24 Sycamore Street
Mr. Leonard was the last person to see seventeen-year-old
Linsey Hart before she vanished into the steamy blue of a
late-summer morning. He was sitting on the black-lacquered
piano bench in the bay window, practicing and singing,
wordlessly, along with the Schumann Kinderscenen. The
window was open only a crack, but Mr. Leonard could still
detect the wormy smell of the sidewalk as the sun struck the
puddles from last night's downpour. He held his fingers over
the keys to listen to the silence between songs, the breath at
the end of the poem lines. Mr. Leonard loved quiet as much
as he loved sound.
The night before, he'd heard her whispering into the
phone, stooped on the wicker rocker on the porch, her long
legs awkwardly folded, so she looked like a strange sort of
beetle in the sick orange light of the streetlamp.
"I can't," she'd said. "They'd worry."
Mr. Leonard wasn't a spy; he merely had insomnia. He
followed all the rules: no alcohol, walking or bicycling for
exercise, warm milk, reading, but not of troublesome
materials—
bed for sleep only, though the book on sleep said bed for
sleep and sex, which wasn't something Mr. Leonard worried
about as a possible pollutant these days. He kept his windows
open. The cicadas rubbed a brisk rhythm; even in death they
were insistent, even calling out their last hope for procreation
they played presto marcato.
"I have it," said Linsey, sweet sotto voce. "I'll bring it."
Then she went inside, her hair a long loose tail behind
her, leaving him alone to wander his house, looking for clues
that might help him dream.
Then it was morning. Mr. Leonard had fallen asleep in an
armchair that smelled of linseed oil and Murphy's. He went
to the piano, because it was always the first person he spoke
to after sleep. He played the Chopin Barcarolle and the first
movement of the Tchaikovsky no. 1 in B-flat Minor, and it
was only just past five; Mr. Leonard could tell by the soft
wash of the light and the hissing of dew just lit on the lawns.
He started the second movement of the Tchaikovsky, then he
paused.
Mr. Leonard resumed playing as Linsey stepped out onto
her front porch in the hard blue light of the early morning,
tucking her long hair—sandy blond, she called it, but
it held
mica glints, almost silver—behind her ears. She pressed
against the piston slide of the screen door to prevent the
usual sigh and thunk as it closed. It was five thirty in the
morning. Mr. Leonard could see her without looking up. This
was something people didn't know about him. There were
many things, speculative and real, that people knew about
Mr. Leonard. They knew he was single and aged—sixty-two,
actually, though the children had simply slipped him into
that category of old person, slightly scary, who gave excessive
amounts of candy at Halloween and therefore was to be tolerated.
They knew he lived in the house his parents had lived
and died in; that his aunt had lived and died in; that a series
of small dogs, shelties, usually, or West Highland whites, had
lived and died in, except for the last, Moonlight. Moonlight
was named after a sonata, though most neighbors thought it
was just an overly romantic appellation bequeathed by a
lonely old man to a runny-eyed dog who was poisoned and
died in the Hopsmiths' garden. His death caused great
speculation
about a number of teens, but the mystery was never
solved.
They knew he was a music teacher for some years at the
middle school, for a single year at the high school before a
combination of budget cuts and the secret of his colon cancer
decided his retirement. He had the first surgery, and couldn't
play for a week; never mind that eating became even less of a
pleasure than it had been. But he was still alive, despite the
dire suggestions of Dr. Meade, who called him personally
after Mr. Leonard told the receptionist, then the nurse, then
the nurse again in consecutive phone calls that he would not
take radiation. He'd rather let it grow back, the way death
always grew, slow consumption of the cells, whole organs, the
eventual, beautiful collapse. It wasn't a fight he could win,
and he didn't want the battle wounds. He rarely ever hurt
unbearably, except when digesting, and that was a dull pain,
a squeezing, a roughhousing of his insides. As long as he
could play, as long as he had enough money and jasmine tea
in the afternoons and could tote new books from the
library—
alternating fiction and nonfiction like an
assignment—every
Wednesday on his old upright bicycle with a basket. Old-lady
bicycle—it had been his aunt's, his father's sister's,
though she
rarely rode it, so the chain had been a seizure of rust when he
first wheeled it out of the shed.
