“So there’s music in your soul,” he said.
“I used to think it was in my fingers,” I told him. “When I was a kid, I would hear a song on TV or on the radio, and then I’d walk over to my mom’s baby grand and play the melody by ear. When my dad asked me how I knew which notes to play, I told him my fingers knew.”
Your dad laughed. “I used to do that, too. We didn’t have a baby grand, though, just a janky old upright with chipped keys.” He took a sip from his Guinness. “I want to hear you play,” he said.
I drained the rest of my beer. He was one ahead of me, and I was trying to catch up. I’d only tried to play once after your grandmother died, eight days after she was gone, when shiva had ended and the house was silent again. I’d ended up sobbing underneath the piano, overwhelmed by thoughts about her, about her teaching me “Hot Cross Buns” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” when I was tiny, her presence strong and warm beside me, about later, when she couldn’t play any longer and would sit with her eyes closed while I played her favorite songs. About how I’d never play them for her again.
After that, any time I felt the urge to play, I would remember that rush of emotions, the pain of my memories, and I would stop. But for the first time I thought that maybe, with your dad next to me, that wouldn’t happen. Playing guitar with him had been almost magical, absent of that pain. And I missed it. I missed the songs. I missed the piano. I missed how I felt when I played. But it didn’t matter anyway.
“I’d play for you,” I told him. “But I don’t have anything to play on.”
“There are some pianos in the music building,” he said. “And luckily you are dating a music major. So I have access to the practice rooms.”
I picked up his beer and drank the rest of it in three big gulps. I was going to do this. I wasn’t going to think about it, I wasn’t going to second-guess. I was going to play the piano again. Hopefully, I wasn’t going to fall apart.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go.”
With his university ID in hand and his guitar case on his back, he unlocked the door to the music building and we found a practice room with a piano inside.
Your dad closed the door and I sat down on the piano bench, running my fingers along the keys. The instrument brought me so much joy and such pain. I still can’t hear Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King” without thinking of your grandma.
That’s what I played for your father that night. “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” When I finished, he was looking at me like he had just gotten a gift, one he’d been waiting for his whole life.
“Queenie,” he said, shaking his head. “You don’t just play the piano, you play the piano. You’re . . . you’re amazing.”
I shrugged, my eyes wet with tears. “I’d be better if I hadn’t stopped lessons when my mom got so sick. But it’s something I’ve always had a knack for. My mom loved listening to me play.”
We’d talked about my mom before, on our walks through the city, at night, in whispers in the dark, when I couldn’t get her out of my head before I went to sleep, when I missed her so much it felt like it was taking over my whole body.
Your dad sat next to me on the piano bench then and held me. “I got you,” he said, like he always did. And those words, his arms, his voice made the feeling of loss ebb enough that there was room inside me for other feelings, too.
* * *
—
A few weeks later he told me to close my eyes before we entered his dorm room. He led me by the hand through the maze of books and clothes and shoes on his floor. Then he stopped.
“Okay,” he said. “Open them.”
I was standing in front of a keyboard, all set up on a stand with an amp and headphones and a damper pedal.
“It’s for you,” he said. “Happy two months before your birthday.”
I was blown away. “For me?” I said. “Really?”
He nodded. “Someone with your talent needs her own instrument. I’ve been checking Craigslist and finally found a keyboard that’s worthy—some Upper East Side parents bought it for their kid who gave up on lessons after a few months. They just wanted it out of their house. It was practically free, but it’s top of the line.”
I turned it on and started playing. The music was in my fingers, just like it had always been.
6
After they left the hospital, Ezra and Emily turned away from the East River, away from the rushing traffic on FDR Drive, and Ezra said, “I know you wanted dinner out tonight . . . but I’m afraid I won’t be the best company.”