Beginners Welcome

by Cindy Baldwin

  I shrank away from Mama, tucking myself into the corner of the sofa, pulling my invisibility cloak tight around me.

  How could I be the brave, wise Annie Lee when the whole world seemed out to hurt me?

  27.

  I could hear Mama crying in her room for a long time that night, her sobs rising and falling like waves in the ocean. I scrunched my eyes hard and rolled over and pulled a pillow over my head, but I could still hear.

  When I finally did sink into sleep, I dreamed about Daddy, back in that same place with the bright sky and the rainbow umbrellas hanging over us like charms and the rolling melody of the piano. “Annie’s Song.” His favorite.

  “Daddy,” I said, and this time he didn’t squint at me or act like I was hard to hear—he stopped playing and turned to look at me straight on, in a way that sent prickles from the top of my head down to my knees. It may have only been a dream, but he was here, and this time, so was I.

  “Al,” he said, his voice all choked. He slid his hands off the keyboard and into his lap. On the piano, where the gold letters usually said something like Yamaha or Baldwin, this one spelled out Fitzgerald.

  “How come you didn’t take care of Mama and me?” I said, the words tripping over themselves before I could stop them. I could half hear Mama’s crying even in my dream. “How come you didn’t leave us life insurance or anything like that?”

  Daddy’s mouth twisted. “I’m so sorry, Al. So sorry.”

  This was the first time I had been able to really talk to my daddy in more than three months, even if it was only a dream, and I couldn’t shut up about the stupid life insurance. “You didn’t leave us anything. Not a single thing except magic tricks. And now Mama has to work all day every day, and comes home looking like wrung-out laundry, and—”

  Daddy was shaking his head. “I wish I had, Al. You have no idea how much I wish I had.”

  He patted the bench beside him. “Want to play with me?”

  All the anger and frustration that were knotted up tight in my chest unfurled like a ball of yarn rolling itself out. I stepped forward. “Yeah.”

  Daddy grinned, the kind of smile that was better than chocolate, and slid over to make room—

  But before I could touch the warm gloss of the piano bench, I woke up.

  I lay there in the darkness of my bedroom for a long time, wondering what it would’ve been like to play a duet with Daddy. Wondering if I’d be able to play the way he did in that bright umbrella place—with careless freedom.

  After we were done, would he have picked me up and twirled me around like he used to, crushing me to him like I was still his little girl?

  Would I have been able to feel him?

  My cell phone, next to my bed, buzzed, making me jump just about out of my skin. The little strip of screen you could see through the flip case glowed blue.

  A minute later, it stopped. The notification screen said MISSED CALL.

  I opened it with shaking hands. The number wasn’t one that had ever been programmed as a contact into this phone, since my only contact was Mama—but it was a number I recognized anyway, one that had been burned into my brain from all the times I’d called it on our home phone.

  I remembered the way Mama had cried and cried the day she’d disconnected it.

  It was Daddy’s cell number.

  I threw the phone so hard it smacked into the wall. In the bedroom across the hallway, I could hear Mama startle, her bed creaking as she turned over.

  I didn’t get back to sleep that night.

  28.

  The night before the first egg-drop presentations, a cold snap settled over Durham. October was usually sunny and mild, a second summer that went on and on. Most years, the weather didn’t think seriously about cooling down until the Thanksgiving pies had been put away.

  But on that Tuesday, I woke up to air that wanted long pants and jackets instead of the shorts I’d been wearing to school for the last month and a half. I pulled a hoodie and some blue jeans out of last year’s clothes bin.

  Both were too short, and the sweatshirt was tight across my chest in places it hadn’t been last year. Meredith and Monica had both gotten new bras over the summer, one after the other. I didn’t think Mama had even realized that I might be ready for something more than a training bra. Even if she had, she wouldn’t have had the money. How much did a real bra cost? Five dollars? Ten? More than a box of name-brand macaroni and cheese, that was for sure.

