Accidental Notes: A Novel

Chapter 28

Shatter

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

Catch up on chapter 27 here.

Before I went to bed, I slid the sheet music back into the piano bench, and as the hinges creaked it felt like I was tucking his song in for the night. Now that it’s morning, while this house moans as the wind squeezes it, and ice slaps against the windows from every direction, it’s time for the music to wake up. I know I don’t have long before we have to drive to the airport. I spread six pages across the piano with care, doubling the rest of the sheet music behind it.

Though I sit and my hands are ready, I can’t sink into the notes like I want to. The beat of the ice is syncopated, which is distracting from the steady rhythm Brennan’s music demands of me. I slam my hands down and every single note is wrong.

“Not quite the chirping of an alarm clock,” Dad says, a yawn slipping through with his words. I glance at my watch. It’s nearly seven o’clock and we should already be out the door. The pass can’t be trusted in this storm, I know that much. And the only thing worse than having to go home, where my mother is dating my music instructor, is getting stuck here.

I turn around, and Dad’s still in a fuzzy robe. Plaid slippers muffle the sound of his footsteps as he approaches.

“Don’t we need to be ready soon? I lost track of time. Thought you’d — ” But I cut myself off. I don’t actually think Dad would have parented me. Neither of us do.

“About that,” he says, and pushes his phone toward me.

It doesn’t take more than two seconds to see what he means. I hand back the phone and head to the window. Dawn is still somewhere east and south of us, so it’s hard to make out any details outside. When I press my face to the glass, all I see is snow. Banks of it on the ground, piled like waves frozen in a photograph, like sand dunes. There was snow on the ground when I went to bed, but it’s doubled now. Maybe even tripled.

About four inches into the snow pressed against the sliding glass door is a break where, like the filling in a cake, a dense, shimmering layer about an inch thick resides. Ice.

“Everywhere?” I ask.

“All the way to Portland. Eight inches of snow overnight at the airport, and the same ice.” Dad unhitches his eyes from mine. It feels intentional. “All flights are grounded until further notice.”

Despite the cold seeping into my palms from the window I’m still touching, sweat materializes all over me, all at once. My face burns and my stomach twists into a knot. I’d want to throw up if I’d eaten anything. I want to throw up anyway. “So… I’m not getting home?”

Dad shakes his head. I wonder if I’m hiding my fear so well he doesn’t see it, or if he’s just so caught up in whatever he’s feeling he can’t reach out to save me, too. “Not today. Probably not tomorrow, either.”

Panic washes over me, steady waves from a tide I don’t realize is swelling until I’m caught in an undercurrent. I’ve spent my whole life feeling like I’m seconds from falling prey to an ocean that’s ready to drown me. Here it is. An ocean made of snow. Then beyond Dad, beyond Grayson, is the whole reason I was supposed to go home. It was one thing to decide not to audition again. It’s another not to have a choice. “What about — ”

“You can Zoom it in again, can’t you?” Dad says.

“Probably. Sure.” My panic subsides because I have to take charge. One of the few things I’ve figured out here is that Dad won’t. “I’ll call Mom and Mr. Gutierrez and see what we can arrange.” I wonder if he already knows about Mom’s relationship. It wouldn’t surprise me either way, I guess, and right now I don’t really care what he thinks.

I turn my back on the snowstorm and settle into a corner on an inside wall, where the whips of tree branches aren’t quite so loud. But right as Mr. Gutierrez’s phone starts ringing, there’s a crackle of electricity. Then a silence descends on the house that somehow makes the howling trees feel simultaneously closer and farther away. An eerie echo I’m probably just imagining. It takes me a moment to realize what it is.

The power’s gone out.

“Adaya? Are you there?” Mr. Gutierrez must have been talking for a while, but his voice seemed like part of the illusion of the wind.

“I’m here. And it looks like I’m going to be here for a long time.” Saying it out loud breaks me. I hang up on him. He can Google what happened. And now he won’t have to worry about that pity-audition he was giving me just because he likes my mom.

