Love and Gravity Read online

  “Who’s there?”

  “Spell.”

  “Spell who?”

  “W-H-O.”

  “Good one, kiddo.” Andrew chuckled and handed his daughter her cello. The instrument was scaled for her size and looked like a doll’s toy in his hands. “Let’s start from the top, shall we?”

  She rested the hand-carved maple cello on her chest. “Ready.”

  Andrew pushed up the sleeve of his plaid sweater and checked the time on his 1960s Patek Philippe Calatrava, the latest addition to his collection of vintage timepieces. He explained to Andrea, almost as often as he told her knock-knock jokes, that watches and cellos were kindred spirits. Both measured time’s pulse. The former expressed it with gears and springs, the latter with strings and notes.

  “What time is it?” Andrea asked.

  “Three-thirty. Are you tired? We can call it a day if you want.”

  She swung her legs from the stool and considered her options. She had finished her warm-up of scales, arpeggios, and long tones, practiced her Popper études, and gone over her repertoire twice. SpongeBob, however, wasn’t on until four.

  “Nah. I’m good, Andrew. Let’s start.” Andrea’s s’s whistled out of the gap where her two front teeth had fallen out.

  “You’re the boss, birthday girl. But please, I’ve told you a million times. Don’t call me Andrew.”

  “Okay, Andrew.” She grinned and curved her fingers around her pernambuco bow.

  Andrew rolled his eyes and positioned his 1914 Neuner and Hornsteiner cello between his legs. He tapped his daughter’s shoulder with his bow and pointed to the full-length mirror leaning against the wall. “And watch your posture this time, missy.”

  Andrea nodded as though she meant it. No matter how many times her father explained the importance of being aware of her posture, arm motion, bow position, and finger height when she played, she loathed checking her reflection. Music was so much easier to see when her eyes were closed. The mirror’s only practical use, as far as she was concerned, was to make sure that she didn’t play Tchaikovsky or Bach while wearing a chocolate milk moustache.

  Andrew pressed the red button on his mini audio recorder and gave Andrea her cue with a wink. She winked back. She arranged her fingertips over the fingerboard and drew the bow across the cello’s strings.

  The silky strains of “The Butterfly Lovers,” a song inspired by an ancient legend thought to be the Chinese equivalent of Romeo and Juliet, flowed out of the two cellos. Notes, sweet and floral like perfectly steeped green tea, swirled around the music room. They twirled in the spot where the grand piano that belonged to Andrea’s mother used to be and drifted past the framed concert posters her dad had accumulated before his early retirement.

  AN EVENING WITH ANDREW LOUVIERE

  CHRISTMAS WITH THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC AND ANDREW LOUVIERE

  ANDREW LOUVIERE GIVES BACH

  The last poster was from his farewell performance, a benefit concert for the National Nerve Cancer Foundation before his hair fell out. His auburn curls, as thick and unruly as Andrea’s, had since grown back. Remission had sounded like a scary word when he first told her about it, but it became her favorite when she learned what it meant.

  The Butterfly Lovers’ tale swelled around them, finding and filling every corner of the music room. Listening to Andrew Louviere play, no one would have guessed that his limb-sparing surgery had left him with a metal rod in his bow arm. But he heard his flaws more sharply than anyone else did. After his surgery, he played only for an audience of one. He told Andrea to listen closely and learn from his mistakes, but all she ever heard was the joy in his strings. It echoed the happiness coursing through hers.

  The telephone ripped the Butterfly Lovers apart. Andrew pressed pause on the recorder and answered it. When his irises brightened from slate to sea blue, Andrea knew that it wasn’t her mother on the other end of the line.

  Andrew clasped his hand over the receiver. “Sorry, kiddo. Do you mind if we take a break? I need to take this call.”

  Andrea fixed her eyes on her glittery purple sneakers and shrugged. “Sure.”

  He ruffled her hair and walked out of the room. “Hi, babe,” he whispered. “I’ve missed you, too. How was the seminar?”

