Everything You Are(55)

The way he says it, she thinks maybe he does know something about what she’s going through. Like maybe he’s had his own grief and lived to tell about it. But her problem is more than grief.

“Grief is a strange place, Allie. Everything is upside down. Don’t make any permanent decisions now.”

The hallway is empty. He’s so understanding, the closest adult to her, really, outside of her mother. Maybe she’ll tell him. Maybe it would help if somebody knew.

“How did the audition go?” he asks, as if reading her mind. “You’ll need to stay in practice to be at your best when university starts in the fall. If it would help, we could set up some structured time to play together to help you ease back in.” He notices, three steps too late, that she’s stopped walking and comes back to her.

“What is it? Did the audition go badly? Nerves?”

She opens her mouth to tell him, all of it, but then the buzzer signals the end of class. She jumps half out of her skin. Doors slam open, and kids fill up the hall as if summoned by magic.

“Come by my office.” Mr. Collins raises his voice above the chaos. “We’ll talk. We can get you another audition. Or I’ll help you apply somewhere else, if you’d rather.”

“Later,” Allie lies, taking cover in the crowd.

Promise or no promise, she is not going to calculus or any other classes. She won’t go and talk to Mr. Collins, either, or set up an audition anywhere else. Nobody tries to stop her as she walks out the front doors and keeps going until she is down the street and well away. Dazed, disoriented, she tries to remember where she parked the car, before memory comes rushing in.

Her father. Making her come to school, taking her keys, and leaving her blowing in the wind again, just like when she was a kid, just like the morning of the audition.

That was supposed to be the best day ever, the one that set her free from her mother’s insistence on med school. The one where she embarked on a life of music.

The one that reconnected her with her father.

She’d schemed for years to get that audition at the University of Washington while keeping her intentions to herself. Mom’s plan was for Allie to be a doctor, and she’d gone along with the admission process to premed, keeping her dreams secret.

Mom would have listened if she’d had some valid alternative to medical school—teaching, accounting, science, whatever, but Mom had a block about music. She tolerated Allie’s playing in the orchestra, but no way was she going to countenance a waste of time and brainpower on a music degree.

Once Allie had her acceptance to UW, though, it was easy to request an audition into the music school and to keep it a secret from her mother. When and if she was accepted, then she’d have ammunition for that battle. Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Mr. Collins and Mr. Blair, the private teacher she’d worked with since sixth grade, had both helped her prepare for the audition. Why she’d ever been allowed to work with Mr. Blair in the first place was always a bit of a mystery, because Mom hated music, always had as far back as Allie could remember, unless it was hymns in church.

This is lesson day, she realizes with a keening note of loss that takes her back to that very first lesson on that very first day.

A terrible day. For some reason Allie can’t understand, the girls in her class at school have turned on her. There have been snide comments and cold shoulders, rolled eyes and colder laughter all day long.

And when Mom shows up to pick them up after school, both Allie and Trey can tell at once that something is wrong.

“Uh-oh,” Trey says before the car rolls to a stop. “It’s one of those days.”

First sign, Mom’s got her hair twisted up into a bun. Her lipstick is red. She sits staring straight ahead, hands on the steering wheel at precisely ten and two.

“You get shotgun,” Allie shouts, racing for the car. The last thing she needs is to be stuck in the front seat with Mom when she’s in a mood.

She skids to a halt when she reaches the car, staring through the window in confusion.

The back seat is full of cello.

Dad’s cello. Or, at least, Dad’s cello case. When he left, it vanished with him and she hasn’t seen it since. Her heart gets stuck in her throat, and the rest of her body goes numb. A thread of Bach finds its way through the closed window and onto the sidewalk, wraps around her heart, and tugs.

Trey is already in place in the front seat, smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

“Get in, already,” her mom says. “Some people might have all day, I do not.”

Allie squeezes into the back seat beside the cello case. She can’t draw a proper breath, maybe because the cello is crowding her, but mostly because she’s caught between hope and fear.

She hasn’t seen the cello since Dad left, has always thought he took it with him. Did he come home? Or has the cello been at the house all along? But if that’s true, then why is it in the car now? Maybe Mom is going to sell it.

Allie remembers being so small she could stand tucked between Dad’s legs and the cello, dwarfed by its magnificence. Remembers the hum running through the wood and continuing on into her body.

“Feel that, little bird?” he’d asked. “That’s as close to magic as we get in this lifetime.”

Allie touches the case. Lightly, questing, feeling the impossible vibrations. Nobody is playing. The cello is in its case, and still the music circles up and around her.