Andrea J. Buchanan

“It is enough to see you so happy,” Mor said, putting his hands on my shoulders.

Mor hadn’t yet brought the stool up, but I threw open the lid and ran my hands over the keys and began a Bach Invention standing. Only when my eyes welled up so that I could barely tell the black keys from the white did I stop playing and try to speak.

I learned later that Samuel had helped Mor sell his favorite painting to buy the piano. Man with a Hammer. It was an oil painting of a worker, hammer in hand, his arms raised as if to bring the tool down on something impenetrable. The worker’s exertion was visible, the weight of everything in the definition of his muscles. I had admired the painting for its execution, but to Mor it was a political statement. I was stunned that he would part with it, his proudest work, but all he would say about the sale, trading the painting for the piano, was, “For you, it was necessary,” with an awkward kiss on the cheek.

He was teaching, he was doing factory work, he was going from gallery to gallery on show days, hoping for someone to recognize his genius. He was forbidding me to practice.

He told me I was no longer allowed to play.

I remember writing a brief letter to my father. You will not have to pay anyone to take me off your hands, as it turns out. I didn’t expect a reply, and I didn’t receive one.

“No matter,” Mor told me. “I am your family now

Worse, whenever I tried to broach the subject of my returning to my studies, of even considering applying to music school, he became agitated. Couldn’t I wait, couldn’t I see he was trying to establish himself, couldn’t I just support him for now until we were stable enough to afford me some leisure? So I waited

I worked, I cooked, I took care of him, I did what wives were supposed to do when they had no occupation. And yet, even in that, I was failing. I’d thought maybe a child would bring some meaning to my life, some purpose, to make me feel less displaced, to make him happy, to make us more like a real family. But every month the disappointment arrived.

He did love me, I knew that. He told me that.

The treatments increased, became more and more frequent, until I was deemed improved enough, or complacent enough, to have regular visits from Mor. Instead of being confined to bed, I was in a regular chair, not even a wheelchair, a blanket on my lap, a robe covering my hospital dress, as we sat in the common room. I was smoothed out from the treatments. I was able to face him across the table and not feel the urge to close my eyes.

He visited once on a particularly sunny day,

kept his hat on, his coat on, as though he were ready to leave at any moment, his entire demeanor a wary apology. But I just smiled.

“I’m so glad you’ve come,” I told him.

“Are you?” he asked, shifting in his seat.

“Of course.”

He stared at his hands for a moment and when he raised his face, his eyes were bright, and he blinked quickly. “Then I’m glad, as well.”

It was easy to smile at him when I was suspended in so much space. Sometimes I felt as though the spaces hid my own thoughts from me too much, erased my memories and my music. But sometimes the spaces protected me. I could float. I could be trapped in a sunbeam.

This wasn’t true. Couldn’t be true. It was utterly unfamiliar to me. And yet, when I looked closely, I could see that the binding was not new, that the cover was yellowing and soft at the edges, that there was writing inside, my writing, markings I myself had made on the score. Irrefutably, in the upper right-hand corner of the title page, was my own name, written in neat student script.

I laughed, which was easy to do, for I felt like laughing that day, and agreed of course it was mine, that’s right, how forgetful I am sometimes.

I was forgetful.