Page 7 of Lost Dreams

Lorelei laughed. “Please, don’t tell him that last part.”

“Nobody can beat Mama’s,” Jack said, winking.

“I know,” Lorelei whispered, smiling.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Jack said, snapping his fingers. “Do you still play?”

Lorelei’s ears rang with surprise. By play he meant play the piano, and no, of course she didn’t. “I mean, I’m married. I have three kids.” She shrugged. “It’s taken all my strength to make that work.”

Jack nodded. “I get it. But I wanted to tell you. Back when I was Seth Green, back when I was traveling all over and hiding myself away, I used to listen to your performances. There was that one you did at the Barbican Center in London. It brought me to my knees, Lorelei. Honestly, I remembered listening to you practice when I was a kid. It was like you were this icon. I didn’t know anybody better at music than you. I still don’t!”

Lorelei’s eyes smarted, but she told herself not to cry—not at her loss of music, and not at the image of poor Seth Green, all alone and listening to her piano performance. She remembered that London performance as though it were yesterday. She’d worn that Dior dress, which had cost far more than even her wedding dress. She’d wanted to be seen. She’d wanted to be respected.

“I guess I thought that would be my life forever,” she said.

“Life has other plans,” Jack said.

After Jack went off to help Addison with something, Lorelei grabbed a glass of champagne and stepped into the ornate ballroom, where she saw the grand piano—the Steinway. The original grand piano that had sat in the ballroom had been a Fazioli. Still, this one, in Lorelei’s opinion, was far nicer, with a grander and bolder and more decadent sound. Since the piano movers had brought it in, Lorelei hadn’t sat down on the bench. She hadn’t dared.

She knew that her family members had been half-waiting for her to do it. They’d been watching her like hawks, eager for her to reconnect with that glorious instrument. After all, they’d all been forced to take piano lessons at a young age, but only Lorelei had pursued it. Only Lorelei had gone on to be “someone great,” at least for a little while.

What were you supposed to do with your “greatness” when it existed so long ago? How could Lorelei even reckon with the fact that that had once been her?

Sometimes Lorelei wondered what Aurora would think about her past when she was older. She wondered how Aurora would think about the time of her life a few years ago, back when she’d wanted to be so independent, back when she’d been so sure that she didn’t need her parents. She’d left home and told them, “I’m going to Berlin to be an artist.”

And then, they’d gotten the call.

Suddenly, Lorelei found herself sitting at the grand piano. She put the tips of her fingers on the glowing white keys but didn’t dare press down. What if she’d forgotten everything she’d ever known about music? What if she had nothing left to give?

4

Twenty-Seven Years Ago

Things in Lorelei’s piano career didn’t fully take off till she left the United States. Despite her clear talent and future in the arts, back in Nantucket, she’d been locked into the White Oak Lodge, spending all her time that she wasn’t practicing the piano at the front desk, helping her parents. But once she moved to Tuscany, she met the iconic classical music agent Raffaello Donatello, who told her, point-blank, “I will make you a star. But you must help me help you.”

It sounded easy. It was anything but.

Of course, Lorelei was connected to Raffaello through her grandfather, her mother’s famous director father, who knew just about everyone in the arts in Italy. This was an advantage that she knew didn’t come to everyone. But she also knew that Raffaello was cutthroat, that he wouldn’t have signed her on his label if he didn’t truly believe in her. In the weeks that followed, she practiced piano with a new intensity, barely ever raising her head from the keys. Sometimes Allegra could drag her out, maybe for a little dance or a half glass of wine. But usually, Lorelei told herself, This is your only shot. Don’t mess it up.

Over the following months after signing with Raffaello, miraculously, things moved very quickly. Lorelei performed piano concertos all over Europe. She found herself in major concert halls in Paris, Athens, Rome, Berlin, and Brussels, after which she was introduced to film stars and politicians, people who’d been told about the “iconic Lorelei Whitmore, the Italian American piano prodigy.” She saw her mother less and less and eventually took an apartment in Rome, where she could work more closely with a piano teacher Raffaello had introduced her to. Bit by bit, she became entirely absorbed in music and performance.

It was a relief to know she’d become something more than what she’d been in the United States.

More than anything, she found that this newfound career in the arts helped her to avoid thoughts of the White Oak Lodge and everything she’d lost. Her American heritage and identity felt further and further away as time passed. She was only just beginning to come to terms with the fact that her father and brother were presumed dead, and that the hotel where she’d grown up and celebrated life and swam in the ocean was now charred-out and no longer available to her. It was as though her entire childhood had been ripped out of time.

This was enough of a reason to begin again, she felt.

Late one night in her apartment in Rome, she called Allegra. By that time, Allegra was still in Florence, dating a guy whom she was thinking of breaking up with and dealing with her own sense of loss in the wake of the fire. Although they usually began their phone calls in Italian, Lorelei switched quickly to English, then burst into tears that surprised her. It was as though the English language had reminded her too much of their father, Benjamin, the only non-Italian in their family—save for Nina. She didn’t like to think about Nina, either.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about home a lot. I’ve been thinking about Nantucket, about that beach we used to swim at… the one we thought was a secret. I’ve been thinking about everything we lost. It’s like we never had it. It’s like we’ll never get it back.”

Allegra was soft-spoken when, in conversation, they returned to the past. “I miss it, too. I’ve been having dreams about it. About the people, too. Like, randomly, that postal worker who always had candy for us? You remember him? Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to us if we’d stayed in Nantucket. Would we have married those silly high school boyfriends of ours? Would we have become islanders forever? But I suppose, well. I suppose you wouldn’t have had this career if we’d stayed. So maybe it’s for the best?”

Lorelei knew her sister was right. But still, it felt like an extraordinary price to pay: fame in exchange for her beloved childhood on Nantucket Island.

At the end of that first incredibly successful year, Raffaello took Lorelei out to a five-star restaurant in Rome. Lorelei was exhausted, but she couldn’t let her face show it. She smiled and laughed at everything Raffaello said, wanting to seem just as grateful as she was. She was twenty-two years old, but her soul felt as though it was aging faster than it should have. It had been through too much.

At the restaurant, they joined two other music agents, plus the man who owned the Sydney Opera House in Australia, and a woman who sang in that opera. After they sat, the opera singer left for the bathroom, and Raffaello leaned over to whisper into Lorelei’s ear. He told her that the opera singer and the owner of the Sydney Opera House had been having an affair for more than ten years, and that soon the owner would fire the opera singer, his top star at the House, and start anew with someone else. “It’s a cutthroat business,” Raffaello told Lorelei, whose heart shook with shock.