music that drifted out from the bars, but seagulls crying over the bay, and the coughing of winos and the barking of dogs. It was always hard to go to school. I was sure they had fun without me all day at home, but to please Lavender, I went.
Life was good. There was food and talk and warmth at home, and that’s all most kids ask. But on top of all that, I had Lavender. The value of that is too great to tell. For over a year, the world was as good as it could possibly be.
One day my mother touched him. By accident. I know, because I was there when it happened. So simple, so stupid. She slipped on the kitchen floor, reached out to steady herself and caught Lavender’s flipper. Lavender’s bare flipper tip, shining with Skoag slime, caught my mother’s hand, steadied her, and transported her to ecstasy. Her face changed, she cried out, a simple “oh” like a kid seeing his first Christmas tree, and sat down on the kitchen floor. She just sat and smiled. Lavender gently pulled his flipper free of her grip, but it was too late. His dark blue eye spots fastened on me.
“You didn’t do it on purpose,” I told him. “It wasn’t your fault.” But my heart was shaking my whole body.
A scant second later, Mom was standing up, saying, “I’m all right. Don’t be upset, Lavender. Stop flapping like that. Billy, don’t stare, I’m fine.” She caught at the edge of the kitchen table, sat down in one of the chairs. “Shit. What a rush!” she said a moment later, and then sighed. And got up from the table and went to the stove and started stirring the spaghetti sauce again. And that was that.
But, of course, she did.
At first she never touched Lavender when I was around. And kids don’t notice gradual changes. I’d get home from school, and she’d be sitting at the table, humming to herself. It got harder to get her attention. More and more, she told me to fix my own supper. At first she’d tell me what to cook, but later she’d just wave at the fridge. After a while, Lavender learned about frozen dinners and bought them for us. One day when I got home, I found that Lavender had replaced our little aid-issued microwave cooker with a more elaborate one. I cooked all the meals from then on. But even then, I didn’t catch on.
If I suspected anything, it was only that Mom and Lavender were growing closer. That first night he had said he loved her. That had never seemed strange to me. I loved my mom, a lot of musicians had said they loved her, so why shouldn’t a strange Skoag standing on the doorstep say it? I never doubted it was true, and I don’t think Mom did either. Lavender never missed a chance to show how important “the Mom” was. Not just the flowers, or the way he played whatever she wanted him to play. It was the way he respected her in a way no one else ever had. He made her listening as important as his playing.
And it started being more and more important. Now when he played for her at night, he’d stop, sometimes in the middle of the music, and say, “Is that it? Is that right?”
“No,” she’d say, and he’d deflate with despair.
Or, “Almost,” she’d say, and hum a bit to herself, a swatch of music nothing like what he’d been playing, but he’d say, “I think I hear,” and try again.
And if she said, “Yes, yes, that’s it,” he’d play the piece over and over again, while she sat and nodded and smiled. Slowly she changed. She didn’t care about her clothes anymore, and she seldom went outside. She got fat and bought big men’s shirts from the secondhand store to cover her belly. She became fussy about her hair, brushing and combing it like a fussy fiddler tuning his strings. Her voice changed, becoming dreamy and muffled, the ends of her words blunting. Sometimes when I got home from school, she’d be sitting at the table, dreaming with her eyes open. I’d talk to her but get no response until Lavender came to stand beside her. Then she’d focus on me, and answer my questions in a sweet, dreamy voice.
It was easier to talk to Lavender instead. He always knew everything anyway, and Mom was so happy and dreamy that I didn’t worry about anything being wrong. She wasn’t like the filthy, skinny Skoag gropies in the schoolbook. She was clean, and shining with health and dreams, plump and pretty. About then I found out Lavender didn’t always leave at night anymore, but sometimes lay on the bed beside her, with Mom gripping his flipper all night, her head pillowed on his plastic-coated body. So I should have known she was a Skoag gropie, right, and realized she was stone deaf. How could I? I was a kid, she didn’t look like a gropie, and even if she ignored me a lot, she was still my mom. And she still listened every night to Lavender’s playing.
