I tried not to stare as we went up the sidewalk. Compared to me and Mama, Mitch’s family might as well have been Bill Gates’s.
“Mom! I’m home!” Mitch shouted as soon as we’d banged in through the front door.
“Okay,” a voice echoed from somewhere down the hall.
“Her study,” Mitch said, pointing at one of the closed doors. “Usually she tries to be done by the time I get home, but today she’s hot on a new article and can’t pull herself away. My grandma’s around here somewhere, though, and—”
Before Mitch could finish talking, a brown-haired streak in a red shirt shot toward her, barreling into her stomach and wrapping its arms around her.
“Oof. And this is Jacob,” Mitch finished, hugging the little boy back. He had high cheekbones and freckles, just like Mitch. “The human torpedo.”
I smiled, wondering what it would be like to have a little brother who liked me enough to run at me like that the minute I got home from school. Meredith was an only kid like me, and Monica had two sisters, but the three of them all drove each other crazy.
Mitch unstuck Jacob’s arms from around her waist and let her backpack drop to the floor with a thunk. It tipped and hit her skateboard where it was leaning up against the wall by the door, sending the skateboard sliding down and crashing onto the gleaming hardwood so loud I jumped. Mitch’s skateboard was infamous—it had been banned from school ever since that first trip to the principal’s office.
“Micheline Adele!” A wrinkled old lady, whose hair was tied back by a leopard-print bandanna that matched her shirt, puffed down the stairs, her eyebrows way up almost to her hairline. “You trying to give an old woman a heart attack?”
Micheline? I mouthed, and the fire in Mitch’s gray eyes could’ve lit up all of Durham. It wasn’t like I would’ve told, though—even if Mitch hadn’t been my only friend in the world, I would’ve been too scared of what she’d do to me to dare breathe a word about it to anyone.
Still, the name tickled around inside my mouth, and I had to work hard not to grin. Micheline. It was a little like Michelle, except that the een on the end made it sound like it was a name that belonged somewhere with lacy tablecloths and escargots and oozing French accents. I was pretty sure I had never heard a name that was more girly, or less Mitch-like.
“Tell anyone, you die,” Mitch whispered as her grandma made it to the bottom of the stairs.
“Eternal secrecy,” I whispered back.
“Well,” said Mitch’s grandma once she was at the bottom, her hands on her hips, “are you going to introduce me to your friend?”
“Yeah, Nana,” Mitch said in a long-suffering kind of way, “this is Annie Lee.”
Nana put out a hand and shook mine, her pink fingers squeezing tight enough to make me think she couldn’t really be as old as she looked. “Pleased to meet you, Annie Lee. I’m Micheline’s daddy’s mama. You can call me Nana or Mrs. Harris, ’specially since that daughter-in-law of mine didn’t see fit to take my son’s name when they got married.” She sniffed like she was full of scorn, but her eyes twinkled with laughter.
“Nice to meet you, too,” I said. I wiggled my toes in my taped-up silver shoes. Mitch’s entryway wasn’t spotlessly clean or fancy—dirt-covered shoes sat haphazardly around the door, and the skateboard had left a streak of mud on the warm-honey wood floor, but underneath all the day-to-day mess of a big family, it was so much nicer than anywhere I’d ever lived that the whole place seemed to whisper poor girl, poor girl, poor girl.
No life insurance check would ever make it so me and Mama were living like Mitch’s family.
“I hope you girls are going to spend some time on your homework!” called the disembodied voice from Mitch’s mama’s office.
Mitch rolled her eyes. “Yep!” she called back, but then in a normal voice she added, “But not yet. We’re going outside, Nana.” Mitch rubbed Jacob’s head until his hair stood straight up, and then leaned down to flip her skateboard up into her hand. “C’mon, Annie Lee, want to learn how to be cool?”
“Uh—” I said, but Mitch was out the door and on the sidewalk already, motioning for me to come.
