Chapter 6 #2
Her eyes stung anyway and she dabbed at them with the inside of her blazer sleeve, leaving a faint damp patch.
The street smelled of exhaust, last night’s rain, and the bakery three doors down, tempting her to make a sandwich of her feelings between two jelly donuts.
She decided discipline never hurt anyone and took a deep breath of the delicious temptation, then squared her shoulders and continued to walk up the chipped concrete sidewalk.
The town received her like it always did, indifferent but familiar.
A pickup rolled past, country radio rambling faintly through the open window.
Two kids argued about Pokémon cards near the newspaper box.
Somewhere, a dog barked at nothing and everything, equally made miserable by the sheer act of facing the day.
The ache behind her ribs swelled, looking for a way out.
And then, like it often did when she was backed into a corner by fate, bureaucracy, or a poorly timed request to cover one more volunteer shift at the soup kitchen, her brain did the only thing it knew would somehow make it all a little better. It turned her life into a musical.
The melody rose in her chest before she could stop it. It wasn’t loud at first. Just a thread of sound, soft and tentative and a little off-key. She could have swallowed it, admonished herself curtly as now was hardly the time for singing.
She didn’t. Instead, she let it out on a mournful sigh that had been waiting for days to escape her.
“Everyone keeps looking at me,
Like I inherited a map…”
The words slipped out before her conscience could veto them. She kept walking, eyes straight ahead, pretending she was just a normal woman muttering to herself and not someone who had just turned Greater Napanee into the setting for her own overture.
“...of how to run a station,
How to hold a town together…”
Her voice was warmer now, stronger. The tune grew in confidence and slid beneath the lines until they locked together into place, like they’d been waiting patiently there for her all along.
“...when the ones who taught me everything,
Vanished past the reach of weather.”
She reached the bakery at the corner though she’d most certainly not intended to be drawn back into its clutches.
The yeasty, sugary air rolled over her like a carb-based blessing.
Mrs. Feinberg stepped out at that moment, holding a paper bag in one hand and a leash in the other.
The leash led to a chihuahua who hated everything but wore a knit pumpkin sweater anyway.
The reason for its earlier complaints was now apparent–orange was rarely flattering on anyone.
Mrs. Feinberg took one look at Emma-Lou, at the black dress, the folder, the shining eyes, and her expression softened.
She reached out, squeezing Emma-Lou’s forearm gently.
“Oh, honey,” she said quietly. “Bless your heart.”
For a second, Emma-Lou’s voice faltered on the next line,
“They boarded that plane with sunscreen and scripture,
A vacation with an unholy twist…”
She could see them so clearly in her mind’s eye: her mother waving a floppy sun hat at the airport; her father insisting on carrying a Bible in his carry-on (“In case of turbulence, Lou-Lou. The Lord likes a man prepared.”)
“But somewhere past the line of sight,
The world swallowed them into mist.”
Her throat swelled around mist. She let the word break and turned it into vibrato, because if she was going to fall apart in public, she might as well make it a show worth watching.
A kid weighed down by a paper route messenger bag zoomed by on a scooter, slowed in curiosity, and glanced back, brow furrowed as a woman in musical mourning was not a usual sight seen on his daily delivery. Emma-Lou kept walking.
The sidewalk under her feet was cracked and slightly sticky from last night’s spilled 7-11 Slushies.
The light bounced off parked cars. A busker leaned against the wall near the pharmacy, half-heartedly coaxing a tune out of an old harmonica.
He cocked his head, listened to her next few notes, and after a beat, slid in underneath her melody with a thin, reedy harmony of his own.
She almost laughed. Of course, her grief would come with accompaniment.
Her steps fell into rhythm as she reached the corner.
Her shoulders squared a little, and the music in her chest shifted, moving toward something bigger, braver.
Her voice climbed into the pre-chorus, the words coming now as surely as her own breath, without effort or restraint,
“Their absence hums through every hallway,
A chord I cannot tune or trace.
Still, something in the radio static
Whispers, Child, step into our place.”
On static, she could practically hear it: that faint hiss in the WWJD soundboard when the levels weren’t quite right, the one her father always fixed with two fingers and a frown. The image made her eyes burn again, but the note came out steady and strong.
