Chapter 7

pianissimo: very gently, softer than piano

Before I leave the library, where the internet is back up and running, I spend a little time on one of the computers, searching for helpful information about time travel. There’s nothing that really comes close to my situation—at least nothing that seems legitimate and not sketchy. Eventually I settle for checking out a few books with time-bending elements in them.)

But once I’m back at my grandparents’ house and have a chance to read through the books, they turn out to be pretty useless too. I don’t find any clues as to why and how one might encounter one’s mother in a shed as her twelve-year-old self, or any instructions for what to say and do to ensure that one doesn’t disrupt the space-time continuum.

Without a roadmap for how to deal with this situation, I’m dreading returning to the shed. If Stimpy meets the fate I expect, it’ll be so sad—and it’ll prove I can’t change anything about the past for the better. If something different happens, that’ll mean I can change things, which means the very future of my existence hangs in the balance.

Unless this Shanna is not actually my mom, in our past, but instead some kind of parallel-universe version of her. Maybe I can change things in her universe without affecting mine. Maybe, years from now, a parallel-universe version of me will be born, and the parallel-universe Shanna will name her after me.

My head aches with the logistics of it all, with the fears and possibilities.

On Tuesday morning, Grandpa invites me to swim with him again after breakfast. As I attempt to lengthen my strokes and perfect my form into something that resembles his lap-swimming techniques, I realize that the constant music in my head has gone quiet. It never completely goes away—there’s always something playing there as long as my eyes are open and I’m seeing colors. But when I swim, I’m able to zone out into the deep blue of the water and almost experience true silence.

Even though I can listen to whole symphonies in my head without needing to play the music, I prefer to listen to recordings with headphones, so the music thrums directly into my ears. That way no interruptions or outside noises get through, and I can hear the music with deeper intensity. The colors are so much brighter then, like technicolor.

It’s the opposite of this in the pool. The watercolor world is muted, and it’s just me and my breath.

In the afternoon, after a few too many hours of loud, colorful silence from my mother and my grandparents, I decide it’s time to return to the shed. I feel an almost physical pull that I can’t ignore any longer.

I’m not sure if I need to go at a certain time of day to catch Shanna. Is she just . . . waiting for me there? All the time? Or does she only materialize in my presence? Has she been waiting there for days, hoping I would show up and disappointed that I’ve been avoiding her? Typical that I could’ve managed to disappoint my mother even before she’s become my mother.

As I step over a snoring Vienna to exit the house, my heart races along to Vivaldi’s “Summer” from The Four Seasons playing in my mind. The pinks, greens, and yellows of the music are all around me in the field.

When I reach the shed I run my hand along the rough outer wall, as if that touch can somehow ground me more than the grass beneath my feet. I close my eyes to listen to the mellow sounds of the gray and brown wood, this time vibrating a minor chord.

I hear her before I see her. Shanna’s sobs reverberate black wisps of smoky sound. I nudge the door open and find her there, exactly as I feared.

“Stimpy’s gone,” she says without even looking up at me. She’s sitting on the rough wood floor, her knees bent up and her arms crossed on top of them. She rests her head on her arms and cries into them, her hair cascading around her face.

I’m momentarily frozen, even though I knew this would happen. It’s a restatement of theme; this movement of the symphony of Shanna’s life has been played before, and unlike the “yes, and” of improv class, the movements can’t be rewritten.

Do I dare touch Shanna? If she’s a figment of my imagination or some sort of ghost-type entity, would it actually be possible? I’m not even sure if she wants comfort from me. After all, to her I’m just some random near-stranger she’s known for a grand total of about forty-five minutes.

Shanna looks up briefly, maybe just to wipe her eyes on the sleeve of her sheer white T-shirt, but our eyes meet, and all my hesitation disappears. I’ve never been the most comfortable person in social situations, and I’ve always felt deeply awkward trying to soothe or console people—just ask Julianne. But in this moment, I don’t hesitate. I sit down in front of Shanna and throw my arms around her shoulders.

