Beginners Welcome

by Cindy Baldwin

  Now, as I rode toward Brightleaf Square, the memory was a little hitch in my breathing, a small pluck at my heart, like hitting the wrong note in a piano piece. But it didn’t slam into me like it might have before school started. It was more like I could feel that little prick of sadness and then move right along—like the sleepover last weekend with Mitch had begun to fill in the M&M-shaped cracks inside me.

  It was a good feeling.

  The mall was quiet when I got there, only a few people ambling in and out of the shops or lingering in the restaurants, their voices drifting out into the atrium like smoke. I went in through a different door than usual so I didn’t have to walk past Queenie’s shop. I couldn’t get the way she’d looked at me last time out of my mind, like she was working out exactly who I was and where I came from and where my mama wasn’t.

  I missed Queenie, but I couldn’t risk seeing her. Not today. Not with so many weeks still between me and the piano competition.

  The atrium itself was empty when I got there, the grand piano crouched and waiting, shining in the skylight. I had never gotten to the mall before Ray. My piano lessons were never on the same day—it always depended on homework, and I couldn’t come too often for fear that Mama would find out I was riding all over town while she was gone—but we always agreed in advance on when we’d meet next.

  I’d never known Ray to be late.

  I hung around for a few minutes, like maybe if I stayed still enough, I’d blink and then he’d explode into being right there on the piano bench, music and light pouring out of his fingers like water.

  But he didn’t. The piano just sat there, silent. It was like a seven-foot magnet, unspooling an invisible string across the floor to me, looping somewhere behind my knees and then tugging. Come, the gloss of the ebony whispered.

  Come here.

  I looked around once, twice, three times just to be sure. The atrium was empty.

  I walked forward, toes first so that my shoes didn’t make any sound on the tile of the floor.

  On a whim, I took my phone out before I sat down, resting it gently on the piano’s music stand and hitting the record button.

  The wood of the bench was cool under my legs, but the ivory keys when I rested my fingertips on them were warm, like somewhere inside it the piano breathed.

  I’d been playing on this piano for weeks now, but somehow it felt different, being here without Ray, without Queenie, with people walking past who might hear anything I played. Even though nothing had really changed, the air was charged.

  Like me sitting down on that bench was the same as me choosing to open my heart right up for anyone to see.

  The first notes of Bach’s “Minuet in G Minor” were wispy and thin, and the left-hand accompaniment was off by two whole notes before I slid my shaking hands to where they were supposed to be.

  I almost stopped. My hands paused, hovering like butterflies barely brushing against the ivory. But then I thought of Ray last week, saying, There’s a little mess in all of us, and instead of lifting my hands up, I pressed down harder.

  And a minute later, when I’d come to the end of that minuet, I let my fingers keep on going, wandering their way up and down the keyboard.

  My music wasn’t like Ray’s. It didn’t have any of his power, or his control, and it didn’t sing out into the atrium like it was giving voice to the soul of every person who heard it. My music was small, and a little bit tentative. There were wrong notes sometimes, and other times notes that weren’t really wrong but didn’t sound very nice, either. I didn’t use the pedal the way Ray did, pulling my song into beautiful swaths the way the Milky Way pulled in the stars, because I didn’t know how yet.

  My music still sounded like beginner stuff.

  But it was mine.

  And as it poured out from somewhere inside me, that so-faint-you-could-hardly-see-it shining gold light rose up and danced above the piano. My very own musical light show. My heart, spun out of my chest like the straw in “Rumpelstiltskin,” glowing there for anyone to see.

  I put everything I’d been thinking and feeling for the last three and a half months into that music: the way it had felt to see Daddy lying cold and still in the hospital. The way Mama cried every morning. How it had seemed like the M&Ms took pieces of my heart away with them when we drifted apart. What it was like when Mitch came to sit next to me, and then kept coming back every day. The way joy had sung through my bones when we’d thrown our egg off the balcony Friday night and it hadn’t even cracked.

