Day 5

Klára woke up very early �" or, more specifically, she slept for only three hours before waking and, being unable to go back to sleep, started wandering the dark silent streets of Minneapolis. It was such a large and foreboding place, and yet serene at the same time with the falling snow. It was that lonely interim between late night and early morning, where the only people on the streets were the young partygoers who were too drunk and exhausted to do much more than shuffle home from the clubs in cramped high-heeled boots and tight jeans. They were mostly Henry’s age, Klára noticed; so why wasn’t he one of them? Hell, why wasn’t she one of them, sporting a false ID card and a deep secret with her friends? Well, she at least knew the answer to that one.

 

“What would Mami say if she knew how hard you were pushing yourself for us, Klára?” asked Jopie the night before when Klára had finally gotten in. Klára had only groaned and curled up into a ball, feeling guilty because really, since she and Henry had started talking she hadn’t been doing much of anything meaningful. She needed a job, or a lucky break, or something to get them by until she turned 18.

 

Walking down the darkened streets, Klára knew that someday her children would ask her if she hadn’t ever once seen the bright side of being homeless and orphaned. There were no parents to fight with constantly, she could stay out as late as she pleased (as proven by her little adventure that night), and according to the US legal system she basically didn’t exist and could do whatever she pleased so long as she wasn’t caught. Klára knew that her children could never really understand that it was much better to have parents, seeing as the benefit of having someone take care of her and worry about what happened to her outweighed the disadvantages of those meaningless little squabbles for power and attention. She could never make them see that there was a difference between staying out as late as she pleased and being so hungry or sick it was impossible to sleep, and that the streets at night were frightening and lonely when by herself. It would never occur to them that being invisible to the US legal system also meant being unable ever to go to the doctor or report robberies or get a job without running the risk of being arrested or dumped into Foster Care.

 

It occurred to Klára that she might not even tell her children about these three years of her life. Why should she? These streets were not the place she would mention when asked where she grew up; she had been raised in Prague for the first 14 years of her life. Homelessness was simply how she toughed out the interim between growing up and legally growing up. Then again, it also occurred to Klára that she might not even have children in the future. There was something within her, something deep an instinctual that told her she would die soon if she didn’t find help soon. Times had been harder than ever with the country’s suffering economy and mistrustful society, and the bundle of saved money in her coat pocket had been slowly dwindling away over the past few months. Jopie was getting weaker and sicker by the day, Nikolas was plagued by horrible nightmares that left his throat painfully raw for days with screaming, and Markus got caught stealing more than he ever got away with it. Death was on the doorstep that didn’t exist, and they were all growing desperate as its presence became more pronounced each day.

 

Klára started humming under her breath to keep her mind away from the dark things that tended to niggle at her day by day. She didn’t know if it was normal or not, but she heard music all the time, in her head and heart and could feel it all the way down to her fingers and toes. Sometimes when she heard a particularly powerful piece of music it physically ailed her, making her cringe and rock and dig her fingernails into her palms until they bled. Music had always been there, through her entire life, but it had never really made its presence known to her until that day when she was six when her Tati had made up a song about her to get her out of that tree. The songs in her mind were vast and varied, sometimes belonging to someone else and sometimes improvised, but always this was what had calmed her when nothing else could.

 

Suddenly a severely hung-over boy who had been walking along behind her without a word groaned loudly and covered his ears, making her jump with fright and turn to look at him. Her humming cut off instantly and he glowered apologetically at her from red-rimmed eyes. “Very nice,” he muttered near-incoherently, as if even the sound of his own voice gave him a headache. “Nice voice, nice song, blah, blah, blah, but it’s too early for that, yeah?” When she didn’t make any attempt to respond, the boy simply staggered over to the wall, pulled down a fluorescent-green flier, and shoved it unsteadily into her hands. “There ya go, have a nice day, please…leave a message…after the beep…”

 

Klára went back to behind the Italian restaurant after a bit more wandering around, and as soon as it was light unfolded the flier the boy had given her. Looping black letters meant to appeal to young people spelled out ‘Carnival of Souls: a Charity Event’. There was a beautifully hand-drawn picture of an ethnic-looking girl standing on one hand with her legs artistically-splayed for balance. Why had he given this to her? She mindlessly folded it up and tucked it into her pocket. It was too cold for her to care right now. She wiped her running nose on the end of her sleeve, longing for even the simple luxury of a tissue.

