Accidental Notes: A Novel

Chapter 4

Bend in the Plan

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

Catch up on chapter 3 here.

Bend in the Plan

With as much as I practiced at home, there’s something still missing in how I play this song that makes it far from performance ready. Then there’s the fact I can’t find my way into memorizing this piece. I’ve learned more complicated pieces by heart. There’s no time for that now, but I have to at least memorize enough so I can turn the page without interrupting the flow.

I pull my phone out of the deep pocket in my Hamilton hoodie and open my metronome app. The steady tick doesn’t ground me like it usually does. I lose my way through the arpeggios and chords almost immediately, so I reset my metronome to half speed and start over. The notes play through my head as I try to remember exactly how this song sounds, but I don’t have to know. Everything I need to play it perfectly is right there on the page.

My left hand arches through G, D, G, B, and D, matching the metronome’s beat while I hold down a chord with my right. Before I move to the second chord, though, Aunt Patricia’s in my peripheral vision. She leans down as she comes closer, side-eying my phone. “Half time? Why would you play in half time?”

I stare at the cherry-red wood, grain like calm waves. “I won’t be playing at half time at the funeral, but I need to practice before tomorrow. I’d hate to disrespect your mother by screwing up.”

“Disrespect her? My mother never would have played like this.” Aunt Patricia grabs my phone and mutes it, probably to make sure I can hear her lecture. I brace myself for anger, but her words are soft. “You have to turn off the metronome and feel the music. That’s what your grandmother did. That’s why her music was so magical.”

It was magical, but I never watched Grandma Nancy practice. I guess I assumed she practiced same as I did, and perfection happened when you got a lot better at it than I was.

“Feeling the music is for the audience. It will happen when I get everything right, just the way it’s written down,” I say.

“Aw, sweetie“. If only you’d stuck around long enough for Mom to teach you the most important part of making music,” she says, like leaving was my choice. “The notes are there to remind you the way when you get lost, but they can’t tell you everything you need to know. You need to know what you’re feeling when you play, so you can choose what your audience feels.”

That doesn’t sound like playing piano. It sounds like manipulation, making myself more important than the composer. Telling my audience how to feel. It’s inauthentic. Wrong. But those words won’t climb down from my brain and into my mouth, so all Aunt Patricia gets from me is a sigh.

“When was the last time you heard Meat Loaf’s version of the song?” she asks.

“I don’t know. The day Dad told me I’d have to play it, probably.”

“Then that is what you should be using your phone for, not some electronic metronome. Pull it up. Listen to it. Feel it. Then come back and play what you feel.”

If only it were that simple. Feeling is one thing. But getting those feelings out of me doesn’t work. Not in words and not through a piano. And yet she means well. “Let me get my AirPods,” I say.

My stomach growls, protesting as I move away from the food instead of toward it, but seconds aren’t ready yet, so my stomach will have to deal. I pocket the AirPods and tread through the crowded house to the sliding glass door that leads into Grandma’s backyard so I can be alone.

Grandma’s yard is more the edge of a forest than a fenced-in, pool-laden thing like we have in Santa Monica. Evergreens grow thirty feet tall, dotted haphazardly along the landscape, sparse near the house, dancing into a forest in the distance. There’s no fence, no lines marking property boundaries. In the dark away from the city, everything is cast in silhouettes, more shadow puppets than monsters. The stars are bright, piling over and on top of one another like chords laid out with no staff lines. Fermatas for the stars that blur into constellations. Fortes for the ones that burn brightest.

I sit down on a stump and let my heels rest against the bark. My toes dig into the frosty ground as I press play. The arpeggio of the piano greets me, and soon so does Meat Loaf’s gravelly, sincere voice, singing these words like he wrote them, when I know he didn’t. There’s probably something to that, but I’m too focused on the piano to notice.