  And I put in Daddy’s music. A little bit of “Annie’s Song,” wistful and sweet, the way Daddy used to sing it to me. The jumping, funny notes of “You Can Call Me Al,” reminding me of how Daddy had turned the volume up and danced around the house with a pretend microphone. The slow melodies of “Carolina in My Mind” and “Like a Sad Song”—Daddy had liked to put those ones on during rainy afternoons. Sad music is good for a crying sky, he’d always said.

  I played until I lost track of time, until the song told me it was ready to be over, and then I let my fingers slow down and creep into something that sounded like an okay ending.

  When I lifted my hands off the keys, somebody walking past clapped.

  Still, there was no sign of Ray. I checked my phone: I’d already been here an hour. The recording had timed out more than forty-five minutes ago. If I didn’t get home quick enough to do all my homework before Mama got back she’d get suspicious, and my secret would be smashed to bits, just like all the eggs that had met their deaths on our apartment parking lot.

  I swallowed down a twinge of unease and slid off the piano bench. I went the regular way out this time, slinking past Queenie’s. With that great big shop window, she must know everything that happened in the building.

  Would she have seen Ray come or go today?

  But even that wasn’t enough to give me the courage to push her door open, and so after a few minutes I just left, pulling my jacket tighter as the cold outside air hit me.

  Did the cold make Ray’s arthur worse? Had he hurt too much this morning, maybe, to get up and come meet me like normal? Last week he’d seemed sick. Had it really just been allergies, or had it been something else?

  As I rode back toward my apartment building, the whir of my scooter against the pavement sounded like a murmuring voice:

  Ray. Ray. Ray.

  Lost. Lost. Lost.

  33.

  Mama was crying when I woke up Wednesday morning. As summer had eased its way into autumn, she’d cried less—it wasn’t every morning now, only four or five times a week. But even on the days her eyes were dry, they looked sunken, the lines around her mouth getting so deep they might as well have been carved there like the lines on Mount Rushmore. At least before the district person had called with the news that there wouldn’t ever be more money from the life insurance, Mama had had a spark of hope inside her, even if it was smaller than a firefly’s light.

  Now, she seemed like maybe one of these days she’d wink out of existence altogether.

  I reached my hand over to my nightstand the way I always did, my fingers itching to rub Daddy’s lucky quarter.

  It wasn’t there.

  I sat up in bed, wide-awake now. The wood of the nightstand was cool under my fingertips. Cool and empty.

  I slid to the floor, hardly registering the sound of Mama cleaning down the ghost-infested bathroom sink and turning on the fan, and ran my hands over the carpet, the bed frame, even poked my fingers in between the mattress and the bed.

  Nothing.

  Nothing.

  And nothing in the rest of my room, either, after I’d stood and turned on the light and started shaking out all the pockets of my jeans and pulling the drawers from my dresser, just to make sure it hadn’t slipped down behind one of them.

  “Annie Lee?” Mama called, knocking twice on my door. “You fighting a bear in there, honey?”

  “No,” I said, the whole world tipping up around me. Where could it have gone? H
ow could I have lost the one thing I had left that still made it feel like Daddy was here, wrapping his arms around me the way he used to?

  “You sure?” Mama said.

  “Yep.” There wasn’t enough air to breathe in my bedroom. How could I go to school without the quarter? How could I be sure Ray would be at Brightleaf when I went over there this afternoon, if I couldn’t carry luck with me, the way Daddy always said? What if it stayed lost, and I didn’t have it with me when Mitch and I did our egg drop on Friday, or when the DPTA piano competition rolled around in December?

  I took a deep breath, then another, then another. My skin buzzed all over, like maybe I’d float away or explode any second.

  If Mama saw me like this, she wouldn’t understand. She’d just tell me to get ready for school, not realizing that I couldn’t go to school without my piece of luck, couldn’t face the world without that little connection to Daddy.

  I’d have to figure out a way to get to the bus without her noticing anything strange.