 

Her mami had had a set of richly-monogrammed, white-and-gold handkerchiefs that had been given to her grandmother as a wedding gift. Even at over sixty years old they had been pure white and delicate as a spider’s downy web in Klára’s curious fingers. How she had wished to inherit them as a girl, but her mami had had to sell them. Klára hadn’t really known how dire their financial situation was until that day. Mami had cried and cried and cried all night over the sparse bit of money, hardly enough to feed them for two days, her most prized possessions had gotten them.

 

Cars and trucks and even the odd bicycle’s whirring tires made a rushing, deafening sound in her ears, as if the sound waves were echoing across every curve of her inner skull. She had a fever, she realized when her trembling had gotten so bad that her cheek was nearly bouncing off of the layer of torn clothes and newspaper they all were laying on. It made sense; she only really got sentimental when she was ill. That same feeling from before, of death waiting patiently with his arms crossed and finger beckoning for her, was present. Was this fever a step in death’s direction, or a reckless, flying leap? Maybe she should have been more careful, hugging Jopie so close when she knew full-well that the 12-year-old was very sick, or kissing Markus when she had no idea of where he had been lurking around.

 

She was a thoughtless, careless, stupid girl who would surely someday die for her mistakes, and where would that leave the kids? Markus would be in charge of the twins at 15 years old, the same age Klára had been when shouldered with the responsibility of keeping the remaining family alive. She could never subject her little brother to that, for he would always be just a kid to her. She closed her eyes against the cacophony of the city and hid her face under her arm to block out the light, and fell asleep almost instantly.

 

The fever wouldn’t allow her to sleep for long, but when she did wake again the day was fully light and Markus gone. Niki and Jopie were watching her very closely; she was always out before they woke up. Klára brushed off their questions of concern, crawled out of their little nest onto the streets, and went to a dingy little grocery store. She bought a loaf of wheat bread, a jar of peanut butter, and a box of plastic spoons, bringing it back to the twins for their breakfast. Then, as if to prove illness really had made her go bonkers, she went to Anne and Charlie’s apartment to see them again.

 

Anne was delighted, of course. Charlie wasn’t anywhere in immediate sight from the doorway. “Hey cutie!” she greeted with a tight hug. “You just missed my son; didja see him? Aw, heck, what am I talking about? The roads are full to burst this time of morning, with everyone going to work and all. You know, you’d think they’d at least try scattering what time businesses opened according to profession to keep traffic from getting so dense, but no, every morning at seven on the nose those streets are clogged up with over a billion-zillion pounds of mass transit.”

 

The older woman seemed to realize that Klára was merely blinking dazedly at her and laughed in a jittery, liquid-sounding way like her cough. “Well, anyway, come on in hun, you want some cereal? We have Cocoa Puffs! Well, the knock-off brand, but they’re still really good!” Klára shook her head as Anne ushered her onto the couch and pulled the hat off her head. “Well, we’ll just set here awhile and visit, then.”

 

Anne and Charlie’s sofa was cool and very well-worn, the cushions flattened and hard, yet somehow very comfortable anyway. It reminded her of her tati’s special chair in their first apartment. That was way back, before Markus and the twins had been born, when it was just her, Josef, and their Mami and Tati. The chair had been large enough to fit all four of them at once, and so old you didn’t even sink into the cushions when you sat down, because all the stuffing was flat. It was wine-red with little white (fading yellow) flowers printed on the fabric. It had moved with them to the house after Markus and Niki and Jopie had come along, but Klára never thought about it with real, true love unless it was in the apartment. Anne and Charlie’s sofa was blue and made her wish for her Tati more ardently than she ever had before.