Mr. Leonard had taken private piano students for some
years, children whose parents evidently were not suspicious
of his linty cardigans or the way he looked just sideways at
almost everyone. They deposited their sleek-haired charges
inside the foyer of the grand Victorian for innocuous training
in culture. Then the students stopped. Mr. Leonard
played his piano, sometimes early in the morning, sometimes
passionately and late at night, sometimes with a languor that
swept across the neighborhood like a wind-borne cloud of
pollen and perfume. Once or twice, new people with money
who had moved in and updated their kitchens with walk-in
Sub-Zeros and ten-burner Viking stoves called the police to
complain about the noise. Rachmaninoff. Brahms. Liszt was
never a problem; Liszt caused children to dance on the
sidewalks,
or sway pleasantly in their dreams after bedtime. Generally,
the police did nothing. Or they rang the doorbell and
asked Mr. Leonard to please close his window, to please play
pianissimo at least (a joke with Beau, the cop who lived
around the corner on Pine. It was Beau's one "music word"—
he'd been one of Mr. L.'s students in middle school), to keep
it down. Mr. Leonard offered them French-press coffee. They
often stopped by the following afternoon for more coffee, and
sat on Mr. Leonard's wide brown front steps as if he needed
protection.
Linsey knew something about Mr. Leonard, something
she had shared with her boyfriend, Timmy, who was supposedly
her former boyfriend since Abigail had convinced her
daughter to break up with him before going to college—that
since he was going to Berkeley, California, and she to Cornell
they shouldn't torture themselves with distance. You're too
young to be so serious, he'd overheard from their porch.
He'd also overheard Linsey telling Timmy this: she knew
that Mr. Leonard sometimes played the piano wearing
inappropriate
attire. Linsey, bless her, hadn't laughed. Never mind
the McGuires, two doors down, who came out to get their
paper in their pj's. Never mind that sometimes Mrs. Copper
nursed her baby in the backyard, and if you kneeled on the
arm of one of the Adirondack chairs on the back deck, you
might see her lifting her blouse for the baby's
mouth—Linsey
had no interest in this spying, she said, she just saw her half
brother Cody in this compromising position. What Linsey
knew about Mr. Leonard was that sometimes he played the
piano, late at night, mind you, or so late morning might have
more claim on the hour than starlight, wearing a ball gown,
blue satin, tight bodice, so his pale skin spilled out over the
top like added lace, or even odder: a slightly yellowed wedding
dress, which Linsey assumed must have belonged to his
mother.
Mr. Leonard watched Linsey pull a folded slip of paper
from the pocket of her jeans. He stopped humming—he only
noticed the humming when everything else had stopped, but
took comfort in knowing that Glenn Gould, too, hummed
when he played; it was a kind of conversation with the
piano—and he could hear Linsey sigh as she read the paper,
then refolded it, then taped it to the pretentious iron mailbox
her stepfather had installed on the front porch, complete
with its own stubby post, and shut the door on the tail of the
note.
Linsey wore a jeans jacket that was too large and too
warm for August and for her slight frame. Mr. Leonard had
always thought of her as a goldfinch, hollow boned, quick
and certain in flight but heavy on the branches. She'd moved
in next door with her family when she was three, when Mr.
Leonard was still a teacher, when he'd imagined he might be
her teacher someday, so he'd let his interest rest on her, a
quiet thing. She'd always had hairdos to match her mother's
then. She'd worn buns pierced with splintery chopsticks
from the Golden Lee Chinese Deli restaurant her family
ordered from every Saturday night. Mr. Leonard could smell
their dinners through the window. They ate on the porch:
moo-shu pork, orange-fried chicken, the sesame and chili oil
scent floating like a casual cloud of conversation from their
table to his. Mr. Leonard didn't like to sit down to eat. He
liked to move, to take a bite from the carefully set plate on
the kitchen counter and go get the paper. Take a bite, then
empty the dishwasher, take a bite, then feed the dog, when he
had one. If he didn't sit down, he didn't have to notice that he
was eating, not really; he didn't have to notice that he was
eating alone.
