17
The Gift
MELANIE
Back in New Jersey, my father preserves Steph’s lilac-colored bedroom exactly as she left it, in anticipation of her return. Late at night, when the anxiety becomes too much to bear—Where is she now? Is someone holding her hostage in some dank cellar? Is she calling out for him?—he pads down the hall and turns on her light.
He lives alone in the faded red house now. My mother, in the hospital, is too weak to travel. As the weeks stretch into months, my dad, who seemed so numb when Steph first went missing, is succumbing to a grief he couldn’t begin to fathom. He is very private and very controlled. He rarely talks about his despair even with me. But he confides to me that in the middle of the night, long after he’s sent his last student home, he will restlessly wander the house, up and down the hall and through the empty rooms, until inevitably he is drawn to the room where he used to read Stephanie bedtime stories and tuck her in, safe and warm, with a good-night kiss. He hasn’t touched a thing in her cluttered bedroom. It is a shrine, like the wedding banquet in Great Expectations, all laid out and waiting for her, gathering dust.
Kneeling by her bed, my father closes his eyes, folds his hands, and prays. Out loud. The words escape his lips in English, in Ukrainian, in a mix of both.
“I tried so hard all her life to protect her, but I failed,” he sobs. “I couldn’t keep her safe.”
In her hospital room, my mother has now decided that Steph ran off to clear her head. Of course she’ll be back. With utter, uncompromising certainty, my mother is sure that no harm has come to my sister. As summer turns to fall, she funnels her worries into practical matters, like the snow and rain.
“The weather is getting colder,” she tells me on the phone a few months after Steph’s disappearance. “I hope she has enough warm clothes.”
Ed and I have to return to Chicago eventually. We’ve spent almost a month sleeping in Stephanie’s bed and eating off her plates, leaving all other responsibilities behind. The atmosphere in Rochester is bleak. We’ve run out of ideas, the trail is growing cold, and the odds of finding her are shrinking. As time wears on, and we realize that we’ve run out of steps to take, we have to make the difficult decision to pack up her belongings and leave her apartment.
I can’t bear the feeling that I’m giving up on my sister, that I’m letting her down. Surely she must be counting on me to figure out what happened, to stay nearby, searching until I find her, to think of her and pray for her and hold her close in my heart so she doesn’t have to suffer alone. Even if the worst has happened, how could I abandon her body to be torn apart by wild animals or rot in a Dumpster? She needs me to find her and bring her home to safety, to the place where she is loved. Late at night, the thought that she may be alive somewhere, held against her will, perhaps tortured in unspeakable ways, drives me to the brink of insanity. I have always been there for her. How can I be failing her now, when she needs me the most?
There is so much raw pain, so much guilt, such a terrible sense of loss. The grief strikes your whole body—a throbbing pain that burrows deeper and deeper, in layers. There is the utter sense of powerlessness and frustration, the terror of not knowing—and even worse, the dread of finding out. There is the pain of seeing my parents’ sadness, after they have already suffered so much more than their share. There is the sudden void left by my best friend, my partner, my soul mate, our whole shared past and our dreams for the future together. There is the grief and rage associated with a life interrupted; the music she owns but hasn’t yet played, the books unread, the knitting projects half done, the little string players still works in progress, the children of her own she hopes for someday. I have no way to cope with the magnitude of the shock and suddenness of events. There can be no peace, no closure. There is no way to say good-bye—no way to know if we should say good-bye—and so no way to heal.
Finally we pack all her things. We return her borrowed furniture and donate her TV set to the Ukrainian club she had joined. Most everything else we box up and move in a U-Haul to our house in Chicago. Ed and I keep Steph’s two parakeets and give her cockatiel, Choobie, to Ken. I force myself not to give up hope that she will come back to us. When she does, she’ll want her books and papers and music and violin. I will keep them all safe for her.
Ed and I go back to Chicago, back to our new little house that has not yet become our home. We store all of Steph’s boxes unopened in our garage and basement, and try to figure out how life for us can go on.
