Chapter 1

fugue: a piece of music with one or more themes, each of which is repeated or echoed by different instruments or voices

It’s not simply that I dream in music. I dream the notes as textures and colors, as feelings and temperatures and tastes. When I wake up and try to write it down, what comes out are fragments of ideas that don’t make much sense: lilies and velvet, sycamore trees, salt and butter, thick lines and thin wispy clouds, the smell of the first day of summer.

But I know how to play that when I take out my violin. It makes sense to me, like a code in a language only I speak, and I can translate it into melody. People have called me a “prodigy” or a “musical genius,” but I’ve never known any other way to be. It’s simply the way my brain works.

I haven’t played the violin in sixty-seven days. My mother is calling it my music strike. She says that when I was a toddler, I went on a nursing strike; I refused to breastfeed for a few days, and then all of a sudden I was back, more ravenous than ever.

My music strike will not end like that. For one thing, how could I possibly have more passion for music than I did before? And for another thing, this isn’t a battle of wills or a show of force. It’s not even accurate to call it a music strike. I can’t avoid music any more than I can avoid breathing. Music exists in all my other senses. It’s in the smell of bread baking in the kitchen, in the colors of the budding tree outside my bedroom window. It’s in the rhythm of how people speak, the sounds of cars driving past my house, the feel of fabric on my skin as I get dressed.

Music and I are inseparable. Just because I’m choosing not to share it with the world doesn’t mean that music isn’t still going on in me. Trying to stop it would be like trying to change my height or the shape of my face.

“Rosie,” Mom says, her sea-storm tone breaking into the melody that constantly plays inside my mind. The gray sound makes me shiver.

“What?” I say, even though Mom hates when I say “What” in response to a question. I should, she tells me quite often, say “Pardon?” or “I’m sorry, can you repeat the question?” if I think I’ve missed one.

Naturally this doesn’t improve the color of her tone.

She’s throwing various chopped vegetables into the salad bowl with an almost comical urgency. “Are you all packed, is what I asked.”

I take silverware out of the drawer and put it on the center of the table. “Yes, all packed.”

She pauses with the salad to catch my eye and give me a pointed look, sharp and shiny like steel. “Including your violin?”

There it is. A chess move in a match I didn’t realize we were still playing.

“I’m not bringing it, Mom. I told you. I’m taking a break.”

She scoffs, the sound like a puff of smoky fire coming out of her mouth. “You don’t take breaks when you’ve made commitments. You have Mahler’s Third in four months, plus the guest solo in Pittsburgh, the Symphony auditions—and I’m sure Peabody will want to see you again for next summer’s concert.”

I could’ve played this list on my violin like a song, I’ve heard it said so many times. I know exactly what this strike will cost me, and I’m okay with it. But she isn’t.

I could spend the next six weeks at the fancy, audition-only, just-for-prodigies music camp I’m supposed to be at already. I could focus on making my fingers match the notes painted in my brain so that the sound flows out of my bow, across the bridge of my violin, vibrating exactly four hundred and forty times for every A, four hundred and forty-six times for every B flat, and so on.

But I’m not at the music camp this year. I’ve been there the past four summers, and I wanted a break.

I needed a break.

This means that Mom has taken away my iPad and screen time. It also means that I have to go to Connecticut with her.

During dinner, Mom plays music. Mahler’s Symphony no. 3—the one I’m supposed to play with the Philharmonic in a few months. She really never stops trying. What she doesn’t understand, though, is that I don’t even need to hear the music out loud to experience it. After hearing it once, I’ve already had every shade and brush stroke of it memorized and mapped in my head.

Dad won’t be home in time to join us for dinner, even though it’s our last night before Mom and I leave for six weeks. Dad will visit us up in Connecticut a few times, if and when his schedule permits.

My dad is a surgeon. He fixes people, and he tries regularly to fix me. He approaches my violin strike like it’s a heart valve and he just cannot quite get the imaging right enough to make a plan for surgery. He asks questions like he’s trying to find the hidden blockage or rupture, but I’m not a ventricle.

