Page 49

THE HURRICANE SOUNDED quieter. Through the skylight backstage, the clouds twisted overhead in a halo of darkness.

We had passed into the eye of the storm.

The back side of the hurricane was always the worst, but at the moment everything sounded serene.

High, high above, the moon poured silver linings into the old music hall.

I sat down on one side of the bench, and Sasha took the other.

Our thighs bumped together, a friction and a connection.

It felt like so long ago when we first came together at this piano.

Back then, we didn’t know each other even though we were embedded in each other’s heads, and now we weren’t.

We hadn’t trusted each other then. We should now.

I trusted him. I think—I think I trusted him so much it had frightened me.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath.

Beside me, I felt Sasha do the same.

Trust me , I wanted him to know.

His leg pressed harder against mine, reassuring, as if he knew what I’d thought, and responded, I do.

“One, two,” I counted off quietly, my voice trailing into silence, three, four—

After weeks with the song in our heads, it came to our fingers as easy as breathing. We knew the notes, sure and bright and loud, surer than we knew ourselves. He played the chords, and I the well-worn melody, our fingers in conversation with each other without a word.

It was like we could hear each other again as we put our feelings into the song.

It was just our voices, an old piano, and the eye of a storm. Thunder rumbled in the distance, rushing across the building, bringing with it wind and leaves and that bright, sweet scent of late-summer rain.

The world faded away.

The hurricane.

The Revelry.

All of it.

There was just Sasha, and me, and the song.

My panic melted. My soul came back. This was my dream—not sparkly fame or big-city lights—but this .

This feeling, this certainty. I felt whole.

And it hadn’t taken a Grammy or a hit or a famous person singing it—it just took the act of creating something new and sharing it.

That was the magic I’d longed for, the part of me that I’d missed.

And it made my heart soar.

I sang for my mom, who I wished could have a hundred more summers like this.

Who would be here, just not in the way we’d always planned.

Sasha sang for his, a memory in a doorway, morning light pouring in around her as she whispered that she loved him, before closing the door one last time.

The pieces that we’d lost, that we would lose, sang with us.

They were in the way we loved music, the way we wrote songs.

Mom was in the radio as I scanned the airwaves for my favorite songs.

She was in my memories of the Revelry, sticky beer and loud music and bright lights.

She was in the way I looked for love in ballads and passion in the key changes.

Perhaps she would lose all her memories, and maybe she would become someone who didn’t even recognize herself, but I carried her memories, too.

As did Dad, and Mitch, and Gigi and Vienna Shores, and all the people who met her in this one too-short life.

We were all made of up memories, anyway. Of ourselves, of other people. We were built on the songs sung to us and the songs we sang to ourselves, the songs we listened to with broken hearts and the ones we danced to at weddings.

Mom couldn’t stop smiling, even though she couldn’t stop her tears, either, as though she’d finally heard the ending of a story that she gave up on finding, and it was bitter and sweet and soft.

My fingers crossed Sasha’s, bumping over each other, twining together, the sound of the baby grand bright and bold with only the good notes.

Chosen by phantom hands decades ago, and finished by two strangers who weren’t strangers anymore, passed on through some invisible songbird who perched against our hearts, and sang.

Playing together, our voices harmonizing, felt like it did when we were in each other’s heads. I knew which way his hands would go; he knew mine. We were connected, but this time the string was music. The threads were chords and counterpoints.

I wasn’t sure what kind of song this would be, but I hoped it would be the kind that made memories.

The kind that made love a conversation, made romance a work of art.

Painted stories of late-night confessions and midmorning heartbreaks, falling in love through joyrides and banana-lemon margaritas and secrets whispered against flushed skin.

And the kind that, when you were lost in the world, brought you home.

The rain battered against the eaves. The wind howled. Candles flickered in the darkness.

And I was home.