STASIA WARD KEHOE
the
sound
of
letting
go
VIKING
An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA)
VIKING
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First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014
Copyright © 2014 by Stasia Ward Kehoe
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Ward, S. (Stasia), date–
The sound of letting go / by Stasia Ward Kehoe.
pages cm
Summary: At seventeen, Daisy feels imprisoned by her brother Steven’s autism and its effects and her only escape is through her trumpet into the world of jazz, but when her parents decide to send Steven to an institution she is not ready to let him go.
ISBN 978-1-101-62655-9
[1. Novels in verse. 2. Autism—Fiction. 3. Trumpet—Fiction. 4. Jazz—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. Family problems—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.5.W24Sou 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2013013098
Version_1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
Chapter 131
Chapter 132
Chapter 133
Chapter 134
Chapter 135
Chapter 136
Chapter 137
Chapter 138
Chapter 139
Chapter 140
Chapter 141
Chapter 142
Chapter 143
Chapter 144
Chapter 145
Acknowledgments
For Thomas, Mak, Sam, Jack,
and Kevin.
Always.
1
Dave Miller grins in my direction.
At least, I think
his easy-eyed, right-cheek-dimpled expression
is meant for me.
It’s hard to be certain, since we are separated
by the fingerprinted interior window that divides my band room refuge from the chaotic dissonance of the rest of Evergreen High.
Dave was my best friend in kindergarten.
We split jelly (no peanut butter) sandwiches together,
told our parents that we’d marry
and build a house, someday, in Dave’s backyard.
But life isn’t kindergarten, and by now,
junior year of high school,
we live on different social planets,
our orbits rarely intersecting,
though sometimes, in the morning,
he’s there outside the band room
making my stomach flutter,
making me want a peanut-butter-free jelly sandwich.
I wonder what sort of smile would telegraph the reply,
If-you-are-looking-at-me-hey-there-but-if-you-are-not-
I-don’t-mind.
Whatever it is, I hope that’s my expression
as I pack up my trumpet,
smooth my hand over the once-black case
now customized with a zillion jazz-musician,
classic-album, instrument art stickers I’ve made
using mom’s scrapbooking gadgets
because my mother keeps things organized.
Our lives in labele
d albums,
our showpiece house in designer paint colors
vacuumed, swept, so pretty that if you just looked
you might want to come inside.
But if you listened,
you’d hear another story:
incomprehensible wailing,
shouting, urgent phone calls,
crying. You’d want to ask if a monster
lived in our house.
I am not sure how I’d answer.
2
I snap the buckles,
hoist my backpack over one shoulder,
slide my trumpet case up onto a band room shelf.
I’ll retrieve it after school.
“Busy tonight, Daisy?”
Dave catches me at the door.
I resist the instinctive why?
and say, “Not really.”
“A bunch of us are going to The Movie House.
Wanna come?”
Dave’s golden-brown eyes hold me,
his hopeful voice a beckoning bell
silenced by the drum crash of reality.
Wednesday is one of Mom’s yoga nights.
A night I watch Steven.
“I—I think I’ll have too much homework for that.”
3
Heart skidding, I walk down the hall to homeroom,
eyes pointed resolutely forward, resisting
the urge to glance back, see if Dave is watching.
I slide my backpack off my shoulder, straighten my spine,
give my hair a casual, carefree shake, just in case.
“The Movie House,” I whisper through near-motionless lips.
I have this habit of sometimes saying words out loud,
narrating my life as I wish it could be,
pretending the pounding in my chest is because I am, secretly, a spy girl or mad scientist,
that my reason for scurrying home, turning down Dave,
is something more exotic than unpleasant.
I let my imagination wander to the possibility of yes.
In my mind, I sit at The Movie House beside Dave
and he puts his hand gently over mine on the armrest
that separates us,
and it doesn’t feel anything like our old sandbox high fives,
and he isn’t the detention-garnering slacker he’s become
but the astronaut-engineer-firefighter he used to portray
when he wore a near-perpetual chocolate-milk mustache
and hair buzzed short by his dad, like a soldier’s.
“Wednesday at The Movie House”
could be the title for an album,
something brassy, instrumental, full of hope.
And that makes me smile a little,
thinking of music inside my head despite my pulsing regret
for saying no.
4
At three fifteen, I haul my feet
to the parking lot, drag
my bags along the ground, not caring
if the rip, tug, pull,
the bump-scratch of trumpet case
grazing asphalt
slows me down.
