A Touch of Lavender Page 3

  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 fame 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 my 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 my 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 sea gulls crying after a storm.

  The next day when I got home from school, Lavender wasn't there. My Mom was sitting at the table. She didn't even look up until I slapped my school books 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 worse.

  "Don't hate him," Mom said, in her slow, sticky voice. "We had to do it, Billy. We couldn't help ourselves. And someday it's going to be all right."

  She couldn't have known how bad it was going to get. All that long empty evening, she'd shiver suddenly and then wrap her arms around herself and cock her head as if seeking for a sound. I sat on the couch and watched her and tried to imagine her loneliness. My mother cut off from music, from all sound. As kind to seal off her lungs from air. But he loved her, he loved me, he couldn't leave her empty like that and me alone, he wouldn't just go away. I watched her digging her fingers into her ears like she was trying to claw out a stopper. Her nails came out with tiny shreds of dry skin and scabby stuff. She wiped at her ears with pieces of toilet paper, and they came away pink. It was awful to watch. But the worst was the sound of flippers on the ramp, and the heavy slap at the door. The worst was me jumping up, believing that Lavender had come back and everything was going to be all right. I ran to the door and dragged it open for him, and he fell halfway into the room.

  It was a terribly clattery sound, his fall, but he didn't cry out. My Mom didn't make a sound as she went to him. I stood clear of them both, watched her roll him over.

  I screamed when I saw what they had done to him. The remains of his bladders fluttered in feeble rags and a pale yellowish stuff oozed from the torn edges. They had slashed them all, every sound membrane on his body. He tried to speak, but made only a ridiculous sound of flapping curtains and newspapers blowing down the street, a terrible fluttering of ripped drumheads. My mother knelt over him and lifted his flippers and pressed them to her cheeks. Even now, I don't believe it was the act of a junkie trying for one last rush. There was terrible wisdom and love in her eyes as his shining iridescence ate into her skin and marked her. His tattered membranes fluttered once more and then hung still.

  I ran out of the apartment and down the streets. They were shiny with rain, shining like his skin, and wet like the dripping stuff from his wounds. I ran as far and fast as I could, trying to run away from those terrible moments to a place where it hadn't happened. I don't know who called the police or the ambulance or whoever it was that came and took the body away. I know it wasn't my Mom. She would have sat there forever, just holding his flippers while his music faded.

  I came back in the grey part of morning. A man and a woman were waiting for me. They wore long overcoats and stood, as if sitting in our chairs might make them dirty. An outline was chalked on the floor, and they wouldn't answer any of my questions. Instead, they asked me questions, lots of them. Had the Skoags killed Lavender? Why? Did I see them do it? Did my Mom help them do it? Why had a Skoag been living with us? Had he ever tried to touch me? But the anger inside me wouldn't let me answer their questions. "Where's my Mom?" I demanded each time, and finally they put me in a car and took me to the Children's Home and left me there.

  The women at the Children's Home all wore grey pants and white shirts. They all called me "honey." They gave me two pants, two shirts, underwear, socks and shoes and a bath. They threw away all my own stuff. Then they showed me a bed with a brown blanket on it in a row of beds with brown blankets, and told me the bed and the box at the foot of it were mine.

  The next day, more people came to talk to me. Nice people, with kind voices and gum and Lifesavers. A lady told me my Mommy was sick, but was in a place where she'd get better soon. But she said it like really my Mom was very bad, and had to stay somewhere until she was good again. They told me the Skoag was gone and I didn't have to be afraid anymore. I could tell about it and no one would
hurt me. They told me the best way to help my Mom was to answer all of their questions. But their voices sounded like creaking cage doors and iron gates swinging in the wind. I knew that talking to them wouldn't help my Mom. So when they asked me questions, I always said I didn't know, or answered the opposite of what was true. I contradicted myself on purpose. I said Lavender was my father. I said my Mom was his secretary. I said I was going to throw up. Then I did, trying to make it hit their shoes. After three days they left me alone.

