Authors: Wyborn Senna
After kindergarten one day, Bea and Ryan were playing in his room together when Zella heard music. Their teacher, Richard Prescott, was known to love musicals, and he enjoyed Rodgers and Hammerstein most of all, oftentimes giving recordings of R&H show tunes to the kids to take home. Ryan was well versed at using his plastic cassette player. Mr. Prescott had given him a tape of
Oklahoma
, and he and Bea were standing in front of his mirror, singing “People Will Say We’re In Love”.
Zella snuck down the hallway, marveling that the kids had memorized the lyrics.
Little Bea was singing to Ryan, who wore a jaunty wool fedora and an oversize blue blazer that draped down to the floor, both borrowed from his father’s closet. When Bea was done with her verse, Ryan sang the next one to her.
Zella gasped. Ryan’s voice was in tune and as clear as a bell. Backing up to the hall closet, she retrieved the video camera and pressed the record button as she crept back to his room. Noticing his mother’s reflection in the mirror, Ryan turned and approached her, getting down on his knees, continuing to sing, not missing a beat. When the song ended, he rose from the floor and pushed the off button on the cassette player.
Bea beamed at Ryan’s mom. “So, Mrs. Wyatt, are we ready for Broadway?”
Zella sat down on the turquoise rug. “Come here and see for yourself.”
They crowded onto her lap as she hit rewind so they could watch the video play back in the viewfinder. When the recording was done, Bea and Ryan applauded.
Though Zella shared the tape with her husband, Eugene didn’t witness Ryan’s talent firsthand until three years later, when he came home and heard singing coming from his son’s room. Approaching the closed door, he listened as Ryan sang “A Little Less Conversation” from
Live A Little, Love A Little
, an Elvis Presley movie from 1968.
Logan woke up in the corner of his room with swollen glands, and he dreaded telling his mother, because he knew she would keep him home from school.
Ramona Lockhart had started hoarding when her mother died five years earlier, and as the years passed, their residence became less of a home and more of a garbage dump. Jarrod was at his wit’s end and chose to handle the situation by working long hours, both at Abercromby’s and on the streets as a dealer for Calder’s meth. In his father’s absence, Logan, an only child, was left to face long hours at home alone with Ramona. He found himself parenting her, trying to curb her online shopping and frequent trips to local thrift stores by finding petty distractions to pull her off her destructive course.
This morning, he picked his way down the hallway through bags of still-tagged, never-worn clothing, purses, and shoes. He found Ramona in a spare room, where she kept a record player and a collection of albums scattered atop boxes stacked on chairs and tables. She was nearly in a trance, listening to the Andrews Sisters singing “Sincerely” in distinctive three-part harmony.
Logan had trouble getting to her and nearly tripped. He ended up falling in front of her, into in a pile of used, folded, recyclable plastic bags she refused to discard.
Over three-hundred-and-fifty pounds, Ramona used a walker for support, clinging to walls and furniture to navigate piles of debris. At twenty-nine, she looked two decades older, with strikes of gray throughout her knee-length, straight dark hair, which took two hours daily to wash and braid. Wrinkles creased her forehead, eyes, and mouth. She smoked not one, but three packs of Camels every twenty-four hours, leaving overflowing ashtrays in her wake whenever she moved from one room to the next.
“Mas música,”
she cried out in Spanish, lapsing into her mother’s native language.
More music. Logan tugged at the collar of the T-shirt he’d slept in and kept his distance lest she pull him into a smothering bear hug. She loved her only boy, even if she didn’t know how to take care of him.
“I’m sick. It feels like I swallowed eggs.”
“Your glands. Swollen again?”
He nodded.
She struggled to get up from the cushioned chair, but he put out his hand in protest. “I’m just going to sleep.”
“What about breakfast?”
Logan knew what was in the kitchen: dirty dishes piled on countertops, unwashed pots in the sink, rotten food in the refrigerator, ice-encrusted artifacts in the freezer, and no place to sit down because the dining table and chairs were buried in clutter.
“It’s OK.”
He picked his way out of the room and made his way back to his bedroom.
He didn’t have a bed, so he usually formed a pile of clothing—some clean, some not—in the corner and crawled on top, pulling something weighty—usually a coat—over his frail frame so he could stay warm. For a pillow, he used a bolt of quilted fabric his mother bought at the Salvation Army down the street. It didn’t matter to him if he didn’t eat that day. He had gone hungry before rather than eat something spoiled that had been unrefrigerated too long. If he were lucky, Ramona would muster up the energy to get her walker in gear and head to McDonald’s for some fast food. And if her conscience rumbled louder than her stomach, maybe she would consider saving half a bite for him.
