Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Diana
February 2019
I t was surreal to walk the grand halls of Juilliard. How often had Diana dreamed of being here with Madeline? How often had she prayed that the professors and grand musicians would speak Madeline’s name with a sense of hope and promise—a sense that she was the next best thing for the classical world? Now, Madeline was in the practice room, reviewing her scales, practicing the pieces she’d memorized and played over thousands of hours. Diana decided to explore a little, to pretend as though Diana herself was a young woman with her entire life ahead of her; as though Diana herself had been allowed to continue to play the piano, to practice for hours and hours and become the world-renowned pianist Diana Nowak. (Of course, in this pretend version of her life, she would have taken her mother’s last name after her father left for the United States without her.) How different everything would have been! Diana never would have had to work as a house cleaner.
She never would have had to pour beers in a bar. Instead, her life would have involved velvet dresses and grand concert halls and long, fancy white gloves. Maybe she would have met a handsome guy, another performer, and maybe they would have gotten married and had a family of equally successful and good-looking performers. In this pretend version of her life, Diana imagined that her mother, Barbara, came over for dinner all the time, that she said, I’m so proud of you, Diana . Look at the life you built for yourself. She imagined that she and Barbara stayed up late, talking over glasses of wine about everything from music to fashion to travel to politics. She imagined that they didn’t agree about everything but respected one another’s opinions. Diana’s heart felt cracked.
Outside, snow fell gently on the Juilliard campus. Diana got in her car and turned up the heat, rubbing her hands together and watching as real Juilliard students hurried from one side of campus to the other. Some moved like ballerinas, graceful and lithe, while others lugged big instruments and furrowed their brows. How often would Diana be able to come out to visit Madeline? She imagined she’d come frequently during the first year, but that Madeline would be too busy to see her as often in the ones after that. Where did that leave Diana’s life? What would she do when she got back to Michigan? Should she move? The idea had never occurred to her till now. Nothing was rooting her in Michigan.
Finally, she could live for herself and only for herself. But Diana had never done that before. As a child, she’d lived for her mother, and after they’d left Poland, she’d lived for her father. Was it possible that she didn’t really know who she was?
Suddenly, Diana’s cell phone rang. The sound startled her so much that she jumped in her car seat. Ruffling through her purse, she pulled out the cell to see a number she didn’t recognize. She ignored it and prepared to leave the parking lot. But when the same number called a second later, she groaned and answered it. “Hello?”
A Polish voice came through the speaker. In a language she never spoke, a man said, “Today is the big day. Barbara wanted to pass on her congratulations to you and your daughter for this remarkable achievement.”
Diana’s blood ran cold. It was Aleksander, that horrible man who, when Madeline was thirteen, had wanted to take Madeline away from her, to “provide for her” in ways Barbara didn’t think Diana was capable of.
“I thought I made myself clear,” Diana said. “I don’t want to hear from you. I don’t want to know you.”
Aleksander pretended not to hear her. “After Madeline proceeds further in the world of classical music, it would be silly to pretend that she and Barbara are not related. It will be plain as day to anyone who sees Madeline or listens to her play. Their techniques are remarkably similar, which is quite bizarre, don’t you agree? They’ve spent Madeline’s entire life apart, and still, she’s found her way back to her grandmother.”
Diana’s breathing was fast and strange. “Madeline is her own person; she’s her own musician. She has nothing to do with Barbara.”
Diana hated calling her mother by her first name. But she needed to remind herself and Aleksander of the incredible distance between them. She needed to remember that Barbara had never come for Diana when it was so clear that she could have. She didn’t want to be my mother anymore. I built a new life for myself.
“It won’t be up to you what Madeline does or what Madeline knows,” Aleksander said. “Madeline will soon be a major force in the world, just as Barbara was. Not only that, but Madeline will also become an adult. She will be able to make her own decisions and move throughout the world at will. Barbara wanted me to explain this to you as a courtesy and nothing more. She suggests that if she and Madeline strike up a friendship, professional or otherwise, there’s no reason that you cannot join them for various dinners and travels through Europe. Barbara, too, has a concert coming up in Manhattan in just a few months. She’d like to invite both of you.”
Diana felt as though she was going to throw up. Everything was happening too quickly. Suddenly, she imagined herself back in the throng of her mother’s fame, waiting in the wings as Barbara introduced Madeline to all the big players of Manhattan’s classical music scene. The very best and brightest in her class at Juilliard, her mother would say proudly, with that lilting Polish accent. Diana still had a Polish accent, too, but hers gave her away as poor, whereas her mother’s made her seem mystical and regal.
