When She Was Gone (18 page)

Jordan brought the cello and played whatever parts he could for Mr. Leonard, transcribing as he played, a beautiful skill; Mr. Leonard had never fully mastered it. They hardly talked, mostly they just played. It had been after the police took him in—the young man had come to his door with his
instrument, stood and spoke through the screen, “Mr. Leonard? I'm Jordan House. I'm a lapsed musician, and I just want someone to play with.” Like the men who used to come with knife-sharpening vans, to your door, asking to sharpen your knives. Only this was a better kind of commerce.

Mr. Leonard wrote at night. His hands felt brittle now, as if they'd been frozen and thawed one time too many. Some days they shook as he marked the notes on the pages, dashing the connection of their stems, up, down, connected triplets, trying to keep it all before it was gone. But this time, it wasn't disintegrating after he woke—it stayed with him, clear in his head, all the voices, clearer than the water sounds from outside, the trees underwater, the wind saturated, the air itself swallowed up in ocean.

The cancer made him feel both substantial and fragile, like a snowflake, like the finest of laces, eaten out but holding, a skeleton, a dried sponge. Mr. Leonard was writing again, he was composing, and it was working this time, the music was coming through his dreams, through his fingers onto the page, a complete conduit, a full circuit.

He had relinquished the formality of food, but he had lollipops and afternoon jasmine tea. In the mornings he spoke to the piano, and then started a lollipop, grape or orange, the satisfying snap as the plastic wrapper came off in a single piece. He let the sticks collect in cups, like flower stems. His mother died without this declination, the long letting go.

If Mr. Leonard's mother had lived long enough, say five or six months longer, then Mr. Leonard would have a sister. A
souvenir of his mother, he thought, but he tried to think it aslant, not looking his own selfish thought in the eye. She would've lived with him now, he knew this with certainty. Maybe she'd be divorced or widowed, but she'd be home again with him by now in his convalescence and simultaneous blooming. It was unkind to think of his mother this way, he was sure, to blame her, but he held the second loss like a cup full of water. Drink, let it go. He needed his hands above all else, for playing, for writing, for holding the music fast to the pages before he was emptied from the world. He didn't mind death. Sometimes he minded knowing so many other deaths—his mother, his father, his aunt, his sister who never made it out of the womb.

He found out at his father's funeral, over a decade ago. His aunt had come back from Vienna, where she'd lived for six years with a woman who may or may not have been her lover. She smelled of the lavender water she would use sparingly until her own death, because it was the last bottle from the last trip to the last store. His aunt liked finality. At his father's funeral she had a strange grin, almost a smirk. She'd finished her modest speech about her brilliant older brother from the podium at Carnegie Hall, where they were holding a memorial service. They had cast the ashes off the Palisades into the Hudson, his aunt pitching her handful like wedding rice. She spoke about the comfort of his shadow, and she'd come to sit beside Mr. Leonard, grasping his hand as if he were a mooring or a sea-tossed ship, he wasn't sure which. Her hands were chapped but warm. She didn't let go until the
reception. The stylish desserts were too festive for a funeral, but they were eating them with abandon, the first violins, the composers, the opera directors, the fraternal students with their same wide jaws and lost gray eyes. They ate the obscenely glazed fruit tarts and the tiny opera cakes, their chocolate layers and strawberry delineated like geologic finds.

“You know,” his aunt said, her hand sliding from his and into her lap, “he always called me a minor talent.”

“A minor talent?” It was so mean, Mr. Leonard's breath hurt. His aunt had played for years in Europe, never building much of a career, but occasionally appearing with her famous brother's orchestras, occasionally concertizing for a university benefit. She taught, and was renowned for shepherding prodigies onto the stage without letting them lose themselves in fame. His father had said something about that. He had said she was an expert in holding them back just enough to never make it. Mr. Leonard didn't share this with his aunt.

“A minor talent is better than C major talent,” he said.

His aunt grimaced, then her face broke free of its distress and she smiled.

