Accidental Notes: A Novel

Chapter 5

An Echo of Ghosts

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

Catch up on Chapter 4 here.

Dad looks worse for the wear when he comes downstairs the next morning, like preparing for his mother’s funeral is enough to age him decades overnight. “We need to get going soon,” he says. I don’t budge from the piano bench where I’ve been practicing the past few hours. I’ve got a knot for a stomach, clenching my insides to distraction, but I pick up my music anyway.

“If we hurry,” he says, “you might get a chance to use the church piano to run through the song a few times.”

That’s enough to get me to move. I’m dressed in a warm black turtleneck and black work pants, the outfit of a stagehand instead of a pianist. When I do showcases, I get to wear the fanciest clothes I own. This is not my idea of fancy.

Our truck ride to church is silent except for Dad’s phone shouting out directions every few streets. I’m surprised. The church is the one we attended when I was a kid. It was the one my piano competition was held at two days before I moved away. Has it been that long since Dad stepped foot in a church?

The parking lot is empty when we arrive, and he pulls into a visitor spot near the front. The doors are unlocked, like church doors should be, and we walk in to an atmosphere that’s stuffy with the smell of old people and perfume. No one is in the foyer right now, though. The smell lingers like an echo of ghosts.

Dad opens the door to the sanctuary. I ignore all church decorum and run when I see that piano. It’s a baby grand, sitting on the side of a carpeted stage, and the last time I touched its keys I was losing a competition to Grayson. I slide onto the bench, lacquered black, and set up my song. Something about the resonance of a baby grand makes me feel completely at home.

“Be quick,” Dad says, almost as permission. “We have about half an hour before guests will start to arrive.”

I play a few scales to warm up. These keys are heaven, truly. My regret and my pain from the day of the competition reside in the atrium, but here at the piano I remember what it was like to be perfect. I need to be perfect again, maybe even more so now. I run through the arpeggios, focus attention on the several key changes, play along with my metronome.

From my spot at the keys, I notice movement just backstage. It reminds me of how I watched Grayson a lifetime ago, but no one should be here yet. My fingers trip over the notes. Oh well. Better to get the mistake over with before it matters.

Out of the shadows steps an old man in a simple black suit, one hand in his pocket. He must be older than Grandma was. His skin droops down his cheeks like melting snow. I can’t play when I’m being studied, not even when he trades his tense brows for a casual smile. With the smile, though, I recognize Pastor Clark. We didn’t come to church every Sunday, to Grandma Nancy’s dismay, but we were here often enough that I know him. I’m about to say hello when he speaks. “Your dad told me he had the music selection under control. I didn’t realize he meant you. For a moment there backstage I could have sworn it was your brother.”

My hands crash into the keys, no chords, all discord. “I… don’t have a brother.” For a moment as he listened to me, I felt seen by an adult for the first time since I got here. Like someone saw me, and not Grandma Nancy’s granddaughter, or Dad’s child, or the ten-year-old I used to be. I don’t know who he’s mistaken me for, but he doesn’t even see a Finley.

His hand comes out of his pocket and joins the other as he wrings them together. But he’s not looking at me anymore. I think he’s searching out my dad’s face in the audience. “Adaya, right? Grown up since the last time I saw you, sure, but now it’s all the more evident you look just like Brennan.”

There has to be a mistake. I am an only child. I know this. So there’s some other Adaya, some explanation for what he’s said. But how many Adayas are there? My arms are simultaneously lead weights and charged with electricity. An invisible screw winds through my jaw. I can’t speak, can’t move.

“I’m glad you’re here.” He comes to the piano bench and pats my shoulder. “Nancy would love to have your music filling her favorite place.”

“I think that’s enough,” Dad says, too loud, from his pew. He gets up and moves toward us faster than I can ever remember. “People are starting to arrive. Come sit with me.”

