Everything After(35)
Emily wasn’t particularly hungry after that exchange, so she turned off the boiling water and abandoned her pesto preparation. Instead of eating dinner, she poured herself a glass of wine and found her battered copy of Anne of Green Gables. She wanted something without any real romance. By chapter four, she was feeling better. By chapter five, she’d refilled her wineglass. And again at chapter ten. Once more at chapter fifteen. By chapter seventeen, she was having trouble focusing on the words.
If Ezra were home, she would curl up against him on the couch. If he were home, she wouldn’t have had nearly an entire bottle of wine all on her own. If he were home, she would’ve eaten dinner. She looked at her list again. Even without Ezra there, she should eat dinner. She could eat dinner.
Emily got up and went into the kitchen. She pulled out the end of a baguette from the bread box and some cheese from the refrigerator and ate them both while looking into the bonus room. It was still a mess. She should clean it out, since she was home alone and it was barely eight p.m. What even was in there?
She hated the quiet of the apartment, so by force of habit she asked Alexa to play some jazz but then realized that was what Ezra liked best, not her, so she switched it to pop as she walked into the tiny, cluttered room. This was a good project for the night. She could feel accomplished, get something done.
Emily piled the items they’d gotten on their most recent trip to Costco in one corner, and already it looked neater. Then she found boxes of Ezra’s medical journals and her notebooks from her PsyD program and separated them into their own piles. She’d get some pretty boxes for them, something she could stack in the living room as an end table or something. There were some winter clothes in a big garbage bag, which Emily brought to the front door to donate to Goodwill the next day. She’d been meaning to do that for the last eight months, but somehow when things got put in that room, they stayed there, in limbo. It was basically purgatory, where objects waited for her or Ezra to send them to their proper place.
Emily checked her phone. Ezra hadn’t written her back.
There was a futon in the room that they’d planned to use when guests slept over, but the room had gotten so crapped up that no one had ever slept there. When Ari or her boys stayed the night, they pulled out the couch in the living room instead. Emily knelt down and looked under the futon. She found two wooden paddles and a ball that they’d used to play matkot at the beach over the summer. A Frisbee was there, too, and a croquet set that someone had given them for their wedding, possibly anticipating a move to the suburbs that hadn’t yet happened and that Emily hoped never would. There was a long black duffel bag under there, too. Emily tugged on it, immediately realizing what it was: her keyboard. In spite of everything, she’d never been able to get rid of it. When the movers brought it in, she just pointed them to the spot under the futon. Ezra hadn’t even seen it.
Emily remembered how it had felt to play at the fund-raiser at the Gregory Hotel—as if something wound tight inside her had loosened, as if she were finally doing the thing her body did best. She took a deep breath and unzipped the black case.
As she looked at the keyboard, memories came rushing back to her: practicing in her dorm room with Rob, performing with him on stage, writing the harmonies to his melodies late into the night. That keyboard had become an extension of who she was back then. It was part of her. But now it wasn’t. She should give it away. Someone in their building would probably be thrilled to find it with a Take me! I’m free! sign in the laundry room. It might become part of them; it might help them create memories like hers.
She liked that idea.
But maybe she should play it one last time. Emily picked it up out of its case and brought it into the living room, where she propped it up on the dining table. Then she went back for the cords and plugged them all in—the power cord, the damper pedal. She didn’t have her amp anymore. There was a pair of headphones she could’ve plugged in, but she decided against it. Instead, she told Alexa to stop playing Ed Sheeran.
The apartment went silent.
Emily was holding her breath when she flicked the keyboard on, worried all at once that it wouldn’t work. But the green light started to glow, and Emily pressed down on middle C. The keyboard was top of the line, with perfectly weighted keys and a beautiful, resonant sound. She ran her fingers up it in a scale, as if she had to wake it up, get the keyboard to clear its throat before she could really start playing.
She tried a few chords. Then found some books to adjust the height of the keyboard. And she began to play. First it was just some arpeggios. Then she fingered the melody of the Ed Sheeran song she’d just turned off. Everyone but Rob had always been impressed by how easily Emily could hear a melody and then play it back afterward. Rob hadn’t been impressed because he could do it, too. “I love that you’re a member of the club,” he’d said, when she’d played a new melody he’d just sung, soon after he’d bought her the keyboard in college.
From Ed Sheeran, she started playing their old medley, the finale of her and Rob’s shows, the pièce de résistance, a review in their college paper had called it after going to one of their performances. Emily hadn’t thought about that review in years. Had locked it away with the rest of her memories. But now, like the music, which had been living inside her, waiting to be reawakened, it came back. Rob Barnes and Emily Solomon play music together like it’s what they were born to do.