“Would you feel differently if you were being paid to play?” he asked recently. No, it’s not about money.

“I bet if we put some of your concert videos up on social media, you’d go viral. Like those kids on TikTok! Would you like to be famous on TikTok?” Ew, no thank you.

“We could throw you a big party! And you could play violin for everyone. Would that be fun?”

It’s like he’s trying to bribe me but doesn’t know me at all. Well, it’s not like that. It is that. He’s trying to bribe me and he doesn’t know me at all.

I have zero interest in going viral or being famous. I don’t want money or attention—at least not the kind of attention Dad has suggested.

Honestly, I’m just tired. During surgeries, Dad clamps peoples’ arteries and veins to stop the flow of blood to their hearts while he fixes them. I wish I could clamp my brain off for a few weeks, to stem the constant flow of colors and thoughts and music and sound. I’d like to get a rest from it. This strike is as close as I can get.

Mom plays more music in the car the next morning—Bach, Beethoven, Saint-Saëns. I sit in the back seat and drift in and out of vibrant technicolor dreams thanks to “The Swan” and “Für Elise.”

The last time I played, sixty-eight days ago, it was spring. Now, the June sun beats down in the back of our station wagon and the calluses on my fingers are going soft, but I can still feel the music in my hands—how my fingers rest on the strings over the soundboard, how the bow feels in my other hand.

A different song pops into my head, one in bold cartoonish colors. It’s “Over the River and Through the Woods,” the song that little kids sing in elementary school.

To grandmother’s house we go

The horse knows the way

To carry the sleigh

Through the white and drifting snow-oh

I guess kids who sing that song know the way to their grandmothers’ houses. Over the river and through the woods.

I don’t know the way to my grandparents’ house. Not that I need to—I mean, my mom is driving, and I’m only twelve. But I don’t recognize any part of the drive. It’s the opposite of how my hands know the music I’m hearing from the car speakers. And there’s a good reason for this. We don’t see my grandparents a lot.

“So what are your plans, Rosie?”

Mom’s voice cuts into my thoughts, the boldest of blue in a laser-thin line. For a moment it even drowns out the steady brown hum of the SUV’s movement.

“My plans?” Apparently we’re in the middle of a conversation, but I was not aware.

Mom sighs. “For the summer. While we’re staying with your grandparents. What are you going to do with your time, if you’re not playing the violin? Remember, tech is off the table—no phone, no computers, no iPad. So what are you going to do?”

This is the big question, isn’t it? When I first went on strike, I still had school. I put all my energy into homework and extra credit and trying not to look like a total loser with no friends. I even made a list: Things Normal Kids Do All the Time That I’ve Never Had Time to Do Because I Was Playing the Violin or Listening to Violin Music or Thinking about the Violin. Everything on that list was inspired by TV shows I’ve seen and books I’ve read. Set up a lemonade stand. Have a crush on someone. Get a phone. Watch YouTube videos of random stuff. Do arts and crafts. Sneak out (where?) with friends (who???). Go to a party (hahaha).

I have no idea where to begin, and without even Julianne in my life, it all seems impossible and pointless. Even now, I can still picture Julianne’s face that day we had our fight—and the Monday afterward, when I watched her sit with Isabela and Amelia at lunch. I have to stop thinking about it before my eyes fill with tears.

“I’ll figure it out when we get there,” I say now.

Mom frowns, our eyes meeting briefly via the rearview mirror, but she doesn’t say anything more. I must drift off to sleep, because the next thing I know, we’re under a dappled canopy of green leaves, with walls of gray rock on either side of us, winding up a country road that might be familiar.

“We’re about six minutes away,” Mom says softly when she sees that I’m awake.

I close my eyes, letting the car lurch me this way and that way as the road curves. When I open them again, I see more green, more stone walls, and large houses down gated driveways.

