Beyond the Headlights is a rag to riches Cinderella to Julliard story of seven-year-old Aiyanna living in a trailer park in remote northern Ontario who, with no musical training, is capable of playing complex concertos on the church basement piano.
Beyond the Headlights is a rag to riches Cinderella to Julliard story of seven-year-old Aiyanna living in a trailer park in remote northern Ontario who, with no musical training, is capable of playing complex concertos on the church basement piano.
CHAPTER ONE
FATHER CLARK
MAY 2009
I was waiting at the front door of the church, which was set back far enough from the gravel road leading to the Broken Deer Double-Wides Trailer Park that I didnât get too much summer dust. I could hear from the basement Aiyana at the piano running her fingers along the keys, up and down, playing âChopsticks.â
When Mr. Skibo arrived, I said, âDonât worry about your shoes. Youâre here to tune this old Samick piano. And then to hear this little girl play it.â
Mr. Skibo opened his leather case. He took out a leaver and wrench and hammer. I watched him plunk and listen and plunk. When he had finished he tidied away his tools. He turned on his tape recorder. âWhat would you like to play, Aiyana?â
âShe canât answer that question,â I said. âShe simply plays what comes to her from the other side.â
âOther side, Father? What other side?â
âShe canât explain that. She believes sheâs two people. First the music comes to her as though sheâs another person playing on the other side. And then she walks over here to the church to play the music she just heard.
âAcausal parallelism. Iâve heard of that. But never have I met someone with that gift.â
I knew Aiyana was ready, no need for a warm-up. She closed her eyes and I closed my eyes. This was how we did it. For her and for me there was no piano. From the dark, her seven-year-old fingers began to pluck the notes that would play the Chopin that she had just heard on the other side.
I stood back, waiting for the tiny flame that lit this childâs heart to burst into this dayâs miracle of notes: an array of complicated tasks accomplished all at the same time by the dance of those long fingers of those little hands â the right doing one job, the left another; the ten fingers doing ten other jobs; sharps and flats in black and white controlled by timing the rests and trills; one hand in three beats to a measure, and in the other hand, four; the mind reading, interpreting, and locating each chord while the fingers softened here and hardened there. And all this performed by this seven-year-old child, eyes closed in a Zen trance.
When she finished, Mr. Skibo said, âThis little girl is astonishing, Father. Never had a lesson, you say? She could be playing on two pianos for the Toronto Symphony.â
âTwo pianos. That is what is so peculiar. She says she is already playing two pianos.â
âIâm sure she feels like sheâs playing two pianos. Who knows? Sheâs a child and will describe it the best way she can. But whatever it is that allows her to play the way she plays, we canât figure that out here.â Mr. Skibo held up the tape. âSomething must be done for this child, and I intend to make it happen.â
I thanked Mr. Skibo and we shook hands. I stood on the front step of the church as Mr. Skibo got into his car and drove away. A well-intentioned man, but unfamiliar with life in the Broken Deer Double-Wides Trailer Park. Still, he might do something, and something had to start somewhere.
Aiyana went home to help her mother with the laundry, so I sat on the front step of my church. Sitting was something I did often because my new heart meds made me dizzy. I leaned back against the front door and closed my eyes. I wondered what Mr. Skibo thought of these fifty-three double-wides sitting in the middle of this one-square-mile field at the edge of Broken Deer Lake. The man who flew the bush plane said that from the sky the trailer park looked like a hodgepodge of different-coloured boxes in a square of dirty brown stuck on a green wall. He said the lakes are all called Deer because looking down from a bush plane, theyâre all shaped like deer.
I imagined myself seated next to Mr. Skibo, driving along the gravel road to Highway 69. Let me tell you about life in Broken Deer Double-Wides, Mr. Skibo. Let me explain not what it looks like from a bush plane but what it looks like from my front door. Listen to how it is. In the summer, the younger Broken Deer girls play hopscotch with their cousins on the park office parking lot. The older ones play hide-and-seek in the ice huts. The younger boys go fishing for suckers and shiners. The boys throw the fish up on the bank where they flop in the grass and die and rot in the sun while the boys go home for lunch: canned pork and beans and fried baloney. They call it âDouble-Wides Deluxe.â After lunch, they go garbage wading at the dump while the bigger boys hang around. They kick things. They spit. They get into fights. They break the windows of the boarded-up houses half a mile along from the trailer park. They play hide-and-seek with the girls in the boarded-up school.