At least now I can blame the storm. If I never audition, I can’t get the part. It’s statistically impossible. Maybe this will hurt less than trying again and failing again.

But as I stand from the pile of blankets I’d sat in, desperate to do something to get this feeling out of my body, hurting less and not hurting at all are so far apart they may as well be on different planets. My phone shakes in my hand, energy pulsing through me and begging for an outlet.

The first thing I notice is the Christmas tree in the corner. Yesterday it was fine, needles dark green, branches hardly bending under the weight of ornaments. Today, though? Dead, the whole way through. Just like Dad said. Just like my plans to go home.

I had other plans today, though, I remember. Plans with Grayson. There might be a chance… I go to the concert page on my phone and check. A banner runs across the top, saying for now the concert is tentatively on, pending the weather clearing up as predicted. I wonder if he even wants me there.

Adaya: Hey, Grayson. With the storm and everything, I’m not getting back to California today. So, uh, I’m here for the concert. If you’re planning on going.

I send the text before I can overthink it, then leave the app. Twenty seconds of unbearable silence. Open it again, no read receipt. Close. Count slowly to thirty. Reopen. Read receipt. No ellipses.

Not that I deserve to hear from him. If I keep staring at our texts hoping something happens, I’m gonna drain the battery, which is an unbelievably bad idea in the middle of a power outage. If I want to forget about him, I have to do something.

I light candles and think impossible things about what would happen if I tipped one over. It would be so lovely to watch this place burn. I steady the votive in my hand, careful not to drop it.

The day goes on. The house gets colder as candles flicker and dark gray clouds turn almost black. Snow flurries slow down, but that only adds to the darkness, since there’s less to reflect what little light shines through. I don’t sit still or stop moving once. I straighten piles of boxes as I think about shoving them over. I shine the floor I want to spit on. I arrange glass figurines on a shelf and wonder what it would sound like as they shatter.

Dad sits in front of the black screen of the TV and scrolls through his phone until it dies, then his iPad until it dies, then his laptop. He ignores the cereal I bring for breakfast, the sandwich I set down for him at lunch.

The estate sale might not even be happening, with this storm, but I’ve single-handedly conquered the preparation anyway. I’ve run out of things to clean and rearrange. The only thing still out of place is the wine bottle I was left with after the white elephant exchange on Christmas Eve. It isn’t Dad’s. It can’t come home with me. It can’t stay here, either, since Grandma’s house will be for sale soon. I clutch it by the neck, then cradle it like a child, but nothing feels right.

I decide I need to ask Dad so I go looking for him, bottle in hand. But he isn’t in the living room anymore. The snow falling outside looks idyllic if you ignore what’s beneath the surface. I stare at it for a moment, but I don’t know what I’m trying to find. The stillness is eerie. Then, suddenly, the light flickers on above me. The television blinks, and then it’s on again like nothing ever happened.

A flush, a faucet running. I turn away from the television and past the stairs toward the bathroom. Dad opens the door, wiping his hands on his jeans. But before he even registers that I’m there, he looks up at the lights. “Power’s back on.”

“It is.”

Dad starts, this look on his face like he’d forgotten I was even in the house at all. I wonder what I was to him as I took care of everything. A buzzing fly in his peripheral vision? Invisible? A ghost? “What are you — I thought you were cleaning.”

I miss Christmas Day, when at least I knew I was alone. He’s been as gone the last few hours as he was then, but I’ve had to go around him. Take care of him. Do the things he should have been doing to prepare this house for not belonging to his family anymore. His absence is a lot easier to deal with when he actually isn’t there. Like the past five years. But it hasn’t been Mom and me only since we moved. It’s been just Mom and me for fifteen years, except sometimes we had someone else in the house.

“Yeah. I was. Don’t worry about helping, though.” I lean against the wall. “I did the whole house for you.”

