October
“Oui, non, cabane a sucre,” Sam replied.
“Grade eight level. Noted,” Robert chuckled.
“Literally true at my old school,” Sam said. A spasm of dark emotion went through her at the thought of her old school.
Robert had the sheet music spread across his lap. He’d leaned over and carefully placed the ukulele on the floor beside him. Sam could see that she’d sparked something with that chart. He no longer appeared as sunken into himself and exhausted from his injuries. His face had brightened. There was excitement in his voice. He sat back in the wheelchair and looked up at her seriously. “There are English lyrics to this song.”
Sam shook her head. “Honestly, I only have a vague sense of what these words mean. Something about seeing life through a positive lens. But the soul of this song is French. When this song goes to bed at night and dreams, it dreams in French.”
Robert nodded as though what she’d said was a plain fact. “Not gonna lie,” he said. “I can’t play most of these chords on ukulele. Yet. You only get four notes per chord. This D13 here? I have no idea…I mean…technically, you cannot make a D13 chord out of four notes. I’m sure there are workarounds. But…this is a new instrument to me. So…”
“So we’ll both be learning.”
Robert nodded. “We’ll both be learning. This is going to be a project, right? You know that, right? Like. We’re not learning this song today. Or this week.”
Sam nodded back. Of course she could see how big of a challenge this was.
“Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to read through this score. It’s gonna take me, like, ten, fifteen minutes.”
“Do you want to listen to the recording?”
“Oh, I know this tune. And…I’ve got this, right?” He held up the papers.
“Right.” She felt sort of dumb. She’d forgotten, really, about how much information was on those sheets, for people who knew how to decipher it.
“I’m going to look through this. Then I’ll play through it, start to finish, a couple of times, and you sing whatever you can sing.”
Sam sat on the landing, her feet down on the stairs, while Robert strummed and hummed, picked out individual notes, and fumbled his way through the chord changes. If anything, this stairwell was more resonant than the one at the back of the school, and she found that even the uncertain fragments of his first run through the song got amplified in a way that gave them a deep emotional significance.
Her phone buzzed. Two short zerts from the floral bookbag across the landing near the wall. She was unused to hearing that sound and associating it with her own phone. She was in the habit of shutting the phone off and only turning it on to get her texts at the end of the school day.
She chose to ignore the alert and stay in the resonant moment of the stairwell.
The music she was listening to now might be called “Robert Learns to Play ‘La Vie en rose.’” It was, in a way, its own song.
“Okay,” Robert said after a while. “This song is in G. And the first note of the melody is a G. Here it is.” He plucked a note. “Can you sing that note, please? Just the note.”
He plucked the note again and she sang it with a la.
“Exactly,” he said. “Now here’s the chord I’m going to be playing when you’re singing that note.” He played the chord. “Just…like…practice singing that note over this chord.” He strummed the chord in a tempo that immediately brought the song to mind.
“Quand…” she sang. “Quand… Quand… Quand…” She knew the word meant when.
She had a separate sheet in her hand, one that only had the lyrics on it. “Bras” meant arms. So there was probably some kind of hug in the first line. But there was a meaning in the song that transcended words, that transcended meaning itself. There was a meaning, too, in the simple act of singing. Singing was meaningful, regardless of the words of the song.
Soon Robert was playing the intro. He said it was four bars long, and she was sure she could count them as they passed, but he said he’d nod when it was time to sing.