Even I was enchanted by his music. Mom no longer asked for stuff by titles, and I had never cared what he played. What had mattered to me was that he was playing for me as well as for Mom. That last bit of special attention at the end of the day was what mattered to me. But slowly that changed, as the music he played changed. He started playing a lot of stuff I didn’t know. Some of it was dreary and mournful, and sometimes the words were in a different language. Sometimes it was full of strings and campfires, and sometimes it sounded like brass challenges and steel replies. But sometimes the music was so strange and wonderful it made the hair stand up on my arms and legs and tickled the back of my neck. I began to understand how my mother could live for music. Some of the music he played made my heart want to dance outside my body, pulled me from my sofa to sit beside Lavender’s fat, calloused feet-flippers, hypnotized me with joy. And some of it made me cry, isolated stinging tears because I could almost, but not quite, tell what the music was about.
That had to be Lavender’s music. No one else could have made up such music, music that knew me so well. It had to be his original music. But Skoags weren’t allowed to make their own music. Unless they were priest- Skoags, composing for the temples.
In February, the first package came for Lavender. It was at the bottom of the ramp when I got home, and I picked it up and took it into the house. Just a little flat black plastic box. “Look what I found,” I said as I came in the door, and Lavender came immediately and took it from me.
“For me,” he told me. “A message.” His cello strings quivered unnaturally as he slipped it into his pouch. I never saw him open it, and he didn’t speak of it again, just asked to see my school papers.
There were three more after that, or perhaps four. Always at the bottom of the ramp when I got home from school, and always Lavender took them. One day it started raining on my way home and when I got to our house, there were flipper prints outlined on the ramp, leading to the flat black box. So Skoags left them. I wondered why the Skoags were sending him messages instead of just talking to him.
The last message box was silver, not black. Lavender held it for a long time, just looking at it. Then the muscles around his eye spots moved and he looked at my mom for a long time. She knew something about those message boxes, and it wasn’t good. I wanted terribly to know what it was, but I was too frightened to ask. Silence wrapped me so tightly it cut into me like wires. I went to Mom, and she held me against her fat stomach and stroked my head like I was a baby. Then she gave me a gentle push and pointed to the door. I was to go outside.
“I’m not a baby anymore,” I said angrily, knowing I was being shut off from something.
“No,” said Lavender. He moved a slow flipper, and Mom let go of me. “You certainly aren’t. You are old enough to be trusted with important things.” He paused, then the cello thrummed rapidly. “Billy Boy. I have made the other Skoags very angry by being here with you. They demand I come back to them and live as they wish me to live. I cannot. Tomorrow I will go to tell them that. There may be . . .” the cello sighed wordlessly, then went on, “a great unpleasantness for me. A most unfortunate happening, perhaps. Until I come back, I will rely on you to take care of the Mom.” He turned slowly until he faced my mom again. “That is all there is to say. Billy does not need to leave.” She bowed her head, accepting his wishes. He spoke no more about it but went about the apartment tunelessly humming and adjusting the wall hanging from pale mauve to a sky blue.
That evening he played long, wordless songs with lots of strings and high-pitched wind instruments. I fell asleep to music like seagulls crying after a storm.
The next day when I got home from school, Lavender wasn’t there. Mom was sitting at the table. She didn’t even look up until I slapped my schoolbooks down in front of her. Then she looked up with eyes as flat and dark as Lavender’s eye spots. Her face was like the day she’d given Teddy our check, but a thousand times worse. “Billy,” she said, in a low swollen voice like her mouth was packed with marshmallows. She reached for me, to pull me near, but the palms of her hands were scarred with iridescence, like the pictures in the Don’t Do Drugs textbook. Suddenly I couldn’t let her touch me. My mind tagged and rejected the truth. I pulled back, feeling betrayed, knowing something was terribly, terribly wrong. “Lavender!” I cried, but no cello sawed an answer. I looked again at my mom, at her scarred hands and her deaf loneliness. I saw what he had done, but his not being here, now, was
