Beauty's on the Inside, not on the Outside

The Piano

Chapter Five: The Piano

She heard it for the first time on the last day before winter break.

She'd stayed late finishing a paper, which was technically true, though she'd also been delaying going home to an apartment that felt too quiet now that her mom was working the holiday shift at the hospital. She was packing up in the library when she heard it from down the hall.

Piano. She knew piano her grandmother had played but not like this. This was the kind of playing that existed in a different register from performance; it was inward-directed, private, the sound of something worked out rather than shown. She followed it without deciding to, which was unusual for her.

The music room. Door half-open, the hallway dark, the light inside warm and golden in a way the rest of the school never managed.

Alex at the piano. Back to the door, not performing for anyone. His hands on the keys with an ease that was completely different from how he moved through the rest of his life where everything was considered and guarded and measured, here it was just open. He played something she didn't recognize, something with a sadness in the left hand and a kind of insistent hope in the right, the two things running together and never quite resolving.

She stood in the doorway for too long. She knew she was standing there for too long.

He stopped, very naturally, and said without turning: "You're in the doorway."

"I'm sorry," Jules said. "I wasn't, I just heard it."

"It's fine." He turned on the bench to face her, and in the warm light of the practice room he looked different from the hallway Alex or the classroom Alex younger, maybe, or more like himself, like the playing had stripped away one of the layers. "You don't have to stand in the doorway."

She came in. She sat in one of the chairs along the wall, the ones for audiences, and looked at him across the warm room.

"What was that?" she asked.

"Beethoven. Sonata No. 14. You probably know it as the Moonlight Sonata." A pause. "I was doing something with it. Changing the rhythm in the second movement."

"Why?"

He thought about this with that characteristic seriousness, the way he thought about everything that deserved a real answer. "Because the way it's usually played sounds like grief that's already over," he said. "I wanted it to sound like grief that's still happening."

Jules looked at him. Outside the window behind him, the December sky had gone the particular deep blue of early evening, the kind that arrives fast in winter and makes everything feel more interior, more contained.

"That's very specific," she said.

"I guess."

She looked at him for a moment. "Alex." She said it before she fully knew she was going to. "What are you grieving?"

The silence was one of his measured ones. She had learned by now to distinguish them — the silences that meant he was thinking, the silences that meant he had decided not to say something, and this one, which meant something in between. Something being decided in real time.

"Nothing dramatic," he said finally. "Just" He looked at his hands on his knees. "I had a brother. Older. Connor. He left for college when I was twelve and the house went very quiet and then my parents split and it never got loud again." He said it like a simple sequence of events, the flatness of something examined so many times it had worn smooth. "I play when I miss that. The loud."

Jules sat with this. "Where is he now?"

"Portland. We talk. It's just" He made a small gesture with one hand. "Distance is real."

"Yeah." She knew about distance. She had been living inside various versions of it for years. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be. It's fine." He almost smiled. "I know I keep saying things are fine."

"I've noticed." She looked at him steadily. "Does it mean fine, or does it mean something you're not ready to say yet?"

The almost-smile became something realer, something that reached further before stopping. "Probably the second one."

"Okay." She settled back in her chair. "Play more?"

He turned back to the piano without ceremony. He played the sonata the actual version first, the way everyone knew it, the way it had been played a thousand times in concert halls and practice rooms and late night apartments. And then his version the slower one with the altered rhythm in the second movement, the one that made grief sound like a present thing rather than a past one.

Jules sat in the audience chair with her hands in her lap and listened to the December dark come fully down outside the window. She listened to grief that was still happening and something that wasn't grief alongside it, something that ran in the right hand while the left hand carried the weight. The two things in conversation. Neither resolving.

She sat there until he finished and the last note faded into the warm quiet of the room.

She didn't say anything for a moment.

Neither did he.

"Thank you," she said finally. Quietly. Not for the playing exactly or not only for that.

He turned on the bench and looked at her. "For what?"

She thought about how to answer that. For playing something true. For letting me hear it. For being someone who makes grief sound like it's still worth feeling rather than something to get past.

"For not pretending," she said.

He looked at her for a long moment in the warm light of the music room. Something moved in his expression not the careful management she usually saw, not the measured consideration. Something more immediate than that.

"Jules," he said.

"Yeah?"

He opened his mouth and then closed it. Looked at the piano keys. Looked back at her. "Nothing," he said. "Never mind."

She looked at him. She thought about pushing. She decided not to.

"Okay," she said.

They sat in the warm room for a little longer. The December dark was fully down now outside the windows. The school was empty around them, just the two of them in the warm lamp light with the ghost of the sonata still in the air.

Eventually Jules stood and picked up her bag.

"Merry Christmas," she said. "Or whatever you celebrate."

"Christmas." He looked up at her from the piano bench. The real smile arrived then the full one, brief and unguarded, the one she'd been collecting. "You too."

She walked out of the music room and down the dark hallway and out of the school into the December cold.