It turns out that we have some time on our hands: just after we get back, the Chicago Symphony goes on strike. Despite our new status as homeowners, with looming mortgage payments and depleted savings, I don’t care. Money has never been that important to me, and never less so than now. I withdraw into a private world, with Ed as my only human contact for weeks. I speak on the phone to each of my parents almost every day, searching fruitlessly for something encouraging to say. Our grief is like a wall around each of us, a form of solitary confinement.
When I’m awake, I alternate between crying and praying. I cry thousands of tears, mostly alone. I pray aloud or in my head constantly. I scrub and clean obsessively in rhythm to long-forgotten hymns and prayers. I splurge on hundreds of bulbs for the garden and sob as I dig my sadness into the ground. I pray formal prayers and made-up prayers and chanting prayers like “please God please God please God” over and over again.
Nights are unbearable. The horror of the unknown is a black hole that sucks me toward it, its gravitational pull overpowering. I literally cannot close my eyes. Hideous scenarios play in my mind, and nightmares torment my sleep. The ache never leaves, not even when I drift off toward dawn. The grief is like a sound track to a movie, rising and falling in volume but always there. Often I sing aloud just to drive away the thoughts of what may have happened to Stephanie. I get up in the middle of the night and come downstairs and mop the already clean kitchen floor, singing the Lord’s Prayer at full volume. Ed comes stumbling from our room into the light looking for me, worried and sleepless himself. Our house is immaculate, and we are both exhausted.
Ed and I don’t consider ourselves especially religious, and we seldom go to church. But we become convinced that if Stephanie’s soul is out floating around somewhere, we want to grab it before it’s too late. When our baby is born the following June, my sister has been missing for almost a year. We name him Nicholas Stephen, after Stephanie, of course. We make Steph his godmother.
Not long afterward, my dad comes to visit. I hurry out the front door to greet him, carrying Nicky sleeping soundly in a basket. Daddy looks years older and frail. He’s lost weight. The bobbling of his chin is more pronounced now, and I notice his hands are shaking, too.
My father’s former students rallied when Steph went missing, and that has helped get him this far. Joanne has connected him with newspaper reporters and TV shows, bringing more publicity for Steph’s case. He draws strength from the letters of support that have come in since. Miriam, now a music teacher herself, treats him as part of her own family in New Jersey. When Nick is born, she comes to Chicago, stepping into the void that otherwise would have been filled by my mother or my little sister. She cooks, cleans, rocks, sings lullabies, and holds the flashlight as I change diapers during yet another days-long power outage.
But the strain is weighing on my father. His health is suffering.
He peers into the basket in my arms. “Oh my God,” he gasps, and it sounds like a prayer. The sadness and loss drain out of his face for a moment as he gazes at his sleeping grandson. “Oh my God,” he says again, and it is a prayer—of thanks for the renewal of life and for the sight of the family red hair and chubby little cheeks handed down to another generation.
Stephanie is still missing two years later, when our twins, Gregory and Laura, are born. It has been three years, almost to the day. The private detective my dad hired to keep on the case has run out of leads. We never talk aloud about giving up hope; hope just slips away on its own.
My dad visits us in Chicago that December. He doesn’t leave the house much these days, other than to see his grandchildren.
“When I come home, I half expect to find Steph waiting on the doorstep,” he confesses, in a rare moment when his iron grip on his emotions falters. “I’m afraid to stay out too late, een case she might be there, locked out and cold.”
I worry about my dad. It seems as if, with each day that passes with her still missing, a little piece of him is lost, too. His eyes have begun to lose their focus, his head bobs and weaves, his hand shakes when he holds a fork. I try to ask him about it, but he waves me off, making it clear that questions aren’t welcome. But during my next visit to him in New Jersey, I find a bottle of prescription pills in his medicine cabinet. It’s a medication used to treat Parkinson’s disease.
