Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  She walks into the kitchen, but instead of letting her go, I follow her. I watch her movements, efficient and graceful, as she takes the kettle off the burner. When she turns to me, her features are smooth, expressionless. “Good night.”

  She walks past me, but just as she reaches the kitchen doorway, I speak. “I’m afraid.”

  Zoe hesitates, her hands framing the door, as if she is caught between two moments.

  “I’m afraid that you’re going to get sick of me,” I admit. “That you’re going to get tired of living a life that still isn’t a hundred percent accepted by society. I’m afraid that, if I let myself feel ecstatic about being with you, then when you leave me, I won’t be able to pull myself back together.”

  In one move, Zoe is across the kitchen again, facing me. “Why do you think I’d leave?”

  “My track record,” I say. “That, and the fact that you have no idea how hard it is. I still worry every day that some parent is going to out me, and convince the school board I should lose my job. I listen to the news and hear politicians who know nothing about me making decisions about what I should and shouldn’t be allowed to do. I don’t understand why the most intriguing thing about my identity is always that I’m gay—not that I’m a Leo or know how to tap dance or that I majored in zoology.”

  “You can tap dance?” Zoe asks.

  “The point is,” I say, “you spent forty years straight. Why wouldn’t you return to the path of least resistance?”

  Zoe looks at me as if I am incredibly thick-headed. “Because, Vanessa. You’re not a guy.”

  That night, we don’t make love. We drink the tea Zoe brews, and we talk about the first time I was called a dyke, how I came home and cried. We talk about how I hate when the mechanic always assumes that I know what he’s talking about when he works on my car, just because I’m a lesbian. I even do a little tap routine for her: step-ball-change, step-ball-change. We spoon on the couch.

  The last thing I remember thinking before I fall asleep in her arms is This is good, too.

  In spite of my disappointment over the X-ray vision glasses from the Bazooka comics prize cache, I wound up saving up for one more item that I simply had to have. It was a whale’s tooth good-luck charm, on a key chain. What intrigued me was the description of the item:

  Guaranteed to bring the owner a lifetime of good fortune.

  I knew better, after my X-ray glasses, than to expect the whale’s tooth to be either real whale or real tooth. Probably it would be plastic, with a hole punched through the top for the metal key ring attached to it. But I still found myself saving up my allowance again to buy Bazooka gum. I hunted on the floor of my mother’s car for spare change, so that I could gather the $1.10 for shipping and handling.

  Three months later, I had my sixty-five Bazooka comics and sent off my envelope for my prize. When the charm arrived, I was a little surprised to see that the tooth seemed to be legitimate (although I couldn’t really tell you if it came from a whale) and that the silver key ring attached to it was heavy, shiny. I slipped it into the front pocket of my backpack and started wishing.

  The next day was Valentine’s Day in school. We had each made little “mailboxes” out of shoe boxes and construction paper. This was in the era of transactional analysis, when no one was allowed to feel left out, so the teacher had a foolproof plan: every girl in the class would send a card to every boy, and vice versa. I was guaranteed, this way, to receive fourteen Valentines in return for the fourteen Tweety and Sylvester cards I had addressed to the boys in class—even Luke, unfortunately, who picked his nose and ate it. At the end of the school day, I carried home my shoe box and sat on my bed and sorted the cards. To my surprise, there was one extra. Yes, every boy had given me a Valentine, as expected. But the fifteenth came from Eileen Connelly, who had sparkly blue eyes and hair as black as night and who once, in gym class, had put her arms around me to show me how to properly hold a bat. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY, the card said, FROM, EILEEN. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t signed with “Love.” It didn’t matter that she might have given a card to every girl in the class in addition to me. All I knew at that moment—all I cared about—was that she had been thinking of me, however briefly. I was convinced that the only reason I’d gotten this bonus Valentine was that whale’s tooth charm—which was fast acting indeed.

  Over the years, every time I moved—from my home to my college dorm, from my college dorm to my apartment in the city, from my apartment to this house—I have gone through my belongings and sorted the wheat from the chaff. And every time, in my nightstand, I have come across that whale’s tooth good-luck charm. I can never quite bear the thought of getting rid of it.

  Apparently, it’s still working.

  MAX

  There are four white marble disks at the far eastern corner of my brother’s backyard. Too small to be stepping-stones, some are even covered with a tangle of brush—rosebushes that, as far as I can tell, have never been pruned. They are memorials, one for each baby that Reid and Liddy have lost.

  Today, I’m putting down a fifth stone.

  Liddy wasn’t very far along this time, but the house is full of crying. I’d like to tell you I came out here so that my brother and his wife could grieve in private, but the truth is it brings back too many memories for me. So instead, I went to the plant nursery and found the matching marble disk. And I’m thinking that—as a thank-you for all Reid’s done for me—I’m going to fix up this little area of the lawn into a garden, when the ground thaws. I’m thinking about adding a flowering quince and some pussy willows, some variegated weigela. I’ll put a small granite bench in the center, with the stones in a half-moon shape around it—a place Liddy could come out to just sit and think and pray. And I’ll stagger the flowers so that there is always something in bloom—purples and blues, like grape hyacinth and cornflowers, heliotrope and purple verbena; and the whitest of whites: star magnolias, Callery pear, Queen Anne’s lace.

  I have just started making a sketch of this angels’ garden when I hear footsteps behind me. Reid stands with his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “Hey,” he says.

  I turn around and squint into the sun. “How is she?”

  Reid shrugs. “You know.”

  I do. I’ve never felt so lost as the times when Zoe miscarried. In this, all prospective parents have something in common with the Eternal Glory Church: to them, a life is a life, no matter how small. These aren’t cells, they’re your future.

  “Pastor Clive’s in there with her now,” Reid adds.

  “I’m really sorry, Reid,” I say. “For whatever that’s worth.” Zoe and I had both gone to the clinic to be tested for infertility problems. I can’t remember much about the condition that caused my sperm count to be low, and made the ones that did show up for the party less motile, but I do remember that it was genetic. Which means Reid’s probably in the same boat.

  He suddenly bends down and picks up the marble disk I’ve bought. I haven’t been able to chip at the frozen ground enough to set it in place. I watch him turn it over in his hands, and then he cradles it like a discus and sends it flying into the brick wall of the built-in barbecue. The marble breaks in half and falls to the ground. Reid kneels, burying his face in his hands.

  You’ve got to understand—my big brother is one of the most unflappable people I’ve ever met. In my life history, when I’m falling apart at the seams, he is the constant I can count on to hold me together. Seeing him losing control like this paralyzes me.

  I grab his shoulders. “Reid, man, you gotta calm down.”

  He looks up at me, his breath hanging in the frigid air. “Pastor Clive’s in there talking about God, praying to God, but you know what I think, Max? I think God checked out a long time ago. I don’t think God gives a rat’s ass about my wife wanting a baby.”

  In the months since my baptism, I have come to believe that God has a reason for everything. It makes sense when the bad guys get their due, then, but it’s ha