She turned. Odette stood behind her in a borrowed dark blue dress, her hands folded, her eyes bright. Next to her Tee bounced on the balls of his sneakers, his bucket nowhere in sight because Pete had taken it from him at security and promised it back, and a grin on his face so wide it looked like it hurt.
"What are you doing back here?" Harmony whispered. "You're supposed to be in the seats. Front row."
"We wanted to see you before," Odette said. "To tell you something."
She took Harmony's face in her hands. Her palms were rough and warm from a lifetime of kitchens.
"Ti zwazo, they can take the sound out of your ears. They cannot take the song out of your chest."
Tee shoved something into her hand. His lucky red guitar pick, the one he had pressed on her the first night they played Fulton Street together. "Bring it back," he said, like always.
"Always," she said, and closed her fist around it.
A stagehand tapped his headset. "Thirty seconds, Harmony."
Odette squeezed her shoulders once, hard, and then they were gone, led away down the corridor toward the front of the house, and Harmony was alone with the sound techs and her mother's old guitar and the pounding in her own throat.
Vivienne Carr was onstage first. Harmony watched her on the wing monitor, and she was magnificent — there was no other word. The girl in the white gown stood under a single wash of gold light and sang her power ballad like the last eighteen years of money and voice coaches had built her for exactly this one minute. Every note landed. The judges leaned back in their chairs. Denise nodded slowly. Marcus pressed his fingertips together and watched like he was seeing something he had to respect.
When Vivienne hit the final note, the theater came apart. Confetti hadn't even been scheduled and the place went up like it had.
Harmony felt it like a punch. That was what she had to follow.
"Evelyn wants the VT ready," the stagehand said. "Your intro package. Stand by."
The intro VT. Harmony had filmed it three days ago in a studio that smelled like coffee and ozone — her walking through the Bronx, sitting on the steps of St. Brigid's, talking about her mother. She had chosen every word carefully. She had kept it about the music.
The lights went down. The big screen behind the stage lit up.
Her own face, enormous. The steps of the shelter. Her voice: "My mama used to say a song is a roof you carry with you."
And then the cut came early — too early — and instead of the steps there was a crowd shot, the cameras sweeping the audience live, and the director's voice in the stage manager's ear must have been Evelyn's because the image locked onto a man in the ninth row.
Older. Gray at the temples. Crying.
A name appeared under his face. Not on the screen — in Harmony's head, unbidden, dredged up from a place she kept boarded over.
Daddy.
The crowd made a sound. Somebody in the fourth row gasped loud enough to be picked up. On the judges' table, Marcus went very still. Denise's face didn't move at all, which was how Harmony knew she was furious.
Harmony heard herself, on the screen, saying words she had never said: "I just wish — I wish my father could see this." But she had never said that. The audio was cut from something else, some other sentence, twisted. They had built a wish out of her voice and handed it to him like a gift.
This was the surprise. This was the ambush. Pete had warned her — a white-faced boy in a corridor three nights ago, whispering fast: "They're flying somebody in. Your daddy, Harmony. For the finale. Ratings." She had told him she didn't believe him. She had told herself she didn't believe him.
Now her father was on the screen, crying, and the host was saying, "Harmony, look who's here!" and the whole theater turned in their seats to look at the ninth row, and then turned back to look at the wings where she was supposed to walk out.
Her legs didn't move.
"Evelyn said you'd freeze," the stagehand muttered, not unkindly, and touched her elbow. "Go on. You got this."
She went. The lights found her like a hand closing around her wrist. She walked to her mark in Odette's good dress, the hem brushing her sneakers, and the applause was enormous and wrong, meant for a reunion and not for a song.
She lifted the guitar. The strap settled on her shoulder like it had settled there a thousand times. She could feel the chipped wood under her thumb.
In her ear, the monitor hissed.
Then it cut. A clean, total silence, the dead air she knew too well — the same dead air as the audition, when Evelyn had ordered her mic killed and she had stood in front of Marcus Vane and his laughing judges with nothing.
For one heartbeat, she was sixteen and alone under the lights again. Her chest went hollow. Her mouth forgot the first word.
Then she looked down.
Front row. Odette, in the dark blue dress, leaning forward with her hands clasped so tight the knuckles shone. And Tee, on his feet between the seats, bouncing, grinning, mouthing something over and over until she read it: Bring it back.
Odette mouthed it too, silent and certain: Ti zwazo.
Harmony reached up and pulled the dead earpiece out of her ear. She set it down on the stage floor the way she had set down the dead microphone at her audition — gently, deliberately, like laying something to rest.
She nodded to the band.
The piano found the first chord of "Bread for the Journey." The lights warmed on her face.
She stepped to the front of the stage, and she began to sing.
Chapter 18: Finale, Part Two
The song had its own weather.