by Chris Cander
* * *
—
Her heart beginning to pound, Katya turned onto his street, hoping she was about to fall into his open arms. I was so worried, she would say. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he would say. I’ve had the flu, but everything’s fine, I told Alice, soon we’ll be together. The idea of losing Bruce now was untenable. She loved him, and she needed him. She couldn’t imagine staying married to Mikhail but didn’t believe she could leave him on her own.
When she saw the burned-down ruins where his house was supposed to be, she sucked in her breath and slowed to a stop. There were only blackened remnants, mounds of unidentifiable rubble inside and on the lawn, a bright yellow DO NOT CROSS tape encircling the entire mess. Her panic turned to relief: she had taken the wrong street. Yes, in her confusion, she hadn’t been paying close attention. This must be that awful fire that had been on the news. How unbearably sad.
Katya continued down the block and rounded the corner, checking the street signs. No, no, no. He lived on Twenty-third Street, didn’t he? Maybe she’d remembered the address wrong. She circled the block, wanting it not to be familiar. She wasn’t wrong. Her heart beat into her temples; she was suffocating.
At his house once again, she flung open her car door and ran to the edge of the devastation. No, no, no. She called his name, though no sound escaped her. The news had said fatal house fire, two dead, property destroyed. Her mind went blank. She stepped over the yellow tape into the debris of what had been the living room. She remembered that it had faced the street, with sunlight pouring through the picture window.
Bruce was dead? That couldn’t be possible. He couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t make herself believe that her love was gone, so she thought instead of her piano. It would’ve been right where she was standing. Yes? The house was small enough that this was the only place he could’ve put it.
“Bruce!” she called out loud, yet her voice, trapped in the back of her throat, sounded strangled. “Bruce!”
She sank to her knees in the middle of the ruined room, the traitorous sunlight on her head and neck. She ran her hands through the gray, powdery ash, digging for evidence. There must be something there. Where had Bruce and Alice been? Where was his body? Frantic, she clawed at the cinders; underneath, it was still warm, damp in places, bone-dry in others. “Bruce!” Ashes covered her clothes, floating up and coating her arms, face, and hair, while she dug, desperately searching for something—teeth, piano keys—or anything at all.
“Hey there!”
Katya jerked her head up.
“Bruce?”
“Lady, stop. You’re not supposed to be in there.” A policeman walked toward her, another officer trailing behind him.
She crawled on her hands and knees, still sifting, picking up any hard object she felt, trying to identify it as meaningful. Bruce.
The female officer crouched a few feet away from her. “Ma’am, I need you to stop. It’s not safe. You can’t be here.”
Katya looked up at her but couldn’t begin to understand what she was saying. She became aware of a tightness in her chest so intense that it seemed to go beyond pain and into an absence of sensation.
“Do you want me to call someone for you?”
Where was he? Where was his body? She clutched a handful of ashes and looked down at it. Was that him? Was that all that was left? The officer stood and took Katya’s arm. “Come on, let’s get you out of here.”
But Katya sank down harder, and began filling her pockets with fistfuls of it, as much as she could grab, before the other officer stepped in to take her by the other arm and lift her up.
She stopped resisting then.
“Don’t cuff her,” the female officer said. “I just want to sit over here with her for a minute.”
Katya allowed herself to be led onto the sidewalk and seated on the curb, facing away from Bruce’s house. The officer was talking to her but it sounded faint and unimportant, just ambient noise from far away. She sat there staring at nothing and chanting his name over and over in her mind. A gentle breeze came through, blowing some of the ashes off her and raising goose bumps on her skin. Even with the relentless California sun beating down, she felt as cold as ice.
GREG CHATTED THROUGHOUT the slow, shuddering, three-hour drive back to their hotel. He told her about his mother, who went by Katya, his demonic father, his childhood in Los Angeles. He asked her about her parents, her hobbies, her friends when she was young. He was amazed that they’d grown up only a few miles apart. He talked about his photography, and asked her what it was like living in Bakersfield. Although flattered by his curiosity and what seemed a genuine interest in the details of her life, she couldn’t stop thinking about her parents.
* * *
—
Her mother was home from a long day spent teaching political science to her undergraduates at UCLA. Clara sat at the table doing homework while her mother listened to NPR on the small radio in the kitchen, occasionally taking a break from peeling carrots and potatoes to take a long drag from her cigarette and flick the ashes into the sink. She’d removed her blazer but not her shoes; it was warmer than usual for August in Santa Monica, and on her silk blouse, there were small sweat stains under the armpits.
Alice closed the oven door and set the timer. “It’s almost six. Your father’s late, as usual,” she said, inhaling sharply through her thin nose. Clara felt a sting of guilt, as though this were somehow her fault. But of course it wasn’t; she had no idea where her father was.
When he did come home that night, long after the stew had been eaten and the leftovers put away, Clara was in the bathroom brushing her teeth and getting ready for bed. She heard the front door bang open and her father say, “Whoa now, careful coming through the door.”
