“Ask Cap to play something for you,” Link finally said. “He’s awesome.”
Once the kitchen was clean, the parents each found their child and walked together into the courtyard, the families disappearing into their own separate houses. Izzy and Cap hung back, walking slowly, hand in hand, until they were the last people in the courtyard. She looked back at the main building and saw Dr. Grind watching them from the entrance. She waved to him and he waved back. When Cap saw the doctor, he broke from his mother, ran back to Dr. Grind for a hug, and then sprinted back to Izzy. Finally, they stepped into their house, all the lights on, as if someone was waiting for them to return.
After bath and story time Cap sat on the edge of his bed, while Izzy sat on the floor facing him. He strummed a few chords on the ukulele and then took a deep breath. “‘You are my sunshine,’” he sang, his fingers easily making the simple chord changes, “‘my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don’t take my sunshine away.’”
And suddenly, as if someone had layered her past memory over this moment and marveled at the similarity, she remembered a moment with Hal, lying in his bed, when she had noticed a guitar sitting in the closet of his bedroom. “Do you play?” she had asked him, and he shook his head, seemingly irritated that the guitar had made its presence known, as if it were a stray dog that kept invading his space.
“Not really,” he said.
“But you play some?” she asked him.
“I guess,” he said, and she could see his face scrunch up, the tiny tics moving across his skin, his aggravation with the whole damn world, and she quieted and rested her head on his chest to calm him. After a few minutes of silence, he said, “You want to hear something?” and she nodded. He swung his feet onto the floor and gently picked up the guitar. He returned to the edge of the bed and quickly tuned the guitar before he expertly strummed the strings with such precision that it seemed to Izzy it was a kind of magic trick. In a soft, but gruff, voice, not Hal’s real voice at all, he began to sing, “‘Oh, I’m sailin’ away, my one true love. I’m sailin’ away in the morning.’” He played the entire song, about a man and a woman, about separation, Spanish boots of Spanish leather. It was, to Izzy, the most beautiful thing she had ever heard. When Hal finished, he placed the guitar back in the closet, softly closed the door, and stood over Izzy. “That was so beautiful,” she told him. He shrugged. “Not that beautiful,” he said. “That motherfucker leaves her, doesn’t he?” and Izzy realized that she hadn’t really listened closely to the song, and she wanted him to sing it again. But she was afraid to ask. And, she now realized, she never heard him sing another song, not another note strummed on that guitar.
Cap frowned when he finished the chorus and then paused for a second. “The rest of the song is kind of sad, actually,” he said, his face so serious, as if he did not think that Izzy could handle the lyrics in her current state.
“That’s okay,” she assured him, wanting only to hear him continue to play; as she stared at the concentration on his face, the seriousness of his actions, she could see Hal so clearly. Was this a new development, she wondered, or was Hal always there in her son and she chose to ignore it to save her heart from breaking? So much of Cap came from Izzy, her genes so insistent on possessing her son entirely that they had taken over the construction of the boy, but there was Hal staring back at her and, though of course it made her sad, it felt like a gift that she would never have given to herself, one that she would always love.
“I’ll just sing the chorus a few more times,” he finally allowed, and Izzy nodded her approval, trying to keep from tearing up until he returned his attention to the song, and then Cap played the chorus once again, then a second time, then three times. Each time he reached the end, Izzy would smile and clap, which would start Cap again. He sang the chorus for the fourth and fifth time, then a sixth. Izzy felt like they could stay like this forever, just the two of them, forever each other’s sunshine in the middle of the night, and she clapped and clapped and then Cap asked her to sing with him and so she did. They sang in unison, and sometimes Cap would speed up the music and other times slow it down to a funeral dirge, before returning to the normal rhythm. Finally, long past the point that Izzy kept track of the song, Cap stopped strumming. “My fingers are a little sore,” he admitted, and Izzy leaned forward and embraced him.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” he replied, holding the ukulele away from his body to keep it from getting in the way of their hug.
“You are an amazing boy,” she told him.
“Am I?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“You are,” she said.