We still have no news of Steph. The police have settled on a “person of interest”: a maintenance man who worked at Steph’s apartment complex. He was arrested and jailed after Steph’s disappearance, after being caught trying to abduct a teenage girl. It turns out, astonishingly, that he had a long history of felonies, including rape.
But the police have no evidence. My dad and I have no emotional reserves to press them. We need every ounce of energy we have to try to heal our family. We don’t want to divert a drop of it into rage or hatred or revenge. We take what little comfort we can in knowing the man is now in prison, unable to harm anyone else.
My dad is in Chicago not just to see us but also to accept a lifetime achievement award from the National School Orchestra Association. I watch proudly as he receives an ovation from the crowd of educators in attendance. Afterward, one of them takes me aside and hands me a tape from her video camera.
“I taped your father’s acceptance speech, but I want you to decide if you think he ought to see it,” she says softly.
I raise an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“I’m afraid it will upset him. When he sees himself. You know, the swaying and shaking…”
While he’s still in Chicago, my dad announces his retirement after thirty-seven years of teaching in East Brunswick. “That’s great, Daddy!” I say. “You can spend more time with us, tour with me, teach violin to your grandchildren. I think you’re doing the right thing.”
“I guess so,” he says. But he doesn’t look happy, just wistful.
The retirement party that spring is held in East Brunswick. It’s just one day after I get back from a Chicago Symphony tour to Japan, and I am discombobulated and jet-lagged. Our little family’s first airplane trip with all three children, including the infant twins, has been an epic disaster, culminating in an airline worker being dispatched to unbolt and replace the seat that Nicky has ruined with his projectile vomiting.
My mother arrives by ambulance to attend the dinner. My ninety-one-year-old grandmother Baba is there, too, in a big shapeless dress, to all appearances heartier and healthier than either one of my parents. Enough former students and colleagues have shown up with their instruments that we’re able to form a small string orchestra.
After the speeches, during which my father speaks tenderly about the “babies born under my supervision,” we give an impromptu performance, my dad conducting. It is the last time he will take the podium in front of a group of East Brunswick musicians. He is funny, and as tough as always on the group of middle-aged performers he’s known since they were kids.
“Watch intonation! A leetle beet off. Don’t be stubborn!” he disciplines the orchestra as we do a bit of rehearsing before the opening number.
Turning to the audience, my father announces the first piece: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Mozart. He raises his arms dramatically, and the orchestra leaps to attention, just like the well-trained beginners we once were under his baton. Then my father brings down his arms to signal the first note, and the orchestra launches into the piece. But it isn’t Eine Kleine Nachtmusik. As my dad looks on, at first perplexed, then smiling, then laughing along with the audience, the orchestra pours itself wholeheartedly into his beginner orchestra classic: “Reuben and Rachel.”
The other pieces are sentimental favorites of my dad’s. Katahdin Sunrise had been written for him by composer Philip Gordon years ago, a nod to the mountain that he loved to climb in Maine, whose peak is said to be the first place the morning sun reaches in the United States. “We deedn’t have a chance to rehearse thees piece,” he explains to the audience before we start, in a tone that signals he is about to issue an order, not an apology: “So eef we fall apart: don’t mind.”
After the piece is over, he rewards the players with his ultimate compliment. “Hey,” he says, sounding surprised. “Not bad.”
Then he turns again to the audience. “Thees concert would not be complete without some raw, Slavic sentimentality,” he announces, and we launch into “Lara’s Theme” from Doctor Zhivago. I smile at the memory of our train trip in the Soviet Union before Steph went missing.
Finally, we play his own arrangement of Ukrainian folk dances. “I want to dedicate thees to my mother,” he announces, his voice catching with emotion. But Baba has left the room. In the middle of her son’s final concert, at the culmination of his four-decade-long career, she decides it’s a good time for a bathroom break.
He sighs, and you can see he is willing away a lifetime of disappointment. “Maybe we could play eet a second time for her, something like that.”
