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Alcohol was the easy way out.
A coward’s way out.
I remember the first time I touched the piano. It sat at our house, tucked away. As tucked away as a piano can be, pressed up against a far wall in a rarely used dining room. There was nothing fancy about it. Just an average console piano. It had become nothing more than a piece of furniture. One that my dad had refused to part with, even though he had never played a note. His mother had and then his sister, until she grew bored with it, he said.
But it always made my dad think of his mother, my grandmother. Made him feel close to her. When she died, he took the piano and wouldn’t hear of giving it away.
One night, I was putting some tablecloths or something away in the china cabinet for Mom. I was probably no more than thirteen or fourteen then. I sat down and started plunking around with the keys. When dad bolted into the room with a shocked look on his face, I was certain I had screwed up. But that shock quickly morphed into joy, and my piano lessons began the next day. I loved it. It came to me easily, as naturally as skating came to B.
We rearranged the living room so the piano could live in there, and they could enjoy my music. I continued to play and take lessons until I moved back east. Then I sought solace in drinking. I forgot all about playing the piano, and only picked it back up when I was at home for the holidays.
When dad got sick, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even sit at that piano bench anymore, and neither could Mom. She used to sit next to me while I played, and Dad would sit in the recliner across the room and smile at us. When I stopped playing, the bench became a landing spot for junk mail or magazines that needed to be carted out to the recycling bin. We had never mustered the energy to move it back to the dining room where we wouldn’t have to look at it. While neither of us could handle touching it anymore, getting rid of it was out of the question.
“Please tell me that’s not the only thing you ever learned to play?”
I look up from the piano and smile as Brady makes his way across the empty room. My fingers continue to move across the keys even as he reaches me.
“All the other kids are choosing Beethoven’s Fifth or Fur Elise, and my baby brother picks Moonlight Sonata,” he says.
“I wanted to be different. I didn’t know it was the saddest symphony on the planet. I just wanted to make Mom proud.”
“She was,” he says. “She is.”
I raise my eyebrows and keep playing. Brady just stands and listens.
“Not sure that would hold true today,” I say, and my hands come to a stop. I stare at my scraped-up knuckles, which are swelling. “Not exactly my finest moment.”
He shrugs but says nothing. Passes no judgment, at least none that he voiced.
“You never call her your stepmom,” he says. “You never have.”
“And you don’t call me your stepbrother.” Even just moments ago, he referred to me as his baby brother. We were eight and twelve, respectively, when our parents met. When Brady plowed into me hard during a pick-up hockey game on a frozen lake in Minnesota. I fell, busted my lip open, and we all ended up at the ER together.
Vicki has always been Mom to me. Way more so than my actual mother. As for Brady…I thought B-man hung the moon. He was my super cool, super-star big brother. And my best friend. He looked out for me; he protected me; he harassed me and teased me. All the things a proper big brother is supposed to do. We shared all our secrets.
Except one.
It was fear, plain and simple, that kept me from telling him the truth about why I was in Boston looking at schools while he and Devyn were having a four-day fuck-fest in my apartment. Sheer terror. Not the terror at him possibly being mad at me. It was that I knew he would want to fix it, make everything better. But there was no fixing this.
Besides, he had just been drafted sixth in the first round of the NHL draft. Sixth overall! My big brother. I couldn’t bear to take that spotlight away from him.
He smiles, but his eyes are shrouded with worry. They sweep across my battered face. “Are you okay?”
I shake my head, the verbal admission feeling out of reach. I look back at the piano keys in front of me. I’m nowhere near being okay. I’m not at all ready to expose the secret, either. I’ve been keeping it from him for far too long. I suspect, given his quiet mood, nobody else has shared that secret with him yet, either. We need to. But first, Davis and I need to get on the same page. We need to figure out some way to still the tension between us and move on.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Nope.” I’m not sure how much Levi tells him. Enough, obviously, that he is here. Of course, that could also be because I turned my phone off. Even with the sobriety that I’ve managed to hold on to, not being able to reach me raises concern. I knew it would send up a red flag to him, especially if he found out about the fight. But I just can’t. I can’t explain it, not yet.
“What can I do?”
I glance away from the piano and up at him. My instinct is to say nothing. That’s always my instinct. Seeking help is hard. Allowing it even harder. Besides, there is nothing he can do.
But I don’t want him to go. I enjoy having him here with me. I work for the same organization as he does, but spend most of my time with Levi, not Brady. We don’t make time to hang out much, ever. I’m not ready to unwrap the complicated mess that is my relationship with Davey yet, not to him anyway, but I don’t want to be alone either.
“Sit,” I say. “Sit with me.”
He takes it more literally than I intend, and instead of sitting in one of the cushy chairs next to the piano, he slides onto the bench next to me. He places his hand atop the keys and starts that rhythmic ping, ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. That universal sound. I laugh and join him in a round of chopsticks, much as we used to when we were kids.
