Vivian In Red (9 page)

“Thanks, Grampa. I love you, too.”

He begins to tap out another question, but he doesn’t get very far before something draws his gaze. The piano. He appears to be staring at the piano. He’s so still for several seconds I’m afraid briefly he’s having another stroke. I look again, following his gaze, and see that it’s actually more like the piano bench. The space where a person would sit.

I touch his elbow, as gently as I can manage so I don’t startle him. I keep my voice low, asking, “Grampa? Do you see someone?”

He flinches away from the piano, his gaze in so doing landing on the contraption in his lap. He upends it, a gesture that might have been dramatic had the board been heavy, but it just flutters inoffensively to the floor. Grampa Milo takes the pointer and flings it with more energy, back over his shoulder, toward the foyer.

The nurse and I make eye contact, and we, too, speak without using words. I send him a reassuring nod and stroke Grampa Milo’s arm.

“I know,” I tell him, so quietly I’m not sure he even hears me. “I know.”

Naomi and Paul thump down the stairs, as Grampa Milo continues to look askance at the piano bench. He seems a little pale, and this time I wave over the nurse, who approaches to check him over, take his pulse, and so on.

The nurse’s invasion seems to snap my grandfather back to himself. He shakes his head hard, like a dog shaking off water, and then throws me what looks like an apologetic smile. Naomi and Paul come in to say their goodbyes; they both have an appointment at the office. I watch Naomi’s glossy assurance, how comfortable she is in the rightness of everything from her shoes to her career to her brilliant, piano-playing, ballet-dancing daughter. I can easily imagine her shaking hands with a publisher and her hand-picked author, waving away any minor concerns about Grampa Milo’s health, in fact using his health as a reason to expedite the progress.

Then this stranger would be in the parlor, and this stranger might witness Grampa Milo’s fixed stares, his throwing and dropping of objects. He’d add a chapter to the end of his book, something like “The Curtain Falls: The Sad Decline of Milo Short.” Without Grampa’s participation, the book would be nothing but a rehash of what everyone already knows, maybe some gossipy anecdotes about his stars and productions.

Paul and Naomi are talking to each other now, and to the nurse, all three of them standing up and talking over my grandfather’s head as if he’s deaf as well as mute.

I swallow hard, as if to choke down the rising sense of panic, which in fact has a voice and it goes like this:
you can’t do it, you’re not qualified, what’s wrong with you, what do you know anyway,
and I approach my uncle, interrupting their conversation as forcefully as I can manage, and leading him away into the foyer.

Uncle Paul looks down at me with his unruly gray eyebrows in twin arcs of surprise.

“I’m writing the book. Just tell me how we start.”

I
shift in this lousy hospital bed, but every position I choose drives some sharp spike of soreness somewhere. I resent every moment in this crummy thing, which does not much help with my sleep. All the money we’ve got, and this cardboard-feeling thing is the best we can do?

Esme forgot to draw the front room curtains and the room glows silver and gold from the moon and streetlights, depending where the light falls. The night nurse is in the living room next door, reading or watching television between her stealthy intrusions to “check your vitals”; in other words, make sure I haven’t croaked.

Down in the theater district, no doubt it’s still hopping. Everyone would be out at late dinners, having cocktails. The show people would be just starting their own happy hours, those young enough to still coast on a few hours of sleep and give a slam-bang performance the next night. In here it’s so quiet I can just about hear my own heart stubbornly thumping away, paying no mind to my fouled-up brain.

Just now it looks like a well-lit set, truth be told, and it’s something like beautiful. Maybe Esme should just leave the curtains open all the time. I wouldn’t mind. Not that I could say the words, and all the charm of playing charades is long gone, never mind that damn alphabet board.

I crane around to see the edge of the stairs just outside the parlor door. It doesn’t seem so far.

A wicked idea takes hold of me. Well, why the hell shouldn’t I? It’s my damn house and my own damn body.

They have clipped this little alarm thingy to my pajamas, and the other end to the bed, all of them pretending like it’s not a dog leash, basically. “In case you fall out of bed,” Rebekah explained it, not looking me in the eye. Who was she trying to kid? However it’s easy enough, even in the semi dark, to unclip it from myself and clip it to the pillowcase.

I push the covers off and swing my legs down toward the floor. It’s a tiny jump down, but no higher than my bed upstairs. I land harder than I expected, but the thick rug makes it nice and quiet. There’s no movement from the nurse in the room next door. She was just here a few minutes ago, so likely won’t be again for a short while.

