Chapter 36
After Evan leaves for work, Annie tries to sleep.
She rolls around and tucks and retucks and flips the pillow to the cool side. Forcing her eyes closed, she does one of those
body scans that’s supposed to help one fall asleep. Her skin is buzzing. She swears her cells themselves are vibrating.
To get up, get dressed, and get coffee is her only choice. Today is the last Tuesday of the month, when the Vancouver Symphony
plays at 10:00 a.m. for elementary schools. She and Evan have season tickets and know the ushers, who let Annie sneak in at
the back, behind the fourth graders. The kids are making paper airplanes out of their brown bag lunches.
It’s another universe inside the Orpheum Theatre: ornate plaster carvings and gold leaf accents, a shimmery chandelier. It
must have five hundred light bulbs. Annie attempts to count them while she waits for the music to start. The Greek musician
Orpheus, painted across the vaulted oval ceiling, wandered the earth playing his mournful songs, music so poignant that, legend
has it, it attracted wild animals and even caused trees to weep.
Annie rakes her fingers over the burgundy seats and makes patterns in the velvet under her thighs.
The orchestra warms up. The children begin to quiet, drawn in by a rumbling tuba, by the flutes calibrating to one another.
The lights dim. Annie’s feet relax against the soles of her shoes.
Her eyelids close, and all of a sudden she remembers her nose and that she has one; that she has a breathing apparatus in her chest. Her own current scent is industrial fabric softener from her scrubs mixed with the fact she rode her bike here and forgot to put on deodorant.
A girl with strawberry-blond hair and wearing a puffy-sleeved blouse is sitting in front of her.
While the percussion section tests the cymbals, she turns around and offers Annie a red Twizzler.
“It’s The Little Mermaid today, for kids,” she says. “Why are you here?”
The truth: She wants to forget the rescue, not strain toward Walker’s fleeting sound and how much she misses him, not question
her existence here in Vancouver.
“Because I like the instruments,” Annie says.
“It’s not exactly The Little Mermaid . . . they’re playing a few songs from it. Later on.” She points to the AirPods. “Why are you wearing those?”
“I have trouble with my hearing.”
“You can’t hear?”
“I hear too much.”
The girl nods as if this makes sense. Then she points to the scrubs. “Are you a nurse?”
“I’m a doctor.”
She hands Annie another Twizzler. “Do you think mermaids are real?”
Annie hasn’t eaten the first one yet, but takes the second one. “I’m not sure,” she says. “But it would be fun if they were.”
The little girl points to the far left side of the orchestra pit. “That’s my mom up there with the ocean drum. It has lapis
lazuli inside it.”
The woman in question has matching strawberry-blond hair, blunt-cut bangs, and long waves down her back. Pink lipstick, visible
even from here, with a knee-length black dress. She holds a two-foot-wide ocean drum in her hands. It makes swooshy sounds
as she tilts it forward and back.
Annie removes her AirPods to listen. “She looks like a mermaid.”
The little girl leans closer and whispers: “I think she is one. She let me sneak in the Twizzlers and wear my Iron Man T-shirt
under my blouse.”
“She probably is a mermaid, then.”
The conductor stands at the podium. The room falls silent as the strings begin. The girl sits back down in her seat. The Twizzler
she gave her tastes medicinal. Annie swallows while the sorrowful violin tingles the corners of her elbows. A gentle pressure
floods her forearms when the viola adds its warm notes. The cello comes from beneath.
Her mother loved orchestras.
They never attended a concert, of course, but on their migrations south, Mara tracked the classical radio stations down the
coast. Within fifty miles of LA, she’d finally be able to tune into KUSC 91.5 FM—-her favourite—-and listen to the LA Philharmonic
at full volume. During the rumbly bass notes, her mom would lie on the deck and close her eyes.
Is it genetic, this love of music? The instruments take all the noise and find order with it. She wishes her mom was still
here so Annie could ask if that’s what it did for her, too. Her vision blurs with tears.
Oboes begin, adding their distinct low timbres to the xylophone chimes and glockenspiel twinkles. Any stress remaining from
Annie’s late ER shift melts away. She’s cleansed by the salt water now coming from her eyes.
The children are silent, mesmerized, inside the kingdom of sound.
And so is Annie.