Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  I know why she is opening up to me. It’s the same reason kids come into my office and confess that, after every meal, they make themselves throw up; or cut themselves in the privacy of the shower with a straight-edge razor blade. Sometimes it’s easier to speak to a stranger. The problem is that, once you turn your heart inside out for someone to see, the other person loses her anonymity.

  Once, when Zoe was working with the autistic student, I’d observed their session. You have to come into music therapy at the place where the patient is, she explained, and when he arrived she didn’t make eye contact with him or force an interaction. Instead she took out her guitar and started playing and singing to herself. The boy sat down at the piano and began racing his hands over the keys in angry arpeggios. Gradually, every time he paused, she would play an equally forceful chord on her guitar. At first, he didn’t connect what she was doing, and then he began to pause more frequently, waiting for her to musically interact. I realized they were having a conversation: first his sentence, then hers. They just were speaking a different language.

  Maybe that was all Zoe Baxter needed—a new method of communication. So she’d stop sinking to the bottoms of pools. So she’d smile.

  Full disclosure here: I am the person who buys the broken piece of furniture, sure I can repair it. I used to have a rescued greyhound. I am a pathological fixer, which accounts for my career as a school counselor, since God knows it’s not about the money or job satisfaction. So it’s not really a surprise to me that my immediate instinct, with Zoe Baxter, is to put her back together again.

  “Death coordinator,” I say, shaking my head. “And I thought my job sucked.”

  Zoe glances up, and then a snort bubbles out of her. She covers her mouth with her hand.

  “It’s okay to laugh,” I say gently.

  “I feel like it’s not. Like it means none of this mattered to me.” She shakes her head, and suddenly her eyes are full of tears. “I’m sorry. You didn’t come to the Y this morning to listen to this. Some date I am.”

  Immediately, I freeze. What does she know? What has she heard?

  Why does it matter?

  You’d think that by now, at age thirty-four, I’d be less worried about what people think. I suppose it’s just that when you’ve been burned before, you’re less likely to dip a toe into the lake of fire.

  “It’s a good thing we ran into each other,” I hear myself say. “I was thinking of calling you.”

  Really? I think, wondering where I’m going with this.

  “Really?” Zoe replies.

  “There’s a kid who’s been suffering from depression,” I say. “She’s been in and out of hospitals, and she’s failing school. I was going to ask you to come in and work with her.” In truth, I haven’t really been thinking of Zoe and her music therapy, at least not in conjunction with Lucy DuBois. But now that I’ve said it, it makes sense. Nothing else has worked for the girl, who’s attempted suicide twice. Her parents—so conservative that they wouldn’t let Lucy talk to a shrink—would just need to be convinced that music therapy isn’t modern voodoo.

  Zoe hesitates, but I can tell she’s considering the offer. “Vanessa, I already told you that I don’t need to be rescued.”

  “I’m not saving you,” I say. “I’m asking you to save someone else.”

  At the time, I think I mean Lucy. I don’t realize I’m talking about me.

  When I was growing up in the southern suburbs of Boston, I used to ride my banana bike with glitter streamers up and down the streets of my neighborhood, silently marking the homes of the girls I thought were pretty. At age six, I fully believed that Katie Whittaker, with her sunshine hair and constellation of freckles, would one day marry me and we’d live happily ever after.

  I can’t really remember when I realized that wasn’t what all the other girls were thinking, and so I started saying along with the rest of the female second graders that I had a crush on Jared Tischbaum, who was cool enough to play on the travel soccer team and who wore the same jean jacket to school every single day because, once, the actor Robin Williams had touched it in an airport baggage terminal.

  I lost my virginity one night in the guest team’s baseball dugout on school grounds with my first boyfriend, Ike. He was sweet and tender and told me I was beautiful—in other words, he did everything right—and yet I remember going home afterward and wondering what all the fuss was about when it came to sex. It had been sweaty and mechanical, and, even though I really did love Ike, something had been missing.

  My best friend, Molly, was the person I confided this to. I’d find myself on the phone with her after midnight, dissecting the sinew and skeleton of my relationship with Ike. I’d study with her for a history test and not want to leave. I would make plans to go shopping with her at the mall on Saturday and would breathlessly count down the school days until the weekend came. We’d criticize the shallow girls who started dating guys and no longer had time for their female friends. We vowed to be inseparable.

  In October 1998, during my junior year of college, Matthew Shepard—a young, gay University of Wyoming student—was severely beaten and left for dead. I didn’t know Matthew Shepard. I wasn’t a political activist. But my boyfriend at the time and I got on a Greyhound bus and traveled to Laramie to participate in the candlelight vigil at the university. It was when I was surrounded by all those points of light that I could confess what I had been terrified to admit to myself: it could have been me. That I was, and always had been, gay.

  And here’s the amazing thing: even after I said it out loud, the world did not stop turning.

  I was still a college student majoring in education, with a 3.8 average. I still weighed 121 pounds and preferred chocolate to vanilla and sang with an a cappella group called Son of a Pitch. I swam at the school pool at least twice a week, and I was still much more likely to be found watching Cheers than getting wasted at a frat party. Admitting I was gay changed nothing about who I had been, or who I was going to be.

  Part of me worried that I didn’t fit into either camp. I’d never been with a woman, and was afraid that it would be as uneventful for me as fooling around with a guy. What if I wasn’t really gay—just totally, functionally asexual? Plus, there was an added wrinkle to this new social world that I hadn’t considered: the default assumption, when you meet a woman, is that she’s heterosexual (unless you happen to be at an Indigo Girls concert . . . or a WNBA basketball game). It wasn’t like certain girls sported an L on the forehead, and my gaydar had not yet been finely tuned.

  In the end, though, I shouldn’t have worried. The girl who was my lab partner in biochemistry invited me to her dorm room for a study session, and pretty soon we were spending all of our free time together. When I wasn’t with her, I wanted to be. When a professor said something ridiculous or sexist or hilarious, she was the first one I wanted to tell. One Saturday at a football game we shivered in the stands underneath a wool tartan blanket, passing a thermos of hot cocoa laced with Baileys back and forth. The score was close, and during one really important fourth down, she grabbed on to my hand, and even after the touchdown, she didn’t let go. The first time she kissed me, I truly thought I’d had an aneurysm—my pulse was thundering so loud and my senses were exploding. This, I remember thinking, the only word I could hold on to in a sea of feelings.

  After that, I could look back with twenty-twenty vision and see that I never had boundaries with my female friends. I wanted to see their baby pictures and listen to their favorite songs and fix my hair the same way they fixed theirs. I would hang up the phone and think of one more thing I had to say. I wouldn’t have defined it as a physical attraction—it was more of an emotional attachment. I could never quite get enough, but I never let myself ask what “enough” really was.

  Believe me, being gay is not a choice. No one would choose to make life harder than it has to be, and no matter how confident and comfortable a gay person is, he or she can’t control the thoughts of others. I’v