  I’d have to figure out a way to go all day without feeling like the pieces of my life that had only begun to fit back together after Daddy’s death were ripping right down the middle.

  I finally gave up looking for the quarter when Mama shouted that I only had ten minutes before the bus came and if I wanted breakfast, I better get it fast.

  “What do you need washed this morning?” she asked as I sat down and poured myself some cereal. “I don’t have time to do a lot.”

  With no washer, we never did laundry in big loads anymore—it was just little dribs and drabs, a few shirts one morning, some jeans the next.

  “My gym clothes and my blue shirt.” The blue shirt was my favorite, one of the few that still fit me right—not pulling too tight across the chest or riding up over my hipbones. It was the color of the ocean, somewhere between teal and turquoise, and it made me feel strong and brave. I’d need it for our egg drop Friday morning.

  Mama rushed off into my room and then hers. When she came back, she had a bundle made of both our clothes in her hands. She filled the sink with hot water, poured in some laundry soap, and started scrubbing. Our clothes never got as clean these days; it was harder to get rid of stains and sweat and dirt without a washing machine to do it for you. It made me understand better why the pioneers had those washboard things to scrape clothes against when they did their laundry.

  In the kitchen, the CD player made a crackle-pop sound and started playing, something mournful and quiet. At the sink, Mama threw her wet hands up, splashing water all over the counters, then trudged to the CD player and yanked the plug out of the wall.

  “Is this supposed to make us feel better, reaching back here to play some depressing music? Because it never does,” she said, but I didn’t know if she was talking to me or to the ghost. Her eyes glistened—from frustration, or sadness, or maybe a tangled-up ball of both—and she rubbed a wet hand across her forehead. “I wish we were all a little better at letting go.”

  When she plugged the CD player back in again, it stayed silent.

  34.

  When I showed up at Brightleaf again that afternoon after school had ended, Ray was nowhere to be found. It was like the whole mall echoed extra without him there—like instead of feeling expansive and filled with light, those high ceilings and dark brick walls were cold and shaded without the spark of Ray’s piano magic.

  Ray wasn’t in the atrium, or in any of the restaurants. He wasn’t outside in the courtyard, where the chilly afternoon air made blood prickle into my cheeks like needles. I even checked the other warehouse, the one I’d never seen him go into. Ray’s red-faced friend Stan the janitor was pushing his broom along the shiny floor there, and he gave me a little wave as he passed by, but Ray himself was nowhere. I wandered back to the warehouse with the grand piano, feeling like I hadn’t lost my piano teacher—I’d lost my own self.

  For the first time since he hadn’t shown up for my Monday lesson, I thought about just getting on my scooter and riding all the way out to find his home. I knew he lived pretty close to Maplewood Cemetery. But that was far—farther away than anywhere I’d ever gone by myself, and on a road that took you right on a bridge over the freeway. Mama would’ve had my hide if she ever found out I’d spent months wandering around Old North Durham all on my own, but she would have more than that if I tried to cross the freeway. She’d take my head right off my shoulders.

  “Hey. Kid. You okay?”

  I jumped. The girl who worked in the music store stood in the doorway of her shop, the silver stud in her nose winking like a star in the dim light.

  “Yeah,” I said. I’d been so upset, so lost in thinking about Ray, I hadn’t even made sure my invisibility cloak was in place.

  “You need something?” Music Store Girl asked, leaning against the doorway like she, too, was tired, like this cold snap that had crept through town had pulled away a little bit of everybody’s soul along with it.

  My fingers went into my empty pocket, wishing for my quarter. “Well. Maybe. I’m just looking for my friend. You maybe know him? He’s here a lot? His name’s Ray Owens?”

  Music Store Girl rubbed the back of her neck. “He the one who’s always out here with you?”

  I nodded.

  “I mean, I know him a little bit. He always says hi, and sometimes he comes in to chat after he’s done playing the piano. But I’ve only worked here since the spring. Sorry. I haven’t seen him around the last few days, if that helps.”