“Is there anything you want to ask me about Grandma Florence before we get there?” Mom asks. There’s a hitch in her voice, as if it’s a broken line, warning-yellow like the strip down the center of the road we’re on.

I shake my head—and also say, “No,” because she’s looking at the road and not at me in the mirror. I suspect she waited this long to invite questions because she doesn’t really want to answer any. And I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Here’s what I do know about Grandma Florence. She’s had Alzheimer’s disease for the past seven years, which means I barely remember her from before dementia set in. She was confused and quiet the handful of times I’ve seen her since then. She’s a tiny lady, short and rail-thin, with wavy white hair cut above her shoulders and big round glasses. I know she’s Mom’s mother. That she’s married to Grandpa Jack, Mom’s father, who’s the same age as Grandma Florence—seventy-eight—but is healthy and active, and quiet in a very different way.

I know that Mom grew up here, at this house we’re approaching. I know she left home when she started college and hasn’t spent much time with her parents since then—not even after I was born and she quit working outside of the home.

I know that Grandma Florence is getting sicker, which is why we’re going to visit. I know she’s in bed all the time. I know she can barely speak, and no one is sure how much she can understand when people speak to her. I know I’m dreading seeing her because I don’t want to think about anyone being so sick. I know she won’t know who I am.

I don’t know who I am either. Now that I’m not playing the violin, I feel like a piece of my body is missing.

The car slows and Mom puts on her blinker, turning left into a driveway with an automatic white gate that swings open for us. She waits until it’s fully open before driving through and pausing to watch it slowly swing closed behind us. She inches down the driveway as if she doesn’t want to actually arrive.

Ahead of us is the white house with green trim. The two levels and attached garage are weathered but beautiful. The house is huge, made up of nonmatching sections my grandparents added on at various times in the almost fifty years they’ve lived here. Mom will be staying in the newest addition on the ground floor, while I’ll stay upstairs in her old bedroom.

Surrounding the house is a big patch of land, much bigger than any yard in our neighborhood. The long driveway splits off in two directions, one path leading up to the house and one looping behind it around the edge of the property, disappearing from view. Somewhere behind the house there’s a fancy pool that Grandpa Jack added after he sold his company for a lot of money. I’m fuzzy on the details, but I know that when Mom was young, my grandparents had very little money, and things changed drastically for them around the time she finished college. Of course, no one talks about this—no one talks about much of anything in my family, at least not to me—but I’ve picked up clues from listening to Mom video chat with my aunt Lily.

Mom parks on the curved driveway right in front of the house. I look around as we get out, half expecting Grandpa Jack to come over and greet us. But the only thing I see that’s moving is the gigantic dog that bounds toward the car.

“Of course,” Mom mutters, rolling her eyes briefly. “The dog.”

Vienna barks and heads straight for me. I cower closer to the car because I know she could topple me over. Still, out of some polite instinct and against my better judgment, I hold out a hand to her. She slows as she reaches it, pausing to smell me.

Vienna is a Bernese mountain dog, and she definitely weighs more than I do. She comes up to my chest, her panting loud and turquoise with delight at new things to smell. I’m tempted to crawl back into the car just to get away from her, but I don’t want to offend Grandpa Jack if he happens to be watching from inside. The various dogs my grandparents have had over the years have always been a point of tension between them and Mom; she seems to dislike them even more than I do. But I don’t want to turn this into a big deal. If I’m going to be here all summer, I’ll have to figure out how to live with Vienna.

I take a deep breath and pat her on the head gingerly. Her thick black fur is coarse, and I can smell her breath, brown and stale and moist.

“You go on inside,” Mom tells me. “I’m right behind you—just bringing a few things in right away. We’ll come back for the rest later.”

Vienna follows me as I walk up the two green-painted steps to the elegant front portico with pillars on either side.

The door is unlocked and I push it open. I’m immediately hit with a smell I’d know anywhere—a song I have memorized, even though I’ve only been here a few times. It’s musty carpets and cinnamon cake and old books and empty fireplaces and freshly cut grass and exposed beams and Vienna the dog. It’s sweet but in a minor key, full of deep reds and dark browns and rich bass notes.

