by Chris Cander
“As for Sasha, she was frozen inside an ice coffin created by her own tears, but she wasn’t dead. It is said that she is still there, waiting for a kind soul to bring a piano into the wretched cold, to thaw her heart and fingers so she can melt the snow with music and bring the village back to life.”
IN SPITE OF HER parking-lot vigil, at some point Clara fell asleep. Then there was a noise, a banging loud enough to wake her. It took her a moment to remember where she was, and why. She unfolded herself and peered through the thin layer of dew that frosted the windshield. The sun was starting to pink the horizon, and she was cold. She yawned and slowly sat up, rubbing at the tingling that started at her left elbow and traveled along a pins-and-needles current into her cast.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
She jumped in her seat and looked through her window, where a man dressed in black stood with his fists raised. She screamed and scrambled away faster than she could have imagined was possible, pressing her back against the passenger door and cocking her legs, ready to kick. She fumbled with her good hand behind her for the lock, but her movements were sloppy with sleep and adrenaline.
“Wait!” the man shouted. “It’s okay. Are you Clara?”
Groping behind herself, she finally released the lock and then nearly spilled out onto the cool asphalt. She remembered something she had learned in the self-defense classes her uncle had made her take when she was sixteen: Put something between you and your would-be assailant: distance, a large obstacle, anything to make it harder for him to get to you.
“Clara, it’s Greg. I’m Greg Zeldin.” He held his fists aloft and Clara, blinking through her confusion, now saw that he was holding two paper cups with steam coming out of the white tops. Coffee. He lifted them even higher, a small white-flag gesture. “I’m the one who bought your piano?”
She recognized his coppery voice from their phone conversation. She took a breath but was careful not to let her guard down completely. “You mean rented.”
He exhaled through his nose with a small huffing sound, and the air at his nostrils turned to steam. “Right,” he said. “Rented.”
“What are you doing here?” she said.
He walked around the front of her car. Instinctively she took a step back, but he reached out, undeterred, and handed her a cup. “I should be asking you that.” He dug into his pants pocket and pulled out two creamers, two sugars, a small red stirrer. “I didn’t know how you’d take it.”
“Cream,” she said, and tried to take a packet from him with the swollen fingers of her broken hand. Both dropped to the ground, one exploding white goo onto her sneakers and the hem of her jeans. “Great,” she mumbled.
“Here.” He took the coffee from her and set it down on the trunk of her car, then picked up the creamer that was still intact and emptied it into the cup. “You want another?” He pulled one more from his pocket and held it up to her with the aplomb of a magician pulling a rabbit out of his hat. She nodded absently, wondering, as he stirred, what else he might be able to produce from the pockets of his all-black clothing: T-shirt, jacket, jeans, shoes. He looked as if he might be capable of certain dark arts. She could imagine him as a circus sideshow performer. The Great Zeldin. All he needed was a hat and cape.
He was handsome, if unconventionally so: pale skin that reached well into his close-cropped and deeply receded hairline, thick brows that didn’t move when he spoke, almost girlish lips. His neatly trimmed goatee had a burst of gray hairs in a small spot by his jaw. His light-colored gaze was striking, like a wolf’s. Yet instead of feeling threatened, she found herself drawn in. Perhaps he wasn’t so much attractive as he was mesmerizing.
“You’re wondering how I knew it was you,” he said, his eyes boring into hers as he handed her the creamed coffee.
She was wondering exactly that, but she didn’t care for his didactic tone. “I assume your guys saw me at the gas station.” She squinted through the coffee’s steam and took a sip, willing herself not to look away, as though it were a challenge she somehow couldn’t afford to lose.
“They did, apparently, but they didn’t put two and two together until they came out this morning to check the truck and saw your car here and you asleep in it.”
Clara looked around and noticed that all the semis were gone. Her car was exposed and alone in the middle of the lot. “Well,” she said, then could think of nothing else to add. Feeling exposed, too, she reached inside for the balled-up sweatshirt she’d found in the backseat and had used as a pillow. The temperature had dropped overnight and she was cold.
