Every Note Played

  Part of him doesn’t want his father to know. Keeping his diagnosis from his father fills Richard with an exhilarating sense of winning. He was born into a father-son game he never wanted to play, the rules still cruel and incomprehensible to him, but damn it, he’s going to win. He’s living with a disease that shaves off another layer of control every single day. Possessing control of whether his father knows or not puts a sword in Richard’s hand, a power that’s too seductive to resist. He’s going to prove, in an ultimate and final test, that he doesn’t want or need his father for anything and wouldn’t turn to him for help or love even in the most dire circumstances. He won’t give his father the satisfaction of knowing he’ll soon be rid of the son he never wanted.

  But when Richard’s bombastic offense tires of wielding its sword and takes a seat, his defense is clearly visible, cowering in the corner. More than anything, he’s afraid of his father’s indifference. He wonders if his father already knows, if word of mouth has spread north to cow country, and Walt Evans is the one doing the snubbing.

  Or his father doesn’t know and wouldn’t respond if he did. Richard imagines his father opening the envelope, reading the letter through once, crumpling the paper in his fist, and tossing it into the trash. Or he reads it, refolds it, and slides the letter into his coat pocket, where it will be forgotten along with some lint and a gas receipt. In all the fantasies Richard entertains about his father’s potential reaction to this letter, Richard’s mind won’t allow for the possibility of his father picking up the phone or showing up at the door. The father Richard knows would offer no words of shock, horror, empathy, sympathy, or love for his youngest son.

  This is why Richard doesn’t print the letter.

  He knows he’ll never send the others. He’ll never get what he wants from his father. What does he want? He wants his father to admit that he was wrong for making Richard feel as if he weren’t good enough to be in the family. He wants his father to tell him that he’s okay exactly as he is. He wants his father to say that he’s proud of him. He wants his father to say he’s sorry for showing no interest in his piano career, his wife, his daughter. In him. He wants a big fat heartfelt apology.

  But Walt Evans is an old dog, and he’s not going to change, and he’s certainly never going to apologize. And it doesn’t matter now. Sorry won’t do Richard any good. What’s done cannot be undone.

  Yet, Richard continues to write to his father. It feels good to get the words out—words Richard felt when he was six but didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate, words he wanted to yell when he was sixteen but didn’t have the courage, words he wanted to argue when he was twenty-six but didn’t have the composure, words he wanted to speak when he was forty-six but literally no longer had the voice. The letters he writes communicate what he could never say, every typed word carrying an ancient scar on its back, every typed sentence fracking a bevy of silenced wounds stored in his deepest, darkest core, releasing a lifetime of outrage and resentment. But it seems no matter how many sentences he writes, the injustices buried within him are never fully mined.

  He considers writing another letter, but he lacks the energy. His neck muscles tire faster when sitting up at the desk versus reclined in his chair or propped against the back of his bed. It’s becoming conscious work to hold up his ten-pound head. His accuracy declines after typing only a few minutes, the cursor drifting down the screen as his head drops forward. He’s probably ready for one of those neck braces, the standard soft white collars people wear when they’ve been injured in an accident.

  He opens the second letter instead. It begins as a résumé, a list of Richard’s achievements, appearances, and critical reviews (only the good ones). If he never sends it to his father, maybe Trevor can use it for Richard’s obituary.

  He graduated with honors from Curtis. He was an associate professor at New England Conservatory. He’s played with the Chicago and Boston Symphony Orchestras; the New York, Cleveland, Berlin, and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras. He’s played at Boston Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Tanglewood, Aspen, and many more. His playing has been hailed as “inspirational,” “spellbinding,” and “possessing great virtuosity.”

  I was a great pianist. Audiences all over the world applauded me. They gave me standing ovations. They loved me. Why couldn’t you applaud me, Dad? Why couldn’t you love me? Richard has never found a satisfying answer to either of these questions, but staring at his bio on the computer screen, he’s proven, at least to himself, that he’s worthy of a father’s love. There is something wrong with him, not me. It took Richard forty-six years and ALS to get that far, which feels like progress but is probably just shifting blame, the pea transferred to another shell under deft sleight of hand, the truth still hidden from everyone.

