Lourdes
Part One
The studio was on the fourth floor of a building that used to be a printworks. When the drum room was quiet you could still smell ink in it, a faint metallic sweetness under the coffee and the carpet glue. Lou had been in there since nine. By the time Naru arrived at eleven, the kit was miked and tuned, and Lou had tracked the song three times with nobody singing over it, only the guide track in her headphones.
It was the hotel-bathroom song. Morgana had written it at four in the morning on a hotel bathroom floor with the tap running so nobody in the room would hear her. She had never been able to finish it. Naru had finished it at the Aldine, in front of two thousand people. Marcus had called the next morning and said that one, that's the single, and for once he had been right.
"She's had a coffee," the engineer said when Naru came into the control room. He nodded through the glass at Lou. "That's about as warm as she gets before lunch."
Through the window Lou sat behind the kit with her headphones round her neck and her sticks crossed on the snare, flexing her left hand slowly, open and closed, like someone working a stiffness out of it. When she saw Naru she lifted one stick an inch. It was the whole of a greeting.
They worked. Naru sang a guide vocal for Lou to play against, and then they did it the other way round. By two o'clock the drums were done, and Lou came into the control room and sat on the old leather couch at the back with a paper cup of coffee from the machine in the hall. Naru sat at the other end of it with hers. The engineer went out for sandwiches.
The coffee was terrible. It was burnt and thin and tasted faintly of the cup. Naru drank it slowly with her whole attention, because it was hot and bitter and because she had never had this particular bad coffee before. She found she liked knowing what it was like.
Lou watched her.
"You used to put four sugars in that," Lou said.
Naru looked at the cup. She remembered. Four sugars, stirred with whatever was nearest, a pen or the end of a drumstick, drunk while it was still too hot, in every studio for years. She remembered it the way she remembered everything of Morgana's, clearly and from slightly too far away, like a film of someone else's life.
"I know," she said.
Lou kept looking at her. Then she looked away, through the glass at her kit sitting under the lights.
"You were a bitch to work with," she said. "Before. You know that, right?"
"Yes."
"Phoenix." Lou drank. "Two years ago. You fired me between soundcheck and doors because I wouldn't take the bridge faster. By text. From your hotel room, which was down the hall from mine." She said it without heat, the way you'd read off a set time. "Never paid me for the last two shows. I drove home."
Naru remembered Phoenix. She remembered the heat in the venue, the bridge, and the tempo Morgana had wanted, which had been wrong. Lou had been right. Morgana had known it and couldn't stand it. She remembered the text, word for word, and the drink she'd had after sending it. She remembered not thinking about Lou again until she needed a drummer eight months later.
She remembered all of it, and now, sitting on the couch with the bad coffee going cold in her hand, she was sorry. Morgana had never been sorry about any of it.
"I'm sorry," she said. "You were right about the bridge. I knew you were right. That was why."
Lou turned and looked at her properly.
It lasted a long time. Naru felt it go through her, the plain hard attention of someone who said true things for a living and could tell when she was hearing one. Under it she felt Lou's want move, slowly, like something large turning over in its sleep. It wasn't suspicion. It was closer to the way you look at a song you thought you knew when someone plays it in a different key.
"I'll pay you," Naru said. "Both shows."
"I don't want the money."
"I know. I'll pay you anyway."
Lou made a sound that might have been a laugh. She leaned her head back against the couch and looked at the ceiling tiles.
"My Tito Ben had a heart attack," she said, "when I was fifteen. On the kitchen floor, in front of everybody, at Christmas. They brought him back in the ambulance. Three minutes, they said." She turned the cup in her hands. "He was a mean old drunk my whole life. Then he came home from the hospital and he was nice. He called my mother every Sunday. He said sorry to people. He came to my school concert and cried."
Naru waited.
"My mother said he'd seen the face of God," Lou said. "My mother says that about everything."
"What happened?"
"About four months later he was a mean old drunk again." Lou shrugged. "Dying shakes things loose. Then they settle." She drank the last of her coffee and looked at the cup as though it had personally disappointed her. "So. That's my theory."
"Dying changed me," Naru said.
It was true. She said it because it was true, and because Lou had held it out to her ready-made, the way you hold out a coat to someone coming in from the rain. Lou nodded slowly. Naru felt her put it away somewhere, not quite closed.
"Give it four months," Lou said.
