Songs of Willow Frost by Jamie Ford Page B

shirt, as though she’d dressed him herself and was aboutto send him back out into the world. She touched his cheek as she spoke. “The person I was back then, she’s dead, William. The person you knew is buried in sorrow and shame. The mother I was, Liu Song, she didn’t have a chance. She didn’t even have a choice. So I let her die. And all that was left was the person on-screen, onstage. Willow, who just kept going …”
    But you are both . “Willow is just a stage name.”
    “It’s how I’ve survived, William. Willow saved me.”
    Yes, but from whom? “Then why didn’t you come back for me?”
    She paused and motioned for him to close the door. Then she asked him to lock it as well. She fished out another cigarette, put it to her mouth, hesitated, and then put it away. “There’s so much you don’t know. You were just a little, little boy.”
    William swam through the memories of his years at the orphanage—years of loneliness, years of longing. Then his mind flashed upon her flickering image on-screen, the movie posters and radiant lifestyle. You have everything .
    When William had dared to hope that Willow was indeed his mother, he’d imagined this moment, the tears of joy, the embrace, the life they would have together. This was nothing like that. These were tears of sadness. “What couldn’t you explain to me?”
    “All I knew was that I couldn’t give you the hideous life I had then—I wouldn’t wish that upon anyone. And I couldn’t give you the life I have now, for your own protection. I couldn’t even give you a decent name. I couldn’t give you anything that mattered.”
    “But you have it all.” William gestured to the dressing room, the theater itself. “You are wealthy—famous! Everyone loves you. What don’t you have?”
    “I don’t have what matters most.”
    Your son , William thought. I’m right here .
    She whispered so softly he barely heard her. “Forgiveness.”
    “What more is there to forgive?” William asked. Then he had a terrible realization, that maybe she was unable to forgive herself.
    She motioned for him to come closer, and she took his hands. She slowly examined them. The years he’d spent working in the laundry or pushing a mop at Sacred Heart hadn’t smoothed his long, wrinkled fingers—they still had the same hands, old hands. But where his were warm, hers were cold, frozen. He felt her let go and then watched as she stared into her empty palms as though reading lines on a map, searching.
    And then, while music began to play from somewhere upstairs, somewhere far away, she spoke to him of family and fathers.

Songs
    (1921)
    Liu Song Eng walked home from Butterfield’s, where she worked after school as a song plugger. Singing in front of the store wasn’t a bad job, per se. With her voice—her thunderous contralto—she managed to earn a nickel for every page of sheet music sold. But her looks drew unwanted attention from passersby, especially when she wore her mother’s chevron tabard dress. Matronly women squinted their eyes at Liu Song and pursed their bee-stung lips. Grown men stopped dead in their tracks when they heard a tearful Mamie Smith ballad coming from Liu Song’s seventeen-year-old body. They leered, looking her up and down, then slowly back up again. Even the prim Seattle beat cops seemed to linger nearby, palming their batons and making jokes about a stiff breeze as she fought to keep the chill wind from blowing up her slip. Meanwhile, Old Man Butterfield sat inside, where it was warm, smoking his pipe and flitting his long fingers across the chipped ivories of an old, upright piano, which, unlike the pianolas, wasn’t for sale. He could have let one of the new autopianos do all the work, but Liu Song suspected that he liked to play as much as she liked to sing. To Liu Song, the lonely old man seemed wedded to his music. He’d never married and rarely even talked about women, except to comment on their shoes.
    “Don’t make