The Baba moment aside, I am moved to see my dad gathering strength from the crowd, looking more robust than he has in a long time. But another guest, my old violinist classmate Ted Kesler, has perhaps a more clear-eyed view. Ted hasn’t seen my dad since we graduated from high school. When he returns home that night, he describes my father this way in his journal:
I was stunned when I introduced myself to Jerry Kupchynsky. Is this what 17 years does to a person? He was gaunt, three inches shorter than me, his head bobbled uncontrollably, and his eyes were glazed over. It seemed that only his left eye worked. I thought maybe he had had a stroke. Later I found out that he has Parkinson’s Disease… His wife was contorted in a wheelchair at a table by the windows.
An alumni orchestra played… Jerry barked the same commands “Watch me!” “Watch your intonation!” “Stop at no. 4 or answer to me!” Arms flailing, body hunched and rocking: no subtlety whatsoever. Everyone smiling at his bullish charm, making [it] through the piece despite the conductor. It was a throwback to H.S., struggling with the music, following him, intimidated.
During our annual summer visit to New Jersey a few months later, one of the staff at my mom’s nursing home pulls Ed and me aside.
“Your mother isn’t doing well,” the nurse says in a hushed voice in the corridor. “We’re concerned that her health is failing.”
I turn that thought over and around in my mind. She has been ill and frail for so long that it almost seems as if she can carry on that way forever. Her illness itself is a constant that in a way has lulled us into complacency. Besides, she has so frequently declined, then rallied again over the years. It’s a permanent cycle, in its own way oddly static.
This time the nurses want us to be prepared: the next dip in my mother’s condition could put her past the point of no return.
In September, I make an impromptu visit back East, bringing two-year-old Laura with me for company. When we get to the nursing home, I am shocked by the changes since just a few weeks earlier. My mother’s body is so twisted and crooked in her wheelchair that it makes my neck ache just to look at her. She falls asleep more than once in mid-conversation.
As I watch her doze, it strikes me that my mother has always seemed invincible to me. She’s made the best of her situation, keeping up with her music as long as she could, writing for the hospital newsletter, and creating mosaic tables and trivets with the help of the occupational therapists. Her mind is still as active as ever. From eight hundred miles away she keeps track of everything that’s going on in our lives in Chicago.
“How did Ed’s performance of that weird modern piece go?” she’ll ask during our near-daily calls. “What did the doctor say, does Greg have an ear infection?”
Ever since Steph has gone missing, from her wheelchair, my mom is the one who lifts my spirits. She never stops hoping for a miracle, that Steph will come home. My dad and I have long ago given up trying to convince her otherwise. When we’re with her, we can almost believe it, too.
Now, my dad and I sit side by side in her room as she tries to rally enough energy for our visit. Though my parents’ marriage was frayed even before she became ill, they are approaching their fortieth wedding anniversary. I know he’s painfully lonely at home. He takes solace in his career, his students, and music. But he also visits faithfully with my mother, sharing news of their grandchildren and his trips to see us in Chicago.
While we talk, Laura busies herself trying on my mother’s necklaces. I always bring my mom costume jewelry from our overseas tours, and Laura is happily running her fingers along the shiny coils of amber and jade and colorful seashells. Conversation is difficult. My mom is having trouble holding up her end, nodding off occasionally while we speak. After a while, she gives up trying. Instead, softly, my mom begins to sing.
“You made me love you…,” she starts, as she smiles at me and then at Laura.
“I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to do it,” I join her, just as I did when I was a little girl.
And so we sing together, like Steph and I used to do when we were barely older than my own daughter is now. My mother’s voice is weak, but in my mind I can still hear her, singing out clear and strong from her wheelchair by the living room window, patiently teaching us the words, the melody, the harmony. Laura watches us, transfixed.
Before we leave, my mom directs me to her bookshelf, where I find a wrapped package.
“For your birthday,” she says.
“Mom, my birthday is months away!”
