NOAH
I was playing piano. I used to take lessons three times a week from a woman with the whitest hair you’ve ever seen and a hand that would shake just a tiny bit, but in another life she’d played Carnegie Hall and been a soloist with every orchestra between Portland and Paris, and when she touched the piano the shake would vanish. I loved my lessons, and unlike almost any other seven-year-old on the planet, I loved to practice.
I’d make my parents sit in the easy chairs by the window and play “concerts” for them.
(Beat.)
One time my mother got up in the middle of a movement of Tchaikovsky. I stopped and started banging on the keys like a maniac until she sat back down. And thus I trained my parents to stay until I played the very last note, and got up from my little booster bench.
(Beat.)
And on a beautiful April day, they are sitting there as I regale them with Mozart’s Piano Concerto Number 15 in B-flat major, which would be extremely challenging at any age. They’re still sitting there as we hear this far away thunder, and I look up from my Mozart and see the hint of a plume of distant dust through the window, but I don’t stop playing, so they don’t stop sitting, and they are still in their chairs when the entire side of the room by the windows falls away into nothing. I don’t know what to do.
A seven-year-old brain cannot process houses and parents winking into never agains, so I finish the 15th, but I am troubled by the middle C, which has gone terribly flat.
(Beat.)
I cry for half an hour—32 minutes, actually—but when it becomes clear that my piano is irrevocably broken, and that neither my parents nor the woman with the white hair will be coming back to listen to me play or for any other reason, I stop crying, close the cover, and two days later, I find
(Indicating the others:)
them. And we keep on going.