I’m relieved to realize that I can touch her—she’s not a ghost or an apparition, not a trick of my mind. She’s real, in physical form, and I can feel her.

For a moment we just sit there, and I feel the slightest burst of cobalt blue as a tear escapes down my own cheek. I don’t need to ask what happened—I already know the story. Mom told me in excruciating detail when I was seven, the last time I ever asked her why we didn’t have any pets.

“Who would take care of a pet?” she asked me sharply, a rusty orange chime cutting through the air. “I already have a full-time job, taking care of you and managing your music career! Your dad is always at the hospital. And you cannot disrupt your practice schedule. How would we possibly manage a pet?”

And when I protested—not yet resigned to accepting my mother’s first answer as the end—she told me the story of her own childhood pet, Stimpy.

“We didn’t have a lot of money,” Mom began.

Now, in the sliver of light from the shed’s dirty skylight, Shanna doesn’t start there. Maybe she’s hiding that fact from me, or maybe it’s not important to the story in her opinion.

“I had him for twenty-nine days,” she says, and I gently rub her arm, massaging small circles of comfort into the cloud-like cotton of her shirt. “He was my responsibility. He was mine. And I let him play in the front yard without a leash on.”

I remember Mom saying how her mom, Grandma Florence, told her she could only get a dog if she promised to do everything for it. Mom’s sister, Aunt Lily, had no interest in a pet, so it was all on Mom.

Shanna looks at me, our eyes connecting via an invisible thread, before she looks away again, off into the distance in front of her. “My house has this long driveway, with grass on both sides. So I thought I had plenty of room to let Stimpy play on the lawn. He’s—he was—so tiny! He couldn’t run that fast! Or at least I didn’t think he could. But I looked away for one second. One! And he made it to the road.”

She pauses again to meet my eyes. I nod, letting her tell the story at her own pace.

“There’s a pretty busy road at the end of our driveway. Well, it’s busy for around here. And . . .”

Mom told me everything she had seen, and how she watched it as if it were happening in slow motion.

“He was hit by a car,” Shanna says, and in a memory overlay, I hear Mom saying the exact same words. The same colors, same tones, same rhythm. Like an echo.

Shanna’s sobs go from blue to black as they deepen in volume and intensity. I let her rest her head on my shoulder, her tears sinking into my bare skin.

“Shanna, I’m really sorry. What did your parents say?”

Shanna’s quiet sniffles morph into full wails, stormy gray-blue like the ocean before a storm. “They said it was my fault. He was my responsibility. And I’m to blame.”

I try to reconcile this with my grandparents as they are now: sweet, almost-silent Grandma Florence and low-key, thoughtful Grandpa Jack. How could they blame their daughter—a sensitive, well-meaning girl who loved her dog—for the worst moment of her life up to that point? Why didn’t they hold her? Why didn’t they just say they were so sorry?

“They both told you it was your fault?”

Shanna’s cries slow a bit, and she wipes her eyes on the crook of her elbow. “My mom did,” she says. “She doesn’t mean to be—I mean, she has these spells. And when she’s tired from working all the time, that gets worse.”

Grandma Florence? What spells?

Shanna continues. “When it’s bad, she can be really mean, but I wish I could fix it.”

I can’t even wrap my head around having this conversation with my mom, about my grandma. I don’t know how to handle this kind of green, open emotion, this kind of honesty.

“So . . . do you get along with your mom?” I ask, not quite knowing how to keep the flow of words going.

Shanna shrugs, wiping her eyes yet again, hiccupping a little as she recovers from crying. “You know how it is. We fight a lot. I guess most mothers and daughters do. Sometimes I hate her but I also just love her so much.”

We both lean back against the wall of the shed, and our legs stretch out to exactly the same length, right into the shaft of light projected onto the floor from the skylight. Her green Converse and my flip-flops also appear to be the same size.

“What do you fight about?” I ask.

“Well . . .” Shanna looks up at the skylight and I brace myself, though I’m not sure what for. “Whether or not I was responsible enough for a pet, but I guess she was right about that one.”

