the cure for buzzing thoughts was busy hands. The kitchen was done, the study too daunting, so I tackled Dad’s room, making the bed, placing columns of bedside books back onto shelves, removing cups and mugs, throwing away an old flower arrangement, cleaning the pile of dry petals beneath it.
I was surveying the now orderly room from the doorway with a slow, calm breath when I noticed that the drawer of one of the nightstands was closed at a funny angle.
Mom used to sleep on that side.
I went very still. Then I crossed the room in a full sprint to wiggle the drawer back into place and push it shut. It was full of random papers—one of them stuck in the back. I tugged it loose, wary of looking too closely.
Too late. It was a glossy program from a concert in Vienna, a full nineteen years ago. Mom was the headliner. Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A Minor. A newspaper clipping was stapled to the back of it—a review from a German newspaper, presumably glowing.
I picked up another scrap of paper from the drawer. And another. These were all hers, interviews, programs, flyers, reviews. The earliest ones were all pasted into a little notebook at the bottom of the pile—her recital at Amberley, her philharmonic debut—but then there was a gap, nine years, ten, and everything since was just tossed in here, sloppily. Almost angrily.
Why had she kept it like this? What was the point? And she hadn’t cleared it out before leaving. Neither had Dad. He just kept sleeping next to it, night after night.
I climbed up to my closet, grabbed the shoebox my new sneakers had come in, ran back down, filled the box with paper scraps of Anna Weston-Chertok, shut the lid, closed the drawer, took the box back to my room, and stared at it.
What now? I could mail this to her. I didn’t even know where she was.
I put the box in my closet and shut the door.
The sun was going down. I wandered to the kitchen to forage, and a text came in from an unknown number.
I immediately started grinning. I hadn’t even put his name in my contacts yet.
I’m conducting till 8:30 but do you want to get together after?
And then . . . If you’re up for it. I can hang out wherever.
I started typing a reply, then let my finger hover until—another message: If you’re busy tonight I totally get it.
Then: Blather on, verb (See above)
I flopped over the kitchen counter, typing fast. Are you conducting your piece?
Nonononononooooooo Then: Not ready yet. At all. Tonight is THE MAN
I turned my phone upside down, like that would make his message make sense.
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
Nice! I replied.
They’re not killin it but we’re getting there, then: aaa break’s over, text you when we’re done
I typed as quickly as I could. Are you leading the orchestra tonight
He didn’t reply. Either he’d switched his phone to silent or he didn’t know how to answer such a pleb question. Of course the conductor would lead. But it seemed like he was describing the job of a real conductor, not a student—the musical director. Were they really giving a kid with next to no experience, running on pure instinct and enthusiasm, free rein with the Amberley summer orchestra?
I couldn’t picture it, but found myself desperately trying, eyes closed, stomach pressed tight against the counter’s edge. For the first time in months, I allowed into my mind the image of Lilly Hall and Lincoln Center—light spilling in interlocking pools, gorgeous crowds clustering around each building’s doors, silhouetted figures waiting by the fountain for their dates to arrive while, inside, musicians listened with bated breath for the first chair oboe, tuning their nerves to match its perfect A.
I swiped on mascara, an arbitrary nod at respectability, and headed over. The traffic was synched, letting me walk the entire way without waiting for lights. My hands clenched as I left the common sidewalk, but I could barely feel my feet hit the ground.
The rondo echoed in the Lilly Hall lobby, and only then did my step falter. I knew the music; everybody knew it, right? But there was a new energy underneath—a sense of having fallen through time and stumbled into Mozart conducting his own piece.
It was a work-through, the orchestra’s main conductor, Emil Reinhardt, hovering in the wings, arms crossed over his Amberley T-shirt—but there was still a scattered audience here watching in rapt silence. Oscar was dressed in the shorts he’d worn earlier today, the orchestra members similarly casual. Aside from that, this could have been a season opener of the philharmonic.
He was . . . electric. Such an overused word in music criticism, but I swore there was lightning bursting from his fingers, his baton, his incredible hair. I sat in one of the velvet seats, tucking my knees under my long skirt so I could clutch my legs tight.
I couldn’t see his face but I knew what it would look like. Joyous. Rapturous. A man in love. There was nothing unformed about Oscar in this moment, nothing of the nervous boy he’d shown me in the courtyard. Up at the podium, he was himself, powerful, unapologetic. He was Mozart and he was Oscar Bell and he was every member of the orchestra and he was the audience, and, right now, he was the entire world, because he was this music that was playing, lanterns in a night garden, stolen kisses, laughter.
