53

Silence, too, is a blank mirror. Winged, I strained after Rebecca, calling after her in that voice that was a color in the air, and there was no response. But I did not lose her. Even when she was a mote on the horizon, I followed.

I caught up with her at last in a garden, somewhere well north of Monterey. A concrete gnome stood guard beside a birdbath, a blush of moss across his shoulders. A purple china cardinal ornamented a fountain. Rebecca wandered a garden, and I kept silent for fear of interrupting her mood.

I scented a sharp perfume, dark, earthy. I recognized it only after a moment. A muted muttering reached us from the house above the lawn. A clock radio, I wondered, or a jolt of CNN to go with the cup of hot chocolate, the beverage I could smell from so far away.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’ve been doing all of this for me. If you lied it was to protect my feelings. All of this has been a wonderful gift, Richard.”

I tried to silence her, but she turned away. I wanted to tell her she was right to be afraid of me. “I started studying the piano when I was six years old. There was no great epiphany, no discovery that I was playing Mozart with a teething ring in my mouth. My parents had a Wurlitzer spinnet. I thought it was the most handsome thing in the world. I loved it when my mother used Lemon Pledge on the mahogany.”

A ancient sound, ugly and heartening at once, made me look at the sky.

A rooster.

I said, “We can’t stay here.”

She heard the rooster, too, but she gazed upward with a smile. “I would play tunes that came into my head, but they were nothing special. Still, they must have impressed my parents. I studied under a woman who was herself partially deaf, with an old-fashioned hearing aid, one of those plastic boxes you pinned to the front of your sweater. I remember even as a little girl thinking surely I should have a piano teacher with good ears. That’s how I thought of it—good ears.”

“I want to hear this,” I began. Some other time—not now.

“My father said she was very polite, and my mother said she had been written up in magazines, world-renowned, gracing the Bay Area with her talent. They drove me to her apartment on College Avenue in North Oakland twice a week. I never complained. I never said, No don’t take me to her, she can’t hear. I was good. Good in the way children use the word. Dutiful.”

The rooster unbent another one of his cries.

She looked at me, put her hand over mine. “Isn’t it strange all the meanings a word can have? I was a good girl. I was obedient, and I wanted to please. My teacher was Sylvia Richter. No, you wouldn’t have heard of her. She had a framed letter from Arthur Rubinstein in her bedroom. I didn’t see it until after her stroke, but there was that air about her of being on the edge of greatness. She had drinks with Horowitz once, at the Biltmore in Los Angeles. And she met Kurt Weill in Malibu, and Stravinsky when he was in Hollywood, but I didn’t know any of this until later, when I met some of her old friends in Austria.”

A hen began to cluck, or was it the rooster himself? How could people live around such noisy fowl? “We don’t have time for this, Rebecca.”

“She told me I had to practice the sequence C,E,G, over and over again. She told me to do it five thousand times. I did. She directed me to play the Minute Waltz sixty times a day, and make a mark on a sheet for every five times I played it. And I did. Day after day, during those smoggy afternoons. The smog was worse, then. Remember? You couldn’t see across the bay some September afternoons.”

“Please, Rebecca—”

“I think she was a person like Eric—someone who would never be a concert pianist, someone who knew she didn’t quite have the focus and the talent. Or the good fortune. But she was a great teacher, Richard.”

A robin fluttered in a nearby shrub, shaking itself awake, a whirr of plumage.

“She said I would need two things to develop my talents. The first was the gift, and that I already had. The second was to look neither to the right nor to the left. Look neither to the right side, nor to the left side, but always straight ahead, on only your music.” Rebecca spoke in the voice of an older woman with a German accent.

I remained silent. Maybe it was only right that we should fade out of existence encircled by this Stonehenge of fake animals. Each figurine spilled an elongated shadow across the grass. Shadows were everywhere, the birdbath casting a long, elegant shape like an inverted pawn.

“After the accident, the piano was all I had. When I realized I could still see the keys in my mind, that the black and whites had not changed position, it was like discovering that a promise had been kept.”

The accident. What a way to refer to such a devastating event.

She said, “We have been distracted by all this.” All this beauty, she meant.

Each yellow dandelion was a shard of light, painful, the glare off a mirror. I pulled Rebecca into the shadow of the fountain.

“I want to see my parents,” said Rebecca.

“And you want the mirror.”

“So do you,” she said.

Of course I did. But now I wanted to find it to preserve it. “I want to destroy the mirror as much as you do,” I lied, with a throb of insincerity in my voice. “This will never happen to anyone else.”

My father felt that organization was not a masculine virtue, and he was a person who modeled himself after a general idea of what was manly and what was not. Most surgeons are meticulous in their records, trusting those bulging patient records to save lives. But my father cultivated a casualness that was, perhaps, a compensation for the exacting nature of his profession. He left his mail, with a studied absentmindedness, throughout the house. My mother was always straightening out magazines on the coffee table, balancing the checkbook. She alphabetized, indexed, filed.

There was one surviving photograph of my brother. I found it in my mother’s papers after her death, in a folder that was not labeled. The snapshot was in an envelope, sealed.

He sat on a brick wall, his legs dangling. He wore short pants and a white T-shirt, and looked sideways at the camera, and at the sun behind the photographer, squinting. He looked like any boy out of another time, in some subtle way, the way boxers in fading publicity photos, stripped to shorts and bare fists, look old-fashioned in ways that are hard to define.

The shadow of the photographer barely crept within the white borders of the picture, just the top of a head on the lawn. Man or woman—it was impossible to tell. But I knew.

The mind is masterful. It can file away even a living human being. The practical approach adopted by my parents scheduled the visits months ahead, a hug and a kiss on days kept apart from the rest of existence. The will could determine that the light of day would not include this creature.

But my mother had never lived an hour without thinking of him. She snapped this picture, had it developed, and then never had to look at it. She carried him in her waking and in her sleeping, and in her last thoughts she took him up and held him in her arms.