I know it hasn’t been thirty minutes yet, and the place is still deserted. I open my mouth to say so, but no words come out. I can’t even think of any words. Dad leads me to the first pew in the church, where I sit staring at the cross in the background and the Christmas lights sparsely spread along the ceiling. Eventually, family members stop and say hi, apologize for my loss. I thank them, but all I want to be asking is if it’s true that I have — had? — a brother. . .The pastor is lying, I think over and over again. He’s wrong. It’s the only thing that makes sense.

My grandmother was a popular woman. Five minutes before the funeral is set to start, the church is full, shoulders against shoulders, sniffles overlapping one another, a sea of black. I want to mourn her, too. She was so much of my childhood in Bend. Instead all I have to offer the sanctuary are questions. My hands clench my legs, sweaty, and I’m itching for the keys of the piano.

Multitudes of people come up to the pulpit to speak about my grandma’s impact on their lives. The piano lessons, volunteering in the nursery at church for long enough to hold her babies’ babies, her performance in the Bend City Choir as a young woman. For as much as I idolized her, the woman I’m learning about feels like a stranger. A fascinating one. Someone I wish I could have gotten to know.

And yet if I had — have? — a brother, she knew. And she never told me. Just like my dad, and my mother, and who knows who else.

Soon, Dad’s shoulder, which has been pressing into mine the whole time since so many people are crammed into this pew reserved for family, nudges me intentionally. “Hey,” he whispers. “It’s your turn to play.”

I was so caught up in my own thoughts I hadn’t been paying attention, and now I’ve missed my cue. Great. That’s exactly the way I planned on starting. I pick up my music from under my seat and climb the stairs of the stage with trepidation. I’ve performed so often nerves shouldn’t be eating me from the inside out, but they’re worse than ever. Here, in a crowd of strangers who call themselves my family, while I wonder about a brother I never knew I had.

The music almost falls off when I set it on the piano again. I should’ve left it up here after practice, but Pastor Clark’s words had me so frazzled, it was second nature to take it with me when Dad called me off the stage.

Focus, Adaya, I chastise. You know what you’re doing.

My hands splay over the keys as I take a breath. Tears press against my face, but I have to fight them. I can’t let my emotions take over. There’s music to be played and I need to be steady to do it. I’m not steady. I’m going to make a mistake. Being here is a mistake. What Pastor Clark said is a mistake — it has to be.

I still haven’t pressed a note. The silence in this church was maddening, but its replacement with the shuffling of programs and feet is worse. If I take too much longer, the uncomfortable shuffles will turn to whispers. Too much time after that and the whispers will turn to outright laughter. Press a note, Adaya. Start playing. Something is better than nothing. Play “Mary Had a Little Lamb” if you have to. Just make their judgment stop.

One more breath. I try not to think about how I’d survive an orchestra. I try not to think about whoever Brennan is. I try not to think about anything but the key of G, and my fingers strike the keys. One measure down. Another. A third. Soon, my left foot taps to the rhythm, filling the space once occupied by my metronome. Not long after that, I’m turning the page. But as chords switch to arpeggios that jump up the keys in intervals so far apart I have to guess, rather than know, where my hand needs to fall, I strike the wrong note. Not only is it wrong, but a G sharp, when I’m in the key of G and the note was supposed to be an F sharp. It grates against my ears in the worst way.

Just keep playing, I tell myself. It’s what Grandma Nancy would tell me. It’s what Mr. Gutierrez would tell me, too. It’s the one piece of advice I’ve always found impossible to follow. Now, between the pressure of a family I feel like I have to impress and a family member who can’t be real, it’s more impossible than usual. My fingers won’t listen. Static draws up from the keys and repels my hands entirely. They can’t play. Won’t. I can’t start over. Can’t keep going. Everything is too broken.

I stand up altogether.

There goes everything. Absolutely everything.

“Sorry,” I squeak out. My feet move almost without me noticing. I stumble down the aisle and the only good thing these unnecessary tears are doing for me is blurring the crowd of people who all witnessed my mistake. The door to the sanctuary closes behind me, and as the atrium comes into view, I’m slammed with the memories of my last failure inside this church. I can’t stay. I keep running. The smell of mediocre food leads me to a small fellowship hall off to one side. A few volunteers are there setting out sandwiches.

