In time the nurse sighed and hit the ENTER key with finality. She rose and slipped into a back room, and when she returned she handed Cecelia a blue blanket folded in a sharp square. Cecelia tucked it under her arm and went down a side hall to the vending machines. She found the one that sold soda and fed the old lady’s dollar into it and the machine promptly spit the bill back out. Of course it would. The thing was about as limp and crinkled as a dollar could get. It looked like it was going to fall apart completely in the next week or so, a tiny portion of the world’s wealth lost. The price for a can of soda was eighty-five cents. Cecelia dug into her pockets and came up with two quarters and a dime. She draped the blanket over her shoulders and squinted at the vending machine. She could go back to the old lady and ask if she had other dollar bills. She could find the nearest open door and ask whoever was inside to borrow a quarter. She had an impulse to just leave the blanket on the floor and escape this floor of the clinic via the stairs, which were at the opposite side of the building than the elevators. This was Cecelia’s most familiar impulse, but she wasn’t going to follow it. She was going to get this lady her damn soda. She felt in no rush about the vigil, still felt no anxiety as she grew later and later. She had nothing against the old lady or the nurse or her uncle’s slow driving. She had nothing against anyone. She had stepped inside the clinic for the first time tonight, and being inside this place, where lives were fought for and won or fought for and relinquished, it made the outside, the vigil, feel like a farce, like make-believe. The vigil was comfortable, Cecelia knew. She’d convinced herself it was some kind of test, but it was a comfortable place where real life was not allowed, where you didn’t have to face anything. It would have been easier for Cecelia to descend to her smoothly paved sanctuary, and suddenly she was washed with the anxiety she’d been awaiting. She pulled the blanket snug around her. Letting the vigil slip away was not a matter of worry, but what she had to do instead was. She had to go up and see Soren, had to set eyes on the boy. As she stood in front of these dull-lit vending machines she was breathing the same air as Soren. He was two floors above her. The blanket on her shoulders might’ve warmed him some recent night.
REGGIE
As soon as he began playing, he recognized the song. He was writing the song but also remembering it. It was the song he’d begun just before his death, that he’d been working on in his pickup that hazy, not-quite-hot day. The notes were there for him, he only needed to give them safe landing. The breeze that had been soothing Reggie picked up into a dry wind as he played. It ruffled Reggie’s hair and raised an eerie wail as it passed through the harmonica over on the bureau — a sound like the cry of a cornered animal. At some point Reggie had decided and then gone on assuming that he was in dusk rather than dawn, but now the hall filled with light, pinkish and strengthening, and Reggie felt a longing to see the moon again, the standoffish white sliver of it or the jolly yellow face. Above him the gray clouds had grown heavy, churning faster with the gusts. Reggie’s shirt blew off the piano bench and out of sight. He kept his feet planted on the pedals, his back straight. He was farther into the song than he’d written in life, more than halfway through. He didn’t allow himself to drag the song out. He harbored no folly. He didn’t play louder or soft. He looked at his hands and they did not look familiar. A fly buzzed around Reggie, bothering his eyebrow and then trying to cling fast to the empty music stand. And then it was gone, lost in its own ordeal. The clouds were lower now. If Reggie had stood on the piano and reached he could’ve touched them. He heard the wind tinking the liquor bottles in the bar, and then heard one of the bottles crash to the floor. Book covers were flying open in the library.
Reggie knew that the pinched calm that filled the spaces between the notes was the sound of eternity. He knew an immediate future awaited, an extended present, and the rest of the song would fill it. He did not hope for unrippled bliss. He did not hope to hear the voice of a god. He did not want oceans or mountains. He was a single note and he only wanted to ring.
SOREN’S FATHER
He parted the blinds with a thumb and still the girl wasn’t out there. The last one. It was past the time when the vigil normally began, and even last week, alone, the girl had shown up promptly. The sun had tipped out of sight, leaving a sloppy wake of flesh-colored sky that was fast disappearing. Soren’s father pulled away his hand and the blinds closed up. He fetched the wastebasket from the bathroom and scraped the table near the window clean. He hadn’t eaten a proper dinner, but he’d polished off five cups of Jell-O. The cups tinked down into the can and then the plastic spoon after them. The only other thing in the trash was a disposable razor Soren’s father had used that morning. There was so little straightening up to do in the room. Usually Soren’s father had coffee around this time. He didn’t want any today.
He moved the orange-upholstered chair right next to the window and drew the blinds enough to see out. He didn’t want the vigils to be over. He didn’t want cars to reclaim that area of the lot. Whether he wanted to notice or not, that portion of ground, that ration of blacktop, had assumed a sacredness, and Soren’s father didn’t want a bunch of cars all over it. Soren’s father was mildly relieved and mildly lonely now as he accepted that the girl was not coming, and he was capable of letting these reasonable feelings inhabit him. This wasn’t a loneliness that would eat at him — instead, one human simply missing other humans. He missed Gee still, and he knew he would hear from her in time and looked forward to that. He missed the last vigiler, the girl. And the relief he was feeling was as much for the girl as for himself. The vigilers had been a target for his frustration, and had also been something reliable to hang his weeks on. None of them had been happy that his son was in a coma. They hadn’t been seekers of relief. They were people who longed to be decent. Who knew how to be decent anymore? Soren’s father leaned forward in his chair, his face close to the window. No sign of the girl. Nothing but the chollas, in full bloom now. They seemed to glow burnt yellow in the new dark, as if they’d been collecting the sun’s power all day.
Soren’s father had stopped wishing for Soren to awaken, at least stopped wishing it in a selfish way. He’d wanted Soren to return, all these months, because it would’ve made him happy, because it would’ve benefited the father, not the son, would’ve saved him from grief and confusion. Soren was in no apparent discomfort. Soren’s father wanted his son to be in a good place and to come to no harm. That was his pure desire. Whether his son was special was beside the point, but for him to presume that his son was just like everyone else because that would be easier was as wrong as calling him an angel or a prophet. If Soren was special, Soren’s father could deal with that. He didn’t have to understand everything. Soren’s destiny was as open as anyone’s, and Soren wouldn’t be afraid of that destiny the way his father had always been afraid.