“I wish you had had that sister,” she said. She cuffed her hand over her mouth. He knew she was pretending; he knew she'd wanted to tell, and tell she did. His mother had been hoping to announce her pregnancy to his father, to young Mr. Leonard himself, at her birthday celebration at the end of the summer. Blueberry pies, they always had blueberry pies. Champagne for the parents and sparkling cider for Mr. Leonard.
That year, of course, there was no pie. But she would've told him there was someone coming into the world to keep him company after his parents were gone.

“Part of the autopsy,” said his aunt. “
Auf gut Deutsch.
That's how he found out.” She had a bit of Vienna in her now—she said “the plain truth” as “the good German.” “May've been the pregnancy that killed her, that made her immune system so sensitive.” His aunt was tipsy with grief and the pleasure of relinquishing her secrets. He knew this was pure conjecture.

“C sharp major talent,” said Mr. Leonard, his chest hurting more from the sister he'd just lost than from his father, who had been gone awhile before it was official.

She would come to live with him, his aunt; they would husband the old house like a couple, like brother and sister. Only she told him what to do more than a sister would, he thought—she bothered him with formalities, with washing his hands before dinner, with whether he'd returned his library books on time. Still, they had been perhaps the easiest years of his life, his aunt's clattering in her own room, typing letters on an Underwood, irritating the neighbors by going out for the newspaper in her stockings with garters showing when the wind gapped her robe. Stockings and a robe, bare feet and a careful felt hat, that was his aunt to the last. He'd not expected her to die, despite all evidence that no one in his life was permanent. Now he understood it, though, the relief of finishing one's work, the relief of not having to fight all the gravities of daily life. Of knowing your own difference and
forgetting it in the slick work of walking on the sidewalk in unfrozen February.

•   •   •

One afternoon they were playing with the windows open. Usually, he kept them closed now; usually he wanted to keep the inside air contained—it felt safer that way. He knew his house smelled stale. Other than writing and playing his music with Jordan, there wasn't much left for him. He couldn't eat without the welling up of a terrible nausea. He had put the gowns in a trunk and labeled them “Mother's Things” as if he'd never opened them, as if he'd never folded himself inside the fabric. He couldn't now, anyway, he couldn't move from room to room without working in small starts, or without Jordan's help when he was there. Sometimes, he waited on the floor, touching the hallway's tongue and groove, keeping his pad with him, two pencils in case one point dulled too quickly. He never locked his door—if someone came to hurt him, it would be easy work just to let them.

“You need a nurse,” said the young man, having just carried him to the bench, propped him up with pillows.

“I am dying, Jordan,” he said. “And it's rather nice this way. Playing to the end.”

“Just don't do it while I'm here, okay? I wouldn't want anyone to blame me.”

“Hah,” said Mr. Leonard. “Back to the second movement. Much more agitato. I know it's hard to play violin on the cello—”

“It isn't. It's fine. You need more juicy cello sections, though.”

What Mr. Leonard wasn't telling him was that he had a cello concerto upstairs, his other final work, in the drawer of the bedside table. It wasn't just for Jordan; his mother had loved the cello—it sounded like her voice. But he wasn't planning to hear this piece except in his own head until after he was dead. He was rather looking forward to it.

Since he hardly ate, he didn't have to go to the bathroom, not often. He drank sparingly, enough to keep from becoming powder before he'd finished these last two pieces—the cello concerto for his mother, and the symphony, which was for his father and his unborn sister. The swollen voice of strings, the timpani interrupting, the woodwinds and the sweetest flute song that was for her. It wasn't painful anymore. He had music; he had something to finish, and something to look forward to at last.

Jordan was pecking out the flute part now, on the piano because Mr. Leonard was in the chair, scribbling down some more for the finale. It was coming before the end of the second movement, but he was upright, he needed to transcribe.

“It sounds like a girl, a lost girl,” said Jordan.

Mr. Leonard bit the inside of his cheek. The blood tasted sweet, just a little blood.