She shrugs a little and looks at me with her beautiful blue eyes, the same eyes I see when I look at my daughter’s face. I swallow hard, sensing that there is more to be said. But she doesn’t speak. Finally, I do, telling her I’ll wait to open the gift until my birthday, and we’ll talk about it then. After I leave the room, we’ve almost reached the elevator when I tell my dad to wait just a minute. I run back to her room and throw my arms around her once more. “Please be around for my birthday,” I whisper.
A few weeks later, my father calls to tell me my mother is dead.
When I fly back to New Jersey, Miriam and her mother, Charlotte, help me plan my mother’s funeral. She has left detailed instructions, so there are not many decisions to be made. At her request, I will play the “Méditation” from Thaïs on my violin at the service. It’s the soulful, heartbreaking piece that my dad taught me for my first solo recital when I was a little girl, when I was too young to appreciate the meaning behind it. Now I fear I understand it much too well.
After we go over the details, I make my way to the nursing home, picking through my mother’s shower-stall-turned-closet to choose her prettiest outfit for burial. But shoes are a problem. Ever since her fall, back when I was four years old, my mother had stopped buying the beautiful shoes she once collected. They seemed a useless taunt to her, once her feet could no longer carry her.
At home, I go digging around in my dad’s basement to see if she has left any footwear behind. I open a little-used closet at the bottom of the stairs and push my way through my mother’s wedding gown and the green gingham dress I wore for the ninth grade production of Bye Bye Birdie. I pull out old Halloween costumes and the devil mask my dad used when his orchestra performed Orpheus in the Underworld. I’m about to give up when I notice, on the floor in the back, a stack of shoeboxes. I reach for them, eagerly tearing off the lids.
There they are: my mother’s old high-heeled shoes, the ones I used to stomp around in when I was just a little girl and she was still able to walk. Somehow they have stayed here in the bottom of the closet for all these years, waiting to be rediscovered.
Searching through the stack, I pick out the highest heels I can find. They are in a mouthwatering shade of blue that just matches my mother’s eyes.
“Okay, guys, time to clean up! What do you want for dinner? Oh my gosh, look at the time… let’s go!”
The years following my mother’s death pass in a blur of concerts and tours interspersed with potty training, playdates, and trips to the zoo. Our children have taken over our lives, and Ed and I love every minute of it. We see more of my dad, too. His solitary life is transformed when he meets his new next-door neighbor, Joan, an avid gardener like him who has three grown daughters of her own. Their friendship flourishes, and after a brief courtship they marry. In their new house, just down the street from his old one, my father teaches a few private students, plants flowers and vegetables, and starts working on a project with the help of Miriam’s father: compiling a book of poetry that he has written, in Ukrainian, over the past fifty years. My dad and Joan break away as often as they can to visit us.
Late one afternoon, two years after my mother’s death, the kids and I are ankle-deep in toys. Legos, dollhouse furniture, blocks, and books are scattered across the floor. The four-year-old twins, Laura and Gregory, are tumbling around, laughing and speaking a secret language that no one else, including me, can decipher. Nick, a solemn six-year-old, is trying to make his Lego tower stand up straight.
I glance at my watch, wondering if I can fit in Nick’s violin practicing before dinner. I signed him up for lessons a year ago, when he turned five, around the same age Steph and I had been when we began lessons. I’ve given him my own first pint-size violin, dependable old Violet. It’s a perfect fit for his little fingers. I figure that between my own music education background and watching my dad all those years, I can teach a monkey to play the violin.
But I didn’t count on Nick.
Getting Nick to practice in the few hours after school and before dinner and my evening concert schedule is an exercise in futility. He squirms and wiggles and can’t stand still. He never walks in a straight line but flings himself from one spot to the next. He’s so hard to pin down, much less to teach, that I draw paper shoe prints on the floor for him to stand on and load marbles on top of his feet, bribing him with candy if he can get through a lesson without them rolling off.