The engineer came back with sandwiches. They ate them on the couch, and then Naru went into the booth and sang the hotel-bathroom song from the start. When she came out of it, three takes later, Lou was still on the couch in the control room. Her sticks were already in her bag. She had nothing left to do there, and she hadn't gone home.
Part Two
Four weeks later Lou sent a text, the first she had ever sent that wasn't about a booking.
Need a new ride. You have ears now. Saturday 11.
The drum shop was on the east side, in a long low building that had been a carpet warehouse. One whole wall was cymbals, hundreds of them hanging on pegs in rows like gold coins on a necklace, and the light from the high windows came down on them in bars. The man behind the counter knew Lou by name. He took one look at Naru and decided not to know her at all, which was a kindness she noticed.
Lou walked the wall slowly with a pair of sticks. She stopped at a cymbal, struck it once near the edge and once on the bell, and listened with her head tilted until the sound had gone completely. Then she moved on. Sometimes she didn't strike at all and only looked.
"What are you listening for?"
"Something that doesn't argue with me." Lou struck one, frowned and stopped it with her palm. "That one argues."
Naru listened to the next. And the next. Somewhere around the tenth, she began to hear what Lou meant. Each cymbal had a voice under the first crash, a long trailing wash of overtones that went on after the note was over. Some of them fought each other, rubbing and beating against one another inside the sound. Some of them lay down together and went out slowly, like water settling.
Lou struck one high on the wall, and Naru said, "That one," before the sound had finished.
Lou looked at her. She struck it again and listened all the way to the end, her head tilted, her eyes on nothing. Then she struck the two on either side of it to compare. Then the first one again.
"Yeah," she said. "That one."
She didn't ask how Naru knew. She took the cymbal down off its peg and carried it to the counter as if it were a plate of something hot.
Afterwards Lou drove them to a Filipino bakery two streets over, a narrow place with a bell on the door. An old woman behind the glass called Lou anak and asked after her mother in a rush of Tagalog that Lou answered in English without breaking stride. Lou bought a paper bag of something without asking what Naru wanted. They ate in the van in the parking lot with the engine running for the heater, the new cymbal in its padded bag lying across the back seat. A sack of cat food was wedged in the footwell under Naru's feet, and there was a dusting of grey fur over everything.
The bread was small and soft and slightly sweet, with crumbs on the outside that went everywhere. Naru ate one slowly, then another. She hadn't known bread could be like this, warm all the way through and so light it seemed to be mostly air.
Lou watched her do it.
"You eat like you've never eaten," she said.
Naru wiped crumbs from her coat and didn't answer.
"My mother had a candle lit for you," Lou said after a while. She was looking out of the windshield at the parking lot. "When it was on the news. The hotel. They were saying you were dead, and then they were saying you weren't, and nobody knew. She called me at two in the morning and asked me to go and light one at Saint Agnes, because she couldn't drive anymore." She tore a piece off her bread and didn't eat it. "I hadn't been inside a church in fifteen years. I went anyway. Lit it. Sat there for an hour like an idiot."
Naru looked at her.
"She thinks it worked," Lou said. "She tells people at her church. She lit a candle and the singer came back."
Naru didn't know what to say. She felt Lou's want then, clearly, for the first time. It wasn't the want of a woman who thought the candle had worked. It was quieter and harder to hold than that. It was the want of someone who had sat in a church for an hour at two in the morning for a woman who had fired her by text, and wanted it to have meant something, and wouldn't have admitted that to anyone alive.
"Thank you," Naru said.
"I didn't do it for you." Lou ate the piece of bread. "I did it for my mother."
"Thank you anyway."
Lou was quiet. The heater ticked. Outside a man was loading flour sacks into a truck, one at a time, onto his shoulder and then into the back.
"The note," Lou said.
Naru waited.
"At the Aldine. Into the space. When I dropped the fill." Lou wasn't looking at her. She was looking at the man with the flour. "I've played behind singers for thirty-one years. I've played behind people who could do things with their voices that would make you cry in a supermarket. I know what technique sounds like. I know what training sounds like." She stopped. "That wasn't either of those. I don't know what that was."
Naru thought about it honestly.
She didn't know where the note had come from. She had held it out over two thousand people in the dark, and it had sounded like wind over open water, and she didn't know why. She had gone down to the bottom of herself to find the grief she needed and come back up with that sound in her mouth, and she had never made it before in this world or any other that she could remember.
"I don't know either," she said.
It was true. Lou heard that it was true. Naru felt her hear it, and felt her put that away too, in the same not-quite-closed place where she had put dying changed me.
