Chapter 8
— Chapter 8 —
It doesn’t make sense for rain to sound different in Somers than it does in Maine, but it seems like a separate sonance. Maybe something to do with the distance from the ocean and barometric pressure. Or maybe the scatter of almost-sleet hitting Jam’s window is a singular melody. But I wake with the thought that it’s been a decade since I’ve heard rain like this.
Next to me, Jam is dreaming. Forehead wrinkled, cheeks damp. He’s never slept well. His brain is not kind to him. Worse than mine.
“No, no, no, no…,” he mumbles, and I want to tell him he’s okay. But once when I tried to shake him from a nightmare, he woke up throwing punches. I told everyone I slipped on ice and hit my chin on the railing outside the school. I swore to Jam it didn’t hurt, but he knew I was lying. Waking him turned a fleeting bad dream into a moment that haunts him, probably still. I won’t do it again, even though it’s painful to watch him suffer through his imaginary horrors.
Jam’s right hand is resting just under his chin, fingers twitching. They’re nicked and scarred, strangely calloused; the nail on his index finger is black and blue. He really is working as a butcher, and I don’t understand why he’d do that to himself.
His eyelids flutter. He opens his eyes wide. “Holy shit, it’s weird to see you.”
“Holy shit, you’re weird,” I say.
He grins. Wipes crud from his eyes. Rubs his face like he’s making sure his cheeks are still there.
“If your dad works in the den,” I ask, “where’s your piano?”
“Basement,” Jam says, then, “don’t,” when he sees the shock on my face.
“How did you even get it down there?”
“Took a little of the house apart. A little of the piano,” he says like it’s nothing, like his 1924 Steinway baby grand is a creaky old bed frame or a leaning bookshelf.
I have always loved Jam’s piano. My great-grandfather Vili carved piano legs at the Steinway factory in Astoria. I never met him, and I don’t know if he carved the legs of Jam’s piano, but I liked believing that my friend played music on something my ancestor took part in making. If that could be true, it meant my connections in the world had roots I couldn’t see, that Jam and I were tethered to each other.
“I still play,” Jam says, so quickly that I know he’s trying to shut down my obvious questions. “I still play it, okay?”
“Okay,” I say, hugging myself into him. I try to picture Jam’s piano in the Olbrichs’ dank, spidery basement. It’s too sad to hold in my brain.
“I just don’t want to look at that piano when I don’t feel like looking at it.”
I nod, letting my chin nudge his ribs. Jam didn’t make me say more after I told him Aubrey was at the house. He just let me stop talking midsentence when my words tangled. I think this is why we got along so well when we were teenagers. We understand that the incomplete quest for the truth of another person isn’t as important as just letting them be.
Jam gets up to go to the bathroom and comes back with a yellow Post-it note stuck to his forehead. It reads Went to Barbara’s. Stay out of trouble. He grins and raises his eyebrows to jiggle the note loose. It falls to the floor, where I’m sure it will live for months among his divorced socks and unopened mail.
“Apparently my dad spent the night with his woman.” He heaves a dramatic sigh. “Sure wish I had time for trouble.”
“Work?”
“Yeah. But you can hang here. He doesn’t see patients on Tuesdays, so he’ll probably be gone all day antiquing with Barb in Connecticut.”
“Thanks.” I can’t tell if he’s joking about the antiques. I try to picture Mr. Olbrich and his walrus mustache searching dusty stores for the perfect pie safe. He always claimed to hate all the old furniture Jam’s mom brought home.
“You could shower,” Jam says, giving me a pointed look.
“That bad?”
He nods.
“I’m sorry! You should have said!”
“It’s fine. You just have that weird healing smell.”
“ Healing smell ?”
“It reminds me of my leg after I got my cast off in second grade.”
“This is… really bad for my self-esteem.” I try to laugh, feeling my face go hot.
“You’ll recover,” he says. “Or you won’t, and after everything you’ve been through, this is the moment that scars you for life.”
“Do you think that scar will make me have a healing smell all over again?”
“No.” Jam shakes his head. “You’re not going to heal from this. The scar on your psyche will smell like an open wound. Forever and ever.”
“Hello.” I pretend I’m introducing myself to an imaginary prissy person. “Don’t mind me smelling like pennies and fear. My best friend hurt my feelings in 2007 and I’ve been gushing blood ever since.”
Jam’s eyes flash at best friend and for a moment I think he’s put off by it, but he climbs back into bed and hugs me. “I don’t care what you smell like as long as you’re here.”
I kiss his cheek.
He sniffs and jumps out of bed and out of the room and doesn’t come back until he’s showered and dressed in clothes that smell like they came straight from the dryer. He brings me a leftover piece of the asparagus frittata he made us for dinner last night.
“I’ll see you later,” he says, and I feel a little like a wild animal he’s hoping to keep captive in his bedroom because he needs a buddy so badly.
“Keep all your fingers please,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I’ll see how I feel in the moment. Play it by ear.”
After Jam leaves, I take my pain pill and eat cold frittata and use the remote to scan through the CDs in his stereo. None of them are his music. There’s a noise band, an orchestra playing Rachmaninoff, someone plucking open cello strings and leaving long pauses between each note. I settle on Chet Baker Sings , but the aching hollows of Chet’s voice make me think of Jam’s nicked-up hands. I go back to the weird cello, trying to make sense of the disparate sounds.
