Chapter 1 Marigold #2
Stockholm is an annual event, but I have no guarantee that I will be able to enter again next year, or any other year. I steal a glance down at my hands as Cessy and I head for our next class, trying to diagnose the slight tremor that shudders down my fingers.
I have to win this competition. I have to prove, once and for all, that I have what it takes.
Because in five years, maybe ten, I won’t be playing piano anymore.
Because my brain is a ticking time bomb, and the fuse is running out.
Two Months Ago
“Goldie,” my father said from the doorway. “It’s time for dinner.”
I finished the measure, then twisted around on the piano bench to face him.
My father had lost weight since my mother died; his white starched dress shirt, once tailored to perfection, hung loose from his bony shoulders.
His cheekbones had sharpened to blades. Sometimes I wondered, if I encountered him somewhere I didn’t expect—if I passed by him in the parking lot of the Walmart in Secaucus, or sitting in the corner booth at one of those dollar-slice pizza joints—would I even recognize him?
“Okay,” I said. “Let me finish the piece.”
Other parents might have shaken their heads and said Right now or It’s getting cold.
But my father was a principal violinist. He understood the importance of practice.
Four hours a day, even during the summer, until my fingertips had calluses and my wrists needed splints to stabilize my carpal tunnel.
I had just gotten through the qualifying round for the Stockholm competition.
It still seemed like some giant scam, the idea that I would actually be in Sweden later this year performing on the world stage.
I watched my fingers skim the notes on the keyboard as I played and tried to imagine myself playing a perfect concerto: every note precise, every pause hanging perfectly in midair.
I dared let myself imagine it, because I didn’t believe in jinxes. Playing down my hopes wouldn’t make a future failure hurt any less.
Besides: The universe owed me this, after everything.
Just one perfect performance.
I finished the piece.
“Goldie,” my father called again, before I could start anything new, and I sighed and pushed the bench back as I stood.
Dad was already sitting at the table when I made it to the dining room, our food already plated.
“Thanks, Tiff,” I said, and Tiff grinned back at me.
She had started working here during my mother’s illness, one of many problems my father had thrown money at, like having an in-home chef would save Mom’s life.
And then she just…never left. I’m not sure Dad could let her go, at that point.
It would just be another of a thousand goodbyes.
Tonight was garlic-roasted chicken with potatoes and broccoli rabe.
Comfort food—not the antioxidant smoothies and adaptogenic mushrooms she used to make while my mother was still alive.
Every meal back then had been a careful algorithm of micronutrients: magnesium and choline and omega-3s.
Anything the Internet said was a secret cure for lupus nephritis.
Anything to buy her one more year, one more month, one more day.
But Miriam Gensler had died at the age of forty-three, her body slowly suffocating itself. We’d buried her with the flute she hadn’t been able to play in over a year, her arthritis-swollen hands finally gone still against its silver.
“Do you need anything else for school?” Dad asked as he cut into his chicken. “New scores? Notebooks? More clothes?”
“I’m okay, thanks.”
“Are you sure? We can go to Bergdorf’s tomorrow. Maybe a new coat?”
He’d been trying to bribe me ever since Mom got sick. Like he was trying to prove we just needed each other—that the two of us would be enough.
I heard him crying sometimes late at night, when he thought I’d gone to sleep.
It had been two and a half years since Mom died, and I still couldn’t bring myself to leave him alone over school breaks.
Instead of getting my own apartment, like I’d planned to do as a senior, I would be staying in the dorms again—an easy excuse to need to go home. To make sure he was okay.
“No, really. I’m good. Can we just get lunch instead?”
The relief on his face was palpable. In two months, I’d be back at Parker—which, although just a short trip away on the subway, could feel like the other end of the earth when you were used to circling each other in tight spaces, holding fast to the same lifeline.
“Great,” he said. “Great. I just have to be at rehearsal by six.”
“More than achievable. Can I come?”
“Always.”
The New York Philharmonic felt like a second home.
Everyone there knew me from my parents, but I ran into them everywhere.
They had wandered the halls of Juilliard when I was a high schooler taking lessons at the Pre-College program there.
They taught at Parker. They were participating in half the same music competitions that I was.
For all the stories I’d heard from my dad about vicious competition for first, second, third chair—up to and including instrument damage—when I was present, it was like we were family.
My phone rang from my pocket. I froze, all the breath abruptly gone from my lungs.
