My father plays dead nocturnes

There’s sheet music on the stand with my name on it. I’ve never seen it before in my life. It’s five in the afternoon and there’s just enough light streaming through the cracks in the blinds to be able to make out the notes. Nocturne for Kole is scribbled across the top of the page. Jarring to see her handwriting appear again so suddenly, and to still recognize it. Feels utterly mundane and supernatural all at once; like finding a ghost in your hamper. 

I squint my eyes in the living room dusk, my hands fumbling over the phrases. Since she died, the house has remained dark. The light was unbearable for her towards the end. A force of nature she was — still is, even in her death, the two of us revolving around her in parallel orbits. Turn off the lights, Kole, it’s hurting my eyes. Do as your mother says, Kole. The habit now stuck to us like rosin, that clinging feeling that something terrible will happen if one of us gives in and flips the switch. Neither wanting to be the first one to do it.

I’m halfway through the piece when I hear the floorboards creak. I always hear him moving around in the house, but it’s not so often that I see him in the flesh. I’m usually in bed by ten, while his room sits empty and abandoned. Always end up falling asleep before he climbs back up the staircase and settles down for the night. I imagine him spending his evenings lurking in the shadows of the house, footsteps rapping the uncarpeted floor like a limping metronome.

It’s midnight now. I’m not in my room and neither is he. I can feel the presence behind me like a portrait that follows you with its eyes. I drop my hands from the keyboard and turn. He’s closer than he’s been in months, so close I can feel the heat of him. I can barely see a thing, but in his eyes I see that he despises me. Might even want to kill me. A flash of metal glints in his hand.

I’m sorry, he says, right before his arm comes swinging like a comet through the sky.

***

Miss Corinna stares at me over the top of her full-moon rimless glasses. She always wears them exaggeratedly low on her nose, like the caricature of a stern librarian. In reality, she’s anything but. Everything about her is warm: long, honey blonde hair, smells like a spiced autumn candle even in the middle of July, looks like she was probably a cheerleader in high school and like if she hadn’t become a piano teacher would probably have taught kindergarten. Most of her students are around that age, anyway. Maternal aura beaming off of her. I know she has twin girls, because they’re never not screaming up a delighted storm. Possibly pregnant with her third, but I’m terrified to assume. I try to imagine calling her Mother.

“Are you hungover?”

“No?”

“Any reason you’re wearing sunglasses inside?”

I sniff, swiping my nose with the back of my hand. “’S bright in here.”

She glances over at the window, nodding like this is an acceptable excuse. Doesn’t want to nag, or maybe just decides to let me be.

“Sorry, this room always gets hit with direct sunlight. Do you want me to close the blinds?”

“Nah, that’s okay.”

I hear her kids running around on the upper floor, their footfall drumming above our heads. Their windows are probably thrown open every hour of the day. Every wall speckled with sunlight.

“How is your father holding up?”

“Well enough, yeah.”

Every time I run into anyone, I get hit with that same question. Everyone knew her, and by association, him. How devastatingly in love with her he was, humble amateur to her dazzling virtuoso. Her musicality that could make the heart weep, tours around the globe playing original compositions. Modern Mozart, they called her. Some said she sold her soul to the devil for those notes. Grew her own little prodigy in the womb, right in that hollow space. And when the prodigal son turned his back on music instead of following in her footsteps, it became his fault when she got sick. 

Most people don’t know that last little bit of the story. How she sat in the dark every day and played old recordings of my recitals at full volume. How I’d have to plug my ears and asphyxiate myself with a pillow to block out the torturous noise. It never did me any good, the air still ringing with it even now. She did it on purpose, I felt. As if she was saying: I know you won’t care if I die — so here. Made sure I would at least be haunted by myself.

“And you? How are you getting on?”

“Oh yeah, just fine.” 

My father just attempted to murder the piano in cold blood, is all. He’s holding up well enough I suppose. My fault. Must’ve been a nasty shock to hear me playing out of nowhere. Doesn’t know I come here. And why am I here? Why start over at the beginning instead of picking up where I left off, drilling arpeggios like they’re a novelty? Something something, too little too late.

She senses my hesitation. And because she’s a mother, one that’s easy to tell things to, I tell her everything.

“Is he usually so violent?” she says after a long silence. 

