Tell Me Something Real (9 page)

“Told you so.”

He pulls me closer and I get my wish: not just the kiss, but the sound of his heart.

“Will you play more?”

“Later.” I lead him back to the porch and we sit on the steps.

He nudges his knees against mine. His skin is still warm from the shower. “Come on,” he says. “Play more. It's just me here.”

“Maybe in a while, okay?”

“You're really good, Vanessa,” he says. “I mean it. I've never heard someone play music like that except on a record or on the radio. No wonder you're getting recruited.”

I look at my bare feet, at my chipped cherry-red nail polish. “I love orchestra, but it's a lot of traveling on weekends and events at night. My teacher wants me to do it, but I can't bail on Adrienne like that.”

“Yeah, but how can you bail on something you've worked so hard for? And you're really good.” He looks at me, waiting for me to keep going.

“It's not about being good, though. Playing was the only time I could breathe at school, so I played whenever I could. Mrs. Albright knew that the only way I was getting through this was by playing. She gave me harder and harder pieces and I just blew through them. She says I need to think about my future, like transferring. But there's no way, right? I mean, how can I do that, ask for that, when we have to take care of my mom?”

“You don't have to explain,” he says.

I nod and rest my head against his shoulder. When I open my eyes, tears spill down my cheeks. “I had science last period. My favorite class after music. I'd walk into class and my teacher, he's really cool, would tell me to go see Mrs. Albright. He'd nod his head and tell me to go. That's it. They always knew when I needed to play. You know, on the hard days. It was hard to be away at the clinic, and it was hard coming back.”

“Going back to your old life,” Caleb says. “Reentry sucks. Nothing's the same, but everyone wants you to be the same. Even when I looked like this.” He rubs his scalp, but he doesn't look like a chemo victim anymore. He is just a boy, maybe too skinny, with weird hair. “It's ridiculous,” he says. “You'll never be the same. No matter what.”

I nod. “Exactly. Now I don't have much time to play.”

“Why don't you play in front of us?”

“I don't want the noise to bother anyone.” I don't tell him that it scares the hell out of me, to be closely observed by people I know. I need the cover of a dimly lit auditorium.

“You have to play every day,” he says.

“There are more important things now. It doesn't feel right to spend all my time practicing when your mom is taking care of the house. No one should be taking care of me.” I hang my head. “I'm not sick. You're the one who had to go back to school and have everyone stare at you, even when you were doing chemo. I can't imagine how you felt.”

He doesn't let go of my hand. My veins pound and my wrist tingles. He presses his finger harder, digging deeper into my life line and heart line, making our fates permanent, intertwined. I feel his illness, his slow recovery, how it must have felt when his dad left.

He takes a deep breath and lets it out slow, relaxing his fingers. “I stopped going. I couldn't take it anymore. I quit water polo. The coach waited for me to tell him. He wasn't going to kick me off the team. Kick someone when they're
down. When I saw another guy wearing my number, I went home and told my mom I wasn't going back to school. She tried to homeschool me, but I wouldn't read. Then I was too sick to even try. No one made me go back, even when they told me I was in remission.”

He squeezes my hand. “I know we're different. Your mom's the one who's sick—not you. I'm not dying, but I'm not cured.”

I nod, knowing he doesn't want to say the obvious: Mom is dying, and she doesn't have a chance of going into remission.

“You're not the one who has cancer,” he says. “But people still stare at you, right? It's not your body, but you still have to live through it. You just know you're going to live.”

I kiss him softly, first on his cheek because that's closest, and then I turn his head and meet his lips. “You're not dying, remember?”

“I remember,” he says.

“Prove it.”

He cups my chin and kisses me until I forget about everything else, even the piano.

Adrienne's bed is empty, a pile of rumpled blankets and sheets. I close my eyes as soon as I open them, remembering Caleb: his touch and taste and the way I exchanged the air in my lungs for his. The steady beat of his heart calming mine, racing rabbit-fast in my chest.

My toes curl at the memory of his hand on the small of my back. He was still warm from the shower. His shirt, a little damp, clung to his skin. He is everything I imagined and still a mystery. I embarrass myself with a ridiculous smile that won't go away.

I think I knew, back on the beach just three weeks ago, that he would change me somehow. And when I walked into his hospital room the next day, watching him sit up and smile at me. The way he looked at me, the way he looked
into
me, isn't that different from the way he kissed me. Like I was the only thought in his head. Like I was the only one he wanted to touch.

I want more of him. I want all of him. He is asleep in the next room, in my bed, and I want to crawl in next to Caleb so I can hear the strength of his heart in his chest. I close my eyes and hope his heart is beating stronger because of me.

Piano becomes a public affair. After Caleb made the error of mentioning my playing, Barb clocks my time on the piano bench. She goes as far as suggesting I play during dinner like a jazz pianist in a bar, the sort who uses a fish bowl as a tip jar.

I refuse.

He kissed me a week ago. Caleb's kissed me since, quiet moments as we explore the neighborhood on his board, jumping off when we're confident we won't be seen. I want to hop on the board and align my body with his. I fall asleep wanting to feel his breath on my neck, his hands around my waist.

Music consumes me. It always will. But until now, I've spent my days with Mom, sitting in the car or at the clinic rather than on the cool, polished wood of the piano bench. With Caleb, I have something to touch other than the keys.

