55. Knocks Me Off My Feet
knocks me off my feet
THIS CHAPTER HAS A SOUNDTRACK
Knocks Me Off My Feet by Stevie Wonder
alyssa
“I can’t believe you moved it.”
I stopped dead when I saw it.
Julian’s father’s piano, out in the open, front and center in the family room.
Julian glanced up from the karaoke machine he was setting up. “Figured it was time. It’s been hidden away long enough.”
I ran my hand over the polished mahogany.
The last time I saw it, it had been under a cloth, tucked in a closed room like something too dangerous to touch. Now it sat where it belonged, buffed to a warm glow, the inscription clear on the fallboard.
“How do you feel about having it out here?”
He stopped untangling a microphone cord and looked at it for a second.
“Different,” he said. “Good different.”
It had been three months since Micah and I moved in. All of us still figuring out what that meant, building routines, settling into a new normal. I had never been happier in my life.
The doorbell rang, and then came the Wade clan letting themselves in with their usual noise.
“Hey, Alyssa. Jules, where do you want the, oh my God.” Simone stopped mid-sentence. The bag of snacks in her arms dropped to the floor. “Julian. That’s.”
“Pops’s piano.” Tre finished it for her, coming in behind her with an armful of drinks. He pulled up so short that Raschad walked into his back, Zaria on his hip, Zhaire tearing past all of them yelling for Micah.
“Damn.” Zion exhaled, arriving with Taryn. “Haven’t seen this thing in years.”
“Too long,” Julian said.
The house filled up fast after that. Aunt Lorraine and Uncle Reggie, Khaz and Khairos, Marlowe and Zenobia, Kendra talking about a case before she’d even set her bag down, kids racing through the halls like they’d been released from a cage.
Excited chaos and all, everybody drifted to the piano like it had its own gravity.
“Lord have mercy.” Aunt Lorraine came at it with slow steps. “I thought I’d never lay eyes on this beautiful thing again.”
Tre moved toward it slow, like it was sacred. His fingers traced the inscription twice, then his hands hovered over the keys without landing.
“It’s even prettier than I remembered.” Simone sniffled and hugged him from the side.
“Look at that mother of pearl,” Khaz said. “Craftsmanship is unreal.”
“Y’all remember how Mama got this made for him?
” Zion was already grinning. “She told Pops she’d taken up collecting rare orchids.
Had a whole story. Special soil, special pots, a greenhouse two towns over.
For damn near two years, that man handed over money every few weeks for orchids he never once laid eyes on, talking about how glad he was she found a hobby that made her happy. ”
He laughed.
“Wasn’t a single orchid. She banked every dollar and had his piano built. Man paid for his own Christmas present.”
“He cried when she surprised him with it,” Tre reminisced. “Sat right down and played ‘This Christmas’ and sang it, and we all fell apart.”
“Remember how he used to play for hours?” Simone added. “He’d sit right there working out melodies and we’d all gather around just to listen.”
“That’s how we all learned to play,” Zion said.
“No, Pops taught us instruments before then, Z. But that’s when we really got good at piano.” Tre corrected.
“Mama would join in sometimes.” Simone’s eyes were wet. “When Daddy got stuck on a bridge or couldn’t find the right chord. She couldn’t play like him, but she had this way of humming a harmony line that would unlock whatever he was reaching for.”
Khairos stepped forward, his voice soft. “I remember staying over one weekend when they were working on that song. What was it called?”
“‘Midnight Rain,’” Julian said.
“I remember that night.” Zion smiled. “We were all begging him to stop so we could sleep, and he was in the zone.”
“That the one Uncle Zay got Song of the Year for?”
“That’s the one,” Uncle Reggie nodded. “He played the same four bars over and over for a week straight until he got that bridge right.”
“Pops in the zone was unstoppable,” Tre said. “He’d get this look on his face like he was hearing something the rest of us couldn’t.”
“He was,” Aunt Lorraine said. “That man had a direct line to something beautiful. Him and Niecy both. It flowed through them like water.”
The room went quiet, everybody somewhere else for a second.
“She’d be so happy to see it out here again.” Aunt Lorraine put her hand on Julian’s shoulder. “Where it’s meant to be.”
Julian nodded. Then he cleared his throat. “All right. Enough nostalgia. Y’all ready for karaoke?”
The next hour and a half went by in singing and laughing. Tre had the microphone hostage for three songs straight with no sign of letting it go.
