Monday morning I began my junior year of college sitting in the dean’s office. The space reflected a man who wanted to appear interesting. Laminate bookshelves held paperbacks with uncreased spines. A layer of dust bordered leather-bound classical volumes. His desk was a playground of tabletop art meant to represent the exotic places he’d been and people he’d met. I’d pay him a hundred dollars if he could show me just one that didn’t have “Made in China” stamped on the bottom.
“Sorry I kept you waiting, Mr. MacKay.” Dean Alcott walked in and took a seat behind his desk. “How was your summer?”
“Fine.”
“Thank you for stopping by. I wanted to mention—”
“I have a class—”
“We’re holding a seminar next week, featuring distinguished faculty and a few invited guests. There will be a panel discussion, and I’d like to invite you to participate, add your thoughts to the conversation.”
“On what?”
“Contemporary classical music.” He smiled, folding his hands on the desk. “Something you are uniquely qualified to speak on.”
The man had a serious hard-on for me. Well, for my name and reputation. To Dean Alcott, an old man who dressed how he thought Harvard professors looked in the fifties—bow ties and sweater vests under wool or tweed jackets—I was just the accumulated sum of my CV.
But that wasn’t me anymore.
“Not interested.” My fists flexed in my lap. “I told you this.”
“You’ve experienced a level of success that other students here will only dream of. What you’ve given up—”
“I sat in this office. With you and my undergraduate advisor freshman year. I was very clear.”
“I hoped I could convince you to reconsider. Just think about it.”
“I’m not interested in returning to the piano. I have no inclination to write contemporary classical anymore, and I’ve nothing else to say on the topic.”
Somewhere in his misguided imagination, he believed I’d spontaneously wake up one morning and declare that my muse had returned and I’d composed a new concerto. He probably yanked it to fantasies of the speeches I would give professing my love for my alma mater and the reawakening I’d experienced while in its hallowed halls.
“A talent like yours—”
“Is mine to waste. We done?” I grabbed my bag and walked out, rushing to my first class of the morning.
* * *
What was it about me that made people think I had a mind that wanted changing? Every semester was the same ordeal with Dean Alcott. Since I first sat in his office two years ago seeking late acceptance to the university, he’d made it his mission to convert me. He considered it a great tragedy that the former child prodigy had walked away from touring as a concert pianist four years ago. The real tragedy was losing my muse and my motivation in the same horrible month.
It wasn’t as if I had stopped playing out of spite. I wasn’t so high on myself that I needed men like the dean to beg in order to shore up the foundation of my ego. I loved playing. It was my passion. If I could physically tolerate putting my fingers to the keys, I’d do nothing else. Scott was right; I had washed out, because the thought of even looking at my mother’s piano...
Damn it.
I took a deep breath and shut my eyes. My stomach rolled with grief and nausea. The ache in my chest was as pronounced as ever. My fingers curled into fists in my lap.
Sitting in the lecture hall of my music theory class, I sank into my seat at the back of the room, begging my body to calm the fuck down. My knee bounced. The barbell in my tongue flicked between my teeth. It clicked against the hard enamel like an anxious metronome. As the professor elaborated on the PowerPoint presentation projected behind him, the room deflated, closing in. My vision became a warped, blurry bubble of bleeding colors. I tried to think of anything else, but the memory insisted:
Three days of avoiding Hadley after the night I’d run out on her four years ago were consumed with rehearsing for my upcoming show. While I was hiding in the music room, my adoptive mother, Carmen, came to sit next to me at the piano bench. For a while, she just listened to me play. I adored the way she smiled and hummed along while my fingers danced over the keys. In those moments, I knew she was proud of me.
“That’s a beautiful song. Will you play it this weekend?”
“No.” I transitioned the second movement into a new composition I’d been tinkering with. “That’s Hadley’s song. I don’t play it for the public.”
My mom set her right hand to the keys beside me, improvising as I continued to play. “She called again this afternoon. She’s come to see you twice this week while you’ve locked yourself in here.”
“I can’t...You don’t understand—”
“You’re right, Josh. I can’t possibly understand. And neither can Hadley. But she loves you. She wants to be there for you. I know she’ll forgive whatever you think is unforgivable.”