 

“You feeling okay, sweetie? You look a little…dazed,” said Anne with concern, brushing her soft knuckles against Klára’s forehead. “You’ve got a fever, kiddo. Want some aspirin?” Before Klára could nod or shake her head Anne had jumped up and skipped to the bathroom. When she opened the medicine cabinet over the sink the mirror turned so Klára could see her reflection. She looked absolutely wretched. Her eyes were half-lidded and cheeks flushed with fever, not to mention the smudges of newsprint on her cheeks, the pinkish pimples on her forehead, and the cold-sore at the left corner of her mouth. What had Henry been thinking, calling her pretty the night before and making her feel a bit more her age? She was hideous. She could have stared in horror at her reflection for much longer, had Anne not closed the cabinet. Pill-bottles rattled on the counter. “We’ve always got Tylenol around here, and I have to take my morning medicine anyway.”

 

She came back into the main room with a handful of pills and two glasses of water. One glass and two white pills were placed on the ringed coffee table before Klára, while Anne immediately started downing her some five to ten different types of medication. Klára very gingerly took the aspirin and drank all of the water in the cup. It tasted a bit like iron, but it was clean. Then she sluggishly put her head down on Anne’s shoulder. The woman took it with grace and wrapped an arm around her. She was warm and soft and smelled just as a mother should. It wasn’t the same as her own mother. She wanted her mami. She started crying quietly and Anne didn’t say a word despite her previous rule of no tears in the house, instead stroking her hair softly. “Shh,” was all she said, softly and soothingly. There were no words. And Klára cried.

 

Her fever broke after half an hour, and her dark, illness-riddled mood drastically shifted. Anne turned on the same music from the day before, and after a while Klára started playing sheepishly along on the crappy keyboard under the window. Anne stayed on the couch and listened with the same fervor as she did her beloved CD. It was nothing special, just a few chords and finger-patterns in the same key as the songs playing, but Anne was mesmerized. “How do you know what key it’s in just by listening?!” she asked with all the fascination of a child. Klára turned around on the rickety little stool and shrugged. “Even my boy can’t get it right on the first try, and he’s practically a genius.”

 

Again Klára shrugged, and she vaguely wondered why she hadn’t spoken to Anne yet, with real words. She was certainly comfortable enough with the woman, and she wasn’t at all frightened with Charlie (even if he tried to be a curmudgeon), and yet she hadn’t found her voice yet. Nervous but trying not to bite her lip in front of Anne, she pushed her hair behind her ear and cleared her throat quietly. “I just know,” she said with shocking ease, her voice just barely audible. Anne just barely concealed a gasp and grin of delight, probably to keep her from getting nervous. “I hear, and know wit’out t’inking.”

 

“That’s amazing.” Klára wasn’t sure if Anne was talking about her ability to recognize music keys or her sudden ability to speak. “You know what that sounds like to me? Perfect pitch. That’s, like, every musician’s wet-dream.” Klára blinked at her confusedly, not knowing what a wet-dream even was. Anne laughed that watery laugh just as the lock began to rattle loudly in the door and a few moments later Charlie appeared, looking flustered and carrying a plastic bag of groceries.

 

“Cold as f**k out there,” he grumbled under his breath as he closed the door. Klára blushed at the profanity, only because she hadn’t expected it. He dropped the bag on the little table and then nodded pointedly to Klára, her fingers still hovering over the keys of the keyboard. “You playing something?”

 

Klára shook her head, but Anne had something different to say about it. “She was just playing along with my CD, you should hear her Charlie. We were just talking about how talented she is.”

 

Charlie’s eyebrows quirked and his lips pursed with interest. “Oh?” He shuffled over in his stocking-feet and planted himself on the couch beside Anne. Only then did Klára notice that they didn’t wear wedding rings, and yet seemed just as close as her parents had been after 13 years of marriage. “Don’t mind me; continue, please.”

 

Klára glanced nervously at Anne, who nodded her on and turned off the stereo. “Go on honey; play us something from your heart.”

 

There was a long gaping silence in which Charlie and Anne patiently waited, while Klára sat staring at the keys with one hand pressed thoughtfully against the center of her chest. Did she have anything in her heart that was worth playing? Or anything in her heart that she could bear to share with someone she hardly knew. There was only one thing in her heart. She reached down with her right hand, the one not feeling the gently-resilient thudding of the real, living heart beneath her thin shirt, and started playing a high, tinny melody on the keyboard. She closed her eyes and felt the heart under her fingers beating away, and then dropped her left hand down onto a crashing bass. Anne gasped quietly and clutched Charlie’s hand as the music rolled on and on like hills, then abruptly dropped and died. Those few, maybe thirty seconds were all she had written, playing it over and over in her mind for nearly four years.

