Robin Hobb - The Inheritance and Other Stories

It was easier to talk to Lavender instead. He always knew everything anyway, and Mom was so happy and dreamy that I didn’t worry about anything being wrong. She wasn’t like the filthy, skinny Skoag gropies in the schoolbook. She was clean, and shining with health and dreams, plump and pretty. About then I found out Lavender didn’t always leave at night anymore, but sometimes lay on the bed beside her, with Mom gripping his flipper all night, her head pillowed on his plastic-coated body. So I should have known she was a Skoag gropie, right, and realized she was stone deaf. How could I? I was a kid, she didn’t look like a gropie, and even if she ignored me a lot, she was still my mom. And she still listened every night to Lavender’s playing.

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 came 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 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 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 seagulls crying after a storm.

The next day when I got home from school, Lavender wasn’t there. Mom was sitting at the table. She didn’t even look up until I slapped my schoolbooks 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 some day 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, and 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.