Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

Looking back, I know he didn’t understand much of basic human needs. Because he learned mostly from me, he had a seven-year-old boy’s idea of what was important. Food he understood, and he always made sure there was plenty of it, though he tended to buy the same kinds over and over again. He loved bright, simple toys that moved, yo-yos and tops and plastic gliders, marbles and Super Balls and Frisbees. I’m convinced he thought that flowers were essential to my mother, and he filled our little apartment with graceful glass vases full of them. I never thought to ask for anything more than what he brought and I know my mother never did. She was too used to giving to learn taking easily. Still, Lavender tried to provide for us. I remember the day I came home and found him cautiously touching his flippers to the protruding nails and scabs of Sheetrock on the two-by-four wall studs. “This pleases the Mom?” he asked me.

“No. It’s really ugly. But it’s all we’ve got,” I told him. A wrinkling ran over his deflated bladders, a gesture I had learned was like an excited grin. “This would please the Mom?” the cello thrummed, and he began pulling yards and yards of stuff out of his belly pouch. Shiny like plastic, but soft like fabric, and so thin you could crumple up a square yard of it in your fist. He began fastening it to the wall, in graceful drapery, and as it fell straight, the room warmed with both color and heat, the musky basement smell faded, and a gentle light suffused the room. Then we hid in the closet until my mom came home and was surprised by it. “Oh, Lavender, you cover up all the rough edges of my life,” Mom told him. For a long time, I thought she meant the wall studs. He could make the hanging different colors, and he adjusted it almost daily, though I never asked how. If I had, he would have told me. I just didn’t ask.

He told me anything I wanted to know. I knew more about Skoags than any of the “experts” of that time. Anything I asked him, he answered. I knew that they had been exiled to our world because they sang in public, and that was not permitted in their home world. I knew that they sang only other people’s music, because making up new music was something only a holy leader could do. The Earth Skoags were religious rebels, sort of like the Pilgrims. They believed singing was so worshipful that Skoags should do it all the time, everywhere, and that everyone should do it, not just priest-Skoags. On their own world, that was heresy, and anyone caught at it had to choose between exile or “a most unfortunate happening.” For a long time I didn’t know what he meant by that. A lot of what he told me was puzzling. Lavender kept trying to explain to me that singing was a circle, and that if one sang well enough to make the perfect music, it would create the one that would close the circle. My mom, he said, was “Close. Almost the end of the circle. The one, but not quite.” I never understood what he meant, but it was very important to him. A day didn’t pass without him trying to make me understand. There just weren’t human words for the Skoag ideas. It worried him very much. It was the only hole in our communication. He told me other stuff, like how some Skoags had long, articulated flippers like my fingers, and how they were dehydrated for their space journeys, and how they thought of humans as “half sexed” because we weren’t self-fertile. Anything I asked, he answered. But if I didn’t ask, he didn’t bother me with it. I never asked him if he had come to end his people’s exile, or if he were a very important Skoag on his world or how their spaceships operated. Or he would have told me. But I didn’t ask.

In the long evenings, Lavender made music for us, playing anything we wanted. He knew every song my mother ever asked for and could do them in any artist’s style. She would sit on the end of my couch, my feet warm against her, listening raptly while Lavender played until I fell asleep. Mornings I would waken to his slaps on the door and run to let him in. He’d be laden with cereal and milk and fruit and a packet of his own gruelly food, and always fresh flowers for Mom. He’d play back to me all the new sounds he’d heard in the night city, not just the 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. Whew, I thought as my mind darted to my Don’t Do Drugs book at school. I’m glad Mom didn’t turn into a Skoag gropie.

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.