Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

The drunk man shoved him and grabbed my hand. “You,” he slurred, “are a fucking nightingale!”

“You don’t swear in front of a lady,” Max said, and he punched the guy. The drunk collapsed against a shrieking cotillion of bridesmaids, their long gowns breaking his fall to the floor.

In an instant, a tuxedoed behemoth grabbed Max and spun him around. “This here’s for beatin’ on my daddy,” he said, and he knocked Max unconscious.

It was pandemonium-Hatfields versus McCoys, tables being overturned, old ladies tearing ribbons off each other’s hats. The band grabbed up their instruments, trying to keep the fray from destroying their equipment. I leaped off the stage and crouched over Max. He was bleeding from his mouth and nose, and also from a cut on his forehead where he’d struck the stage as he fell. I pulled his head onto my lap and huddled over him, shielding him from the rest of the commotion. “That,” I said, as soon as his eyes fluttered open, “was idiotic.”

He grinned. “I don’t know about that,” Max said. “It got your arms around me.”

He was bleeding so much that I insisted he go to the emergency room. He gave me the keys to his truck and let me drive while he pressed a napkin to his forehead. “Guess no one’s ever going to forget Reid’s wedding,” he mused.

I didn’t answer.

“You’re mad at me,” Max said.

“It was a compliment,” I said finally. “You punched a guy for giving me a compliment.”

He hesitated. “You’re right. I should have let him tear your dress off.”

“He wouldn’t have torn my dress off. The guys in the band would have stopped him before-”

“I wanted to be the one to save you,” Max said simply, and I stared at him in the green glow of the dashboard.

At the hospital, I waited with Max in a cubicle. “You’re going to need stitches,” I told him.

“I’m going to need a lot more than that,” he said. “For starters, I’m pretty sure my brother will never speak to me again.”

Before I could respond, a doctor pulled aside the curtain and entered, introducing himself. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and asked what had happened. “I ran into something,” Max said.

He winced as the doctor probed the scalp wound. “Into what?”

“A fist?”

The doctor took a penlight from his pocket and instructed Max to follow the tiny beam. I watched his eyes roll up, then from side to side. He caught my glance and winked at me.

“You’re going to need stitches,” the doctor echoed. “You don’t seem to have a concussion, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make sure someone stays with you tonight.” He pulled aside the curtains of the cubicle. “I’ll be back with the suture tray.”

Max looked up at me, a question in his eyes.

“Of course I’ll stay,” I said. “Doctor’s orders.”

One week later, I go back to work at the burn unit of the hospital. The first patient I see is Serena, a fourteen-year-old girl from the Dominican Republic who is one of my regulars. Burned severely in a house fire, she was treated locally and wound up disfigured and scarred. She hid in the dark in her family home for two years before coming to Rhode Island to have reconstructive skin grafts. I’ve met with her for an hour each time I am scheduled to be at the hospital, although at first, no one really understood what good music therapy could do for Serena. She was blind because of cataracts that developed when her scarred eyelids wouldn’t shut, and has limited movement in her hands. At first I just sang to her until she began to sing along with me. Eventually, I modified a guitar for her, tuning it to an open chord and then fitting it with a slide so that she could play. I put Velcro patches on the back of the neck of the guitar so that she could literally feel her way into the chords she was learning to play.

“Hi, Serena,” I say, as I knock on the door to her room.

“Hey, stranger,” she answers. I can hear the smile in her voice.

I am grateful, selfishly, for her blindness. For the fact that, unlike minutes ago, when I was talking to the nurses at their desk, I will not have to be responsible for putting her at ease when she doesn’t know how to offer condolences. Serena never knew I was pregnant; therefore, she has no reason to know the baby died.

“Where’ve you been?” she asks.

“Sick,” I say, pulling up a chair beside her and settling my guitar across my lap. I begin to tune it, and she reaches for her own instrument. “What have you been doing?”

“The usual,” Serena says. Her face is swathed in bandages, still healing from her most recent operation. Her words are slurred, but, after all this time, I know the patterns of her speech. “I have something for you.”

“You do?”

“Yeah. Listen. It’s called ‘The Third Life.’” I sit up, interested. This term grew out of therapy sessions we’d had over the past two months, where we’d talked about the difference between her first life-pre-fire-and her second, after the fire. What about your third life? I had asked Serena. Where do you think of yourself, when all the surgeries are finished?

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.