“You,” she said, setting the board on the ground and pointing to it. “There. One foot forward, one foot back, like this.”
“Are you sure?” I asked, because all I was sure of was falling on my butt if I tried to get up on that thing.
Mitch gave me a don’t-make-me-tell-you-twice look that made her transform right into her grandmother, and I swallowed and put one foot up on the sandpaper surface of the skateboard.
“Good,” said Mitch. “Now the other, nice and slow. You can hold on to my arm if you need. The main thing is you have to keep your knees bent so your center of gravity stays low.”
So slowly that the grass might’ve grown faster than I moved, I pulled my other foot up after the first, leaning hard on Mitch. The skateboard rolled a little, but she was right: as long as I stayed still and kept my knees bent enough, I didn’t fall.
“See? You got it!” Mitch crowed, and a split second later she’d shaken my hand off her arm and reached out and given a good hard push on the skateboard that sent me rocketing down the sidewalk.
I might’ve screamed, or let out one of those cuss words I’d heard Mama shout every once in a while when she stubbed her toe, or even hollered Mitch’s real name to the whole dang neighborhood—but all the air had been sucked right out of my lungs by shock, and all I could do was keep my knees bent and pray and think about how I was gonna kill Micheline Harris just as soon as I got off that death trap.
But to my surprise more than anyone else’s, by the time the skateboard had swerved into the grass and I’d stumbled free and just barely managed to keep myself from spread-eagling onto the pavement, I was laughing. Real, deep, belly laughing, the kind that makes tears pop up at the corners of your eyes, the kind that feels like it’s never going to stop and that’s okay because you don’t want it to. I laughed so hard that I sat right down on the lawn and kept on laughing.
“You are the weirdest girl I’ve ever met,” Mitch said, stalking forward to stand over me with her arms crossed.
But I’d learned enough to know that in Mitch language, that was as good as saying I like you a lot or Thanks for being my friend, and so I didn’t bother to stop laughing.
I just let that laughter fill me up, all the way down to my toes, the way the sun comes up in the morning and fills the whole sky with brightness, till I felt lighter and happier than I had in a long, long time.
And when Mitch tapped her foot and pursed her lips, I just kicked my legs out and knocked her off-balance so that she toppled into the grass next to me, laughing her squeaky-door laugh, too.
16.
That floaty, light feeling lasted all the way until Mitch and her mama—a nice lady with Mitch’s curly hair and a no-nonsense voice, who liked to use words like predilection—drove me home and I stepped into the apartment.
It was gloomy, the curtains closed and all the lights off, which meant that Mama wasn’t home yet. But that wasn’t what I noticed as soon as I put my foot in the door.
What I noticed was that Daddy’s old record player was whirring like there was a record inside it even though I knew for sure it was empty, and James Taylor was singing sadly about how he was gone to Carolina in his mind.
Daddy’s music.
Before I’d so much as gotten the rest of my body inside the door, that song had reached right inside me and squeezed so that I couldn’t even swallow.
They say that when you’re about to die, your life flashes in front of your eyes. This was like that—I could see images like ghosts all around me, times that Daddy had let me stand on his feet when I was little and danced me around the kitchen of our old house, or hummed along to the car radio, or sat at the piano picking out the notes to “Annie’s Song” and singing, “You fill up my senses, like a night in a forest . . .”
Except it wasn’t seeing so much as it was fee
ling, feeling it so strongly all the way through to my bones that I could have reached out my hand and it would’ve met Daddy’s big warm one.
“Annie Lee?”
I startled, blinking like I was waking up from a dream. Mrs. Garcia was standing on the landing next to me, her face wrinkled up in concern. “You okay, mija?”
“Uh. Yeah. Fine. I just was remembering a homework assignment I gotta go do. See you!”
“Let me know if you need anything!” Mrs. Garcia called as I bolted inside.
“Yep!” I closed the door behind me with a quick snap and went right to the record player and pulled the plug.