Mom steps in, closing the front door behind us. She places a few things out of sight in the foyer around the corner to my left.

“We’re here,” she singsongs. “Dad? It’s me, Shoshanna. And Rosie.”

I follow Mom to the right, past the staircase and through a little hallway to a formal dining room. Vienna trails me like I have roast beef—or whatever dogs love to smell—in my pockets. She makes me very, very uncomfortable, that dog.

Grandpa Jack comes into the dining room through the door on the opposite side. He must’ve been snoozing because his tuft of white hair is mussed and his shirt is rumpled, and he seems kind of surprised to see us.

“You made it,” he says, holding out his arms. I’m not sure which one of us is supposed to run into them, but it doesn’t matter because Vienna beats us to it. She leaps up onto Grandpa Jack as if she’s the one who hasn’t seen him in over a year.

“Down, girl,” he says to the dog, and she sits, wagging her ginormous tail across the rug that covers most of the floor. Mom always says rugs like this are more valuable if they’ve got threadbare patches and discolorations, which makes absolutely zero sense to me. But this particular rug must be especially valuable because it’s been worn bare in several spots. I have to imagine Vienna had something to do with that.

In books and movies, grandparents are always obsessed with their grandchildren, but Grandpa Jack can’t take his eyes off Mom. He looks at her like he’s seeing her for the first time and also like he can see every version of her from the past forty-something years.

“Hi, Dad,” she says, stepping into his hug. Her back is to me, and over her shoulder I can see Grandpa Jack’s eyes close softly.

When Mom steps away, I wave awkwardly to Grandpa Jack. He nods at me, as if he’s also unsure how we’re supposed to greet each other.

“Rosie,” he says. “Welcome. So glad you’re here.” Grandpa is a little taller than Mom, with thin arms and a rounded stomach. Most of his wrinkles sit in areas that suggest they’re smile-induced, which is something I like about him. His voice complements his light blue eyes—it’s a slightly darker blue, but almost as glass-like and shiny. Every time I’ve seen him, I’ve had the same thought: I wish I knew more about him.

Honestly, we’ve never spent more than a day or two at a time together, thanks to my schedule of rehearsals and lessons and concerts—and Grandma Florence’s poor health. Now it’s fully hitting me that we’re about to spend six weeks together.

I can imagine that after years of living in this house with only Grandma Florence, having Mom and me here is going to be quite a change for Grandpa Jack.

Mom looks around, taking in the room. Sunlight streams through the thick window glass, blocked in places by ceramic vases and decorative colored-glass bottles, sweeping over the oblong table and its ten chairs, the dust on the wooden sideboard, and the paintings on the walls. “Where’s Mom?” she asks.

The smile doesn’t leave Grandpa Jack’s lips, but when he speaks, his voice is a heavy jade green. “Upstairs, of course,” he says, gesturing behind us.

Mom has already told me that Grandma Florence has been getting worse lately—that she “doesn’t have much longer.” I hate that euphemism because it’s so vague. She’s dying. We know that. But no one can give me a sense of the actual timing. Six months from now? A year?

We follow Grandpa Jack up the dark wooden staircase and down a long hall. “There’s your room, Rosie,” he says, gesturing to an open doorway as we pass it. “And I’m in here these days,” he adds with a nod to the door across the hall. “We’ve got the visiting nurse coming every morning, but I like to be close by the rest of the time . . .”

We reach the main bedroom. As soon as I see Grandma Florence in the king-sized bed, looking so tiny and shrunken, staring off in the middle distance as if she has no idea where she is, I know: she’s going to die soon.

Grandpa Jack taps lightly on the door, more staccato than a trill, using the knuckles of his right middle and ring fingers. “The girls are here, Florence,” he says loudly.

Grandma Florence’s gaze doesn’t leave the empty center of the room, but she smiles. “The girls? Is it Lily?”

