Sing You Home Read online

  I've promised Vanessa I'll pick up her dry cleaning along with mine, so I make a quick run downtown before settling in to reread Lucy's school file. The woman who runs the cleaner is tiny, with a quickness to her movements that always makes me think of a hummingbird. "You're all alone today," she says, taking the tickets from me and running the wonderful maze of mechanized hangers. Last week, when Vanessa said they looked like something out of a Tim Burton movie, the owner took us behind the counter to see how they snaked around back, like a giant zipper running the perimeter of the ceiling.

  "Yeah. Flying solo this weekend," I reply.

  She hands me my trousers, and a bright bouquet of Vanessa's button-down shirts. I trade her this week's dry cleaning and tuck the pink slips into my purse. "Thanks," I say. "See you next week."

  "Tell your partner I said hello!"

  I freeze in the act of zipping my wallet. "She's not--I'm not--" I shake my head. "Mrs. Chin, Vanessa and I--We're just friends."

  It is, I suppose, an honest mistake. She has seen me with Vanessa for weeks now; it's actually wonderful to think the world has changed enough that a storekeeper might assume two people of the same sex are a couple.

  So why am I blushing?

  As I carry the dry cleaning back to my car, I think that, actually, this is funny. That when I tell Vanessa, she'll think so, too.

  The last teens I worked with were part of a diversion program meant to bring together warring adolescent gangs in the inner city. Previously, they'd been on the streets trying to kill each other. When I told them we'd be doing a drum circle together, they nearly charged for each other's throats, but their resource officers forced them to sit down on the perimeter of the pile of percussion instruments I'd assembled: a djembe and a tubano, a conga drum, an ashiko, and a djun-djun. One by one, I handed out the instruments, and, believe me, if you are an adolescent boy with a drum in your hands, you're going to beat it. We started with a simple hand rhythm: clap-clap-lap; clap-clap-lap. Then we moved to the drums. Eventually, we went around the circle so each kid could have a spotlighted solo with a unique rhythm.

  Here's what's great about a drum circle: no one ever has to play alone. And all the inappropriate ways of expressing anger can be channeled into the movement of beating that drum instead in a safe, controlled setting. Before the group could even realize it, they were creating a piece of music, and they were doing it together.

  So I have to admit, I'm feeling pretty confident about my first session with Lucy DuBois. One of the fantastic things about music is that it accesses both sides of the brain--the analytical left side and the emotional right side--and forces a connection. This is how a stroke victim who can't speak a sentence might be able to sing a lyric; how a patient frozen by severe Parkinson's disease can use the sequence and inherent rhythm in music in order to move and dance again. If music has the ability to bypass the part of the brain that isn't working correctly in order to facilitate a link to the rest of the brain in these other situations, it must be able to do the same for a mind crippled by clinical depression.

  In school, Vanessa's different than she is when we're just hanging out together. She wears tailored pantsuits and silk blouses in bright jewel colors, and she walks briskly, as if she is already five minutes late. When she comes across two teens groping in the hall, she breaks them apart with efficiency. "People," she sighs, with a quietly unassuming authority, "is this really how you want to waste my time?"

  "No, Miz Shaw," the girl murmurs, and she and her boyfriend slink down opposite sides of the hallway, like two magnets repelled by the same polarity.

  "Sorry about that," Vanessa says, as I hurry to keep pace with her. "In my job, hormones are an occupational hazard." She smiles at me. "So what's the game plan for today?"

  "An assessment," I tell her. "The whole point of therapy is to come into the process where Lucy is."

  "I'm psyched. I've never really seen you in action before," Vanessa says.

  I stop walking. "I don't know if that's a good idea . . ."

  "Oh, I'm sure you're going to be great--"

  "It's not that," I interrupt. "Vanessa, it's therapy. If you referred Lucy to a psychiatrist, you wouldn't expect to sit in on the session, would you?"

  "Right. Got it," she says, but I can tell she's still miffed. "Anyway," Vanessa starts moving at breakneck speed again, "I got you a room to use in the special needs wing."

  "Look, I don't want you to--"

  "Zoe," Vanessa says brusquely, "I understand."

  I tell myself that I will explain it to her later. Because we turn the corner into the reserved room, and Lucy DuBois is slumped in a chair.

  She has long ropes of red hair, some of which are caught beneath her checked flannel shirt. Her eyes are a hooded, angry brown. Her sleeves are rolled up to show faint red scars on her wrists, as if she's daring the rest of us to comment. She's chewing gum, which is banned on the school grounds.

  "Lucy," Vanessa says. "Get rid of the gum."

  She takes it out of her mouth and mashes it onto the surface of the desk.

  "Lucy, this is Ms. Baxter."

  I toyed with going back to my maiden name, Weeks, but that made me think of my mother. Max had taken a lot away from me, but legally, I could still use that name if I wanted to. And a girl who's grown up at the end of the alphabet doesn't lightly decide to toss away a last name that begins with a B. "You can call me Zoe," I say.

  Everything about this girl screams defensive--from her hunched shoulders to her studious refusal to look me in the eye. I notice that she's got a nose ring--one tiny, thin gold hoop that looks like a trick of the light until you do a second glance--and what seem to be tattoos on the knuckles of one hand.

  They're letters, actually.

  F.U.C.K.

  I remember Vanessa telling me that Lucy's family attends Eternal Glory--Max's ultraconservative church. I try to imagine Lucy handing out pamphlets in front of the movie theater with the bright, sparkly teenage girls who'd been there the night Pastor Clive & Co. set up their protest.

  I wonder if Max knows her.

  "I'm really looking forward to working with you, Lucy," I say.

  She doesn't move a muscle.

  "I'll expect you to give Zoe your full attention," Vanessa adds. "Do you have any questions before you two start?"

  "Yeah." Lucy's head falls backward, like a dandelion too heavy for its stem. "If I don't show up for these sessions, do I get a cut on my record?"

  Vanessa looks at me and raises her brows. "Good luck," she says, and she closes the door behind her as she leaves.

  "So." I pull a chair in front of Lucy's so that she cannot help but see me, and sit down. "I'm really glad that I'll be getting to work with you. Did anyone explain what music therapy is, exactly?"

  "Bullshit?" Lucy offers.

  "It's a way to use music to access feelings that are sometimes locked inside," I say, as if she hasn't even spoken. "In fact, you're probably doing a little of this on your own already. Everyone does. You know how, when you have a bad day and you only want to put on your sweats and eat a pint of chocolate ice cream and sob to the song 'All by Myself'? That's music therapy. Or when it finally gets warm enough to roll down the windows of you car, so you crank up the stereo and sing along? That's music therapy, too."

  As I speak, I take out a notebook, so that I can begin to do my assessment. The plan is to write down comments a client gives, and my own impressions, and later to cobble them into a more formal clinical document. When I do this in the hospital, it's easy--I assess the pain level of the client, her state of anxiety, her facial expressions.

  Lucy, however, is a blank slate.

  Her eyes stare straight over my shoulder; her thumb absently scratches at the carvings on the desk made by ballpoint pens and bored students.

  "So," I say brightly. "I thought that, today, maybe you could help me learn a little more about you. Like, for example, have you ever played an instrument?"

  Lucy yawns.