When Maria returned to the Music City Rescue Mission’s homeless shelter on Lafayette Street in Nashville, she had thirty-eight dollars and seventeen cents in her pocket, one more page of lyrics for a new song in Worlds & Time, and no job.
And no prospects.
And nowhere else to go.
She wanted to get to the shelter before sunset. The beds filled up fast these days, and even though this would be night fifteen, she knew that the Mission was her best shot at having a roof over her head. At least, a good roof over her head. Where she was safe.
She looked up at the clouds that had been gathering all afternoon, darkening, waiting to pour down. The first drops of rain fell on her as she climbed the cracked concrete stairs.
The administrator who had shown her the door that morning was sitting at the intake table this evening.
“Maria,” he said, looking up from the list, a pencil held in his hand. “Tell me some good news.” He didn’t smile. “You got a job?”
“I’ve got thirty-eight dollars in my pocket. I know that’s twelve short, but I’ll get the rest.”
He sighed.
“And I’ll work.” She nodded. “In the kitchen. Cleaning. Whatever needs doing.”
“We’ve given those jobs out—to those in need, who aren’t able to get anything else.”
“I’ll apply for food stamps too. And turn them over to you all.” She shrugged. “I don’t care if the tabloids pick it up and report it. So be it.”
“It’s fifty dollars a month, Maria. The Mission doesn’t take partial payments. And it doesn’t make loans.”
She opened her mouth to plead her case, but stopped when she saw him rock to the side and draw his wallet from his back pocket and count out two five-dollar bills and two ones. “But I do. And I think you’re good for it. Don’t make me regret it, Maria. The truth is, I’m not that much better off than you are. I’m just getting by myself.”
*
Maria had learned a lot of things in her five years in the music business. One was that different people needed different environments to do their best creative work. Some liked it loud—a coffee shop, the back of a tour bus, or a busy subway train. Others needed nearly absolute quiet—a library, a closet, or a messy hotel room after the rest of the band had passed out.
The thing Maria had learned recently was that when you were hungry, the rules got rewritten. All of a sudden, you became capable of things you weren’t before. A hungry person became more able to work anywhere. And faster.
In the cramped bunkroom, where conversations and arguments and card games raged, she lay on her stomach staring down at the notebook, chewing the end of the white pen, seeing the music flow in her mind.
For her, sometimes the lines of a song formed from a vague image or a feeling. In this case, the inspiration was a tree, reaching to the sky, branches forking, never predicable. The limbs on the left and right grew outward until they turned down, growing thin, wilting, eventually extending below the ground, where they flowed toward each other, joining and surging upward to become the trunk.
It was a tree of life with no beginning and no end. In her mind’s eye, she studied the image. It was more than a tree. On both sides, in the negative space where the branches turned downward, the area between them and the trunk was egg-shaped, like an embryo that had started in the center and then split, both sides seemingly equal, but in truth with small differences shaped by the paths the branches had taken.
She turned to a fresh page and wrote a heading.
The Mirror Tree
Yes, she liked that title. The song would be about beginnings and endings and standing tall against the test of time, about how time grows in branches. About how every ending is also a beginning.
Around her, a hush fell over the room. Maria didn’t look up.
She couldn’t. She was into the song now. It was coming to her, as though she had uncovered the first flash of the white bone of a buried skeleton. Her pen raced over the page, an excavation brush wisking away, uncovering more lyrics.
The shelter administrator’s voice called out above her. She looked up from the bunk, still balanced on her elbows, her feet in the air. There were two Nashville uniformed police officers with him. And three people in suits standing near the creep who had paid her for that CVS swab this morning.
She didn’t like this.
The man pointed. “Yeah. That’s her.”
