“No, she doesn’t.” He ruffled my hair. “Nor-eini, try to speak in class, okay?”
But the teacher’s threat, relayed and amplified by my mother, was indelible in my mind. Not speaking meant that I would have to repeat, and repeating meant that I wouldn’t have to see Brittany Cutler or her acolytes every day. So I stayed in kindergarten another year. I learned the alphabet again and the pledge of allegiance again, though this time there was Sonya Mukherjee, a girl who was just as quiet as me, a girl who didn’t fit in with the others, either. By the time I started the first grade, I had one friend.
Still, it wasn’t until middle school that I fell in with my own tribe—music nerds. Two summers earlier, having noticed my talk of music and colors, my father had enrolled me in piano classes with Mrs. Winslow, a neighbor who had retired to the desert after years of teaching music at USC. She gave a name to how I saw the world. Synesthesia. And with that word came the realization that there was nothing wrong with me, that I shared this way of experiencing sound with many others, some of them musicians. At the audition for band class, I played Minuet in G, and was immediately given a spot. Sonya, too, earned a place, playing the flute. And there were other good kids in the band. Lily and Jeremy and Manuel and Jamie. Kids whose first instinct wasn’t to ask “What are you?” but “What do you play?” Pinned to the wall above the teacher’s desk was a poster that asked: DID YOU PRACTICE YESTERDAY? ARE YOU PRACTICING TODAY? WILL YOU PRACTICE TOMORROW? The strict discipline and long rehearsals he imposed on us bound us together. And I didn’t even have to talk much—I only had to play.
One day the jazz band was invited to perform at the Summer Festival in Palm Springs. Walking across the stage to the piano, I did what my teacher had advised. Pretend you’re only playing for one person. That way you won’t be so nervous. I glanced at my father, who sat in the front row, leaning his head just so, waiting. Then I closed my eyes, and began to play. As my fingers moved on the keys, I felt as if I were speaking to my bandmates, calling to Manuel on the drums or answering a question from Lily on the bass. The talk between us deepened, and I became so immersed in our many-colored conversation that when it was over I was nearly startled by the rousing applause from the audience. I remember feeling happy that night, and whole.
Yet the sense of being different never completely went away. The fault lines usually appeared when I was asked what church I went to, or when my mother spoke to me in the school parking lot, or when the history teacher asked a random question about the Middle East and all eyes turned to me for an answer. It didn’t help that my parents weren’t getting along and that there was constant squabbling at home. Every time a door was slammed or a dish was smashed, I locked myself in my room and listened to music. I dreamed of growing up, going to college, escaping the desert. “Why do you always have your head in the clouds?” my mother would ask.
All at once I felt alert to the smell of the coffee brewing in the pot, the starch of the napkin in my hand, the weight of my body against the kitchen counter. “I don’t have my head in the clouds,” I said. “I just think that today isn’t a good day to be talking about money.”
“We’re not talking about money,” Salma said. “We’re talking about Baba’s restaurant, which he cared about immensely, as you yourself pointed out a little while ago.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, what did you mean, then?”
“It would be good if your husband was a bit more sensitive, that’s all.”
“He was only trying to help.”
The doorbell rang, startling me. Salma went to answer it, her bracelets jingling on her wrist at a steady pace, as though she were keeping time. With a growing ache in my chest, I finished folding the napkins. Only a day in this house and already the arguments had started. I didn’t understand why people were visiting the house so soon; it could have waited until after the funeral. I didn’t want to hear the story, told again and again to each new visitor, of how my father had been found unconscious on the pavement by a schoolteacher out on her nightly run. The paramedics arrived only minutes later, but it was too late, he was already dead. I didn’t want to be asked where I was when it happened, or how I heard the news. I grew tired of shaking hands with my sister’s friends, tired of hearing their hushed voices. After a while, I retreated to the deck.
Jeremy
When I got to her house, the front door was open. I could hear the din of overlapping conversations inside, some of them in a language that felt familiar to me but that I couldn’t understand. There were several pairs of shoes lined up at the entrance, and I wondered if I should take mine off as well, but what if she wasn’t even here? Framed photographs hung along the hallway, including one from our high school jazz band. It occurred to me that I had never been inside her house before, and yet for ten years my likeness had waited for me on the wall.
In the living room, I found myself in a crowd of strangers, all of them standing in small clusters, drinking tea from tiny blue glasses. Her mother sat on the sofa, absorbed in a conversation with an old man in a black jacket and a white skullcap. The phone rang in the kitchen. Someone called out for a glass of water and an Advil. The house was loud and stuffy and I felt out of place. I had come straight from the police station, and now I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea. Then I saw her on the deck.
I walked through the glass doors, relieved to be out of the crowd if nothing else. It was just after dusk, the sky turning from blue to black. Along the wooden fence, bundles of red Indian paintbrush glowed like the embers of a dying fire. The floorboards creaked under my shoes. “Nora,” I called. At the sound of my voice, she turned around. Her hair was long and black and fell about her shoulders. Her eyes were as I remembered them, dark and direct. She was wearing a green dress cinched at the waist with a narrow belt. In the yellow light that came from the living room, her skin looked golden. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
She looked at me wordlessly, and for a moment I had the horrifying thought that she didn’t remember me and that I shouldn’t have come at all. But then she crossed the deck, her bare feet light and silent on the wooden slats, and hugged me. Warmly, I thought later that night as I sat in a bath. “Thank you for coming, Jeremy,” she said. When she stepped back, her gaze was drawn to the living room. A sudden wail soared, and a chorus of bereaved voices rose in comfort. She looked at me again, this time with despair. “Would you mind—could you stay for a bit?”
“Sure, of course.” I sat beside her on the wooden bench. But for all my certainty about coming to see her, I had prepared nothing else to say. I settled on something simple. “Your father was a good man.”
“Thank you for saying that,” she said, and touched my arm lightly.
“I remember when we had afternoon rehearsals, he’d come and listen to us. To you. None of the other parents did that.”
She crossed her legs—they were long and brown, and her toenails were painted red. I forced myself to look away, patted my pocket, tried to remember how many cigarettes I’d had that day. Fewer than five. My new one-day limit. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
“No, go ahead.”
I lit a cigarette and blew the smoke away from her, but the wind was against me. For a week now, fierce Santa Anas had been sweeping across the valley, bringing with them heat, dust, and the calls of wild animals from the mountains. Between gusts of wind, a low murmur drifted out from the living room.
“How did you hear about my dad?”
“One of my colleagues is working the case.”
“You’re a detective?”
“Sheriff’s deputy. You sound surprised.”