I try to make it fun, exhausting my ingenuity as I attempt ever more creative ways to get him to focus. I use all my dad’s tricks, too—they work remarkably well—and like him, I insist on perfect form and intonation. But I don’t use a timer, and neither Ed nor I would ever spank our kids. Even so, I find myself yelling, saying all the things my dad said that I vowed I never would, like “What is wrong with you?!” until Ed says, “You should hear yourself screaming. It’s not good for him and not good for you, either. You sound just like your father!”
Now the kids are flinging their toys around the living room, dinner isn’t ready, Nick hasn’t practiced, and my concert is coming up in just a couple of hours. In the confusion, the telephone chooses that moment to ring.
“Is this Melanie Koop-a-chinsky?”
“That’s Kupchynsky, yes.”
The caller identifies herself as a newspaper reporter from Rochester. Then she asks, with brisk efficiency: “Can you comment on the news that the remains of a woman were discovered in the woods today near Greece, New York?”
Somehow I manage to turn on The Lion King to distract the kids and get out of the room in the space of a heartbeat. It takes another beat for me to start to understand what she’s said.
“Do they know who it is? Why are you calling me?” My heart has started up again and, shot through with adrenaline, is now pounding audibly in my chest.
“Yes, they have identified the remains as Stephanie Kupchynsky, the music teacher. Have the police not called you?”
I am stunned into silence.
“I’m so sorry,” the reporter says. “I thought you would have heard by now. Can I get a reaction? Are you surprised?”
That is how I learn that the seven-year-long search for my sister is over.
JOANNE
Our apartment was chaos. The living room was engulfed in giant, primary-colored plastic toys. Five-year-old Andrew loved sports. There was the red plastic T-ball. The blue-and-orange plastic slide. Various sizes of plastic basketballs and soccer balls that left black scuff marks when he threw them against the walls.
Andrew’s room was a shrine to Thomas the Tank Engine. Curtains, rug, pillows—all paid tribute to Thomas, as did the little wooden trains that were constantly underfoot on his bedroom floor. Rebecca’s room, befitting a budding ballerina, was pink, a color she recently decided she hated. Her floor was littered with bobby pins and hairnets and ballet shoes that needed the ribbons sewn on. She was dancing around, practicing her party scene role in The Nutcracker.
I didn’t have the luxury of worrying about housekeeping. I had become an editor at the Wall Street Journal, first working on Page One and most recently creating a new section called Weekend Journal as its editor in chief. The seven-days-a-week crush of launch mode crowded out brain space for anything else. My work hours were a scrim of meetings. My nights were spent immersed in page proofs that I marked up with red felt-tipped pens in between reading the kids their bedtime stories.
Now I flopped on my bed, surrounded by catalogs, comparing girls’ pink fleece anoraks from a half-a-dozen stores, brainstorming a new weekly feature that would be called Catalog Critic. “Remember to practice!” I called out absently to Rebecca.
There were two activities that I required of our children: going to Hebrew school and taking music lessons. Both qualified as religion, I guess you could say.
We had started both kids on piano, and Rebecca studied violin as well, but they were indifferent students. For Rebecca, ballet held much more appeal, which to my mind was just as good: She danced in ballets composed by Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky. She studied at the School of American Ballet, the training school of the New York City Ballet, where her fierce old Russian teacher poked at her feet with a cane. I found it oddly comforting.
Andrew, meanwhile, had just discovered the French horn. He was inspired by Ronni’s horn-playing son, Steven. In fact, between my sisters and me, all seven of our children played instruments, and Steven would go on to become a professional musician. Mr. K’s influence had extended to the next generation.
Of course, insisting that my kids play an instrument was one thing; doing it myself was another. My children had never even seen my old viola, much less heard me play it. That was long ago and far away. I was far too preoccupied with other things. Like the six pink anoraks I was studying in six different catalogs, all spread out across my rumpled bedspread.
That’s when the phone rang.
“It’s Miriam.”
The cellist from our old quartet! I hadn’t heard from her in years.
“Stephanie’s remains have been found.”
That stopped me short.