I’ve always suspected that Jam gets more from music than most people—hears extra frequencies or patterns that make songs this far into the abstract appealing—a secret language he shares with similarly gifted musicians. Even when I don’t understand the music Jam chooses, I can tell there’s solidity to it. That noise band is more than chaos. This cello creates purposeful unease. Jam’s music—whether he played someone else’s song or his own composition—always accomplished exactly what he intended. When I listened to Jam play piano, I knew I was feeling the way he wanted me to feel, and ever since I left, I’ve longed to hand over control of my emotions to his music again.
He used to have shelves of his own recordings—titles scrawled in pencil on torn strips of masking tape, like if he took the time to label them carefully, he might lose all the good thoughts in his head. But the shelves are gone, piles of clothes and stacks of books in their place.
I raid his clothes. His boxers smell like the weed he stores in his underwear drawer. I pick jeans from the bottom of the stack because he probably likes those least, and grab a ratty undershirt. I find the faded blue flannel he’s had since high school hanging in the back of his closet, next to the garment bag that holds his recital tuxedo. The bow tie is wrapped around the neck of the hanger, outside the bag, grayed by a layer of dust, still wrinkled at the knot point.
While I was gone, every so often I’d go to the library and use the computers to search Jam’s name, certain I’d find news of an album release, a performance at the philharmonic, a European tour. But all I found was old local news: human interest pieces in the Patent Trader , like one about twelve-year-old Jam astounding audiences at a concert to celebrate the 1988 Somers Bicentennial, or how, at fifteen, he was selected to play in a regional recital at Alice Tully Hall. Four months later, he’s mentioned in the news story about search and rescue divers recovering Patty Olbrich’s body from the icy reservoir, and then in her obituary: She leaves behind her loving husband, Gene, and their son, Benjamin.
There’s a puff piece about where the Somers class of 1994 would be attending college. Jam was the only Tusker headed to Juilliard. He did some gigs for cash over the next few years, and a couple of them had event listings, but after that, there’s no record of him. I don’t know if Juilliard is where Jam stopped performing, or if it’s harder to make the paper when you’re not a child prodigy anymore. He’ll tell me if he wants to, and if he doesn’t, it’s not mine to know. I don’t like it when people ask me questions I don’t want to answer. I try not to do that to anyone else.
In the shower, I let the water free the bandage on my stomach and pull it off, eyes closed, trying not to think about what it means to have a cut that goes all the way through to your insides. I’m good at not seeing what I don’t want to, and so far, I’ve managed to avoid a clear look. I know there are some stitches that feel like fishing wire. I know the first few gauze pads I changed were soaked and disgusting when they probably shouldn’t have been. But this one is clean on the outside at least. That’s got to be a good sign. I bandage myself again and get dressed in Jam’s clothes. My hips are the size of his waist, so his jeans hang low. I roll the cuffs a few times.
I feel the need to check on Jam’s piano, like a sick pet or an elderly neighbor. The door to the basement is in the den, so I have to walk through Mr. Olbrich’s office, where the Steinway used to live. Now, there’s a knockoff Eames chair, cracked leather couch, and a dusty glass coffee table with a box of store-brand tissues.
Jam’s mom ran estate sales and found that Steinway for Jam after he started plunking out songs from the radio on his dad’s Casio keyboard at four years old. When Patty was a child, she wanted to be a ballerina, but her parents wouldn’t pay for lessons, so she poured everything into Jam’s first spark of interest. The Steinway had been kept in perfect condition, but the heirs to the estate didn’t understand its value, so they took Patty’s offer to run the sale in exchange for the piano. This seemed like a win at the time, but no one teaches us how to live with the vestiges of the people we lose. I always suspected that after Patty died, Mr. Olbrich felt saddled with the expenses and hassles of piano tuning, lessons, Jam’s commute to the city, and that custom-made tuxedo in the closet.
I wonder if Mr. Olbrich made Jam move the piano in an assertion of freedom or practicality, or if Jam is the one who insisted. The door to the basement is loose on the frame and the surrounding drywall is lumpy. It’s obvious that when Jam took the wall apart, he didn’t extend enough effort into putting it back together. At the bottom of the stairs, I flick the light switch. The fluorescent tubes have been replaced with blue and purple and green ones—the light from them dim and strange, reflecting in the glossy finish of Jam’s piano. But I can see water marks on those legs that Vili may have carved, and a gash in the side of the wheat-colored body. I open the keyboard cover, and the ivory is missing on two of the keys.
My throat cramps as I imagine Jam playing this gouged-up piano with his gouged-up fingers. I sit on the worn bench and plunk out Moonlight Sonata —the only song I remember—from back when Jam tried to teach me. He insisted that the only difference between him and someone who couldn’t play was the time he put into it. I understood how he truly believed that and also that it wasn’t true.
The left-hand part is all I remember, and it sounds wrong. I can’t tell how much of the problem is me and how much is the piano, but it forces me to understand in my soul that nothing will ever be the way it was. I cannot go back to that time in the den, with Jam wearing his new blue flannel shirt, teaching me how to play his pristine Steinway. It seems like a loss I should have already reckoned with, but I haven’t had enough markers for the passing of time. I play through the whole song anyway. Then I close the keyboard, turn off the colored lights, climb the stairs, and close the wobbly basement door behind me. Before I leave, I take a tissue from the box and wipe the dust from Mr. Olbrich’s coffee table.