A red tainted Silence (6 page)

I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t even bother turning on the light or opening the curtains, just lay in the dark, letting my anger and despair roil over me. Jenny hadn’t gotten any responses to her flyers except for some prank calls, which made me wallow ever deeper in my misery. I knew I needed to shake this, but couldn’t let it go. Not yet.

Finally my mom came in and kissed me on the forehead. She wrinkled her nose.

“Brandon, you need to get up. At least take a shower, let me change these sheets.” Guess she was right. I had gotten kind of rank.

So I dragged myself up and into the shower, kinda freaked at just how skinny I’d gotten in so short a time. Six, seven pounds doesn’t sound like much, but on me it was. If I didn’t gain it back, Sprout would add “string” to her nickname for me. The shower did make me feel better, though. After gelling my hair and shaving, I pulled on my jean shorts and an old AC-DC t-shirt my brother Jonathan had discarded. All my clothes were at the apartment.

So I emerged from my cave at last. While I was in the shower, my mom had pulled the curtains back and stripped my bed, but hadn’t made it yet -- think she did that on purpose so I wouldn’t crawl right back in. Smart mom.

Padding barefoot through the house, I ended up in the kitchen. She’d left me a note: Gone to the store to pick up some chicken and Oreo cookies. I grinned. Oreos, the best medicine.

I fixed myself a glass of ice water, then leaned against the sink and stared through the kitchen door into the room beyond, my gaze settling on the baby grand piano, which gobbled up most of the front room.

30 Carolyn Gray

Sunlight glinted across the wooden floors and bathed the piano in beckoning light. My fingers twitched. It’d been a long time since I’d sat and played anything but electronic keyboards, and I realized I kinda missed the purity of the piano’s sound.

I was nine when my parents got the baby grand for me. My older brothers’ musical interests had taken them different directions, but I’d shown from a very early age to have a gift for the piano and for memorizing music. I spent years banging away on our old upright, spending all the hours I could spare sitting on its hard bench. My butt still remembers that bench.

But the upright was old and easily went out of tune, especially as much as I played it.

After a time, I began to get frustrated with the sound quality, and my playing sessions would abruptly end. My mom would watch me storm off and yank open the back door, slamming it behind me as I went outside to mope. I’d never answer when she’d ask me what was wrong. I began to play less and picked up the guitar, finding in it a lot of the pleasure I’d had playing the piano. But it was never the same.

Then, one weekend, I went with my parents on vacation to the home of a friend of theirs. They were rich, these friends, living in a huge house overlooking the ocean. I remember vowing to myself that someday I’d have a place overlooking the ocean, too. That dream became reality, but back then I didn’t really believe it would ever happen. After all, I was just a kid, nobody special.

The house was incredible, with room after room packed with antiques and amazing artifacts from all over the world. Giant urns from Egypt, a stuffed tiger from India, Ming vases, fine porcelains, a collection of snuff boxes made of precious metals and stones, each one different from the other, that fascinated me. I remember asking what a snuff was and everyone laughing.

But everything in that house paled in comparison to the piano that graced a ballroom-size room with windows that soared three stories high. I remember standing on the pale pink marble floor in leather shoes that hurt my feet and staring at the piano, feeling the same itch in my fingers to play that I felt now. The piano was huge -- a concert grand, slick and black.

I’d never seen anything like it. The owner of the house, Mr. Halprin, asked me if I knew how to play. When I mutely nodded, he gestured for me to show him.

So, I did.

I think he expected chopsticks or something, because as Mozart, Debussy, Chopin, even a little Lee Joplin -- I loved ragtime -- poured from my fingers, his smile grew wider and wider. I nearly cried with the joy of it as my music filled the room. I forgot the audience watching and listening, and I closed my eyes as the music took me in. I’d finish one piece, then go on to another, and another. My arms and back began to hurt, but I didn’t care. The sound was flawless, perfection. The keys smooth and alive beneath my fingers. I felt like I’d come home. Each strike of the hammer, each note, lifted me up to the ceiling and filled the aching loneliness that was my childhood.