“No, Shanna,” I say, the words spilling out like a rough fountain of turbulent white water. “It’s not completely on you. Things happen. Maybe the car was speeding. Maybe someone else should’ve been teaching you how to take care of the dog. Maybe—”

Shanna shakes her head. “Thanks,” she says. “But no. It was my fault, and I’ll never forgive myself.”

Once again, tears gather in her brown eyes and threaten to fall. Mom always urges me not to cry when I’m upset. Like when I messed up a few notes of a solo in Handel’s Sonata no. 3, and afterward she told me to keep it together so as not to draw attention to my mistakes, but I just wanted five minutes of the relief of letting the tears out.

So I don’t tell Shanna not to cry, but I do ask what else she and her mother fight about. Now I just have to know.

“My bat mitzvah,” she says right away, rolling her eyes. “That’s a big one. We fight a ton about that. She won’t let me get out of it.”

“Why?” I ask, surprised.

Shanna laughs. It’s purple, but not a gentle purple. It’s an angry color. “Because we’re Jewish and it’s what everyone Jewish does. I’ve been going to Hebrew school forever, and it’s just what you do next.”

I peer at her, her face lit up in the streaming sunshine from above us. “But you don’t want to?”

Shanna takes a deep breath and lets it out before answering me. “I don’t even know. Sometimes it feels like, if I had a choice, maybe I would choose to do it. But I don’t have a choice.”

I feel my blood run cold. Sometimes that’s exactly how I feel about music, about the violin specifically.

I’m sure my face is a pale gray, and I’m grateful that Shanna keeps talking so I don’t have to say anything.

“My mom is weird about being Jewish, because of everything her family had to go through.”

What does that mean? I search my memories, wondering what Grandma Florence’s parents were like. I can’t even remember their names at the moment. I’m not sure I know anything about them. “What did they go through?”

“The Holocaust,” she says as if it’s obvious. “My mom was born in a displaced persons’ camp after the war ended, because her parents met in Auschwitz.”

I’ve never heard anyone in my family mention anything like that. Of course I know what the Holocaust is—I know that millions and millions of people, including six million Jews, were killed by the Nazis in concentration camps like Auschwitz, and that lots of people lost their entire families. I know that Mom’s ancestors came to the United States from Europe sometime after World War II. I know Mom’s ancestors were all Jewish. But I never knew Grandma Florence’s parents met in a Nazi death camp, or that Grandma Florence was born in another kind of camp.

Instinctively I shake my head. “No, I don’t—that’s not right,” I say before thinking better of it.

Shanna stiffens. “What do you mean, it’s not right?”

I feel trapped. So far, it’s been surprisingly easy to avoid revealing my identity to Shanna. She hasn’t asked why I’m on her parents’ property or why she’s never seen me outside of the shed. It’s like there’s an unspoken rule that she won’t ask probing questions and I won’t volunteer certain information. So how can I explain that we share a family, and thus a family history, and that she must have something wrong about it?

I can’t say that. I’m going to have to let it go for now.

I backtrack. “Oh, nothing. I’m sorry. I don’t know what—” And now I know how to possibly fix it. “I meant that it’s not right, like it’s not fair. That your grandparents were in Auschwitz.” I bite my lip and hold my breath, hoping I’ve saved the conversation, like I did the first time with the How do you say what year it is? school project lie.

Shanna nods. I breathe a misty sigh of relief, pink in the air, mingling with Shanna’s previous angry purple, making a color so much calmer and warmer in its magenta magic.

“I’m really sorry about your dog,” I say after a long, comfortable silence. “And I don’t think it’s your fault.”

Shanna smiles, though it’s a limp half-smile. “Well, I do. But thanks.”

I want to ask her a billion more questions, but I’m terrified of endangering our fragile existence.

“I have to go,” I say eventually, watching a cloud pass somewhere above the skylight, dimming the shed for a few moments.

“I know,” she says, and I have no idea what that means. We stand, and I give her another hug. She holds me tightly, and I wonder again who she thinks I am, or where she thinks I exist.