Earlier in the day, Rosamel Walker had been stretched out on the floor of Mo’s room, sucking cannabis through a fancy new vape designed to mimic a highlighter. It even worked as a highlighter, she said. Best study aid ever.
They’d already gone over the night at the Cliff Hangar, and of course there was nothing useful there. He’d been there to see Susannah or tell Susannah something. But that hadn’t happened, as far as he remembered. What had happened, he didn’t remember.
Rosamel threw the vaporizer at him. “Catch. They legalized it in Ireland yet?”
Mo consulted his fake memories as he waited for the red light to appear. “No?” he said. “But gay marriage is looking like it might come up for a vote in a year or two, so. You wanna tell me about this girl? The one in Ohio?”
“It was a thing,” Rosamel said. “But now it’s done. Did she put a dent in my heart? Yes. Do I want to talk about it? No. It’s all very boring. What I want to talk about is you. Is Ireland as racist as the Internet says? Please say no. Please tell me you’ve hooked up with some Riverdancing guy named Seamus.”
Mo said, “More racist than Ohio?”
“I wanted to see what it was like to live somewhere you can’t see the ocean,” Rosamel said. “Like, as far away from the ocean as you can get.”
It was interesting. Mo had memories of Ireland but no memories of Irish people being particularly racist or being particularly anything at all. How depressing it would be if Mr. Anabin had given him that kind of memory. For the first time he was almost grateful, and then mad to be grateful, for something like that.
“Seamus,” Rosamel prompted him. “Red hair. Freckles. Big—”
Mo said, “Aren’t you the one always telling me to find a nice Black boy?”
“I’m not holding my breath,” Rosamel said.
Mo said, “Mostly I’ve kind of been focusing on my music. Writing my own stuff. You know.”
“No,” Rosamel said. “I don’t. Because you never let anybody see any of your shit.” She sounded genuinely put out.
“I am a vault of unheard sounds,” Mo said. He really was. As it turned out, deciding never to talk to any of your friends about the music you wrote had been great training for other stuff. “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.”
“For a guy with nothing to say, you sure run your mouth,” Rosamel shot back.
So then they were silent for a while. Sunlight decorated the ceiling in slabs of brightness. Mo took another hit. He flipped through the book Rosamel had returned. Here were favorite sentences he’d highlighted: The composer (organizer of sound) will be faced not only with the entire field of sound but also with the entire field of time. And Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another? And Will Boulez be there or did he go away when I wasn’t looking? Only someone had crossed out Boulez and written Bogomil above it. He hadn’t done that. He put the book down.
Rosamel said, “You remember that thing my mom had with that Mrs. Sangovich over at her church?”
Mo said, “The one who cheated at bridge and your mom caught her, right? They have that feud.”
“Yeah, her,” Rosamel said. “So the weirdest thing since I got back, Mr. Sangovich died a couple months ago? And my mom took her over a tray of cinnamon rolls and now they’re, like, friends. They go everywhere together. Movies, lunch, now they’re even bridge partners. My dad can’t get over it. He keeps saying, ‘But how can you trust her? She’s a cheat!’ But, you know, I think he’s mostly just jealous. She and my mom are on the phone all the time. Mrs. Sangovich calls after dinner, and she and my mom sit on the phone and watch television together.”
“That’s a whole romance novel,” Mo said. “I’d read it.”
Rosamel said, “Just saying. My mom hated that old bitch. But she got over it. Maybe she’ll get over me, eventually. We might even be friends someday. Maybe. Maybe I’ll come over and visit you in Ireland, though. I always thought there was kind of a thing between me and that Laura girl. Whenever I looked over at her in homeroom, she was always looking at me.”
“You hooked up with Susannah,” Mo said. “Aren’t sisters off-limits?”
“We didn’t get past the meet-and-greet portion,” Rosamel said dismissively. “You really friends with those two now? With Daniel? Never thought you had any time for him.”
“We’re not friends,” Mo said. “We’ve spent some time together, but we’re not friends.”
“What’s she like? Laura?”
“Motivated,” Mo said. “A little sneaky.”
“Both excellent qualities,” Rosamel said. She rubbed her head. “Haven’t gotten used to this yet. If I’d been smart, I would’ve waited until summer.”
“It looks good, though,” Mo said. It really did. Maybe he should shave his head, too. No, he had a weird ridge in his skull. His fingers sought it out. “You look like you’re just back from some sex vacation on the moon.”
Rosamel said, “Please. Moon couldn’t handle me. You up for some time with me and Natalie and Theo tomorrow? Theo said her mom will make us mango rolls.”
Mo heaved himself off his bed and carried the vaporizer back to Rosamel. He dropped down on the floor and lay on his back beside her.
