Choir Practice

Nick tells himself it was a practical move. Cheap rent, good light for the studio, a town where a gallon of paint costs less than a coffee in the city. That's the story he gives people at the hardware store, anyway. The real story is dumber and he knows it.

Twenty-two years ago, when he was 22 and Sunita was, as far as he knew, 22 too, they dated for about four months. Four months! Then she got a job offer out east and he got a girl named Carla's phone number at a party, and it just... fizzled. No drama. No big speech. She hugged him at the bus station and said "take care of yourself, Nick," and that was that.

Except apparently it wasn't, because last spring his cousin mentions, offhand, that Sunita sings in the church choir in some town he'd never heard of, and Nick goes home that night and looks at apartments there. Within a week he's signed a lease on a studio next to St. Brigid's, which is not even the right church for his cousin's story, but whatever, there's a choir.

He laughs at himself sometimes, painting trim white in a kitchen he doesn't care about. Forty-four years old, uprooting his whole life for the ghost of a woman he knew for one season when they were both barely adults. His sister asked him point blank if this was a midlife thing. He said no. She said "uh huh" in that way she has.

Still. The rent is genuinely cheap. The light is genuinely good. And Thursday is choir night.

---

The annex is a wooden building behind the church, smelling of old varnish and dust. Nick slips in at seven on the dot, takes a folding chair in the back row, and does his best impression of furniture. A few people glance at him. A man with a stack of hymnals nods. Nobody asks questions, which suits him fine.

Then he sees her, third riser on the left, alto section, and his stomach does something complicated.

She's older. Obviously she's older, it's been twenty-two years, everyone is older. But she looks more herself than anyone he's seen in decades. Same dark hair, now pinned up with a plain clip. Same way of standing, weight on one foot, like she's about to step off a curb. She's wearing a gray cardigan and she is talking to the woman beside her and laughing at something, hand over her mouth, and Nick feels 21 again for about four seconds before he gets a grip.

She's contained, though. That's the word that comes to him. Contained. Like someone turned the volume down on her between then and now. Back in the day she filled a room without trying. This version of Sunita sits inside herself.

"Alright, people, from the top of page four!" That's the director, a short brisk woman the hymnal man calls Fiona. She's got a clipboard and zero patience. "Altos, you're dragging again, and I can hear it, so don't make that face, Dolores."

"We're not dragging, the tenors are early," one of the altos fires back.

"The tenors are never early, that's the whole problem with tenors!"

Nick smiles into his collar. He forgot how much he likes choir people. They bicker like family and nobody means any of it.

They run through the same four bars about eleven times. The altos keep going flat and Fiona keeps stopping them, and every time Sunita glances down at her sheet music, Nick studies her like he's painting her. He is a painter, so partly it's habit. Mostly it's not.

There's something odd about her, now that he watches properly. When the whole choir sings, everyone else's face does the thing faces do, the effort, the squinting at the conductor. Sunita just... hums along, smooth as a machine. And twice he catches people near her leaning in slightly, like plants toward a window. The sopranos on her left keep drifting closer to her riser without noticing they're doing it.

Huh, he thinks. Interesting light on that one. That's the painter in him talking, and he doesn't believe it for a second.

Practice ends at eight thirty with Fiona announcing, "Same time next week! Harry, did you lock the back door last week or did I dream that?"

"You dreamed it, love," says an older man collecting coffee cups. Harry, apparently. Retired postal worker by the look of him, the kind of man who knows everyone's business and considers it a public service. He squints over at Nick's row. "You. New fella. You sing?"

"Oh, no, I'm just... listening. I paint. I'm over at the studio on Elm."

"The painter!" Harry brightens like Nick has just confirmed a rumor he'd been cultivating. "Knew there was a painter moving in. Marlene at the post office said you'd be at practice within a month."

"Marlene's good," Nick admits.

"Marlene's never wrong," Harry says, which sounds like a threat.

People file out into the dark. Nick hangs back on purpose, folding chairs, being helpful, buying time. Fiona locks the door behind the last of them and says goodnight. Harry lingers, clearly hoping for gossip, but his phone buzzes and he shuffles off toward the church muttering about his sister.

And then it's just the two of them in the annex, under one buzzing fluorescent tube, and Sunita is walking over.

Up close she's even more her. Little lines at the corners of her eyes. The same almost-smile she used to wear when she was about to say something that would make him snort tea out his nose. He stands there holding a folding chair like an idiot.

"Nick," she says. Not a question.

"Sunita. Hi. Wow, hi!"

"You're the painter on Elm." She takes the chair out of his hands and folds it properly, which is somehow the most embarrassing thing that's happened to him all year. "Harry told me last week. Marlene told him before that. Small towns, eh?"

"Yeah. I, uh." He gestures vaguely at the annex, the hymnals, his entire situation. "I heard you sang here. It sounded nice. I didn't want to, I don't know, just show up at your door after twenty years, so I thought I'd... sit in the back like a creep instead."

"That is creepier, honestly," she says, and she's smiling, flat and knowing, and he remembers exactly how it used to feel to lose an argument to her. "But it's fine. How long have you been here?"

"Moved in, what, three weeks ago? Four?"

"Six," she says. "I've seen you carrying canvases. You've gotten taller, or your hair got taller."

"It got taller. It's a whole situation up there now." She laughs at that, short and real, and something in his chest unclenches that he didn't know was clenched. "So. Choir. You still sing. That's good. You always were the only person I knew who could hold a note and a grudge at the same time."