 

Klára turned around on the stool and looked to Anne and Charlie, waiting for them to ask where the rest of the song was. Charlie seemed confused, but Anne looked as if she were about to cry. “That was your heart,” she said with an earnest nod. “That was really from your heart.”

 

Klára didn’t know what to say to that, so she shrugged her shoulders and chewed on the inside of her lip. The clock on the wall beeped with the hour-change and she jumped. She had been gone a long time. Without really thinking first she got up and walked out of the flat, not feeling the frantic screaming beat of her heart until she was back down in the street. She was terrified, or at least had been up there. She had shown Anne and Charlie a part of herself deeply private, that she had not intended to show anyone in all her life. She wandered the street listlessly, her ears so cold they hurt in the biting breeze; she had left in such a hurry her hat was still on the table. What had happened in there? Well, probably the same thing as with Henry three days ago, but she’d thought she was over that now.

 

She sat down on the corner where she had met Henry and pulled out her cup. Why hadn’t she been doing this lately? Was she ashamed? Did she think herself too good to beg for spare change? Too attractive? Because seeing herself in Anne’s bathroom mirror had certainly destroyed any trace of vanity inside of her. This was all she would ever amount to, sitting here and waiting for someone to feel charitable enough to help her.

 

***

 

Henry knew that something was wrong the moment he made it to the sidewalk on the corner, and he saw Klára sitting silently against the wall with her Styrofoam cup in her hands. They didn’t talk much, only enough to say hello and goodbye. Before he left she placed a piece of neon-green paper in his hands with a rather puzzled look on her face. “What’s this?” he asked, unfolding it and trying to decipher the words and times among the vibrant design.

 

Klára shrugged and shook her head, gesturing limply to the flyer. “I ask you,” she pointed out before biting on her little fingernail. Henry laughed a bit at his own idiocy and began to fold the flyer into careful quarters.

 

“Can I keep this? I’ll look it up at the library on my way home.”

 

Klára nodded, looking down at the pavement. “See you tomorrow?” she asked meekly. Henry felt his heart accelerate so much that he started to sweat a little bit. The things she did to him were ridiculous.

 

He tipped his hat and grinned. “You know it.” Henry waved goodbye before turning around to leave, and saw that before Klára could even turn to go her brother, the boy who had been stealing two days ago, was already a few feet away and waiting impatiently for her. They said barely more than two words to each other before he grabbed her hand and they took off running in the opposite direction as Henry was about to go. He furrowed his brow, but didn’t follow them. It was none of his business what the siblings got up to when they were together. She had looked so scared…

 

The walk to the library was short in distance, but very long in companionship. He found himself yearning for Klára’s presence beside him �" not for his own physical or romantic or whateverthehell pleasure he had sought out the night before �" for the simpler pleasure of having a true friend. He had had friends before, schoolmates that he hung around with in the halls and cafeteria, but never someone he could really trust to talk with about everything in the world that bothered or scared him. There was this sort of presence in Klára’s silence, that she wasn’t silent to ignore or shun him, but to better hear and understand him. There was an underlying resilience in her, a toughness in everything she did that only those who had really been there could have. But where was it she had been? What had she seen? And when would she trust him with the same secret feelings he so ardently wanted to share with her?

 

So busy was he, contemplating all of these things about Klára, that he almost walked right past the library. Shaking his head to banish the face of the Praguer from his mind’s eye, he pulled open the creaky doors and went inside. It had been a long time since he’d gone to the library; it was in such bad shape, being on the poor side of town, that it was hardly worth going to anymore. But he was determined, so he walked to the outer ring of cubicles and sat down at a computer, sitting Annabel securely in the cubicle beside him. Pulling the flyer from his coat pocket, he saw the website www.CanivalOfSouls.com scrawled across the bottom and typed it into the address bar. Then, tentatively, he opened Google in a separate tab and typed in only one word: Mishkovah.

 

Did you mean Myshkova?

 

Henry shrugged to himself; that sounded like how Klára had said her last name, so he clicked it.

