Chapter 14

A Secret Worth Keeping

Not sure what this story is? The synopsis is available here.

Catch up on chapter 13 here.

I never know what I’m feeling until my body acts it out. My anxiety is all in my stomach, and when I’m excited, I shake and sweat at the same time. But that’s describing it backward. When my stomach is in knots, I learn that I’m anxious. When I’m shaking and sweaty at the same time, I know I’m excited. Right now, as my body almost vibrates with an energy I can only satisfy by working so hard I feel it in my muscles, I realize I’m angry.

Dad disappears outside and the only place I can go is to the piano. How dare he. If I don’t center myself inside some music soon, I think I’ll tear apart from the inside. I try a scale, starting in F like always, but my fingers press down too hard and the rhythm escapes me. How dare he. How dare Mom.

A secret, for years. Maybe my whole life. Tiptoeing around things they didn’t think I’d need to understand, when it isn’t true. I need to understand everything.

The scale ends. I can’t move on to G to continue warming up. My hands drop into my lap. The house is deserted. Silent. Vast and full of echoes now that I’m alone and I can’t even fill this space with music.

I had a brother. All the echoes in this house belong to him. A creak in the stair. A door shutting when no one is near it. This person named Brennan who grew up — maybe? Maybe he never grew up — before and without me. How dare everyone.

Dad didn’t give me anything. I had to work for every confession I pulled from him, and I don’t expect that to change. He’s outside chopping wood now. Each log splits in a fury and the pieces go flying. It’s the only reason I know what he said is the truth. I’m not going to get anything out of him by asking directly. Especially not about why he wrote the music.

And I can’t play it. My fingers refuse to cooperate on scales, let alone a piece as intricate as what he wrote. I stand up and go to the kitchen, where our gingerbread house is on the verge of falling apart. Dried-up frosting flakes out of the seams. I’m afraid if I get too close, it will crumble, so I leave it alone and find some dishes I can do, something to keep my hands busy while my mind reels.

“Just the three of us,” Mom would always say about our family. I would say it back. Dad never would, and now that I think of it, something always slumped in his shoulders whenever we’d bring it up. I can’t decide what’s worse: both of my parents lying for my entire life, or the truth they’ve been hiding. I want to know everything. How old he would be. If we lived at the same time. Why he died.

The dishes are all on the rack to dry before I’ve even run out of questions. But no matter. I can find answers here, in Grandma’s house. She kept this secret too, but she also kept breadcrumbs. This house is stuffed with memories, and memories are clues. Maybe I can piece together the details myself.

Despite being neat, the kitchen is full of unnecessary things. Receipts a decade old fall out of a cookie jar when I open it. I find a dozen salt and pepper shakers in various themes — most of them musical — in the back of a cabinet I thought had been dedicated to cereal bowls. In the drawer underneath the oven I find six handwritten recipe books, one of them in Spanish.

Just by paying attention to what she kept, I’ve learned so much about my grandmother. But I’ve still learned nothing about Brennan. I head to the living room next, but before I get there, my phone buzzes in my back pocket.

Riley: Is the snow a foot deep yet? Have you built a snowman?

Adaya: Yes. Yes.

I type quickly. I love Riley and I miss her, but I don’t know if I want to say what’s wrong. Even though she’ll know something is.

Sure enough.

Riley: You okay? Trouble with your family?

Adaya: That’s one way to put it.

But then I have an idea.

Adaya: Tell me about your break so far. I want ALL THE DEETS.

I’m sure she knows what I’m trying to do by copying her language, but she leans in to my redirection and gives me exactly what I asked for. While I go through the bookshelves in the living room (I find a hatbox full of buttons, a tin can with sewing needles and loose thread shoved in haphazardly), I check my phone as it continues incessantly buzzing.

I devour Riley’s story and let her excessive exclamation points take me back to Santa Monica. She’s got trouble right now with this boy who’s kind of been flirting with her since school started, and they ran into each other when she went in to the movies and accidentally sat by him and his parents and she says they exchanged actual phone numbers instead of just DMing.