Ryan Wyatt got his first guitar the Christmas he turned ten and wrote his first song two days shy of his eleventh birthday in the privacy of his bedroom. The décor hadn’t changed much as he got older, save for the addition of an ivory coin bank shaped like a skull that sat on his desk, watching his pen move across the pages of his early American history notebook, where he dutifully entered multiple choice answers to questions from his textbook on the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The words running across the page
…blah blah blah…
were nudged by strings of new ones.
All my worries used to be…blah blah blah…where to go and who to see…blah blah blah…now I’m older, lookin’ around…blah blah blah…wondering about the new girl in town
. Ryan threw down his pen and ran to his bed, where his Les Paul sat in its open, velour-lined case.
Oh, she’s blond, and she’s boogie, wanna call her my shoogie, with hair down to there and a thousand-yard stare, she’s a cinnamon heart of a cutie
.
An electric thrill raced down Ryan’s spine. He sprinted back to his desk, wrote two more verses to run against the chorus, and returned to his bed to bang out the melody. Inspiration struck swiftly, and the payoff rolled out faster than a greyhound on race day. He’d been barely able to write down one line before another tumbled out and rendered him deliriously happy. He ran over to the mirror to make sure he hadn’t been transported to another realm. His handsome young features—clear blue eyes, thick dark hair, lopsided grin, and strong jaw—were reflected back at him. He was the same boy in the same house, with the same guitar, yet he felt reborn and more alive than ever. The word came to him—
purpose
—and swam around in his mind until it merged with the porpoises on his underwater mural, and he laughed aloud with pleasure.
An ordinary chain-link fence separated Jarrod and Ramona Lockhart’s property from the family that lived behind them, but it didn’t stop Logan from trying to make friends with the boy who lived there, Fred Henn.
When summer arrived, and Fred’s eleventh birthday loomed, Kara Henn sent out invitations for a pool party in their backyard, complete with pizza, sodas, cake, and a clown, to the boys in Fred’s class. Not being in Fred’s class, Logan wasn’t invited, but the morning they began hanging crepe streamers outside, Ted Henn took pity on the boy and issued him an invitation.
Excited, Logan searched for his swim trunks in the piles of clothing that had formed like haystacks throughout his room. His mother was in the kitchen, burning bacon and eggs for his father, who hadn’t found an adequate excuse to escape her rare offer to push all the trash aside and try to cook a meal.
Flipping through channels on the television positioned across from the cluttered kitchen table, Jarrod settled on NBC Sports and lit a cigarette. He was in his undershirt and shorts and needed a shower, but it was Saturday, and Abercromby’s was closed until noon because Calder Baillie needed to fill double his usual meth orders.
Ramona was giddy with excitement. She had found her frying pan in a cupboard filled with old glass jars her mother had used for preserves. Once she cleared off the stove, she could make a late breakfast, and maybe, if Jarrod showed interest, they could find time to be alone.
The bacon and eggs were beginning to blacken as smoke filled the kitchen.
Jarrod jumped out of his seat. “Jesus, woman! What the hell are you doing?”
“I thought you liked your bacon crisp.”
“Yeah, but not my nose hair!”
Logan couldn’t find his swimsuit, so he put on a pair of shorts and wandered outside. He had dug a hole directly into the Henns’ backyard, so he crawled under the fence and looked up at the treehouse in the oak that grew along the property line, where Logan spent many a night whenever his parents argued. He sat down and watched as a pair of Fred’s classmates showed up and placed gifts on the picnic table.
Kara came out with a stack of plastic cups and a pitcher of lemonade. “Hi, boys. Fred is inside. I’ll tell him you’re here. You can put your towels over there.” She indicated to another table near a sandbox filled with Tonka trucks.
“Cool,” the taller one, named Eben, said.
The boys stripped off their jeans and shirts to reveal swimming trunks.
Wearing a pair of board shorts, Fred came out of the house and pointed at the pool. “Jump in, guys.”
They did, and soon, Fred joined them. Within a half hour, a dozen more boys arrived. Logan worked up the courage to try the pool. He stepped into the shallow end and sat down on the steps. The water was up to his chest.