Mom shoots Grandpa Jack a look. “Not Lily,” she says, stepping closer to the bed. “It’s me, Shoshanna. Remember? Lily lives far away and never visits you. But I do! And I brought Rosie.”

“Where’s Lily?”

Grandpa Jack clears his throat, a noise of clashing colors—ochre and puce mixing to an unpleasant shade. “Lily lives far away,” he says patiently, and I can tell they have this conversation a lot. I’ve certainly heard Mom complain to Dad about Aunt Lily—about how she’s so obsessed with the past and how she can’t get herself “organized” to come see her family enough. I’ve only met Aunt Lily five or six times in my life, but I haven’t seen my grandparents much more than that, so I’m not sure how fair Mom’s criticisms are.

“Isn’t Lily in school?” Grandma Florence asks.

Grandpa Jack shakes his head. “No, she’s an adult. She lives in Austria. Shoshanna is here, though.”

I’m wondering if we’ll need to explain that my mom is a grown-up, that she lives in Baltimore with my dad, that she has a daughter (me), and all sorts of other details. But Grandma Florence’s face brightens and she snaps her eyes away from the blur of nothingness, straight into my line of sight.

“Rosie,” she says, her voice pink-satin dreamy. “With the violin.”

“No,” I say, sounding far more metallic and harsh than I planned. “No violin. Just Rosie.”

Grandma Florence looks confused again. “What happened to the music?”

“No, Mom, you were right!” Mom jumps in. “It’s Rosie with the violin. She just . . . doesn’t have it at the moment. It’s downstairs.”

“No, it’s not,” I hiss at Mom, already afraid of her reply.

“Yes, it is,” she says through gritted teeth. “I packed it in case you change your mind, and I brought it inside first thing because you know it can get so hot in the car . . .”

That’s all it takes to make me turn on my heel. The background music that plays in my head almost constantly has turned to an angry red buzzing, and I can hardly see through the burgundy haze.

“Excuse me,” I wheeze as I push past Grandpa Jack and down the hallway.

I know Mom is following me even before I hear her speak.

“You didn’t think I’d leave your violin at home, did you?” she says. “You know it needs to be temperature controlled. How would we make sure it stays perfectly humidified for six weeks if we left—”

“It’s not that,” I say, whirling around to face her in the doorway of her childhood bedroom.

“Well, if it’s not that—”

“Don’t you see what I mean now?”

She looks genuinely surprised; a vacant, confused look crosses her face. I pull her into her old room and close the door, even though I know Grandpa Jack’s hearing is bad and Grandma Florence has no idea what’s going on.

Mom’s old bedroom contains no trace of the kid she must’ve been once. Its two twin beds, bare walls, and plush white carpet might as well have come straight out of a hotel.

“This is exactly why I am not playing the violin right now,” I say, my hands on my hips and my voice a clangorous discord. “Grandma Florence can’t remember who you are or that Aunt Lily lives in Austria, but she can still remember that I’m ‘the one with the violin,’ right?”

Mom frowns, still at a loss.

“That’s the problem!” My voice becomes a thick river of murky blue, and I try not to cry. “That’s all I am to everyone. The girl with the violin.”

I can practically see the wheels turning in Mom’s brain, as if she can reshape my ideas into a different story. “No, honey, she has Alzheimer’s, she just can’t remember all the other things—”

“There are no other things about me!” I explode. “That’s the thing. The only thing. And that’s the problem!”

From the hallway, Grandpa Jack calls, “Is everything okay?”

I look down at the carpet, at my shoes sinking into the plush strands. Mom excuses herself to go out and talk to Grandpa Jack. I’m sure she’ll spin some lie, like “Rosie’s just hungry” or “Rosie gets carsick and it makes her grumpy,” to explain away my rudeness and yelling.

I walk over to one of the beds and flop down, straight like a wooden board, my face hitting the pillow with a thunk.

I want to scream into it, but apparently Grandpa Jack’s hearing is better than I thought it was.