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I didn’t want to stop, but finally I began to falter. A hand rested on my shoulder, startling me. I looked up then, blinking. I must’ve looked like an owl caught in bright sunlight, because Mr. Halprin burst out into deep-seated laughter. He didn’t say much else, but I do know that soon after that, I came home from school one day to find a baby grand sitting in the living room, the old upright and the couch and chair (there wasn’t room) gone.

I always suspected Mr. Halprin had something to do with it, but my parents never said and I didn’t ask. At ten years old, I felt like I’d been reborn.

My weekly chore was polishing the piano, one duty I never minded. Make me polish windows and I’d run screaming, but shove a bottle of piano polish and a rag into my hands, and I’d feel like bursting into song even though I’m a lousy singer. Adam thought I was loony, and he was probably right, but sometimes I’d polish that piano three or four times a week. I couldn’t explain then why I got such comfort from the simple task. I couldn’t explain a lot of my feelings back then.

I looked at the baby grand that day after mom had forced me out of bed and decided it probably hadn’t been touched since I’d moved in with Adam. So, looking under the sink, I was happy to find a fairly new bottle of polish. I found a soft cloth and padded into the living room, smiling in anticipation of my task.

For the next hour, I worked over that piano from end to end, rubbing away countless fingerprints, grimacing at the faint scratches from the blasted cat my mom briefly owned, finally finishing where I’d always finished when I was a kid -- lying down and stretched out beneath, my head situated next to the pedals, where I could look up at whatever imaginary pianist I could conjure. I’d imagined all kinds of famous people played my piano, like Elton John. I lived in an imaginary world a lot of the time when I was young -- it was much kinder to me than reality.

The day I did sit down and play with the real Elton John, all my fantasies paled in comparison to the reality. But back then, who would’ve thought such a thing could happen to me?

My mom had often come in whenever I was at that point. She would tease me, saying I didn’t need to polish underneath, too, but then she’d sit down on the bench and talk to me for a while. We’d had some great conversations that way, me finding it easier to talk to her while she looked sorta upside down at me than when we were face to face.

The back door slammed. I heard her coming into the kitchen. “Brandon?”

“In here,” I called out, grinning as I heard her laugh when she spied where I was.

“Stay put, son. I’ll be there in a minute.”

The floor was hard and I was getting a little chilly, but I didn’t move, just grinned like a fool as she put up the groceries and finally came and sat on the bench and looked down at me, a beautiful smile brightening her face.

Damn, I love my mom.

32 Carolyn Gray

I guess it was inevitable that we’d end up there. She’d been patient with me all week, knowing more than the flu and the stolen music and keyboards ate at me. It was time to talk, though I dreaded it. “Looks good, honey. Your piano’s been neglected lately.” With me lying like that, my mom’s mouth looked funny when she talked. Once, I’d convinced her to let me draw eyes and a nose on her chin so that when she talked, it had looked like some alien creature was talking to me. I laughed. “Can I draw a nose and eyes --”

“No, Brandon, you may not.” She smiled at me then. “You feeling better?” she asked.

“Much.”

“Good. I’m making chicken soup for dinner for you.”

“With Oreos for dessert? Thanks.”

“I bought two packages. That may be the only way to get more meat on your bones, son.” Then she hesitated. “I talked with the mom of one of Jenny’s friends today.”

“What about?”

She reached into her back pocket and pulled out one of Jenny’s flyers. “About this. She found a stack of these in her daughter’s room and wanted to know why you were looking for that boy.”

That boy. I swallowed. “What did she say?”

“She told me she’d forbidden her daughter to help pass them out. She was quite upset because, as she put it, Nicholas Kilmain is, and I quote her words, ‘a fag,’ and she didn’t want her daughter ‘associating with such people.’ I also talked with Adam today about him.

Adam’s opinion was pretty harsh.”

“Why?” I said, unable to keep the anger from my voice. “Because Nicholas cared when I fainted? Because he told Adam to get me some ice? Did Adam tell you what he said? ‘Your timing really sucks, Brandon.’ That’s what he said.” I pushed my way out from underneath the piano and walked away, hurt battering at me. But Mom was fast; she grabbed my arm and stopped me, turning me around, placing her hands on my shoulders. I bowed my head, the anger falling away at the compassion in her eyes.

“Adam probably wasn’t the best person to ask, Brandon, but I didn’t have anyone else.