She reached the crosswalk. The DON’T WALK hand blinked red at her like an accusation.
She pressed the button and as the world waited, so did the music.
A wind picked up, riffling the papers in her folder.
She clamped them tighter against her chest. The sign flashed at her and encouraged her to WALK.
She looked both ways, then stepped out into the street and into her own chorus,
“Who rises when the lighthouse keepers
Disappear into the deep?”
The words rang out, clearer now, surprising her with their boldness. From a truck idling at the intersection, a fisherman in a ball cap looked over and muttered, “Somebody’s gotta,” as if in answer.
“Who learns to tend the flame alone
When grief will not let her sleep?”
As if on cue, the church bells down the block chimed the quarter hour–late, as usual but pleasant in their key.
A woman carrying a florist’s box walked past, blinked twice and sneezed, then tightened her grip around the flowers as if hugging herself despite her body’s aversion to one of her favourite things.
“I never asked to hold this post,
But I can hear the coastline call.”
She really could. Not literally–though on the Bay of Quinte, Napanne’s closest coastline was Lake Ontario, twenty kilometres away but in her imagination she heard the wind and the gulls and that relentless, low boom of the crashing waves that said, you’re small, but I still see you.
“If faith is built on unseen things,
Then I will answer, I will stand tall.”
On tall, she lengthened her spine and lifted her chin like some invisible director had shouted, “Posture! Shoulders back! Chest out! Really let ‘em have it now!” Her mother’s blazer pulled across her back, the seams protesting slightly.
She ignored it, and grasping a hand around a lamppost, used it as leverage to swing and strike a pose like Lady Liberty staring out across the imaginary ocean engulfing her small town.
“I’ll hold my flare above the waves,
Though my own heart shakes with doubt.
They built the tower.
Now it’s my turn
To send the signal out!”
The last line left her on a held note as she reached the steps of Trinity United Church.
A toddler on the top step dropped his ice cream cone with perfect comedic timing and howled like the universe had personally wronged him too.
Emma-Lou bent without missing the tail-end of the note, scooped the scoop back onto the waffle, and offered it to him with a smile that agreed, it was indeed one of those days.
He sniffled, then accepted with a nod, and his mother mouthed thank you.
She cut down a side street, away from the main traffic, letting the song carry her between brick buildings and chain-link fences sagging with long-dry morning glory vines.
The town thinned a little here–fewer shops, more houses, laundry flapping lazily in small backyards.
A lilac bush spilled over someone’s fence, the scent overripe and nostalgic, swirling up memories.
She took it in as the next verse climbed up through her chest,
“All my life, I stayed behind them,
Shadow, secretary, dutiful child.
Sorting mail and brewing coffee,
Every dream of mine too wild.”
She saw herself at sixteen, manning the WWJD front desk, highlighter in hand, dutifully colour-coding donation pledges while her friends were at the mall trying on jean skirts and shoplifting lip gloss.
Her mother had said, “You’re helping people find Jesus, Lou-Lou.
In the end times, what do you think people will need more? Malls or the radio?”
She huffed out something between a laugh and a sob,
“But now the chairs behind their desks
Look carved with something like my name,
And Greater Napanee keeps waiting
For a leader to relight the flame.”
She imagined the office upstairs at the station–her father’s favourite coffee cup on his desk, her mother’s Post-its stuck to the corkboard in a constellation of duties to be done. Plant tulips for Spring. Call the Ferraris. Pay Hydro. Pray for Cheryl’s hip.
The thought of sitting in those chairs made her stomach swoop like she’d crested the top of a roller coaster.
She passed a little side garden where Mrs. Lavadeer knelt in dirt-streaked track pants she may have once used for running, hand planted to steady herself on a trowel in the flower bed.
The older woman looked up, studied Emma-Lou’s black clothes and set jaw.
“Tout est bien qui finit bien, ma chère,” she called. “Are you doing alright?”
“Getting there,” Emma-Lou answered, and leaned on the little picket fence to share how she was really feeling,
“I hear their laughter in the plaster,
Their prayers tucked into every tile.
Though the Triangle kept their bodies,
Their purpose lingers in this file.”