The final notes resounded. The twenty people scattered through the house burst into applause—and I headed for the lobby. I can’t.
A man walked out ahead of me, holding the door so I could pass. He looked dazed too, like he’d been kissed by a supermodel. It took me a second to recognize him as the New York Times reporter from earlier today. This would go in the piece he was writing. Oscar’s brilliance. His promise. His work with the great Martin Chertok and this prestigious school. His incredible future.
As the reporter left the building, I stood in the empty lobby, excitement and despair coursing through me in alternating currents. And something else. Something dizzy.
This was an obvious mistake. Coming here, listening to this . . . I wasn’t ready. But at the same time, I’d needed it. Everything looked sharper now. The air was charged in my lungs. I’d missed it and I hated that I felt this way, but anger still felt better than the awful numbness I’d endured since April. I loved this. I had no right to, but oh God, I did.
My phone buzzed, a text. Done now, you home? :)
Oscar must have picked up his phone the instant he put down his baton.
I’m here, actually, I texted back, swiping for the right, charmingly sheepish emoji. Lobby.
The door swung open from the hall. I pivoted, but it was a few people from the audience chatting quietly as they left. They looked familiar—friends of Dad’s?
The door behind them creaked again and Oscar burst through, holding the top of his head with both hands. “I had no idea you were here.”
The audience members turned, curious, and I realized they were Amberley board members. They must have turned out to see Oscar in action and found a bit more gossip than they’d bargained for.
They would talk no matter what we did.
Oscar rubbed his eyes, like he’d sleepwalked here. I could feel energy pulsing off him—macho, wired, massively distracted.
“You wanted to hang out?” I lifted my cell phone, entering it into evidence.
“Yeah, I’m done, let’s . . .” He pressed his fingertips to his lips.
I knew that expression—the look Dad got when he was listening to something only he could hear. Still, it was jarring, seeing it on Oscar.
I stepped back. “Do you want to grab dinner, or—?”
“I ate earlier.” His eyes met mine, fuzzy around the edges. “Could we hang out in my room? Is that . . . would that be okay?”
His room. My pulse quickened, deepening until I could feel it everywhere.
“I just . . .” He scratched his face. “I’ve got an idea for how to spice up the recapitulation and if I don’t get it down quickly, I’m afraid I’ll—”
“Oh!” I let out a tight laugh. “Right, yeah. That’s fine, let’s . . . get back.”
He sprinted out of the hall with me, waving vaguely to the board members as we passed them on our way to the sidewalk.
“Sorry to be so frantic,” he muttered. “I’ve never worked on something with this scope before and I usually have my school notebooks with me, you know? Something to jot the idea down on.”
“Write on me,” I joked, extending my arm as we hurried around the corner. “I’ve been trying to get a tan, but it hasn’t worked, so you might as well take advantage.”
“Do you have a pen?” Oscar asked, dead-serious.
“Oh.” I stopped walking and fished one out of my bag. “It’s purple. Is that weird?”
“Purple is stupendous.” He took the pen and twirled it idly between his fingers, squinting to himself as I scanned the road.
A cab pulled up at the taxi stand, dropping off a late operagoer. I raced to snag it.
“Seventy-first and Central Park West,” I said, slamming the door behind us. Then I offered my arm to Oscar.
He cradled my wrist, smoothing one finger along the bone, like he was worried about breaking me. Then he bit the cap off my purple pen and started to write. I closed my eyes, enjoying the rocking of the taxi, the tickling, sliding touch of the pen marking me. Oscar’s music, covering me.
I felt him sigh, a warm gust, and opened my eyes to see him staring at my face.
He smiled slowly. “Sorry. Just a little . . .”
“You don’t have to.” I laughed. “It was only an idea.”
“No, this is great. If you really don’t mind.” He kept going, quickly now, all the way up to the curve of my biceps.
When he finished, he kissed my palm lightly, a thank-you, and my whole body went fizzy.
As we got out of the cab, Oscar held my arm gently upright, like he thought the notes might tumble onto the sidewalk.
It was dark inside the basement apartment. Oscar fumbled for the light switch, and when the overheads came on, I let out a surprised laugh. The mess of composition pages had spread, carpeting the floor around the sofa, while some sparse neater pages taped to the wall flapped in the AC unit’s breeze. How did he live like this?