I stood, sinking my bare toes into the bedroom carpet as she told me the details. A couple of brothers, eleven and thirteen years old, were fishing in a shallow stream in upstate New York. They were chasing the fish, sloshing through foot-high water. They stumbled over something and bent down to take a look. Turned out they had run right into human bones.
How long had it been since Stephanie’s disappearance? I thought back, back to when I first heard the news from Mr. K, when Rebecca was a baby and Andrew hadn’t yet been born. Seven years.
A memory tugged at the base of my brain, coming into focus like something out of a long-forgotten dream. Stephanie as a little girl, eight years old, perched on the arm of my chair, her thin arm thrown casually around my neck, her breath gently tickling my ear as she laughed. Her hair, brushing my cheek as she bent to look more closely at the book we were reading together while I waited for my lesson. Her hand, pointing to the pictures as we screeched in delight. The book, The Bog People. The photos, of murder victims discovered by fishermen sloshing through the shallows.
I shook off a chill. Miriam was saying something about a memorial service.
“We’ve picked out the church, in East Brunswick,” she said. “So we’re all set. See you then.”
My thoughts snapped back to work, to looming deadlines. Certainly I wanted to go—how could I miss it? I furiously calculated article assignments and deadline timetables in my head, trying to see how I could squeeze in some time away from the office.
“If I can get out of work, I’ll be there,” I said.
“Of course you’ll be there,” Miriam snapped. “You’re playing in it.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, confused.
“Our quartet is performing for the service. Darlene Brandt is playing Stephanie’s part.”
“But Miriam, I don’t play anymore!”
“You do now.”
A few weeks later, I found myself standing nervously on the doorstep of Mr. K’s house. He had remarried by now, and he and his new wife, Joan, had moved to a newly built home down the street. I hadn’t seen him in fifteen years.
I was a boss back at work, but here I was a cowering kid again. My mother drove me. On the doorstep, as I heard the door creak open, I edged uneasily behind her, like I did when I was five years old.
As the door swung open, for a split-second I got a glimpse of Mr. K, reassuringly familiar with his combed-over hair and trim little mustache. Then he was on the steps with me, throwing his arms around me and holding me tight in a bear hug. “My baby!” he said, hugging me tighter. “My baby! You’re back.” We stayed that way for a long time, arms wrapped around each other, not wanting to let go.
It was only after he finally stepped back that I got a good look at him. He was shorter than I remembered, and frail. His hair had thinned. He had an unmistakable wobble to his head. But he was most recognizably my old Mr. K, now grabbing me by the hand to lead me inside.
I had never been happier to see anyone.
Melanie and Miriam were already in the house, warming up on their instruments. Miriam, who had become a music teacher herself, looked the same as she had in high school, with her thick long hair and warm smile, except she was pregnant. Her husband sat on the couch with their infant daughter. Melanie was practicing behind a closed door. Listening to her spectacular riffs, I was intimidated all over again.
Darlene Brandt, who had started out as Mr. K’s frightened student and had gone on to become one of our teachers, was there, too. She would be playing second violin, filling in the position Stephanie had played in our quartet. Darlene’s own father had died before her wedding. Mr. K had walked her down the aisle.
I unpacked my viola while listening to Melanie behind that door. We had barely been in touch for the last twenty years, aside from trading birth announcements. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d seen each other. She sounded so confident, her playing strong and powerful, the music soaring to emotional heights that reminded me of when I used to sit in the audience listening to her when we were kids. I imagined her striding out of the room, self-assured, a world traveler now, maybe a little arrogant. She could afford to swagger, after all, being at the top of her profession. I looked down at my viola, now unfamiliarly cradled under one elbow. It felt like an alien, and I like a musical imposter.
Finally, the door opened and Melanie emerged, violin in one hand. The thoughts racing through my head came to a halt. As powerful as her playing was, her demeanor was as shy as ever. She barely looked up. It was almost as if we were meeting for the first time again, when we were ten and she peeked through the lesson-room door while her dad was yelling at her for his tea and simultaneously yelling at me to play it “Again!”
