When the Sky Fell on Splendor(96)

A strangled gasp escaped Wayne. “Kill . . . Molly?”

“No,” Arthur said, shaking his head. “Put the weapons down. I’ll explain.”

“What is there to explain?” Nick cried. “This man is dangerous!”

“Nick.” There was a spark in Arthur’s eye. “The song.” He jerked Wayne’s hijacked rifle toward the piano. “Play the song.”

Nick stonewalled him. It was so like Art, to make demands with no explanation.

For all we knew, the tornado was headed right this way, and even it wasn’t, Rothstadt was.

But it was also like Arthur to put the pieces of something together, to have a master plan.

“Trust me,” Arthur said. “It’s what you have to do. It’s the last piece.”

Nick stared at him for a long moment, but no one spoke and Arthur didn’t back down. Finally, Nick handed the shovel he’d been holding to Levi, and gave Art, Wayne, and the spiral a wide berth as he made his way to the piano.

His fingers floated onto the keys so lightly they didn’t make a sound. After a moment of just feeling them, he sat on the bench, and his joints curled and stretched to the end of the ivory keys.

His shoulders relaxed, melting into a new shape in the last beat of silence before his hands sank, coaxing sound from the instrument.

A note rang out, quivering until it faded entirely before he played another, and then he fell into a slow, tender rhythm.

We stood in an anxious clump around the spiral, Wayne backed into the corner with a stricken look, like not even he could believe how stupid this was, and Droog curled up against him. I thought dogs were supposed to be good judges of character, but she was nuzzling into him, pushing at his hand with her snout.

We needed to get down to the cellar, I kept thinking. It was all I could focus on at first.

But then, as before, the song did something to me. It was just so familiar, so haunting and tragic and preternatural.

Arthur had to be right; it had to mean something.

We fell into a kind of daze, and Wayne backed into the wall, pale as a ghost. As Nick sank into the melody, my chest felt full and my throat tightened.

The song was more than happy or sad or scared; it was everything, all at once, a full lifetime of events and the feelings that went with them collapsed into notes.

I pulled out the picture of Molly at the piano.

I closed my eyes as the sound pushed through me and the memory of that star-swept black spread over me, the choir of voices singing out from the streaks of light as they dove toward the warm darkness below.

This song. This, I thought, had been what was emanating off the body of light I could just barely remember from Molly’s consciousness. This song was the sound of her, screaming across the sky. It held her whole life between notes, untranslatable to words.

I held my breath as Nick approached the final note, and I knew he must be thinking that when that sound finished its quivering, faded into the hum and roar of the storm, the last spark of her would go with it from us, and from the world we lived in.

We would no longer be connected, to one another, to her. We’d say goodbye to the glory and mystery and connection that Black Mailbox Bill/Albert had craved at any cost, and we would just be us: the six of us again. The Ordinary.

Nick relaxed into the final chord and it hung there, like I’d known it would, and I wasn’t afraid for the moment it would end, but I was sad, because I would miss it.

I closed my eyes, wanting the sound to overtake my other senses, to become a smell and a feeling—maybe a temperature and a humidity, the feeling of the air itself—and a taste and a color.

It stretched out, thick as honey waiting to drop, and behind my eyelids, I saw white light rushing past.

Somewhere, far from here, I felt myself hurtling through the starry black, and I heard voices singing the word, and I felt the chill beating against me, and I waited.

The sound was there, there, there, there, and then, at last, it was not.

Slowly, I released my breath. The world had gone quiet. Perhaps the storm had moved on.

I opened my eyes.

Wayne was crumpled in the corner, his massive hands covering his face as silent sobs heaved through him. Arthur knelt and touched his back.

Wayne looked at my brother; my brother looked at Wayne. “I wrote that for her,” Wayne wheezed. “Some of it, but not all. It was her song. It sounded like her.”

“She loves you,” Arthur said.

“She did,” Wayne said. “She’s gone.”

“Yes,” Arthur said.

In profile, my brother looked more like a child than he had even when we were kids: that eager swoop of his nose, the furry jut of his eyebrows and sun-dappled freckly skin, the way his wide mouth opened in a breathless circle. “She’s not here anymore, but wherever she is, she loves you.

“She came to us,” Arthur said. “I don’t understand how, but she did. She fell out of the sky, and she left pieces of herself in all of us, and when I saw you—I could feel it right away, what she’d given to me . . . I know everything you mean to her, and everything she wants for you. I don’t have the memories, but I have the feelings.” There were tears in Arthur’s eyes now. “I know you were always there. You never let her down.”

Wayne’s features pinched as he looked down to the scar on Arthur’s forearm, which had shrunk to little more than a purple blot between his thumb and forefinger.