The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(44)

Nora




A day passed, then another. I tried to go back to the routine of ordinary life, but I was unprepared for the brutality with which it greeted me. When I checked my email, I found two rejections, one from the Pacific Music Festival and the other from Banff. The PMF note was boilerplate, but the judges at Banff had written that my composition was “too cerebral” and “didn’t quite fit our aesthetic.” Every time I tried to parse what this meant, I came up with nothing. I had no idea what the judges were trying to say. What purpose did such criticism serve? I couldn’t do anything with it.

For several weeks before my father’s death, I had been working on a series of jazz pieces inspired by my first trip to Morocco, when my parents had taken my sister and me to meet their relatives. My great-grandmother was still alive at the time, and we had taken the train from Casablanca to Marrakesh to visit her. We arrived at dusk and, walking through the throngs of food vendors and snake charmers and fortune-tellers on the Jamaat el-Fna, we’d stopped to watch a troupe of acrobats performing. Some of them were teens roughly my age, but others were much younger. All were barefoot and moved with an agility I had never witnessed before. They jumped and cartwheeled and backflipped until, rolling in twos and threes, they landed in a perfect pyramid. We were jostled by the crowd, and my parents and sister moved on, heading toward the north side of the square, but I stayed where I was, transfixed by the pattern of the acrobats’ movements. Each boy performed alone, yet in community with the others. It was that moment I was trying to capture in music, years later.

The rejection from Banff wasn’t unusual and, in any case, it was for a piece that was still under consideration by several other festivals, but it had found me in a state of such intense grief that it shattered me. All of my insecurities seeped out at once. I hadn’t trained at a conservatory, hadn’t apprenticed with a renowned soloist, hadn’t attracted the attention of a good mentor, hadn’t played gigs at the Fillmore or the Blue Note. In the jazz bands or chamber orchestras I’d performed with over the years, I was often the only woman, the odd one out. And I liked to write in different traditions, jazz and classical, which meant that my place in the music world was not quite settled. Perhaps it would never be.

That evening, alone in the cabin, I opened Sibelius on my laptop, and it was as if I were looking at someone else’s notations. I couldn’t get the judges’ words out of my head. My work was too cerebral. Too out there. Too something or other. I don’t know how long I sat on that old sofa, an hour or two or three, but the composition stopped exciting me or inspiring me or even making any sense to me. Maybe I needed to get rid of it. Erase it and start over. My cursor was poised over the Delete button when I heard a car pull up the driveway. A moment later, there was a knock at the door.

The sun was setting, and in its orange glow Jeremy’s eyes looked green rather than blue. He was in hiking pants and boots, and he jingled his keys nervously. “I was on my way to Hidden Valley,” he said, “and I wondered if you wanted to come.”

“Now? It’s past seven.”

“The heat’s finally breaking. And there’s a full moon tonight.”

The sky was the color of a ripe apricot. Soon it would be night, the cabin would be cast in even deeper silence, and I would be alone again, facing my score. Above the swamp cooler the turtledove cooed. We both turned to look. “She’s got eggs in there,” I said.

“Or he does.”

“How can you tell it’s a male?”

“I can’t, I just know they take turns incubating.”

So that was why the nest was never empty. I had begun to wonder how the poor dove fed itself if it was sitting in there all the time. Now it tilted its head sideways and stared at us with curiosity. “Come inside while I get my shoes,” I said.

The cabin was barely furnished. The sofa, the chair, the coffee table—these were solid and comfortable, but they held no history and revealed nothing about me. There were no mementoes on the shelves, no family pictures on the wall. I closed Sibelius before Jeremy could ask about my music. “My mom made that,” I said when I saw him looking at the ridiculous arrangement of dried flowers above the fireplace. I finished tying my shoelaces and stood up. “I don’t know if I have a water bottle,” I said, walking to the kitchenette and opening and closing cabinets at random.

“I have one in the car.”

“Flashlight?”

“I have that, too.”

In the car, I lowered my window and let the wind whip through, its hum a stand-in for conversation. The town lights sparkled in the desert, but once we drove into the national park, darkness wrapped itself around us. In the distance were giant boulders and, everywhere on the plain beneath them, Joshua trees. I had always loved the oaks and pines and redwoods of the Bay Area, with their long and leafy limbs, but I had missed the desert trees: stout, prickly, wild-armed, and yet utterly fragile. It was only after I had left my hometown that I had really taken the full measure of how rare they were.

When we got to Hidden Valley, we found the metal gate locked. A sign said that the trail was closed after sunset. But Jeremy parked the car on the side of the road, got out, and hopped easily over the gate. “You coming?” he called. We started walking. Though the moon was still low in the sky, it was bright enough that there was no need for a flashlight. An owl flew overhead, its wings so quiet that we didn’t see the bird until it was ten feet past us.