I want to be alone with Caleb and I want to be alone to play. Something shifted with our kiss. I opened myself to him, and when I did, I saw things differently. There can be more than the house and the clinic. Maybe, just maybe, we could make the conservatories work. Our lives aren't as small as they were just last month. With her tender bossiness, Barb assumed custody of us all, putting food on the
table, listening to Dad, and nursing Mom. I'm allowed to practice instead of cook. Barb, with all of her natural remedies and vegetarian cookbooks, makes our house feel like a home again.

Caleb liberates my heart—Barb liberates us all.

Except Mom. Nothing can free Mom, but Barb tends to her in a way none of us can. Not even Dad.

When I sit at the piano, I play with a newfound attention, as though I'm playing for my future, like everything depends on it.

Caleb doesn't understand that I'm not a performer, not in the way he assumes. Being in orchestra allows me to focus on music. Recitals and concerts are nothing more than requirements, transactions, a small price for hours alone with the piano. Come practice time, he sneaks into the room, which throws me off the clear constellation of notes. Too shy to ask him to leave, I fumble through new pieces, cringing at my crappy progress.

My compromise: Whenever he enters a nearby room, I switch to a mastered piece, one of the six I included in my conservatory applications. This works for a couple of days until Adrienne calls me out.

“You promised you'd never play that one again.
Ever.
” She turns to Caleb. “Holy crap, we had to listen to that for two months.”

I slam the lid shut.

Mom defends me, telling Caleb about her favorites,
itemizing my solos, recitals, and awards. How she asks me to play the same piece over and over again, her “healing music,” she calls it.

But even Mom's praise doesn't ease my nerves. Whenever Barb insists that I practice, excuses roll off my tongue and I find myself vacuuming under my parents' bed, cleaning Mom's vanity table, and tackling other intimate chores. There are windows of time, half an hour here and there, when the house empties for errands, and I stay behind to play without an audience. As long as I muffle the piano, I can practice while Mom sleeps, an increasing amount week by week.

Mrs. Albright assembled my summer homework with care. She organized the sheet music by level of difficulty, not in regards to skill, but emotion. She understood that I can't touch the keys without feeling, and some of the pieces paralyze me, especially Chopin, with his uncanny knack for leaving me breathless.

I may play by myself, but I don't play alone. Her spidery handwriting adorns the folder, her standing invitation to call or visit.

She wouldn't approve of how I break her carefully constructed order, but I can't squeeze in Liszt minutes at a time. He requires more—hours, even days.

After a few days of struggling with Liszt, I tell Caleb I need to skip the clinic sleepover. He studies the sheet music, reading the title, Piano Sonata in B minor, with an
expression of bewildered jealousy. Even with cancer, he is unaccustomed to a rival.

They all leave without me. Dad comes home hours later, his arms filled with blueprints. “It's not like you to play hooky.” He rests his oversize paper, building designs rolled like scrolls, on the dining room table.

“I've got to finish this,” I say. “I'm not even close.”

He wrestles off his tie and gives me a tired smile. “We'll work together. I think I can get this done by the end of the week. We're that close. Want anything from the kitchen, sweetie? I need a beer.”

“No thanks. I'm good.”

Even drinking a beer, Dad looks kind of elegant, handsome in an old movie sort of way. He pulls out a chair and taps a few keys, rapidly, like a player himself. “You need a better place to play. You shouldn't be cramped in here.”

I release the piano from my sloppy soundproofing, covering the floor with blankets, a large pile that takes up too much space. I play a small part of the sonata, the few proficient notes. The sound can't compete with school's grand piano, despite its age and overuse.

“It's fine,” I say.

He glances around the house. “We'll figure out something better after—”

Our eyes meet, both of us startled by the acknowledgement that she'll be gone soon, that we could consider rearranging furniture without protest, without negotiation. Without her.

I feel slapped by the brutality of the truth, something implied every day. She will die before long, a plain fact, but for how much we deal with the daily details, we never speak of our lives without her, not beyond the abstract. He covers his face with his hands. “I didn't mean it like that.”

I close the piano, hoping that by hiding away the keys, I'll erase the betrayal.

“Yes, you did.”

“I didn't mean for it to sound like that, Vanessa.”

His eyes possess a pleading quality, and I understand that only I can assuage his guilt. Her death will destroy us, but it also will free us of small burdens, of the constraints of her fatigue and nausea and strong opinions. He is speaking of more than redecorating our house. They are horrible thoughts, thoughts that I have too, and I regret each and every one.

We had a dog once, a border collie, Smiling Joe. I don't remember, but apparently I begged for a puppy, and after a solid year of asking, I woke to bundle of black-and-white fur licking my face. Dad said that he liked having another male in the house, even if it was just a dog. My seven-year-old legs were too short to keep up with his bounding pace. He was built to run and herd sheep. I was twelve when he bolted out the gaping front door in order to chase a trespassing cat. Our neighbor tried to swerve. I doubt she could have missed him. Afterward, he howled and then let out a sound that was so close to human that I still remember it. I crouched
next to him, avoiding the sight of his crushed hind legs, and stroked his ears. I didn't want to add to his pain by putting any weight on him. Just an hour earlier, I'd rested my head on the scruff of his neck. So, I hovered above him and whispered any reassuring thought that came to mind. Mostly a mantra of
I'm right here; it will be okay
.