Olivia shivering on my front steps. Thanking my lucky stars that I’d bothered to put on my robe, I hustled her into the kitchen, where I wrapped her in two blankets.
“How long were you out there?” I asked as I filled the coffee maker.
She stared down at the table. “I don’t know. Awhile...”
I ground some beans, and when the coffee was ready, I pressed a mug into her cold hands. “Drink this.”
Olivia smiled. “Could I have sugar and milk in it?”
“Right. I forgot about that.”
She was one of those people who likes coffee with her sugar. I drink mine black and strong, as did Sandra, my ex.
Without asking, I started cooking breakfast, my regular morning job when I still had a family. Olivia expressed no preference, so she got eggs scrambled the way I like them. Even though she’d claimed not to be hungry, she wolfed down the eggs, four slices of bacon and several pieces of toast. I took the opportunity to shower and dress while she finished.
When I came back downstairs, I found her, sans blankets, in the living room looking over my shelves of CDs.
“Does Maggie know you’re here?”
“She was, um, busy when I left.”
“Next time you get here early, please ring the bell. I don’t want to find your frozen body on my front steps.”
I’d meant it jokingly, but Olivia’s expression clearly showed she’d taken me at my word. I’d find later that she often did that.
We spent the morning listening to tunes I thought would be appropriate for her range and expertise. Her sponge-like memory astonished me. She had each song down note perfect after only a few listenings. The bottom of her range was a low F, and none of the songs seemed to strain her upper limits. In short, she could pretty well sing anything she wanted in almost any key.
“Have you taken lessons?” I asked as we enjoyed more coffee and some toast towards the end of the morning.
She shook her head. “I just like to sing.”
We had to knock it off around noon so I could go out to Oakville to pick up Kate. We’d planned to buy some bedroom furniture for her at IKEA, a place I was beginning to know well since Sandra had torn our family to shreds.
“You can come early tomorrow before rehearsal to go over these songs again if you’d like.”
Olivia shrugged noncommittally.
“It’s really no trouble if you’d like to come early,” I said as I helped her on with her coat, “but ring the doorbell, okay? It’s supposed to be absolutely frigid, and I don’t mind getting up.”
Twenty-four hours later, I again found her on the steps – this time with Maggie, and it had obviously been her wearing out my doorbell, since her finger was still on it when I opened the door.
She wasted little time getting in my face. “You have no right to badger Olivia the way you do,” she snarled. “You should just leave her alone!”
“Look,” I said, trying to keep my own anger in check. “I’m simply offering her a way to get off the street. She likes to sing. She’s good, and don’t you think it’s up to her to decide what she wants to do?”
So the argument raged back and forth, first on my porch, then in the front hall. Through the whole thing, Olivia just looked on blankly, never asking us to stop shouting, or more importantly, stop discussing her as if she wasn’t even there.
Finally, I got a word in edgewise, one that Maggie didn’t try to talk over. “What is the big deal about singing in public?”
The venom in Maggie’s voice was nearly overpowering. “Don’t play games with me! You know goddamn well what Olivia can do with her voice. You just want to use her so she can bring in plenty more customers and save your lazy-ass jobs. Her ability is not going to go unnoticed for long.”
I hit her with my best shot. “And why is that so important?”
“Maggie, please,” Olivia finally said.
Her friend turned with blazing eyes. “I have a stake in this too, you know. I took as big a risk as you.”
Olivia blanched and looked down at her feet like a scolded child.
“What are you talking about?” I interjected.
But the angry woman had made a decision and turned, her hand on the front door knob. “Do what you want, okay? But when the shit hits the fan, just make sure none of it gets on me!”
With that, she stomped across the porch, down the steps, and hurried off towards Broadview.
I gently closed the front door and turned. Olivia was still standing there, face blank, head lowered. Tears flowed down her cheeks.
Putting my arm around her, I asked, “Hey, are you all right?”
“No, I’m not!” came the answer as she shook off my arm.
Walking into the living room, she sat on my brand new IKEA chair with her head turned away.
I left her alone while I brewed a pot of coffee, hoping that the smell might bring her around. When I brought her a mug, she’d turned the chair around to face the wall and was rocking and humming softly.
She wouldn’t acknowledge my presence, and while I went around the house doing various odds and ends, I continually checked on her. The hours ticked by with no change, and I was getting concerned when she appeared in the kitchen doorway as I was reading the paper.
“Can I have some water?”
“Sure,” I said springing to my feet.
Olivia took the glass without a word and went back to the living room. I waited a moment, then followed.
The sun had disappeared behind heavy clouds rolling in from the west, leaving the room in near darkness. She was back in the chair still facing the wall, but she wasn’t rocking or humming. I sat on the sofa and waited.
“I guess I need a place to stay,” she said softly a few minutes later.
“Why was your friend so angry?”
“Because she’s right. I’m being foolish.”
“What’s the ‘big risk’ Maggie was talking about?”
Olivia turned, but I could barely see her face in the dim light. “I can’t answer that, and you must never ask me again.”
From her tone, I knew she meant it. So I didn’t ask. I seldom asked her anything after that.
I realized now that I should have.
***
Word was now getting around town that Olivia wasn’t singing with us any more, but even so, we had a pretty good house at the Sal that evening, enthusiastic and relatively quiet. Dom had invited a sax playing friend from Montreal to sit in, and Simon had been very impressive on tenor, soprano and flute. We all stayed a bit later than normal, listening to old war stories about the ‘60s jazz scene as witnessed by Harry the owner and Franco the bartender.
Ronald usually cut out as soon as the gig was over, but he stayed around, primarily to crow about his new computer – as if any of the rest of us cared.
He lived alone, and while he would shack up with the occasional woman, the two passions in his life were the piano and computers. Ronald could make both sing. The few times I’d asked him for help looking up stuff online, I was amazed at how much he knew and how his fingers flew as fast over the computer’s keyboard as they did on the piano’s. I believed that he could find anything that existed in cyberspace with just the stroke of a few keys.
That night he went on and on about his computer’s great processing strength, its