Porcelain Keys (2 page)

I must have looked terrified because he raised his palms and said gently, “Don’t be scared. I won’t hurt you.”

I knew I should say something, explain myself, but all I could do was stare up at the blue jay, still thrashing its wings against the rafters. The boy followed my gaze, then turned away and stepped out of view. I peered around the corner to see what he was doing.

He went to a wall and tugged at a latch that secured the
roof. It came loose; then he went to the opposite wall and unlatched another. Taking hold of a joist, he gave a few jerks until the roof opened like a sliding lid on a wooden box.

Mr. Euler had been an astronomer, and he’d used the tree house as his personal observatory. But it had been years since he’d slid open the roof to view the night sky, and the wheels made a crackling sound as they rolled over dirt and dried leaves along the track. The free corners of the roof moved over the deck on wheeled posts, and when it opened halfway, the blue jay dove toward the deck, then flew away. I turned back to the boy, wishing I could have flown away too.

The boy watched the bird disappear into the nearby aspens, then he turned to me. His lips parted as if to say something, but instead he pressed them back together and looked down, seeming as uncomfortable as I was. He scratched the sparse stubble on his jaw, then lifted his gaze to try again.

“I’m Thomas,” he said. “Frank Euler’s grandson.” When I gave no response, he tilted his head and raised a dark eyebrow. “And you are?”

Blood rushed up my neck and into my cheeks, bringing my voice with it. “I . . . I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I’m Aria. I live next door. I just come here sometimes to spend the night—for fun. Your grandpa knows, or knew, when he lived here.” It all came out in a nervous rush, and I bit down on my tongue, trying to keep more words from spilling out.

The corner of his mouth twitched as he leaned his shoulder against the wall and shrugged. “It’s okay. You’re not in trouble. I just wanted to know who you were.” He watched me, as though waiting for me to do or say something.
When I didn’t move or speak, he rubbed the back of his neck and gave an encouraging smile. “You can come out of there . . . if you want.”

I coerced my shoulders to loosen a notch, then stepped tentatively out of the shadow into the light, still clutching my sleeping bag to my chest.

He squinted against the sunlight falling through the open roof and took a step toward me, his face gradually brightening in recognition. “I think I’ve seen you before.”

“When?” I asked, searching his face for familiarity but finding none.

“A couple years ago—when we helped my grandpa move to the nursing home. You came up the driveway and started talking to him.” He paused and studied the floor a moment, musing privately on the memory. “You hugged him, then left.”

As if sifting through a box of old photos, it took me a minute to retrieve the memory. But it was there. I’d been fifteen, crying, and all too aware of the cute dark-haired boy watching me from the window.

In the light of this memory, I appraised him again more attentively. He was still cute. In fact, he put cute to shame. His clothes were nothing spectacular—just a snug T-shirt and loose jeans—but the way the morning sun highlighted the lines of his face made him look like some Victorian masterpiece. I couldn’t help but contrast his appearance with mine. With my dirty bare feet, scuffed knees, and snarled hair, I probably looked more like something hanging from the rafters of Dad’s barn than in the borders of a gilded frame. “Yeah,” I finally said, twisting my hair over one shoulder in an attempt to tame it. “That was me.”

“My grandpa must have been a good friend to you.” From his gentle tone, I guessed that he was still picturing my tearful fifteen-year-old face in his mind.

I nodded. “Is he back from the nursing home, then?”

He diverted his eyes to the window and twisted his mouth like he was tasting something bitter. “He . . . passed away a few weeks ago.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the all-too-familiar sting of loss in the pit of my stomach.

“Yeah. Me too.” He hooked his thumbs in his pockets and sighed. “It was unexpected, so I didn’t really get to say good-bye.” A long silence stretched between us, until he turned to look at me and offered a little smile. “Anyway, we’re just here until the spring to get his place ready to sell.”

I’d been searching for a way to make a dignified exit, and his words opened a gate. “Well, I guess I’d better get out of your hair, then.”

He started saying something about how I didn’t need to go, but as I went to the doorway and tossed my sleeping bag to the ground, he trailed off. I glanced up at him, and his pointed gaze was fixed on my arm. When I glanced down, I gasped at what I saw.