  “Do you know when you saw him last?”

  “I dunno. Maybe last time you were out there together playing on that thing.”

  Thursday, then—the day of my last lesson. Six days ago.

  “Thanks anyway,” I said.

  Music Store Girl ducked back into her store, letting the door swing shut behind her like a breath.

  Most evenings, Mama was home by six, and I didn’t need the buzz of the reminder alarm on the phone in my pocket to tell me it was past time I got heading back so I could get to the apartment before she did.

  But I couldn’t leave without knowing more about Ray’s disappearance than I already did.

  I stood in front of Queenie’s big glass window, my heart ticking like a metronome turned all the way up, clickclickclickclick. I hadn’t talked to her at all since two weeks ago. She’d been asking me more about Mama then, the piano lesson before last, with that look on her face like the gears in her head were sliding into place.

  I couldn’t get that look out of my mind. How much did she suspect about what I’d been doing behind my mama’s back? I’d avoided her ever since, always coming in through the door that didn’t go right past her shop. I kept to the shadows, invisibility cloak pulled tight, if I noticed her in the atrium.

  But right now, my problems were bigger than me, bigger than the Vesuvius-level eruption that would come out of Mama if she found out how I’d been sneaking off to take piano lessons from a strange old man for the last two months.

  I had to talk to Queenie about Ray, even if it gave her more chances to figure me out. I couldn’t worry about the competition today, or my lies. My worrying was used up by Ray’s disappearance.

  I pushed my hand against the swinging salon door before my brain could freeze my feet up with fear.

  A little bell tinkled above the door as it opened, and Queenie looked up from where she was writing something in a ledger at the salon’s front desk. Her smile was like daffodils and hot chocolate and sunlight and the whoosh of summer rain, the way it went through you and traveled deep down to your toes.

  “Annie Lee!” she said. “I haven’t seen you in a hot minute, child! Where you been?”

  I cleared my throat, wishing for the millionth time that I had my quarter back.

  “It’s about Ray,” I said.

  “I noticed that piano’s been quiet this week,” said Queenie.

  “He’s missing,” I said, the words like cut glass in my mouth. “He was supposed to be here Monday, but I haven
’t seen him since my lesson last Thursday. I’ve come twice already this week. I don’t know where he could be. I thought with the two of you being such good friends, you might know where he was. Or maybe you’d have seen him through your big window. Or maybe you’d gone out to hear him play, and . . .”

  Queenie’s lips pulled in together and her forehead wrinkled up. “I can’t say as I’ve seen him this week, either. At least not since Friday. We actually got in a little bit of an argument, if you could picture the two of us old fuddy-duddies arguing. He was sneezing and coughing like all get out, and I was on his case to go home instead of finishing out his shift. He said I was being a busybody and that nothing was wrong with him that a dose of NyQuil couldn’t cure. He was pretty crabby with me by the time he left—didn’t even say goodbye. I was kinda glad when he didn’t show up Monday, to be honest, since I figured it meant he was taking it easy like I’d told him to. I’m surprised he missed your lesson, though. That’s not like him.”

  All the air trickled out of me, through my skin and my scalp and my fingertips. “Has he ever been gone this long before?”

  “Sure, he’ll miss a few days here or there, if he’s got a little cold or had something else come up. And sometimes he goes down to Georgia to visit his brother, though he usually he lets me know if he’ll be gone so I can feed his dog. I know he’s got some neighbor kids to tend her before, though.”

  Maybe he had a cold. Maybe he’d been coming down with it last Thursday during my lesson, and that’s what was wrong with him Friday when Queenie told him to go home. But would a cold have kept him away for nearly a week?

  “Tell you what, Annie Lee. Ray’ll call me an old busybody again, but once I’m off work I’ll drive over to his place and take a look around,” said Queenie. “I’d call, but he hasn’t had a phone for a while now. Couldn’t keep up on the bills.”