Miss Corinna looks concerned. Like she’s considering whether she’s obligated to call CPS or something, or realizing that they’re likely to not give a shit when the child in question is actually twenty-two years old and the victim is actually a 1978 Steinway baby grand. The weapon of choice? A meat tenderizer. Oh, they’d laugh.

“Not even a little bit,” I tell her truthfully.

“You must’ve been frightened.”

“Not really. I think maybe I’d been afraid of him my whole life, right until that very moment.”

It feels impossible to explain. I want my father to riot. I want him to nurse that seed of violence like a swaddled newborn; water it and watch it grow into something sentient, and one day, maybe even human. I want him to take the mallet back up again and smash the piano into smithereens and sawdust, to shatter the windows from the inside out and watch it rain glass and gore and grief onto the pavement below. I want him to be irrevocably angry; at me, at her, at the innocent instrument whose only sin was being within his line of sight. I want to not be alone anymore. I need my father to riot. I need him to be human.

I think of Miss Corinna’s children upstairs, always running around carefree and delighted. Barefoot and stripped of legacy. One of them lets out a high-pitched shriek. I tilt my head, trying to place the note. If she were here she’d have named it immediately. 

“Do they not play?”

“The twins?” Her eyebrows shoot up, like the mere idea of it is amusing to her. “No, they have no interest. Couldn’t force it if I tried.”

She looks at me like she’s waiting for me to say something. I lift a hand to flutter over the keys; seized with the urge to just start playing and drown her out, to skip through the obligatory half hour of small talk that precedes every lesson. I hesitate, and she smiles.

“If you try to force passion it doesn’t really count, does it?”

***

The floor slopes dangerously as I feel my way along the walls, my head spinning. I didn’t used to drink so much, couldn’t stand the taste, but it goes down smoother these days. It’s late, maybe two or three in the morning. The house close to pitch black.

Don’t turn on the light it hurts her eyes don’t want to hurt don’t want to hurt her anymore don't want to—

I stumble through the room, lurching like a shipwreck. Only when I’m a couple steps away do I see the silent silhouette sitting at the piano, get startled so bad that my foot catches on the edge of the rug and skids. Everything tilts. I reach out blindly to catch myself, and the jagged, splintering edge of the piano’s exposed wound clamps down on my palm. Flesh devouring flesh. I stagger back with a cry.

He stands up from the bench and seizes my wrist. My blood spills over his knuckles. Are you hurt?

“Play it for me,” I beg, sinking to the floor. My voice painfully hoarse. “Please.”

The sheets are still on the stand where he left them. He doesn’t wipe his hands before lifting them to the keys. My eyes gradually adjust to the dark as he begins trembling through the piece, weaving harmony and dissonance in an inconceivable braid.

The music hadn't held any of the same nuance in my attempt. Flat and bitter without any of the sweet, without any cream to dilute the black. Beneath his fingers, the composition comes alive — disappointment and pride, passion and fear, love and resentment; both halves unconditional in equal measure. A visceral confession punctuated with an inscrutable sigh.

I hope you’re happy, the melody sings. I hope to God you’ll be happy.

My father had always labeled himself an amateur. Unfit to stand beside her. He had never said that last part out loud; maybe I was the one who had thought that. Maybe I was the one who had thought a lot of things. But now as the final note rings and rings before dissipating into beautiful closure, I understand for the first time how my mother had fallen in love with him.

“Did she write that?” I ask quietly.

The day she found out she was pregnant.

“Oh.”

She loved you, you know.

“Yeah.”

She wanted so much for you.

“I know.”

I hear him fumbling for the lamp switch, his breathing shallow. He sounds frantic, and there’s a choking, hiccuping sound that I realize is coming from me. My face is wet. I can hear a clock ticking somewhere deep within the house, some illusion at play making it seem to tick faster and faster with every breath. I guess I never fully fathomed the concept of wasted time until now: loving something, someone, without ever knowing you loved it. Grieving without the feeling of grief, tuning out all your ghosts. Until someone, some soft, agreeable being who never raised his voice in his life, takes a meat hammer straight to your ribcage and mashes your hardened wooden heart into paper pulp.

There’s blood on my hands, but it’s also on his, and on the piano now too. Still we go on wrenching music out of the dark. Still we go on playing dead nocturnes.

Go on then, just turn on the light, goddammit — let’s look each other in the face for the first time.