You don’t know the boy, what kind of person he is. And he obviously upset you.” How could I tell her he upset me because he’d walked away and now I couldn’t find him? Because I wanted him so bad, seeing him leave about killed me? I couldn’t find the words, so I remained silent. I think, though, my silence was more telling than if I’d protested.

“Why are you trying to find him, Brandon?”

I blinked, feeling nausea pool in my stomach. I licked my lips, suddenly dry, and looked anywhere but at my mom. I wished I hadn’t gone in there. I wasn’t ready for this. I A Red-Tainted Silence

33

couldn’t lie to her when she asked me anything point blank. Never have been able to, then or now.

“I have to, Mom. He’s --” I closed my eyes, feeling my face flush with humiliation, and fear. “I just have to. Ever since I first saw him, heard him sing, I knew I had to have him.” I opened my eyes. “I want him so bad it hurts.”

If she was shocked at my words, she did a remarkable job of not letting on. I mean, if it’d been me, hearing my son was practically in love with another guy, I’d have said something. But she didn’t. At least, not what I expected. “He’s the boy who was in the play you went to with Jenny a couple of years ago, isn’t he?” I gulped in shock. “How’d you know about that?”

She shrugged one shoulder. “You were so depressed after that, and I started to worry.

You wouldn’t talk to me, Brandon.”

I hung my head. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“So when I found the pictures in your room, I put two and two together.” I snapped my head up. “Shit, Mom, I never left them out.”

“But Adam did.”

My face must’ve turned ten shades of white. Dizziness socked me between the eyes.

With a gasp, my mom helped me ease down onto the floor and lean against the wall. I drew my knees up and bowed my head, wrapping my arms around my legs. She sat next to me.

Tears of degradation rolled down my cheeks, and my nose started to run. I flinched when I felt a hand stroke my hair, but she didn’t stop.

“I’m so sorry, Mom,” I choked out.

“Sorry about what, honey?”

I lifted my head and laid my cheek against my bare knees. “I’ve disappointed you so much.”

Anger flared in her eyes, making me hold my breath. “Brandon Ashwood. You are not a disappointment to me, or to your father. Why would you say such a thing?”

“But ... I dropped out of school, I’ve gotten nowhere with my music, and now all of it’s gone. My keyboards are gone, and I’m not even done paying for them; and I keep getting sick; and I can’t even find a decent job, or take care of myself. And now --” But the words stuck in my throat. I couldn’t speak, could only shake my head and bury my face in my arms again.

“Listen to me, son. You are my youngest, and probably my favorite son. No, you are,” she said when I looked at her in amazement. “You could never disappoint me. It’s been a little rocky for you, but that’s to be expected. You are young.” I dropped my head back down, but she would have none of it. “Look at me, Brandon.” I lifted my head.

34 Carolyn Gray

She nodded in encouragement. “I believe in you.” Those four words filled me, touched me in a way that nothing else could have. “You do?”

“Yes. Of the three of you, it’s you who I know, here --” She touched her heart. “-- to be destined for amazing things. Someday, everyone will know who Brandon Ashwood is. All over the world, for what you have in here.” She touched my head. “You have amazing talent, Brandon. An amazing gift that is going to take you places you can’t imagine. Your friend Nicholas may well be a part of that journey, as your musical partner and your ... maybe as your life partner as well. But you won’t know for sure until you give it a chance. Right?” I nodded, too dumbfounded to say anything else. She kissed me on the cheek.

“Go wash your face, and take my car and get out of here for a while. The flyers are a good idea, but did you think about checking with music stores?”

“Music stores?”

She smiled at me, then touched me on the nose. “He’s a musician, too, isn’t he? And from what I’ve heard, he’s quite distinctive. He’s bound to go into music stores on occasion.

Maybe someone will remember him.”

I blinked and found myself grinning. “Why didn’t Sprout or I think of that?” She raised her eyebrows. “She’s been in this from the beginning, then, hasn’t she?” I nodded, sheepish. “Yes.”

“Figured as much. But I’m glad you two are so close.”

“Me, too. Wish I could trade her for Adam.”

She smiled at that. “I just wish you’d felt you could tell me about your feelings. Did you think I wouldn’t understand?”