Riley: Basically, it’s getting serious.

I can’t follow her story after that. Because what got serious here is how I have a brother I don’t even know how to tell her about. Nothing feels as serious as that. Even though I wanted the distraction, I mute the chat and use my extra energy thinking of excuses I can tell her later for why I disappeared.

Inside me, everything is a mess. My stomach is steel. My arms are restless. Sorting isn’t enough anymore. It’s like I ache from lack of movement. I stand and find cleaning supplies in a hall closet. They wobble in the heavy bucket as I lug it to the family room. My entire life has been a lie, I think as I spray wood cleaner along the top of the piano, scrub until the scratches shine, then dry-dust the keys. I vacuum the floors until I’ve emptied the container four times. As I dump the dust into the garbage bin in the kitchen, I wonder when the last time anyone vacuumed was. It was probably Grandma Nancy, insisting on doing it herself sometime before she passed.

Then I remember how dust is mostly made of people, skin we shed without realizing it, and it’s like I’m grave digging. All I want is to uncover my brother, but I have to get through everything my dad and grandmother left behind before I can find him.

When even the bathrooms are sparkling, I finally settle into an armchair. Once I’ve stopped moving, though, my energy regroups in my eyes and I feel ready to sob. I don’t want to, so I try to steady myself the way my mom taught me. Deep breaths. Affirming phrases. Five things I see. A reminder that I am not my mind, and I am not my body. I am both, and I am more than both.

Right now, though? I feel like a mind and a body in desperate need of crying. I can’t do that. Without the cracks of splitting logs ringing from outside anymore, I don’t know where Dad is. I don’t want him to find me in tears. If anything will make him regret telling me about Brennan, it’s that. So I run up the stairs and collapse on my bed and try to stop everything. No headphones or watching videos or texting Riley. I get as close to being nothing at all as I possibly can, until waking up makes me realize I’ve fallen asleep.

Everything is still ruined. I am worse for the wear, but I get up because I hear music coming from the living room. It doesn’t sound like Dad, who sticks to classics or improvs melodies like the ones in his music. This is all counterbeats and staccatos, hardly any languid movement between left and right.

This music is daring. It’s happy. It gives me hope. I wait for a moment halfway down the stairs, before the wall turns into a railing, and close my eyes. I take a step, and another, until I’m past the wall and to the railing and opening my eyes, pretending I’m coming downstairs to my brother on those keys, playing for me.

Instead, it’s Grayson. It’s always Grayson. He’s everywhere.

Halfway through a measure, he stops, like he senses me. Doesn’t even have the sensibility to finish a musical thought, and the unfinished melody makes me uneasy. “Adaya.” He picks his phone up from the top of the piano, messes with it a moment, and slides it into his pocket.

“Aren’t you going to finish the song?”

“Nah, it’s not important. I was just messing around.” I neither believe him nor press the issue.

We’re still talking from different levels of the house, me halfway down the stairs, leaning over the railing, him looking up at me. I’d rather be equals, so I join him before speaking again. “Do you not have a piano at your house? How did you compose without one?”

“I have a keyboard in my bedroom, but it’s not really the same, especially for writing. Nancy used to let me come over whenever. I had this idea — I was on the doorstep when I realized — ”

It’s weird, watching the loss of someone I loved wash over someone else’s face. “Oh.”

“But your dad let me in so I figured I might as well.” He fidgets. “Anyway. Do you want to play?”

I slide onto the bench beside him, but hesitate. I don’t even know where to put my hands. “I don’t have anything — ”

“We could improv together.”

It’s different, sitting with him and not my dad. I don’t think he’d teach me without even making sure I’m listening first. But our arms brush. What if we play notes too close together and our hands overlap? “What key? Time signature? Were you thinking more like Heart and Soul or — ”

Grayson takes his hands off the piano and raises them in mocking surrender, a smile crossing his face. “You really haven’t done this before. Didn’t mean to short-circuit you.” He nudges me. “Are you all right?”

