Part 5
Lucy made room. Beatrice lowered herself onto the bench, set her cane within reach, and gave the printed page a moment of attention.
“Go back to the bit you can play without bracing for trouble. We’ll hear what happens from there.”
Lucy began eight measures earlier. As she approached the ninth, her wrist became stiff enough for her to feel it before the older woman spoke.
“That’s far enough for now. There’s no benefit in practicing the flinch.”
Andrea and the faculty pianist watched without urging Lucy to finish. They moved on to the rest of the audition: a short Bach passage she hadn’t seen, scales, and chords that required her to listen before choosing the next notes. Nobody treated the unfinished Debussy as a verdict on everything else.
Afterward, Andrea brought Lucy and Daniel into her office and handed him an offer letter. Willowbank would cover the tuition for the rest of the school year and the summer. Lucy could have a lesson with Beatrice each week, attend theory classes, and reserve a practice room on four afternoons. She also qualified to apply for an instrument through the school’s placement program.
Daniel traced the line about tuition with his thumb.
“There’s no portion left for us to pay?”
“Your tuition bill will be zero,” Andrea said. “We review scholarships each year. We want students to be able to stay, not get started and lose their lessons.”
He nodded several times, then looked toward the office window until he could speak normally. Lucy recognized the way he pressed at the corners of his eyes. Usually she saw that when an envelope arrived he didn’t want to open. This time, he folded the letter and kept it in his shirt pocket.
They were nearly out of downtown before he said anything in the car.
“If your mother were here, she’d have worn out the phone.”
“She’d call the wrong number and tell them, too.”
Daniel laughed so suddenly that Lucy laughed with him. For the rest of the drive, the letter made a faint crackling sound whenever he moved.
Her first lesson was on Tuesday. Beatrice didn’t resemble Hannah in any of the ways Lucy had feared she might. She didn’t sing explanations, and she didn’t reach over to soften a child’s wrist. She asked Lucy what she heard and waited until she gave a useful answer.
When Lucy apologized before trying a difficult passage, Beatrice tapped the measure with a pencil.
“Save your breath. We haven’t heard the error yet.”
After Lucy played it, the older woman made her identify what had gone wrong.
They broke the Debussy into sections of two or four measures. Beatrice had Lucy study the chords underneath so she could understand how to get from one place to another, instead of trying to retrieve her mother’s fingers from memory. On some afternoons she learned a whole new stretch. On others, she worked at one change until the hour ended.
Beatrice never told her what Hannah would have wanted. She hadn’t known her and didn’t pretend that she had.
Once, after Lucy had gone quiet over a new measure, she said, “The part your mother gave you will still be there when you learn the next part.” Lucy listened, though she wasn’t ready to believe it completely.
At Cedar Ridge, Ms. Voss had begun doing things that Lucy could easily imagine her stopping again. When Tyler lost the beat, she let him begin from the last place he’d known it. She answered a simple question about rests without asking why the child hadn’t understood it already.
Paige still received praise for careful practice. So did Ethan, who made a mistake, listened to it, and managed the measure on his second attempt.
Lucy watched the teacher catch herself preparing an impatient response. Sometimes Ms. Voss took long enough to change it that the whole class noticed.
Before Thursday’s lesson, she asked Lucy whether she wanted to audition for a concert solo. “Think about it,” she added before Lucy answered. “You’ve already had one performance you didn’t choose. This one is up to you.”
“I want to. But who’ll decide?”
“Dr. Bennett, an instructor from Willowbank, and me.”
Lucy looked across the room, where Simon was adjusting his bow.
“Could we try out with something together, too?”
Ms. Voss followed her glance. “Bring me the music. We’ll make room to hear it.”
Andrea had warned Daniel that placing a piano could take months. An apparently free instrument might need expensive repairs; a usable one still required space, permission to put it there, and people who knew how to move it. Daniel filled out the forms without telling Lucy to expect anything soon.
Beatrice already had an upright she’d intended to give Willowbank. It was from the late seventies and still received regular tuning. Arthritis meant she rarely played more than a few scales at home now, while Lucy needed somewhere to work every day.
A technician checked the instrument. Daniel obtained written approval from the landlord, and a local arts fund agreed to pay for moving it and tuning it afterward.
When they visited Beatrice’s house, Lucy stood beside the upright and looked at the shallow dents in its case.
“Will you miss having it?”
“Certainly.” Beatrice rested a hand on the top. “But I’ll dislike its sitting unused more than I’ll miss seeing it in this room.”
The delivery took place on a wet Saturday. Daniel had measured the apartment doorway, then measured it again. He moved the kitchen table out of the route and helped clear a place against the interior wall, where the piano would carry less directly into the neighboring rooms.
Lucy waited in the corridor with the paper keyboard folded against her. The movers had to turn the upright twice to get through the entrance. She held her breath until they put it safely on the floor.
After they left, her father opened the cupboard above the coats and brought down a shallow plastic box. He placed it on the bench and undid the lid. Inside were photographs, recital programs, Hannah’s metronome, and a small stack of scores. Lucy recognized the taped spine of Clair de Lune before she touched it.
“These came with us,” Daniel said. “I made sure of that.”
She opened the music. Pencil numbers clustered beside the notes. Some passages were circled; others had pedal reminders or a mark telling her to listen instead of hurry. A question mark Hannah had written in annoyance was still there.
Lucy sat before her knees could give her a reason not to.
“You had them this whole time?”
Daniel sat beside her. “I tried opening the box. Then I’d put the lid back before I’d even lifted anything out. I kept telling myself you weren’t ready.”
She looked at him. “I was the one who couldn’t do it,” he said.
Lucy traced a penciled number without rubbing it.
After the tuning, they ate tomato soup and buttered toast. Then she brought the old score to the piano and played while her father cleared the dishes. The room was smaller than the living room in the house, and the sound reached her differently. It reached her all the same.
At the difficult passage, she found a fingering she couldn’t recall seeing before. She tried it slowly, repositioned her thumb, and tried again. The next line became possible. She turned the page. The pencil notes disappeared. Beyond the last place Hannah had helped her, the remaining measures waited without a single mark…
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