“It isn’t about forgiveness.” I’d been at the keys for hours, but it was the topic that had me exhausted. As if Hadley wasn’t on my mind every moment. “I’m broken. I’m not capable of…She should just move on.”
“Could you? Just move on from your best friend?”
“No.” Hadley was it for me. She always had been. “But if I wait it out long enough, she’ll learn to hate me. It’ll be better that way.”
For two more hours, my mom sat with me as I gave up rehearsing and just let my mind wander while the two of us improvised together. It was sort of a pastime of ours. My mom would start a verse and then I’d come in next to her, and on and on.
She would never abandon the cause of pulling me out of my depression and masochism, but Carmen knew when to push and when to retreat. Hadley had always been my creative muse, and her song was the first I’d ever composed on the piano, but Carmen was my motivation in music.
My mother died of a brain aneurysm that afternoon during Rachmaninoff’s Third, collapsed across my lap with blood trickling out of her nose, while her pained, vacant eyes stared up at me.
The lecture hall was empty when I opened my eyes from the memory and took a deep breath. I gathered my stuff and got the hell out of there.
* * *
On the third floor of the student union, I found a quiet place to sit in an overstuffed chair by the window that looked out on the brick-paved courtyard. The wide walkways were cluttered with frightened-looking freshmen navigating the folding-table market of student clubs and thinly veiled cults smiling under Greek banners.
Tuning out the noise and chatter of those around me in the study lounge, I dug into my pocket and pulled out my phone. My father picked up on the second ring.
“Josh, hello.”
“Hi, Dad.”
“You’re up early.”
True. I wasn’t usually functional before 11:00 a.m.
“Hadley likes early classes. I worked around her schedule this semester.”
“That was diplomatic of you.”
“Yeah, well...How’s your day going?”
“Oh, you know. The same. No one is ever happy to see me when I walk into a room.”
My adoptive father was psychiatrist at a hospital in Manhattan. Dr. Simon MacKay had briefly entertained the hope that I might find an interest in medicine but supported me when my aptitude for music became apparent.
Simon took the job in New York after my initial acceptance to Columbia. The two of us were all we had left after Carmen died. We needed each other. Then Hadley needed me more, so I stayed behind while Simon tried to get on with his life. Whatever that meant.
He was still talking. Somewhere in the middle, I realized I’d not been paying attention. I was content to listen to his voice rather than the words.
“Josh?”
I leaned back and fixed my attention to the woven patterns in the upholstered chair. “I’m here. Sorry.”
“I spoke to Hadley last night.”
Her weekly informal therapy session. As if I wasn’t supposed to understand the coded language there. Sunday nights I knew to make myself scarce on the other side of the house so I didn’t hear Hadley’s voice traveling through the walls as she talked about her level of anxiety during the week and told my father what an insufferable jackass his son was on any given day.
“You brought a woman home.”
Fuck. “I had too much to drink and uh…” Fuck. Fuck. “Well, Hadley didn’t want to leave the bar yet…So, yeah. It’s not like I make it a habit. Why, did Hadley say something?”
“I wouldn’t tell you if she did,” he reminded me.
I was his son, but Hadley had been his patient before Simon and I ever met.
“I ask out of concern for you. Are you sexually active?”
“Dad—”
“If something’s changed…”
“Yes, I’m having sex. No, nothing’s changed.” I blew a breath through my nose, pinching the bridge between my fingers. “Can we not do this right now?”
“Talk to me, son.”
“I was thinking about Mom. And about playing. Figured I’d call.”
“I’m glad you did.”
It’d been four years since Carmen died, and still I was rendered nearly immobile when my mind slipped to her memory.
My throat was dry when I tried to speak again. “I was sitting in class. Had an episode. No one seemed to notice, I think. But by the time it passed, I was the only one left in the room.”
“What do you think brought it on this time?”
There wasn’t a good answer that was any different than the others. “I miss her.”
“Of course you do. I promise that it will get easier in time. But not allowing yourself to feel the grief and deal with it will only prolong the healing process. Don’t deny yourself her memory.”
I felt my eyes begin to sting. My fingers went a little numb. “I have to go. Class.”
“I love you, Josh. I’m here. Anytime.”
“I know. Love you.” I hung up the phone and escaped toward the stairs before I had another public meltdown.
