December 2024
Anneliese
ANNELIESE WOKE UP with a start. Willem’s side of the bed was cold, and the apartment was silent. It was the first time he had left without kissing her goodbye. Her insides churned with anxiety when she remembered their conversation last night. If she could do yesterday over, she would behave like a mature adult at the cemetery instead of like a spoiled child. She wouldn’t snoop in Katja’s study or steal the diary.
Last night she had let her imagination run away with her. Willem wasn’t Daan. He was nothing like Daan. How could she have thought that even for an instant? But a chasm had opened between them.
Was it because of their secrets? Could they trust each other enough someday to share?
After a breakfast of tea and toast to settle her stomach, she went down the basement stairs and unlocked the crypt. She sat down at the Steinway, opened the Veldkamp Lesson Book, Level Five, and played a few exercises. She tried to concentrate, but her mind wandered. Who had the diary now?
She raised her eyes to the concert poster on the adjacent wall: Louisa’s hands, large as a man’s, but feminine, with long graceful fingers. A morbid image floated into her head. She saw Louisa’s body, limbs askew, drifting wherever the currents took it. Marine predators devoured her flesh and scattered her bones over the seabed. Stray bones washed ashore on Wexalia and in Denmark and as far away as England. They couldn’t put Louisa together again.
How did Louisa, while jogging on the beach, wind up in the water and drown? Anneliese wondered if there was more to the story than the family let on. Had she been depressed? Did she commit suicide? Was she murdered? But Anneliese had to respect Willem’s wishes; the only past she had the right to dig into was her own.
When she’d had her fill of practicing scales and exercises, she sorted through Louisa’s yellowed sheet music, looking for a piece that was challenging, but not too difficult. She found a prelude with chords that her small hands could reach.
Hours later Willem stuck his head inside the door.
“Anneliese, I’ve been looking everywhere for you. How long have you been down here?”
She stopped playing and shook her wrists.
“I don’t know. What time is it?”
“Almost seven.”
“Yikes. I didn’t know it was so late.”
“Shall we order takeaway?”
“Indian?”
“Fine with me.” He waited, his broad shoulders filling the doorway, blocking her escape if she had needed one, which of course she didn’t. Why had the thought of escape entered her mind?
“Are you coming?” he asked.
She followed him up the concrete steps.
That night in bed he pulled her close, and she felt herself stiffen. When his hand stroked her belly, she flinched. He withdrew his hand, and they lay side by side in the dark, her breathing ragged, his deep and steady.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. She could hear the hurt in his voice.
“I’m nauseated,” she said, though it wasn’t the pregnancy making her sick, but the thought of his hands, so like Louisa’s, amputated at the wrists and adorning a grave.
After a few days Anneliese decided Carla had been right. It would take months of practice before she could play at her old level. It meant endlessly playing scales, exercises, and arpeggios. To break up the tedium, she practiced the prelude.
Each day she practiced until her wrists ached and her eyes smarted. She skipped lunches, and Willem had to drag her away for dinner in the evenings. She ate little and lost the couple of pounds she had gained since becoming pregnant. Willem didn’t try to make love to her again. They each seemed to be waiting for the other to make the first move.
After a week she was ready to play the prelude for Willem. At his usual lunchtime, she knocked on the office door, and when he called “Come in,” she went inside.
He had visitors. Katja and Hendrik sat facing him across his neat glossy desk. The three faces turned toward her. She remained standing like a schoolgirl called to the head teacher’s office.
Willem’s eyes were guarded, Katja’s frosty, and Hendrik’s black as a tar pit. Her stomach twisted.
“Am I interrupting a group therapy session?” she joked.
Willem said. “Hendrik received a letter from his neuropsychologist with the results of his checkup.”
Sheets of paper lay face down on his desk. She hadn’t noticed which way the papers faced when she had entered.
She turned to Hendrik. “If you don’t mind me asking, what did the letter say?”
“Of course, I don’t mind. You’re family now. To summarize, there’s been no significant decline in my cognitive ability since the last checkup. The medicine is working.”
“That’s good news,” Anneliese said, Hendrik’s words echoing in her head: She was family now. Her hand went to her belly, where the new little Veldkamp was growing.
“It’s wonderful news,” Katja said.
Willem leaned back. “Did you want something, Anneliese?”