“Fine. Really. But I’d rather not play right now.”

“You just don’t want to be shown up,” he teases.

I can work with that. “Exactly it. Can’t have you thinking you’re better than me.”

He laughs and changes the subject. “You know, I’ve spent a lot of time in this house over the years. It has never, not once, been this clean. Don’t go telling me your dad did it, or your grandmother’s ghost came back and cleaned it all in her sleep, because there were more important things to her than cleaning.”

With him on the piano bench, hips touching mine, I can think about telling him what I can’t even bring myself to tell Riley. Something about his immediacy — how he is here, and now, and the space between us vibrates like we’re a fifth chord waiting to resolve — makes me want to tell him.

Or maybe it’s just because it’s harder to ghost someone when they’re standing right in front of you.

“We can talk outside,” he suggests when he sees my hesitation. “No piano to trip you up there.”

There are a lot of places I’d rather be than outside, but I grab a heavy coat and a scarf and my boots. Snow still falls, this constant but subtle thing. I shake the snowflakes from my scarf and my hair, but they won’t leave me alone. They fall gently, but their very gentleness is so incessant they cover God only knows how much. But things that get buried press up in the springtime, blooming.

“Thanks for trusting me,” Grayson says, when he chooses a spot against a tree trunk, on the exposed side, so he sits in the snow. I didn’t bother with all of Dad’s gear, so I brush off a stump so my jeans don’t get soaking wet. “What happened to make you clean like that? Taylor — you remember my sister? — only cleans when she’s angry, and when she cleans in that mood, our house absolutely sparkles.”

I blow a stray snowflake off my nose. It’s immediately replaced. Tiny, delicate, incessant flakes. “I’ve been looking for the best way to say this, but that sheet music we found? It seemed so perfect, like it was meant for me, right? Well… I guess I know why now.”

The whole story comes out of me, even the parts he already knows, from Pastor Clark’s words about a brother, to the box in the spare bedroom, to how Dad basically told me he wrote the music himself, something to remember Brennan by. Somehow, now that I’ve shared it with someone else, it has morphed into a secret worth keeping. Something real, instead of an impossible thing inside my imagination.

“All the time I spent here and — you’re sure?”

“Positive. I don’t want it to be, but the evidence is all there. Did you ever hear my dad work on anything?”

Grayson settles against the bark of the tree. “Usually when I was over, I was the one working on the piano. Your grandma helped me a lot with that song I wrote. The one my mom sent in? First composition I ever really finished and then… Anyway, it means your dad didn’t play much when I was around.”

It would be so much easier if Grayson just knew. “Oh. But I guess it doesn’t mean anything if you just never had the chance to find out.”

“I thought you were certain he wrote it.”

I cross my arms. “I am. I also want evidence.”

He twists his pale-yellow scarf until it’s looser around his neck. “What difference does it make? Either it’s real or it isn’t, and you’re sure it’s real.”

“So? It’s the difference between a theorem and a proof.”

“You don’t have to constantly remind me how smart you are.”

I look away. “Sorry. We were studying proofs in geometry before break, and it fits. There are more than 400 proofs for the Pythagorean Theorem. It’s true, but people keep making sure.”

His hand slides through the snow, drawing a line between us. My arm dangles off the stump where I sit. Grayson is too close to me, and also much too far away. But as soon as his line reaches the stump, his finger makes a right angle and he finishes the triangle. “Well then, I guess we need a proof.”

“Right, that will be perfectly easy. All we need is evidence for something my parents hid from me my entire life, and I fly home on New Year’s Eve.”

“Come on, Adaya. You got this far. We’re the two smartest people I know. It won’t be hard for us.”

Something about the way he says us stops me. I told him a secret. He wants to help me make a plan. Now, no matter what comes of it, I guess we’re in this together.

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