Part 6
The coordinator crossed out everything except Lucy Mercer and Claude Debussy.
The program was printed that way.
At home, Dan made dinner without turning on the radio. Lucy set plates on the table, moved the salt, then moved it back.
“I shouldn’t have said you sold Mom,” she told him.
Dan kept stirring the pasta. “I did sell the piano.”
“That’s not what I made it sound like.”
“No.”
She waited for him to make the answer easier. He did not.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Dan placed the spoon on the stove. “I wanted you to agree to that program because the funding scares me. Twelve weeks I understand. Next year, I don’t know. I thought if people saw the keyboard, maybe money would appear.”
“Would it?”
“Maybe. Or maybe strangers would know things about us and nothing else would change.”
Lucy pulled out her chair. “I still don’t want them to have it.”
“Then they don’t.”
Two nights later, Dan came to Cedar Ridge during aftercare and sat in the last row of the music room. It was the first time Lucy had asked him to listen since Elise died.
He held his work cap between his hands. When Lucy reached the passage marked in Elise’s pencil, his fingers tightened around the brim, but he did not leave.
At the clean page, Lucy missed the new fingering and stopped.
Dan stayed seated while she began the measure again.
The independent arts-night auditions took place the following week. Ms. Pike organized the schedule but did not score Lucy. A district arts coordinator and a middle-school choir director listened from the auditorium.
Sophie earned a Mozart solo. Dylan’s percussion group was selected for the opening.
Lucy received a featured place near the end of the program after completing Clair de Lune with one memory slip and a blurred pedal change she corrected before the final chord.
Ms. Pike handed Lucy the result after class.
“The judges’ notes are attached,” she said. “You’re not required to accept.”
“I accept.”
“Would you like the bench placed before you walk onstage, or do you want to adjust it yourself?”
“I’ll do it.”
“All right.”
The dress rehearsal showed how much Ms. Pike’s habits had changed and how much effort the change still required.
Dylan lost the beat during the percussion opening. Ms. Pike’s breath escaped through her nose—the beginning of the sigh Lucy knew. The teacher stopped herself, lowered her hands, and waited.
Dylan found the measure and continued.
Later, Sophie rushed the transition in her Mozart. Her mother called something from the auditorium, and Sophie stopped with both hands above the keyboard.
“I can’t start there again,” she said.
Ms. Pike took one step toward the stage, then remained where she was.
Lucy stood near the curtain with her score. The corrected notes were already moving against her knee. She made herself stop.
“Sophie,” she called, “do you want me to count you in two measures earlier?”
Sophie looked toward her mother, then at Lucy.
“Yes.”
Lucy sat beside her on the bench but kept her hands in her lap. She counted softly. Sophie entered, reached the transition, and landed both hands together.
Ms. Pike wrote something on her clipboard. She did not interrupt.
Arts night arrived on the final Friday in May. Folding chairs filled the Cedar Ridge auditorium, but the crowd was made mostly of families, teachers, Riverbend students, and people who had bought five-dollar tickets at the door.
There were no reporters and no display about Lucy in the lobby.
Dan had traded an entire shift and lost the overtime he usually depended on. He sat in the second row wearing the blue button-down shirt Lucy had last seen at Elise’s funeral.
Ruth sat beside him with her thumb brace visible beneath one sleeve. Dr. Torres occupied the aisle seat.
The percussion group opened. Dylan came in half a beat late, corrected, and completed the piece. Sophie played soon afterward, cleanly enough that her mother stopped whispering after the first page.
Backstage, Lucy wore a navy dress borrowed from Riverbend’s recital closet. The hem had been shortened with temporary tape. Her paper keyboard remained folded inside her backpack.
Ms. Pike approached when the choir left the stage.
“You’re next,” she said.
Lucy nodded.
“Do you still want only your name and the piece?”
“Yes.”
Ms. Pike checked the revised cue card. It carried only Lucy’s name and the title of the piece.
When she walked to the microphone, she said, “Lucy Mercer will play Debussy’s Clair de Lune.”
Nothing more.
The applause was brief and ordinary. Lucy crossed the stage and reached the grand.
Months earlier, Ms. Pike had dragged the bench into place and ordered her to sit. Now the teacher remained beside the curtain while Lucy turned the side knobs herself, tested the distance, and moved the bench half an inch forward.
She set Elise’s score on the rack.
From the stage, Dan’s face was difficult to read beneath the lights. Lucy could see only that he was there and that both his hands rested flat on his knees.
She began.
The first chords no longer startled her. She let the keys rise fully before the next phrase and cleared the pedal where Ruth had marked it. The opening carried Elise’s penciled numbers, but Lucy did not try to make the room in Millhaven sound like their old living room.
She heard the auditorium as she played: a program shifting, the vent above the stage, the faint click of Ruth adjusting her brace. None of it broke the music.
The passage Elise had taught from the couch arrived. Lucy felt Dan’s presence beyond the lights and kept her eyes on the score.
Then she reached the first line with no marks in her mother’s handwriting.
Her own small number waited beneath the note.
Lucy placed her second finger, turned her hand, and continued past it.
The phrase gathered speed. Her left hand arrived early at one chord and struck a note that did not belong. The mistake sounded clearly enough that Lucy saw Sophie blink in the wings.
For one beat, Lucy’s fingers tried to tighten around everything that followed.
She released the wrong key.
The next one rose beneath her hand. She played on.
At the final page, Elise’s handwriting was absent. Lucy’s numbers and two erased smudges followed the music to its last line.
She lowered the final chord without forcing it and kept the pedal down until the sound became thinner than the auditorium’s air system.
Then she released it and lifted her hands…
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