His next-door neighbors' first few years were peaceful, as
the last few had been. In between, after they lost the boy,
Linsey's
family was loud and angry. Linsey had wept her face
into angry blotches, flinging herself onto the window seat on
the stairwell, which faced Mr. Leonard's house. Linsey's bedroom
wasn't on that side of the house, so for him, it was as if
she never slept. Mr. Leonard heard the yowling, almost catlike,
territorial, of Mr. and Mrs.; he didn't see the slamming
of the front door, but he saw Mr. Hart's back, huge and
hunched like a bear's in a quilted winter coat, as he stalked
away from the house. The ancient glass in the door, an intricate
flower pattern of panes divided by wires and thin strips
of wood, waited while Mr. Hart started his Volvo. But before
he'd backed out, spinning tires and crushed ice over the
unshoveled driveway, the glass began to fall, tuneful shards,
on the wide floorboards of the porch. He saw Linsey later,
picking at the bits of glass as if they held clues. He'd wanted
to push open his window, call out, careful, but of course he
didn't. She was eight, the same age Mr. Leonard had been
when his family folded like a finished fan. Then her father
had moved out, then the new man had moved in.
He watched the family; it was like a field gone fallow,
tilled and hand hewn to remove the rocks, ready for replanting.
The stepfather put in a new door, hauling the cardboardpatched
broken one—thick oak and heavy—to the curb by
himself on Big Trash Day. One August the twins were born,
Toby and Cody, a dark boy and a light boy, the latter bald at
first, then bright blond, the kind of blond that causes casual
touching; people passing in the supermarket reached toward
his mother's cart, took strands between their fingertips before
they knew what they were doing. Then Linsey was a teen, and
she had a boyfriend. Mr. Leonard had liked him at first; he'd
been one of his own students, Timmy, heavy of chest and
quick to smile, chocolate brown eyes, a good laugh. He
laughed a lot at lessons. He didn't practice. He had a strong
ear and could plunk out melodies, finger by finger, but had
no interest in picking at the tight weave of himself in search
of loops of talent. That was how it worked for most people:
they could find enough talent to wind together, to braid with
rote skill, they could find pleasure in the music that way, even
if they would never give much in performance. Pleasure in
the music was something. It was like a child athlete growing
into adulthood, perhaps running a little faster to catch the
commuter train. The real talents—bundles and ropes of it,
the kind of talent that made playing not a choice, once they
found their fingers, but a requirement, even if they played
passionately until college and then gave it up, always feeling
the music in their fingers, in their arms, music like ghost
limbs—they were rare.
He'd seen the breakup through the glass. Linsey leaning
in toward Timmy, touching his face, then removing herself,
fingers first, then arms, then she got up from the wicker love
seat and sat on a chair by herself, wrapped only in its arms.
He saw them kissing good-bye, like they always did, mouths
fit together like wheel and cog, only their bodies told the
rest,
space between them, chests breathing independently.
Early that spring, Mr. Leonard had watched Linsey and
Timmy holding hands on the porch swing like a fifties couple,
courting. He'd seen the way they made their arms and
legs fit together, a single body for so many limbs. He'd seen
the way the love flared off them, dazzling light. Now he saw
Linsey's sadness. Again. The window seat, like a crumpled
child.
Mr. Leonard was a half-breed, his father a famous Jewish
conductor and an agnostic, his mother a lapsed Catholic
who'd died of anaphylactic shock in the picnic-blanketed
audience while her husband wound his arms passionately
around Mahler's no. 8 with the Tanglewood Festival orchestra.
Molly Leonard had never been stung by a bee before that
day, at the renowned summer festival of outdoor concerts.
Perhaps it was a paper wasp, perhaps an ordinary honeybee,
perhaps she had squashed it absently with her thigh or perhaps
it was aggressive, rising from the earth with a mindless
malice—either way, Mr. Leonard was with a nanny at the
pine-beamed rental cottage. He was eight. He would swim in
Long Pond, he would drink pink lemonade, hand-squeezed
by the nanny, lemons and pink grapefruit, quite a lot of sugar
slushing at the bottom of the striped glass; he would change
into his pale blue cotton pajamas—my little maestro, his
mother called him—and eat nine squares more Lindt milk
chocolate than was allowed, reading The Adventures of Tintin,
while his babysitter talked with her boyfriend on the
phone, winding the cord around and around. He would sleep
once more before he knew his mother was dead.
