Connor tucked the blankets around her and let his hand linger on her arm. “You will soon. I promise.”
She knew he was right; she had the antidote, and the sickness would dissipate eventually. Despite the physical ache however, part of her already felt better.
17
Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans
Seeing Liza so sick had Connor in a state of mild anxiety for a while after she had recovered. About a week after her bout with the flu, Liza was still a bit puny and pale, but she’d been showing up to work for a couple of days. Connor couldn’t stop hovering and fussing over her like an anxious mother hen. On this day, he had extra anxiety because she insisted upon accompanying him, Jimmy, Brennan, and Frankie to Oscar’s mold-infected house to lay down a few tracks.
“This wasmyidea,” Liza had snipped that morning, slumped in her chair, frail shoulders sagging. “I want to be there.”
Connor waved a box of paper surgical masks he’d picked up at the pharmacy during his jog into work. “Well, will you at least wear one of these? We don’t need you getting some kinda secondary infection.”
She’d rolled her eyes, groaned, and dropped her head backward against the chair. “Stop mom-ing me, Connor.”
But now, there she sat on a folding chair in the corner of Oscar’s dingy living room, long legs crossed, and arms folded, wearing the mask, cutting an annoyed glance at Connor every so often as she tugged the edge of it.
Grimy as Oscar’s living room was, the first time Connor had been inside of it, he was surprised at how decent everything looked. Although,decentin this instance meant almost completely bare. No carpet, walls stripped of wallpaper, no TV, not much in the way of furniture beyond a secondhand couch, so on and so forth. The ceiling was stained yellow and a section of it had been cut out.
“Used to be a hole,” Oscar had told him. “That’s how they pulled out my brother after it was all over.”
Oscar now perched on a stool under that particular section, cradling his horn in his lap, the single bright, shiny object in the entire grayed-out, matte, subdued environment. He wore a ruby red derby hat, pulled low and hiding his eyes, a crisp, clean white dress shirt, purple tie loosened, and black suspenders attached to freshly-pressed, pinstriped, black slacks. Black and white patent leather wing-tipped shoes on his feet. He looked like a spindly, young Count Basie with even more polish and every bit as much soul.
Frankie crouched in one corner diagonal from him, silently snapping photos of him with a DSLR camera. Brennan leaned against a wall next to Liza’s chair, hands in the pockets of his slacks and staring at the floor with a stoic expression as he held a bottle of Gatorade for her, which she occasionally took from him and sipped. Jimmy shifted one of the rugs they’d brought in and moved back and forth between it and where Oscar was sitting, then gave a loud double clap a couple of times to test the acoustics.
“Y’know,” Jimmy said, pacing and then clapping his hands again, “it’s not ideal, but it sounds interesting. We’ll clean it up a bit in post-production, but I think it’s going to have a really distinctive sound.” He adjusted two stereo microphones positioned just in front of Oscar and then made his way back to the portable soundboard set up on a folding table next to the front door. He placed a pair of headphones on his ears and smashed a button. “Gimme a B flat major scale really quick.”
Oscar moistened his lips and shifted on the stool as he lifted the horn to his mouth. The clear, velvety, melodic climb filled the small space.
Jimmy gave a small jolt as his eyelids stretched wide, and he threw his open palms in the air. “Hot damn!”
Oscar stopped, snapping his head up and looking at Jimmy with a concerned expression.
Jimmy pulled the headphones off and pointed at Oscar, wagging his finger and chuckling. “You’re not even gonna believe how incredible this sounds.”
Oscar smirked. “It was just a scale.”
“Yeah, but it sounds like The Mooche 1928.” He clapped his hands together and then rubbed his arms. “Whoo-eee!I got the chills. We’ve stumbled upon some kinda magic set-up in this house.”
A smile quirked Oscar’s lips, and he tilted his head down.
“All right.” Jimmy flipped a few more switches. “You ready, son?”
Oscar offered a confident nod. “Yes, sir.”
“I’m ready for you. You just play. Don’t even look at me. I ain’t even here. Do what you do.”
Heady silence filled the room for a good thirty seconds until a mournful whine emerged from the bell of the trumpet, quiet at first, but then slowly increasing in a ringing crescendo, warbling like an Italian soprano before backing off into a brief silence. It picked up again in a low, dry, eerie moan, wrapping the perimeter of the small room like a cashmere coat that couldn’t keep out the cold.
Oscar stood, pointing the horn at his feet as he silently padded, pacing the small square of rugs, the wail of the trumpet climbing a half scale and hanging from the E note before retreating back down to B flat. He sucked in an inaudible breath, and then the horn wailed in a leaping ascent to the top of the scale, trilling and buzzing in high-pitched revelry as if summoning the saints from heaven, and the hot, stuffy room seemed to lift in a cold clearing.
Oscar paused as he silently paced the rug, face pointed at the floor, a teardrop dangling from the tip of his nose. His shoulders lifted and then sagged as he sucked in a quiet breath and exhaled, and then dabbed his face with the back of his hand. Then the horn warbled again, sounding as if Oscar himself were filling the room with the sound of a grieving wail.
Chills scattered Connor’s forearms, and part of him knew he shouldn’t stare at Oscar given his studio stage fright, so he looked at Liza. She brought both hands to her cheeks, clutching the edges of the mask as she stared wide-eyed at the rugs, stone like a statue. Connor silently took the four steps to stand between Brennan and her chair. Brennan’s head hung below his shoulders as he clutched the bridge of his nose. Connor fully related to the feelings he knew his macho friend was attempting to hide, and he squeezed Brennan’s shoulder before lowering himself to crouch next to Liza.
She cut her brimming eyes toward Connor, reached for his hand, and clutched it against her chest as tears tripped and trickled over the paper mask. She turned her attention back to the rug as Oscar’s horn tiptoed and slid along the bottom rungs of the scale, murmuring in long, low notes that hugged the room with the warmth of embers from a dying fire on a winter day.
Liza released Connor’s hand and touched the screen of the tablet balanced on her lap, silently tapping the pads of her fingertips on the screen, and then tilted it toward him.