  Andrea ran her forefinger over the cello’s purfling, the inlaid border that prevented cracks from spreading through the instrument’s wood. She dug a chewed fingernail into it. If someone had invented something similar for families, she was convinced that hers would not have cracked. She dipped her bow onto the cello’s strings and lifted it in a brisk spiccato style, hurling the opening strains of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” out the door. Her dad hated heavy metal as much as she enjoyed giving it a classical twist. Today, the song wrestled with her fingers. It had been ten months since her parents’ divorce, but it still rang in her ears and made everything sound a little off-key.

  New notes nudged her fingertips and tempted her to stray from the percussive strains she knew by heart. She chased them over the fingerboard. She could never resist the promise of a shiny new song for long. Her father urged her to write her compositions down, but Andrea wasn’t convinced it was necessary. The music came and went as it pleased and by the time he got her to sit still at her desk, it was gone. She flipped through her dad’s music sheets and filled their staff lines with fluffy striped cats instead.

  Andrea glided her bow over the cello and made the new tune speak. Finding its notes was like popping a Jelly Belly into her mouth and guessing its flavor. The last three tasted like a mix of green apple, cinnamon, and French vanilla. The song twisted and turned, and just when she thought that it was trying to be happy, it squeezed a fat, hot tear through her lashes. She looked up at the mirror and followed the tear’s path down her reflection’s cheek. A bright white light streaked over the wall behind her. Andrea jumped up and knocked her cello to the floor.

  The wall grew dark. Andrea crept to it and gave it a poke. Acoustic foam pushed against her fingers. She exhaled. Her dad was right. She was tired.

  His laugh frothed through the doorway. The sound was still new to Andrea. It was half an octave higher than the chuckle he reserved for her knock-knock jokes. He had found it three months earlier in the cereal aisle when a five-foot-four Pilates instructor’s slender hand collided into his as they both reached for the last box of gluten-free organic muesli. He let Sylvia Miller Takashi have the cereal and went home with Froot Loops, her phone number, and a giggle that made him sound a lot younger than forty-two. Andrea hated it instantly.

  She clamped her hands over her ears and ran up to her room.

  Four leather-clad cellists flicked their long blond hair from their usual spot on her bedroom’s purple wall. On any other day, she would have smiled back at the poster of the Finnish heavy metal cello quartet. She stomped past Apocalyptica to her desk and yanked its drawer open. Johann Sebastian Bach greeted her from inside it. She pulled out the small red Moleskine journal with less care than it deserved. The boyish laughter burrowing into her middle ear didn’t give her time to feel guilty.

  The notebook had come in a FedEx packet a week ago, along with a pop-up card that sang a tinny version of “Happy Birthday.” Julia, Andrea’s mother, let Hallmark do the talking for her but scribbled the last two words at the bottom of the card herself.

  Love, Mom

  Andrea imagined her mother saying them out loud. Her voice was naturally clipped, and Andrea always had to search her eyes to tell if she was happy, angry, or sad. Andrea fidgeted by the phone every Saturday, waiting to hear it. Their weekly talks were brief, just as they’d been when Julia lived at home.

  “You’re lucky, Andrea,” Julia had said one damp afternoon when Andrea was five and still played the piano. Of the few words she spoke to Andrea in a day, these were the three that she said most often. Julia never said them with a smile. “This is all so easy for you, isn’t it?”

  “Is it supposed to be hard?” Andrea asked, her fingers dancing
over the grand piano’s keyboard.

  “Yes.”

  Andrea did not know much about envy then. She just knew that being “lucky” made Julia carve a stiff smile whenever she played a piano piece better than Julia did. Andrea switched to the cello as soon as she was big enough to hold one.

  Her dad did not try to stop Julia when she left them to live in New York. Andrea did. She couldn’t get her mother to like her more if she wasn’t around.

  Andrea cracked open the journal Julia had sent. She did not know whether her mother had selected it because it was an easy gift to mail or because the wind had magically carried the words she sobbed into her pillow each evening to Julia’s Upper East Side apartment. She didn’t bother to find out. She was just happy to find a friend she could talk to. She named him after her favorite composer. Johann Sebastian Bach was hard to spell, but she had stuck with it. “Diary” was boring.

