Melody

              Mel always did this thing with her fingertips, lightly tracing them over your back when she thought you might be upset. I thought about that often my last year of high school. I never knew when she would call next. It may be in two months or just as I was dozing off under warm covers, listening to the sounds of my family down the stairs of my childhood home. My phone woke me.

             “Hello?”

              “Is this a bad time? I really need to talk.” I heard her thoughts, cluttered and frantic.

              I rubbed new sleep out of my eyes, smearing leftover mascara, and propped an elbow on plush pillows. Even when I knew Mel, she was a fading image. A conjured presence. Her words ambled, and I thought about a girl with curly blonde hair, perfectly straight teeth, and plump terra cotta lips who warned, before I met Mel, that Melody was popular with the boys. Melody was beautiful, but not in a typical way. She had dark brown hair that was not brushed very often. I had only met her once. We had spent a week together at some camp a few summers past. We kept in touch for a little while and even tried to plan a few visits. Beyond those attempts, she simply kept calling. Each call created a sort of song. It was a song stretched thin over years. Its words were always just a little broken but its rhythm always tapped out a sort of hopefulness.

              It’s funny, in a way, that my initial impression of her was formed as a quick judgement concerning the tissue paper flowers that she was crafting and the assumed silliness and innocence of that activity. On Thursday of that week I had my first kiss.

             My stomach curdled as his fingers climbed out of the grass and up my leg. We sat with our backs against a red brick building, alone. I had annoyed him to let me read a love poem that he had been writing in class.

             “Hey,” he whispered, tilting my chin towards him.

             “It’s my first.” I moved away timidly and rashly.

             “I just… I just have so much going on right now.” He cast pleading brown eyes to the grass.

             Suddenly, I grasped his hand.

             “Really, I only want to have fun,” I promised.

             We hid ourselves and kissed. His lips weren’t unkind, but I ran away. He asked if I was okay before I ran into a bathroom, breathing deeply, my chest flushed. Mel hugged me close, and I slept in her bed that night, cuddled into the flowers promenading on her bedsheets. She hadn’t had her first kiss. With little experience, however, Mel knew far more than she should have.

              We parted ways and traveled back to our homes, states away. She chronicled every story about a redheaded boy who was all of her firsts.

             “I sat on his lap…” she remarked shyly. “And his hands felt cold when they slid up my shirt.”

              I can’t remember his name because soon there were hundreds, each a projection of something in her. Untouched. There was the name that she couldn’t have—we’ll call him Unrequited. There was the name who stole all of her belongings—we’ll call him Thief. There was the name who claimed that he had a spirit living inside of him and that he couldn’t control his actions—we’ll call him Abuse. She named them all Love.

              Melody fell into darkness for a while. The song reached interlude. I worried about her more than I do now. When she resurfaced, she called to tell me about her miscarriage. She told me how a bloody mass of cells and a bottle of vodka had created an overwhelming drunk blackness. She told me how she couldn’t shower any longer—she hadn’t for almost a month. There was really no way to reconcile the girl who had not experienced her first kiss to the girl with a bottle of vodka. How do you explain that? Maybe it was just a broken faith, a broken melody, or a broken heart. It always is. She followed Thief away from her home and never returned. I was briefly acquainted with all the names that were only sex—we’ll call them Liars. She named them all Hearts in need of repair.

              She called to tell me of pregnancy scares and scars on wrists and new homes and new friends and hickeys and always a boy who wasn’t quite enough and the next one who she really loved and who really loved her back.  I wanted her to know that she was worth more, and I told her so often. Sometimes the radio was too loud. Sometimes I didn’t know how to make her listen as she drowned and choked on thick, black, sticky hearts. I wanted her to know that there was a God, and I told her so often. As often as she called, though, she said that there was not a God for her. I stayed up, on the phone until morning, after Abuse had knocked her out with a longboard in the front yard of their apartment complex, telling her of this other life and this greater love. She said that this was her life. So I just kept answering the phone.

              “What’s wrong, love?”

              “He doesn’t know what he is doing,”  she quietly remarked, to convince one of us.

              “What did he do, Melody?”

