Revolution - Jennifer Donnelly [158]
He redials. Gets on with one of his taxi-driving friends. He takes my hand and squeezes it while he’s talking. I’m scared to squeeze back, but I do. I look at the side of his face, listening as he tells the guy where we are, and yeah, it’s a long story, but his friend is hurt and needs to go to the hospital and can he come get us? He thanks the guy and ends the call.
We sit for a bit, holding hands. He starts singing, softly. He sings lines from a song we were playing earlier, “My Friends.”
“I heard a little girl
And what she said was something beautiful
To give your love no matter what
Is what she said”
I lift my face to the night sky.
It’s still dark.
But I can see the stars.
EPILOGUE
Winter, one year later
I’m in a hospital room. Sitting on a hospital bed. Playing tunes.
There’s a girl in the corner. She’s sitting on the floor with her back to me. Rocking.
I’ve been playing to her for almost two hours but she won’t respond. She just keeps rocking.
Her head scarf shifts a little and I can see the scars on her neck. They continue, those scars, all the way down her back. Her caseworker told me that.
She’s Muslim, this girl. Thirteen years old. She was attacked in a park outside her building. She was beaten and raped. This was two months ago. She’s barely spoken since. Or eaten. Or done much else except rock.
I come every Thursday evening because her caseworker says she likes music. “Play gentle songs,” she advised.
It’s almost time for me to go and once again, I’ve gotten nowhere. I stop playing. But she doesn’t stop rocking.
Suddenly, I have an idea. Enough of the gentle tunes. I’m going to try something different. “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” As I play, I hear it—the sadness in four notes—and she does, too, I think, because she stops rocking. She turns her head, then her body. And I can see her huge sad scared eyes.
I keep playing. All the way through. I wish I had my electric guitar here. And David Gilmour, too. But I don’t. So I do what I can.
I finish the song. The last few notes rise and fade. We sit there for a few minutes and then I ask her if she’d like me to come again next week. She nods. And it’s all I can do not to jump up and down on the bed.
I tell her goodbye, bundle up, and head out of the hospital, feeling like a million dollars. It’s dark outside. And cold. I’m late. I stayed longer than I was supposed to. There’s no time to go home and shower. And I’m hungry. Starving, actually. I hope Rémy has stew tonight.
I sling my guitar case over my shoulder, hop on my moped, and start the engine. I pull out of my parking space and join the flow of traffic headed to central Paris. I’m over by the Invalides and I’ve got to get all the way to the Rue Oberkampf.
The traffic’s bad. I get cut off by a truck, then almost get flattened by a limo. The moped was a graduation present from my parents.
My father is still in Cambridge. He has a new son now—Leroy. He spends a lot of time with the baby. More than he ever did with me and Truman. I guess I should be bitter about that but I’m not. He’s kind of fading for me. Like the final notes of a song. It’s sad, but it’s okay. It’s hard for us to be together. It always has been.
He’s very busy these days, mapping the baby’s genome. Maybe it’ll help him understand what makes this child tick. He never understood me. “DNA tells you all the secrets of life,” he used to say. Except for one—how to live it.
I merge onto the Pont Neuf, get honked at by a cab, then cross over the river. The Seine is beautiful tonight, with the streetlights sparkling on its dark waters.
My mother moved back to Paris. She sold the Brooklyn house and almost everything in it after she checked herself out of the hospital last January. After having finally painted every square inch of the walls in her hospital room. I got a call one day. It was her. “Can you come get me, Andi?” she said. “If I don’t leave this place now, I never will.”
She chucked her pills out the car window on the way home. I’d chucked mine, too. Weeks before. Then she asked if she