Chapter Eighteen
Gabby
“Yes, Mom, things are going well. I have a gig next week. I’ve already had one lesson with Julia, and I have another one tomorrow.”
“You think she’ll be a good fit?”
“She’s great, Mom. I think you’d like her. She’s friendly, but honest. And she already has me getting a deeper tone out of my instrument. I think Clara will be impressed when I get back to school in the fall.”
“Well, good.” My mom’s voice sounds more pleased and less concerned after a long list of reassurances about how I’m doing here. From the way she’s acting, you wouldn’t guess that I’ve been gone for most of the last year. Like me being far from home is new.
I guess she did expect to have me home all summer. All things considered, she and Dad are handling the change of plans really well.
“And how’s Jonathan?”
As usual, a little smile comes to my face when I talk about him. “Keeping busy. He’s at a meeting with the label right now, getting more details about the album release and concert tour.”
Mom’s quiet for a minute. “Oh, well, that sounds positive.”
“It is. His career is moving forward. I’m happy for him.”
“Good. I’m happy for him too. I know we haven’t met in person, but I feel like I know him from you talking about him and the few conversations I’ve had with him. I just worry about you. About what’ll happen between you two when you go back to school.”
Sighing, I sit down on the bed. My violin case is still open next to me. I’d been working on the little melody I started composing a couple of weeks ago when Mom called, playing through it, seeing if I can expand on it.
“I know, Mom. It’s not going to be easy. But we’ll figure it out. He won’t be on tour forever. And there are breaks. I don’t know what his tour schedule will look like, but I’m sure he’ll have time off eventually. Plus, I’ll be busy with school to keep me distracted while he’s gone.”
She makes a noncommittal sound. “Well, I’m glad things are going well for him anyway.”
“Me too, Mom.”
The sound of the front door opening and closing reaches me in the bedroom, followed by Jonathan’s voice. “Gabby?”
I head into the living room, waving at Jonathan and pointing to my phone. “It’s my mom,” I mouth.
He smiles and leans in close. “Hi, Mrs. Kane.”
“Oh!” Mom almost squeaks in my ear. “I didn’t realize he was there.”
I giggle. “He just got home. I guess he wants to say hello. Hang on.” Pulling the phone away from my ear, I put it on speaker. “Okay, he can hear you now.”
“Hello, Jonathan. And I’ve told you that you can call me Elizabeth.”
“Elizabeth. How are you?”
“I’m well, thank you. Better now that I’ve gotten my weekly confirmation that my youngest daughter is still alive and well. She assures me that you’re taking good care of her.”
My eyes widen in mortification. “Mom!”
Jonathan just chuckles. “I wouldn’t dream of doing anything less.”
Mom hums. “That’s what I like to hear from the man taking my daughter away from her family.”
“Mother!” I turn away from Jonathan, taking the phone off speaker. “That’s quite enough, Mom. What happened to you feeling connected to him?”
She scoffs. “That doesn’t mean I’m not going to interrogate him about your wellbeing. I’d never hear the end of it if your father found out I talked to him and didn’t ask.”
“Fine,” I grumble. She has a point. He was that way with Marissa and Peter for a long time, too. They’ve been together long enough that he doesn’t do it anymore. Though with what Marissa was saying while she was here, maybe he should still subject Peter to that kind of interrogation too. Or maybe Marissa just needs to make up her own mind about her life.
“Well, since Jonathan’s home, I’m going to go. He looks like he has news.”
Jonathan nods, smiling.
“Alright,” my mom says in my ear. “It was good talking to you. Call me soon.”
“I will. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
Jonathan barely waits for me to get off the phone before his arms are around me, lifting me off the ground, crushing my mouth to his. His tongue slides between my lips, and I cling to him, giving as good as I get.
This is the kind of greeting I can get behind. He’s only been gone a few hours, but we’ve spent all our time together for the last three days, so it’s been weird having him gone.
He backs up to the couch, sitting down with me on his lap, his hands undoing the messy bun I had my hair in while I played. When he breaks the kiss, it’s so he can toss the ponytail holder to the coffee table and run his fingers through my hair. “I have good news.”
His words almost don’t register, because his eyes are focused on his fingers combing through my hair.
“What?”
His dark green eyes find mine, one corner of his lips tugging up, drawing my attention back to his mouth. His lips look fuller and a little pinker than they were when he came in, the result of our frantic kissing just now. Then he opens his mouth and speaks again.
