“I know.” Anna pats the blanket beside her. “Keely? Will you come tell me about other planets again? Please?”
“Okay, okay.” She scoots over to Anna, and they both lean back. Keely takes a deep breath, like she’s beginning a fairy tale. “Well, Gliese 667 is a three-star system with seven planets. Three of those planets are rocky terrain and possibly habitable. And the system is only about twenty-two light-years away. So it’s something that could maybe actually happen.”
“Probably the thing I’m saddest about right now,” Anna muses, “is that it might not be in our lifetime. God, I hope it is. So bad. I just want to know.”
I’ve always thought only in terms of heaven and earth. In my mind, heaven is somewhere inaccessibly skyward, and hell is somewhere near the molten core of the earth.
Anna twists around. “Lucy, do you believe that there are other life forms out there?”
“Um . . .” I know the right answer is yes, but it would be a lie. “I’ve never thought about it.”
“A nonbeliever,” Keely says to Anna.
“We can convert her,” she whispers back. They lower their voices more, giggling and occasionally pointing at the sky. I look up, where a patch of dark sky is barely touched by treetops. Stars splattered. If I squint, it’s almost like a page of music with the colors inverted. Black page with tiny white dots strewn across.
Tambe returns and joins them on the blanket, happily musing about universes beyond.
I look over at Jones. “What about you? ET? No ET?”
“Ah. I’m an alien agnostic.”
“Meaning . . . there may or may not be extraterrestrials, but you don’t really care to think about it?”
He taps a finger on his nose and points at me with his other hand. “Got other things on my mind.”
“Like trumpet.”
“Ha. Sometimes.”
“It’s very impressive for only ‘sometimes.’?”
“Eh, not really. I mean, you play the piano.”
“Yeah, but pianos have keys . . . I just know what they are and can press them in different combinations.”
In the firelight, I can see him arch an eyebrow above his glasses. “What do you think a trumpet has?”
“Well, I know those are keys too, but you only have three! I have eighty-eight! And I don’t have to do anything with my breathing for my instrument to make sound.”
“Well, I don’t have to use my feet at all.”
I guess I do use pedals; they’re just second nature now. “How long have you played?”
“Since I was five.”
“Five? That’s early, right?” I don’t know when public school kids start playing instruments, but kindergarten seems way early for a brass instrument.
“Yeah.” He laughs. “I sounded like a grief-stricken duck because my mouth wasn’t even big enough, but I just wanted to play so badly. I couldn’t wait. Have you heard of Sean Jones?”
This feels like a trick. “Is that . . . you?”
“No!” This is so wrong, apparently, that he laughs. “No relation. I wish. Sean Jones is a trumpet player. One of the best in the world. I saw him play when I was in kindergarten, and I was like: That’s it. That’s what I want to do.”
This feels so awkward, but I have to know. “So, um, what is your name?”
“Oh, that’s funny that you don’t know! Well, maybe it’s not. I’ve always gone by Jones here, even before I was a counselor. You don’t want to guess?”
“Rumpelstiltskin,” I say, which makes him burst out laughing.
“Henry Morris Jones IV.” He holds out a hand, which I shake. His skin is warm across my palm.
“Henry,” I repeat. I almost could have guessed it, maybe. Henry: old-fashioned but still cool. Like his glasses and his wardrobe. “Henry Jones. Wait. Isn’t that . . . ?”
“Indiana Jones’s real name? Yep. But it was my great-grandad’s before it was Indy’s.”
“Four of you with the same name? Isn’t that confusing?”
“Nah. My great-grandfather went by Henry, my grandpa’s Hank. My dad is Trey.”
“That’s so nice—a name with all that history, so much meaning.” I wrinkle my nose. “I’m named for Saint Lucy.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know that one.”
“Oh, she was a martyr. Of course. Died for her faith—by eye gouging or sword, the story varies.”
“Maybe eye-gouged with a sword,” Jones offers. “Well, that’s . . . charming.”
I laugh. “Right? My dad wanted to name me Esther, but my mom thought it sounded elderly. It’s my middle name. They couldn’t agree on anything biblical, so they branched out to saint names. We’re not even Catholic!”
“Me neither. I do like the idea of saints, though. Rhea has a statue of Saint Jude, patron saint of lost causes, even though she doesn’t believe in saints or that any cause is ever lost.”
If a cause is entirely lost, what’s the point of a saint to watch over it? Or to field prayers about it? But I know. I know because, for the first time, I feel like a lost cause—or at least a desperate case. I would want a saint who knows how far gone everything feels.
He tells me more about Rhea, and about her son, Bryan—the tall guy with a beard who I met only briefly. He’s always hurrying from one place to the next. I learn that Jones has been at Daybreak since sixth grade, same as Anna. Tambe since seventh, and Simmons since fifth. I don’t even feel disappointed to confirm that theirs is an impossible history for me to slide into. I just feel sad—and, okay, a little curious—about all of them experiencing some kind of trauma so young. What sent each of them here?
We talk about the shared lives of musicians—about exacting teachers who pushed us to be better, about the long hours, and nerve-racking performances.
“So, why’d you stop piano lessons?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. It felt inevitable, at the time. “I think it’s that my mom swam when she was my age, so it’s this shared language. Something we both get. With piano, I was the only person at home who played. Plus, I think I wanted to be part of a team instead of all that practice alone or with a teacher.”
“I’ve always thought I want to be a professional trumpeter,” Jones says. “But sometimes I think it’s too solitary for me. Like maybe I’d be happier with counseling or social work. Not psychiatry—my mom’s a psychiatrist, so I’m too close to that, ha. But something where I can help kids the way Rhea and Bryan helped me.”
There is a tiny piece of my heart—like rot in an apple—that hopes one of his parents had cancer and made it through. Maybe that’s his checked bag. Then he could talk me through it in his highly skilled counselor way. It’s so selfish a thought that I stun myself with it, wondering if the devil has sunk his nails into me. I tuck my arms together, leaning forward to look at Jones. “You’d be a natural at that.”