So I sing, slowly, a cappella. “Hallelujah,” the old Leonard Cohen song from before Lucy was born.
With my eyes closed, with every word a brushstroke, I do the kind of praying people do when they don’t know if there is a God. I hope, for Lucy. For me and Vanessa. For all the misfits in the world who don’t necessarily want to fit in. We just don’t want to always be blamed, either.
When I finish, I have tears in my eyes. But Lucy doesn’t. Her features might as well be stone.
“Again,” she commands.
I sing the song twice. Three times.
It is on the chorus, on the sixth round, that Lucy starts to sob. She buries her face in her hands. “It’s not a boy,” she confesses.
When I was small I got the strangest Christmas gift from a distant aunt: a twenty-dollar bill inside an acrylic puzzle. You had to pull knobs and twist levers in different machinations until you found the sequence that would release the catch and let you take the bounty. I was tempted to smash it open with a hammer, but my mother convinced me that the pieces would fall into place, and, once they started, it seemed I couldn’t make a wrong move. Boom boom boom, one door or latch opened after another as if they’d never been locked in the first place.
The same thing happens now—a curtain pulled back, a sentence turned on its edge to reveal a different meaning: the suicide attempts. Pastor Clive’s speech. Lucy’s angry tackle. Jeremy.Can someone stop loving you?
It’s not a boy,Lucy had said.
Maybe that’s because it’s agirl.
If there is one cardinal rule of music therapy, it’s that you come into a patient’s life at the place she needs you, and you leave her at a different place. You, as the therapist, are just a catalyst. A constant. You do not change as part of the equation. And you most certainly do not talk about yourself. You’re there solely for the patient.
It’s why, when Lucy asked me whether I was married, I didn’t answer.
It’s why she knew nothing about me and I know everything about her.
This isn’t a friendship—I’ve told Lucy that before. This is a professional relationship.
But that was before my future became a snack for public consumption. That was before I sat in a courtroom with the stares of strangers needling between my shoulder blades. Before I listened to a pastor I did not know or like tell me I was a reprobate. Before I went to the ladies’ room and had someone slip me a novena card underneath the stall wall with a message scribbled on the back:I am praying for you, dear.
If I have to run this gauntlet because I happen to love a woman, let it at least do someone else some good. Let me pay it forward.
“Lucy,” I say quietly. “You know I’m gay, right?”
Her head snaps up. “Why—why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking or feeling, but you need to understand that it’s completely normal.”
She stares at me, silent.
“You know how, when you go back into a preschool classroom, you sit down in the tiny chairs at the tiny tables and feel like Alice in Wonderland? You can’t imagine ever being small enough to fit the space? That’s what it feels like to come out. You look back and can’t imagine squeezing inside again. Even if Pastor Clive and his entire church are shoving as hard as they can.”
Lucy’s eyes are so wide I can see rims of white around the irises. She leans forward, her breath caught, as there is a knock on the door.
Vanessa pokes her head inside. “It’s eight-forty-five,” she tells me, and I jump out of my seat. We are going to have to fly if we want to get to the courthouse on time.
“Lucy, I have to go,” I say, but she is not looking at me. She’s looking at Vanessa, and thinking about what Pastor Clive said about her, and putting my life together as seamlessly as I just did hers.
Lucy grabs her backpack and, without a word, runs out of Vanessa’s office.
I didn’t realize how much of being a witness involves being an actor. Just as if I’m in a stage play, I’ve been well rehearsed for this moment—from learning the lines through the intonation of my voice to the costume which Angela herself picked out for me (a navy blue sheath dress with a white cardigan; so incredibly conservative that when Vanessa saw me she started laughing and called me Mother Baxter).
Yes, I have been prepared. Yes, I am technically ready. And yes, I’m certainly used to performing.
But then again, there’s a reason I play and sing music. Somehow, I get lost in the notes, adrift in the melodies, and forget where I am while I’m doing it. When I play for an audience, I can totally believe that the benefit sits squarely with me, instead of the people listening. On the other hand, the last time I was in a play, I was ten years old and cast as a cornstalk inThe Wizard of Oz,and thirty seconds before I had to walk onto the stage, I threw up on the director’s shoes.
“My name is Zoe Baxter,” I say. “I live at six-eighty Garvin Street in Wilmington.”
Angela smiles brightly at me, as if I’ve solved a differential calculus problem, instead of just reciting my name and address. “How old are you, Zoe?”
