The Stolen Child(113)

guilty pleasure at having nipped them. He ranted at the librarians, but eventually he collected himself and

went about his work. I welcomed the peace, which gave me the time to finish writing my book in the

quiet hours. Soon I would be free of Henry Day. That evening, I packed the sheets in a cardboard box,

placing a few old drawings on top of the manuscript, and then folded Speck's letter carefully and tucked

the pages in my pocket. After a quick trip home, I planned on returning one last time to collect my

belongings and say my final goodbyes to the dear old space. In my haste, I neglected to think of the time.

The last hour of daylight held sway when I pushed out into the open. Considering the risk, I should not

have chanced it, but I stepped away from the back staircase and began to walk home.

Henry Day stood not a dozen feet ahead, looking directly at me and the crack beneath the library.

Like a cornered hare, I reacted instinctively, running straight at him and then veering off sharply into the

street. He moved not a single step. His dulled reflexes failed him. I ran through town with complete

disregard for any people, crossed lawns with sprinklers spritzing the dry grass, leapt chainlink fences,

tore in front of a moving car or two. I did not stop until deep in the woods, then collapsed on the ground,

panting, laughing un-til tears fell. The look of surprise, anger, and fear on his face. He had no idea who I

was. All I had to do was go back later for the book, and that would be the end of the story.

• C H A P T E R 3 5 •

"The monster never breathes," the composer Berlioz supposedly laid about the organ, but I found

the opposite to be true. When I played I felt alive and at one with the machine, as if exhaling the music.

Tess and Edward visited the studio to hear the lengthening shape of my composition and at the end of

the performance my son said, "You were moving the same as I was breathing." Over the course of a

year, I worked on the symphony during what hours I could steal, regenerating it constantly from the

desire to confess, seeking to craft a texture that would allow me to explain. I felt that if she could but

hear my story in the music, Tess would surely understand and forgive. In my studio, I could take refuge

at the keyboard. Lock the door and draw the curtains to feel safe and whole again. Lose myself, find

myself, in the music.

By the springtime, I had secured a small orchestra—a wind ensemble from Duquesne, timpani from

Carnegie-Mellon, a few local musicians—to perform the piece when it was completed. After Edward

had finished first grade in June, Tess took him for a two-week visit to her cousin Penny's to give me time

alone in the house to finish my symphony—a work about a child trapped in his silence, how the sounds

could never get out of his own imagination, living in two worlds, the internal life locked to all

communication with outside reality.

After struggling for years to find the music for that stolen child, I fi-nally finished. The score lay

spread out across the organ, the scrawled notes on the staves a marvel of mathematical beauty and

precision. Two stories told at the same time—the inner life and the outer world in counterpoint. My

method was not to juxtapose each chord with its double, for that is not reality. Sometimes our thoughts

and dreams are more real than the rest of our experience, and at other moments that which happens to

us overshad-ows anything we might imagine. I had not been able to write fast enough to capture the

sounds in my head, notes that flowed from deep within, as if half of me had been composing, and the

other half acting as amanuensis. I had yet to fully transcribe the musical shorthand and to assign all of the

instrumentation—tasks that might take months of rehearsal to perfect—but the initial process of setting

down the bones of the symphony had made me giddy and exhausted, as if in a waking dream. Its

relentless logic, strange to the ordinary rules of language, seemed to me what I had been hoping to write

all along.

At five o'clock that afternoon, hot and wrung-out, I went to the kitchen for a bottle of beer, and

drank it on the way upstairs. My plan was a shower, another beer with dinner, and then back to work.

In the bedroom closet, the empty spaces where her clothes had been reminded me of Tess, and I wished

she had been there to share the sudden burst of creativity and accomplishment. Moments after stepping

into the hot shower, I heard a loud crash downstairs. Without turning off the water, I stepped out,

wrapped a towel around my waist, and hurried to investigate. One of the windows in the living room had

been broken, and glass lay all over the rug. A breeze flapped the curtains. Half naked and dripping wet,

I stood there puzzled, until a sudden discordant hammering of the piano keys frightened me, as if a cat