The man finished loading the flour, slammed the back of his truck and drove away. Lou finished her bread and folded the paper bag very small, into a square and then a smaller square, and held it in her lap.
Part Three
Lou didn't put the van in gear.
They sat in the bakery parking lot with the engine idling and the heater ticking, and the light outside going the thin early gold of late November at three in the afternoon. Lou turned the folded paper bag over in her fingers, over and over. Naru waited. She felt the question gathering in Lou the way you feel weather gathering, a pressure in the air before anything has changed.
"It's been five months," Lou said.
Naru didn't say anything.
"Tito Ben went back in four." Lou put the folded bag in the cup holder. "You're not going back. Are you."
"No."
Lou nodded slowly. She put both hands on the wheel, though the van wasn't moving, and looked straight ahead through the windshield at the bakery's back wall.
"So I'm going to ask you something," she said. "And I want you to know before I ask it that I'm going to hear whatever you say. I'm not going to laugh. But if it sounds crazy, I'm going to tell you it sounds crazy. Because I'd want you to do that for me."
"Okay."
Lou turned and looked at her.
"Where did you go?"
The van was very quiet.
Naru had been asked it before, in a parking garage, by a man with a camera at his chest who wanted her face when she heard it. She had made him wish he'd never been born. Lou wasn't holding a camera. Lou was holding nothing at all. She was sitting with her hands on the wheel of a van that smelled of cat food and warm bread, asking because she had sat in a church at two in the morning, and because a sound had come out of a throat she knew that the throat couldn't make, and because she was the kind of person who asked.
Naru found she couldn't lie to her. She had known for weeks that she wouldn't, and now she found that she couldn't either.
"I can't tell you," she said.
Lou's hands tightened on the wheel.
"I mean that words won't work. If I tell you, it'll sound crazy. You'll tell me it sounds crazy. You'll be right." Naru looked at her own hands in her lap, the small dark marks across the knuckles. "I can show you."
Lou said nothing.
"If I show you, you'll see it for the rest of your life. You won't be able to stop seeing it. And you can never tell anyone. Not your mother. Not anyone."
"Why?"
"I'll tell you after. If you still want to know."
Lou looked at her for a long moment. Her right hand came off the wheel and went to her collar, and Naru saw a thin chain there for the first time, half-hidden under the neck of her sweater, a small oval of tarnished silver at the end of it. Lou didn't take it out. She held it through the wool, the way you'd hold a hand.
"Okay," Lou said. "Show me."
Naru knew what she was risking before she did it.
Since the Aldine, the light at the bottom had stayed on. She felt it every day, small and pale and far down, like a lamp left burning in a window for someone expected home. She didn't know what Lou would see when she stopped hiding. She couldn't choose what Lou saw. She knew only that whatever she was would come up into her face, and that the light was part of what she was now.
She stopped hiding.
It wasn't a thing she did so much as a thing she stopped doing. All day, every day since the hospital, she had been holding something closed, the way you hold a door against a wind without noticing the effort until you let go. She let go. The human shape stayed where it was, the face, the hands, the coat with crumbs on it. Under it, everything she had been keeping out of her eyes came up into them.
She felt the deep open under her like a window.
Far down, the light was on. It didn't move. Beside it, in the silt, something vast lay in the dark and looked up through the window at the small bright space of the van, at Lou, at the two of them. It watched with all the patience it had. It didn't stir. It didn't need to.
Naru looked at Lou, and let Lou look back.
She saw it reach Lou. She felt it first, the way she felt everything. Lou's want went white all at once, every flicker in her flaring and then going utterly still, the way a field goes still when a shadow crosses it. Then she saw it in Lou's face. The blood went out of it. Lou's mouth opened. Her back went hard against the driver's door, and her hand closed so tightly on the medal through her sweater that the chain pulled taut against the back of her neck.
In the dark of Lou's pupils, very small, Naru saw a pale light, the colour of a swimming pool at night.
She felt what Lou was seeing. It came through Lou's fear the way light comes through water, broken and wavering, but the shape of it was clear enough. The van was too small. It had always been too small. The cab was full of a pressure that came from every side at once, and in the passenger seat sat a woman whose eyes were lit from somewhere very far below. Behind her, filling the space where the back of the van should have been and going on past it, past the parking lot and the bakery and the city, was something. Lou couldn't see its edges. She saw only that it was there and very large, and that it had long limbs folded in the dark behind the woman's shoulders like something resting, and that it was looking at her too. It was looking at her with the same eyes.