“Thanks,” he says, like he doesn’t catch a single ounce of my sarcasm. He’s looking over my shoulder, toward the living room where the television is on. Some show I don’t recognize by voice, and I wonder if Dad even knows it. As far as the look on his face says, though, the power being on again is his salvation, and me cleaning the house was a given.

He tries to move past me, but I can’t let him. Not right now. One hand still cradling the bottle of wine, I use the other to grab his wrist. “No. I have a question for you and you’re going to stick around and answer it for once.”

“What are you talking about? I’m always here for you.”

“Where? Sitting in the chair? Attached to a phone you never picked up when I called? When was the last time you sat down and helped me when I needed something? Even if it was hard. Even if you didn’t want to talk about it. You ran away from me on Christmas to avoid talking about Brennan.”

“Brennan is none of your business. He never was.” Dad still won’t look at me, and I don’t even want him to anymore. He shakes his wrist free and I let him.

Red-hot feelings that have pulsed through me for hours beg for release. “He. Is. My. Brother. He matters to me. And he matters a hell of a lot more to you than I ever did. Even now. He’s been dead for seventeen years, Dad. For the love of God. He’s dead!”

“He’s my son. He’s my family.”

“In a way I never was and never will be.” The wine I’m holding is proof of that. Everyone had been so preoccupied with their own grief that they couldn’t even see me.

“You have no right to talk to me that way on the anniversary — I’m your father.”

For days, all I’d wanted was for him to stand up to me, to parent me, to make a single decision that mattered. And this is the one he chooses. This is where he finally draws that line. It’s the wrong thing to stand up for and he should know it. It isn’t even true. He may be my father, but he’s never been fatherly to me.

“You’re a sperm donor. Even when I lived here. You’re nice to me when it’s convenient. When it’s easy. The rest of the time — you think I don’t see you? You’re busy numbing yourself in front of the television, or with alcohol, or at that stupid piano, unable to get over the loss of one child and realize you’re losing another.”

I run out of breath and have to stop. Dad’s eyes are glazed over, his attention focused elsewhere. The chattering of the television fills the silence I left. “Dad?”

“Huh? Sorry. Was trying to listen to — Can we do this later?”

I don’t think as I raise the wine bottle I’m holding and the liquid sloshes around, unbalanced in my hand. Then I do think. This wine is everything I hate about my family right now. It’s every secret they’ve kept, every lie they’ve told, every ounce of grief they’ve drowned themselves in instead of talking. Dad. Mom. Even Grandma Nancy, who let me sit on her piano bench covered in scratches made by little boys pushing cars without once telling me one of those little boys was my brother.

She probably promised the piano to him first. She probably only saw me as a replacement, same as my parents. I don’t want any of it right now. Not a single bit. Dad still hasn’t gotten past me, but it’s easy to push through him. Two steps and I can see the piano. Two seconds and my arm is ready. I throw it. The burden is finally, finally, out of my hands.

Milliseconds later, the piano groans, its last cry a quiet discord of notes that don’t belong together as the bottle falls onto the keys. The storm outside the windows is percussion as the piano sings one last song.

It stops abruptly and so do I, frozen in place as I watch wine soak into the wooden keys beneath the white, staining them red and swelling them until they’re impossible to play. The F just above middle C gets the worst of it, wedged up and out of place as wine soaks into the E and G on either side.

Soon the piano is bleeding, red drops that patter onto the hardwood floor beneath it like rain.

I tear my eyes away and toward Dad, but he’s a statue. He’s looking this direction now, but I’m sure he still doesn’t see me. I wish he’d yell at me. I want to yell at myself. Not a single glance, though. Not one, as he takes two more steps toward the piano, then drops to his knees inches from the first shard of glass.

Everything would be better if he could admit how much he hates me. Tell me I’m not good enough. That I’m no Brennan and never will be. That what I did is completely unforgivable. But the only noises are the drip of wine, creak after creak as more keys malign, and the incessant television clamoring in the other room.

I’m not even important enough to blame.

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