Would Barbara bother to introduce Diana as her daughter? Or would Diana be skipped over again and again as a near-constant reminder that she was never good enough for her mother?
Diana’s eyes were filled with tears. She cranked the engine and left campus. She had a little while before Madeline’s performance, time to kill before she had to return to Madeline’s practice room for their pre-audition ritual. It was something Diana had come up with before a particularly nerve-wracking event in Seattle: a song and hand-clap game that they sped up faster and faster until they made themselves dizzy. Diana was surprised that Madeline still wanted to do the ritual, especially here at Juilliard, where her professional career was about to kick off. But it touched Diana’s heart to know that her daughter still needed her, for now. She knew it wouldn’t always be so.
What Diana didn’t know was this:
As she drove around campus, and as the snow lined the streets, and as her heart filled to the brim with love for her daughter, a series of horrific events were taking place, events that would set the stage for the end of her life.
What she didn’t know was that she would never make it back to Juilliard campus to see her daughter play for her audition. She wouldn’t even make it back for the ritual, which would plant a seed of doubt in Madeline’s mind, one that she would carry out onto that stage.
Diana couldn’t have known that, when she was driving through an intersection, using the green light that was rightly hers, a senior at Juilliard—a flute player who hadn’t slept in two nights because she’d been struggling and practicing to please a teacher who had threatened to kick her out of university—would run a red light and smash her mother’s Prius into Diana’s rental car. When it happened, the flute player’s Prius and Diana’s rental would fly off the road, and Diana would hit a telephone pole and immediately black out. The flute player would break her arm and sit as waves of panic crashed over her and the sirens screamed and screamed. Diana would enter a coma from which she would never wake up. She would die two weeks later, with Madeline at her side.
* * *
After Madeline got on stage at Juilliard to perform her perfectly practiced pieces, pieces that were basically written inside her at this point, a feeling of dread crept into her stomach. There were five judges, waiting expectantly at the table twenty feet away from the piano, and Mrs. Everett was sitting in the back row, her hands clasped and her chin raised. But Madeline couldn’t see her mother anywhere. Madeline’s ears rang with sudden certainty: something had happened, something that had kept her mother from being here today. She heard Diana’s voice in her head, saying, No matter what, you have to give them a good show. You’ve practiced well. You’re on top of your game. Show them what you’re made of. But when Madeline said hello, her voice shook, and when she announced what she was going to play to the Juilliard professors, she hardly recognized herself. She sat down at the piano bench and put her fingers on keys that seemed foreign and too slippery. When had she ever felt so off her game at the piano? She began to play, and at first, she thought it would be all right. But she couldn’t stop indulging the nagging and horrible sensation that something was very wrong. Something had happened that couldn’t be taken back. She hated it.
The first mistake came three minutes into the piece. It was a wrong note, and it sent everything off-kilter. Madeline couldn’t rebound, and her anxiety took all the perfection and emotionality out of the rest of it. Worse than that, she completely forgot a major section of the Rachmaninoff and instead skipped to a section later toward the end. There was no going back now. There was no forgetting that right here, right now was the biggest moment of her career—and she was failing. What would her mother say?
When Madeline finished, she got up and ran off stage. Panic made her heart pound. Out in the hall, she turned to look for Mrs. Everett, and when Mrs. Everett followed her out, she looked so stricken and angry that she couldn’t speak. She glared at Madeline, as though Madeline had messed up on purpose.
All Madeline could say was, “Where is my mom?”
Mrs. Everett snapped her hands on her thighs and gaped at her.
“Do you know where she is?” Madeline demanded.
Several more musicians flitted past, eyeing Madeline nervously. Maybe news had already traveled through Juilliard, news of the “best pianist” dropping in the ranks all the way to the “worst.”
“Answer me!” Madeline cried. “Do you know where she is?”
Mrs. Everett finally croaked, “What is wrong with you?”
Madeline couldn’t deal with this. She turned on her heel and ran straight into the swirling snow, all the way to the parking lot where she knew her mother was allowed to park. But her mother’s car wasn’t in the lot. It was freezing, and Madeline was wearing only a black dress with a pair of tights. Mrs. Everett crept outside and pulled her coat on and watched her from the sidewalk across the road. Abstractly, Madeline realized that to her piano teacher, it probably looked as though Madeline was having a psychotic break. Maybe she was. But where was her mother?
It wasn’t for another fifteen minutes of shivering and calling out for her mother that Mrs. Everett got up the nerve to gather Madeline’s things and put her in her car. Mrs. Everett was so furious that she couldn’t speak directly to her. Still, she made several calls to Diana, searching for her, until finally, someone at the hospital answered her and informed Mrs. Everett of Diana’s whereabouts. When Mrs. Everett learned the news, she closed her eyes and said, “There’s been an accident.”
