Accidental Notes: A Novel

Chapter 24

Intentional Notes

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

Catch up on chapter 23 here.

Grayson is home with his family. I’ve been playing piano without keeping track of the time, but dusk darkens the room and Dad still isn’t back yet. It’s Christmas and he’s spending it somewhere besides with me. Studying this composition doesn’t help numb me to that fact. I keep being reminded that it’s his, that he once worked hard at something, when he hasn’t for as long as I’ve been alive. Still, it’s better than television and social media, which never quite numb me enough.

I pull the music off the piano and spread it on the floor again. There are parts of this music I don’t understand — not that the musical phrases don’t make sense, but being handwritten throws everything into a chaotic whirlwind. If I follow Grayson’s advice, I’d be analyzing the left hand and finding the chord progressions so I can improv when I get lost. But making something easier feels like cheating, even though my logic falls apart when I ask myself why.

This music is too heartbreakingly beautiful for anything about it to be accidental. And yet some notes are underlined. Which makes no sense because underlining doesn’t mean anything in musical notation. Some of the markings for how loudly to play, or random letters inside the Italian words that describe the tempo, are in bold. This much intentionality doesn’t track with the father I know, but maybe I don’t know him at all.

I have to know this.

Everything — about this song, about my brother, and about who my dad is — feels like a puzzle I’ve memorized but still can’t put together. A missing piece nags at me, something I know would make sense of everything if I could just find it. Somewhere in this music is the proof of a theorem I haven’t quite uncovered. There has to be. I run upstairs and grab my bullet journal and a blue pen and turn to the next blank page. I hate that I have to go past the schedule that didn’t work, then didn’t work again, to get to one, but it’s irrelevant now.

I quickly write in some block letters — THE MESSAGE IN THE MUSIC — to title the page, then transcribe the notes and annotations that make no sense, all in a line, one after the other. Halfway through fourteen pages of music, I drop my pen.

There’s no way. It’s impossible.

My hands tremble and my stomach twists and I have to make sure. So I keep writing, though the letters get shakier and shakier.

The final bold is the fermata — a pause of unspecified length — on the last note of the song. It’s drawn over so many times that the pen bleeds through the back of the paper. The last note of this song, an F, is to be held forever and ever until it fades.

It’s the final punctuation mark on my page, too, a full sentence spelled out in what I’d written off as a poor copy.

I am sorry dad I love you always and (fermata)

For as many accidental notes dot the pages of the song, nothing about this note is accidental. And as much as I thought it made sense, this music isn’t Dad’s. Not with the apology wrapped inside this note.

It’s Brennan’s song.

We never could have guessed, Dad said. But he could have. He could have. He could have.

I wish time travel were a thing, but the paradox of our existences would fail me. I go tell Brennan to give himself a second chance, to keep trying, and I never would have existed, and then I couldn’t go back to tell him.

It’s still too quiet. There’s nothing to hear but wind rattling windows, the occasional groan of a tree branch under the weight of too much snow. I’m alone with my brother’s suicide note.

From what Meghan told me, Dad still thinks Brennan’s death could have been an accident. Now I’m staring at the proof it wasn’t.

I gather the music, still unannotated with anything but fingerings on the first few pages, and put it into the piano bench. I trudge up the stairs toward my room. Brennan’s haunting music is stuck on replay in my mind. Every accidental note is intentional. Everything I’ve guessed has been wrong.

When I get to my room, I don’t even turn the light on. I throw my bullet journal on the floor. It lands upside down, pages sprawled and bent. I climb under the comforter on the bed and stare at the ceiling, looking for more signs I’ve missed.

A metronome won’t leave me alone. Darkness has swept entirely over my room, but the incessant tick tick tick doesn’t dissipate. It gets faster. Louder. That isn’t how a metronome works. The beats in my head swirl around, distorting sheet music until the notes are warped, bolded and fractured, the tail of an eighth note splitting off like a gun, every half note a noose. Entire measures of notes split away from their stems and catapult down the page to a waiting, open mouth.

Then a voice seeps through the wood of my door, getting lost on the way. “Is anyone there?” Higher pitched than I expect. Maybe it’s Brennan, here to haunt me. “Open the door. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

I stretch and sit up. The room fades bottom to top into nothingness punctuated with stars when I move too fast. “Come in,” I mumble.

“You locked it. I can’t. I’ve been trying.”

Huh. I don’t remember locking it, but sure enough, it is. I turn it and open it, even though I don’t want to see Dad at all. I don’t want anything. The moment I open the door, all I can smell is stale beer. “What time is it?”

Dad’s face looks ghostly under the illumination of his phone. “Three a.m.”

“Did you… did you know that when you knocked on the door?”

He shrugs. “Lost track of time, I guess.”

“It’s not Christmas anymore.” I’m not asking a question, so he doesn’t answer me. “When did you get home?”

“I don’t know. A while ago. I fell asleep downstairs. Then I wanted to check on you.”

“Well, I’m fine. Go away. I want to sleep.”

“Sure. But maybe put pajamas on before you sleep again?”

There’s too much judgment in his voice, considering he’s also in jeans and a flannel shirt. But there’s nothing to argue. I’m too mad at him to say anything. Instead I close the door and lie back down and pretend I’ll fall asleep again before dawn.

Dad shakes me awake, so I must have slept, but the mundane gray outside my window gives no indication of the time. Snowflakes fall harder today than they have been. “Breakfast?” Dad says.

I shrug. It doesn’t matter now. My mind, usually a place of constant chatter, second-guessing myself and planning ahead, has frozen like a river. The stillness is unsettling. Every thought is slippery: half-formed sentences, single words. Music. Brennan. Suicide. Note. Dad.

I get ready and meet Dad in the kitchen. It’s the only room in this house that feels like it belongs to both of us equally, since we’re both out of place here. But he isn’t getting breakfast ready. No porcelain bowl out for his cereal, no acai bowl for me. Dad leans on the counter and takes a candy from the icing on our gingerbread house. It takes him a minute to unstick it and as he tugs I’m afraid the whole house will come tumbling down.

“You went back into the spare bedroom.”

That feels like eons ago. A different lifetime. An alternate universe. “I had to know. You haven’t told me anything.” It’s a terrible breakfast, but I grab a piece from our gingerbread house anyway. The clock on the oven says it’s after 10:30 in the morning. “Then you disappeared all day.”

“I had things I needed to do.”

“On Christmas.” We both take a few more pieces from our gingerbread house. It should crumble as we pull it apart, but it holds together somehow.

“It didn’t feel like Christmas.”

The gumdrop is stale but sweet, the combination impossible and true at the same time. I want an apology, but I’m starting to understand who my dad is. He can be here for me as long as it’s convenient. As long as it’s easy. Like in the middle of the night on Christmas Day. But when I start asking hard questions, when he doesn’t know what to do with me, the only thing he knows how to do is disappear. “Tell me about it. I was all alone and no closer to answers. You took them away.”

Dad looks me over again and takes a breath. “All you’ve been asking about recently is your brother. You really want to know him better?”

“Of course.” And I want to find out if Dad ever knew him at all.

“Let’s go for a drive,” he says. One more gumdrop pulled from the gingerbread house. There’s an indent in the icing where it was, a splash of color, but the hints are all that remain.

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