Everything After Tuesday

Chapter Two Part 2

CHAPTER TWO PART 2

Too Many Interests

There was, however, one thing Grand-mère insisted upon above all the rest, and she said it to Shuri more than once over the years, in different words each time but always the same meaning underneath. "If you're going to understand how things work," she told her one evening, drying dishes while Shuri sat at the table surrounded by the disassembled pieces of an old radio she had already fixed twice before, "you must also understand people. Machines will always let you take them apart and put them back together. People are not so forgiving, and they are worth understanding all the same."

At first, Shuri assumed this meant something closer to psychology, some careful study of behavior she could approach the way she approached everything else, methodically, with diagrams if necessary. It didn't. What Grand-mère meant, it turned out, was simpler and harder than that. She meant conversation.

Maison Céleste welcomed guests from everywhere, and at breakfast the dining room filled with a tangle of accents and laughter that Shuri found, for the first time in her young life, genuinely frustrating rather than merely interesting. French families argued cheerfully over the last croissant. Italian couples traded gossip in rapid, musical sentences that made the whole table laugh before

Shuri had understood even the first word. German hikers discussed trail routes in low, careful tones. A Japanese family in the corner spoke to each other in a language that made something ache faintly in Shuri's chest, though she could not yet have explained why. English guests apologized constantly, for everything, in a way she found endlessly amusing.

She noticed, sitting at the edge of all of it with her toast going cold, that she could not understand most of what she heard. It felt incomplete in a way that unsettled her more than any broken clock ever had. A radio she couldn't fix was simply a radio she hadn't gotten to yet. A joke she couldn't understand felt like a door closing somewhere just out of reach.

One morning she tugged gently at the sleeve of Grand-mère's cardigan as they cleared the breakfast plates.

"What language are they speaking?" She nodded toward a table near the window, where an elderly couple were laughing over something in low, rolling vowels.

"Dutch."

"What are they laughing about?"

"I don't know," Grand-mère admitted.

Shuri frowned at her own empty hands. "I don't like not knowing."

Grand-mère smiled, setting a stack of plates gently into the sink. "Then perhaps you should learn."

So she did.

Languages entered Shuri's life the way most things did, one conversation at a time, without any particular plan behind them. French, because it was already hers, the language the house itself seemed to breathe in. Italian, because the neighboring village spoke it nearly as often as French, and half the produce at the Wednesday market came from families who switched between the two without seeming to notice. English, because almost every guest who passed through Maison Céleste knew at least a little of it, and it seemed, to Shuri, the closest thing to a bridge between all the others. Japanese, quietly, and for longer than she admitted to anyone, because something about its rhythm reminded her of her mother, though she could not have said exactly why, only that certain sounds settled into her chest in a way she didn't examine too closely. Spanish, because one family returned to Maison Céleste every summer without fail, and their youngest daughter had, over several years, become something close to a friend, the kind who existed mostly in July and August and was missed, quietly, for the other ten months. German, because a guest named Frau Lindqvist had taken it upon herself one long, rainy weekend to correct Shuri's pronunciation over breakfast every morning, with such patient good humor that Shuri kept practicing long after she'd left.

She never learned any of it to impress anyone, though plenty of guests were impressed regardless, laughing in delight when the quiet girl clearing their plates suddenly answered a joke in their own language, a half-beat too fast to be anything but genuine understanding. She learned because she disliked, more than almost anything else, watching a room laugh at something she couldn't follow. A joke without a translation felt to her like a machine with a piece missing, and she had never once in her life been able to leave a machine like that alone.

Grand-mère found her one afternoon carrying five dictionaries stacked precariously on top of one another, chin balanced on the top cover to keep the whole tower from toppling.

"What on earth are those for?"

"I keep forgetting which word belongs to which language," Shuri admitted, setting the stack down on the kitchen table with visible relief.

"Have you considered," Grand-mère asked, not quite hiding her smile, "learning one at a time?"

Shuri actually thought about it, tilting her head, weighing the suggestion with real seriousness before she answered. "No."

Music arrived by accident, the way the best things in Shuri's life so often did. The old upright piano in the sitting room had belonged to Grand-mère's mother, and for years it had sat mostly ignored in the corner, dusted weekly, played rarely, more furniture than instrument. Most guests walked past it without a second glance. One rainy afternoon, a little girl staying at the bed-and-breakfast with her parents sat down at it before dinner and picked out a short, simple melody, the kind of thing most children learn in their first month of lessons, and then wandered off to find her mother, forgetting the piano entirely the moment she was done with it.

Shuri did not forget it. She sat down at the bench the girl had left warm, and pressed the same keys, hesitantly at first, and then again, and then again, adjusting each time until the sequence sounded less like an accident and more like the thing the little girl had actually played. By the time dinner was served, she had worked the entire melody out by ear, sitting very straight on the bench with the particular concentration she brought to everything, as though the piano itself might reward her focus.

Grand-mère stopped drying plates in the kitchen doorway, dish towel forgotten over one shoulder, listening.

"Did someone teach you that?"

"No."

"You've never had lessons."

"I know."

"So how—"

"I just listened," Shuri said simply, as though this explained everything, which, as far as she was concerned, it did.

Lessons began the following week, arranged through a retired music teacher in the village who agreed, with some skepticism, to take on a nine-year-old who had apparently already taught herself half of what she was meant to be learning. The violin came not long after, because Shuri had heard one playing softly from a guest's room one evening and wanted to understand why it sounded so much sadder than the piano, as though sadness were a technical property that could be traced to a specific mechanism rather than a bow drawn a certain way across a certain string. The guitar followed because guests kept bringing them on holiday, propped in corners of the sitting room, and she liked the way the strings gave slightly under her fingers, a softness the piano didn't have. The cello came later still, because she liked, more than any melody it produced, the way it vibrated against the floor when she played the lowest notes, a sensation she could feel in her chest before she consciously heard it. Drums arrived last of all, several years afterward, left behind by a traveling musician who had stayed a single night and forgotten to collect his practice pad on the way out, and never returned for it, so that eventually it simply became hers by a kind of quiet, unspoken inheritance.

Each instrument fascinated her for an entirely different reason, and she was careful, even at that age, to notice the difference rather than flatten them all into the same simple word, music. The piano solved sound with keys, discrete and orderly, a problem you could see laid out in front of you. The violin solved it with a bow and an argument between friction and string, something closer to persuasion than instruction. The guitar solved it with strings you touched directly, immediate and personal. The drums solved it with rhythm alone, no melody at all, just the architecture of time itself. She was not interested in performing, not particularly, though she was good enough by her early teens that guests sometimes gathered in the sitting room in the evenings just to listen. She was interested in the fact that four completely different machines, if you thought about them the right way, all arrived at something people were willing to call the same word. When people asked which instrument she loved most, expecting, perhaps, some clean and simple answer, she always gave them the same one.

"I haven't decided."