by Lisa Genova
The phone numbers for Caring Health, his neurologist, and Bill’s cell are written on a piece of paper and held by a magnet to the refrigerator. Next to this is a photograph of Grace and Karina at Grace’s high school graduation. They’re both wearing black, both beaming. Grace has her mother’s smile.
There are no other photographs. No other smiling children on what used to be his refrigerator. The son he always wanted. A sister for Grace. All those years trying to get Karina pregnant, believing in her doctor’s appointments, jerking off into plastic cups, hoping. None of it was real. Maybe this is why he can’t remember loving her.
All that time wasted.
It’s 9:06.
With nothing more to explore, he’s walking back to the den when he’s struck with the sudden, out-of-body, slow-motion realization that he’s falling. He went to step right, but his leg never responded. Something in the interplay between neurons and muscles broke off. Something didn’t fire or listen or land. Something let go, unplugged, and the command to walk fizzled out, the connection severed. In the split second before he hits the floor, he’s aware that he cannot break his fall and thinks to turn his head, but not soon enough. His chin and nose take the brunt of the impact.
Warm blood drains down his right nostril. He can taste its metallic saltiness in his mouth. He registers the pain, throbbing and sharp, mostly at the bridge of his nose, between his eyes. Internally, he scans his limbs, trying to discern if anything is broken. He can’t seem to find his right leg. A realization sinks in like liquid concrete funneling into his body, transforming him into immovable stone. Nothing is broken, but he’s not getting up. His right leg is gone, consumed by ALS. As he lies facedown on the kitchen floor, he knows he’ll never walk again.
He tries to yell for Grace, but he can barely get enough air into his lungs in this position to breathe, never mind produce loud sound. He lifts his head and tries again.
“Graaa.”
He lowers his head, resting his right cheek on the cold tile floor. A puddle of drool mingled with blood pools beneath his chin. He’s not sure he has the strength to lift his head again. He finds the only part of his body still available to him. His left foot. He lifts and drops it over and over, banging his wool-slippered foot against the floor like a foreboding, muffled drumbeat.
Several minutes pass. Tired, he stops tapping his foot. Panic wants him now. It forms a fist in his stomach, its claw reaching for his throat. He won’t be able to breathe if panic takes him. Grace. She comes down every night at ten for his last feeding and to hook him up to the BiPAP machine. What time is it? It won’t be long now. He has to fight against the panic and keep breathing.
He’s lost in the feeble yet steady rhythm of his inhales and has no sense of how much time has passed when he hears Grace’s footsteps.
“Oh my God!”
He opens his eyes, and Grace appears over him like an angel.
“What happened?”
He doesn’t expend his limited energy to state the obvious.
“Okay, I’m calling 911.”
“No,” he whispers. “Please-don.”
“Why? I’ll call Bill or someone at Caring Health.”
She looks over at the refrigerator, at the phone numbers on the door.
“No. Is-late.”
“What if you broke something?”
“I-din.”
“Your face is all bloody. I think you broke your nose.”
“There-goes-my mo-de-ling ca-reer.”
“I have to roll you over then.”
His head is turned to the left. She places a hand on his left shoulder and hip and pulls on him carefully but with great effort. He assists as much as he can with his left foot, and she finally manages to turn him onto his back. She grabs a dish towel from the counter, runs it under the tap, crouches over him, and wipes his mouth, cheek, and neck. As she scrubs the cloth too roughly against his skin, working to loosen the blood that has dried and crusted on his face, cold water drips down his neck, soaking his back. She’s gentler around his nose.
She stands up and studies him now. He studies her, too, and can’t tell if she’s worried, disgusted, or scared. Probably all of the above.
“I’m not strong enough to get you into bed.”
“Thas o-kay. I-ca slee-here.”
She folds her arms over her chest.
“I’ll be right back.”