  Her strawberry-scented pen trembled over one of Bach’s crisp, white pages. An army of words trampled over one another on their way to the pen’s tip. She gripped her pen, forming bold block letters the way Mrs. Leary had taught her in penmanship class. Andrea stopped writing and flung the pen across the room. She was going to burst before she wrote down everything boiling inside her. There was a quicker way.

  Andrea pulled her second cello out of her closet. She spread rosin over its bow’s hairs, letting the dark amber cake coat each strand to help them grip the cello’s strings. She rested the cello against her chest. Its shape and weight were identical to her practice instrument, but she could tell that it was not her old friend. Its polished maple felt colder. She drew her bow over the steel strings her dad had meticulously selected to produce the best sound in a large and highly reverberant room—the exact sort of place she did her best to avoid. Every string was out of tune.

  The last time she had used the instrument was when she performed at the San Francisco Symphony’s “Sounds of Music” Youth Concert at the Davies Symphony Hall earlier that month. Her dad had bribed her to accept the orchestra’s invitation with an autographed copy of Apocalyptica’s latest album. Nothing less would have swayed her. She loved the band almost as much as she hated performing in front of an audience, especially one made up of fidgeting fourth graders.

  Andrea switched on her pocket-size chromatic tuner and made her bow speak over the A string. A-sharp flashed on the tuner’s digital screen. She twisted the peg at the top of the cello’s neck while plucking the string and turned the knobs of the fine adjusters on the instrument’s ebony tailpiece to get the proper tension. She played the string and checked the tuner. A digital A appeared on its screen. She tuned the other three strings by ear and dove into the prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major. She stopped after three notes. They were too happy. She shook the stiffness from her wrist and let her bow take the lead.

  Green apples, cinnamon, and warm vanilla drifted out of the cello’s steel strings. She held her chin up and squared her jaw. She refused to let the song make her cry again. White light flashed over the wall on the opposite end of her bedroom. Her bow screeched over the D string. The light retreated into the purple wallpaper. If Andrea was older, she might have been relieved to watch it disappear. But she was seven and the Tooth Fairy had just left a dollar under her pillow. She believed in magic, and this time she wanted to see more.

  Andrea coaxed the song back with steady bow strokes. White light glowed over the wall and expanded to the size of one of her mom’s Christian Louboutin shoe boxes. She inhaled sharply and caught a whiff of a cool evening, ripe apples, and damp grass seeping through her wall. A faint greasy smell that reminded her of burning bacon wafted after it. She leaned closer. A jagged glowing crack broke through the wall. Shadows turned into shapes behind it.

  A candle.

  A window.

  A bed.

  A desk.

  A boy.

  Andrea clung to her cello to keep from jumping out of her skin. The boy, who appeared to be around her age, was hunched over his desk as Andrea played. His wavy dark hair curled at the collar of his loose linen shirt. A fire, brighter than the flame of his half-melted candle, flickered in his hazel eyes as he assembled a miniature wooden cart. Andrea recognized the look. She saw it whenever she chanced upon her reflection while she played the cello.

  The boy hammered a wooden wheel into place. Andrea strained to hear the slightest thud, thump, or scrape. Only silence escaped through the crack. The boy pounded away, equally deaf to Andrea’s music. The candle in the corner of his desk flickered. The boy sheltered its flame with one hand and reached for the window’s turnbuckle with the other. His fingers froze over the wrought-iron handle. His eyes shifted in their sockets and met Andrea’s. He choked on a silent gasp.

  Andrea raised her bow and gave him a small wave. It seemed like the polite thing to do. The boy tumbled off his chair. He scrambled to his feet, his lips quivering. He wrangled his mouth into a lopsided grin and waved back. He took a step forward.

  Andrea leapt out of her chair and staggered back from him. He raised his hand, gesturing her to come closer. Her legs refused to do anything except tremble. The boy grabbed three small brown objects from his desk. From where Andrea stood, they looked like pieces of bread. The boy grinned and tossed them over his head. His bright hazel eyes twinkled as he juggled. One by one, the pieces vanished as they fell into his hand. Andrea gasped. The boy held his empty palms out to her, beaming proudly. A chunk of bread slipped out of his sleeve and fell to the floor. The boy’s cheeks burned bright red. He scratched the back of his head and chewed the corner of his lower lip. He lowered his eyes and peeked at Andrea through his thick lashes.