“I got in late myself,” Greg said. “Flew into Vegas and rented a car. God, what a shithole that place is. Every time I go there, I feel like my soul corrodes a little bit. Besides, there’s no point in gambling in those big casinos. They treat you like a king—okay, maybe a low-level nobleman—and some uninspired waitress who probably had a lousy childhood brings you rounds and rounds of drinks while you spend your money, blackjack, slots, whatever, and if you start doing okay, well, they don’t care too much for that. The house guys in their cheap suits start moving in, watching. The house is always supposed to win in the end. Haven’t you heard that saying, ‘The house always wins’? But places like this”—he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder toward the crumbling gambling hall behind them—“they don’t mind so much, at least for a little while. A little action fires up the indigents.” He broke off his soliloquy to take a sip of coffee, watching her as he did so, as though awaiting a reply.
“I don’t really gamble?” she said, curling the end up into a question like she wasn’t sure of this herself. Immediately she wanted to say it insistently—I don’t gamble—but drawing attention to it would only make it sound worse.
“So says the girl who followed a moving truck into the middle of nowhere.” When he smiled at her, she blushed.
Behind him, the sunrise crept slowly over the serrated ridges of Clark Mountain, though nothing else indicated that it was morning. The gamblers must all have still been asleep, Clara figured. She felt strange standing in an almost empty parking lot at dawn, drinking coffee delivered by a stranger. But it also lent the day a vague sense of potential.
“Why are you here, then? In the middle of nowhere,” she said, adding, “with my piano.”
“I told you. I’m going to photograph it.”
“Where?”
“Various places.”
“Like casinos?”
“No. Outdoors.”
“Out in the open?”
“Yes.”
“But what about the elements? The dirt?” Her voice rose and she swept her arm toward the ground. She thought about Juan’s flicking gesture the day before, the suggestion of danger in it.
“I told you not to worry. I’ll be careful with it. Trust me.”
She took a sip of coffee—it was hot but tasted old—and dumped the rest out on the ground. “I just don’t understand why you’re doing this,” she said.
Greg’s eyes narrowed slightly as he looked at her. He took his time answering. “I should think that five grand would answer any questions you might have about my plans for the next week or so. Or does minding your own business cost extra?”
Never mind that she’d found his plan interesting, or that his voice on the phone had been a comfort in the dark. Suddenly he was an adversary.
* * *
—
Growing up as an apprentice in her uncle’s garage, she’d learned virtually all aspects of car maintenance and repair. She could fix anything. But what made her a good mechanic, what kept the customers loyal, was what her uncle taught her about dealing with them. “You gotta think from their position,” he told her. “Their car’s busted up or broken down—it’s totally out of the blue. Now they’re late for work, their whole day’s gone off the rails, they’re thinking about all the money it’s gonna cost. They’re pissed off
. Not at you, but they’re gonna take it out on you. You can’t take it personal. You just tighten up your gut and take it like you’re taking a punch. Then you just breathe out, nice and calm, no attitude, and you break it down in layman’s terms what’s wrong, how long it’ll take to fix, what it’s gonna cost. Show them some empathy, show them where the coffeemaker is, but don’t ever try to tell them why they’re wrong being mad or being ugly. It’s called ‘de-escalation.’ ”
“You’re right,” she said to Greg now. “It’s your business. But technically, it’s also mine. I’m not asking what you’re going to eat for dinner or what time you’re going to get up in the morning. I’m just asking about my piano.” Then she forced herself to smile, and continued to look at him with what she hoped was a pleasant, de-escalating expression until he sighed and leaned against her car.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have been so insensitive. Obviously you wouldn’t be here if you weren’t concerned, but I assure you”—he reached out and touched her on the forearm—“it will be safe. Juan and Beto are good. We’ll all be very careful.” He gazed at her with such earnestness that even his cold-eyed stare seemed warm.