“I have news. They showed me my concert schedule starting this fall. I’ll be spending lots of time in California, then expanding to hit the major cities around the country.”
I chew on my bottom lip, processing that. “Just the major ones?”
That corner of his mouth turns up again. “Well, that was the plan. But I suggested adding a Spokane stop. Since I have connections there, it seems like a no brainer, right? Eric, the head of the label, agreed. So they’re going to add a concert there.”
“Really?”
He nods. “So that means I’ll get to see you at least once during the school year.”
My face falls at the idea of only seeing him once. “I guess that’s something.”
“Hey.” His hand cups my cheek, turning my face so I’ll meet his eyes again. “It’ll work out. We’ll see each other more than one time. But adding the Spokane stop means we’re guaranteed to see each other at least then. I’ll be in Portland and Seattle at different points, so you can come out for those weekends since they’re not too far. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it’ll be okay. We’ll add in some other times, too. This is just the beginning, okay?”
“Okay.” It comes out as a whisper, and I sound close to tears. Because I am. The thought of seeing him only three times over the course of nine months sounds like torture.
He’s believed we can make this work for longer than I have. And so far he’s been right.
I have no reason to doubt him now.
Julia opens the door to her apartment with a smile. “Come in, come in.”
I follow her into the open concept living room, where she has a music stand set up. Last week when I came over, she told me that her husband, Stefan, had found somewhere to be for the hour of my lesson so we could have the nicer acoustics of the main room instead of using the small second bedroom that they use as their studio. Stefan is apparently a musician too. I didn’t ask for details.
She lays her case across the arms of a chair and opens it, her violin available if she wants to demonstrate something. I lay mine across the couch, pulling my music out of the pocket and setting it on the stand before unpacking. She sets her little electronic metronome on the stand, looking at me with one eyebrow cocked as I turn the screw on my bow a few times to tighten it.
“Ready?” she asks, waiting for my nod before switching on the tuning note on the metronome.
Making slight adjustments to the strings, I get the tuning perfect, nodding again when I’m finished for Julia to turn off the drone of the A.
Like last time, she has me start with bowing exercises. The first set is about varying placement and pressure, pushing the sound to the edges of tolerance, learning how hard and how slow I can go before the sound breaks.
“Good,” she says. “You’re less hesitant about that than you were last week. I can tell you’ve been working on it. Have you noticed it helping your playing yet?”
I pull my violin down off my shoulder. “Um, not really.”
She grins, and shifts a paper over to reveal the next set of exercises, working on string crossings. These are more fun. “Remember, hold your elbow a little more on the lower string side, and dip your wrist to cross to the higher string.”
Setting the metronome, I start slowly, like Julia said to last week, focusing on the motion, imprinting it in my muscle memory. These exercises are simple, designed to focus on only one thing, so my left hand merely supports the neck of the violin, not moving. Yet. That’ll come next.
After going through the lines of exercises, Julia bumps up the tempo and indicates the beginning again. We do this over and over, each time a little faster. She even gets me going faster than I have on my own, and I give her a nervous grin when she bumps it up another ten beats per minute, the metronome ticking so fast, it’s starting to all run together.
Deep breath, set the bow on the string, elbow up, focus on the beat, count myself in, and go.
I make it about halfway through before faltering. I pause and restart where I messed up, my brows furrowing with concentration. But I mess up again on the next line, stopping with a laugh.
Julia laughs too, turning off the metronome. “Good. That was really good. Keep working on those. You’ve gotten a lot better just since I’ve last seen you. You’ll blow your normal teacher away when you get back to school in the fall.”
I grin, basking in her praise. “Thanks.” Clara’s good about telling me what I’m doing right, but she’s less effusive. Except for that one time when I had a huge breakthrough and pulled the kind of sound she’d been trying to get out of me for weeks, and she shouted “Yes!” and did a fist pump in the air when I did it the first time.
Julia shifts some more papers around on the stand, looking for my next round of torture, I mean, exercises. She pauses, and I put my violin on my shoulder, expecting her to step aside and start the metronome. But she stays there. Just staring at whatever’s in front of her.
She picks up the paper, but her body is still blocking my view, so I don’t know what she could be staring at so intently. Letting my arm droop, and my violin slide down my shoulder a little, I try to figure out what’s caught her attention.
“What is this?” she finally says, glancing at me over her shoulder.
“What is what?”
I step closer, peering around her arm to see what she’s looking at. My stomach seizes when I realize that she’s holding a sheet of staff paper with hand drawn notes and scribbles. My hand drawn notes and scribbles. It’s the little melody I’ve been messing around with.