  After that I had to go to school classes each day with the other Home-kids and special anti-substance abuse classes for the kids of junkies. I got beat up nearly every day. The bigger kids called me "Billy Bun, the Skoag fucker's son." One of the kids had a checkstand newspaper with a picture of my Mom on the front and big black print that said, "SKOAG'S LOVE SLAVE WITNESSES RITUAL EXECUTION!!! Gropie confesses, `They killed him for loving me! " I hit that kid and grabbed the paper and tore it up, and the playground lady said I was an animal not fit to associate with other children. I had to stay in for three recesses. Which was fine with me. That night I got out of bed and went down to that kid's bunk and pissed on the foot of it. So he got in trouble for wetting his bed. I learned fast.

  A very long time went by. Probably it was only a month or two, but it seemed forever. My real life had ended, and someone had stuck me in this new one. I felt like I was someone else, that both Lavender's life and Lavender's death had happened to someone I knew, some dumb little kid who hadn't seen his Mom was a junkie and his friend was her pusher. I'd never be that stupid again. The counselor told me that I must always remember that none of it was my fault. I was only a child, and I couldn't have done a thing about my mother's decision to become a Skoag gropie. They worked real hard at taking away my guilt and replacing it with bitterness toward my Mom, who had ruined my life. But then a spring day came, and I looked out the classroom window and saw a lady with a coat and hood and gloves and a scarf wrapped around her face. I didn't recognize her, so I just went back to arithmetic. At recess they let her take me home.

  Things are simple when you're a kid. So simple and so awful. I accepted what happened and the aftermath, just kept on day after day, and nothing surprised me because I never knew what to expect. So I wasn't shocked to find that our door had been busted in, and someone, our neighbors or the street kids, had trashed the place. The smeared chalk outline was still on the floor, with piles of human shit all over it. Lavender's wall hangings were dead brown tatters, and his flowers were a moldering mess of brown stems and petals and broken glass on the table. The cupboard doors had been ripped down, the microwave was gone, and my couch smelled like urine. Food had been thrown around and mouse droppings were everywhere.

  Mom picked up a kitchen chair and set it on its feet and brushed off the seat. She took off her coat and scarf and gloves and put them on the chair, baring her scars so matter-of-factly that they didn't shock me.

  They were part of her now, like her fat belly and dark eyes. She picked up a scrap of paper off the floor and wrote down a list of cleaning supplies and cheap food and gave me some money. Then she picked up our old broom.

  No one bothered me on the way to the store. The check-out man stared at me for about two minutes before he rang up the stuff. Coming home, I passed a Skoag on the street, a big fat one, and he turned and started following me. But all Skoags are slow, and I ignored the way he tooted for me to come back, he wanted to be my friend, he had candy for me. I just hurried, going through alleys until I lost him.

  I got home, and the place looked almost normal. Most of the mess had been scraped into brown sacks for me to shuttle out to the dumpster. The chalk lines were gone, and as if that was some kind of undoing magic, I half expected to see Lavender come out of the bedroom, or to hear his cello thrumming. Instead there was silence, and the crisp brown tatters of his wall hangings dangled over the edges of a garbage sack.

  I stood there and the silence filled me up, made me as deaf and isolated as my mother. Welling up with the silence came the sudden grief of knowing he was really dead. I sat down on the floor and started crying and calling out, "Lavender, Lavender!" My Mom kept right on trying to put the cupboard doors back on, using a table knife for a screwdriver, and I kicked my feet and slapped my hands on the hard cold cement and screamed until someone upstairs started pounding on the floor with a broom handle. I guess Mom felt the vibrations. She came and held me until I stopped crying, and said I was okay. But I wasn't. I knew just how alone I really was. My pain was like an invisible knife stuck in me that no one could see to pull out. I knew my mother was hurt just as badly, and there was nothing I could do to help her, either. That was when I decided to forgive her for the awful thing she had done to me, for making Lavender go away.

  We found a rhythm in our days, a steady beat that kept us living. Mom became a very good housekeeper, mostly to fill her time. Everything was cleaned up and she pieced back together the broken stuff. She saved from each aid check until we could buy an economy microwave and have hot foods again. She mended all my clothes, and sewed things from my outgrown stuff. Every two weeks she'd put on her gloves and scarf and go after her aid check, but I did all the shopping. I went back to school. I got beat up every day on the playground. Then I stole a baseball bat from school and laid for the kid that had done it and really worked him over. The third time a kid beat me up, and then got bushwhacked, the other kids made the connection. They left me alone. They knew they could hit me at school, but sooner or later the price for doing it was higher than anyone wanted to pay. So I got by. I'd still see the fat Skoag outside the grocery store, and he'd call to me, but I outran him. So no one bothered me. The silence of my home spread out and wrapped me up. No one talked to me much, and that seemed fitting. What better way to mourn Lavender's passing than with silence? I was nine years old, and the best part of my life was over.

