Part 7
The audience waited through the silence Lucy had left for them.
Then the applause began.
It was warm and sustained, but no one rushed the stage. Ruth clapped without standing. Dr. Torres smiled. Dan remained still for one extra breath before bringing his hands together.
Lucy bowed once.
Backstage, Sophie reached her first.
“You hit the wrong note in the middle,” she said.
“I know.”
“You didn’t make a face.”
“I made one inside.”
Sophie laughed and hugged her quickly. Dylan offered a raised fist, which Lucy tapped with her own.
Ruth waited until the other children moved toward the refreshment tables.
“You covered too much with the pedal on the second page,” she said. “The final section was steadier than Tuesday.”
Lucy smiled. “Thank you.”
Dan stood a few feet behind Ruth, still holding the folded program. When they were alone, he opened it to Lucy’s name.
“I heard the whole clean page,” he said.
Lucy looked at his shirt. One cuff had come partly unbuttoned, and he had fastened it through the wrong hole.
“Was it hard?”
“Yes.”
He did not pretend otherwise.
Lucy leaned against him. Dan wrapped both arms around her, careful of the score between them. Neither said what Elise would have thought. She was not available to answer, and for once they left the question alone.
By September, Riverbend had extended Lucy’s placement through the fall semester. The funding would still need renewal after that.
Because she had completed the trial and kept her practice schedule after the missed lesson, she also qualified for a digital piano on loan.
It arrived in the back of the center’s van, scratched along one side and missing its original stand. Dan built a new stand from steel shelving left over at the warehouse and added rubber feet so it would not rock on the apartment floor.
The left speaker crackled on low notes. Dan offered to open the case, but Riverbend’s technician had tagged it for a future repair and asked him not to.
“It still works,” Lucy said.
Dan turned the screwdriver once between his fingers, then put it back in the drawer.
The paper keyboard stayed folded inside the piano bench. Lucy took it out sometimes to repair the tape or look at the blue keys worn pale by a year of silent practice. She did not hang it on a wall or show it to visitors.
On Saturday mornings, she practiced through the speakers until noon. After that, she used headphones for the downstairs neighbor.
One Saturday, Dan made pancakes while Lucy opened Clair de Lune to the page where Elise’s pencil marks ended. Her own fingerings continued below them, darker at first, then lighter as she learned to write without pressing so hard.
She erased one number, replaced it with another, and tried the measure again.
The left speaker gave its faint buzz beneath the final chord. Behind her, Dan stood at the stove with a spatula in his hand and waited until the sound was gone.