“Um …” I try to come up with an answer, but I don’t really have one. I don’t even know what it is. Or what it’s supposed to be. It’s just a melody. No structure, no real form yet. But whatever lame answer I was trying to come up with dies on my tongue. It doesn’t matter. Julia’s not listening. Nope, she’s humming through it. Humming. The notes. That I wrote. From my brain.
“Uh,” I try again. But that’s still all I’ve got. My brain seems to have frozen and stopped producing intelligent words.
“This is really pretty. What is this?” She hums through it again, faster this time, now that she’s a little more familiar with it. Then she finally looks at me, and I realize she asked her question again.
“Um, it’s just a … a thing. I don’t know. It came to me one day, so I wrote it down. I’ve been fiddling with it, adding to it some, but …”
As I’m talking, her eyebrows are climbing her forehead, her blue eyes going wide. “You wrote this?”
I swallow hard. “Yeah. It’s no big deal, though. It’s just something I was messing with. I must’ve grabbed it on accident when I was getting my music together today. I didn’t mean to bring it.”
“No big deal? I didn’t know you write.”
“I don’t really.”
She snorts, setting the paper back on the stand. For a brief, shining second I think we’re done talking about it and will get back to the lesson. That I can push aside the embarrassment of having someone find out I’m trying to write music and pretend it never happened.
But no.
Picking up her violin, she taps the bow on the strings, checking the tuning, then plays the A and E together, adjusting the fine tuner on the E. Satisfied, she starts playing. Not only did she hum my little melody, now she’s playing it on the violin. I think my brain just exploded.
But it sounds a little wonky. “No. You should push on this note more. This is the important spot in the phrase.”
She looks at me, surprised, but doesn’t say anything, just plays it again, following my direction. When she’s done, she nods. “You’re right.” Then she picks up a pencil and draws a little line over that note, a tenuto mark, so that the direction I gave her is now committed to paper.
“Why didn’t you tell me you compose?” she asks as she sets her violin back down in its case.
“Um, I don’t know?”
Looking up at me, she’s smiling, like I just said something amusing. “Have you been doing it long?”
I shake my head. “No. This is the first thing. I mean, I’ve helped Jonathan with his stuff some. But that’s mostly theory and helping flesh out some harmonies. Making the chords work so it sounds better. Not actual composing.”
She snorts again, the same sound as before, indicating her dismissal of my take on the situation. “Shane’s told me a little about Jonathan’s album. He was impressed with the quality of the music. Says it’s better, more interesting, than the usual one, four, five, one chords over and over and over, ad nauseam. Is that your influence?”
“I just make suggestions. Jonathan’s the songwriter.”
This time she chuckles. “Right. Whatever you say, Gabby.”
“No. I’m serious.”
But she’s shaking her head, laughing at my protests. Shuffling through the papers on the stand again, she says, “So am I. You should talk to Stefan. He’ll give you some good pointers. Though he might try to sway you to switching to composition instead of performance.” Her shoulders lift in a shrug, still not looking at me. “You’ll have to figure that out for yourself, though.”
At the confused look on my face, she laughs again. “Stefan’s a composer, Gabby. Did I not tell you that?”
I shake my head dumbly.
“He is. He’s an adjunct composition professor at Edgewater University. Between that, paid commissions, and film and TV work, he does pretty well. He can help you flesh out this little melody, give you some ideas of where to take it depending on what you want it to be. Depending on how fast you work, he might even help you with instrumentation.”
My mouth is hanging open. I want to speak, but … what do I say to that?
With a grin, she tilts her head toward the stand. “I’ll have him give you a call later. Let’s get back to playing, though. Since that’s the real reason you’re here.”
Nodding, I shut my mouth. “Okay. Um, thanks.”
“No problem.”
It takes me a second to focus on the page of Ševčik exercises—the same ones Clara has me doing—and decipher the meaning of all the little black dots on the page. But I finally do, and the familiar rhythms of the exercises, the action of my fingers, the tick of the metronome, all pull my focus back to this.
But a little voice in the back of my mind is still spluttering in disbelief. Julia thinks I’m a composer? And that the little melody I’ve come up with has promise?
I came to California to see Jonathan. Now, here I am, new opportunities falling into my lap from every direction. The gigs, lessons with Julia, and now her offering to connect me with her composer-teacher husband?
Nothing like this has ever been on my radar. But I can’t help getting excited by the new possibilities.