The music that keeps echoing back

by Chris Benjamin

Thereare two similar scenes in Leo McKay Jr’s novel, What Comes Echoing Back — one in a school and one in a hospital — that echo one another without redundancy. They are my favourite scenes in the book, and serve multiple purposes of fundamental importance to the reading experience.

In each of those scenes, a girl named Patricia who goes by Sam and a boy named Robert who goes by Robot find a spot in the respective settings by a stairwell, where the resonance is so perfect for singing that the institutional setting disappears around them. All that’s left is music. They are students in a high school strings class, Robot the guitar prodigy gone ukulele and Sam there for credits, but moved by what she’s learned— especially from Robot.

At school, Sam is afraid to venture into the stairwell. The door would close behind her. It’s a trigger. She was recently violently traumatized. Later at the hospital, it’s Robot who is wounded by violence.

These incidents, as built up to and revealed by McKay Jr, are painful to read. Such is the author’s skill. We know certain events are coming from the first chapters, yet when they finally unfold we are gut-punched. We have grown to care about these young people, not just sympathize but empathize.

Sam and Robot are shells of their former selves, but they are gravitating to what will heal them. Music and, perhaps, each other. There is an attraction, but it’s not clear to us — maybe not to them either — whether it’s romantic or a much-needed friendship for two isolated souls. There is intimacy is their passionate discovery of music, and in how Sam holds Robot’s hand when he’s immobile in his hospital bed.

McKay Jr’s novel is about communities of teenagers singling out and hurting people, using their bodies and social media as powerful, devastating weapons. Sam’s story is reminiscent of Nova Scotia’s Rehtaeh Parsons, who was gang raped, harassed and bullied online, before she committed suicide.

MacKay Jr is measured in what he shows us of these violent acts. The sexualized violence happens off-page, but it’s a central event of the novel. MacKay Jr makes this work well, surrounding those moments with enough tension to stick the tune in my head for weeks after reading, and focusing

What Comes Echoing Back

Leo McKay Jr Nimbus Publishing

twice as much on the impacts, the persistent caution it takes to come back from trauma.

After Sam is assaulted, McKay Jr notes that “only she can see the fist-sized circles on the insides of her thighs.” There is deep, layered pain in that phrase.

The heaviest lifting here is done by healing. Music flexes its universal healing power, massaging broken hearts with stories that go beyond words to uplift us. Sam falls in love with an Edith Piaf song, though she doesn’t quite understand the French. She finds her voice when Robot plays an old prison blues number, letting her anguish fly to words she has no context for.

More minor characters feel it too. McKay Jr ensures that his minor characters do heavy thematic lifting; they each have a purpose. Emily, a trans girl in the music class, also finds her voice to Robot’s ukulele. For once, “they were not staring at Emily as though she were a freak. They were not looking through her, as though she were not there.”

Robot is no saviour, but through this act Sam sees his kindness for the first time, a strong contrast to his reputation as a low-life hooligan. The brutality hovering through the novel is contrasted with many profoundly moving scenes of tenderness: girlfriends sharing giggling fits, an uncle clumsily cooking massive breakfasts for the young woman in his care, an awkward session with a stick-and-poke tattoo artist, a mother apologizing to her son for her weaknesses.

Too often love is portrayed in clichés, rose petals and crashing waves. McKay Jr, who is a high school English teacher, shows his deep understanding of the complicated lives of young people, how askew they can be set, how vulnerable they are to anonymous yet known forces online, and how it takes a whole lot of people — professionals and families and friends — and a whole lot of inner strength to work their way back on course.

But the music does help. ■

CHRIS BENJAMIN is a journalist, editor, and fiction writer, as well as the former managing editor for Atlantic Books Today. His latest book is Chasing Paradise: A Hitchhiker’s Search for Home in a World at War with Itself