  Maybe if he’d loved to play something more accessible to his father, if he’d been into playing Billy Joel or the Beatles, if he’d wanted to play in a rock ’n’ roll band in a pub instead of classical piano in a recital hall, if he’d also played football and baseball like Mikey and Tommy, his father would’ve approved. Walt hated classical music. They lived in a one-hundred-year-old three-bedroom farmhouse with thin rugs and thinner walls. Whenever Richard practiced, which was all the time, there was nowhere in the house that didn’t fill with sound. If Richard was playing Bach, the entire house was listening to Bach.

  Walt Evans hated Bach. Ten minutes was about all he could tolerate before he either stormed out of the house to do yard work or got in his pickup and drove to Moe’s, the local bar. If for some reason he wasn’t allowed to leave the house, if Richard’s mother told them supper would be ready in a few minutes, and Walt was forced to endure a few more minutes of Richard’s practicing, he’d explode. “Would you stop with all the goddamn noise?!”

  Richard opens another letter, and every familiar sentence, every ancient accusation, is a bugle call to his oldest, darkest suffering, summoning an army of resentment and hatred to rise up within him. You called me a pansy for playing piano instead of football. . . . You called me a fag for loving Mozart. . . . You threatened to hack my piano to pieces with an ax and use the wood for kindling. . . . You never came to my recitals. . . . You never accepted me. . . . You never even knew me. . . . You never loved me, Karina, or Grace.

  Grace. An electric ripple runs through him, decimating the tortured battlefield within, leaving him hollowed out, staring in helpless horror at his computer screen, seeing history repeated. The letters on the screen blur as he imagines a similar letter addressed to him, written by Grace.

  You picked piano over me. You never came to my games. And now you have ALS, and you’ll never know me. You never loved Mom or me.

  Tears roll down his face. Please don’t think that. He can’t stand the thought of this kind of letter, penned by her hand, of this legacy of pain he’s leaving her. Maybe what’s done can be undone. Maybe that’s what apology is for.

  After a quick knock on his door Karina enters the room without pausing. It irritates him that she doesn’t even allow him to respond, for the possibility that he might not want her to enter. He’s still upset, his face wet with tears. He can’t wipe them away.

  “It’s Tommy.” She’s holding Richard’s cell phone, faceup.

  “Who?”

  “Your brother,” a voice says from the phone on speaker. “Hey, Ricky, I’m sorry I’m not calling with better news. But, well . . .” Tommy’s voice thins out and disappears. He sighs and clears his throat. “Dad died last night.”

  Richard stares at Karina. The puddle of agony he was just knee-deep in over Grace’s imagined letter evaporates. He waits for what replaces it. He feels nothing.

  “Mikey found him early this morning. He was in his chair with the TV on. We think he died in his sleep. Probably a heart attack. . . .You there?”

  “Yah.”

  “I’m so sorry,” says Karina.

  “Thank you. The wake is Thursday at Knight’s Funeral Home and t
he funeral is Friday at St. Jude’s.”

  “O-kay,” says Richard.

  “I know. I’m having trouble talking, too. He lived a good life. Almost eighty-three. And dying in your own home in your sleep, no hospitals or long, drawn-out disease, you can’t ask for better than that, right?”

  Richard and Karina trade a silent conversation about ALS and death with their eyes before Richard realizes that Tommy is waiting for an answer.

  “No.”

  “Hey, I know we haven’t seen you in a long time, but you’re welcome to stay with Mikey or at Dad’s house. I’d have you here, but we literally got kids sleeping in closets and don’t have any room.”

  Richard looks up at Karina. She nods. She’ll go with him to New Hampshire.

  “Thaks-Tom-my. We’ll-be-there.”