The longer the song plays, the more acutely aware I am that clear skies in December mean something different in Bend than they do in California. My hoodie is hardly enough to counteract a temperature well below freezing. No amount of music, not even hauntingly beautiful music, can wrap me in warmth now.

Movement to my left hitches my breath. I shiver and pause the song. A creature ambles toward me, and I remember that the edge of Grandma’s property is wild. Then it’s close enough for me to see past the silhouette, to a parka, ski hat, gloves, and snow pants. The person is so completely covered I wonder if they’re an illusion. But visible breaths spiral my way and soon morph into words. “You’ve got to be freezing. What are you doing outside?”

“Making a big mistake.”

Somehow just my voice stops the parka in its tracks. They study me, head bent to one side. “Adaya Finley?”

I didn’t recognize his voice at first, but something about how he says my name makes him unmistakable.

Grayson West and I were in the same fourth-grade class before I moved. We’d grown close because my grandmother taught him piano lessons, too, and we were both entering our first piano competition that December. We’d talk music and books at recess while he hung upside down from a monkey bar and I perched on the ladder, holding sheet music for both of us. He’d help me with dynamics and I’d help him with fingerings.

the time the recital came, we’dWe’d spent weeks preparing. I had every note of both pieces memorized, every forte and fermata burned into my brain. The morning of the competition, I put on a red satin dress with a velvet black bow and a bolero. When we arrived at the church hosting the competition, the first person I saw was Grayson. He looked handsomer than I’d ever seen him in his pressed white shirt and suspenders, but I couldn’t tell him that, could hardly muster a whispered “good luck” backstage.

I played as perfect as I possibly could. Didn’t miss a single note, a single dynamics change. I smiled so big as I bowed. Then Grayson took to the stage and I’d stayed where I could watch him. He made no less than three mistakes that I could count, but forty-five minutes later, he was the one holding the trophy.

Mom had told me I had to congratulate him as we munched on stale cookies and watery lemonade in the foyer afterward. So I trudged over. “Hey, Grayson. Congrats.”

His fingers clamped tightly over the trophy as I spoke. “Thanks. Funny, huh. We both thought you would win and then…” His sentence disappeared into a chuckle that grew into a laugh.

I walked away without saying a word.

That evening I sat in my room alone, trying to tune out the fight my parents were having. It was nothing unusual, especially for December, so there was no point in listening. I should have, though, because twenty minutes later Mom was upstairs in my room, her makeup smeared. “You need to pack, Adaya. I told you we’d been thinking about moving? Well, it’s time.”

I hadn’t spoken to Grayson since

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again,” Grayson says now.

The last time I talked to him, he was laughing at me. “I… sorry. Who are you?”

“You can’t tell me you don’t remember me.” His tone is joking, but the puffs of his breath come out smaller. He isn’t exhaling. Then he does, all at once, in a laugh that dances toward me. “Oh, right. I’m a walking pile of snow gear for all you can tell. Grayson, remember? From fourth grade? You used to steal half of my brownies at lunchtime while you lectured on Chopin.”

He remembers so much, more than I expected him to, but I can’t shrug off his betrayal, so I shrug my shoulders instead, looking down at his boots. “Oh. Right, I guess.”

“What kind of mistake are you making? You’re just… sitting there.”

Talking to you, for one thing, I think. But it’s unfair to release five years of hurt on him, and I’m too cold to bother. “I should have turned myself into a walking pile of snow gear before coming out here. But there’s a lot of people inside and I needed to listen to Meat Loaf.”

“Needed to?”

My lips are turning blue. I didn’t know this is something someone could literally feel, but I can. They’re chapping and going numb all at once, and I’m almost too cold to shiver. But giving up means facing an annoyance of well-meaning relatives. “I’m supposed to play one of his songs for Grandma’s funeral.”

He shoves his gloved hands into his pocket and looks down. “Oh. Of course you’ll be playing for the funeral.”

