The bench was a little far from the keys. She drew it in with both hands, not a scrape for attention, a correction. Her feet did not quite reach the floor in a way that satisfied her, so she shifted forward until the balls of her feet found tile and the cardigan settled at her wrists. She looked at the keyboard the way a person looks at a face she knows and has not seen in a public room. Her hands rose. They hovered. The right thumb knew where it meant to go. The left hand waited in the air above a C that had not yet agreed to sound. A security guard near the fountain glanced over and decided, for the moment, that a child at a public piano was not a crisis. The glass ceiling held the light steady. Somewhere above the second-level railing, a shop door chimed.
Aaliyah did not look at Lauren. She did not look at Marcus. She looked at the place where the first note would have to live if she let it, and she spoke to the whole small audience the room had accidentally become, including the boy with the pretzel and the teenager with the lids and the woman who had used sweetheart as a fence.
"Just wait."
Her wrists were lifted. The keys reflected a thin bar of ceiling light and the yellow of her sleeve. No one had heard a note yet. The mall did not know what it was holding. Aaliyah held it a second longer than comfort, because she had been taught that the silence before a sound is part of the sound, and because she was ten and her heart was knocking hard enough that she needed the extra breath to keep her hands from telling on her.
The note did not come.
Not yet.
The morning had started in a kitchen where the light arrived late and the toaster arrived early.