It is hard to go home.
Sometimes I think I’d join any band, rehearse any song,
for the chance to be away from that place an extra hour.
If I called Mom, asked,
she’d probably let me go to The Movie House tonight.
But I can’t do that to her.
5
“I’m back!” I announce not too loudly,
slipping the house key back into my jeans pocket.
“Mom?”
I get no reply, but head to the kitchen anyway.
As I pass the table, Steven catches my arm
in a grip that’s gotten tighter,
rougher, since he turned thirteen.
His feet keep growing.
His face is getting pimply.
He is starting to look like a man.
“Hi, Daisy.”
Mom is wearing her “Kiss the Cook” apron
over a blue-and-white yoga ensemble.
“Is that new?” I ask
as I pull my arm from its vice-hold,
already glad I didn’t disappoint her
by asking to escape tonight.
It’s still two hours until yoga
and she’s already dressed to go.
6
“We made chocolate chip cookies.” Mom unties her apron.
“Would you mind if I left a little early?
A few other yoga-moms are meeting for tea before class.”
“Go ahead,” I say,
sitting down at the kitchen table across from my brother.
Mom puts a cookie on my paper plate,
places another in Steven’s hand.
I do not like warm cookies.
I prefer to wait until the chocolate chips
have gotten cool, firm, and the cookie a little crispy.
But I take a bite.
Steven taps his cookie against his lips,
the bottom of his nose,
then he pushes it into his mouth,
crumbs dropping onto the table.
The cookie finished, he settles into a familiar pose—
head cocked to the left,
gazing vaguely upward as if the ceiling reveals secrets
only he can see.
I watch the energy transfer to Steven’s plump fingers:
Elbows drawn tight against his belly,
he moves his forearms slowly,
not the agile, winglike flapping that stereotypes autistics
on television
but a cruel series of arduous passes—
palm over back of hand . . . palm over back of hand . . .
His knuckles are calloused, reddish from wear.
Mom bustles around the kitchen.
“The casserole should come out at five thirty.
Dad’s working late again,
but he’ll be home to put Steven to bed.
I’ll give him his meds before I go.”
“Want to go watch TV, Steven?” I ask.
Nothing.
I stand up. “TV in the family room, Steven?”
Beat . . . Beat . . .
“No-ahhh.” His flat, tuneless half-word/half-moan
instantly stops Mom’s sweeping.
“How about Blokus?”
She pulls the box from the kitchen island,
slides it before Steven.
Plastic pieces tumble onto the table.
I have “played” Blokus with Steven many times;
our game rule is simply that I watch him
align the square chips
in single-colored rows until the board is full.
Sometimes we do it three times or more,
Steven’s hands wringing
as he contemplates the colors, almost never acknowledging
that I am sitting across from him
or that he feels any satisfaction in completing a row.
“There.” Mom nods her head
as Steven begins to focus on the game.
“You’ll be fine.”
“Yeah.”
I calculate the breadth of Steven’s shoulders,
now wider than mine;
count the hours
between now and Dad coming home to take over;
and I am only a little afraid
of the night.
7
In the morning,
the wails are my alarm clock.
Steven does not like to take a shower, b
rush his teeth.
Most of all, he hates to put on deodorant.
I wait under the quilt
as the sun teases through the slats in the window blinds,
until thudding footsteps on the stairs report
the second floor has been emptied of everyone but me.
Then I haul myself out of bed, tired, as always,
from a late night of homework and trumpet practice
that can only begin
after one of my parents has come home to take over Steven.
I rub my eyes, trying to remember
a morning when I woke up feeling rested,
a day that wasn’t a constant strain of worries,
a time when I didn’t care
about time.
Breakfast is another terse routine of favorite foods,
Mom’s constant monologue of calming words,
restating the day’s plan,
asking Dad random questions about the news, the weather,
as if we lived in an ordinary house,
could take pleasure in morning conversation.
I ghost my way through the kitchen,
pour cereal from the nearest box to hand
into a clean bowl, slosh in milk,
eat at the kitchen island, while Mom, Dad, and Steven
circle the table with their family farce.
“Today at school, we’re not going to hit anyone,
right, Steven?
We are going to sit nicely in our seat and not hit, right?”
Mom tries to keep her voice steady.
Dad lets out a long breath from behind his paper.
We are living on the verge of Steven’s dismissal
from his current special-needs public school program,
where he has begun to smack the teachers almost daily,
grab at the wrists of his female classmates
if they pass too closely by his desk.