She stepped out into the hallway, ready to call out a greeting, but stopped when she saw him and two of his colleagues—all of them professors, soft-looking and vaguely out of shape—come through the front door, panting and struggling under the weight of a huge black piano.
Alice, standing in the doorway between her office and the foyer, pushed her reading glasses back on top of her head. “What’s this?” she said in her centurion voice.
Clara froze, the toothbrush still in her mouth. Even as the men jostled inside, she felt a grave stillness descending. Alice’s padded shoulders were squared above her crossed arms, and she looked both angry and frightened.
“What are you doing with that piano, Bruce?”
Her father’s back was turned, and he glanced over at her with a tentative expression that Clara didn’t recognize. But Alice must have, because in that instant came a private exchange between them. In all the years since, Clara had tried to translate that silent conversation into something she could understand. But all she could remember was how her mother held her breath for a moment too long, her body going oddly rigid until she finally exhaled in a slow, measured way that seemed to empty her of both her breath and her fight, as if whatever battle might lie ahead had already been lost.
“It’s for Clara,” he said. Then, with too much enthusiasm: “An early birthday present.”
“Her birthday isn’t for another six weeks,” she said, in a slow and menacing tone. Bruce’s helpers seemed to be trying to hide behind the narrow width of the piano as they took small, shuffling steps forward.
Bruce didn’t meet her eyes. “Like I said, an early birthday present.” The piano shifted slightly and one of the men grunted. “Oh,” her father said, “you remember Paul, don’t you? From the English department?”
Paul leaned his head out from behind the piano. “Nice to see you, Alice.” His cheeks were red.
Bruce continued, “And of course you know Ben.”
“Hel-lo,” Ben said in a tight singsong from behind the piano.
“Hello,” Alice said, making it sound more like good-bye. Then she leaned si
deways and rested against the doorway with a simulated forbearance, as she watched them wrestle the massive piano into her foyer, wet spots blooming under their armpits, too.
“Where do you want to put it?” Ben asked.
“Here, let’s just set it down for a second.” They did, and Bruce wiped his forehead with the wad of shirtsleeve rolled up to his elbow. “This thing weighs a ton.” He flexed his hands, then rested the backs of his wrists against his hips, elbows akimbo, and looked around. “I don’t know, actually. Maybe the living room. That makes the most sense. We could move the armoire and put it there, or maybe in front of the window—though it’s pretty tall. It would block out some of the light. Or Clara’s room? I don’t know, is there enough room in there, honey?” He offered Alice an awkward smile.
“Really?” she said, cocking her head like she did when she checked Clara’s homework and found a careless mistake. “You’re actually asking me that?”
“Well, I just thought, you know, that you’d have an opinion, since you usually do.” They stared at each other for a long moment while Bruce’s friends found other things to look at: the abstract painting on the wall, the grain of the wood floor. Clara couldn’t seem to move at all.
“I don’t think I need to tell you where to put it, Bruce,” Alice finally said. Then, using her shoulder for leverage, she pushed herself off the doorjamb and went into her office. Clara could feel the slam of the door in her chest like a thud.
He ran a hand over his graying red hair, squeezing his scalp at the top. “Oh, well then,” he said, shrugging his eyebrows at his colleagues. “I guess it’s up to me.”
Clara slipped back into the bathroom and closed the door carefully so it wouldn’t make a sound. Her mouth, she realized, was full of toothpaste and saliva. She spit it out and turned the water on full blast, so that anyone who might be listening would know that she was in there, then sat down on the edge of the bathtub. She looked at her feet and moved them up and down, pointing and flexing. Her toenails needed to be trimmed. She could hear her father and his friends murmuring and moving furniture around. He’d decided on the living room after all, and she was glad because there wasn’t any extra space in her room. She already had her bed, her bookshelf, and the desk and chest of drawers that had been her grandmother’s, making the rug in the center the only place to lie down and do her homework or play board games with Tabitha, her best friend. There wasn’t room for any piano. And why did he think she wanted one, anyway?
She heard her dad thank his friends, then all of them saying their good-byes, the front door opening and closing. Finally, she stood up. She flushed the toilet and ran the sink water, trying to camouflage the fact that she’d been hiding. After opening the door, she walked down the hall and pretended to be surprised when she saw her father struggling to push the dark, hulking piano closer to the living room wall where her mother’s sitting area had been, the two wing chairs and the pedestal table now huddled in the middle of the room.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said.
“Hello, sweet,” he said.
She walked over and threaded her arms around his waist, rested her ear against his chest, listening to his heart for a few beats until he took a step back.
“I have something for you,” he said, filling his low voice with mystery. He turned her toward the piano.
“Oh,” she said. “Wow.”
“What, you don’t like it?”
“I guess so. But I don’t know how to play.”
“Not yet.” He put a hand against her back and guided her forward. “Try it out.” He wiggled his fingers over a few random keys.
She stepped up and pressed down on a key at the near end.
“Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, maybe a little out of tune, but that can be fixed. Also these gouges here on the case.” He ran his hand over the top, and it struck her even then how gently he caressed the damaged wood. “And we’ll get you lessons, of course. Hey, maybe I’ll even try some, too. I can’t play at all, but I’d love to be able to. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
She nodded, pleased but a little embarrassed by his sudden interest in her. Maybe it would be fun, she thought. She didn’t get to spend much time with her dad, and if taking piano lessons was her only chance, she’d do it. “What about Mom?”
He shrugged his hands into his pants pockets. “What do you mean?”
This amplified tension between her parents, so dense and sticky, always came and went, and now it was there again, like a spider web that had been spun in the night. She pushed down on another key, harder this time. It didn’t sound any better, just louder. “She seems mad.”
“Mom’s just readjusting to teaching again after the summer break is all. We both are. Lots of new students, all these papers to grade. We’re a little out of sorts, but everything’s fine. Don’t you worry.” He tipped her chin up with his finger and smiled until fine lines fanned out from the corners of his eyes.
Why shouldn’t she believe him? Her mother was always prickly for the first few weeks of a new semester. He was, too. That’s probably all it was. Clara played a few more keys, both hard and soft, and liked the sounds it made. Then she dragged one finger down the length of the keyboard, producing noises from very low to really high, and her father smiled. “A virtuoso already,” he said. “Soon you’ll be able to play Scriabin’s Prelude no. 14 in E-flat Minor for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh you’ve heard it, I’m sure. It’s poetry and color and imagination. In any of the languages I know, I can’t find the right words for it. I’ll play it for you tomorrow on the stereo. You’ll love it.”
She thanked him for the gift and he shooed her off to her room, and in the hall, she knocked softly on her mother’s office door. There was no answer.
Sharp voices from her parents’ room awakened her that night, and she crept out of her own room to listen. A few harsh phrases were loud enough to make out—under my goddamn nose and think I wouldn’t know and don’t want to see that thing back here ever again—followed by her father’s responses in an equally angry but lower register that she couldn’t hear as well. Sometime the following day, while she was in school, the piano was taken away.
Remembered again through the nuance of all the new information, the fragments of fighting she’d heard through their closed door took on a different meaning, but back then she’d been too young to infer that there was more to their argument than the piano’s unexpected arrival. The living room had been restored to its long-standing arrangement, but the household had not. At the dinner table the next evening, she cautiously asked where the piano was and noted how her mother drew her shoulders back and raised an eyebrow at her father, who lowered the newspaper he was reading and said, “It was terribly out of tune. I had it moved to a dealer nearby so they could fix it up for you.”
Years later, she learned that pianos go out of tune each time they’re moved and that tuners go to the piano, not vice versa. But she’d never, until now, questioned her father’s explanation, because after he was gone she was grateful that he’d sent it away. A week or so after she went to live with her aunt and uncle, Jack received a phone call from the technician. “Do you know anything about a piano?” Jack asked her after hanging up, and she told him it had been an early birthday gift. In the painful aftermath of her parents’ deaths, she’d forgotten all about it—not having had it long enough to feel like it was hers, and not having wanted it to begin with—but she sobbed with relief when her uncle said, “Well then, let’s go get it.”
Then it seemed miraculous to have something that had been theirs, even if only for a day, when everything else was lost: her white wicker furniture; the yellow bedspread with white and pink flowers that her grandmother had made; the posters of Aerosmith, Ace of Base, and Boyz II Men; the photos of her and Tabitha from camp, Halloween, and school; her favorite pair of green corduroys, which fit
her better than anything else, and the new sweater she’d saved three months’ allowance money to buy; the book she’d been reading about an eleven-year-old girl in foster care who was sent to live with relatives in another state, which in retrospect seemed so prophetic that she rarely read fiction again after she moved to her aunt and uncle’s home; her diary, which contained only a few entries, one of them a thorough reenactment of the time a boy named Jamie, the first to ever make her feel a little dizzy, said hello to her in the sixth-grade hall; the Mickey Mouse ears from the trip to Disneyland for her fifth birthday; her drawing of an owl that won third place in her fourth-grade art show; her entire home; her parents; her childhood.
The Blüthner was the only thing she had left.
* * *
—
She hit the button on the dash to turn off the music, and pivoted sharply to Greg. “You’re not going to try to take the piano back, are you?”
“What? Why would I do that?”
“Is that what last night was about? Did you seduce me so I’d give you the piano?”
“No! Of course not. Why would you think that?”
“Because you said you had no desire to sleep with me, remember? At the hotel?”
“You said it to me first—quite loudly, I might add. ‘You’re dreaming if you think I’m going to sleep with you.’ I think every single guest heard you. It was embarrassing.”
She considered that. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. I’m really glad you changed your mind.” He reached over and stroked her arm above her cast. “And no, I’m not trying to take the piano away from you. It’s yours now. It has been for fourteen years.”
