The Sound of Letting Go (9 page)

Despite my plan, I get home before seven.

Rebellion failed.

Steven is staring toward some cartoon

on the little kitchen television

while Mom loads the dishwasher.

“There’s a plate for you in the fridge, Daisy.”

“Hey, hon.” Dad surprises me

by coming through the door.

“Shower time, Steven!”

he says with enormous fake cheer,

doesn’t bother to smile.

Steven doesn’t seem to respond to Dad’s expressions,

so there is no point in looking any happier,

unhappier, than he feels,

and Dad is pretty much always far beyond blue.

The plate is a giant chef salad

that looks delicious,

especially because it’s been more than twelve hours

since anything but cafeteria food landed in my stomach.

I sit alone at the kitchen island,

watch Mom’s furious arms scrub pots and pans in the sink.

Her hair is up in a ponytail,

the knobby bones of her spine a ladder of anxiety.

I cram my mouth until

the awful, flat wailing begins floating down the stairs,

accompanied by Dad’s attempts at not shouting,

which fail:

“Steven, Steven, close your eyes or they’ll get full of soap.

Steven, this is just water.

Steven, hang on, Steven.

Shit!”

Growing ever tenser, less mock-cheerful.

Mom leans her weight against the counter’s edge,

hands framing the sink, elbows bent.

I watch her try to yoga-breathe,

count, prepare to go upstairs

and mop the sloshed and soapy battleground

Dad will have abandoned

as soon as Steven is passably clean.

“Gonna go start practicing.” I set my half-f plate

on the counter.

She doesn’t mention the waste

or ask for explanation.

We all know.

I stare at my horn, freed from its case,

as if it were half a stranger,

not a comfortable extension of my arm, my voice.

Three simple valves

I have pressed nearly every day for eight years,

buzzing, tonguing, even singing into the mouthpiece,

sometimes feeling like it’s the only way I can free

the secrets of my heart.

But tonight, in this tasteful basement,

I worry that my forward momentum has stalled.

Perhaps I will even, like Steven, regress.

I know my brother has lost more—

never had so many of the things I have—

yet sometimes it’s hard not to blame him for my descent from orchestra-guest-artist-worthy

prodigy horn player at ten or eleven

to mere highly capable teen trumpeter, winner of things like ribbons and high school plaudits.

Maybe that’s all I am now.

Are my parents the devils

who shot me from highest grace?

Or are they simply the arrows fired by Steven,

who has morphed from challenging autistic boy

to dangerous, nonverbal near-man?

Are they, like me,

victims of genetics and circumstance,

targets and weapons in a war

that is happening inside my brother’s mind?

Either way, they pierce me with their flagging energy, decreasing allotments of time

to come with me to master classes,

regional competitions,

to hear me perform.

Is seventeen old enough

to not need a mother and father anymore?

Should I not care

that Dad doesn’t tuck me into bed at night,

nor mind that there’s no time

to confide in Mom that Dave asked me to the movies?

Is this the way it ought to be?

All I know for certain is that

here I am

without showers of attention;

with fewer trips, fewer prizes,

hour after hour

trying to make a sound like Miles Davis,

imagining jazz as a cure

for the blues.

Ten o’clock

should be quiet.

Ten o’clock,

the warriors should be back at their separate bases.

Instead,

Mom and Dad have closed the pocket doors,

sealed themselves inside the kitchen.

And I hear whispering, the occasional loud word.

I retreat to the solace of the family room television,

but HBO provides no relief.

The naked, writhing bodies of the historical miniseries

remind me only of Dave Miller, what I wanted,

what I feared.

I study the girls’ breasts, some huge and pendulous,

some small and firm;

consider my own, somewhere in between, I think.

Enough for Dave Miller, I guess.

Consider my face, pretty enough,

though maybe not for television,

the nose a little buttonish,

the mouth a little wide.

Now there is a Roman king, speaking of power

to a woman who tries to wield her own

through the translucent gauze of her dress.

(I love the British accents, which make even seduction

seem like art.)

I wish

that my parents still shared a bed,

that Dad did not sleep in the extra room beside Steven’s

while Mom has the master to herself.

On television, a kiss,

a slap.

No resolution.

I pull out my phone.

Text Justine:

“Did your parents start talking more

right before the divorce?”

But she doesn’t reply.

Real time has passed.

It’s now almost eleven.

Maybe she’s asleep.

Eleven,

and Steven is quiet.

The credits are running,

HBO tantalizing viewers with promises

of more passion next Tuesday night.

Just past eleven,

the pocket doors to the kitchen still drawn,

the whispering goes on.

No answers.

Wednesday’s breakfast,

dutiful as usual, yet there’s something less resistant

about the weight of Dad’s tread

on the kitchen hardwood,

which yields, instead of comfort,

a sense of impending doom.

The
dah-nah-nah-nah-nah
of
Phantom of the Opera
.

The
dee-up, dee-up, dee-up

of John Williams’s
Jaws
movie score

as the shark’s narrow fin emerges, razorlike,

from the ocean’s surface.

The threat throbbing

through the silence of Dad’s absent criticism

as Mom stoops belatedly

to tie my brother’s shoes.

I am so embroiled in my family horror story

I don’t think to tell Justine about Dave Miller

and the egg chair and the parking lot

until we’re in the girls’ room after lunch.

Her squeal is so glass-shatteringly loud it draws my eye

to the bathroom mirror

in search of cracks.

“And you didn’t text me
that
last night?”

She gives me a soft pinch.

“There was a lot going on. My parents . . .”

“Oh, but no,

my parents didn’t talk more before the divorce.

Maybe they’re trying to make up,” she suggests.

“But, back to Dave,” she says. “How
was
it?”

Two other girls come through the bathroom door.

We exchange polite hi-but-you-can’t-hear-my-secrets glances.

Justine puts her lipstick back in her purse,

drags me into the hall.

“Let’s go find him!” she says.

“He’s usually out on the bleachers

behind the school after lunch, right?”

I don’t know how to explain the power of his kiss,

something hard to understand.

Not as terrifying as the force in Steven’s arm

when he smashes a dish.

Yet, with both, I never quite know

if it’s entirely innocent, if it can be at all controlled.

What is it

when someone so close to you

makes you hurt, a lot or a little,

in action or in circumstance?

“It kind of didn’t end well,” I tell Justine.

“Besides, I want to do some work on my Overton application.”

“More good news for your parents!” she declares.

“Yeah,” I say.

But all I know for certain

is that despite the calm of the morning,

Dad still didn’t kiss Mom good-bye.

“Describe some of the ensembles in which you play”

is the prompt for the second essay

of the Overton application I am frantic to finish.

If my parents split up, will going away to music camp be harder or easier?

Will Steven be less my responsibility

or more?

The worries clutter my straight-A mind,

which has gotten me through all kinds of essays,

from a sunny “My Summer Vacation”

to the endlessly boring
Moby-Dick
.

This should not be so hard.
I try to calm myself.

This should be about jazz versus classical,

band versus orchestra versus playing in the basement

alone.

Yet, when I hit “save” on the keyboard,

I have managed just three lines:

Playing a solo is very different from being in an ensemble.

Even if your own standard of perfection is constant,

different mistakes are more noticeable,

different skills are more valuable in different groups.

And I’m off,

with my unfinished essays and all my other burdens,

to figure out how to say,

“We had gone to the beach,”

“He had arrived at the beach,”

“They had wanted to go to the beach,”

en français
.