He did not look at Harper. He looked at the place in the air where the music would be if he let it.
"Just listen."
His fingers hovered. The pedal was a cool brass promise under his shoe. Somewhere beyond the open doors a chair leg scraped and then was still. No one coughed. The late light laid a thin gold edge along the black keys, and the white ones waited, ordinary and enormous, and he had not yet touched them.
Before the lobby, there was the kitchen, and before the kitchen there was the year.
Elijah woke on the morning of the open house while the apartment was still blue. The window faced the brick of the next building, so morning never arrived as a spectacle, only as a slow permission. He lay still and ran the prelude in his head from the first note to the place where the left hand stopped pretending it was accompaniment and became a second voice with its own errands. He had done this so many times that the mattress felt, faintly, like a bench. When he lost his place he did not open his eyes and panic. He went back to the measure where the alto crossed under the soprano and started again. Mrs. Keene said memory was not a cupboard. It was a path. If you left the path you walked back to it. You did not demand that the cupboard fly open.
In the other room his mother ran the shower for a shorter time than she wanted. Denise Brooks was thirty-four, though she sometimes felt, in the fluorescent light of the hospital's registration desk, older than the number and, in her own kitchen, younger. She worked patient access, which meant she spent her days translating fear into forms and forms into appointments, and she was good at it in a way that did not make the days shorter. She had traded her Saturday shift to come to Whitaker. The trade had cost her a Sunday in May. She had paid it without telling Elijah the price, not as a martyrdom, as a preference. Some costs did not need to be carried by an eleven-year-old's hands.
She ironed the shirt while he ate cereal. The cereal was too sweet. He ate it anyway because the rule on audition days, established by nobody and obeyed by both of them, was that you did not invent a new breakfast.
"You don't have to impress the building," she said, not looking up from the cuff. "The building isn't on the panel."