The Choir Loft

Jared Norton was twenty-four years old, and he had learned to be patient in hallways. It came with the job. Security guard at St. Catherine's Community Hall, three nights a week, mostly nothing to do. He locked doors, checked the boiler room, and walked the same loop until his feet knew the floor by memory.

Tuesday nights were the good nights, because Tuesday was choir rehearsal.

He was not supposed to care about that. But there it was. From eight to nine thirty, the big room filled up with twenty-odd adults ranging from thirty to seventy, and the noise they made together was the closest thing to a warm thing in his week. He usually heard it from his booth, through the wall, muffled and distant. Sometimes he stood in the hallway instead, where the sound was better.

He knew them by voice before he knew them by face. The tenor section had a big man named Ray who laughed in the middle of songs. The soprano in front, Mrs. Hughes, corrected everybody and was usually right. And there was one alto who sang like the song was happening to her. Jared had looked her up on the sign-in sheet once, just to put a name to it. Mona Sandford. Thirty-one. He had checked the sheet again a few weeks later just to see the name again, which was maybe a problem, or maybe just a thing a bored man does.

That Tuesday, the last Tuesday of August, rehearsal ran long. Alma Chan, the director, kept them on the same eight bars of the Mozart for what felt like an hour.

"Altos," Alma said, tapping her folder against the stand. "You are the glue. If you go soggy, the whole thing falls apart. Again."

"Alma, honey, it's ninety degrees in here," somebody said.

"Then sing it hot and in tune. Again."

Jared stood in the hallway with his clipboard and did not check it. When they finally finished, the room emptied out fast. Chairs scraped, people laughed about the heat, the piano lid came down. He went through the motions. Watered the plants by the front office because Alma had asked him to, God help him, and then he locked the main doors at ten sharp, the way the paperwork said.

Except one voice kept going.

He heard it before he understood it, low through the wall. Not the Mozart. Something slower. He walked halfway down the hall and stopped, because standing closer felt like a thing a man should have a reason for, and he did not have one he liked.

It was the alto. Mona. She had stayed behind, and she was singing alone, no piano, just her voice and the room. It was the Schubert "Ave Maria," which the choir had butchered in Latin all summer, and she was singing it in English, quiet, like she was saying it to somebody specific.

Jared leaned against the wall and listened to the whole thing. He did not move until she finished, and then he felt caught even though nobody had caught him. He went back to the booth and sat down and looked at the monitor for ten minutes, where he could see the shape of her at the door, gathering her coat, and then the shape of her going out the side entrance and down the steps into the parking lot.

He wrote "all secure, 10:40 pm" in the log. It was 10:55. He did not correct it.

He concluded the matter. Except the next morning, when he did the walkthrough, he found a hair tie on the floor of the choir room, plain black, and he picked it up and then set it on the piano where she'd find it, and that little pointless kindness sat in his chest all day like a sunburn.

* * *

The following Tuesday was the first week of September, and it was cooler, and the choir sounded better for it. Jared did his loop during rehearsal as always and ended up in the hallway again, and again she sang through the wall, this time with the whole alto section around her, and her line still cut through. There was a stretch in the second half of the piece where the altos carried the melody and everybody else just breathed, and he heard it and closed his eyes for a second, which was stupid, but the hallway was empty.

The next Tuesday, he almost said something. She came out the side entrance while he was checking the lot, and they passed within ten feet of each other under the light.

"Night," she said.

"Night," he said. "Take care."

She looked at him a half second longer than a person needed to, he thought, and then she walked to her car. He stood there with his flashlight, a man who had rehearsed a better sentence and dropped it.

Her birthday, he learned, because the choir was a small town inside a small town and information leaked through the walls, was the third week of September. He heard two sopranos planning a cake in the parking lot, whispering about it like contraband. He did not plan anything. He was not a planner. But on the Tuesday after her birthday, he sat in his booth with a pad of paper from the lost and found and he wrote something down, and then he crossed it out, and then he wrote something plainer.

It took him four tries. What he ended up with was six words, and it took him forty minutes to pick them.

At the end of the night, when the room emptied and the coats came off their hooks, he did the thing he had been turning over for two days. He waited by the coat rack until her coat was the last one hanging there, and then he folded the paper small and put it in the outside pocket. Then he walked the loop twice at a normal guard's pace so his hands would stop shaking.

Happy birthday. You sang "Ave Maria" like you meant it.

No name. He wasn't an idiot.

* * *

Mona Sandford found the paper on Thursday, which is how long it took her to wear that coat again. She was thirty-one, sitting in her kitchen with coffee going cold, and she reached in for a tissue and came out with a folded square instead.

She read it twice. She looked around the kitchen like the answer might be on the ceiling.

"Okay," she said out loud, to nobody. "Okay, so."

Andres was asleep, having worked the night shift at the yard and come home at six. The house was quiet in the way she loved and hated at the same time. She sat down and read it a third time.

The strange part was not that somebody had written it. The strange part was that it was true. She had stayed after rehearsal that night and sung the Schubert alone, in English, the way she used to before she got married and started singing like a person being careful. She had sung it like she meant it because for four minutes nobody was watching, and it had felt like being twenty-two again.

And somebody had heard.

