Chapter Thirty-Seven
Beau · Now
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It's a different auditorium, eight months on, in the spring—a bigger one, two towns over, the regional youth orchestra's end-of-year showcase.
Theo's got a solo again, because that's who he is: a kid who keeps walking back out onto stages.
Same Saint-Sa?ns. He asked to keep playing it.
I think he wanted to play it just once in a world where the chair wasn't empty.
We get there early.
I get there early—and that goes on the record too, the same way the absence did, because it's the whole point of me now.
I'm the one who says we're leaving with time to spare.
I'm the one who carries the cello out to the truck and sets it in the back like it's made of birthday candles.
I'm the one who walks into that big cold auditorium ahead of everybody and puts my hand on the backs of four seats in the second row—center, on the aisle—and stands there guarding them while the place fills up, a grown man holding four folding chairs against the world like they're the last four on earth.
Martha takes the inside one, Etta climbing back and forth across both our laps and narrating the program to a stranger's kid two rows up.
And the seat beside Martha—the one on my other side, the one where my coat used to sit by itself, folded over the back, keeping a place a man couldn't be bothered to keep himself—
this time I put myself in it.
I sit down in the empty seat. And I stay in it.
The lights come down. The murmur dies. They walk him out, and he's bigger than he was in the fall—they grow when you're not busy missing it, a whole inch of him I'd have sworn wasn't there in October—and he's got the cello in one hand and the bow in the other and that flat unreadable face he gets from his mother, and he crosses to the chair at the center of the stage and sits and settles the instrument against him the way you settle a thing you love.
And then, before he touches the bow to the string, he does what he's done his whole life. What he did to an empty chair in October.
He looks into the second row for his father's face.
I watch it happen. I watch my son's eyes go out over the footlights and down into the dark of the second row, to the seat where the coat used to be—and find me in it. Present. Early. Sure. Looking straight back at him.
And I watch the half inch come up.
The one that dropped out of his shoulders in October and came partway back in his bedroom that night with the cello in his lap—it comes up the rest of the way now, all of it, finally, in front of two hundred strangers who have no idea they're watching a boy get something handed back to him.
He doesn't smile. He's not a kid who performs what he feels; he gets that from his mother, and thank God, because it means that when it's real, you can trust it.
He just holds my eyes for one beat—the same beat he gave the empty chair, except this one has a man sitting in it—and then he lifts the bow.
And he plays the Saint-Sa?ns to the second row.
To me. To a face this time. Not to an absence.
I promised his mother, a lifetime ago on a kitchen floor, that I'd be the one crying first. I wasn't there to keep it in October.
I keep it now. Somewhere in the first eight bars I feel her hand find mine in the dark—my unsentimental wife, who does not cry at recitals, who audited me for six months and doesn't run on promises—and I feel her thumb move across my knuckles, once.
I see you. I see you keeping it. And I sit in the seat I was too much of a coward to sit in the first time, with my wife's hand in mine and my daughter's weight against my arm, and I let my son's music take the last of the year out of me.
Every mile I ever rode away from these people. And every nothing-Tuesday I rode back.
There are all kinds of ways to leave somebody. I know, because I found most of them that year. You can leave from two hundred miles off and you can leave from the next room. You can leave with a phone turned facedown at a fire. You can leave by just—not being in a chair.
And there's only one way back, and it isn't a grand one, and nobody claps for it.
You show up. In the seat. On the Tuesday.
In the second row. Over and over, on the days that don't matter and the days that do, until the people you left stop checking the sky over the door every single time you come through it.
His last note lands clean.
The hard shift—the one he caught on the eleventh try in a bedroom where I finally got to be sitting on the end of the bed—drops into its place, dead center, and holds, and fades, and the bow lifts off the string, and for a second the whole auditorium just breathes.
Then it comes up roaring.
He stands. He bows—stiff, quick, embarrassed, the bow of a boy who'd rather be anywhere.
And he finds us in the second row: all four of us, the seat full, no coat, his father in the chair and his mother's hand in that father's hand and his little sister up on her feet on the folding seat clapping over her head.
And this time my son smiles.
I'm already crying.
I got there first.