  “You okay, man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. We’ll see you Thursday then.”

  Tommy doesn’t know that Richard has ALS. Neither does Mikey. None of them knows. They’re about to find out.

  Karina hangs up the phone and eyes Richard’s impassive-yet-already-tear-strewn face. “I’m sorry. Are you really okay?”

  “Fine.” He swivels his chair toward the computer and away from her, showing her the back of his head.

  He hears her leave the room without a word. He swivels the chair to be sure that she’s gone, then returns to his computer. He takes a deep breath, or at least a deep shallow breath. He points his nose at the screen, holding the position of his heavy head steady, focused on the folder labeled Letters to My Father. The folder opens. One by one, he selects each of the nine files and drags them to the trash. He studies the screen. The folder remains. The cursor darts and shimmies and his heart pounds hard in his throat as he works to select and then direct the folder to the trash bin.

  There.

  In an instant, his father and any possibility of apology are dead and gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  They’re the last to arrive at Walt’s house after the funeral. Karina and Grace hover awkwardly behind Richard in the living room, waiting for him to continue walking or sit down or do something. He just stands there, paralyzed, observing empty space. His upright piano, a fixture in his childhood home as seemingly permanent as its foundation, is gone. There is nothing in its place. Richard stands still, trying to comprehend its incomprehensible absence, feeling as if the only record of his childhood has been expunged. As he imagines his dead father erasing his past and ALS erasing his future, there is too little of him left. Time feels as if it’s collapsing in on him, and his bones are suddenly too fragile, his skin too transparent, his presence sliced too thin, and he wonders if he might cease to exist right then and there.

  “Whe-did-he geh-ri-do-vit?” he asks of no one in particular, his voice barely audible even with the voice amplifier.

  Karina moves to his right side, wraps her arm around his waist, and holds him by the hip, offering him stability.

  His brother Tommy wanders in from the kitchen. “What’s going on?”

  “Where’s the piano?” asks Karina.

  “I have it. Lucy and Jessie take lessons. I hope that’s okay.”

  Relief washes through Richard. He breathes, and he’s back in his body. Lucy and Jessie are his nieces, ages nine and twelve. He nods.

  “Yes. Thas-per-feck.”

  “They’re really good. I tell them they get it from their uncle.”

  Richard smiles with his eyes and looks down at his feet, uncertain how to handle this unexpected compliment.

  “You guys hungry? We’ve got food in the kitchen. Grace?”

  “Sure.” Grace follows her uncle into the other room.

  Richard takes a seat in the rocking chair and looks around the living room as if he were visiting for the first time. It may well be the last time. Much like its former occupant, the house is old and outdated. The floorboards are worn and creaky, the paint on the cracked walls is chipped, the ceiling is mottled with water stains. With the exception of the missing piano and the additions of a giant-screen TV and an oversized recliner, the living room is furnished exactly as Richard remembers it.

  There are still no curtains on the windows. His mother believed in sunshine and having nothing to hide. She often said she wouldn’t do anything she wouldn’t mind the neighbors seeing. On this four-acre, heavily wooded property, the nearest neighbor would’ve needed the Hubble telescope to see Sandy Evans smoking cigarettes in her pink curlers and nightgown.

  Even though his mother has been gone for twenty-eight years, it’s her absence and not his father’s that Richard feels most acutely in this room. She was his only ally in the family, the only one who truly saw and accepted him. Without his mother, he couldn’t have played piano. She arranged for his lessons, insisted on the money from Walt to pay for them, drove him to every lesson, every recital and competition, and defended his right to practice.

  He remembers the time she put herself between Richard’s piano and Walt’s chain saw. Richard can’t remember what set him off. Maybe he’d had a half dozen beers, and the Patriots lost. Richard does remember the thumping of his heart in his ears playing percussion with the distant buzz of his father’s chain saw slicing through the branches of a maple tree in the backyard after Walt stood down, determined to destroy something. Richard remembers sitting at the kitchen table while he listened, his mother’s hands shaking as she measured out flour and salt for apple-pie dough. He remembers stupidly asking, “Can I play now?”—his mother answering, “Not now, honey.” He remembers he was ten.