It figures he’d not want to hear me play again. Not after the disaster of last time. I stuff my hands deeper into the pocket of my hoodie and lace my own freezing fingers together. It just makes me colder. “Dad asked me. Chose the song and everything. I think it’s the only reason I’m here.”

Grayson waits a long time before saying anything else. It’s just us in the dark, where the moonlight catches on our breaths. A few times his breaths come out sharp, like the starts of sentences, but he never says them. Until finally, “You’re freezing, California Girl. We should get you inside.”

I want to challenge him on it. My family’s being nice to me, I guess, but I don’t even know them. My stomach growls. Dinner round two should be ready by now, and I should probably eat at some point. “What are you doing over here anyway?” I say as I stand. “I thought you lived closer to downtown.”

He walks beside me, closer than he has to. Maybe to keep me warm. “Mom sent me to come wrangle our dog from your family. She always ends up here somehow. Likes your dad, I think.”

“Harmony is your dog?”

The way Harmony sidles up to him as we open the sliding glass door is answer enough. “We moved out here last year, when Fred Roberson died. Got Harmony at the same time.” I wait for Grayson as he sheds layer after layer of outerwear, but I don’t know why I’m waiting. Steak taunts me from the kitchen and I’m pretty sure Uncle Jeff put extra butter in the mashed potatoes. But I kneel, petting Harmony anyway, watching Grayson transform.

He’s a little taller than I am, skinny as a rail, glasses perched on his nose. His blond hair is cut into a hairstyle too on-trend for the rest of him. His hands boast long fingers perfect for the piano and his cheekbones have gained definition over the past five years. I can’t stand the idea of thinking this boy, who befriended me only to beat me and laugh about it, is cute. My heart pounds anyway.

“Grayson!” Dad says when he sees us, rounding a corner from the living room. Aunt Patricia calls after him, Uncle Jeff on her heels, but Dad ignores them. “Have you eaten yet? Can I get you some hot cocoa?” He doesn’t wait for an answer from either of us. “Two cups coming right up.”

I try not to calculate exactly how much more excited he seems to see Grayson than he was this morning to see me. I fail.

“You hanging in there?” Dad says to Grayson. “I know it’s been a hard few weeks for you, too.”

“Doing all right I guess, Mr. F.”

“Dad,” I say. He’s probably forgotten all about that piano competition. Or maybe he decided he likes Grayson better, since he won. Dad ignores me, and Grayson follows him to the kitchen and opens a cupboard door without asking. The inside is packed with coffee mugs. Like he knew. He hands the mugs to Dad and gets himself a plate, moving through the kitchen like he owns it. Dad pours the hot cocoa and adds marshmallows I’ve never liked to both cups.

“If you need anything, you have my number.”

“I’m sure I’ll be around,” Grayson says with a quick glance at me and a longer one at his dog before he leaves the room.

I sincerely hope not.

Harmony nudges against my hand and all but pushes me into the kitchen with her. Maybe she’s hoping for more steak. Dad is already back to whispering with Aunt Patricia and Uncle Jeff by the sink. They huddle close and their voices raise and lower in turns, like the path of a Tilt-a-Whirl, and none of them sounds happy. But I won’t eavesdrop on whatever they’re fighting about this time.

I take a plate instead of the mug Grayson set out for me and get the meal I’d planned on. I make my way to the living room, since my cousins’ have taken over the dining room table with a game of Spoons. Grayson’s sitting on one of the couches there. The marshmallows are already gone from his mug. Of course. Harmony jumps and curls up beside him in the middle. I feel almost beckoned to sit beside her, so I do, setting my plate beside the #1 Grandma mug I made in first grade. Then I warm my hands in Harmony’s fur, trying not to memorize the feel of Grayson’s hand against mine as we pet her together.

“I thought you needed to get Harmony home?” I say when Grayson’s food and cocoa are gone but he still hasn’t left. He looks more comfortable here than I do. Which just makes me more uncomfortable.

“You’re back. Mom will understand.” But the curt way he says it only tells me how much he’s still hiding.

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