James Taylor stopped midsentence, and only silence was left, holding me tight, its arms wrapped around me like it wouldn’t let me go no matter what I did.
That night I had the dream again.
I was back in the rainbow-umbrella place, my senses filled up with the smell of my daddy and the sound of his piano—playing “Carolina in My Mind” this time, just like the record player had been when I’d gotten home from Mitch’s house. He looked strong and happy, his red hair catching the glittery sunlight and making his skin glow, so that he seemed almost like one of those Greek gods that we’d studied last year in school.
I reached into my dream-pocket, but the quarter wasn’t there, so I just twined my fingers together instead. How could he look so happy, so all right, without me and Mama there by him?
After last time I was afraid of what would happen if I opened my mouth and called out to him, but I did anyway.
“Daddy?” My word hit the sparkling air around me and sizzled. But Daddy stopped playing and turned around anyway.
“Al?” He squinted, like I was standing in front of the sun, like he couldn’t quite make out where my edges began.
I’d spent three months wishing every single day that I’d had a chance to say something to my daddy before he died. To tell him that I loved him, that I needed him. To tell him that being without him to bridge the way between me and Mama scared me. To beg him to stay, stay, stay.
But here, in this dream, with Daddy in front of me at the shining black piano and the air that smelled like aftershave and paper and love, I couldn’t make any of those words come out.
“Daddy, I love you.”
But this time, my voice was reedy and hard even for my own ears to catch.
“Annie Lee?” Daddy said, his mouth tightening up, his eyes looking worried. “Al? Baby, where’d you go? Annie Lee?”
I looked down at my hands, except my eyes didn’t land on pink skin and knuckles and stubby fingers with nails trimmed short. They went right through to the grass below that sparkled in the sun as it came through the umbrellas in shades of green and red and gold.
Ever since the day Daddy died, I’d done my best to be invisible, to let myself fade into the world around me, to hide in plain sight.
It looked like I’d finally succeeded.
17.
Waking up one Sunday morning a month after school started to the sound of Mama crying and rinsing out the bathroom sink, I realized that I didn’t know whether or not I wanted the ghost to leave.
I closed my eyes and settled back against the pillow. That week in English we’d been working on argumentative essays. The teacher had explained to us that an argumentative essay was a little bit like a formal pro-con list: weighing competing opinions and picking a side. We’d done a few exercises in class, drawing a line down the center of a piece of paper and writing bullet points on each side, to help us brainstorm through arguments on either side of our assigned issues.
Now, I imagined that my mind was lined like notebook paper. At the top I’d written The Ghost in Our House, and then I’d pulled the pen straight down the middle of the paper, one side labeled Pros and the other labeled Cons.
PRO: With the ghost in the house, it was like a tiny piece of Daddy still lived there. Sometimes when the radio or the TV flipped on by their own selves, instead of turning them off right away I’d close my eyes, pretending like it meant that Daddy would be standing right there with his hand on the dial and a smile on his face.
Of course, that always made opening my eyes even harder.
CON: With the ghost in the house, it was like the only pieces of Daddy left there were the hard parts—the parts that socked me in my stomach with missing him and reminded me how I’d never hear one of his bad dad jokes or hear his soft voice singing me to sleep at night. Never, ever again.
With the ghost in the house, I couldn’t let the memories of Daddy loosen and unspool enough so that they were good things, instead of feeling like they had closed their fingers around my neck.
I opened my eyes again. The water in the bathroom sink had stopped, and I could hear Mama’s footsteps padding down the hall to the kitchen.
I wasn’t sure which side had won out on that list in my head.
“Let’s do something today,” Mama said at breakfast. “Something fun. It’s been too long since we did that.”
I took a drink of my water. I didn’t know if Mama and I had ever done anything “fun” with just the two of us. We’d both counted on Daddy to take care of things like fun.
“How about we go to Eno River State Park?”
