Chris Adrian - The Great Night

Everything looked the same. Her father looked the same, singing with his eyes closed and strumming those same four chords on his guitar. Her mother looked the same, shimmying in place. Chris and Craig and Colin looked the same, and Clay looked the same, thrusting his chin out while he played the bass. Mary was stabbing, as she always did, at the keyboard, and Malinda was managing to open her pinched-up little mouth just enough for her weak voice to slip out. Melissa was dancing around like a fool who didn’t have a clue what was in store for her, and Peabo … it didn’t even matter what Peabo was doing. They were all hideous, and she knew without a mirror to tell her so that she was uglier than any of them. As soon as the video shoot was done, she found her father in his study and told him.

They started their tour in the auditorium of the New Calvary School, which was where they started all their tours, because it was down the street from their house and because it could be relied upon to provide a crowd that was both sympathetic and constructively critical. Though the family had technically abandoned the institution, the principal was still a good friend of their father’s and a member of their church, and he passed out evaluation forms, dutifully completed by all the students, which scored their performance from one to ten in areas like musicality and spirit and goodness of news. A week after Peabo’s departure, there was still a shadow on the performance, though Melissa was the only one who said she missed him, or that they had played better with him around, or that the music sounded different without him. “Don’t be stupid,” Malinda said. “He only played the tambourine .”

All their parents would say was that he had done something that demonstrated that it wasn’t in God’s plan for him to live with them, which was what they said about everyone who got sent back or sent away, but the children suspected it must have been something horrible, because no one before had ever been sent away after only one week. “I guess you were right about him,” Malinda said to Molly. “He didn’t last a month.” She gave Molly a hard stare.

“I guess so,” Molly said, finding it easy to stare back blankly at her sister as if she’d had nothing at all to do with Peabo’s ejection. It was exactly as easy as it was to stare blankly at her parents, together and separately, when they asked if anything else had happened besides just a viewing . Aunt Jean took her shopping, though she wouldn’t buy any of the things Molly had picked out for herself. The special attention almost gave away that something had happened to her, and Molly hid the condolence barrette that Jean had given her, after a weepy interrogation in the car. “It must have been so horrible for you!” she said, and Molly said, with perfect calmness, that it was.

They opened with “Sycamore Trees” and then played “Jesus Loves You More” before their father talked a bit to the audience. He wasn’t a preacher, but he liked to give sermons and tell stories meant to throw the message of the song into starker relief. He was saying something about choices, which led into “The Ballad of the Warm Fuzzies,” and Molly had a moment in which she thought she could hear the silence into which the voice should be speaking an insult to him. But it had been silent since Peabo left, as if it were sulking. She didn’t miss it, but she didn’t feel any better, now that it had shut up. She wondered where Peabo was. She had been succeeding fantastically at not thinking about him, though not about his Jesus, which accompanied her everywhere. It was not exactly that she could not stop thinking about it, or even that she saw it in cucumbers or carrots or bunches of bananas. It was with her in a way that was hard to describe, because nothing had ever stayed with her this way before, a permanent afterimage not perceived with the eyes.

The music started without her; she had missed her father’s cue. She started in late and settled down into an unthinking rhythm. She looked around at the audience and found herself searching for Peabo, but there were only three black kids in the whole student body and they were all girls. “Don’t you miss him?” Melissa kept asking them all. Molly could swear that she did not, but now she thought she might cry. That was okay. Her father approved of tears, though not sobs, during a performance. She missed the chorus the first time around, waiting for the tears to come, but not a single one fell, even though everywhere she looked she saw the shine and the blur of them. Her family were moving all around her, and she didn’t know why until they squared off into their fuzzy and prickly sides. They sang at her, cocking their heads as they asked if she was going to be a Warm Fuzzy, but it was clear from their faces that they were really asking what was wrong with her.

I don’t know, she tried to say, right into her microphone, but something else came out, not even a word but just a noise made in a voice that did not sound like her own voice, though it was very familiar. It was lost in the singing. The family stepped expertly back to their original positions and started the second verse. Melissa picked up a bag and started to throw Warm Fuzzies — really just plush kittens with their hair teased up and their legs cut off, bought in bulk from the five-and-dime — into the crowd. Molly spoke again, louder this time and clearer, so it might have been heard over the music if it hadn’t been lost under the noise of the crowd. “Bitch!”

Malinda turned around to glare at her and raise her hand to her lips in a gesture denoting not “Shush” but “Shut up and sing.” Molly shook her tambourine at her, two shakes off the beat. Malinda furrowed her brow and stamped her foot, which warranted another shake of the tambourine and a spoken response: “Bitch! Bastard! Bitch!” Then her mother turned around. She got a shake as well, and then Molly gave one to everyone in the family, one here and two there, and then a scattering of them for the audience. She imagined her family in the audience, and imagined herself in the audience, and imagined Peabo in the audience, and imagined his Jesus in the audience, and now she was singing to all of them. It was a whole audience of delicately curving, uncircumcised Jesuses, and each of them was asking her a question. “Fuck!” she answered. A twisted moan, it hardly sounded like the word, but it was the answer, as she shouted it, to every question she could ask. Where did he come from? Where did he go? Where had the shine gone when it disappeared off everything? What was wrong with her? The noise she was making— “Fargh! Foo-ack!” —was the answer, and then it was the question, too. She stood up straight and tall, shaking her tambourine and singing for a long time after the music had stopped.

M olly was developing a relationship with the bench. She knew it pretty well already, compared to all the other benches in all the other parks in the city, because she had spent so much time on it while Ryan made his Buena Vista peregrinations, but tonight it felt like it was giving something back to her, which was what separated the really special benches from the ones you were merely friendly with. She sat on it, and then slouched, and then eventually reclined, and the longer she spent on it the more at ease she felt about never making it to the party. The more time she spent on the bench, the more it seemed like enough work — indeed, a lot of work — to have climbed this high hill, and the more it seemed like enough satisfaction to sit and enjoy the view, though the fog had closed it half an hour ago and she had spent the last fifteen minutes on her back staring up at the swirling white ceiling above the treetops.