  She was so proud of him for getting into Curtis on scholarship. She died just before he turned nineteen. She never met Karina, never got to see him graduate or play professionally, never got to hold her granddaughter. She never knew that her son would someday have ALS.

  He thinks his mother would’ve approved of Karina. What little his father experienced of her, he was never a fan. Walt didn’t trust anyone from out of town, never mind from out of state, never mind from Poland. His world played out within his zip code, his life revolving around his job at the local quarry, the town church, the bank, the school, and Moe’s tavern. He didn’t like that he didn’t know Karina’s parents, that he couldn’t judge what kind of family she came from. When asked about her religion, she told him she was a lapsed Catholic. The only kind of person Walt, a Protestant and faithful Sunday churchgoer, trusted less than a Catholic was a godless woman. He found no charm in her accent and didn’t appreciate her sophisticated vocabulary, which, even spoken in broken English, was far superior to Walt’s. He blamed Karina for his son’s name preference of Richard over Ricky when she had nothing to do with it. Walt took her to be uppity, a snob, a heathen, probably a communist, a lazy immigrant only interested in Richard as a ticket to a green card.

  The grown-ups filter into the room carrying food and drinks and take seats. No one chooses the recliner. That must’ve been “the chair.” Richard’s not sure if everyone is staying off it in reverence to Walt or if they all find it too creepy, knowing he died there a few days ago. On Monday, his father was sitting in that chair watching TV. Today he’s in a box in the ground.

  Grace says she isn’t hungry after all and joins seven of her eight cousins outside, sledding on the hill. They range in age from three to twenty-two, nieces and nephews Richard doesn’t know. They were all stone-faced and tearless during the funeral, seemingly more weirded out by their drooling, unfamiliar uncle than their dead grandfather. It’s probably easier to bear witness to the graceful exit of an old man than the sloppy, slow-motion, paralytic crawl to death that is ALS in someone who should be in the prime of life. The older kids snuck periodic glances at him as if on a dare, and when caught staring, their eyes fled to somewhere safer, often the coffin.

  Brendan, age eight, wiry with a buzz cut, a sharp nose, and curious eyes, doesn’t feel like getting wet or cold and is sitting sandwiched between his parents, Mikey and Emily, on the small couch. Tommy and Karina are o
n the love seat. Tommy’s wife, Rachael, is outside, helping her two youngest kids up and down the steep hill. Everyone is eating deli-meat sandwiches and Buffalo chicken wings on paper plates. The men are drinking Budweiser out of cans, and the women are drinking white wine.

  Richard watches his brothers eat, massive bites of bread, ham, and cheese churning around in their open mouths like clothes in a circular dryer window while they talk, and he’s a kid again at the supper table. Skinny, he ate modest meals, always a single helping, and finished quickly. Never allowed to be excused early, he felt as if he spent hours at the table every night, waiting in lonely silence as his brothers gorged on several platefuls of meat and potatoes. Unlike Richard, they were big boys with big muscles to feed. Athletes who were every day running on a field or bench-pressing at the gym, they were in good physical shape when they were young, but now, they’re both overweight. They’ve got beer guts and full-moon faces and beefy arms and legs that look stiff when they walk, like growing kids stuffed into last winter’s snowsuits.

  “Want me to get you a plate?” asks Mikey, noticing that Richard isn’t eating.

  “I-can’t-eee-tha.”

  “You need one of us to hold the sandwich for you?”

  “It’s not that. He can’t swallow the bites without choking,” says Karina.

  “I-ha-va fee-ding tu.”

  “There’s a tube in his stomach,” says Karina to wide-eyed Brendan.

  “Can I see it?” asks Brendan.

  “Sure,” says Richard.

  They all sit, watching him, as if waiting in the audience for the curtain to rise and the show to start.