He sees the light flick on in the den, and a few moments later, he hears the wheels of the BiPAP cart rolling toward him. She wiggles three pillows under his head, adjusts his arms to match their position on either side of his body, and drapes his bed comforter over him. She leaves again. This time, he hears her footsteps running up the stairs. She returns with her pillow, a blanket, and her blue-and-white gingham comforter.
“I’ll sleep next to you. In case something happens.”
She plugs in the humidifier and the BiPAP, turns them on, and checks the settings. He doesn’t bother to mention that she’s forgotten to feed him. He’s not hungry. She holds the mask in her hand, and he’s afraid of how much it’s going to hurt when pressed against the bridge of his nose.
“I’m sorry I didn’t hear you right away.”
“Don-be-sor-ry. I’m-the-one who-sor-ry.”
“For what?”
He’s sorry he didn’t give enough of his time to her. He’s sorry he’s running out of it. He’s afraid he doesn’t have much left. He’s sorry he wasn’t a better father to her. He’s sorry she didn’t feel loved by him.
It’s now or never.
“Ev-er-y thin. I-love-you-Grace. I’m-so sor-ry.”
She closes her eyes, and a gentle close-lipped smile settles on her mouth. She opens her eyes, and tears stream down her beautiful face. She doesn’t wipe them.
“I love you, too, Dad.”
She fits the BiPAP mask over his face, and he endures the screaming pain between his eyes as air flows in and out of his lungs. For the first time in as long as he can remember, he feels peace when he breathes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Karina, Elise, and her students are early, sitting at a cluster of four round tables, three chairs at each huddled in a half-moon facing the stage. They’re at Snug Harbor Jazz Bistro on Frenchmen Street, just outside the French Quarter, tucked away in a windowless, candlelit, cozy room behind the dive bar out front, waiting for the show to start. Tonight features up-and-coming jazz pianist Alexander Lynch, accompanied by drums and a bass, a simple trio. With a background in classical piano and then Broadway, Alexander is new to the jazz scene. Elise saw him in New York at Blue Note in October and can’t stop raving about him, says he reminds her of Oscar Peterson.
The room hasn’t filled in yet. Karina counts fifteen tables plus a balcony above them. Their seats are right up front, inches from the stage, which feels intimidating, threatening even, as if she were sitting too close to an open flame, as if being here could be dangerous.
She pulls at her lavender silk scarf, spreading it across her front like a bib, covering her cleavage as much as possible. After much angst, she decided to wear her best black dress, spaghetti strapped and tight around the bust, flaring and flowy from the waist to the knees, probably too short and too revealing for her age. She bought it over a decade ago. It fit her better then. She fears she looks like ten pounds of potatoes in a five-pound bag. Elise is in jeans and black suede ankle boots, a black velvet blazer over a graphic T-shirt, laughing and chatting with her students, totally at ease, as if she were a regular, as if this were her seat and the club was expecting her. She fits into everything.
The students are also in black and jeans, edgy and casual and cool. They belong here, too. They’re all in their early twenties, about where Karina left off before giving up, still believing it’s all possible.
Karina slides the bottom olive off the plastic skewer in her martini and chews on it while Elise leans over to the table to their right. As Elise’s back is now to her, Karina can’t hear the conversation an
d feels excluded, out of place, conspicuous. She doesn’t deserve to be on this field trip. She’s not a teacher at Berklee. She’s not a student. She’s not even a real musician.
She’s Elise’s sad, pathetic neighbor. She’s an old, suburban piano teacher, a has-been, a never-was. Once upon a time, an almost-was.
She wants to be home, in her flannel pajamas, reading a book in her living room. But as soon as she imagines being on her couch, she hears Richard calling her from the den. She drags a long sip from her martini and pulls another olive into her mouth with her teeth. It’s an enormous relief to be away from him, to have a break from the distressing sound of his struggling to clear a cough, from having to tend to him all day and night. She blinked her eyes open this morning in her hotel bed and felt almost giddy, realizing that she had just slept through the night undisturbed.