* * *
When a child’s first memory is abandonment, he tends to latch on tightly to those who show him affection. Losing Carmen four years ago was just one loss too many, and I didn’t know how to deal.
That first memory—I was maybe three at the time—was of a woman sitting on a public bus next to me. She told me to stay in my seat, that she’d be right back. I saw her squeeze down the aisle toward the door, get off the bus, and that was it. I never saw her again. When the last passenger boarded for that stop, the bus driver closed the door and pulled away from the curb. I must have ridden along the route for hours until the end of the driver’s shift when he spotted me sitting toward the back. Next stop was the police station. From there, it was a series of foster homes.
Hadley Mitchell saved my life. I’d gravitated toward her the first day she showed up in my third foster home when we were five years old. To this day, I don’t know what drew me to her.
Her parents had been killed in some kind of accident. She had no surviving family. But the day Tom Hughes showed up to rescue her from that living hell—the state had finally gotten its shit together and tracked down her godfather—was both the best and worst day of my life to that point. She was getting out, but it meant I was alone again. While nothing Hadley could have done in that home would have saved me, having her there when it was over was better than suffering alone.
I didn’t understand until many years later, but it was Hadley who freed me from the foster system and the daily hell I’d endured. For a week straight after going home with Tom, Hadley pitched fits, had nightmares, and ran away. When Tom exhausted his parental knowledge on how to deal with the situation, he took Hadley to see a psychiatrist named Dr. Simon MacKay. After a few sessions, Simon learned the truth. That this little girl had left behind her only friend, a boy in pain who needed help. So that was it. Simon and Carmen put in a call to start my adoption proceedings and put my tormentor in prison.
Hadley had needed me once. Instead of being her savior and repaying that outstanding debt, I failed her. It only sickened me further that, despite all of this, Hadley still showed me compassion. She still lived in my house because she felt safer with me sleeping next door than she did in her own home.
If that didn’t just twist the knife.
* * *
After my last class of the day, I went to meet Hadley. Through the narrow window in the lecture hall’s door, I saw her sitting alone in the back of the room. Her head was bent over her sketchpad, her long cascade of dark hair concealing her profile.
I checked my phone and noticed I’d missed a text message from Scott.
I want my money from the last gig.
Fat chance. He’d pissed all over any goodwill I had for him. Besides, I’d already split his share with Corey and Trey. So I sent what I thought was an appropriate reply.
Tough shit.
A loud pop caught my attention. Leaning against the opposite wall, a chick stood popping a sheet of bubble wrap hanging out of her purse. She looked like half a Kardashian escaped from a Judas Priest concert: layers of black fashionably distressed clothing and metal studs. Her long black hair hung over her shoulder, one side of her head shaved down to stubble.
She stared at me, though I couldn’t place her. Not exactly the kind of girl I would forget.
“You look deep in thought,” she said, pinching tiny plastic bubbles between her fingers.
“Do I know you?”
“I’m Asha.”
“And?”
“And I need a ride to your place.”
“That’s forward. Don’t even offer to buy me dinner first.”
“Sorry, you’re not my type.” Her red lips curved into a sarcastic smile. “You’re pretty and all, but I don’t do the whole tattoos and piercings thing.”
“You sure?” I would have pegged her for exactly that type. She was attractive, and maybe in another life...
Asha leaned her weight on one foot and studied my arms. “I find it all too distracting. You”—she came closer and twirled her finger in my face—“are too high maintenance. I don’t have that kind of time on my hands.”
“I’m confused.”
She was fucking with me. Had to be.
“I’m Asha. You’re giving me a ride.”
“That’s the part I’m having trouble with.”
The door to Hadley’s class swung open, people pouring into the hall. Asha pushed her way into the stampede.
“Late much?” She snagged Hadley by the wrist to tug her over. “I met Josh already. We’re old friends now. Ready to go?”
Hadley dug her sunglasses out of her messenger bag and slid them on top of her head. “You don’t mind, Josh?”
“No. But, uh, how is she getting home?”
Making another trip into the city and back today was out of the question.
“I’ll catch a ride with Trey.” Asha put her arm around Hadley and turned on her heel to head down the hallway. “You coming or what?”
Well, damn. That was something.