“Now you’re just milking it,” Taryn called from the couch.
“Let the man cook,” Raschad said, recording on his phone.
I was wedged into the corner of the couch with my shoes off and my feet tucked under me, laughing, and I caught myself looking for Julian.
He stood at the threshold of the room, arms crossed, shoulder against the frame, a quiet half-smile on him, watching everybody be loud in his house like it was the best show he’d ever seen.
“Okay.” Tre finished his song. “Who’s following greatness?”
“I’ll go.” Khairos reached for the mic.
“Actually.” Julian came off the wall. “I’ll go.”
The room didn’t go silent. It glitched.
“I’m sorry. What?” Tre turned to him.
Julian hosted karaoke all the time. Julian did not sing. Not the night I closed my eyes and sang “Ready for Love” to a room I was pretending wasn’t there. Even then he only leaned on a wall and watched. Never once reached for the mic himself.
Simone was already smacking Raschad’s arm. “Record this. Record this right now.”
“Julian is doing karaoke,” Tre announced. “Everybody bear witness.”
I was grinning. Even though I’d heard him sing a few times, I had never once seen him hold that microphone. He didn’t then either. Instead, he crossed the room and sat down at the piano.
The temperature in the room changed.
The laughing drained out of it. Aunt Lorraine’s hand came up slowly and pressed flat over her mouth.
“Is he gonna play?” Taryn whispered.
Nobody answered her.
Julian settled onto the bench. Rolled his shoulders once. Laid his hands over the keys and held them there a second, like he was asking the piano for permission.
Then he pressed down.
The first notes came out soft and round, and then they opened into something, and I felt Simone go still beside me before I placed it myself. I knew this song. Everybody in the room knew this song.
Knocks Me Off My Feet by Stevie Wonder
“Oh,” Uncle Reggie breathed.
Years came out of that piano one chord at a time.
Across the room, Raschad put his eyes on the ceiling and breathed slowly through his nose.
Then Julian started to sing.
The first line out of him broke the room open. Somebody made a sound like they’d been hit. Behind me, I heard a wrecked, “My Lord.”
Aunt Lorraine gave up and started crying where she sat. Zion reached over and pulled Taryn into his chest.
I had heard Julian sing.
But not like this.
Not with his whole family in front of him, falling apart at a voice they hadn’t heard since they were kids.
And then the song lifted.
Because it isn’t a sad song. It’s joyful and warm.
It swings and smiles. And here was Julian, the most contained man I have known in my life, starting to really feel it.
His shoulders came down into the rhythm and his head began to move.
His knee was bouncing under the keys. The locked-down half-smile cracked open into something wide and young as he sang.
And the crying and gasps around the room tipped over into laughing and clapping.
I was up off the couch and on my feet, clapping and swaying along, watching him do the thing he had kept locked away since he was nineteen years old.
Every time the song came around to repeat I love you, he stopped watching his hands and looked up. At me.
He sang those words straight at me, eyes on mine, then he’d drop his gaze back to the keys and pick the rhythm up again, knee going, shoulder dipping, gone into it while his family hollered him on.
Julian’s eyes lifted and found me and held, and I pressed my hand flat to my chest and sang the words to him as he sang them to me, with my eyes stinging.
I thought it was just the song. I thought he was lost in this moment for his family. I stood there loving it for him, and it never crossed my mind that he was telling me something out loud in front of every person he loved.
By the time he got to the end of it, the part that just repeats and repeats and dares you not to join, the whole room was in.
Tre went first. He started clapping on the beat and singing it too loud, and then it caught.
Aunt Lorraine, eyes shut, hands up, swaying like she was three pews back in church.
Kendra and Simone trying to harmonize and missing and not caring.
Micah and Zhaire jumping in place. All of them singing it back to him, the same three words, over and over, and Julian carrying the whole thing from the bench with that grin on him, glancing up at me between the lines.
And I sang it too.
I sang it with all of them, folding my voice into the room, sending it to him the way everybody was sending it to him. Loving him. Singing him home. My throat ached with how much I loved this for him.
I did not once understand that he was singing it to me. That I was standing in the middle of a whole room saying it back to him and never once hearing what it was.
Then the song came to the part where he dragged his hand down the whole length of the keys in one long sweep, a glissando that rippled from one end to the other, and the tempo picked up under it.
And then it was just those three words. I love you, over and over, again and again, carrying the song out to its end.
The whole room came in at once, clapping, singing it back and forth to each other, to him.