  At the bus stop I joined all the other kids waiting there and tried to ignore the cold whisper of the wind on the exposed skin at my wrists and ankles. It had been such a strange season—long and short, full of goodbyes and not many hellos. I didn’t think I’d been to the pool once, or laid out in the sun, or eaten so much as one Popsicle.

  Mr. Barton’s class felt like a party, with kids laughing and tossing paper airplanes at one another as Mitch and I settled into our seats. The plan was to have the first four oral presentations, and then we’d all troop outside and watch the presenters drop their eggs off the school roof. The roof was one of those strictly off-limits places, the kind that had a big heavy door with a regular lock and a padlock too, and excitement zinged through the whole classroom at the idea of going up there, even if most of us wouldn’t be getting our turn today.

  “I understand that our agenda for today has imbued this classroom with a frisson of electricity,” said Mr. Barton, the brown skin on top of his head gleaming in the fluorescent light. “Still, I expect perfect quiet and utter politeness as our first two teams present.”

  From the front row of the class, tater-tot-throwing Malik muttered in a not-very-quiet-voice, “I still don’t get why we can’t all just go up and toss our eggs at the same time. Ka-POW!”

  “I understand your position, Mr. Larson. It would indeed be thrilling, had we time enough to launch all of our projects at once. Quite, as you say, ‘ka-pow.’ Unfortunately, the main purpose of this project is to demonstrate your grasp of the scientific method itself, and as such, we must put a priority on the oral report as well. Now! Team one! You may take the floor.”

  The class was quiet but twitchy all through the four presentations, and when they finally finished and Mr. Barton motioned that we could get up, we sounded like a herd of elephants.

  Mitch linked her arm through mine, a move that seemed oddly un-Mitch-like. Then again, the more I got to know her, the less I felt like I had her pegged. “Think they’ll work, reader girl?”

  I shrugged. Mitch and I had worked our way through our whole list of ideas, and every single one of them had smashed to yolky smithereens on the pavement. Now that the presentations had started we weren’t allowed to come up with any new designs, but Mr. Barton had said we could revise them as long as we didn’t use ideas from other teams, so we were adding everything we could think of to make them safer.

  “Let’s just say it’s a good thing none of us are responsible for making sure astronauts enter the atmosphere safely,” I said as we shuffled through the front door of the school. Mitch laughed, a dog-bark of a laugh that made me laugh, too.

  It felt good, making people laugh. There hadn’t been much laughing in my house since the Bad Day, except for the night Mama and I smashed the eggs. I wished we’d been able to hold on to that lightness, that laughter, but the call from District Superintendent Shepherd had stolen that barely-begun smile away from Mama faster than the chilly air stole the heat from our bodies as we gathered outside the school building.

  “All right, scholars!” Mr. Barton waved from the roof. He’d borrowed a bullhorn from the gym coach, which made me suspect that deep down, he was just as excited about this as the rest of us were. “Here comes our first demonstration. Team one: let it rip!”

  Black-haired Kavya Lahiri, half of the first team, stepped cautiously to the edge of the roof. She held up her contraption—a Dixie cup filled with cotton, the egg nested into the middle of it, a plastic grocery bag tied to the cup’s top to act as a parachute. Kavy
a waited for a moment, the cup and bag in her hands, like she was afraid to let go.

  And then she dropped it.

  The cup went fast at first, until the plastic bag ballooned out and started to slow it down. It fell, rocking once or twice in the wind, all the way down to the blue tarp Mr. Barton had laid out on the pavement to catch the fallen eggs. The cup tipped gently onto its side, a few of the top cotton balls slipping out onto the ground.

  Like a beast with seventeen heads, all of us kids on the ground moved toward the tarp. Tonya and Shonda were nearest to the downed parachute, their best-friend necklaces gleaming in the cold sunlight. They hovered close as Kavya’s team partner, a tall girl with skin almost as creamy as the egg Kavya had dropped, picked the contraption up. Her hands cradled the Dixie cup like a newborn puppy as she pulled the cotton balls out, and then the egg.

  It was whole.