  Mom got fatter and slower. I thought she was going to die. She moved like an old, old woman, and sat like she was blind as well as deaf. Once a week an aid lady came, with pamphlets about how not to be a Skoag gropie, and Don't Do Drugs coloring books and balloons and crayons for me. She'd give Mom a signed slip, and Mom had to turn it in to get her aid check. The aid lady was younger than Mom and wore grey pants and a white shirt. I secretly believed she was from the Children's Home and might take me back there. She always made me show her my hands, and every week I had to pee in a bottle for her, even though everyone knows that Skoag slime won't show in a pee test. She left signing booklets for my Mom, but she didn't want them. So I took them and learned to sign dirty words to the kids at school.

  And Lavender was never there.

  That's how it would hit me, I'd be going along, doing a math page or signing out something about someone's sister or folding up my blanket or getting a drink of water, and suddenly I'd notice, all over again, that Lavender wasn't there. It always felt like someone had suddenly grabbed hold of my heart and squeezed it. I looked all through the house one day, trying to find one thing that he had touched, one thing he'd given to us that we still had. But there was nothing. It was like he'd never existed, and the silence was like he'd never made music.

  One May day I came home from school and Mom had a baby. She hadn't warned me, so it was a big shock to find her lying in bed with this little pink thing dressed in a nightgown made from one of my old T-shirts. I knew someone had helped her from the neatly folded towels by the bed, and the grey box of paper diapers. More aid stuff My Mom's fat stomach was gone, and I felt really dumb for not knowing she had been pregnant. I saw pregnant women in the streets all the time, but it had never occurred to me that my Mom could get that way. I knew, too, that she couldn't get a baby unless she'd done it with somebody. And the only one who'd been living with us…

  Mom wasn't saying much, just watching me as I looked at the baby. What fascinated me the most was those tiny little fingernails she had, thin as paper. I kept staring at her hands.

  "Go ahead," Mom finally said. "You can
touch her. She's your little sister, Billy. Put your finger in her hand." Her voice dragged like an old tape, and she sounded really tired.

  "Is it… safe?" I asked. But she wasn't watching my mouth, so she didn't know I'd said anything. I went and got my school tablet. On it I printed, very carefully, "IS SHE PART SKOAG ON HER SKIN?" Then I took it back into Mom's bedroom and handed it to her.

  She read it and crumpled it up and threw it across the room. Her mouth went so tight it was white around her lips. It scared me. She'd never been mad at me while Lavender was around, and since he'd died, she'd been too beaten to be angry at anything. "Shit!" she said, and the word came out with hard edges, sounding like she used to. She grabbed my wrist, and I could feel the hard slickness of her Skoag scarred palms. "You listen to me, Billy Boy," she said fiercely. "I know what you been hearing. But you knew Lavender, and you damn well know me. And you should know that we… that we loved each other. And if he'd been a human and we could have had a baby together, we'd have done it. But he wasn't, and we didn't. This baby here, she's all mine. One hundred percent. It sometimes happens to women who get hooked on Skoag touch. They call it a self-induced pregnancy. This baby's a clone of me. You understand that? She's the same as me, all over again. Only I'm going to make sure she comes out right. She's going to be loved, she's going to have chances. She's not going to end up in a dump on aid, with no…"

  Her voice got more and more runny, the words souping together. She let go of my wrist, and started crying. She lifted her hands and curled her fingers toward the tight skin on her palms, and held them near her face but not touching it. Her tears trickled into the flipper scars that her final touching of Lavender had left on her face. Her crying woke the baby up, and she started crying, too. Her little face got red and her mouth gaped open, but no sound came out. Then my Mom said to her, in the most terrible voice I've ever heard, "Baby, what'd you come here for? I got nothing to give you. I got nothing to give anyone." And she rolled over and turned her back on her.