"I'm an alto now. Altos hold everything up and get none of the credit. Very on brand for me." She looks at him for a beat, and there's that flat, knowing smile again, like she's reading the back of a package. "You came six hundred miles to sit in the back of a choir practice, Nick. Why?"

Honest answer or funny answer? He opens his mouth to pick funny, and what comes out is, "Because I kept thinking about you and I got tired of it."

Well. There it is. Out in the fluorescent light, hanging between two folding chairs and a coffee urn.

Sunita doesn't laugh this time. She looks down at the chair in her hands, then back up, and something flickers across her face that he can't name. Something old and careful.

"Okay," she says quietly. "Okay. Well. Come to next Thursday's practice then. Properly this time. And Nick?"

"Yeah?"

"Stop watching me like you're figuring out a painting." Her smile goes crooked. "You'll never get the colors right anyway."

They walk out together into the cold. She pulls a coat on over the gray cardigan and doesn't ask where they're going, which is good, because Nick has no plan. His feet just go the way they always go, down the gravel alley between the church and his building, past the rhododendrons that the landlord keeps threatening to cut back and never does.

"This is me," he says, pointing at the lit window over the studio door. "Practically on church grounds. Very convenient for whatever this is."

"What is this, exactly?" She stops under the one streetlight back there. Moths are doing their thing around it. Her hair's still pinned up with the plain clip.

"Good question. Honestly? I don't know. I moved six hundred miles because of a rumor from my cousin and that's insane, right? A guy my age doing that."

"Forty-four is young from where I'm standing," she says. "But no. It's not insane. It's something, though."

There's a beat where neither of them says anything. A car goes by over on Elm and its headlights sweep across the rhododendrons and then it's dark again and she's still looking at him, steady, like she's deciding something.

"Nick. Straight question. Do you want to know what I actually am?"

"What, like, spiritually? Because I was raised Catholic and the answer is lapsed."

"No. Really. Do you want to know? Because if you don't, we can say goodnight and you can come to Thursday practice and sing or not sing and that's a fine life. But if you do want to know, there's no taking it back. It doesn't hurt or anything. It's just true, and true sticks."

He thinks about it for maybe four seconds, which is longer than it sounds under a streetlight with a woman you've been haunted by for twenty-two years.

"Yeah. I want to know."

"Okay." She shifts her weight, casual, like she's about to tell him the bus schedule. "I'm a succubus."

Nick waits for the rest of the sentence. It doesn't come.

"A... okay. A succubus."

"Yes!"

"Like the, uh. The demon? The sex demon from the...?"

"That's the one, yeah," she says, and she's smiling a little now, wry, watching him do the math on his own face. "And before you ask, no, it's not like that. It's never been like that. The stories get it so wrong it's almost funny. Almost."

He leans back against the brick of his own building because his legs object to standing. "Okay. Walk me through it. Because you just said a massive thing very calmly and I'm over here like a man being told the mailman is a wizard."

"It's not a big deal, that's the thing. It hasn't been a big deal for a very long time." She tucks her hands in her coat pockets. "I don't feed on sex, Nick. I never really did, even when I was young and stupid about it. I feed on attention. On wanting. Quiet, ordinary longing. The kind people carry around all day and never say out loud."

"Longing."

"Longing. Yearning, if you want the fancy word. Somebody hoping the guy at the counter notices them. Somebody remembering an old friend and smiling at nothing. That's food. Tiny little meals, all day long, everywhere. You have no idea how much of it humans produce for free. You're basically walking snack bars."

"That's the least romantic thing anyone's ever said to me."

"You dated me for four months twenty-two years ago and I never once took a real bite out of you, so apparently it works."

He opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. "Wait. Back up. Our whole... that was you feeding?"

"No! God, no!" She actually looks offended, which is somehow reassuring. "That was just a boyfriend and a girlfriend being twenty-one and dumb. I liked you. I liked you a lot, that was the problem, actually. Being around you I never had to try. You gave off so much... you were so open, Nick. You still are, apparently, you walked six hundred miles toward a rumor. Do you know what that feels like from my side? Like standing next to a bakery."

"Huh."

"'Huh,' he says."

"No, I mean, huh, okay, that tracks. The bus station. You hugged me and said take care of yourself, Nick, and I thought about it for a decade. And you're telling me that was, what, ambient?"

"That was me being sad," she says quietly. "Different thing. I do actually have those."

The moth hits the light with a little tick. Nick looks at his own window, glowing above them, his paints and his half-finished canvases and the kettle he never descales, and tries to locate the panic he assumes he should be feeling. It's not there. What's there is more like the feeling of a puzzle piece clicking in sideways.

"So the choir. The people leaning toward you during the hymns. I saw that. I thought it was the light."

"It's not the light."

"Right. And Fiona? Harry? Do they...?"

"Fiona's known me nine years. She'd tell you I'm the steadiest person in the parish. She's right. Harry thinks I'm a widow with no children because that's what I told him and he never checked because why would he. I've been here nine years. Before this it was a town in Oregon, before that a place in Wales. You go somewhere, you join things, you're pleasant, you're a little bit lovely, and people feel good around you and you eat like a hermit eats, lightly and with gratitude. Nobody gets hurt. Nobody even knows."

"And the church part doesn't, like. Burn you?"

"Why would it? Half the angels in the old stories couldn't tell us apart from regular folk either." She shrugs. "I sing alto. I like the hymns. I like that everyone there is hoping for something, even if it's just rain for the garden. Best buffet in town and nobody knows I'm eating."

He looks at her for a while. The streetlight buzzes. Somewhere behind the church Harry's still rattling around, or that might be a raccoon, honestly it could be either.

"Can I ask the obvious rude question?"