  Shonda, standing behind the girl from Team One, cheered. “Not a crack!” she yelled, loud enough that Mr. Barton and the teams on the roof could hear it.

  Everyone cheered.

  “All right, ladies and gentlemen,” Mr. Barton called through his bullhorn a minute later. “I appreciate your jubilation. That was indeed an auspicious beginning to our demonstrations. Now, it’s time for our second team to take their turn.”

  The dropper from the second team—a blond boy named Chris, with a black hoodie that looked like an exclamation point against the blue October sky—stepped to the edge of the roof, holding up his team’s egg. It was encased in a complicated cube made from what looked like toothpicks.

  He let it go.

  This one fell a lot faster than the first, hurtling corner-over-corner toward the pavement. I slipped my hand into my pocket and rubbed my quarter hard.

  The contraption landed with an audible crash, the toothpicks collapsing with the impact as they hit the ground. I didn’t even have to see the yellow yolk oozing out over the blue tarp to know that their egg was toast.

  A few students hooted, and somebody yelled out, “Anybody want an omelet?” Everyone laughed. Up on the roof, Chris huddled into his hoodie like a turtle retreating into its shell.

  The egg from the third team broke, too, but without the dramatic splat—it looked fine until the team member on the ground held it up and we could see a crack in the side, leaking sticky egg white. The fourth egg was perfect, smooth and whole and completely protected by the hollowed-out grapefruit they’d taped it into. I wished Mitch and I had come up with that idea.

  “My friends,” said Mr. Barton from the roof after the fourth egg had been retrieved, “alas, it is time to return to our classroom. We shall meet you there posthaste.”

  The aide who had stayed with us in the parking lot moved forward to gather up the tarp, and the rest of us started shuffling back into the school. I took my quarter out and flipped it over and over in my fingers, heads, heads, heads. What if our project turned out the way Team Two’s had? What if our egg splattered into smithereens, and everyone in the class laughed at us, too?

  I rubbed the quarter harder.

  After we’d settled back into our seats and Mr. Barton was giving the homework assignment for the day, Mitch reached over and flicked a note onto my desk when he wasn’t looking.

  It’s okay, the note said, her little round letters more cheerful than any words that ever actually came out of Mitch’s mouth. Our project is going to be THE BOMB.

  As long as it doesn’t just BOMB, I wrote back, my quarter warm in my other hand.

  29.

  Hang on a minute—don’t get that out quite yet,” said Ray Thursday afternoon, after I’d finished playing my scales and reached for the sheet music for the Bach minuet. He gestured at the sheet music—his fingers trembled a little and he was breathing harder than normal, like maybe he wasn’t feeling so well. He opened his mouth to keep talking, but coughed instead.

  “Mr. Owens—I mean, Ray. Are you feeling okay?”

  He waved my concern away. “Just got a touch of the allergies this week. Won’t seem to quite leave my chest.”

  “Would it be better if I come back some other time?”

  “Nah, Miss Annie Lee, I’ll be fine. But leave that sheet music put away for now. We’re gonna try something different this time.”

  I pressed the heels of my hands into the piano bench. My daddy had been the kind of person who loved “different.” He’d driven home from work a different way every day, just to keep things interesting, he said. When we went to church on Sundays, he couldn’t bear to sit in the same part of the chapel every week. At dinnertime, if he was the one setting the table, he’d never put any of us in the same chair two nights in a row.

  Mama, on the other hand, wasn’t a big fan of “different.” She liked patterns, organizing things, a place for everything and everything in its place.

  I chewed on my lip. I wanted so, so much to be like my daddy, full of fun and adventure. Or like Ray, joyfully living his life even though he didn’t have much money and always hurt. Or like Queenie, so filled with love and light that she positively glowed.

  But I knew I took after Mama the most: liking things the same way every time, getting nervous when big changes came along. Never quite brave enough to reach out and try to catch things that seemed just a little out of my reach.

  “What do you mean about trying something different?”

  Ray coughed again, a deep, throaty kind of cough. “Oh, that’s nothing to worry about. You’re ready for it, I know. When you came to me back in September, you said you wanted to learn to play piano the way I do.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. The music. And the lights.”

