Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  Vanessa doesn’t even hesitate. “My office. Take as long as you need.”

  I march Lucy into the main office—a place where she’s spent far too much time, being disciplined by the assistant principal—and into Vanessa’s cozy space. I close the door behind us. “Are you all right?”

  She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “I just wanted him to shut up,” Lucy murmurs.

  She must know, by now, that I am the center of this storm. There have been articles in the papers about the trial. Last night when I was brushing my teeth, there was my face, on the local late-night news. And now, there’s picketing on the steps of the school. I may initially have tried to keep my private life from her because of our therapy relationship, but now, doing so would be like trying to sandbag the ocean.

  It makes sense that Lucy’s heard about all this. That people at her church are bad-mouthing me, and that she feels torn.

  Torn enough to tackle Clive Lincoln.

  I pull out a chair so she can sit down. “Do you believe him?” she asks.

  “Frankly, no,” I admit. “He’s like something out of a circus sideshow.”

  “No.” Lucy shakes her head. “I mean . . . do you believe him?”

  At first I am shocked. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone who can listen to Pastor Clive and not take his words as utter lies. But then again, Lucy is only a teenager. Lucy goes to an evangelical church. She’s been spoon-fed this rhetoric all her life.

  “No, I don’t believe him,” I say softly. “Do you?”

  Lucy picks at the unraveling black threads of her leggings. “There was this kid who went to school here last year. Jeremy. He was in my homeroom. We all knew he was gay even though he never said it. He didn’t have to. I mean, everyone else called him a faggot often enough.” She looks up at me. “He hanged himself in his basement just before Christmas. His stupid fucking parents blamed it on a D he got in Civics.” Lucy’s eyes glint, hard as diamonds. “I was so jealous of him. Because he got to check out of this place for good. He left, and no matter how many times I try, I can’t.”

  I taste copper on my tongue; it takes a moment for me to realize this is fear. “Lucy, are you thinking of hurting yourself?” When she doesn’t answer, I stare at her forearms, to see if she’s cutting again, but even in this mild weather she’s wearing a long-sleeved thermal shirt.

  “What I want to know is where the fuck is Jesus,” Lucy says. “Where is He when there’s so much hate it feels like concrete drying up around you? Well, fuck you, God. Fuck you for going when the going gets tough.”

  “Lucy. Talk to me. Do you have a plan?” It is basic suicide counseling—get someone to talk about her intentions, and it’s possible to diffuse them. I need to know if she’s got pills in her purse, a rope in her closet, a gun under her mattress.

  “Can someone stop loving you because you’re not who they want you to be?”

  Her question stops me cold. I find myself thinking of Max. “I guess so,” I admit. Has Lucy had her heart broken? It could certainly account for her latest downslide; if I know anything about this girl, it’s that she expects people to leave her, and blames herself when they do. “Did something happen with a boy?”

  She turns to me, her face as open as a wound. “Sing,” Lucy begs. “Make this all go away.”

  I don’t have my guitar. I’ve left everything for music therapy in the car—the crowd that had gathered outside commanded my attention. The only instrument I have is my voice.

  So I sing, slowly, a cappella. “Hallelujah,” the old Leonard Cohen song from before Lucy was born.

  With my eyes closed, with every word a brushstroke, I do the kind of praying people do when they don’t know if there is a God. I hope, for Lucy. For me and Vanessa. For all the misfits in the world who don’t necessarily want to fit in. We just don’t want to always be blamed, either.

  When I finish, I have tears in my eyes. But Lucy doesn’t. Her features might as well be stone.

  “Again,” she commands.

  I sing the song twice. Three times.

  It is on the chorus, on the sixth round, that Lucy starts to sob. She buries her face in her hands. “It’s not a boy,” she confesses.

  When I was small I got the strangest Christmas gift from a distant aunt: a twenty-dollar bill inside an acrylic puzzle. You had to pull knobs and twist levers in different machinations until you found the sequence that would release the catch and let you take the bounty. I was tempted to smash it open with a hammer, but my mother convinced me that the pieces would fall into place, and, once they started, it seemed I couldn’t make a wrong move. Boom boom boom, one door or latch opened after another as if they’d never been locked in the first place.

  The same thing happens now—a curtain pulled back, a sentence turned on its edge to reveal a different meaning: the suicide attempts. Pastor Clive’s speech. Lucy’s angry tackle. Jeremy. Can someone stop loving you?

  It’s not a boy, Lucy had said.

  Maybe that’s because it’s a girl.

  If there is one cardinal rule of music therapy, it’s that you come into a patient’s life at the place she needs you, and you leave her at a different place. You, as the therapist, are just a catalyst. A constant. You do not change as part of the equation. And you most certainly do not talk about yourself. You’re there solely for the patient.

  It’s why, when Lucy asked me whether I was married, I didn’t answer.

  It’s why she knew nothing about me and I know everything about her.

  This isn’t a friendship—I’ve told Lucy that before. This is a professional relationship.

  But that was before my future became a snack for public consumption. That was before I sat in a courtroom with the stares of strangers needling between my shoulder blades. Before I listened to a pastor I did not know or like tell me I was a reprobate. Before I went to the ladies’ room and had someone slip me a novena card underneath the stall wall with a message scribbled on the back: I am praying for you, dear.

  If I have to run this gauntlet because I happen to love a woman, let it at least do someone else some good. Let me pay it forward.

  “Lucy,” I say quietly. “You know I’m gay, right?”

  Her head snaps up. “Why—why are you telling me this?”

  “I don’t know what you’re thinking or feeling, but you need to understand that it’s completely normal.”

  She stares at me, silent.

  “You know how, when you go back into a preschool classroom, you sit down in the tiny chairs at the tiny tables and feel like Alice in Wonderland? You can’t imagine ever being small enough to fit the space? That’s what it feels like to come out. You look back and can’t imagine squeezing inside again. Even if Pastor Clive and his entire church are shoving as hard as they can.”

  Lucy’s eyes are so wide I can see rims of white around the irises. She leans forward, her breath caught, as there is a knock on the door.

  Vanessa pokes her head inside. “It’s eight-forty-five,” she tells me, and I jump out of my seat. We are going to have to fly if we want to get to the courthouse on time.

  “Lucy, I have to go,” I say, but she is not looking at me. She’s looking at Vanessa, and thinking about what Pastor Clive said about her, and putting my life together as seamlessly as I just did hers.

  Lucy grabs her backpack and, without a word, runs out of Vanessa’s office.

  I didn’t realize how much of being a witness involves being an actor. Just as if I’m in a stage play, I’ve been well rehearsed for this moment—from learning the lines through the intonation of my voice to the costume which Angela herself picked out for me (a navy blue sheath dress with a white cardigan; so incredibly conservative that when Vanessa saw me she started laughing and called me Mother Baxter).

  Yes, I have been prepared. Yes, I am technically ready. And yes, I’m certainly used to performing.

  But then again, there’s a reason I play and sing music. Somehow, I get lost in the notes, adrift in the m