Three bruises banded my upper arm like a cuff. They were barred, the size and shape of a man’s fingers.

Instinctively, my hand came up to cover them. He turned away and absently opened a cabinet door, his face composing into a careful mask as he searched the empty shelves for absolutely nothing.

I tried to think of something to say, but no words came to mind. Only images from the night before.

Dad’s callused fingers clamped down on my arm, his
thorny hangnail digging into my skin. His lips pulled tight over his teeth as he reprimanded me for doing the only thing that made me happy.

My vision wavered behind the pressure of unshed tears. But not wanting to cry in front of Thomas, I bit down hard on my lip, fortifying the dam keeping the tears at bay.

Thomas turned back to me and tried to smile. “I guess I’ll see you at school, then. It starts Monday, right?”

Whether his evasion was for his sake or mine, I didn’t know, but I was grateful I wouldn’t have to come up with an impromptu explanation. “Right—Monday,” I said vacantly.

Without another word, I descended from the tree house, snatched up my sleeping bag, and walked away, raw humiliation leaving me stunned. As soon as I was safely blanketed in aspens, I broke into a run. I didn’t see their white branches whip past me, or the tunnel that closed over me as I passed down a row of apple trees, or the wooden fence as I clambered over. In their place, I saw Dad’s eyes, bulging and wild. I saw the porch light cutting through the parlor window, making his red hair look like flames. I saw his hand on the piano key cover, slamming it shut. But worst of all, I saw Thomas’s eyes, wide with alarm and fixed on the glaring evidence of Dad’s abuse.

With each stride, the pressure behind my eyes built until the dam began to crumble. And when I reached Dad’s barn, I pressed my back against the side and slid to the ground, where I buried my head in my arms and released the tears.

The kitchen was dark when I stepped through the back door to get ready for work, and all my senses were on high
alert. The faucet dripped slowly in the kitchen sink, but the rest of the house was silent. An open bottle of brandy sat on the kitchen table, waiting to be finished. I tiptoed inside, the old floorboards creaking underfoot, and as I approached the living room, I saw Dad stretched out on the carpet at the base of the stairs.

He lay on his back, one arm resting across his muscular chest, the other propped up on the bottom step. His thick red hair shot out in every direction as if he’d been tugging at it all night, and he still wore the plaid flannel shirt I’d mended the day before. Oddly enough, it was still tucked neatly into his jeans. His abdomen slowly rose and fell, and his face was relaxed and peaceful. The way he used to look before Mom died, the way he’d begun to look again before his relapse the night before. It made my heart grieve over the loss of the good father he’d once been, and the three months of sobriety he’d thrown away.

A long rectangle of sunlight stretched across the carpet from the parlor door, and I was surprised to see it still open. The piano beckoned to me from inside the small room, but with Dad sprawled out on the floor just feet away, it wasn’t exactly an ideal time to interpret
Fantasie Impromptu
. I went to close the door, but first stepped inside to pick up the sheet music that had fallen to the floor the night before. The morning sun spilled through the tall windows, washing the room with a heavenly golden hue.

Dad viewed the parlor as a sacred sepulcher, a forbidden place where memories of Mom dwelled, sleeping and inaccessible. But for me, it was where I came to be with her. I couldn’t run my hands across the worn piano keys without seeing her own, couldn’t sit on the bench without feeling her warmth beside me. Even the tendrils of dark
hair that spilled over my shoulders when I played reminded me of her. Her hair had been the same shade as the dark mahogany piano, and when she wore it down, it shrouded her shoulders and back like a hooded cape, melding her and the piano into one inseparable instrument.

With a heartsick sigh, I turned around and left the parlor, locking and shutting the door behind me, just the way Dad wanted it. As I approached the stairs, I could feel Dad’s hunting prizes watching me. I could almost hear them say,
If you go in there again, you’ll be next
.

Dad didn’t know, but I had names for all his furry trophies. Ann, the red fox on the side table, was polite, kept mostly to herself, and had impeccable posture. Harriet and Ned, two quails on the wall, constantly quarreled about whose fault it was that they’d ended up stuffed and mounted to a tree branch. Of all the stiff specimens in the room, I related to Harriet and Ned the most. Wings forever spread as if in flight, yet suspended, unable to go anywhere.

