Page 68 of Theo of Golden

Kendrick smiled. “And you keep playing.”

An hour later, Simone packed up his cello, put it on his back, and locked the door to the studio. As he stepped out of the building, he saw Kendrick sitting on a bench nearby. They exchanged hellos.

Kendrick held up his cell phone. “I’m just taking a break and checkin’ on my little girl.”

“Is she up this late?”

“Naw, naw. She’s asleep, but I got this camera thing in her room, so I can look in at her. I got a friend who gave it to me, so I could watch her while she’s in the hospital. She had to go back in last week to have a surgery.”

“Is she OK?”

Kendrick told the story of Lamisha’s accident and injury.

“She got a real nice doctor, Dr. Good — that’s what we call him ‘cause his last name is kind of hard to say. He’s from Nigeria. He’s the one who did the operation. My daughter’s gonna have a limp, but she’s gonna be pretty much able to do everything like everybody else. We thought she might lose her leg, but the doctor fixed her. We’re blessed. You wanna see her?”

Kendrick tapped a couple of times on the small screen. Simone sat down beside him, leaned in close, and looked at the picture.

The hospital room was dimly lit. A bed, a number of pole-mounted monitors, an IV bag, and walls in the stark institutional color of no-color surrounded a sleeping girl with intricately braided hair.

Her leg was held slightly elevated and immobile by various gadgets. She had the appearance of a small-scale suspension bridge — cables, wires, rods.

“They have to put all that there so her bone heals right,” Kendrick explained. “It hurts her a lot, but Dr. Good says they gotta do it. He gives her medicine to help her sleep.”

“That’s quite a cast on her leg,” Simone observed.

And it was. The doctor had allowed Lamisha to select the color herself. It was one way to let the young patient feel that she was in control of at least a small part of her healing.

She had chosen the brightest shade of blue on the menu of options. Not quite blue as morpho but close. It glowed in the half light of the room.

She was sleeping soundly.

A figure entered the camera view. A nurse?

On the small screen, it was hard to tell.

“That’s him,” Kendrick said. “That’s my friend who gave me the camera.”

Simone leaned in closer, squinted and frowned. “Is that… Is that Theo?’

Kendrick’s face lit up. “You know Mr. Theo?”

“I do. He’s sort of a neighbor. I see him on the Promenade a lot. Why is he there?”

Kendrick recounted the friendship of the old man and the little girl. “Well, Mr. Theo loves my little girl, and when she’s in the hospital, he goes to check on her, and when she’s home he comes over every week to read with her. He can’t sleep sometimes at night. That’s what he told me. So, maybe that’s why he’s there so late tonight.

“Somethin’ about Mr. Theo, when he comes around, they take real good care of Lamisha. They think he’s important or somethin’. My grandmama says he’s an angel.”

“How’d you meet him?”

Kendrick told the story of the bestowal. “It still seems crazy to me and I still don’t know why he’s so nice to us, but he’s a good man. A for-real good man.”

“How long will he stay there tonight?”

“I don’t know. Till it’s time to go, I guess.”

Kendrick’s work break was over. When he turned his cell phone off, Theo was still sitting in the chair beside Lamisha’s bed, hands in his lap and his eyes closed. It was a comforting scene.

For the second time that night, Kendrick and Simone said their farewells. Kendrick returned to the bright interior of the classroom suite in Symphony Hall, Simone to the misty darkness of the Promenade.