“It’s too hot,” I mumbled, laying my head down on my arms on the table. Autumn would begin tomorrow, according to the calendar, but the weather hadn’t got the memo.
Besides, I’d been planning to hole up in my room and study the sheet music Ray had given me during our second piano lesson. It’ll take some time to learn, he’d said, setting it on the piano, but I know you can do it, Annie Lee. It was by Beethoven, called “Russian Folk Song in G,” and it had two hands on the piano and an F-sharp. When Ray played it, it sounded too complicated for my fingers to ever wrap themselves around. But he had reassured me it wasn’t any harder than the “Minuet in G Major” I’d been learning a year before. Keep trying, he’d said. Your fingers will remember.
I’d had two lessons since the first one two weeks ago, but the music still felt like a foreign language, like something hovering at the edge of my understanding that I could never quite figure out.
I couldn’t practice at home, but I could at least look at the music and whisper the names of the notes to myself, bringing back the memories of all those days I’d struggled to learn to read music when I was taking lessons from Mrs. Kline. When I’d told him I didn’t have a piano, Ray had even suggested that I just practice the fingerings anyway, tapping my fingers against a table or a piece of paper or something. Some teachers actually have their students do that on purpose, he’d said, to help train them to be able to visualize the notes more clearly.
Plus, Ray had given me some finger exercises to do to help strengthen my fingers when I couldn’t make it in to Brightleaf to practice or have a lesson.
Mama checked the thermometer that hung outside the kitchen window. “It’s barely even sixty right now. It should be gorgeous. Come on.”
She turned to look at me, biting her lip just a little bit, like she was the kid and I was the mom. “Please?”
I sighed. “Okay.”
I looked out the car window as we drove. It was gorgeous, the kind of warm Carolina September morning where the blue sky felt deep enough to swim in.
“Remember Daddy and the fuel pump?” Mama said with a sad little laugh. “I think of that every time I start this old car up.”
“Yeah,” I said. The year I was eight, our car spent months having mysterious problems—sometimes it would be fine, other times it would drive for a few minutes and then just shut off. Mama had asked Daddy to please take it to the mechanic and get it looked at after he was done at work, but he kept forgetting. Until finally one day it wouldn’t start up again for love or money. The evening it broke for good, Daddy had gotten tickets for the Durham Symphony—two tickets, for me and him, for a special night out. Except once it was clear the car was really and truly dead, going anywhere without a tow truck was out of the question.
; “Remember how he strung up those Christmas lights in the fort for me?” I asked. After he had pronounced the car dead, Daddy had gone to work on a plan B: he’d gotten practically all the pillows and blankets we owned and made them into an epic fort that took up nearly our whole living room, then strung Christmas lights all through it, so it looked like something out of fairyland. He’d pulled his record player inside and we’d lain back on the pillows while he played record after record after record, until we’d heard every single piece the symphony had been set to play that night.
And even though it cost hundreds of dollars to get the car towed to a mechanic the next day and the fuel pump replaced, and even though money was always tight, all I’d seen in Mama’s eyes when she told Daddy the total for the repair was love, deep as the ocean.
“I do remember,” Mama said. “He loved you, Annie Lee. He loved you more than words could say.”
She lapsed into silence, and I tapped my fingers against my knees, practicing scales the way Ray had shown me: one-two-three, cross my thumb under, one-two-three-four-five. When I showed up for my third lesson two days ago, Ray had still wanted me to pretend I knew what I was doing and make up something to play on those black keys. But I liked the precision of the scales, the way all the notes stayed in their place. I liked the predictability of deciphering the notes in the Russian folk song so that I could know exactly what was supposed to come next and exactly how it was supposed to be played.
Thursday, before I went to have my lesson with Ray, I’d googled the Durham Piano Teachers Association competition. Their website had said you had to know how to play two scales, one major and one minor, and two pieces from the Junior A repertoire, both memorized.
“Russian Folk Song in G” was on the Junior A repertoire list.
Beginners Welcome Page 7