Part 3
The hallway floor creaked after the note disappeared.
Ms. Pike stood outside the open door. Ms. Hernandez remained at her table, a paperback open in front of her.
“Dr. Torres asked you and your father whether I could speak with you,” Ms. Pike said. “They told me the choice was yours.”
Lucy lowered her hands. “You can stay by the door.”
Ms. Pike did.
“I came to apologize.”
“For which part?”
The question caught the teacher before she could continue.
“For calling you up after you said no.”
“Only that part?”
Ms. Pike glanced into the room. “No. I saw you break a rule. I saw Sophie watching your hands, and you’d left the training question blank. I put those things together and decided I knew why you were doing it.”
“I wasn’t trying to make her feel bad.”
“I know that now. I should’ve asked you after class, where everyone else couldn’t listen.”
Lucy pressed her thumbnail into the side of the bench.
“You wanted me to be bad.”
Ms. Pike’s gaze shifted to the keyboard.
“When you sat down, yes.”
The answer hurt more than an excuse might have, but it also left Lucy with nothing false to push against.
Ms. Pike explained that she had removed herself from any decision about Lucy’s place in the spring arts night. Another district music teacher and the district arts coordinator would evaluate the auditions. She had also agreed to classroom observations and whatever other corrective steps Dr. Torres required.
She did not say those steps would make yesterday disappear.
“Sophie really thought I was laughing at her?” Lucy asked.
“She thought you were judging her.”
“I was checking whether I remembered.”
“Sophie couldn’t know that.”
Lucy looked at the paper keyboard on the rack. That part belonged to her, not Ms. Pike.
“Dylan knows the beat,” she said. “When he loses it, you sigh before he gets it back.”
Ms. Pike’s lips parted slightly.
“All right,” she said.
“That isn’t an apology to him.”
“No. It isn’t.”
Ms. Pike waited, perhaps expecting another condition.
Lucy placed her hands over the keys. “I don’t want you to watch me today.”
The teacher nodded once and left.
Lucy listened to her shoes cross the hall. When they were gone, she pressed the opening chord again. It still came out too loud, but this time she played the next one.
At home that evening, Dan set the Riverbend application beside two bowls of canned tomato soup. The form requested household income, previous instruction, access to an instrument, transportation, and the reason the student sought placement.
Dan tapped his pen against the last question. “What do you want to write?”
“I don’t know.”
“We can leave it until tomorrow.”
Lucy tore a grilled-cheese sandwich into four exact strips. “Do we have any of Mom’s music?”
Dan stopped tapping the pen.
“The movers took most of it with the piano,” he said.
“Most?”
He looked toward the narrow hall closet. Lucy followed his eyes.
For thirteen months, the top shelf had held winter blankets, a red toolbox, and a flat plastic container Dan always moved himself. Lucy had assumed it contained tax papers or parts from the old house.
Dan got up and opened the closet.
He brought the container to the table and moved their bowls aside. Dust outlined one corner of the lid.
“I couldn’t sell all of it,” he said.
Inside were recital programs, photographs, a black metronome, two music pencils, and seven scores. Lucy recognized Elise’s handwriting before she touched anything. It appeared on labels, page corners, and strips of masking tape used to repair worn covers.
At the bottom lay Clair de Lune.
Lucy lifted it with both hands. “You said it was gone.”
“I know.”
“You knew I was practicing it from memory.”
Dan sat across from her. “I knew you moved your hands on the paper. I didn’t know you were still working on this exact piece.”
“You could’ve asked.”
“Yes.”
His answer made her angrier.
“Why did you hide it?”
“I put the box away after we moved. Every time I opened it, I—” He rubbed both palms over his work pants. “I shut it again.”
“You said you were protecting me.”
“I thought I was.”
“You were protecting yourself.”
Dan looked at the unopened soup can still sitting near the stove. “Yes.”
The refrigerator motor started. Lucy could hear the uneven click it had made since Tuesday, the one Dan intended to repair on his day off.
“The paper didn’t make any sound,” she said. “So you could let me use that.”
Dan closed his eyes for one breath.
“I’m sorry, Luce.”
She did not tell him it was all right.
Instead, she opened the score. Elise’s pencil crowded the first page: finger numbers, pedal changes, circles around notes Lucy used to miss. The second page held reminders written more faintly during her illness.
On the third, the markings stopped halfway down.
Everything after that was clean.
Lucy turned to the final page and found no numbers, no circles, no impatient question marks—nothing to show where her mother’s hands had intended hers to go…
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