She walked home with her heart loud.

Winter break was fourteen days.

Jules spent the first three at her mother's apartment, reading and swimming and doing the specific productive nothing of someone who is resting deliberately rather than out of laziness. Her mother worked the first four days in a row and came home each evening exhausted and grateful and present in the way she was always present when she wasn't exhausted fully, warmly, with the quality of attention that Jules had always loved about her.

On the fifth day her father picked her up.

David Marron was a tall man with the same warm brown skin as Jules and the nose she'd inherited and a way of being in a room that was quiet without being withdrawn comfortable with himself in the way of people who had done the work of figuring out who they were and arrived somewhere they could live with. He and Jules had always been easy with each other, even after the separation, even through the harder years. He was the person she most resembled, inside and out, and she thought sometimes that this was why because when she looked at him she could see herself clearly, the person she was becoming, the person she was capable of being.

He had made her favorite meal. He had remembered, which he always did.

They ate at the kitchen table and talked the way they always talked unhurriedly, about everything and nothing, about her school and his work and the book he was reading and the swim meet coming up in January. About Connor Sinclair coming home for Christmas, which Jules mentioned without thinking and then sat very still for a moment, aware of what she'd revealed.

Her father looked at her with the specific perceptiveness of a parent who knows when their child has said more than they meant to.

"Connor Sinclair," he said.

"He's his brother. Someone from school."

"Someone."

"A person. From school." Jules took a very focused interest in her food. "We worked on a project together."

Her father said nothing. He had the particular skill of silences that invited rather than demanded, that made it easy to keep talking if you wanted to and equally easy not to.

Jules kept eating.

"He plays piano," she said, after a moment, to her plate.

Her father nodded slowly. "Does he."

"He's good." She looked up. "He changed the rhythm of the Moonlight Sonata to make it sound like grief that was still happening instead of grief that was over."

Her father looked at her for a long moment. His expression was the careful one he wore when he was paying very close attention to something. "That's interesting," he said. "The person or the piano?"

Jules looked at him. "Both," she said honestly.

Her father nodded. He picked up his fork. He did not say anything else about it, which was exactly what she needed.

She spent the rest of the meal telling him about Priya, about the AP English project, about the swim times she was working toward. She did not mention Alex again. She didn't need to. He was already in the room in the way that people are in rooms when you are thinking about them present without being visible, taking up space you hadn't cleared for them.

She texted him on Christmas Eve.

She had not planned to. She had been lying on her bed at her father's house with her phone on her chest watching the ceiling when she picked it up and opened his contact and typed: Merry Christmas before she could think better of it.

She put the phone face down and stared at the ceiling.

It buzzed thirty seconds later.

Merry Christmas Jules. How's the break?

She looked at the message for longer than was reasonable. She typed back: Quiet. You?

Loud, he wrote. Connor's home.

She smiled at her phone in the dark. Good loud or bad loud?

Just loud, he wrote. And then, after a pause: Good.

She held her phone against her chest and looked at the ceiling and felt the specific warmth of knowing that someone she cared about was having a good Christmas. The specific additional warmth of being the person they told about it.

Good, she wrote back.

She fell asleep with her phone in her hand.

January arrived with the particular freshness of a new year that felt, for the first time in a while, like it might actually be new.

Jules went back to school with something different in her chest not resolved exactly, but clarified. The way things clarify when you've had enough time and quiet to look at them directly. She knew what she was feeling. She had stopped pretending she didn't. She had not decided what to do about it, which was a separate question, but the knowing itself felt like a kind of progress.

Alex was at his locker when she arrived on the first day back. She saw him from the end of the corridor just standing there with his bag, reading something on his phone, completely ordinary in the way of someone who had no idea they were being watched and felt the specific internal shift of someone seeing something they have missed and not fully admitted to missing.

He looked up when she reached her locker. Twelve lockers down.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey." She worked her combination. "How was Connor?"

Something moved in his face the unguarded version of good, the one that didn't go through the filter first. "Really good," he said. "It was yeah. Really good."

Jules looked at him. She felt the warmth of it his good Christmas, the loud house, Connor home the way you feel warmth that belongs to someone else but that they've let you near.

"Good," she said.

He looked at her for a moment. "How was yours?"

"Quiet," she said. "But the good kind."

He nodded. They stood in the first-day-back corridor with its particular noise and energy and looked at each other across twelve lockers of distance and something passed between them that was not nothing, that was not yet something nameable, that was exactly what it had been since October present, growing, patient.

"AP English is going to be brutal this semester," he said.

"I know." She closed her locker. "I already read ahead."

He shook his head slightly, which was as close as he came to laughing. "Of course you did."

She walked past him toward class. She felt him fall into step beside her, the familiar quiet of his presence, the specific warmth of someone walking next to you who you want to be walking next to you.

The new semester started.

Something was beginning.

She could feel it.

End of Chapter Five.

Get ready for Chapter Six!🤭