask if that was all, but I knew Dad was terrified of forgetting a message and I didn’t want him worrying he had. Especially since he probably hadn’t. I was hoping Mike would call, but I didn’t expect him to.

Dad was sitting in the recliner. The TV was on, but the volume was so low I knew he wasn’t watching.

“How was Mary Beth?”

“Pretty much the same.” I fell back on the couch and yawned. “Her doctor said she probably won’t be out for a while.”