“Did he listen to you play?”
She nodded. “Oh, yes. He’s the reason my dream is what it is.”
I frowned, reaching for one of the bottles of water we’d packed and cracking it open. “What do you mean?”
“He took me to a performance at Carnegie Hall when I was eleven.” She shook her head, eyes lighting up as she reached for her crystal. “It was when Daniel Barenboim played with the Staatskapelle Berlin string quartet.”
“Wow.”
She laughed. “Right? I remember sitting there in the audience, dressed up and holding my dad’s hand, mouth hanging open pretty much the entire performance.”
“I would have been catching flies, too.”
Sarah chuckled. “It was so incredible, and so moving. One moment I’d be smiling and laughing, bouncing with the music. The next? I’d be quietly crying. And my dad squeezed my hand and never let go the entire time.” She softened at that, picking at the grass near the edge of the blanket. “When the show was over and everyone got up to make their way out, he made me stay and sit. And when the theatre was nearly empty, he pointed up at the stage, and he said, ‘You belong up there. That’s going to be you one day.’ And from that moment on, it was my dream to make his words come true.”
The breeze picked up, blowing what was left of the spring blooms on the dogwood above us. Little puffs of white floated down and around us, surfing the wind until they landed on the grass or our blanket. I just watched Sarah pick at the grass until Rojo shifted, her head rolling over onto Sarah’s leg. She smiled at that, rubbing behind Rojo’s ear.
Suddenly, it all made sense — her passion, her drive, her optimism when it came to Carnegie, despite all the obstacles life had handed her. She could have quit after her father passed, or after her injury, or after her professor assaulted her. But instead, she’d taken that pain and used it as fuel. She’d made a promise to her father and to herself, and no matter how out of reach it seemed to get on that stage in New York, she was going to do it.
She believed it. I believed it.
It would happen. I knew that more than anything in my entire life.
I watched her petting my dog as all that sank in, as my heart swelled with respect and care. I’d never talked to anyone in my entire life the way I talked with Sarah, the way she talked with me. How was it that we’d only known each other a few months, and yet, she was so easy to open up to, to show my scars to?
And her scars didn’t scare me. They looked just like mine. I understood them — the shiny skin, the curve of the mark, the deep branding of the cut. I knew it all too well.
This.
This was what I missed.
Her stories, her unique way of looking at life, her optimism, her unmovable belief that she would make her dreams come true. Sarah was unlike any woman I’d met before. She was positive despite the cards life had handed her. Where I broke under the tragedies of my life, she flourished under hers.
“Anyway,” she said, shaking her head as she turned to me. “What about you? What are your dreams?”
I let my head fall back as a bark of a laugh left my chest. When I looked back at Sarah, her brows were drawn in. “Wait, are you serious?”
“Of course, I’m serious.”
I laughed again. “Sarah, I’m thirty-seven years old.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” She scrunched up her nose. “You can have dreams no matter how old you are. Surely, there must be something you want to achieve, somewhere you want to go, some place you want to see?”
The way she was looking at me, it was the first time in my life that I felt ashamed of my answer to that question. I’d always just embraced it, accepted that my life was never going to turn out the way I thought it would when I was twelve. My family was gone. The woman I wanted to marry married someone else. I pissed away my talent instead of putting myself to work in Manhattan. I was a mess in every sense of the word, and I’d always been okay with it.
Until I had to answer to Sarah.
“The only thing I want is to survive,” I said, and then I sort of scoffed. “And honestly, even that comes in waves.”
Sarah’s face crumpled at that. “Reese…”
“I don’t mean it like that,” I said quickly, yanking the hair tie from where it was holding my hair at the nape of my neck. I ran my hands through it, situating it again before replacing the tie. “I just mean that my time for dreaming has come and gone. I just want to play piano and make enough money to pay my bills.” I looked at Rojo, who was panting from laying in the sun, her eyes closed and little mouth turned up into what could be a smile. “And take care of that one, now, too.”
Sarah rubbed Rojo’s head, but her mouth was pulled to the side when she faced me again. The way the sun streamed through the tree above us, it highlighted her mocha skin in little streams of gold, the flecks in her eyes coming to life with each blow of the wind.
“You’re not too old to dream, Reese,” she said softly. “But if you’re happy, that’s all that matters.”
I internally laughed at that. Happy. When was the last time I could say that word in a sentence that described how I felt? But, this was just another difference between us, Sarah and I. She was young, she had her whole life ahead of her. And I did not.
My time had passed, and whether I wanted to be in Mount Lebanon teaching piano to prep school kids or not didn’t matter. I had a job, and a house that was my own. I had my health — for the most part, though I knew smoking wasn’t going to help me keep that statement accurate for long.
I wasn’t necessarily happy, but I was okay.
That was enough for me.
“Have you ever written a song?” I asked her, changing the subject away from me. “For piano? Have you ever composed?”
Sarah took a deep breath, eyes floating up to the tree branches above us. “Only once. After my dad died.” She chuckled. “It was awful, but it meant something to me.”
“You should play it for me sometime.”
“That will never happen,” she said quickly. “It’s really hard for me to create music. I can play it, but asking me to figure out how to build a song, how to find a melody that conveys what I’m feeling? It’s like asking me to design a website. I know nothing.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “You just have to have the right inspiration. I didn’t write my first song until after my family died, either. And the first real one I wrote that I was proud of came when I least expected it.”
“Who was it for?”
Her question hit me hard in the chest, because she could have asked a number of other things — when did you write it, where did you play it, what kind of song, have you ever played it for anyone — but instead, she asked who it was for.
Because a song was always written with someone else in mind.
I didn’t answer, and we both knew I didn’t have to. She knew who the song was for. And I was so painfully aware of how pathetic I was in that moment that I wished I’d never admitted to writing a song at all.
Another gust of wind set the dogwood blooms flying, and one landed in a fold of Sarah’s scarf. I leaned over, plucking it free before I even realized I was doing it.