It was Wednesday, and evening now, so the vigil had begun. Soren’s father hadn’t heard them gathering but they were down there. Soren’s father’s mental state was one of being acutely aware that he was in a fog, and the vigils weren’t helping clear that fog. He parted the blinds. This was the third Wednesday and their numbers were growing. They were far below, most of them bowing their heads, and it disconcerted Soren’s father that he couldn’t see any of their faces. They were like those schools of tiny fish he remembered from boyhood filmstrips that moved in concert like a single inscrutable organism. They seemed practiced, experienced, but where would they have gotten experience at this sort of thing? Nurse Lula said there had been vigils at the clinic before but it was usually a one-time thing. She remembered last year a cop had been shot in the abdomen during a traffic stop and a crew of folks in uniforms had come one night with candles and had each slurped down one bottle of the cop’s favorite beer. These people showing up for Soren didn’t light candles and they didn’t drink. Soren’s father didn’t know how he was supposed to feel about them. He worried that they knew something he didn’t, that they had access to a gravity of spirit that was beyond him. And the vigilers made him feel exposed too, onstage, so whenever they were gathered out there he stayed hidden behind the meticulously dusted blinds.
Soren’s father had seen them arriving that first Wednesday, before he knew they would become a vigil, when they were merely a half-dozen people loitering in the corner of the parking lot. A security guard had approached that first week and looked them over and elected to leave them be. Last week, with close to fifty people in the troop, a news van had rolled into the lot and a girl in an orange scarf had tried to talk to the vigilers. She didn’t get a thing out of them. Not one word. They didn’t stay long, the news folks. Nobody was beating drums or getting drunk or holding signs. No one was crying. Nobody was doing anything that could be readily mocked.
THE PIANO TEACHER
The lie she had come up with was that a library branch on the other side of town was screening old monster movies each Wednesday evening. She couldn’t tell her daughter she was going to sit outside a defunct flea market half the night, watching people a football field away as they vigiled. Her daughter wouldn’t understand vigiling and she certainly wouldn’t understand spying on a vigil from the high ground of an adjacent lot. And she also couldn’t tell her daughter she wanted to be near the boy. The piano teacher had climbed into the car her daughter had given her as a hand-me-up, a high-riding silver station wagon, and had sat at swaying red light after swaying red light and crossed Route 66 and now she slowed passing the clinic, which was out of place here on the edge of town, the only tall building in sight. The vigilers huddling in the parking lot were like cattle awaiting a storm.
The piano teacher passed them by and rolled onto the grounds of the market. She didn’t feel she was superior to the other vigilers, and in fact observed the rules she knew they followed — didn’t speak during the vigils, or turn the car radio on — but she was more than a vigiler. She was one of the forces that had put them in the parking lot of that clinic. She could do what they did, could open her windows and endure the chill air rather than running the heater in her car, but the vigilers could never do what she’d done, which was to halt a miracle. The others, hugging themselves loosely in the sand-swept parking lot, were hoping to gain something, but the piano teacher was only hoping to feel sorry enough.
So here she was in the dark in a part of town she wouldn’t have visited in a hundred years. The moon was strong and the piano teacher could see the writing on the market stalls, all in Spanish, cartoonish drawings of vegetables and shoes. Between the market and the clinic was a used car lot full of tall gleaming pickups. From this distance the clinic looked like a spaceship that had run out of gas. Or like a miniature of itself, a toy.
The piano teacher had thought for sure she’d seen something moving in the shadows, and now she saw a creature ambling across the parking lot that must’ve been an enormous coyote. He was big for a coyote. The creature seemed male, though the piano teacher wasn’t sure why. He moved with a strut. The piano teacher watched him pick his way along the fence, which he probably could’ve jumped at any time. He came into the moonlight and passed back out of it and was gone in one complete moment, and the piano teacher, after the fact, thought of rolling up her windows. The piano teacher could not have said what color the animal was, one of those dark shades of the desert that was more a feeling than a color. He hadn’t even glanced at her. The piano teacher looked at the sky, at the clinic, down at her hands, at the buttons that locked the doors and ran the windows up and down. The boy had really played that music, had written it or channeled it or who knew where it had come from. He had played his soul, without ever having previously touched a piano. If he’d stayed conscious there would’ve been calls coming in from all over to hear the boy play, from the wealthy craving a novelty and maybe even from conservatories wanting another prodigy. But the boy didn’t know how to play. The boy had played what he’d played but he had no idea about piano. He was in a coma now, so instead of a prodigy many thought of him as some sort of angel, though they were afraid to use that word. He didn’t know how to play piano but he was an instrument himself, they believed. And of course many were firm that there had to be a medical explanation, folks who would cling to their practicality to the end. And none of these people had even heard the music. They knew it had been played and that experts had deemed it original, but only about a dozen people had heard the music and the piano teacher was one of them, and she was the only one who’d heard it that first time, who’d heard the boy play it live. If anyone knew the truth it was the piano teacher, but she knew nothing. She was a dumb witness. There wasn’t a thing wrong with Soren physically, the newspaper had been clear about that until they’d finally let the story drop because there were no new developments. There was nothing at all wrong with him except he was not conscious.
The piano teacher had decided she would always depart last. She would remain until every last vigiler down in the parking lot was headed back to regular life. She would wait for the exodus that would occur between one and two in the morning, and after the last car had left the clinic and the wind was the only sound again, she would turn her key and leave the market and steal the last faraway glance at Soren’s blank window up on the top floor.