Chapter 17 - The Piano Room
1043 Words
She had been taking piano lessons for two weeks.
Every evening after dinner Emeka would appear at the door of the piano room and she would follow him in and they would sit on the narrow bench together and he would teach her.
He was a patient teacher.
This surprised her. She had expected impatience. The kind of controlled frustration of a man used to efficiency encountering someone learning slowly. Instead he was measured and quiet and never once made her feel incompetent even when she played the same wrong note four times in a row.
Which happened more than she would like to admit.
"Again," he would say simply. Not unkindly. Just again.
And she would play it again.
She was learning a simple melody. Something his grandfather had taught him first. He had not told her that directly. She had figured it out from the way he listened when she played it. The particular stillness that came over him.
Like he was hearing something from a long time ago.
Tonight she played it through for the first time without stopping.
Simple. Imperfect. But complete.
When the last note faded she sat very still.
"You did it," he said quietly.
"I made three mistakes."
"You played it through," he said. "The mistakes are part of learning. Playing it through is the achievement."
She looked at the keys.
"My father would have liked this," she said softly. She had not planned to say it. It just came out.
Emeka did not respond immediately.
"Tell me about him," he said after a moment.
She looked at him sideways. He was looking at the keys the way he sometimes did when he was listening most carefully. Like eye contact would interrupt something.
So she talked.
She told him about her father the way she had not told anyone since the funeral. Not the careful edited version she gave people who asked politely. The real version.
How he used to whistle the same four notes every morning while making tea. How he argued with the television during football matches as if the players could hear him. How he read to her every night until she was twelve and then switched to discussing books with her instead as if the transition was completely natural. How he called her his iron lady from the time she was seven because she refused to cry when she fell down even though her knees were bleeding.
How in his last months when the business was failing and the debts were growing he still made jokes at the dinner table because he did not want her mother to see him frightened.
How she had known anyway.
How she had never told him she knew.
When she finished the piano room was very quiet.
Emeka was still looking at the keys.
He sounds like a man who loved his family more than himself," he said.
"Yes," she said. Simply. Because that was exactly it.
"My grandfather was the same," he said. Very quietly. "Everything he did was for other people. He never once made you feel like a burden." He paused. "I did not know that was unusual until I was much older."
She understood what was underneath that.
A father who was the opposite.
She did not push. She just sat with him in the quiet of the piano room and let the understanding be there between them without needing to be said out loud.
After a while he placed his hands on the keys.
Played the melody she had just learned.
But he played it fully. The complete version she had not heard before. The same simple notes she had been learning but extended. Deeper. More complicated. Moving into something that sounded like memory and loss and the particular ache of loving someone who was no longer there.
She sat beside him on the bench and listened.
When he finished she did not say anything.
He did not say anything.
They sat together in the silence that the music left behind.
Outside Lagos hummed its endless hum. The flame tree moved in the night breeze. Somewhere in the house Mrs Fashola had left the kitchen light on the way she always did.
Emeka lowered his hands from the keys.
He did not move away from the bench.
She did not move away from the bench.
They were very close in the way the bench required and neither of them was pretending that was the only reason anymore.
She became aware of the exact distance between them. The warmth of him. The particular quality of his stillness which was different from his office stillness or his dinner table stillness. More open. Like the piano room was the one place the walls came down completely.
"Emeka," she said softly.
He turned to look at her.
Up close. The small room. The single lamp. His dark eyes finding hers in that direct way he had that felt like being seen properly.
"I think," she said carefully. "That your grandfather was very wise."
A pause.
"Why," he said. His voice was quieter than usual.
"Because he knew you needed this." She gestured at the piano. At the room. "A place to put yourself."
He looked at her for a long moment.
Something moved through his expression. Deep and complicated and entirely unguarded in a way she had not seen from him before.
He reached out.
Tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
His fingers were warm against her face. Just for a second. Light and careful like a man touching something he was not sure he had the right to touch.
Then he dropped his hand.
Looked back at the keys.
"Goodnight Adaeze," he said quietly.
She stood up slowly.
"Goodnight Emeka," she said.
She walked to the door.
Stopped.
She did not turn around.
"Three more notes tomorrow," she said softly.
A pause.
"Three more notes," he said.
She went upstairs.
She sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and pressed her fingers to the side of her face where his hand had been.
The piano started again softly from downstairs.
The same melody. Her melody now.
She listened until it stopped.
She did not sleep for a long time
- Writer