She nodded. “So Death Valley, huh?”
“My mother’s favorite place.” He glanced down at the top of his cup—the first time, she realized, he’d taken his eyes off hers since he’d shown up.
“You said she played piano. Do you play, too? Your website says you studied music.”
He shook his head. “Studied, yes. But I don’t play. Do you?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Here we are bickering over a piano that neither of us plays.” He drained his coffee and then crumpled the cup, looking around for someplace to throw it. Finding none, he shoved it into his jacket pocket, against whatever props or secrets he might be carrying. “I haven’t even seen it yet. You want to show it to me before you take off?” Not I take off, she noted. Not we.
She shrugged. “Sure,” she said. He led her to the truck and she noticed, walking behind him, that his gait was irregular. His left leg swung out in a tight arc each time he moved it forward, just enough to give the impression of a sashay. It didn’t seem to inhibit him, however, and might even have added something to his self-possession. Maybe it was a dare, his striding ahead of her with his low-slung sway: There’s nothing you can think about this that I haven’t already thought, but go ahead and try anyway. Or maybe how he straightened his back above his swung-out leg and faced the dawn with a lifted chin was his personal emblem of triumph over something. Or maybe it was nothing, she thought as he unlocked the truck and heaved open the door. Maybe he was just an asshole with a limp.
The truck was parked facing west, so when the door scrolled up early sunlight filled the bed. Greg climbed inside, a little awkwardly with his leg, and then, almost as an afterthought, turned to offer Clara his hand.
“Need help?” he asked.
“No thanks. I got it.” She grabbed the rail with her good hand and leapt in.
“What happened to your arm, anyway?”
Clara looked down. A week after the accident, her fingers were still swollen, and the skin was peeling a little at the edge of the cast. It was uncomfortable and irritating, but she was getting used to it. “Not my arm. My hand. Well, technically my wrist but it might as well be my hand. I broke it. While moving the piano, actually. Too bad I didn’t have your guys to move it for me. They made it look pretty easy. Of course, if I hadn’t broken my hand, I wouldn’t have listed it for sale in the first place.”
“In that case, I’m not entirely sorry you broke it,” he said with a wry smile. “But I’m sorry if it hurt.”
He released the ties, pulled the piano away from the wall, and began to unbundle it. His thick eyebrows knit together in concentration as he peeled off the layers of padding and tossed them aside, moving quicker and more urgently the closer he got to its bare surface.
It was fascinating to witness someone else showing such interest in the Blüthner. To her, it had abruptly become a part of her life, meaningful only because her father had given it to her. Those first few days, she had accepted it as she would’ve a new freckle on her forearm or an extra inch in height. But after he was gone, the Blüthner seemed inexorable. The unwitting custodian of her childhood. She had never imagined it being important to anyone except her.
Greg placed his hand lightly on top of the case and stared at it for a moment before dragging his fingers down its length, stopping at the dents on the treble end. He closed his eyes there, moved his fingertips into and around them, feeling their gentle topography as if he were reading the piano’s history.
“I didn’t see these in the pictures,” he said, so quietly that Clara almost didn’t hear him.
“I know, I’m sorry. I don’t know where they came from. They were actually worse when I got it, but we had the case repaired and refinished.”
“Yes,” Greg said. He opened his eyes sleepily, then studied the rest of the case with his eyes, his hands. Clara watched him caress the piano, running his slender fingers over the fallboard and key block, down the leg trusses to the toes. “Yes,” he said again, his voice barely above a whisper.
He pulled the piano farther away from the truck rails, exposing its back to the sunlight, and went around behind it and crouched down. A strange sound escaped him, a small bark between a laugh and a sob. Then he was quiet again. He nodded slightly, or maybe he was trembling; Clara couldn’t tell. She stepped up close to see what had affected him. He was looking at the tiny engraving at the bottom of the bass end of the case. Someone—the manufacturer, she’d always assumed—had carved a single word or name into the ebony and, apparently, stained it so it wouldn’t stand out.