After an awkward greeting, we settled down to rehearse, setting up in formation in Mr. K’s finished basement. As we tuned our instruments, I was so nervous that my right hand clutched the bow in a death grip. When we first turned to play Bach’s beautiful, solemn Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3, my bow skittered across the strings. But then something happened. It was like we were kids again. All the years in between disappeared. We were all breathing together. We had such different lives now, but somehow it was as if we were all thinking with one brain. And it felt as if Stephanie was right there with us. The memory of that old connection between us kicked in, and I realized that it had never gone away. It was inside us all the time.
The basement had a big stereo, so that Mr. K could blast his classical music, and a bar at one end. That’s where Mr. K was now. I noticed his hands shaking alarmingly as he poured drinks, while the wobbling of his head marked a different rhythm all its own. Still, he was smiling as he looked out at us, watching us play.
“Thees room eez just for me,” he said, after insisting we try it “one more time—again.” A playful look momentarily wiped away the pain that I had seen on his face earlier. “See? I got my own Black Russian bar.”
At the church for the memorial mass the next day, an enormous poster-size photo of Stephanie, propped up on an easel in front of the altar, greeted us. The picture stopped me short. It was difficult to look at but impossible to look away. The photo was the same one that I had seen in my parents’ newspaper seven years ago. Stephanie, with her beautiful dark eyes and porcelain skin, with a little smile on her face, ready to break into a giggle. Melanie excused herself and ran from the sanctuary.
When I first saw that photo seven years ago, Steph was still a member of our generation. She looked a lot like the rest of us in our quartet. But since then, I had had a second child, become an editor, fixed up our fixer-upper house. Melanie had had three kids and toured the world. Miriam had married, started a family, and taught too many students to count how to play instruments. We would all be pushing forty before we knew it.
And then there was Stephanie. In the photo, she was in her midtwenties—almost a generation younger than we were now. With each day, that gap was widening. You could feel it, that she was slipping away from us, receding into the past as we plowed into the future. We would continue to build lives and careers, to collect wrinkles and gray hairs, and to watch our children grow. She would stay that age forever. She was beautiful, but she was in amber. No—she was gone.
Mr. K, accustomed to an audience, seemed to be more collected than any of us as he greeted the crowd. I was too rattled to notice that the church had filled to capacity. The four of us in the quartet unpacked our instruments and sat in formation, to the side of the altar, listening to the service. We performed our Bach Air, and I saw a few people in the front rows dabbing at their eyes.
At one point, Melanie got up to perform a solo in Steph’s memory. It was “Méditation” from Thaïs, by Massenet, and it was the most heartbreaking piece I’ve ever heard. I wiped my eyes, smearing my makeup across my cheeks, and as she sat back down, I said something dumb and hopelessly inadequate like, “What a beautiful tribute to Steph.” Melanie didn’t look at me. She was somewhere far away, far from everyone else.
Afterward, I was surprised by the size of the crowd, which overflowed into the lobby. Mr. K’s old students and their parents had converged in force. Some still lived in town, but many had traveled a far distance. My old friend Jonathan, the smartest boy in our class, was there. Now he was a doctor; he had driven in from Boston with his glamorous Italian neurobiologist wife.
Miriam’s family was there, too. Of the seven kids in her family—all of them students of Mr. K—four of them had become either teachers or musicians. Her parents were there as well, along with many other parents I recognized, older now, their children long grown, but determined to be there to support Mr. K.
But mostly, there were Mr. K’s former students—younger students, older students, from dewy twentysomethings to graying near-retirees. At the reception afterward, throngs of the now-grown pupils greeted one another, introducing their spouses, trading addresses, and running after toddlers. The room was rippling with happy shrieks of recognition. Children ran around with cookies and punch.
I was talking with Jonathan’s mother when Mr. K approached me. He gathered me in one more hug, and I saw tears in his eyes.
He motioned to the crowd circulating around him. “Thees was Stephanie’s last gift,” he told me. “To bring us all back together again.”