“I want to play one of Louisa’s compositions for you.” Inspiration struck her, and she turned to Katja and Hendrik. “Will you come too?”
The smiles faded.
“Sorry, I have to work,” Katja said.
“It’s time for my nap,” Hendrik said.
Anneliese looked at Willem.
“Maybe later. I’m going to eat a sandwich at my desk and catch up on paperwork.”
Lame excuses.
“Fine,” Anneliese snapped. She turned her back to hide the tears of frustration clotting her eyelashes, and headed for the door. After a few steps, she stopped. They couldn’t get away with blowing her off unless she let them. She wiped her eyes with her knuckles and slowly turned around.
“The piece takes less than five minutes to play,” she said.
They agreed to attend her mini-concert at three o’clock.
At three, Katja and Hendrik came into the studio and sat down on the sofa.
“Better never than late,” Hendrik said.
Willem carried in an extra chair from upstairs and set it next to Hendrik. The studio seemed crowded with four people in it, like standing chest to butt in a metro a second before it plunged into a dark tunnel.
Anneliese’s hands went slippery with sweat. This was a bad idea. She was setting herself up for a huge humiliation.
She recalled her last recital a few months before Daan’s death. Tineke, Ray, and Daan had arrived late and taken the only empty chairs, which happened to be in the front row. Daan had pulled faces at Anneliese. She’d stumbled halfway through the piece, and her mind had blanked. After an awful silence, she’d skipped to the last measure and played it with a flourish. The other parents had glanced at one another, but Tineke and Ray had clapped and cheered, unaware she’d played only half the piece.
Anneliese knew Louisa’s prelude by heart, but she placed the sheet music on the rack, just in case. It was one of her early compositions, the manuscript handwritten, her drawing delicate and clear as the music itself.
She took a deep breath and began. The studio dissolved around her. Her fingertips connected to the keys, which raised the hammers, and the hammers struck the strings. It was as if the music flowed from deep inside her. She became the instrument. Her practicing paid off, and she came to the end without making a single mistake.
Beaming, she rose from the bench and imagined herself wearing a gorgeous red gown, bowing to applause in a packed concert hall, and Willem bounding across the stage with a bouquet of red roses in his arms. Her eyes rested on her audience’s set faces, and she saw that their clapping was merely polite.
“Didn’t you like it?” she asked, her smile fading.
Hendrik said, “There’s more to a performance than playing the right notes. You have to take command. Feel the music.”
“I felt it.”
“The emotion doesn’t come through in your playing. That was Louisa’s gift. She could make her audience share her passion.”
She bit down hard on her lip. “Anything else?”
“You move too much.”
Katja said, “Don’t pay any attention to Hendrik. No one expects you to play like a concert pianist.”
“I’m impressed,” Willem said, glancing at his watch.
Why were they still here? She wanted them to go—the sooner the better.
Willem cleared his throat and caught Hendrik’s eye before speaking. “I have some news that may disappoint you, Anneliese.”
“Oh?”
“Hendrik wants to convert the piano studio into a workshop. He wants to tinker with a new idea.”
Anneliese blinked, taking a moment to let the words sink in. “What about Louisa’s legacy? Her manuscripts, concert posters, and programs? The Steinway?”
“The National Library has been after Hendrik for years to donate her things. This time he said yes. They plan to create a permanent exhibition about her life. The centerpiece will be her piano.”
Anneliese felt as if the Steinway had rolled over her. She looked at Hendrik. His face was unreadable, but she thought his dark eyes flickered. Why had he changed his mind after turning down the library’s previous requests? Had her playing raked up painful memories? Was he punishing her for snooping?
Willem rose. “I’ll buy you a digital piano for the apartment, and a first-rate set of headphones.”
She tore her gaze away from Hendrik “There’s no need, Willem. I’m done with the piano.”
“But I thought you enjoyed playing.”
“I won’t have time after the baby is born, anyway.”
Katja and Hendrik filed out and Willem carried the extra chair away, leaving Anneliese alone, her shoulders rigid with anger.
Her phone vibrated. She snatched it up and snapped open a text from a number not in her contacts.
I found Bep.
Her anger faded. Who had sent the message? Who was Bep? Then it came to her. The sender must be the old janitor at the hotel in Den Bosch, and Bep was the junkie housekeeper who had cleaned Katja’s and Louisa’s rooms.