She’d noticed that mark soon after she’d moved to Bakersfield with her aunt and uncle. The piano had to be stored in the garage until a bedroom could be cleared out, the one that would’ve been the baby’s—her cousin’s—had he lived. It had become a sort of junk room because her soft-spoken aunt hadn’t been able to get rid of anything easily after his death. So for a few weeks, while her aunt and a neighbor slowly dismantled the room and emptied it of the things about which nobody spoke openly, Clara slept on a pallet in the living room and the piano stayed in the garage, with its keyboard facing the wall for safety. She didn’t speak much herself for those few weeks—hardly a word, in fact, for several months—and hadn’t yet developed that helpful relationship with her uncle, so she only really felt comfortable in the garage with the piano. She would lie down on the cool concrete and stare at the case’s smooth side panel. She pretended the shiny black was outer space, and she would look for images of her parents amid the indistinct reflections of the items behind her: the tool chest and gardening equipment and Christmas decorations. During one of those lie-downs she discovered the little carving in the corner, the one Greg was staring at now with an inscrutable expression: Гриша.
She’d never known why it was there.
THE DOORBELL RANG. Katya was transferring cheese pastries from the baking sheet to the wire rack for cooling. She’d made too many, as usual. Maybe she would take some to her son’s eighth-grade class. No, that would embarrass him. American mothers didn’t do things like that. At least not after elementary school. The bell rang again.
“Moment!” she called, hurrying with the last few. “Moment,” she said again, wiping her hands as she went to the door. She smoothed her hair and glanced around the living room, hoping it was one of the neighbors with an invitation to dinner or a party. She hadn’t been to a party in a very long time. But it probably wasn’t a social call; since her old friend Ella had died, she hadn’t had many spontaneous visitors, and she hadn’t been very good about cultivating friends. She worried about having people over, because she never knew when Mikhail would come home ranting loudly about rude customers and terrible tips, the traffic and smog and r
uts in the streets. “I could make much better roads than these even if I had no eyes!” he would yell and, drink in hand, heave himself into a chair, which gasped beneath him. Mikhail’s driving schedule was unpredictable, especially when he drank. He drank a lot these days.
The person on her small front porch was a man. Maybe it was someone coming to ask for piano lessons, she thought. She had put an advertisement on the community bulletin board at the park.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello.”
“Are you Ekaterina Zeldin?”
Carried awkwardly on this man’s voice, the sound of her full name was strange and rich. There was a shape to it that reminded her of the first measure of Scriabin’s E-flat Minor Prelude. His face did, too. The left half was colored a deep purple, a rodimoye pyatno like Gorbachev had on his forehead, but thicker and broader, spreading from his temple down over his eye and beyond the ridge of jaw onto his neck. His eyelashes, she noticed, were so pale that she was moved to wonder if they provided his light brown eyes any shade. He was tall, much taller than Mikhail, and stood in a tentative, apologetic manner, holding an envelope in both hands. Maybe he was with the mail service? Or the police? But he wore no uniform, and his shoes were too clean. Did American policemen shine their shoes?
She had always believed that Mikhail had led her into this country incorrectly. Even when they had spent those weeks in Vienna, waiting, then the long months in Italy, where they had finally been given permission to enter the United States, it had seemed to her that they were riding on the tide of something illegal. Yet this worry had brought her no shame. Let the police come, let them send her back to Leningrad, even though now it was called St. Petersburg again. As long as she could take Grisha, after all this time she might have a chance to be happy. Oh, but it was too late to go home now. They had applied for citizenship by naturalization, studied for the exam, and sat all day in a federal building waiting for their turn to take the 150-question test. At the end of the exam, they needed to write a complete sentence in English. Mikhail chose the easiest thing, something suggested to him by others who had already passed: “I love the U.S.A.” Katya borrowed from Tolstoy: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
