19. Gerard
Gerard
At his first choir practice, Gerard was do-re-mi-fa-so nervous.
Under the watchful gaze of the Jesus statue up on the cross and Regina behind the organ leading vocal warm-ups, Gerard suffered flop sweat like the imposter he was.
He pretended to be a practicing Christian and pretended to be James.
Oh, and he harbored an invisible fugitive in his rented apartment.
He was not sure which of the Ten Commandments that last one violated, but maybe all of them? His hands holding the hymnal shook.
Gerard rounded the choir out to an even twenty singers.
Before Gerard arrived, there were six sopranos, eight altos, two tenors, and three basses.
The average age was sixty-one, and the average hair color was graying or nonexistent.
Gerard stuck out like a sore thumb, which worried him at first, but then he concluded they were less likely to recognize him, given their age and seeming disinterest in secular music.
Iping Island was behind when it came to pop culture.
Every year after graduation, eighteen-year-olds left for college or to enlist in the service, and few returned, dwindling the population and mostly cutting them off from new media, except in the summer when tourists came to town talking of superhero movies and must-watch reality TV.
While the insular island was perfect for him to hide on, he worried his voice could ring a few bells for people—what if someone’s teenager had We the Wells on their favorite playlist?—but then he remembered the island didn’t even have its own radio station, so he was probably safe.
The following Sunday’s selections were a mixture of hymns still vivid in his memory from childhood and others that sounded vaguely familiar.
As they worked through some trickier harmonies in “To Do Your Will,” Gerard flashed back to Mr. Bud coaching his old church’s choir through a different arrangement of the same hymn.
At the time, he’d idolized Mr. Bud as a talented musician and leader in their parish, but it occurred to him then that perhaps Mr. Bud was gay and Gerard had been seeing not only a hero in the man, but also a blueprint for how to survive as a marginalized person in the church.
Especially during a time when marriage equality was lambasted by the pope.
After the hymns, they switched to service music—various responses sung in the middle of mass—before Regina announced that in a little over two weeks, they would begin rehearsing choral music for the Christmas season, though by that time she hoped to recruit a few more singers into the fold for a more vigorous sound.
Gerard couldn’t think that far ahead, because he loved the fall and didn’t want to skip over his favorite season.
He also didn’t know how long he’d go undetected on Iping.
No sense getting excited about “Away in a Manger” when he might be sweating it out in a recording studio in Los Angeles by Thanksgiving.
“For today, let us once again give a warm welcome to James,” Regina said, before turning her attention to him.
“I can already tell you’re going to be a big help to our men in finding the right notes.
” An elderly Black man to Gerard’s right gave a snort.
“Before we move on to coffee and doughnuts, Angie will lead us in our closing worship.”
Angie was Kellen’s wife. She had chestnut hair, high cheekbones, a new-mother glow, and not a lick of an Iping accent.
Angie read aloud a short passage from Isaiah 49 about how a mother cannot forget her child and therefore God cannot forget His disciples, which Angie then meditated on, talking about how much she loved rehearsals and the choir, but as a mom of a two-month-old, every second she was not singing for Him her mind was on the lowercase-him being watched by his dad back home.
Several of the women around Gerard put their hands over their hearts, let out amens of agreement.
Tears speckled the edges of Angie’s doe-like eyes as she finished speaking of Kellen Jr., and as they all moved into the vestibule for refreshments, Gerard wondered about his own mom back home.
Yes, he was a grown man who was capable of fending for himself, but had his disappearance upset her?
After two weeks of absence, had she run herself ragged putting out missing person calls for him?
Surely their publicist would’ve stamped that idea out. Think of the bad press! If his brothers got photographed leaving a New York City recording studio without him, they probably would have said he was under the weather or resting at a spa after a long, grueling tour.
Instead, he was shacking up with an invisible scientist on a remote island.
Still, he pictured his mom somewhere in his parents’ sprawling New Jersey home, sobbing into a WE THE WELLS T-shirt, and for the first time since arriving, he regretted being so hasty in his escape.
He wished he could send her a message to let her know that he was okay and that she was not to blame for his disappearance, but the risk of his discovery via postmark was too high.
