"We can try," she said. "Trying is not the same thing as owing them a miracle."
"I don't have a miracle," Elijah said.
"Good. Those are expensive, and they don't tune."
Mrs. Keene read the requirements at her dining table, glasses low on her nose. Preliminary round by video. No editing in the middle of a movement. A statement from the student, not from the parent. A recommendation. She tapped the page.
"We record here. The keyboard in your apartment will not tell them what you sound like. It will tell them what you have been surviving."
They recorded on a Thursday in January, when the light in the dining room was thin and honest. Mrs. Keene's nephew, who did sound for a church with more ambition than speakers, brought a microphone and a patience Elijah trusted. They did the Bach Prelude in C minor from the first book of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the nocturne, and a short dance by Florence Price that Mrs. Keene had introduced in the fall, not as a lesson in identity, as a lesson in rhythm that did not apologize for its accent. Elijah played the Price last, and his left hand, which had been conscientious all afternoon, suddenly became glad. They kept the second take of the Bach and the first of the Price and a third of the nocturne in which he did not rush the turn into the last return of the melody.
Afterward he drank water from a jelly glass and felt empty in the good way, the way a room feels empty after the right people have left.