She turned her keys and drove directly to the hospital as Madeline wept and said, “I knew it. I knew it. I knew it,” over and over again.
Madeline tore out of Mrs. Everett’s car and ran into the hospital without waiting for her teacher. The woman at the front desk told her she had to sit down, that the doctor was seeing her mother now, but that they’d have news soon. Madeline paced the white waiting room, sure that soon, her mother would emerge from the back of the hospital and say, “That was weird,” and ask Madeline about her audition. What would she say? How would she explain herself? She remembered that she hadn’t bothered to apply for any other music schools and now realized how insane that was. But she’d never bombed an audition! Never in her life.
Mrs. Everett waited in a little chair and alternated staring out the window and looking down at her phone. Annoyance echoed off her face. Madeline was Mrs. Everett’s “career,” her “product,” and it was as though that product had spontaneously stopped working the minute Mrs. Everett needed to show it off. But Madeline couldn’t care.
When Madeline was finally allowed to see her mother, she crept to Diana’s bed, sat down, and took one of her small, limp hands with both of hers. Her mother looked far tinier than Madeline remembered. It was hard to imagine that this was the same woman who’d carried her from place to place as a baby, setting her up wherever she cleaned houses. It was hard to imagine that this was the powerhouse woman who’d given Madeline everything.
When Mrs. Everett came into the hospital room to see her, she said under her breath, “Oh, for goodness’ sake.”
Madeline stared at Mrs. Everett with anger in her heart. She was annoyed. She didn’t care. This felt especially horrific because Madeline was suddenly sure that Mrs. Everett was one of the few people on the planet that Diana counted as a friend.
Later that night, Mrs. Everett tried desperately to get Madeline to return to the hotel. But Madeline wouldn’t leave her mother’s side. For three nights, she slept up at the hospital, hardly eating a thing. She felt sure that the minute she left her mother, she would wake up and not know what to do, or where she was, or how she got there.
The nurses were not thrilled with her, especially when they learned that she was still a minor. They told her they needed to call child services, so Madeline called Mrs. Everett and asked her to tell them that she was “watching” Madeline, for now. Madeline sounded so frantic and upset on the phone that Mrs. Everett finally agreed.
“But I want to fly back to Michigan soon,” Mrs. Everett said. “I can’t afford to stay out here for much longer.”
It was then she told Madeline that she’d collected all of Madeline and Diana’s things from their hotel room and put them in her car. This boggled Madeline’s mind. Things? Suitcases? She couldn’t remember anything of her former life, her time before the hospital, before the bright white walls that would drive anyone insane.
Madeline heard herself say, “I’m going to move out here to be close to her.”
“But Madeline, be reasonable. You don’t have money,” Mrs. Everett said.
“I’ll get a job. I’ll figure something out,” Madeline said.
Mrs. Everett sighed. “Madeline, it was really just one audition. You’re a brilliant pianist. I’m sure we could find you another school to audition for. There are countless records of your wonderful playing. Someone will take you. You can still have a future.”
But by that time, Madeline hadn’t practiced the piano in days, which felt like an entire lifetime. Her fingers were her own again. Her time belonged to her, rather than to that big, alien beast that had stolen so much of her life.
“I don’t want to play the piano,” Madeline said. “I quit.”
But it was that very night that Diana passed away. Madeline held her hand and watched the monitor fade out. When it happened, the nurses removed the tubes and told Madeline she could have as much time as she wanted with her mother before they proceeded to “the next step.” But Madeline didn’t understand what that meant and didn’t think to ask before the nurses sped off to help someone else. Madeline was too exhausted to cry. She sat there and internally begged her mother to wake up, to get up and yell at her about how she hadn’t practiced the piano in days and days. After all we’ve been through? She imagined her saying, After all that, you’re just going to quit?
Madeline slept-walked through the next era of her life. Because they didn’t have the money for a proper burial, she opted for the cheapest way forward and was given a small box of her mother’s ashes. With the information in her mother’s purse, she was able to put her name on her mother’s bank account and yank together some semblance of a life—a life that felt so small and hollow that it didn’t excite her at all. When it continued to snow deep into March and then at the beginning of April, she went out onto the porch of the little rental she had not far from Juilliard, raised her chin to the sky, and thought, No, I can’t do the cold anymore . She flew to Los Angeles three days later and tried to create a life for herself. But nothing fit her. Nothing was right—until Greta walked into her life and saw something magical in her and invited her to The Copperfield House. It was then that her life could truly begin again.