I need something to busy these useless hands before I use them to catch tears that shouldn’t fall. “Can I help?” I ask.

“Aren’t you — you’re Eric’s daughter, aren’t you? The piano prodigy?” asks an older woman with salt and pepper hair pulled tight into a bun.

I scoff. “Not if today is any indication.”

“Everyone makes mistakes. Even professionals. Especially when it’s something so emotional.”

Tension slides into every muscle of my body. “Professionals don’t walk out in the middle of a song.”

She laughs. It’s almost good-natured and that’s almost worse. “I can’t imagine the stress you’re under right now. With your grandmother passing, and coming back here to — ” She stops herself like there’s something I’m coming back to besides this void. Something like a brother. “You’re under a lot of stress. People will understand.”

“Pastor Clark said I reminded him of my brother Brennan.”

“Well — ”

“I don’t have a brother. I don’t know who it is everyone is confusing me with, but I don’t have a brother.”

She looks like she’s about to hug me, but thinks better of it. “Have a sandwich, Adaya. Sit down.”

“Uh, thanks,” I say, taking the cucumber and cream cheese sandwich like this is high tea instead of a funeral. But I don’t want to sit down, not by her. Whatever it is I need to hear, I don’t want to find out from a stranger. I wander instead to a corner where I can make myself feel small and stare at the ceiling, pretending I can trace the popcorn into constellations.

“There are chairs, you know. All over the room,” someone says way too soon.

“Are you everywhere?”

“Unfortunately, omnipresence isn’t one of my superpowers. But I’m working on it,” Grayson says as he slides down the wall beside me, so close I can practically feel his arm against mine. Seeing Grayson is the last thing I want, or second-last, after him leaving now that he’s here. He looks so nice in his black button-down shirt and dark-wash jeans.

“I know the service isn’t over yet,” I prod.

He turns away from me until the lenses of his glasses are all glare from the lights and no soul. “I, uh, was worried about you. You kinda choked in there.”

“So, what, you followed me out to check on me? If you remember as much about me as you seem to, you’d know how little I’d want to be around people after embarrassing myself halfway to Mars.”

Grayson still isn’t looking at me, but his head angles toward me on the wall just enough that I notice. I want to lean my head his way, too, until I can feel the static fly between our hair. Then I want to punch myself for thinking it. “I was worried about you, but that’s not why I left,” he confesses. “Grandma Nancy — we’d gotten close. This is my first funeral where I’ve really cared and I didn’t want to be in there anymore.”

He takes a breath, shuffles a little bit like he’s as nervous beside me as I am beside him. “But I only knew her well the past few months or so. I can’t imagine what you were going through, having to play for this. You could have started over. It’s not like anyone expects you to be okay, you know.”

“I do. I expect me to be okay.”

“You have always been way too hard on yourself, Adaya.”

Suddenly I’m aware that we’ve moved in microscopic increments until we are touching in a few places. Knees. Elbows. Not enough to be noticeable unless you’re paying attention, but I am. I want nothing more than to move closer, but it’s the wrong thing to want.

Instead, I squeeze into the corner and away from him. “If you’re hurting, don’t spend your time comforting me. I don’t need it. I’m fine, Grayson, even if you aren’t. Fine.” I can’t tell him what Pastor Clark said. I don’t want to bother Grayson if he doesn’t know, but more than that, I couldn’t stand it if somehow he did. The longer he sits here beside me, the more at risk I am of slipping and mentioning it anyway. “Please. If you want to do me a favor, leave me alone.”

Now when Grayson looks at me, there’s no glare from the lights so I see the way his eyes fall. His disappointment burrows its way into me, balling inside my throat as this kind of half-sob. Proof that I hate how my words made him look like that.

But I can’t take it back. It’s better for both of us right now if I’m alone. That’s what I tell myself as he stands and walks away with no goodbye, no glance over his shoulder. The door slams behind him, resounding with an echo that clambers through my mind. Brother, mistake, Brennan, failure, mistake, mistake, mistake.

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