"If they forget the box," Alvarez said, "you remind them. Forgetting is sometimes just forgetting. Sometimes it is a convenience. You don't have to decide which one it is in order to ask for the harp you were promised."
Nia lay awake and ran the prelude in the air above her blanket. In the other room, June's alarm was already set for a shift she had swapped so she could be home when Nia returned. The city outside made its night sounds. Somewhere across the river, in a house with a piano nobody played enough and a violin case by the door, a girl named Claire Whitmore also lay awake, worrying about intonation and about whether her mother would speak to the judges again this year. Different ceilings. Same dark. The morning had not yet introduced them.
Mr. Carter's office at the Meridian was a narrow room with a window that looked onto an air shaft and a filing cabinet that had outlived three directors. The badge on his desk, when he was not wearing it, lay faceup: M. CARTER, AUDITION COORDINATOR. People who had known him longer called him Marcus in the hall and Mr. Carter in front of parents, a bilingualism of respect he had stopped correcting. He was fifty, and he had worked in the building since his thirties, first as an operations assistant who moved pianos and printed programs, then as the person who made auditions happen without anyone tripping over a music stand or a feeling.
On Thursday night, after the staff had gone and the practice rooms had emptied into their particular hush, he opened the lower drawer of the cabinet. The folder was thin. The label, typed on a label-maker that had eaten a lot of tape in 2008, read COLE, DENISE — YA FELLOWSHIP.
Inside: an application, a repertoire list, a photo of a young woman with Nia's eyes and a serious mouth, and a handwritten note on plain paper dated three weeks after the audition.
Thank you for staying to help with the elevator. Most people leave when the playing is over. I know the panel has its reasons. I will keep working. If you ever need a substitute for a church service or a lobby, I am easy to reach. — Denise Cole
He had answered, briefly, with the names of two contractors who sometimes hired. He had not answered the part that mattered, because the part that mattered would have required him to repeat what he had heard in the deliberation room, and he had been thirty-two and new and convinced that repeating it would cost him a job he had fought to get. A donor on the panel, a man with soft hands and a hard calendar, had said Denise was talented and that the gala committee liked a certain photograph. A woman had said the word competitive as if it were a blanket she could put over the whole conversation. Another panelist had shrugged. Marcus Carter had looked at his notepad and written the word polite and then crossed it out so hard the paper tore.
He had told himself, for years, that one swallowed sentence had not decided her life. This was true and insufficient. Lives are decided by accumulations. He had contributed one stone and then gone home and called it professionalism.
When the youth scholarship applications came in this cycle, he read them in the order they arrived, which was his superstition and his fairness. Nia Cole's form was typed where June had typed it and handwritten where Nia had insisted. Instrument: harp. Own instrument: no. Request for house harp: yes, the box checked firmly, almost through the paper. Musical background, in a child's careful print: My mother, Denise Cole, taught me until she died. Miss Lorraine Alvarez teaches me at Eastbridge Community Arts. I practice on the harp there.