And then there was Knox, Dad’s prized possession and my least favorite resident. The large gray wolf was preserved pushing off his hind foot, the rest of his body leaping into the air in attack position. Every time I walked past him, I felt him stalking me, waiting for an opportunity to tear into my calf with his razor teeth.

I heard the crackling sound of tires rolling over the gravel driveway outside—one of Dad’s customers, I guessed. I always thought it ironic that when Dad wasn’t running around in his fireman’s uniform saving people, he ran a taxidermy business in our barn, preserving what others had killed.

I glanced through the lace curtains that were the last remains of Mom’s decorating influence and saw a
middle-aged man getting out of a silver car. A nervous tremble rippled down my abdomen as I recognized him from the night before. He’d shown up and argued with Dad in the driveway, and although I hadn’t heard their conversation, it had set Dad off on his drinking rampage. And now, here he was again. I didn’t know him, and from his appearance I guessed he wasn’t one of Dad’s customers. His sandy-blond hair looked like he’d spent half the day styling it, and he wore a starchy dress shirt and vogue square-rimmed glasses. Dad’s customers were inclined toward dungarees, flannel shirts, and duck canvas vests.

I didn’t have time to deal with him, so I stepped over Dad and went upstairs to get ready for work. Already late, I skipped the shower and went to my room to change. As I slipped the sheet music under my mattress with all my other music, there was a knock on the front door, loud and urgent. But I ignored it, taking off my dirty tank and shorts and throwing on an unflattering lime-green bussing shirt and black slacks.

The doorbell rang, and I poked my head into the hallway to see if Dad was waking up, but he hadn’t stirred. I crossed the hall to the bathroom, where I did my best to make myself presentable by dabbing on some makeup and wrangling my hair into a bun. Luckily the sleeves of my bussing shirt were long enough to conceal the bruises on my arm. The doorbell didn’t ring again, and soon I heard the man’s car rolling back over the gravel and his engine fading away. I came back down the stairs and stepped over Dad, gave him one last pitiful look, and then left for work.

D
espite the rock
already filling my gut, I fetched my lunch sack from my locker Monday afternoon and went to the cafeteria. Students gathered in their new back-to-school clothes at long tables or lined up with trays, poking and flirting as they waited for pizza and fries. I leaned against the brick wall and browsed the tables for a place to sit. A couple of girls from English Literature waved at me from a table by a window, but I didn’t have it in me to join them. With my nerves still frayed from what had happened over the weekend, I didn’t feel like putting on a show and pretending that everything was okay. I didn’t want people asking what was wrong or why I was wearing long sleeves and jeans in August or what I did this summer.

A tall, dark-haired boy with a black T-shirt and loose jeans strolled in. With his back to me, he paused and scanned the lunchroom. Even before seeing his striking profile, I knew it was Thomas.

I felt anew the humiliation of the other morning, and not wanting to risk running into him, I backed out of the
cafeteria and fled down the hall. Turning a couple corners, I came to the heavy door that led to the auditorium stage. I glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then snuck inside.

I found the old upright piano tucked behind layers of black curtain and opened the key cover, then sat on the bench and locked down the soft pedal. With my sandwich in my left hand and my right hand on the keys, I practiced the melody of Debussy’s
Reverie
. I switched sides and practiced the bass line. When my sandwich was gone and both hands were free, I sank into the lulling passages without reserve, expressing the things that were not safe to say.

My hands moved up and down the keyboard, summoning great waves of music, each one crested with sorrow, loneliness, and anger. Tides of emotion rose and fell, gradually finding their way down my arms and to the keys, becoming harmonies that filled and then dissipated into the air like mist.

When the lunch bell rang, I lingered for a few minutes so no one would see me come out, then gathered my things and went to class.

My World Civilizations class was bubbling with chatter when I walked in, the various tones and timbres of students’ voices mixing like the cacophony of an orchestra warm-up. I skirted around the back of the room until I found an empty seat, but the moment I sat down, I regretted it. One row over and two seats up sat Thomas. He gazed down at his notebook with pencil in hand, making long, slow movements across the page.