Page 99 of A Boy Called Lovesong

A fairy-like melody.

A dream.

“I hear it,” I whispered.

“Now you know,” he said.

I opened my eyes, the snow-covered trees looming large around us, as though they could protect us from anything.

“Now I know what?”

“Now you know where I want to be,” he smiled. “Where the pianos are born.”

Suddenly, reality seemed to be returning to me.

Chet.

Cybil’s pickup.

The letter.

The Bible.

Lovesong.

Joel’s urn.

The world came flooding back too fast.

A world in which Joel no longer belonged.

I started to panic.

“Joel, don’t leave me. I don’t want you to go. I want you back.”

I was crying and he held me close, whispering in my ear, “Shhh. It’s all right, my darling. You have to go back to the start of the song now. It’s time to begin again. It’s time to learn a new melody, one we don’t know the steps to. But if your heart keeps beating in time with the music… you’ll learn to dance again.”He cradled my head against his shoulder and said, “Now… close your eyes. And when you open them again, you’ll be—”

CHAPTER 21

“Awake! He’s awake!”

The voice belonged to Lovesong.

I opened my eyes and saw him leaning over me, holding my hand.

I must have stirred, I must have moved, I must have given some indication that I was conscious and alive and—

“In a hospital bed?” My voice was rough, dry, confused. “What am I doing in a hospital bed? What happened?”

As I asked the question and looked around at the heart-monitoring machine and the IV drip and the x-rays on the wall, the accident with the pickup came rushing back to me.

“Chet! Where’s Chet?”

“He’s okay. Leroy took him to a veterinarian down the road. He called to say Chet’s gonna be just fine. You were the one who took the brunt of the blow.”

“Cybil. What about Cybil? I saw her collapse at the wheel. Is she…?”

“She’s in the cardiac ward, they’re going to operate soon. The doc says she needs a stent put in. Earl is with her now, as well as all the cotton pickers. The second the accident happened,everyone scrambled to get y’all to the hospital here in Baton Rouge.”

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