“You okay, friend?” Rosamel said. She had turned to look at him, to really look at him. He allowed it.
He said, “Don’t know. Missed you and Natalie and Theo something bad. And now, you know, uh.”
“I’m sorry about your grams.”
“Yeah,” Mo said.
Rosamel studied his face. Then she sat up. “Oh, Mo. The state of your ends. Sadness is good for nobody’s hair. Here.”
She went into his bathroom and came out with his pomegranate oil.
“It’s okay,” Mo said. “I can take care of myself.”
“Yeah, you can,” Rosamel said. “But let me. Let me do something for you. Remember when Theo and I broke up and I was afraid she’d make everybody choose between us? Remember how you made it right? You were so nice to both of us. And so we figured out how to be nice to each other. Let me, Mo. A little thing. Because we’re friends, and friends ought to take care of each other.”
Mo sat up and she poured oil in her palm. “Nice stuff,” she said and began to work it into his hair.
When was the last time someone had done this for him? Mo closed his eyes and he was a little boy again. His grandmother’s fingers were patient. But he could feel their strength, too. The things they knew. His mother’s hands would have been careful. Deft. They had been a musician’s hands. He thought he remembered this: how every touch had told how much she loved him.
His room still smelled faintly of weed and pomegranate oil. Daniel and Laura had left and he’d said good night to Jenny and gone to bed, but now the round moon was in the window, gushing light, and Mo, too, was fizzing with a kind of radiant electricity. He didn’t even bother to turn on his bedroom light. He could see in the dark. He could see everything. It hadn’t been a fluke, the thing he’d done in Mr. Anabin’s classroom. He was magic. He could do magic. He had made the roses bloom. If it was his grandmother who had left him the message, who had come to him, then when she came back she would see her roses blooming. And who else would it have been? Who else in this whole world loved him enough to stand in the middle of the night outside his window, waiting for him to see and come down? Surely she would come again. She had an epigraph from Rumi in one of her books. Mo had always loved it, even when, after doing some digging online, it became less clear whether it was actually by Rumi or by someone called Abu Said Abul-Kayr. The past was a confusing place, full of bad information and mysteries. Mo loved the epigraph so much that in sixth grade he’d set it to music, and he still thought the composition was one of the best things he’d written.
Come, come, whoever you are,
Wanderer, worshipper, lover of leaving.
It doesn’t matter.
Ours is not a caravan of despair.
Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.
Come, yet again, come, come.
He said it to the moon in the window. He said it with his whole being. He said it twice more, and then he sang it in his disappointing and wholly inadequate alto, very softly so he wouldn’t wake Jenny up. But he let that new part of himself, that new ability, shape what he sang and extend it out into the night, as far as he could, as loudly as he could.
Far down below the Cliffs, Daniel and Laura heard the song and wondered who was singing it. Bogomil pricked up his ears, and Mr. Anabin put down the T-shirt he had been folding. Bowie, now an owl tucked inside the hollow of the oldest tree in Lovesend, a two-hundred-year-old sycamore, drew that yet more ancient pocket of suspended time that exists at the heart of all trees more tightly around himself (older even still) and slept on.
Mo’s phone buzzed with a text from Rosamel.
Mo texted back a sad face.
Rosamel sent back a whole string of them, then
But there had been two tigers.
And there were two beings who heard Mo’s song. One was the tiger still living. She’d had a night full of adventures. Earlier she’d attacked a woman almost exactly the same age as she (when she’d been a woman and not a tiger) on the boardwalk. But the woman had been walking her two chows and the chows were not afraid of a tiger. She got one of them by the shoulder, though her teeth did not get much past the fur and loose skin. The other chow locked its jaw around her back leg as its owner screamed and began to strike the tiger’s muzzle with the stick she’d been throwing for her dogs earlier. As the tiger ran away, the woman threw a bag of dog shit after her. Later, this was the triumphant highlight of the story the woman told at cocktail parties.
The tiger was standing on her back paws, head inside a dumpster outside the back door of What Hast Thou Ground? when she heard Mo singing.
She began to make her way back to the familiar terrain of the Cliffs.
Mo found he was not entirely satisfied with one piece of his song after all. There should be something to differentiate that last repetition of the word “come.” Should it signal command or invitation? Did it seduce or did it beg? Some of that should be in the interpretation, but some, too, should be there already, suggested in the composition. Or perhaps the power was in the sameness, the repetition of the note, and he should be reworking the “yet again.” Anyway, the song needed work, but the magic part did not. He’d asked the night a question and soon he would have his answer. Mo stretched out on his window seat on his side. He put one hand against the glass, feeling coolness and sweetness and possibility seep through, and fell asleep at once.