And then Guilt came marching in, stomping with its monster feet and pounding its drum, scaring any nascent feelings of relief and lightness back into their holes. She shouldn’t have stuck Grace with him for four days. Grace shouldn’t have to clean up her father’s piss and be up all hours of the night while Karina is well rested and wearing a poorly fitting black dress, drinking a dirty martini, and listening to jazz with a bunch of kids. What if something goes wrong?
“I can’t wait for you to hear this guy,” says Elise, leaning back over to Karina. “Abby just called him the Mozart of jazz.”
Karina nods. It’s been so long since she’s been to any kind of live musical performance, years since she’s been to Symphony Hall, the Hatch Shell, Jordan Hall. The last time might’ve been to see Richard at Tanglewood. He played The Marriage of Figaro overture. Eight years ago? Can it really be that long?
She wouldn’t feel so uneasy if they were at a concert hall, if she were tucked somewhere safe and civilized in the orchestra or mezzanine section, waiting to hear a recital or concerto. Classical music has always been her home base, her comfort food, her security blanket. At Curtis, she started as a classical pianist, and by third year, her career looked more promising than Richard’s. They never acknowledged this aloud, but they both knew it. Her teachers praised her and gave her opportunities normally reserved for seniors or graduates. They did not offer these opportunities to Richard.
He congratulated her whenever this happened, but his words were rigid and cold, spoken through his teeth, and would leave her feeling insulted instead of championed. Whenever she privately or publically surpassed his playing, he’d grow distant and critical of her in other ways. He didn’t like her hair. He ridiculed her grammar. He withheld affection, refused sex, and pouted. She craved nothing more than to be loved by him when he felt self-confident and admired in the spotlight. Ironically, the biggest obstacle to his center-stage bravado seemed to be her.
When they were students, their technical skills were similarly matched, but her playing was emotionally connected and far more mature. While Richard could master the technical complexity of any piece, listening to him play often made her picture the notes on the page, the chords, the key, intellectually appreciating his athleticism, hearing the music as dissected elements rather than a whole. Not until after graduation, when they lived in New York, did something click in him, and he began to play the emotion of a piece and not simply the notes.
She remembers Professor Cohen and the Test. Each student was asked to play a piece but not until Professor Cohen left the classroom. The Test was simple. Could the student make the teacher cry in the hallway?
The first time Karina took the Test, she played Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, op. 12, no. 1. She played the closing gesture, tender and quiet, and waited, breath held, for Professor Cohen to return. The door opened, and Professor Cohen was smiling with clasped hands and wet eyes. She made him cry several times that semester. Richard never did.
She discovered jazz first semester of her senior year. She breezed into the campus coffeehouse for a quick espresso, on her way to something else, and stayed for two hours, mesmerized by three of her classmates, a trio of piano, drums, and trumpet playing Miles Davis. This music was so different from the sacred, rigid exactness of Mozart or Chopin. It had an exhilarating freedom, a playful exploration outside the structure of the melody. She watched the three improvise, detour, collaborate, creating something original, discovering the music as they played it, following a free association, a harmony, an embellishment, wherever it led them. They generated a momentum, a magical chemistry, a river that flowed through everyone there. Her heart was captivated, dizzy, spellbound.
She doesn’t think her relationship with Richard would’ve lasted beyond graduation if she hadn’t discovered jazz. In abandoning classical piano for jazz, she ensured that they would never compete, that the classical spotlight would be his to shine in. But switching from classical piano to jazz wasn’t an easy transition. Jazz is complex and in many ways technically more difficult than classical piano. And her decision was at best frowned upon, more often snubbed and mocked. Although neither genres are mainstream music, the world of classical piano is privileged and white, played in grand symphony halls to audiences who sip champagne. The jazz world is historically poor and black, played in hole-in-the-wall nightclubs for patrons drunk on bourbon.