              “He has a spirit living inside of him.”

              “A demon?”

              “No, a spirit. He hit me. He’s drunk and passed out on the couch. I don’t have anywhere to go.”

              During that week we knew each other, she was constantly humming a tune or singing some song. It was a song about American Apparel underwear on a bedroom floor. She told me she had it stuck in her head, and I nodded and sang along. Mel had a soft and raspy voice accompanied by perfect pitch. Her voice was reminiscent of the music that gently floats in an elevator.  I couldn’t sing as well as she; I couldn’t even carry a tune, but sometimes I sang anyway. I knew she wouldn’t laugh or turn to whisper in another ear. I asked her what it was like one time. Her response was strikingly motherlike, as if it was a soft lullaby sung to the gentle beat of a rocking chair in a dark corner of a happy home, the occupant either knitting or feeding an infant. She told me to wait, as long as I could.

             Tears betrayed me over my own Liar, and she told me that she knew that I had only wanted to make him better. I confided in Mel more than other school friends with curly blonde hair. She had dreams, too, she said, though I cannot recall what they were now. She made me promise to run after mine, as if she knew she was running in circles. She told me, after that, of a friend named Entitled. She had thought he was only a friend. When he found out that he was not more, however, he instructed her to screw their brains out, all the other names.

             The song wavered and continued. She was now a waitress at some bar. She was happy because the man she was dating had a child, four years of age; she got to be a mommy and play in the sand with him.

             “He’s going to put me through nursing school. I trust him, I really do! I am safe and we’re going to be happy. He makes me so happy,” she said, reciting a chorus. It was monotone and dull, even as she spoke.

             “You would make such a great nurse. You’re always taking care of people anyway.” I wondered how one held onto the flowers printed on bedsheets like she did.

             She believed him, though she said she could not even trust herself any longer. Too often, she had found herself in the bed of a man to whom she didn’t belong.

             The last phone call took place during August. It was the month before I would leave home for college. I was walking along the sidewalk of my neighborhood with my boyfriend, watching the sunset. I tilted my head up towards his height, expecting a kiss. He felt the phone in my back jeans pocket and pulled it out to hand it over. Holding his hand, I talked with the other. She told me of the little baby girl with soft black hair that she had given up for adoption. The new mommy sent her photos once a week. She told me how she had held her baby girl on the hospital bed and whispered into a fragile ear, her cheek pressed against a sterile white pillow, that she loved her but she couldn’t keep her and she was sorry. She told me that she had been asleep the night Beth was conceived. When she told him, he had asked for the pregnancy to be terminated. Salty promises were cried that night just so that they would go away. So, alone in a hospital, she handed her baby girl over to the arms of the new mother she ached to be. She paused, and I squeezed his hand a little tighter. Gently, he looked down at me. I nestled into his chest, and he pressed his lips onto my forehead, next, my nose, and last, my chin. He always did that.

             “I love you,” Melody said, “I’ve got to go now. My shift starts in fifteen.” I could almost hear her snuff the cigarette beneath her sandal.

             “You don’t have to go onto the next. You know that, right?”

             She told me she knew.

              Two weeks after the last phone call had taken place, I moved away from home. I moved far away with dreams of chasing words and writing stories like she sang songs, sweet and twisted. I would come to remember Mel when it was necessary to summon the conviction to walk away fearlessly.  I was never going to be able to find God in his eyes. Two and a half years came to an end in two minutes. I watched the dryer tumble an assortment of clothing and inhaled warm air saturated with fabric softener as I told Then that I needed to walk away. As Billy Joel would say, it is my life anyway. I would come to remember Mel when I woke to his fingers striking the keys of a piano. I sat and Now sang to me, “I can’t help falling in love with you,” as Elvis might have in 1961. Maybe Melody is more than a tragic song. We all live and break hearts and have our own hearts broken. Some pretend better than others. Some have the courage to fall in love again. We only met once, but I remember her face and her tangled hair.

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Olivia Lamm is a graduate of Belhaven University with a BFA in Creative Writing and a BA in English, She strives to use her gifts to glorify God. She believes that life is beautiful and the written word is powerful.