Let me explain what happens to the girls, Mr. Skibo. Winter comes. The younger ones play with the dolls shipped up to this church every Christmas. Every Christmas is white and the white stays until it melts into yellow slush, which turns the trailer park into the dirty brown the bush pilot was talking about, the same colour as the rutted road you were ten minutes ago driving on, dirty brown like the dolls after a long, boring winter.
Springs come and go. The dolls get lost and the girls get older. I tell the parents they shouldnât drink so much and should spend time with their kids and pay more attention to what the older girls are doing with the boys in the ice huts pulled up on shore for the summer. Theyâre in there fishing, all right. The girls have the bait and the boys have the poles but what theyâre going to catch wonât come out looking like a fish but will come out looking like an unwanted doll.
See me now, Mr. Skibo. I wipe at a tear with the back of my hand. I struggle to my feet. What I mean to say, Mr. Skibo, I look at Aiyanaâs future and it breaks my heart.
I returned to my apartment at the back of the church and stretched out on my chesterfield. My new meds were making my mind do a lot of drifting. Not that it had anything else to do, mind you. Years ago, yes. But the only thing left at the Sisters of Mercy Church now was the Saturday morning food bank.
Apart from that, Mr. Skibo, have I changed anything here in Broken Deer? Have I accomplished anything? The parents pretend they donât know what goes on in those ice huts. They act like the FAS kids I used to visit at the assessment centre in Sudbury. But the parents arenât FAS. Theyâre drunk, almost the same thing, I guess. Besides, Mr. Skibo, if you add it up, more babies mean more welfare.
Ah well, Mr. Skibo. By now you will have reached the crossroads. Youâll be idling at the stop sign. The road sign that used to be there pointing Sudbury this way and Toronto that way got shot so full of holes itâs hard to read. There was no point in replacing the sign â it would just get shot full of holes again. Thatâs why right now youâre sitting there wondering which direction to choose.
They say, Mr. Skibo, the job of the angels is to give us signs to help us make good choices in lifeâs directions. I have a reproduction of the fifteenth-century painting of the Angel of Mercy, her white wings spread wide, providing protection for a small child huddled at a crossroad. This is the real Angel of Mercy, not the modern Angel of Mercy who brings death.
So, Mr. Skibo, if youâve been sent here by the real Angel of Mercy, as I know you have, I pray that, when you make your decision and signal your turn, your direction will return you to Broken Deer to help this little girl called Aiyanna.
Aiyana is a seven-year-old girl, growing up in a cheap trailer park in northern Ontario, Canada with an alcoholic mother and her mother's various drunken lovers. She is mysteriously able to play beautiful classic piano pieces without having had any lessons - and without being able to read or write because of her severe dyslexia.
The story line sounds simple, but as it unfolds there are layers within layers of the strange world of the savant, those rare people who have an extraordinary talent, often in one particular area. Aiyana is befriended by the local priest who recognizes her talent but is fairly helpless to do much about it, until the piano tuner arrives and suggests she study further. But simple it is not, as when Aiyana, now a teenager finally runs away she is determined to enter the prestigious Juilliard piano competition. Unable to make sense of the street names and addresses in Toronto, she is hopelessly lost and is rescued by Eric, a young accountant who takes her in. As their unusual relationship develops Eric sees in her a huge number of similarities to his girlfriend who died in a car accident when he was driving, just a few months before. Both girls wore a white feather in their hair, and both believed in a double existence between this world and that on the Other Side.
Together they try without success to get someone at the music conservatory to hear her play, but no, there are other forces at work, including several vicious attempts to make her go back home to her motherâs trailer. Overshadowing this are Ericâs attempts to scatter his girlfriendâs ashes on the lake, and the strange way in which Aiyana knows where to go on the lake and how to still the wind and waves for long enough to scatter them.
Back in Toronto she takes a job as a cleaner at a beautiful music concert hall and inevitably she sits down one night, after everyone has left, to play the piano â but one person, the orchestraâs own pianist, hears her. He questions her and recognizes that she is a musical savant, a rarity, someone with absolute genius. At last, she has reached her goal and someone has listened to her.
Almost whimsical at times the story leads down unexplored paths and through many mysteries but remains focused on Aiyana and her divine talent.