Accidental Notes: A Novel

Chapter 13

Accidental Notes

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Catch up on chapter 12 here.

I try to forget about Grayson as I warm up by the fire. Dad watches me from a distance, like a ghost hovering in my peripheral vision, just far enough out of reach I wonder if he’s real.

When I stop shivering, Dad comes closer, then envelops me in a manufactured hug. “What I did to you earlier was rude. I know you need to practice for your audition, but piano is how I’m getting by, too. Maybe we should be doing it together. Join me?”

I nod and follow him to the piano. Where else would I go? Everything I want in Bend is right there. The keys. The sheet music. A relationship with my dad.

He scoots over on the bench, moving to the bass and making room for me on the treble end. We’ve played so many duets this way. Maybe music is the way to him. Now that we’re playing together, he might talk to me about what I found. “About the music I played last night…”

Instead of answering me, he transitions out of our first, simple duet into a pattern I don’t recognize.

“What’s this song?”

“I’m improvising. I like to mess around in chord progressions when I’m frustrated. It calms me down.” He looks at me over his glasses. “The most important rule in improv is to know the rules of music and when to break them.”

He’s doing this on purpose. Telling me about improv instead of answering my question. “You weren’t stopping me from playing the piano this morning. You were stopping me from playing that song.”

Dad doesn’t miss a beat on the piano, doesn’t look at me, doesn’t acknowledge that I said a thing. He’s a recorded lecture I don’t want to hear. “Know the chord progressions that work. Break them when you need to and return to them when the break is over. Find the rhythm not only of each note but of when to change things. Let people fall into your music because they know what to expect from it. Then defy their expectations.”

“I don’t need the sixteen rules of improv, or whatever it is. Improv isn’t what I do.” I’ve got to find a way to turn off the recording he’s becoming and remind him what matters to me. So I reach over his shoulder and grab a page of the music from the piano. “I want to learn about this. I want to understand this. You won’t face the question.”

Dad says nothing to me, but he stops playing. He slides his glasses up his nose in a way I recognize because I do it, too. He’s annoyed and wants out of the conversation but doesn’t know how to tell me.

“Whatever.” I take the whole song and curl up in an armchair stationed across from the piano. I won’t play it, but let’s see him make me not study it at all.

He swivels on the piano bench until he faces me. “I owe you an explanation about that music. I know I do.” I take a breath and try to smile. It feels like I’ve waited years to hear that from him. “But I need some time to process it before — ”

His argument washes over me like waves on a California beach, and I want to smother them before they drown me. “I don’t have time, Dad. I need to start practicing now. I need to get this right. And something tells me I’ll be a lot better at it when you tell me where it came from.”

“It came from the attic,” he says. The sarcasm is immature in his mouth.

“You would’ve slapped me for that kind of response,” I say. “Or wanted to.” I know I’m right, and I hate how parents can get away with things they would never let their kids do in a million years.

Dad ignores the jab. “The box was dusty? Off to one side and away from everything?” No pause. I guess because he knows. “You had no business opening things that didn’t belong to you. We shouldn’t have stayed here, where you — ”

This time Dad chokes off his own words. I think he might be on the verge of admitting something. The air slows around us, and I notice the dust dancing, a mirror to the snow outside, but so minuscule no one knows when it lands. Until years pass and the dust builds up into layers so thick I leave fingerprints when I disturb it. I’m not done being angry.

He drove us to the airport, I remember. Our ride over the pass was so full of tension I wanted to play a root chord to break it — get us back to where we belong. But Mom was uprooting us. We were the key of F — our joke because of our last name — and moving away from Bend but leaving the Finley family behind. I had no root.

Maybe that’s the thing: Dad is rooted here. He’s the F, the root note in this key, and when I’m here, I’m part of his chord instead of the root of my own. So he thinks he can resolve this tension like we’re nothing more than improv-ing, and my A is a minor third he can draw back to himself. There’s nothing I want more right now than to resist his pull.

I glare at him over the sheet music between us. “Whatever it is you’re about to say, I’m guessing I deserved to hear it years ago.”

He flinches. I struck a nerve. I’m glad.

When he talks again, he’s looking at his lap, not me. So I listen while I run one finger along the music in my hand. “I told my mother again and again that keeping mementos around was just asking for trouble. She never believed me. Thought we could keep the memory of him for ourselves without it ever — My entire world was over, and knowing so much was still upstairs, in this house, when I’d begged her to — ”

His eyes meet mine, but he stares through me. His irises deepen until they’re a dark brown I can hardly distinguish from the pupils. I can’t see into him, and I wonder if he can even see out.

“Pastor Clark compared you to Brennan, and then you came home and somehow found the one box — ” He doesn’t say anything else. Instead he slams his hand down on the piano — an Fsus I’m neither sure he intended to hit nor certain it’s possible to hit accidentally — and walks away.

His words echo in my mind, get tangled up in one another as I sit, stunned. Dad’s soliloquy about how to improv knots with everything else he said. I look at the music again. It does exactly what Dad told me about: following a chord progression enough to establish a pattern, then breaking it in a way that defies expectations. It’s the mathematical equation for making people feel things.

The things this music will make its audience feel? They’re all sad.

Dad wasn’t deflecting, then, when he told me about improv. I thought he was avoiding the question, but he was coming at it sideways, not just the ask but the answer. He was trying to tell me something.

That Brennan is real. He’s my brother. He’s probably dead. And this music? It’s so obvious now. Dad wrote it, and he must have written it to mourn his son.

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