  Ray leaned forward and slid his hands onto the keys high up on the piano, closing his eyes and playing a few chords that sounded like chimes in the wind, like memories and what it felt like to be a kid and sad things that were somehow happy, too. A wisp of purple sunset light glowed in the air above his fingers.

  I swallowed.

  “You asked me before why some could see the lights and some couldn’t,” Ray said.

  “You said that people seem to see them when they need them.”

  “Exactly. I’ve been playing my whole life but never had seen anything like those lights until my Margie died. I was at a concert one night, feeling right sorry for myself, and there was a solo violinist on the stage. Every time he set bow to string, music came out of that instrument like nothing I’d ever heard. And when he played, light swirled in the air above his fingerboard. I thought at first it was part of the show—thought it had been rigged up by the lighting techs. But then I started seeing them other places, too. When a musician was truly opening themselves up, playing the truth inside of them, there would be light coming from their fingers.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why could you only see it after Margie died?”

  “Things were pretty dark for me in those days. I’d just lost my soul mate, and it wasn’t long afterward that I fell off that roof and ended up losing my job, too. I didn’t know which way to turn. Didn’t know if I even wanted to keep on living. I think those lights appeared when they did because I needed to know it was possible to be happy again. I needed to know it was worth being like those musicians—learning to open myself back up to life the way they did. Music, it takes courage, Annie Lee. That kind of vulnerability can be scary. You’ve got to be willing to let go, to let the audience see a true, deep part of you. Otherwise, you might as well just plug some tones into a computer and call it Mozart.”

  “You have to take off your invisibility cloak,” I whispered.

  “That’s exactly it. You can’t have secrets from the piano.”

  “But what if you . . . get hurt?”

  Ray looked at me with an expression as gentle as his dog Clara’s, and just as wise, too. “Sometimes you will, Annie Lee.”

  “But isn’t that scary?”

  “’Course it is. Every time I sit down at this grand piano and start playing, it scares me. But that’s the choice I make. Opening up to
the music, making yourself so anyone can see what’s in your heart . . . it means you’re willing to get hurt, if that’s what it takes to experience the magic.”

  I smiled without quite meaning to, looking down at the keys.

  “Now. You want to learn to play the way I play? You gotta practice that, just like we practice the other things,” Ray went on. “Remember how you played your competition songs last time so pretty it near about made me cry? That’s what you got to do, Annie Lee. But this time, with your music.” He tapped his chest. “The music that lives right here.”

  My whole body was perfectly still, still as stone, still as glass, still as the ivory on the piano keys themselves.

  “But—” I licked my lips. “What if I don’t have any music? Or what if it sounds bad?”

  “Oh, it will. Don’t everything new sound bad at first? But in time, it’ll come. Just try it out.”

  “But—the competition. Don’t I need to focus on practicing the pieces I’ve got for that?”

  “Sure, and we’ll do that today, too. But trust me when I say that finding your own music will just make you that much more able to play Bach’s and Beethoven’s stuff. Now, try it out. Close your eyes and let it come. Be that brave, true version of Annie Lee Fitzgerald that I know’s hiding out in there.”

  I took a deep breath, let the air travel down my arms, to my fingers, till the skin of my fingertips was light and tingly. I didn’t want to do it—but at the same time, I did.

  I lifted up my hands, closed my eyes, and did my best to open up my heart, the way Ray said.

  The notes were jangly at first, like stumbling feet. My pulse thumped in my fingers, hammering bad idea, bad idea.

  It took everything I had to keep my eyes closed, to keep my fingers on the piano.

  But then I found a few notes that sounded good together. And then some more, and some more after that. My fingers were slow on the keys, but that was okay. The song really did sound a little bit like the things inside me: tentative, fearful, nervous, all wrapped up in a gossamer string that felt like hope. And even though it still felt like I was on a cliff’s edge and any minute the wrong note might send me spiraling down to the rocks below, I kept on going.