Never Coming Back by Alison McGhee

Author:Alison McGhee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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One Wednesday night the Subaru and I turned left at the village green. The Twin Churches were lit up. They were always lit up on Wednesday night, because that was choir practice night. Annabelle Lee would be in the rehearsal room at this very moment, her arms spread wide, the baton in her hand. I knew this because I used to spy on the choristers—which is the word for choir members, plural—when I was a child. Down the hall from the church house I would sneak in the dark, past the Sunday-school rooms I had never entered, down the steps to the closed door of the rehearsal room, where I would press my head and listen.

If you listen long enough, with your eyes closed, the voices of a choir become distinct. Not just when someone is singing a solo, but in general. What sounds like one voice from far away becomes many voices close up. I used to listen for my mother’s voice, pick it out of the crowd.

It was 9:21 on the car dashboard. Choir practice was over. I watched as first the far-end hallway light went dark, then the near-end hallway light, then the church itself, with its stained-glass windows, and finally the light that illuminated the front steps. The church and its adjoining building transformed in an instant into dark hulks on this November night. Then the front door opened and the dark hulk of Annabelle Lee herself emerged. I got out of the car.

“Who’s there,” she said. Her voice was a sharp command. Not a question.

“Sorry, Annabelle. It’s just me.”

“Clara? Is your mother ​—?”

“She’s fine. I mean she’s not fine, but she’s not why I’m here.”

Annabelle Lee was silent. The mass of her moved down the steps in the darkness and came toward me.

“Can I ask you some things?”

“Such as?”

“Why did my mother always eat out of cans and jars?”

Her sigh gusted out white in the dark air. She bent her head forward and rolled it back and forth, one hand massaging the back of her neck.

“Follow me back to the trailer,” she said. She always called it “the trailer,” never “home” or “my trailer” or “my place.” “It’s too cold out here to be answering questions.”

I parked behind the giant Impala. She held the door open and we went inside. I had Brown’s grid with me, the way I used to have a written-out list on a piece of scrap paper next to the phone when I was a reporter. It was comforting. It was a thing, a tangible thing in the midst of intangible talk. The kitchen seemed to be the only place Annabelle Lee occupied in her immaculate double-wide. It was full of light and music—the soundtrack to Hairspray, with the “You Can’t Stop the Beat” song having been set to repeat, apparently, the whole time Annabelle was at choir practice—and the smell of food, spaghetti and meatballs, so far as I could tell. Beyond the kitchen the living room and bedroom hallway stretched out dark and quiet.

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