 

Did you mean Myšková?

 

Trying not to get too lost in the world of “did you mean?”s, Henry settled on hitting the Images panel of the website and started wading through pictures. He almost passed over the suggested images related to Myšková until he saw a tiny photo from PraguePost.cz, of a dark-haired woman who looked remarkably like Klára at such virtual distance. He clicked on the picture and looked at the Post’s website below. It was all in Czech, of course, but he could get that the gist of the article was a wedding announcement of some Cecília Irglová to Miloslav Myšká from the pictures. In contrast to his new wife, Miloslav was very fair and muscular, possibly of German heritage, and he looked nothing like Klára but rather a lot like her brother in the face. There was another wedding picture below the first, of the bride and groom with two small children, the girl barely over a year old and one tiny months-old baby. He scanned through the indecipherable words of the caption and found two names besides Cecília and Miloslav: Josef and Klára.

 

So this was her family. Her mother was beautiful and olive-skinned and dark-haired, and the man Henry could only assume was her stepfather was strong and pale and fair-haired; her coloring didn’t really match either of them. He went back to the American Google and opened a third tab to find the Czech alphabet, copy-pasting any odd characters into the search bar to spell “Myšková Minneapolis Minnesota US”. It seemed a specific enough search term.

 

There was only one online article that matched Myšková and Minneapolis, and Henry felt his stomach turn when he saw what it contained.

 

“Minneapolis authorities are currently on the lookout for four lost and probably very scared children,” says Officer Barons of the Minneapolis PD.

They are the children of a woman left unclaimed in the morgue at a downtown Minneapolis hospital.

The woman (identified by an out-dated ID-card as Cecília Myšková) was admitted on January 5^th by her daughter for a case of pneumonia.

Myšková died only hours after being admitted, and her four children left under the pretense of going to fetch their father, but never returned.

The children did not give their names or place of residence, arousing suspicion that the family may have been homeless. Anyone with information on the family is asked to contact authorities immediately.

Henry leaned back in his chair and rubbed his face as if it had gone numb from shock. Klára wasn’t homeless. There were probably dozens of people in Minneapolis named Myšková. And maybe the woman in the Czech paper was an aunt of Klára’s and she had been the flower-girl at the wedding. Maybe that wasn’t even the Klára he knew at all. He couldn’t get her face from his mind, dirty and sad, her torn clothes and savaged hands and the hollows of her cheeks.  Her 14-year-old’s figure despite being 17. Her haunted eyes. Her smile. The warmth of her body against his. Her voice, rare and beautiful as an exotic bird. He shook his head. He couldn’t let his love her for cloud reason. But he couldn’t let that be true, either. If she was homeless…but she couldn’t be…she had shown him…. A condemned building. Oh, god.

 

He closed the tab for the sake of his sanity, and instead forced himself to look at the Carnival website for Klára. He would tell her all about it, and she would smile, and that would fix everything. He was sure of it.

 

The pages were rather plain, done by probably a novice web-designer, but they got their point across quite well. With hands that were suddenly shaking and a mind far, far away from the tiny cubicle in the battered library on the poor side of the city, Henry printed the mission statement and Rules page of the Carnival website before snatching up Annabel and running for home as quickly as his feet could carry him.

 

“It’s a talent contest!” he hollered the moment he burst into the apartment, the door surprisingly cooperative. His parents turned from their places on the sofa, faces plainly puzzled.

 

“What’s a talent contest, hon?” his mom asked with one eyebrow quirked.

 

Shaking so badly he dropped Annabel onto the floor and didn’t even bring himself to pick her up, Henry pulled the flyer from his pocket with the web pages and practically flung them at his parents’ faces. “This! This, this Carnival thing! It’s a talent contest specifically for the low-incomes, the down-on-their-luck, the (forgive the language, Mom) goddamn-f*****g-underdog of society!”

 

His mom outright laughed at his behavior, not entirely concerned about his language since he was a grown man. “I think we get it, babe. But what’s got you so worked up? You’ve been in talent shows before.”

 

Henry’s head shook and his eyes closed, as if the possibilities were all too much. “This isn’t just some run-of-the-mill talent show, Mom,” he said softly. “It’s funded by people like Bob Dylan and Prince. If I win this thing, we get fifty thousand dollars.”