Oscar wandered to his bed, pulling me with him. He smoothed a corner of his striped duvet for me to sit on, then joined me on the mattress. It felt like a line crossed to sit here, even though Oscar was working, carefully transcribing his music from my arm to his notation paper.
“This okay?” he murmured, scooting closer.
“Yeah.” I kept still, feeling the gentle heat of his exhalations— distracting myself by trying to make sense of what he’d written. That note was an E, maybe, if it lined up with the dots he’d drawn on the side? F sharp, after that?
His finger slid up my arm. I refocused on the music. Were those eighth notes, sixteenths . . . would Dad know? Could Mom look at this and decipher it?
“What do you think?” Oscar asked, tossing the pen onto the ground. “Oh. Sorry . . . here.”
He handed me the sheet of paper where he’d transcribed the notes. In these few minutes, he’d added chords to it, a winding countermelody along the bass line. I could pick out the main theme now. I hummed it and it started to take form, an echo against stone, lilting but sad . . .
A grin flitted across Oscar’s face. “You have a pretty voice.”
“Oh. Thank you.” I cleared my throat—a harsh sound, ruining it. “My mom always had me sing the melody of a keyboard piece before I started working it. She said I sounded happier singing music than playing it, so I needed to . . .”
I pressed my lips together, not liking the direction this memory was headed.
“So . . .” Oscar nodded to the paper, a question in his eyes.
“Yeah, it sounds . . .” I waited for the surge of memory to ebb. Then I drew a breath. “Why do you care what I think?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“I don’t have an eye for this. Or an ear. Maybe an arm.”
He ran his thumb down my wrist again. “Thanks for that.”
“I’m not an expert. It sounds . . . lovely to me? But I can’t hear all of it in my head the way other people seem to be able to.”
“Hum it for me again.”
I went warm, but picked up the paper and teased out the melody. When I stopped and looked up again, Oscar’s eyes were glowing.
“You do get it.” He took the paper from me. “You get it in a different way.”
I smiled through my puzzlement. This moment felt so tenuous, like the early-morning haze before the sun breaks over the skyline, everything insubstantial, from the duvet under me to the boy in front of me.
Then he crumpled his composition into a ball.
“What are you doing?” I rose onto my knees, reaching for it.
He pulled it away. “It’s cool, this was an idea. You gave me a better one.”
“How?”
“Trust me, it’s fine!” He tossed it at what looked to be the discard pile beside the sofa. “This will get me there but . . . yeah. Not it.”
“Oscar—”
“Especially after the Mozart. Hearing that and then writing this? I don’t know. Maybe I need a quiet room for a few days to get Wolfgang out of my head.” He reached out, letting my curls pool in his palm. “Maybe I need your courtyard.”
“Wolfgang might follow you. I’ve always heard music more clearly there. That was part of it, the way it could make the music in my head sound so . . . pure.”
My ritual—sitting alone in the courtyard, eyes closed, visualizing myself on a stage, playing the most breathtaking piece the world had ever heard. It had felt real there. Possible.
And now even the memory of imagining those things felt like a false one.
“Music in your head?” Oscar looked weirdly excited. “Do you ever write it down?”
“Not that kind of . . . no.” I shook my head. “I don’t compose. I don’t do anything but listen.”
“Oh. Well, without listeners, there’s no reason to play music.”
“Fair point. Count me in among the masses, then.”
If there was a hint of venom in my voice, Oscar ignored it. He moved closer. “Did you like what you listened to tonight?”
“Tonight was . . .” I stared at my lap, then back up at him, unable to be anything but honest. “It was like . . . a miracle.”
I half expected him to jump up and do a victory leap, but he didn’t move a muscle. “Do you know what I was thinking about when I was conducting?”
I watched him move closer.
“Nachos?” I whispered.
He closed his eyes and I closed mine and there were his lips, warm and parting, my arms sliding up around his neck to sink deeper into it. Relief surged over me like a warm bath. In the same moment, we both seemed to remember how polite we’d been all day, how very upbeat and chaste, and smiled against each other’s lips, then more kissing, more urgent, more greedy.
He pulled back a few inches. “How did you know I was thinking about nachos?”
I laughed.
Oscar peered at me—a question.
“So.” I shook my head. “Are we . . . ?”
“I don’t think we have a choice.” He looked almost exultant.
