The Awakening of Dr. Brown

Phoenix stood behind her old piano man, watching him make notes on the sheet of music propped up in front of him. His head was cocked back so he could see through the glasses perched on the end of his nose. She focused on the oval patch of shiny walnut-brown skin on his crown. “Doveman, can I ask you a question?”

He cackled thinly but didn’t look around. “Since when you ask my permission?”

Newly discovered nerves jumped and skittered in her belly. She had an overpowering desire to throw her arms around his neck and lay her cheek alongside his stubbly jaw the way she had when she was a child, and inhale his familiar and comforting scent of Old Spice, whiskey and cigarettes. To curb the urge, she folded her arms across her middle and went to lean against the piano box.

“No-this isn’t about music. I want to know something-” she took a breath “-about…when you found me.”

Doveman stopped writing. He took off his glasses, drew a handkerchief from his pocket and began to wipe them with it. Not looking at her, he said slowly, “What you wantin’ to know?”

“Why’d you do it?” She made her voice hard. “When I tried to hustle you, why didn’t you just turn me over to the cops? Why’d you take me in?”

It seemed a long time before he answered…just sat there wiping methodically at his glasses with the handkerchief, as if he hadn’t heard her. Then he looked up, and his eyes had that sad, filmy look that made her heart lurch and her chest turn cold and fearful with the thought, Doveman’s old…

“Why didn’t I turn you in? Child, it never once entered my mind to do that.”

“But why? I was a street kid-a hustler. I stole from you.”

“Well…maybe I never saw that street kid…that hustler. All I saw was a little lost bird, got blown out of her nest by a storm. Nothin’ to do with a bird like that, you know, but take her in, give her shelter, make her feel safe an’ warm…”

“But,” Phoenix whispered, “how did you know?” Her throat felt raw, as if all the tears she hadn’t shed back then were burning there now, saltwater on her wounded spirit. “For all you knew I could’ve just…ripped you off and split.”

The piano man smiled. “Oh…I knew you wasn’t gonna do that. Not once you found out ol’ Doveman had something you needed more than a baby need’s her momma’s milk.” Phoenix made a small, frustrated sound, but Doveman shook his head. He held up his hands with their fingers gnarled and bent, the palms pale and lined like fine old parchment. “I had these, baby-girl. They was the keys…”

“Keys?” She cried it out, frustrated…aching.

“That’s right.” Doveman touched his own chest, just over the spot where she hurt so. “These old hands was the keys that let loose all that music you had shut up inside here. That music was born in you, child. You came into this world with that music in your soul. Just didn’t know how to let it out. You was a lost and angry child until ol’ Doveman came along with these hands and showed you how.”

“Then why,” she whispered, dashing away tears, “do I feel so lost now? I have you, I have the music…”

Doveman shook his head. He swiveled on the bench, his eyes going past her and far, far away. “Because things change,” he said in his soft, ruined voice. “Everything has its time. Everything has its season. Time comes when ol’ Doveman and the music aren’t enough anymore. Time comes when you be wantin’ somebody to love. Somebody to love you, maybe make some fat pretty babies with you. That’s the way it’s meant to be…”

Phoenix caught and held her breath. I want something more from you.

What scares me is…maybe you want something from me that I can’t give you.

She cried out, with the harshness of fear, “What if I can’t?”

The piano man’s gaze jerked back to her, eyebrows raised as if in amazement. “Can’t what? Can’t find anybody, or can’t love?”

“Both!”

“Well,” he shot back, exasperated, “I know for a certainty you ain’t gonna be able to do either one ’less you love y’self first!”

Phoenix gave a snort of hopeless laughter. “Love myself? How am I supposed to do that when I don’t even know who the hell I am?”

Doveman just shook his head and didn’t say anything. Unable to withstand his gaze any longer, she pushed away from the piano and walked, as she so often did, to the windows. From there, with her back to him she said softly, rubbing at the goose bumps on her arms, “Yesterday a priest told me I wasn’t lost at all…just looking. As in, searching for? Trying to find something, i.e., me.” She gave another of those high, hurting laughs. “He might be right, but what I didn’t tell him is that I have no clue at all where to look. None…”

Feeling so desolate, it came as a shock to her to hear the rusty wheeze of Doveman’s laughter. She turned with the hurt of betrayal in her eyes and an angry reproach on her lips, to find him regarding her the way she imagined a doting father might look upon his slightly foolish child.

“Well, now,” he said with an exaggerated lifting of his shoulders, “I don’t know about you, but the first thing I generally do when I want to find something is, I go back and look in the place I was when I lost it.”

Stepping from the dark sedan while Tom Applegate held the door for him, Ethan looked up at the squatty redbrick building silhouetted against a fading sunset as if it were a holy place, a sacred shrine to which he’d come seeking answers…or at the very least a soothing balm to quiet his uneasy soul. The shadowed and dusty windows gave him little hope of, either.

“You don’t have to come in, do you?” he said to Tom as he slammed the car door. “I don’t think this is going to take long.”

The Secret Service agent regarded him for a long, tense moment, no doubt assessing his duties and weighing the likelihood that Ethan might give him the slip out the back way again. Apparently concluding the risk was minimal and his protectee’s intentions pure, at least this time, he gave in, but on a soft exhalation of long-suffering. “All right, sir. I’ll wait here.”

The front door was locked. Ethan pushed on a button unobtrusively located to the left of the door and heard a bell’s strident shriek echo and resound behind the solid brick walls. He waited, fidgeting, and had just turned to go back down the steps, thinking he’d try the loading dock entrance, when the door clanked open behind him.

“Hey, Doc, how y’doing?” Rupert Dove greeted him in his cracked voice. “Saw you on the monitor…sorry I couldn’t get here any quicker. These ol’ legs don’t go like they used to.” He cackled, then turned somber, though his eyes still held a certain brightness. “What can I do for you, Doc? Sorry to tell you, but if you’re wantin’ Phoenix, she ain’t here.”

Ethan smiled, even as he wondered what those sharp old eyes would make of it. There was, he thought, something almost birdlike about their intensity. “That’s okay,” he said, “it’s you I came to see.”

“Me!” The old man reared back as he said it, but Ethan had the feeling he wasn’t really all that surprised. “Well now. You’d best come in, then. Come on in, son.”

He closed the heavy door, than led Ethan past other doors, also closed, past the empty recording studio and control room, into the rehearsal hall. As before, the huge room was dimly lit, the only illumination coming from the bandstand, music stands and sound equipment softly backlit like the chancel of a church. Ethan would have been glad to stop there, glad to have this conversation in the camouflaging darkness, but Rupert Dove led him on, straight through the hall.

“May’s well be comfortable,” he said as he waved Ethan onto the elevator ahead of him. Following, he clanked the cage gate shut and threw Ethan an unapologetic grin. “Got my smokes hid upstairs.”

In the loft, Rupert Dove waved his guest to the couch with a careless gesture and made a beeline for the baby grand. He fished a half-empty pack of Camels and a book of matches from its innards and lit up, carefully putting the extinguished match in his pocket before he turned back to Ethan, coughing smoke. “What can I get for you, son?”

The old piano man waited while Ethan shook his head, then settled himself on the piano bench. Ethan felt sure it must be his customary place; he looked so natural there-like part of the instrument itself. Rupert Dove took another deep drag from his cigarette, coughed alarmingly as he tapped ash into the palm of his hand, then looked