I rest a moment at the edge of the hospital bed, collecting my breath and my bearings. I’m surprisingly dizzy from being upright all of a sudden. Then I straighten up my posture as much as my creaky body lets me and just walk across the floor like it’s nothing, which it isn’t, of course. I smile to myself and try a little laugh, though all that comes out is a light cough. Still. A sound I intended to make, it’s progress of a kind.

The progress to the foot of the staircase is unremarkable. Now that I’m here, the staircase looks taller than I remembered it, before I fell. Or maybe it’s being in the dark. Everything’s scarier in the dark. Also, I left my glasses on the small table next to the bed.

Motion from the corner of my eye startles me just as I raise my foot to the first step, and I gasp and grab for the railing.

I chuckle at myself the moment I can tell it was simply headlights turning onto the street outside, which briefly glowed into the entryway. As for the glasses? I don’t want to walk all that way back and anyhow, it’s too dark to make so much difference.

It’s been a few days since a Vivian sighting, and that combined with my ability to sort of laugh-cough has got me feeling more optimistic again. Whatever has gone awry in my brain is healing over. I can picture it up there, knitting away like when Bee made a scarf and it would stretch further down her lap night after night, as she stitched.

The progress up the stairs, though, is slower than I thought. I’d conveniently managed to forget how little I used the stairs during the day. Even before my fall, I’d come down in the morning, and only go up after supper and spend the rest of my evening and night on the piano or in bed. And often, Esme would take one arm as she walked me up after dinner.

So I put two hands on the railing, my arms pulling me up along with my legs pushing. Now I’m starting to feel sleepy. Fine time for that at this point, as I reach the landing at the first bend in the stairs. I’m committed now. I might as well push on through. I imagine my soft canopy bed and push toward it like I’m climbing a mountain, which it actually feels like just about now. I guess I’m having what the grandkids call a “what was I thinking” moment.

I smell her before I see her: roses and smoke.

Vivian is leaning on the opposite stairway railing. She’s wearing a shirtwaist now, and a hat set on a jaunty sideways angle. Her arms are folded and she’s just looking at me, with that amused, slightly haughty expression I remember when we first met.

She stands up from the wall and walks toward me, growing larger in my vision, making me think she’s going to keep walking up until she walks right into me like mist.

Unspoken words are dancing around on my tongue like grease in a hot pan. All I can do is mouth them, so I do, helplessly, pathetically.

Why are you here? What are you? Leave me alone.

She has stopped in her forward progress, in a dark patch of the landing between pools of outside light, such that I have to strain to tell if she’s even there.

What do you want? My lips form the sentence, my throat choking on the words that won’t come.

That voice! It’s deeper than it should be for someone so slim, resonant like the inside of a finely tuned instrument. It’s not coming from her, though, because her, its—the apparition, vision, hallucination—the lips aren’t moving.

I just want to be heard
, is what purrs into my mind, vibrating in my own chest as if I’m the one speaking.
Don’t we all just want to be heard?

My legs buckle and I fold down, hitting the landing first with my knees, then my palms, then I hope to God I don’t tumble all the way down and break my neck, all for the sake of a canopy bed. As my blurred, dark vision goes all the way black I’m thinking how different it all would’ve been if only I’d bought that goddamn coat somewhere else.

“H
ey, Milo, you listening?”

Milo sprang upright from where he’d been resting his head on his desk. Allen’s hands hovered over the piano keys. “I’m gonna play this one time, so pay attention.”

Milo closed his eyes and let the notes wrap around him, through him. He moved his fingers across the desk, an invisible keyboard. It was hardly an elegant system, but so far it worked better than Milo squinting himself sick at the music. He’d listen to Allen play it through one time, and between his memory and what his eyes could decipher, he’d lock it into his brain.

Allen had spotted him curled into a C with his pounding head between his knees after squinting at music all day.

“What’s your problem?” he’d asked. “You got a hangover?”

“Headache. My eyes aren’t great, makes the music hard to see.” As soon as Milo said it, his instincts dulled by exhaustion and the tight pain across his head, he felt a dart of fear that Allen would get him canned, make room for a piano player who could read music properly.

Allen hadn’t replied, which Milo found hardly reassuring. Instead, he began to pace their tiny office, a comical task in that box-shaped space. Then he nudged Milo’s shoulder hard enough that he almost knocked him off the chair. “So, how are you with playing by ear?” Milo squinted up at Allen, his vision wavering into focus on his friend’s smile. “Because I’ve got an idea,” Allen said.

And thus was born their partnership in keeping Milo employed.

Milo was afraid the bosses would figure it out and send him packing, soon as they realized he couldn’t actually see the music he was plugging. But no one paid him all that close attention once he got hired, and the bosses—who now answered to Warner Brothers, which pillaged the catalog for their films regularly after buying them out—had other things on their mind than whether their newest plugger could see.