I listen to Serena’s reedy soprano, punctuated by the beeps and whirs of monitors attached to her body:
No hiding in the darkness
No anger and no pain
The outside may be different
But inside I’m the same
On the second verse, when I have her melody tangled in my mind, I begin to pick out harmony on my own guitar. I finish when she finishes singing, and as she slides her hand up the neck of the guitar, I clap.
“That,” I tell Serena, “was the best present ever.”
“Worth getting sick for?”
Once, during a session, Serena was playing with a rainstick, turning it over and over and getting progressively more agitated. When I asked her what it reminded her of, she told me about the last day she had been outside in the Dominican Republic. She was walking home from school and it started to pour. She knew, because she stepped in the puddles that were forming, and her hair was wet. But she couldn’t feel drops on her skin, because of the scar tissue. What she’d never understood was why she could not feel rain, but something as insubstantial as a classmate’s sneer about her Bride of Frankenstein face felt like a hot sword running through her.
That was the moment she decided not to leave her house again.
Music therapy is not supposed to be about the therapist, it’s supposed to be about the patient. And yet, a small splash on the belly of my guitar suggests I must be crying. Like Serena, I haven’t felt the tears on my cheeks at all.
I take a deep breath. “Which verse do you like the most?”
“The second, I guess.”
I fall back into the familiar: teacher to student, therapist to patient, the person I used to be. “Tell me why,” I say.
I don’t know where Max has found the boat, but the rental is waiting for us when we get to Narragansett Bay. The weather report was wrong; it is cold and damp. I am quite sure we are the only people booking a motorboat this morning. Mist sprays against my face, and I zip my jacket all the way up to my chin.
“You go first,” Max says, and he holds the boat so that I can step into it. Then he hands me the cardboard box that has been on the seat between us for the drive down to the beach.
Max guns the engine, and we go spitting out to sea, puttering through the no-wake zone around buoys and the sleeping hulks of sailboats. Whitecaps reach their bony fingers over the hull of the little boat and soak my sneakers.
“Where are we going?” I yell over the motor.
Max doesn’t hear me, or he pretends not to. He has been doing a lot of that lately. He comes home hours after the sun has set and I know he couldn’t possibly be pruning or planting or mowing or even surfing. He uses this excuse to sleep on the couch.I didn’t want to wake you up,he says, as if it is my fault.
It’s not even really morning yet. It was Max’s idea to come out here when the ocean was quiet—no fishing trawlers, no weekend sailors. I sit on the center of the bench of the boat with the box on my lap. When I close my eyes, the churn of the engine and the slap of the waves rearrange themselves into a rap beat. I drum my fingers against the metal seat, playing in time.
After about ten minutes Max cuts the engine. We bob along, tossed by our own wake.
He sits across from me, his hands tucked between his knees. “What do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to . . .”
“No,” I say, thrusting the box at him. “You do it.”
He nods and takes the small blue ceramic shoe out of the box. A few packing peanuts flutter away on the wind. It makes me panic—what if a big gust of wind comes along at just the wrong moment? What if the ashes wind up in my hair, on my jacket?
“I feel like we ought to say something,” Max murmurs.
My eyes fill with tears. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.
For not knowing anything better to say.
For having to do this in the first place.