I beamed, catching the joy on his face. But then he frowned—and the litany of worries he’d recited earlier today ran through my head like a news-ticker.
His mouth dipped to my neck, and I blurted, “Nora thinks it’s great. You and me.”
He looked up. “Ms. Visser?”
“Yeah!” Why why why would you bring her up right now? “In case you were worried about how, um, Amberley people would react.” Sweat prickled my armpits. “She guessed this morning and she gave me a big . . . thumbs-up?” I demonstrated, scrambling to wind this conversation back to the point before I’d derailed it. “I didn’t tell her anything. Obviously. I didn’t know if there was anything to tell.”
“Wow.” He leaned away, thoughtful. “That’s good to hear, actually. I shouldn’t care, but . . . huh.”
My face burned. Oscar lapsed into silence and I suspected if I tried to fill it, I might say something even more wrong-headed.
There were dirty dishes piled up on the counter of his galley kitchen. I gave his shoulder a soft tap, and went to fill the sink.
“You know, we switched the piece tonight. They were supposed to be rehearsing L’Apres-Midi with Reinhardt, but I mentioned Mozart in the interview, so everything got shifted. They’d done Night Music already, last Thursday.” He kicked his legs up with a cocky grin. “But not like that.”
I looked back down at the soapy basin, the dishes I was scrubbing, my wet arm, all the purple notes running together.
“Ah. Ruby.” Oscar jumped up, crossing the room in three long strides. “You don’t need to do that.”
“I don’t mind.” I stacked clean plates to the side. “What did you say about Mozart? In the interview . . .”
Oscar grabbed a dishrag and started to dry. “That he’s my north star, basically. That I admire everybody, but Mozart’s the one who nails what love sounds like.”
“Mozart.” The brazenness of that statement forced a laugh out of me. “Not, I don’t know . . . the Romantics?”
“Okay,” Oscar said, hopping up on the counter. “How about, Mozart nails what I want falling in love to feel like.” He let his legs swing out, back in. “If I could choose, I’d much rather have that purity, that peace, that grace to come home to than any drama, however gorgeous and sweeping and complex and . . . you get it.”
I peered up at him, elbow grazing his knee, feeling a lot of things, none of them pure. “Most people would disagree with you. Everybody seems to want to get destroyed.”
“My brain is messy enough.” He slid back down. “I need a Mozart kind of love.”
I felt him move behind me, warm and steady, his hands falling to rest on either side of me against the counter. I washed one more cup—his breath on the nape of my neck, his hips drawing closer to mine . . .
But he reached for my wrists, stilling them. “You don’t need to take care of people so much, Ruby. You can take a break.”
My hand closed around the drain plug, shoulders locked tight. “It’s the only thing—”
He peered around me, intent. “What?”
I pulled the plug and dried myself off. “I really don’t mind!”
He watched me cross the room. “I noticed you the other day, going into Marty’s study. Like, sneaking. And then when we went in to work, it was immaculate—”
“Dad can’t concentrate when it’s messy and he’s a naturally messy person, so . . . I don’t know.” I picked at my thumbnail, flustered. “I sort the mail, get his music in the right order. I vacuum. It’s not like I’m curing cancer.”
Good lord, if Jules heard me say that . . .
“You’re helpful,” Oscar said, stepping closer. “Kind.” Another step. “Beautiful.”
I smiled, speechless.
“So,” he said.
“So . . .”
He leaned against the wall. “There’s this Amberley thing I have to go to this weekend, while your dad’s away. This young donors’ cocktail reception something-something?”
“Wing Club?”
“Yes! You know about it?”
“Nora mentioned it to me.” Practically your birthright.
“Oh, of course.” His fingers nervously tapped the wall. “Well, are you going? Do you want to be my date? Sunday night. It would make it a lot more fun.”
There was an edge to his cheerfulness, like he was daring himself to say all this. Was this his way of getting past all the things he was worried about?
“I wasn’t actually planning to go,” I said. “But Wing Club is really nice. And you’re really nice to ask me.”
Not an answer, but all I could conjure amid all the Alert, Alert, Alerts clanging in my brain. I pinched the buttonhole of his polo shirt to distract myself, my thumb grazing warm skin as his arm looped around me, pulling me closer.
“Thank you for this morning,” he whispered. “And tonight. And everything.”
Before I could say “You’re welcome,” he kissed me again, and I forgot what day it was, let alone what happened this morning.