“Coffee?” Regina asked, waving an aromatic cup under Gerard’s nose. The warmth of the paper cup he accepted from her grounded him. “You are a natural. What’s your musical background?”
“Just a hobbyist,” Gerard said, piling on a new lie.
“Get out,” said a burly man with tan skin, wizened lines crisscrossing his face like tributaries of his forehead.
“Ignore Joe,” said Regina. Surely this couldn’t be the same Joe who manned the Susanna, the crabbing boat Emory had worked on.
He’d stood next to the guy the whole rehearsal, and while he wouldn’t call him a good singer, he was definitely the most enthusiastic of the basses.
“He is a more recent addition to our choir, and we’re still working on finding pitch. ”
“You sound like your pipes are made of gold,” said the Black tenor whose name he learned was Jericho.
“Seriously, if you had an album of lullabies, I’d play it for Kellen Jr. every night,” Angie added, with dust from a powdered doughnut coating her hands.
A woman with white hair wearing a pink sweater said, “If you had any album, I’d play it night and day!”
Gerard half winced, half glowed under their praise. Usually, it was Garret as the lead singer of the group who got all the attention. This was a welcome change.
“Let’s not give our new guy a big head just yet. We’ll save that for when he nails his first solo,” said Regina, offering him a clandestine wink. “Now Angie, you promised to show us some new baby pictures.”
The apartment smelled of baking spices when Gerard returned, still floating on the high of a successful rehearsal that morning.
Slinging his scarf onto the rack beside Emory’s lab coat, he asked, “What did you make?”
A green-striped apron hung suspended in the kitchen. A pair of airborne oven mitts clutched a baking sheet. “Cookies,” Emory said brightly, setting the tray on a cooling rack.
“Are we having dessert for dinner?” Gerard asked, drawn in by the alluring scent of melted chocolate, cinnamon, clove, and nutmeg.
“I figured we’d have them after dinner while we listen to your second album,” he said as if this were an activity they had already agreed to do together. Emory must’ve enjoyed their self-titled album more than Gerard thought. “The cookies need time to cool.”
Gerard had skipped the doughnuts at choir practice, but these gooey-looking creations were not as easy to resist, so he reached out a sneaky hand when he thought Emory’s back was turned.
Before he could steal one to sample, Emory surprisingly and playfully smacked him away.
“I said they need time to cool.” Up close, bracketed in by the counter and the kitchen table, Gerard felt the heat of Emory’s invisible body exacerbated by their proximity to the still-hot oven.
His breath hitched up into his throat as he raised his arms in surrender.
“Go wash your hands. Dinner will be ready momentarily,” Emory said, stepping back from what might or might not have been a moment.
Gerard wasn’t good at reading facial expressions even when he could physically see them, but whatever transpired there by the oven had felt as gooey as those cookies looked.
He ventured into the bathroom, replaying the moment over in his head.
“You’re going to waste all the hot water,” Emory called after some time. Gerard’s hands had turned violently red from the scalding slosh he’d let go on too long.
When Gerard came to the table, he began to eat. Emory asked how choir practice had gone, but Gerard barely answered. His mind was too preoccupied by the cookies. “Are they from scratch?” Gerard asked.
Emory laughed in a way that suggested he was rolling his eyes. “Don’t make me enforce a ‘no dessert until you’ve eaten your vegetables’ rule.” Emory had boiled chicken breasts with a side of broccoli and potatoes. “But if you must know, they are from scratch.”
“What kind are they?” Gerard asked.
“Autumn chocolate chip. We used to have these at the campus dining hall every October, and they were a big hit,” Emory said. “I don’t indulge in sweets often, but when I do, these are the cookies I always crave.”
“How did you have the time to do all this?” Gerard asked. It was a more bountiful spread than he was used to, not that he was complaining. He popped another bite of potato into his mouth.
As Gerard ate, Emory went to the counter and plated the cookies, sliding them one by one off the cooling rack. “I woke up earlier than usual and couldn’t fall back to sleep.”
“Were you uncomfortable? Those pillows aren’t the best,” Gerard said. But in fairness, he’d frequented hotels with whole pillow menus, so he wasn’t exactly a good judge.
“It wasn’t that. I think I was too excited.”
His words swayed between them for a second. “About?”