Never Coming Back(56)

“I was.”

“But you never tried to get a job using your piano?”

I shook my head and waited for him to tilt his head in that typical quizzical way and ask, Why not? But he didn’t do that. What he did instead was wait. The bartender was good enough at waiting to beat me at my own waiting game.

“I studied piano because I loved it.”

“And the loving it was enough?”

I nodded. Unlike most people, the bartender didn’t pursue the topic, didn’t ask why I had studied something I hadn’t used since. Didn’t ask why I had put all those vast late-night solo soundproof practice room stretches of time into getting better and better and better at something that I had then abandoned.

Even though I hadn’t abandoned it.

I never said that, though. It wouldn’t make sense. How could I explain that all those hours, fingers crawling or flying or stumbling over the keys, up and down and up and down, thousands of miles of black and white notes floating up out of the massive stringed throat of that instrument, had embedded themselves in me, in my blood and flesh and bone, in my heart, so that wherever I went in this world, music went with me? As hymns were to Asa, so my piano was to me.

“It was a refuge. Somewhere I could go and sit and work and work and work and when I was done it was like I had worked myself into another world.”

He smiled. “Another world where everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, like Gayle’s tattoo?” He nodded in the direction of the server.

“Where beautiful was inconsequential. Where beautiful and ugly and in between had disappeared, because your fingers had played themselves out and there wasn’t anything left to think about.”

Just then my phone buzzed, vibrating against my thigh deep in my pocket, in its home next to the hammer earring. “Ma,” read the screen, which meant not Ma but someone who looked after Ma. Sylvia, usually. The phone twinkled and shook in my hand.

“This is Clara.”

“Hi, Clara. It’s Sylvia.”

“What’s going on?”

“She’s having a hard time tonight. She keeps looking for you. She says she needs to go outside and find you. I’m sorry for calling so late. I thought we could calm her but??—”

“I’m on my way.”

The phone went dark and I pushed it back into my pocket. The bartender’s hands folded the dish towel into half, then quarters.

“Your mother?”

“The nurse.”

“What’s going on?”

I shook my head. I pictured her searching for me, pushing her walker up and down hallway after hallway, stopping at the Green Room, stopping at the reception desk, at the juice station, at the cleaning closets. Picking her walker up and throwing it at the wall. Yelling at Sylvia.

“I have to go.”

“Do you want company?”

“No thanks.” Already I was mentally in the Subaru. But as I got up from the stool—goodbye, quiet bar, goodbye, quiet conversation, goodbye, upside-down wineglasses shining in your quiet rows overhead—my heart flared.

I sat back down and breathed. Breathed in, breathed out. Long and slow. But my chest shook with frantic fluttering. I closed my eyes and put my fingers on my carotid artery and pressed.

“You okay?”

He came around the end of the bar and took my other hand in his.

“What’s happening?”

“Nothing.”

The fluttering intensified. I had to lie down. Where? The floor was a bar floor, and the chairs and stools were high and small. The long black booth in the back was empty and I made my way toward it, my eyesight fuzzy, and lay down and drew my knees up and closed my eyes. There was the sound of a chair scraping across the floor. He was sitting next to me, his knees touching my hip.

“Clara, what’s going on?”

“It’s just a glitch in my heart. It races sometimes and I have to lie down until it goes back to normal. It’s nothing.”

If you say things with authority and calm, if you project a do-not-touch aura around yourself, people listen to you. They back off. You can remain pristine, an island unto yourself. No one will try to take charge of you.

Not so with the bartender. His hand was on my heart now, right below my breast—two fingers, I could feel them—measuring the pulsing flutter. I opened my eyes to see his narrowed, looking at my chest, which was shaking with the effort of my heart. I closed my eyes again.

“You’re touching my boob.”

“I’m touching your heart.”

“It’s a boob-heart continuum.”

My breaths were short. I tried to lengthen them out but they stayed quick and shallow.

“Don’t call 911,” I said. “It’s nothing.”

But my heart was working as hard as it could, shuddering and jolting with effort. It should have stopped by now, the way it always used to. My heart was a different animal these days. You have to get that fixed. You have to get that fixed. You have to get that fixed. Was it possible to pass out when you were lying down? Stars materialized in the air above me and swirled in patterns like the ones Tamar’s fingers made when she was searching for the right word. Tamar. Tamar trolling the hallways, looking for her daughter.

“Can you do me a favor? Can you call that last number back for me?”