Travis’s mother, Loretta, fed it. Loretta was a widow who ran the flower committee at church and had run every one of her children the same way, with a smile and a grip like a bench vise. She would sit in my living room with her coffee and say, Charlene has such a gift with her, such an instinct. She knows how to bring a gifted child along.
A gifted child.
Not my daughter. Not Josie. Just a gifted child, the way you would say a valuable animal, a prize calf that needed the right hands.
In the beginning I told myself I was being small. Insecure. Jealous of a woman who could not have what I had. Josie was gifted, that part was true. She could sit at that dime-store keyboard and find a song by ear after hearing it once on the radio, both hands, in the right key, like it was nothing. When she was nervous she hummed under her breath without knowing she was doing it, a little private engine of a sound. Music had always been the thing between us, hers and mine, since before she could talk.
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The song that was only ours
When Josie was five and terrified of starting kindergarten, so scared she threw up the morning of the first day, I made her a little song to carry with her. Four notes and one line. I am no musician. I cannot read a note. But I hummed her four notes going up and coming back down, and I put words to them.
Come on home, little bird.
That was all. That was the whole thing.
It became our signal. Our come-and-get-me song. I told her, if you are ever somewhere and you are scared, or somebody is making you do something and you cannot get the words out, you hum our song and Mama will hear it. It does not matter how quiet. Mama’s ears are tuned to it. I will come.
For three years it was a small private thing between us. She hummed it walking into the dentist. She hummed it the night we heard about her cousin’s accident. Nobody else knew what it meant. It was not written anywhere. It was ours the way a scar is yours, made once, kept forever.
So when I heard those four notes come off that stage, quiet, almost swallowed by the shuffling and the coughing of a full gym, every drop of blood in me turned to creek water. Because my daughter would not play that song in front of two hundred people for no reason. She had reached for the one rope she knew I had given her, in front of everybody, because it was the only way she had left to reach me.