I had set a specific ringtone for this contact.
If—when—I got a call, it would make a sound like cymbals clashing.
I’d been waiting to hear that sound for weeks, long enough that the anticipation had mostly worn off.
But right here, now, at this table, the sound of those cymbals rang loud in the stilled air.
It was the neurologist.
“What is it?” my dad asked, oblivious. “You look like you’re about to be sick.”
I felt like I was about to be sick. Tiff’s chicken was a sudden weight in my stomach, pulling me heavier against the seat.
“I’ve gotta take this. Sorry. Just. Hold on.”
In the past year, I had done an unholy amount of Internet research on all the things that could be wrong with me.
It had started with fatigue. Not the normal kind of tired you get when you spend too many hours in the practice room for your own good—but the kind that made you feel like you were moving underwater, hardly able to keep your eyes open even in the middle of a conversation.
Then there was the clumsiness, which at first I thought was me being an embarrassing loser—but it was weird that I would trip over nothing while walking down the street, or practically fall flat on my face when I got out of bed in the morning, or suddenly find myself unable to use the treadmill at the gym because I’d just…
fall off it. It was weird that I would drop not one wineglass, but three in the same night.
And it was weird the morning I woke up blind in one eye—as if a black curtain had fallen shut and taken the entire left side of my world with it.
I’d had blurry vision for a few days before that, but I’d chalked it up to New York summer and allergies.
The eye thing was what made me finally go to the doctor, who took a look in there with his fancy machines and diagnosed me with optic neuritis. He gave me meds to make it go away, but he also gave me a referral to neurology.
Cue the Google spiral.
Brain tumor. Every other conceivable kind of tumor, too. Aneurysm. Multiple sclerosis. Viral encephalitis. Lupus, like my mother. According to WebMD, I was basically dying.
The neurologist had run a bunch of tests, and he’d had me get an MRI of my brain and spinal cord, but he’d been real cagey about what he thought the problem was.
At one point he’d even told me it could just be migraines, which had felt a little bit insulting, because I might not be a doctor, but I was pretty sure migraines usually involved an actual headache.
And presumably migraines didn’t set your optic nerve on fire.
I told him that my mother had lupus. Had died of lupus. Could this be lupus?
Let’s just see what your MRI says first, he’d told me.
And now, I guess, was the moment of truth.
I fled the room and shut myself away in the parlor. My hand was already sweaty as I punched the screen to answer the call.
“Hi,” I said.
“Is this Marigold Gensler?” Yes, yes it was.
The doctor had me confirm my date of birth and zip code.
I knew this was standard protocol, some kind of HIPAA thing, but the longer he made me talk about nonsense, the sicker I felt.
I tried to divine the news from his tone of voice.
Was his cadence slow because he was putting off telling me the cold truth?
Or was it because he wasn’t in a rush to get it all over with?
“So, I’ve just had a chance to look at your MRI images and talk with the radiologist”—no shit—“and…I’m sorry to tell you, but what we are seeing on your scans is consistent with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.”
He kept talking, but I didn’t hear any of it. My brain had shut off, and I was falling into a black ocean, nothing but the deafening loudness of too-deep water filling my ears. An impossible pressure crushed in from all sides. I couldn’t breathe.
The only thing I could process, really, was that he kept apologizing. As if he had done something wrong, like he had personally reached into my body and manipulated my immune system and told it to ruin my life.
I wanted to hang up on him. I really did.
But I made myself stay on the line and make hollow comments about how I understood, thank you, and yes, the fifteenth would work for me to come in for a follow-up appointment, great, have a good evening, okay. Goodbye.
When I hung up, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I guessed I had to tell my dad at some point. But the idea of walking back in there and devastating one of our last family dinners before I went back to school made me want to crawl into the most remote cave I could find.
I couldn’t just go up and hide in bed, though. That would be as good as a confession.
I sat down on the sofa and stayed there for a while. Maybe, I thought, if I stayed here long enough, he would call me back. He could have confused my chart with someone else’s. A Mary, not a Marigold. A Gershwin, not a Gensler.
But nope. My stupid name is too stupid. There’s only one Marigold at any clinic, anywhere.
Eventually, though, I had to go back.
I had to face my father. The man who had lost his wife to an autoimmune disease that ravaged her body and happiness until her kidneys finally gave up and took her away from us forever. The man who would now get to watch his daughter’s body fall to pieces, too.
I had to tell him the truth.