Page 10 of Night Songs

She sat in the room, watchin’ the tree,

Waitin’ for someone to set her free

I closed my eyes and hummed with the melody of the guitar, and then I quietly sang the line, which led to another, and another, like it always did when I got on a story I wanted to tell. After a few lines, I had this feeling that the music needed to crescendo, when the character feels that they can’t go on. But then they get a chance at escape, and as freedom gets closer, the music gets looser, feeding air into the tight coil. I said all of this to Hess, and she built upon it as I played around with the words.

After a while, she played it through with us singing together. When it was done, she stared at me.

“My word. Where on earth did you come from?”

The front door slammed, and an older woman’s voice called through the house. I jumped up from where I’d settled on the floor, suddenly aware of my surroundings. If this “Mom” woman saw me, she would certainly kick me out. “I’m sorry. I gotta go now.”

Hess looked panicked. “Now?” She followed me to the door. “Will you come back? Another day?”

I wasn’t sure it was wise, but I wanted to more than anything. “Yes. Just start playing the song, and I’ll come.”

Back in the stale air of the shed, I relived every moment of the afternoon with Hess, and I realized that my sense of time had returned. Every moment I had been in Nashville had pooled together like shit in a pit, but now there was this one crisp stretch of time that stood apart, that marked an hour gloriously spent.

Music had returned to me as well, its raw material like fairy magic swirling into different combinations in my head. Our song played over and over, and the parts I wanted to add and change glowed in the dark space of my mind. I closed my eyes and pretended I lived only in that world.

The next time I heard Hess playing, I couldn’t stay away, and it was the same the next time, and the next. We met up almost every day that week, and I lived for our afternoons making music together.

I had missed the woods since I came to Nashville. It’s where I wrote most of my songs, alone among the trees. Their special silence allowed me to hear the music that drifted down from above.

Now, when Hess and I harmonized, it was like walking in the woods again. Hess’s voice was lower and steadier, like something made in nature. It surrounded me with its wilderness and put solid ground under my feet.

When our music-making session was over, I’d leave Hess’s room, and the color and stuff of me would fade the farther I got from her, and I’d float like a spirit to my shed.

I could only hear myself,trulyhear myself, when I was with Hess. I was only solid in her presence.

One afternoon, I noticed Hess side-eyeing me with this strange look, and after a while, I couldn’t let it go on.

“Hess, just spit it out.”

“What do you mean?”

“I know you got something on your mind. Come on. Out with it.”

Her eyes widened. Though she never said anything, I could tell she was startled sometimes by my way of getting straight to the point. It was how I’d been raised. My family wasn’t afraid of being rough with each other, for better or worse.

“Lou, I—” She stopped, took a deep breath. “I was talking to Mrs. Haskins yesterday, and I mentioned you, and she, um, she said she didn’t have any cousins staying with her. She’d never heard of you.”

The floor dropped away, and my body lightened.

She’d found me out.

She would tell the police, and they would lock me up, and I would never make music with her again.

She took me by the shoulders. “Lou, I don’t know what your situation is, but I know it isn’t good. There’s an open room here, and Mom said you can have it.”

I hadn’t met Mom yet, but I imagined she might be singing a different tune if she saw me. “Hess, I don’t have any money.”

“I’ll help you out,” she said simply.

We never talked about it, but I knew Hess came from money. I could tell in the way she talked and her nice clothes. Thoughwhoshe was, theHessof her, was so much more than that. She didn’t act like she was better than me, or make fun of me for being a hillbilly. I could tell she was someone who had made herself rather than being made, which is how I thought of me.

But that didn’t mean I was going to take her money. “I can’t let you do that.”

“Why not?”