“They still haven't found her,” Jordan said, looking out the window at Linsey Hart's house. “I'm sorry,” he added. “I know they gave you a hard time—I wasn't implying anything—”

“It's all right,” said Mr. Leonard. His fingers were dented
from the pencil; he massaged them, trying to get back enough circulation to write more. “I know something I didn't tell them,” he said.

Jordan played the flute again, more fluently. He looked at the page and the keys, only. He was an awkward pianist, unaccustomed to the horizontal surface of sound.

“It was old news, so I thought it didn't matter. Doesn't matter.” He sucked in air against his teeth, annoyed by the restraints of tense.

“Okay,” said Jordan. He plucked out the violin line, the melody, much too slowly.

“One night, maybe last year, she sat under my window with that boyfriend of hers, Timmy.”

“The one she broke up with?”

“She didn't break up him.”

Jordan stopped playing and looked at the man, quizzical.

“That part doesn't matter, they said she's not with him. Anyway, they sat under my window. I was looking over Rachmaninoff—not playing, just thinking it, because sometimes they mind if I play at night.”

“And?”

“And do they think houses are anonymous at night? Teenagers. I was right there, and they were talking under my window. She said she'd pretend to break up for her mother—so she'd leave them alone.”

“Ah.” Jordan was studying his strings. “What did the boyfriend say?”

“He dissembled for a while, but eventually he said maybe
the mother was right—they shouldn't stretch things across the continent.”

“Poor kid,” said Jordan. He looked out the window as if there were more information there.

“And she sobbed. That girl, she had been left too many times, I think. She said maybe she'd go to school in California, or maybe she wouldn't go to school at all. I hope no one took her—I hope she finds a way to do what she needs to do.”

“I hate that idea, that someone
took
her. She's a person—it's so infuriating,” said Jordan. “I know that sounds trite. I just hate feeling ineffectual, I hate that someone can have free will taken from them. Even if her free will was going to be something other than what everyone else wanted for her.” He spoke as if he knew something about this.

“When you get old, you feel everything becoming ineffectual. I suppose that's the reason for music—someone else's voice singing after you're gone.”

“Ah,” said Jordan. Mr. Leonard knew he was being kind, a small kindness not to point out how utterly banal his sentiment had been.

“Oh, and she asked her father for money, the night before she left. I heard her call him. I almost called out the window to offer her my money, but that would have been ridiculous.”

“So the boyfriend really broke up with her? Did you tell the mother? It might mean something, who knows?”

“I suppose,” said Mr. Leonard.

“I could tell them about it—anonymously,” said Jordan.

“If you think it matters.”

“Everything matters,” Jordan said, but he doubted it was true. He looked out the window. There was a cluster of girls in front of the house next door, a young man lying on his back as if their lawn were a beach.

“I think it's supposed to be a vigil,” he said. “They don't know how to show support, or else they like the drama.”

“Play the adagio again. Strings, please; your piano is awful.”

“Is this symphony about her?” He didn't say anything about telling the police.

“Not at all, my dear,” said Mr. Leonard. “I'm the only one who's dying now.”

3 CEDAR COURT

G
eo was constructing a mosaic in the basement, where everything smelled of laundry lint and the clay of underground. He thought she'd be more worried about him, maybe take him to the pediatrician, maybe insist they call the Steins—or at least she'd give him ice and sympathy, but his mother had turned strange on him after she saw the bruise. She'd poked at it for a while, making his skin sting, and then she told him to go clean up his room. He'd hoped they could change the subject, but instead she seemed stuck on his room, and asked him again, and again, when he went to get peanut butter crackers, when he sat upstairs and looked through photographs. He didn't want to; he never wanted to. The mess was organized, and he took comfort in knowing where everything was, even if he didn't know where everything went.

This was why he kept thinking about Linsey, he realized as he carefully sorted bits of sea glass on the basement floor. It was the tangle of simply not knowing. He had collected the sea glass on a trip to Cape May, piles of brown, greens, and cloudy whites, the occasional blue. He was arranging the colors
to write Caroline's name, because her birthday would be at the end of the month, and she would come home, and they would mix simple syrup and lemon juice with water, homemade lemonade, the way they did on every one of her birthdays that he could remember.