"Susmaryosep," Lou whispered. It came out of her like a breath, a word from her mother's kitchen, from before she knew any other words. Her lips kept moving after it, very fast and silent, and Naru knew without hearing that it was the prayer every child of that church learns first, the one to the Mother, said so many times that it had worn smooth.
Naru closed the window.
She drew everything back down out of her eyes and held the door shut again. The deep went dark under her. The light stayed on, far down. The thing beside it watched the window close, the way it watched everything, and did nothing at all.
The van was a van again. The heater ticked. There were crumbs on her coat.
Lou didn't run.
She sat pressed against the driver's door with her hand around the medal and breathed. It was too fast at first, high in her chest, then slower. Then slower still. It took a long time. Naru didn't move or speak. She sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap and let Lou breathe, because there was nothing she could say that would be any use, and because Lou was the one who would decide what happened next.
Tears ran down Lou's face. She didn't seem to notice them. She didn't wipe them away.
After a long time she let go of the medal. Her fingers had left a pattern of red marks across the wool, and she looked at them as if they belonged to someone else. Then she reached over, slowly, and turned the key, and the engine died, and the heater stopped ticking, and the silence came in.
"What was that," she said. It wasn't quite a question.
Naru thought about how to say it. There were a hundred words, in a hundred languages, and most of them were wrong. Some of them were lies. The few that were left were ugly.
"Your mother," she said. "What would she call it?"
Lou looked at her. Her eyes were red and very steady.
"She'd call it a demon."
Naru didn't say anything.
Lou closed her eyes. She sat like that for a while with her head back against the window. When she opened them again she was looking at the ceiling of the van.
"Where's Morgana?"
"Gone," Naru said. "She was gone when I came. I didn't take her. She'd already let go." She stopped, and made herself say the rest. "I have all of her. Every memory. Phoenix. The bridge. The four sugars. I just wasn't there for any of it."
Lou breathed out slowly through her mouth.
"Who else knows?"
"Two people."
"Why only two?"
Naru looked out of the windshield at the bakery's back wall. The gold had gone out of the light. It was just grey brick.
"Because if more people knew, someone would find out who knows what I am," she said. "And they'd come for me. They'd kill me if they could." She turned and looked at Lou. "They'd be right to try."
Lou didn't answer.
"You saw what's down there," Naru said. "I keep it down there. Every day. Most days it's not hard." She held Lou's eyes. "But if someone backed me into a corner, if they came for me in the street, in a crowd, I don't know what it would do. I don't know how far it would reach. That's why nobody can know. Not just for me. For anyone who'd be standing nearby."
Lou looked at her for a long time.
"Are you going to hurt me?"
Naru had known that question was coming since the bakery. She had thought she knew what she would say. She found now that there was only one answer she could give Lou, and it wasn't the one she had wanted.
"Not on purpose," she said.
Lou took that in. Naru felt her take it in, all of it, down to the bottom, and saw her understand exactly what it meant. It was the worst possible answer, and the only honest one.
Lou nodded once.
Then she sat up straight in the driver's seat, wiped her face with the heel of her hand, first one side and then the other, and looked at herself in the rear-view mirror. She took a breath.
"You still owe me for Phoenix," she said.
Naru stared at her.
"Two shows," Lou said. Her voice was hoarse and almost level. "I don't care what you are. You were there for it, or you've got her memories of it, or whatever. Same thing. You owe me two shows."
Something came up in Naru's chest that she couldn't name. It wasn't a laugh and it wasn't crying. It was both, and it got stuck halfway and came out as a sound that was neither. Lou heard it. The corner of her mouth moved, very slightly, the first thing it had done in twenty minutes that wasn't fear.
"Okay," Naru said, when she could. "Two shows."
"Plus interest."
"Plus interest."
Lou started the van. The heater came back on, ticking. She checked the mirror, put it in reverse and backed out of the space slowly and carefully, the way you drive with something fragile in the back. Then she pulled out onto the street.
She didn't say anything for a long time. Neither did Naru. They drove west with the low sun in their eyes, the new cymbal lying across the back seat in its padded bag, and grey cat hair on everything. Lou kept one hand on the wheel. The other had gone back up to her collar, and every few blocks her fingers found the medal through the wool and held it for a moment, and let it go again.
At a red light near the river, without looking over, Lou reached across and brushed the crumbs off Naru's coat.