 

(It was actually a hundred thousand dollars, but in his haste Henry had accidentally read the prize for the first-runner-up, not the first-place-winner.)

 

His dad’s head sort of lolled back and then dipped forward until it was in his hands, and her mother gasped for breath so ferociously that she choked and it took a full five minutes to catch her breath. They gaped at one another and their son in turns, unable to form words to fully describe how much that money would mean to them. They could actually pay off his mom’s treatments; they might even be able to hire a live-in nurse while his dad focused on writing. Henry might even be able to go to college, or at least buy some recording time or a plane ticket out or something.

 

He thought about all of the great things fifty thousand dollars could bring him and his family, and then, inevitably, thought about Klára. How she could use this money, maybe buy some new clothes and a few square meals, go to school and get her life in order. Buy her parents a new place (because she did have a place to live; it just sucked) maybe, and get her brother a haircut. What if it was twenty-five thousand?

 

“Klára needs to be in on this,” he muttered to himself, and realized that that must have been why she had picked it up to begin with. It had all been a ploy, because she wanted Henry to know about it! His mom was already up on her feet, reaching up into the closet for her violin for the first time in months. His dad picked Annabel up from the floor and handed it to Henry, who held it mute in his hands. “Mom, Klára needs to be in on this,” he repeated at a higher volume. His mom turned with her precious instrument already tucked under her chin and bow poised.

 

“She does?” she asked with her eyebrows raised. “I was just thinking our new friend should be in. She plays piano like a dream.”

 

Henry was instantly interested in this girl. “Really? Klára sings! This is awesome; we could have like a whole Real Band! We should invite them over tomorrow night and get some practice in!”

 

“And your dad just bought food!” his mom exclaimed excitedly. “We can have them over for some dinner and music and oh, it’ll be just like the old days.” She smiled so widely her face was like to split in two as she sat down on the sofa again and started playing a cheery, Irish-sounding tune on her violin. Henry started plucking along on his guitar, and his dad quietly slipped into the bedroom for some private writing-time while they celebrated and practiced. Henry played a few of his best songs and his mom wrote violin pieces for them until her hands gave out. “When is this thing, anyway?” she asked from the sofa while Henry put her violin back into the closet for the night.

 

He looked down at the flyer thoughtfully. “Next week Thursday. Auditions are Monday and Tuesday.” He started to feel a bit nervous about asking Klára to be in his band, even if it was only for a few days. She was very slowly emerging from her shell musically, but he knew that if he went too fast and pushed her too far she would collapse under the pressure and never speak to him again. But he would take it as slowly as possible if it would keep her happy, because he had that same unbearable urge to protect her from all the bad things in the world. “Klára already knows all of my songs. We could really win this thing, Mom.”

 

He sat beside her on the sofa and, like he was still a child, she brushed her soft hands against his cheek. “I know, hun,” she said with that wonderfully unwavering faith that only a mother could contain. Then she yawned widely and patted his knees before pushing herself to her feet. “You invite your lady friend and I’ll invite Baby for dinner tomorrow night. Dad’ll make Alfredo.”

 

“Sounds good. ‘Night Mom.”

 

See you in the morning, hun. Love you.”

 

“Love you too.”

 

Henry lay awake a long time after his parents went to bed, his stomach turning in slow circles for no particular reason. First he thought about what he would do if he won Carnival. Then he imagined Klára’s face when he gave half of the prize money to her, how happy it would make her. Then he must have slipped into an uneasy sleep because he had an extremely vivid nightmare even when his brain still felt awake. They had lost Carnival but did not give up hope. They were busking together, him and Klára, and it was spring at last, and in the middle of a love song she fell over onto the sidewalk and died. He started freaking out and screaming and shaking her, but no one even looked their way. Then her brother turned the corner, saw Henry holding his dead sister in his arms, and, thinking Henry had killed her, fell upon him with his large bone-hard fists and knobby knees and sharp ribs and elbows until he knocked Henry’s head back onto the concrete and cracked his skull. He woke up with a half-formed scream in his throat. He didn’t want to think about what that dream represented. He didn’t even think about what would happen if they lost Carnival.