Mr. Leonard would've like to have talked to Linsey's
mother—
no longer Mrs. Hart; now she was Mrs. Stein, and she had
taken a course at the reform synagogue for non-Jews who
had married in and didn't want to convert, but wanted to
give their homes some Jewishness (Mr. Leonard thought
about this: some Jewishness, like a twig from an olive tree:
like a spray can of something, eau de prewar Eastern Europe:
or better yet: German Jew, crystals hung in the windows,
Viennese cakes with fig fillings), so she made Shabbat dinner
on Fridays. Linsey loved eating the challah; Mr. Leonard
knew this because she often took hunks out to the wicker
landings of the porch, fed them to Timmy, before Timmy was
banished—Mr. Leonard would've like to have told Mrs. Stein
not to push her daughter so hard. To let her stay with Timmy:
if they were going to split up, it would happen. Linsey was
young, but she wasn't stupid. Abortion was legal—for now,
anyway. Children lived together now, they decided whether
they fit together like puzzle pieces or whether they ought to
share only meals and conversations and maybe sex but not
the rest of life. The rest of life—Mr. Leonard
thought—should
belong to Linsey. Her mother was making the worst mistake,
trying to conduct a soloist, trying to instruct her daughter's
life in a way it could not be forced to go. He had always been
cordial with the Harts/Steins. He brought their papers up to
the porch—stacked them neatly under the rocker, bundled
the mail just inside the screen door, feeling presumptuous
but helpful—when they went away on vacation. They didn't
ask him to do this, but he knew they appreciated it. Once, a
hundred years ago when she was still a girl and he was still a
teacher, Linsey had been sent over with a plate of brownies as
a thank-you. She'd been eating one she had slipped out from
under the cellophane as he came to the door. He heard her
coming, but let her ring the bell anyway.
"For you," she'd said. "Um, for the mail."
He'd wanted to swipe the crumb from the corner of her
mouth. He'd wanted to tie the lace of her pink sneaker,
unlooped and dangerous.
"Thank you," he said, taking a single brownie, not the
whole plate.
"No," said Linsey. "All of them."
"Okay," he said. "Except this one's for you." He removed
another, just three left. The brownie tasted of cocoa, and
vaguely metallic, like mix. Not unpleasing.
"Did you make them?"
Linsey was eating again. "Mmm," she said.
"Do you want milk?"
"I have to go back," she said.
"I could give you a lesson," he said, and Linsey looked
puzzled, though she'd been eyeing the piano through the
curved glass of the turret.
"No," she said. "I play flute. Bye." She turned and ran, and
Mr. Leonard watched with trepidation, but she didn't trip.
The brownies had come on a paper plate, so there was nothing
to return.
Now Mr. Leonard watched Linsey leave her porch. She'd
slung her little black backpack over one shoulder and she
looked small under the weight of the morning light. The zipper
wasn't closed all the way; he imagined the contents spilling
out like food from an interrupted mouthful. She stepped
out to the street as if waiting for something. Then she started
down Sycamore, sneakers almost silent on the sidewalk. She
walked past Mr. Leonard's house, and then she was gone.
The houses were quiet, his and hers. He fingered the keys
without pressing for a while, then allowed himself a Lully
minuet, softer than it should be, but innocent. It was almost
nine by the time the twins slammed open the door, running
for the camp bus. Mr. Leonard was playing a requiem now;
he felt like something was ending. Cody and Toby kicked the
screen door on the porch and let in the quick, hot breeze. A
single yellow leaf fell from the dogwood in front of their
house. As the boys shoved each other along toward the bus,
legs long and brown, one face pinched, the other open, the
note in the mailbox stirred. The breeze broke the tape's kiss
with the iron, tugged the corner free from the lid. Mr. Leonard
didn't see the paper as it floated free, then landed with
fateful precision, the edge slipping between the floorboards
of the porch. The door opened again, Mrs. Stein calling after
her boys, "I love you! Have fun!" and the note fell into the
lightless land between the porch's latticed-in legs and the
concrete foundation of the house.
Later, when they came to question him, Mr. Leonard
would try to be faithful to the morning. He remembered the
note, but assumed they already knew. He remembered a lot
of things, but only answered their questions. By then, the
word "vanished" had wafted into his windows like the stray
spittle that worked its way from rain through the screens. But
vanished, Mr. Leonard thought, was a relative term. Linsey
knew where she was, he thought, Linsey knew what she was
seeing and hearing, what tastes touched her tongue.
He'd seen her seeing him. It wasn't as if he could help
himself—it wasn't as if he was really living in his
body—
sometimes at the piano, sometimes inside the music. Mr.
Leonard knew something about Linsey, something secret.
But then, he had secrets of his own; he understood, and he
wasn't telling.