She thought about who it could be. Not Alma, who signed everything. Not Ray, who would have put a smiley face. Not any of the choir, because they'd have just said it out loud in the room, choir people could not keep a compliment in their pockets for two minutes.

Which left, mostly, the guard. The young one. Jared. She'd said "night" to him twice now and both times she had noticed him noticing her, and both times she had told herself she imagined it.

She put the note in her jewelry box, under the tray, and she felt ridiculous and she did it anyway.

* * *

The next Tuesday, rehearsal went long again, because Alma had heard about the Christmas program and it was September, and Alma did not believe in the passage of time. By the time the room cleared it was past ten.

Mona was the last one out, on purpose, and she did not fully admit that to herself until she was doing it.

She stopped at the booth. The light was on and Jared was there behind the glass, filling out the log, and he looked up when she knocked on the door frame, and his face did something honest, a flicker of surprise and then something like fear.

"Hey," she said. "Sorry. Weird question. Is that lost and found pad yours, or does it belong to the building?"

"It's the building's," he said. "Technically."

"Technically." She smiled. "Good answer."

She had written her note that morning on the back of a grocery list, and she had rewritten it three times too, which would have made her laugh if it hadn't made her nervous. Two words. Thank you. Nothing in it, no way to trace it back to anything. Except everything.

She slid it into the gap of the booth's door jamb, right at eye level, and she stepped back.

"Have a good night, Jared."

"You too, Mona," he said, and then, too late to matter, "Happy birthday. Belated. I mean."

She was already walking away. She turned at the door. "How did you know that was me? On the paper."

Jared sat there with his pen still in his hand, trapped and knowing it.

"You sing loud," he said. "When you're alone, I mean. You sing like the room's empty."

"Well," Mona said. "It was."

She went out the side door and down the steps, and Jared watched her taillights cross the lot, and then he took the paper out of the jamb and read it. Thank you. He unfolded his wallet, put it behind his license, and folded the wallet shut over it like a man keeping a receipt for something he hadn't bought yet.

In the log he wrote "all secure, 10:52 pm." That time it was true.

Sunday came around the way Sundays did, with coffee and hymnals and Alma Chan standing at the front of the choir checking everyone's posture like a woman inspecting troops. Jared worked the day shift on Sundays because the church was full and the hall needed eyes. He stood by the back wall during the service, hands folded, and he watched the loft the way you watch a fire you are not supposed to be enjoying.

Mona sang the second hymn with her eyes closed. He knew he should look at the exits. He looked at her instead.

Alma noticed. Alma noticed everything, which was probably why she had survived being a choir director for nineteen years without going insane. She came over during the passing of the peace, when the whole room was shaking hands and saying the words, and she stood next to him with her little hymnbook held like a shield.

"Young man," she said, quietly, under the noise. "What's your name again?"

"Jared. Jared Norton."

"Jared. You've been standing at that wall for four Sundays now."

"That's my job. Sundays, I mean. Someone has to watch the room."

"Mm," Alma said. She looked at the choir loft, and then at him, and the look was not angry. It was worse than angry. It was careful. "You know, I have run this choir a long time. I have watched marriages come apart over less than what you're doing right now."

"I'm not doing anything."

"No," she agreed. "That's the trick of it. Nobody ever does anything at first. They just watch, and then they leave a little note, and then they watch some more." Jared felt his ears go hot. She could not have known about the note. Nobody could have known about the note. But Alma Chan's eyes said she knew something, even if it was only the shape of a thing and not the thing itself.

"The choir is a family, Jared," she went on. "It is a strange family, and a loud one, and half of them can't stay on pitch, but it is a family. Some of those people have sung together for thirty years. They have buried spouses together. And some of them," and here her voice got very even, "have wrecked homes over a look in a loft. I have seen it. I have buried friendships over it too."

"I hear you," he said, and meant it, mostly.

"Do you?" She smiled at him then, and the smile had a little kindness in it, which somehow made it harder. "You seem like a decent young man. That's why I'm saying this and not just moving your post. Whatever it is you're looking at up there, it is not yours to look at. She's a married woman, in case you hadn't read the bulletin."

"I know she's married."

"Then look at the exits, dear." She patted his arm once, like closing a gate, and walked back to her spot by the organ, and the whole conversation had taken ninety seconds and no one in the room had seen it happen.

Jared stood there through the third hymn and looked at the exits. He did a good job of it too, right up until the benediction, when Mona turned around in her seat to shrug off her cardigan and he looked at her one more time, briefly, like a man taking a last drag before throwing away the pack.

* * *

The following Tuesday, rehearsal ended at nine sharp, which surprised everyone, including Alma, who announced it like she had been overruled by a higher power. "Coffee at the diner," Ray called out. "Mona, you coming?"

"I can't," Mona said. "I've got an early morning."

"You always have an early morning," Ray said.

"Then I'm consistent," she said, and she got a laugh, and she gathered her coat, and she walked out the side door of the hall like a woman going home. She did not go home. She went around the back of the building, where the lot was dark and her little car sat alone, and she stood in the dark for a minute questioning her whole plan, which had no steps in it that she could name.

Then she went back inside through the door she had propped with her foot, and she climbed the narrow stairs to the loft.

The loft was where the overflow chairs lived and where Alma stored the Robes Of Unfortunate History, which were