  Andrea stared at him. The boy’s sleight of hand trick had failed, but not before his magic had sailed through her wall. It found her chest and melted the lump of fear inside it. She exhaled. A chuckle hitched a ride with her breath, tickled the back of her throat, and bubbled out of her. She clapped for her new friend. She wasn’t sure if the boy could hear her applause, but she hoped that he could tell that he had made her happy.

  A smile spread across the boy’s handsome face. The golden embers in his eyes burned brighter. He plucked the chunk of bread from the floor. He held it to the crack and swept his other hand over it. Two more pieces of bread appeared on his palm. He stuffed them into his mouth and grinned.

  Andrea burst into laughter.

  The boy inched forward, his ruddy cheeks stuffed with bread, as though he was approaching a tiny animal that he did not want to scare away.

  Andrea did the same. The glowing borders of the crack dimmed. Wallpaper crept over the hole between her and the boy, shrinking it to the size of a deck of cards. The boy ran to the wall, questions swirling in his irises. A purple bunny print sealed the crack before any of them made it to his lips.

  “Wait!” Andrea sprinted to the wall and banged her fists on it. “Come back. Who are you?”

  Knuckles rapped on her door. “Andrea?” her dad said. “Are you okay in there?”

  Andrea did not have enough breath to answer.

  The doorknob rattled. “Andrea? Let me in.”

  She walked to the door. That is, she thought she did. There was an equal chance that she crawled. She couldn’t bring herself to remember or care. She unlocked the door, her head clouded with apple-scented fog.

  Her dad crouched and cupped her shoulders. “What was all that shouting about? Are you all right?”

  “There’s someone in my room.”

  “What?” He jumped to his feet. “Where?”

  Andrea threw her arms around his waist and pointed to the wall. “There.”

  Her father frowned. “In the wall?”

  She nodded. “There was a crack and there was a boy inside it.”

  Andrew knelt beside her. “Listen, kiddo. I know you don’t like that I’m dating Sylvia. I understand. Really, I do. But you don’t have to make up stories just to—”

  “I’m not lying. He was real. I saw him. He juggle
d bread and made it vanish. He knew magic. You have to believe me, Daddy.” Andrea choked on tears. “Please.”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t cry.” Her dad dried her eyes with his handkerchief. “Why don’t we go for a walk?”

  Walks were Andrew Louviere’s universal solution. Before his retirement, along with handfuls of orange M&M’s, it shook off his nerves before his concerts and his excess of adrenaline after them. After his wife left, he liked to take Andrea on long ones around their neighborhood. San Francisco’s steep and sloping streets bought him time to answer Andrea’s questions about when her mother was coming home.

  “Why don’t you believe me?” Andrea asked.

  Her father wrapped his arms around her and sighed into her hair. “I do believe you, kiddo.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pinky swear?”

  Andrew hooked his little finger around Andrea’s pinky. “Pinky swear.”

  Andrea laid her cheek against his sweater and breathed in the scent of Ivory soap and citrusy cologne. “Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Olive.”

  “Olive who?”

  “Olive you, Daddy.” She hugged her father tight and thought about the story she would tell Johann Sebastian Bach that evening about the boy who lived behind her bedroom wall.

  —

  There was a new book on Andrew Louviere’s nightstand the next day: Imaginary Friends: Should Parents Worry? At dinner, Andrew asked Andrea about her friend’s name. Andrea stabbed the vegetarian meatloaf Sylvia had sent over and told him it was George. A pea rolled across her plate. Andrew smiled and said that it was okay to invite George to come with them when they went on a picnic with Sylvia at Crissy Field that Sunday. He told her to tell George to bring a sweater in case it got cold. Andrea drank her chocolate milk and drowned out his voice with the tinkling of four ice cubes.

  Be patient and tough; one day this pain will be useful to you.

  —OVID