Ramona’s voice was so loud she could be heard in the Henns yard. “You’re not going anywhere!”
Jarrod was just as loud, just as caustic. “The hell I’m not!”
Logan slid down the steps of the pool and sank down into the water. The argument escalated, and Logan reddened, certain someone would notice him. Kara came out with more lemonade and stopped beside her husband, who was setting up lawn chairs.
“Are they at it again?” Ted’s eyes darted around the yard. He had invited Logan to the party but didn’t see him anywhere.
Logan was ashamed. It hadn’t always been like this. He shut his eyes and drifted back to a time when MawMaw was still alive and his mother was happy. MawMaw had her own room, and it was the only place in the house that was kept clean and tidy. Even now, her belongings remained in the drawers and closet as though she were still alive. Occasionally, Logan escaped to her room to be alone in the dark and inhale the scent of lavender sachets she kept buried among her stockings. The only clutter back then was Ramona’s ever-increasing stack of Elvis Presley albums, which Ramona and MawMaw listened to as they played cards at the dining room table. Logan remembered them all—the one of Elvis in his tropical shirt and the swirly lettering of the words “Blue Hawaii”, the black and white one that said “Elvis” in red along the left-hand side of the cover and “Presley” in green along the bottom, and the one where golden records were hung like ornaments, with Elvis’s face on one of them. The golden records one had songs like “Hound Dog”, “All Shook Up”, “Heartbreak Hotel”, and “Jailhouse Rock” on it, and it was MawMaw and Ramona’s favorite.
Logan was only five when MawMaw died, and sometimes he was certain his mother had died with her. He knew, at least, her heart had. In the months following her mother’s passing, Ramona dedicated herself to buying useless items, cluttering up every square inch of the house but leaving MawMaw’s shrine intact. He wanted to go back to the days of Elvis, when both of the ladies would sit at the table, drinking gin and tonics, smoking cigarettes, playing cards, and gossiping like schoolgirls. Their laughter and the clinking of ice in their glasses complimented the music they listened to, and now that it was gone, all that was left in the house was the seething resentment between his parents.
Ramona was still screaming now, but Jarrod hadn’t left.
Kara restacked the plastic cups on the table. “Isn’t there something we can do?”
Finally, one of the boys noticed Logan pressed against the side of the pool in the shallow end. “Hey, Lockhart, don’t your parents ever shut up?”
A few boys made their way to the shallow end, and one of them grabbed him. “Don’t you ever get sick and tired of listening to them argue?”
One of the boys laughed and jumped on Logan, pushing him down, holding him under the water.
“Maybe they’re arguing about him. Maybe they’re sorry they had him. Maybe things would be better if he were dead.”
Underwater, Logan held his breath for as long as he could. Then he started to feel dizzy. Oblivious of the fact a boy had shouted Logan’s name and that he was in the pool, Kara was still talking to Ted. “That poor boy. Someone should get him away from those people.”
“Hey, cut it out, guys!” Fred pushed his friends out of the way and dragged Logan to the surface.
Logan sputtered and coughed.
Kara finally noticed him. “Oh, my God!”
Fred slapped Logan on the back, trying to clear his lungs. “You OK, dude?”
The boys who had been pushed away muttered to themselves and moved to the deep end. Logan wished Fred a happy birthday and got out of the pool. Kara noticed he didn’t have a towel, so she brought over one of hers and dried him off.
“It’s rough at home, isn’t it, Logan?”
Logan shook his head, trying to be tough.
Kara’s words were hesitant. “If you ever need anything…”
“Thanks, Mrs. Henn. I’ll be OK.”
Now dry, Logan walked back to the fence and crawled under it. He turned back, wanting to thank Mr. Henn for inviting him, but no one was watching.
Ryan’s voice was angelically high and sweet. Puberty hadn’t raised a pimple, but he already loved music and girls, and of all the girls in the world, little Beatrice Edwin ranked higher on his best-loved list than the chocolate in his milk, frosting on his cake, sleeping in on Saturdays, baseball with his buddies, and his favorite song—“Jailhouse Rock”—all rolled into one. Most of all, he loved to spend time with her in her bedroom, which was decorated with Disney princesses and an ever-increasing number of wall clocks. Right after Thanksgiving, in early December, they lay on the floor in her frilly room, staring at a new cuckoo clock she’d placed on the wall above her dresser, waiting for four p.m. sharp so they could watch the cheery bird pop out.