Alexander, the drummer, and the bassist take the stage, and the audience applauds while the musicians ready themselves at their instruments. Alexander is slender, about Karina’s age, with a mop of glossy black hair and fingers that extend for miles, poised on the keys like a sprinter in the blocks, ready to explode into action, holding for the gun to fire. Alexander nods, and the three begin.
The melody is a simple repetition, a catchy, easy-breezy tune, but soon breaks into improvised solos. As Alexander plays, Karina closes her eyes, and the notes become a summer-evening stroll down a country road drenched in moonlight, more of a mood than a melody, sultry and slow, in no hurry at all. Softened by vodka, she rides the notes, allowing herself to be carried, and her blood is flowing hotter. She’s turned on.
Karina remembers living on East Sixth Street in New York City, hanging around the Village Vanguard, listening to Branford Marsalis, Herbie Hancock, Sonny Rollins, and Brad Mehldau, learning through listening, watching, asking, performing, and improvising. Learning jazz was a three-dimensional experience of unique expressive discovery, lived and breathed on the fly in spontaneous jam sessions. Learning classical piano had been an academic exercise in practiced techniques, adherence to strict rules, memorizing the notes on the page, practicing alone. She never felt more challenged, more alive, than when she was playing jazz.
The next two pieces are high energy, a call to action and a celebration. Alexander’s fingers are a fiddler crab running from a seagull’s pursuing shadow; a hummingbird drinking nectar from the keys, trilling arpeggios inhabited by God.
He’s traveling low to high on the keyboard, coloring outside the lines, hitting notes that land just shy of displeasing. This is renegade music, exciting, provocative.
“Holy shit, right?” says Elise.
Karina nods. She closes her eyes again during the fourth piece, entranced by Alexander’s riffs, the way his chord extensions wander from the head. He’s playing outside now, and the song becomes about the journey, not the destination, about getting lost along the way and what he might discover, an embellished grace note, an ascending harmonic progression, a meandering Sunday drive. He varies the phrasing, changing the shape and texture, inserting blue notes and trills that sound like children laughing. He dances across the keys, courting the notes, loving them, and the music is a gentle morning rain playing on a windowpane, delicate, lonely, longing for a lover, a childhood friend, a mother.
The song ends, and the audience applauds. Karina opens her eyes and tears spill down her face. She is enraptured, changed, remembering who she is.
She is a jazz pianist.
With stunning clarity, she suddenly sees the role she’s been playing, the costume and mask she chose and has been wearing for twenty years. She’s been hi
ding, an impostor, unable to give herself permission to do this, to play jazz, to be who she is, shackled inside a prison of blame and excuses.
At first it was all Richard’s fault for moving them to Boston. Jazz pianists live in New York, not Boston. Then Richard started traveling. He was hardly ever home. They rarely had sex anymore. She needed to refill her birth control pill prescription, but it was February and so cold outside, and she didn’t feel like walking to the pharmacy.
She was lazy. She was stupid. She was pregnant.
Her excuse then chasséd over to Grace and motherhood. Now she couldn’t be a jazz pianist because her baby needed her. Richard still spent much of the year touring. She was essentially a single mother. She was consumed and devastatingly lonely in the demands of young motherhood. There was often no room for a shower, never mind for getting back to playing jazz. So she tended to Grace full-time, creating a safe nest where Karina could hide. She promised herself it would be a temporary shelter.
Karina remembers her mother, born in an oppressed country, stuck in an economically depressed town by her husband’s meager coal-mining wages, trapped in a bad marriage by her religion, confined within the dirty beige walls of her small home, raising five children. Every day, she wore a dingy white apron, her prematurely gray hair pulled into a bun, resignation in her eyes, and her arthritic hands to the bone cooking and cleaning and tending to the needs of her children, whose singular dreams were to leave that house, that town, that country, as soon as they could. They all left her.
Karina swore she wouldn’t repeat her mother’s life. As much as Karina loved being Grace’s mother, she would not bear child after child, adding brick after brick to the wall of her maternal prison. Grace would be her only child. One and done. But Richard wanted many children, a big family.