Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  At that, Lucy folds back into herself. Gone is the girl willing to talk about running away. In her place is the familiar drawstring purse of a mouth, the angry eyes, the folded arms. One step forward, two steps back. “Would you like to try the marimba?” Zoe asks again.

  She is met by a stony wall of silence.

  “How about the harp?”

  When Lucy ignores her again, Zoe pulls the instruments aside. “Every songwriter uses music to express something she can’t have. Maybe that’s a place, and maybe that’s a feeling. You know how sometimes you feel like if you don’t let go of some of the pressure that’s inside you, you’re going to explode? A song can be that release. How about you pick a song, and we talk about the place it takes us when we listen to it?”

  Lucy closes her eyes.

  “I’ll give you some choices,” Zoe says. “‘Amazing Grace.’ ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends.’ Or, ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.’”

  She could not have picked three more diverse options: a spiritual, a Green Day song, and an Elton John oldie.

  “Okay, then,” Zoe says, when Lucy doesn’t respond. “I’ll pick.” She begins to play the lap harp. Her voice starts out on a husky low note, and swings upward:

  Amazing grace, how sweet the sound . . .

  That saved a wretch like me.

  I once was lost, but now I’m found.

  Was blind, but now I see.

  There is a richness to Zoe’s singing that feels like tea on a rainy day, like a blanket over your shoulders while you’re shivering. Lots of women have pretty voices, but hers has a soul. I love how, when she wakes up in the morning, it sounds as if her throat is coated in sand. I love how, when she gets frustrated, she doesn’t yell but instead belts one high, operatic note of anger.

  When I look over at Lucy, she has tears in her eyes. She furtively glances at me, and wipes them away as Zoe finishes the song with a few strokes plucked on the harp. “Every time I hear that hymn I imagine a girl in a white dress, standing barefoot on a swing,” Zoe says. “And the swing’s on a big old elm tree.” She laughs, shaking her head. “I have no idea why. It’s actually about a slave trader who was struggling with his life, and how some divine power got him to see the person he was meant to be instead. How about you? What does the song make you think of?”

  “Lies.”

  “Really!” Zoe says. “That’s interesting. What sorts of lies?”

  Suddenly Lucy stands so abruptly that she knocks over her chair. “I hate that song. I hate it!”

  Zoe moves quickly so that she is only inches away from the girl. “That’s great. The music made you feel something. What did you hate about it?”

  Lucy narrows her eyes. “That you were singing it,” she says, and she shoves Zoe out of the way. “I’m fucking done.” She kicks the marimba as she passes. It sounds a low good-bye.

  Zoe turns to me as the door slams behind Lucy. “Well,” Zoe says, beaming. “At least this time, she stayed twice as long.”

  “The dead man on the train,” I say.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “That’s what the song makes me think of,” I say. “I was in college and I was going home for Thanksgiving. The trains were full, and I wound up sitting next to an old man who asked me what my name was. Vanessa, I told him, and he said Vanessa What? I didn’t know him, and I was afraid to give out my last name in case he was a serial killer or something, so I told him my middle name instead: Vanessa Grace. And he started singing to me, substituting my name for Amazing grace. He had a really beautiful, deep voice, and people clapped. I was embarrassed, and he wouldn’t quit talking, so I pretended to fall asleep. When we got to South Station, the last stop, he was leaning against the window with his eyes closed. I shook him, to tell him that it was time to get off the train, but he didn’t wake up. I got a conductor, and the police and ambulance came, and I had to tell them everything I knew—which was almost nothing.” I hesitate. “His name was Murray Wasserman, and he was a stranger, and I was the last person he sang to before he died.”

  When I finish speaking, I find Zoe staring at me. She glances at the door of the room, which is still closed, and then she hugs me. “I think he was probably a pretty lucky guy.”

  I look at her dubiously. “To drop dead? On Amtrak? The day before Thanksgiving?”

  “No,” Zoe says. “To have you sitting next to him, on the last ride of his life.”

  I duck my head. I’m not a praying woman, but I pray at that moment that, when it’s my turn, Zoe and I will still be traveling together.

  The day after I told my mother that I was a lesbian, the shock had worn off and she was full of questions. She asked me if this was some phase I was going through, like the time I’d been hell-bent on dyeing my hair purple and getting an eyebrow ring. When I told her I was convinced of my attraction to women, she burst into tears and asked me how she had failed me as a mother. She told me she’d pray for me. Every night, when I went to bed, she slipped a new pamphlet under the door. Many trees have died so that the Catholic Church can preach against homosexuality.

  I started to wage a counterattack. On every pamphlet, I took a thick marker and wrote the name of someone famous who had an LGBT child: Cher. Barbra Streisand. Dick Gephardt. Michael Landon. I’d slip these under her bedroom door.

  Finally, at a stalemate, I agreed to meet with her priest. He asked me how I could do this to the woman who’d raised me, as if my sexuality was a personal attack on her. He asked if I’d considered becoming a nun instead. Not once was I asked if I was afraid, or lonely, or worried about my future.

  On the way home from the church, I asked my mother if she still loved me.

  “I’m trying,” she said.

  It took my first long-term girlfriend (whose own mother, when she came out to her, shrugged and said, Tell me something I don’t know) to make me understand why my mother was the complete opposite. “You’re dead to her,” my girlfriend had told me. “Everything she’s dreamed of for you, everything she figured you’d be and have, it’s not going to happen. She’s been seeing you in suburbia with a cookie cutter husband and your two point four kids and a dog, and now you’ve gone and ruined that by being with me.”

  So I gave my mother time to grieve. I never flaunted my girlfriends in front of her, or brought one home to a holiday meal, or signed her name on a Christmas card. Not because I was ashamed but simply because I loved my mother, and I knew that was what she needed from me. When my mother got sick and went into the hospital, I took care of her. I like to think that, before the morphine took over her mind—before she died—she realized that my being a lesbian mattered far less than the fact that I was a good daughter.

  I’m telling you this as a means of explaining that I have been through the coming-out ringer, and wish to repeat it about as much as a person wants a second root canal. But when Zoe begs me to come with her when she tells Dara about us, I know I will. Because it’s the first proof I have that—maybe—Zoe isn’t just trying this new gay persona on for size, and planning to return it and go back to her old, straight self.

  “Are you nervous?” I ask, as we stand side by side in front of Zoe’s mother’s front door.

  “No. Well, yeah. A little.” She looks at me. “It feels big. It’s big, right?”

  “Your mother is one of the most open-minded people I’ve ever met.”

  “But she considers herself an expert on me,” Zoe says. “It was just the two of us, when I was growing up.”

  “Well, I grew up with a single mom, too.”

  “This is different, Vanessa. On my birthday, my mother still calls me at 10:03 A.M. and screams and pants into the phone to relive the birth experience.”

  I blink at her. “That’s just plain strange.”

  Zoe smiles. “I know. She’s one in a million. It’s a blessing and a curse all at once.” With a deep breath, she rings the doorbell.

  Dara opens it with a mangled coat hanger in her hands. “Zoe!” she says, delig