"The Skoag?" Mom asked, but I was already past her and undoing the flimsy deadbolt on the door. I had to see it. It was so impossible for a Skoag to be outside our door at night that I had to see it was real. "Billy!" Mom warned, but I dragged the door open anyway.
The Skoag was there. The same purple-crested one we had listened to earlier. Only he looked a lot smaller with all his bladders deflated, not much bigger than my Mom. He was wearing a sort of pouch thing on his front, and in it was a brown grocery sack, a bouquet of flowers wrapped in green tissue paper, and a skinny brown liquor store bag. He was draped in the transparent plastic robe Skoags were supposed to wear in Human dwellings. His skin glistened through it in the watery street-lamp light like oil on a puddle, iridescent and shifting. His fat little flippers waved up and down slowly, like a fish underwater. His murky blue eye spots fixed on my mother.
She stared back at him. She still had the knife in her hand, but she had forgotten it. She crossed her arms, a closing, denying gesture. "What do you want?" she demanded, in the scared stubborn voice she kept for the landlord.
A little bladder above his eyes pulsed with his cello voice. "To come in."
"Well, you can't," she said, at the same time as I asked, "How did you get down the steps?"
"With great difficulty," he pulsed at me, but there was a violin squibble above the cello that made his answer a sort of joke. I grinned at him, I couldn't help it. He'd noticed me. He'd answered my question before he paid attention to what my Mom had said, and he'd answered it in the way one buddy might kid with another. I felt two feet taller.
He looked back at my Mom, waiting.
"Go away," she told him.
"I cannot," he said, all cello again. "Earlier today, I heard you listening to us. I think. My companions tell me it was not so, that I am tricking myself because I want too badly. But I am not deceived. I have hope only. I have brought gifts. Flowers and wine for you, as is fitting, and food for your child, who said he was hungry. May I come in?"
She just stood there, staring at him. A car shushed by in the rainy street outside, and the wind gusted, blowing cold air down our steps and in past the Skoag. And still they both just stood there, waiting for something.
"I love you," the cello thrummed and the sound swelled like a big warm wave washing through our apartment. The sound didn't end with the words, it went on with music, like embroidery on the edges of the thought. I listened to it pass and fade, and then the silence came behind it, separating us again. The silence seemed unbearable.
"Come in," said my mother.
So Lavender came to live with us.
Everything changed.
Everything.
Within just a few days, the neighbors stopped knowing us. I'd walk down the streets, and rocks would bounce around me, but I'd never see who'd thrown them. The radio was never turned on again. There was real food, every day. Mom stopped looking at street musicians and haunting the open mikes. The street people called her ugly names, and our mailbox got ripped off the wall in the upstairs lobby. I got into so many fights at school that the principal said I had to stay in at recesses for the rest of the year. After that, I was left totally alone. I didn't care. Because I had Lavender at home.
Every day I went to school, because Lavender said I should. It would be important, later, he assured me, and that was enough for me. Everyday I came home and slid down the ridged ramp that had replaced our steps. And Lavender was always waiting for me to come home, even if my mother wasn't there. Always before, Mom's musicians had tolerated and ignored me, treated me like a cat or a houseplant, a semi-annoying creature that lived in my mother's house. Not Lavender. He knew I was there, and he was glad. He made me important. We would have a snack together, he rubbing his sludgy porridge through a membrane on his chest, me munching cookies and milk. Then I had to show him every single paper I'd brought home, read aloud from every library book I'd checked out. All I did amazed him. But mostly we'd talk and laugh. His laugh reminded me of a giant grasshopper chirring. Once he told me that Skoags had never laughed before they came to Earth, but the idea of a special sound made just to show happiness was so wonderful that now it was the first thing that all exiles were allowed to do. Each Skoag got to make up his own kind of laugh. He said it like it was some big favor for them. Then he told me that my laugh was one of the best ones he'd ever heard. That first day, when he'd heard my laugh in the street, he'd known that anyone who could create so marvelous a sound had to be very special indeed. And then he laughed my own laugh for me to hear, and that set me laughing, and we laughed together for about ten minutes, in harmony, like a new kind of song.
Looking back, I know he didn't understand much of basic human needs. Because he learned mostly from me, he had a seven-year-old boy's idea of what was important. Food he understood, and he always made sure there was plenty of it, though he tended to buy the same kinds over and over again. He loved bright, simple toys that moved, yo-yos and tops and plastic gliders, marbles and super balls and frisbees. I'm convinced he thought that flowers were essential to my mother, and he filled our little apartment with graceful glass vases full of them. I never thought to ask for anything more than what he brought and I know my mother never did. She was too used to giving to learn taking easily. Still, Lavender tried to provide for us. I remember the day I came home and found him cautiously touching his flippers to the protruding nails and scabs of sheetrock on the two-by-four wall studs. "This pleases the Mom?" he asked me.
"No. It's really ugly. But it's all we've got," I told him. A wrinkling ran over his deflated bladders, a gesture I had learned was like an excited grin. "This would please the Mom?" the cello thrummed, and he began pulling yards and yards of stuff out of his belly pouch. Shiny like plastic, but soft like fabric, and so thin you could crumple a square yard of it up in your fist. He began fastening it to the wall, in graceful drapery, and as it fell straight, the room warmed with both color and heat, the musky basement smell faded, and a gentle light suffused the room. Then we hid in the closet until my Mom came home and was surprised by it. "Oh, Lavender, you cover up all the rough edges of my life," Mom told him. For a long time, I thought she meant the wall studs. He could make the hanging different colors, and he adjusted it almost daily, though I never asked how. If I had, he would have told me. I just didn't ask.
He told me anything I wanted to know. I knew more about Skoags than any of the «experts» of that time. Anything I asked him, he answered. I knew that they had been exiled to our world because they sang in public, and that was not permitted on their home world. I knew that they sang only other people's music, because making up new music was something only a holy leader could do. The earth Skoags were religious rebels, sort of like the Pilgrims. They believed singing was so worshipful that Skoags should do it all the time, everywhere, and that everyone should do it, not just priest-Skoags. On their own world, that was heresy, and anyone caught at it had to choose between exile or "a most unfortunate happening." For a long time I didn't know what he meant by that. A lot of what he told me was puzzling. Lavender kept trying to explain to me that singing was a circle, and that if one sang well enough to make the perfect music, it would create the one that would close the circle. My Mom, he said, was "Close. Almost the end of the circle. The one, but not quite." I never understood what he meant, but it was very important to him. A day didn't pass without him trying to make me understand. There just weren't human words for the Skoag ideas. It worried him very much. It was the only hole in our communication. He told me other stuff, like how some Skoags had long, articulated flippers like my fingers, and how they were dehydrated for their space journeys, and how they thought of Humans as «half-sexed» because we weren't self-fertile. Anything I asked, he answered. But if I didn't ask, he didn't bother me with it. I never asked him if he had come to end his people's exile, or if he were a very important Skoag on his world or how their spaceships operated. Or he would have told me. But I didn't ask.