#phoebe lost a piece of her heart when melody left and now melody is filling it with her essence | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spookyspaghettisundae · 7 years

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Bright Light

His granddaughter Phoebe always reminded Albert of his dead wife, not only because she had been born the day Lucy had died. She never reminded him more of the love of his life than when she played the piano. They both had the same heartfelt playing style and graceful look, it almost seemed like a warm light was embracing them when they played. He could practically feel Lucy’s presence in Phoebe’s music, especially when she played on her grandmother’s piano, like she was doing now.

The first time Lucy heard her beloved instrument was in the mid-fifties. About a decade after the second world war, things were still quite tough for almost everyone, so she had no hope of buying the piano that had enchanted her. She was on her way home from the butcher, a baby in one arm and a toddler on her other hand, when she walked by the second-hand shop. She had, of course, heard other pianos being played before and had adored their sound, but none of them had touched her so deeply.

Almost unwillingly, she entered the shop and listened to a customer playing while the owner, Mr Roberts, was waiting next to him. Her older boy sat on the floor, playing with a used toy he had just found on a crowded shelf, but Lucy barely noticed that. Once the customer had finished, Mr Roberts told him the instrument’s price, which as he said, included the transport and the tuning of the piano in its new home. Lucy knew right away that that was more money than Albert and she could put aside in many months, and with a heart that was both filled with the sadness of a loss of something she had never owned and the joy of finding something that elated her entirely, she left the store.

After dinner that night, Lucy told Albert about her experience and her new-found passion, not to persuade him to buy the instrument – she knew they couldn’t afford it – but because they shared everything. Listening to her voice raising to seldom heights while she was speaking, he closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair until she had finished her tale. When he opened them again, he had made up his mind.

“We will buy you this piano,” he said.

“But we can’t afford it, love.”

“We will spend as little money as possible and even stop eating meat until we can.”

“Don’t be silly. You need the strength for your work.”

“I need your happiness more.”

“It will be gone by the time we have saved enough money.”

“We will see about that. If you’re supposed to have this piano, it will still be there, waiting for you.”

Even in his reminiscing, Albert had to laugh at this point. When he told Phoebe about this little detail not too long ago, she frowned and said that you didn’t need meat at all because there were ways to compensate nutritionally. She would know, she was, after all, a vegetarian. He had smiled back then too, telling her that those were different times, resources were limited, and anything beyond a potato stew with onions and carrots was a luxury, even the pieces of meagre meat that went with it from time to time.

Then his thoughts went back to his dead wife and her piano. After making up his mind, it took them three months of tightening their belts until they had saved enough money.

The morning she had the money, Lucy ran to the little shop with her heart beating so fast she was a bit worried she would have to rest before she could speak to the owner. Yet suddenly, her heart sank to the lowest levels of her stomach and almost stopped beating at all, when she looked at the spot where the piano used to be. It was gone, and instead there was a dining room table there.

“Of course, I’m too late. Silly me, believing it would still be here.”

“What was that, dear?”

Lucy turned around with a start and looked into Mr Roberts’ friendly face. “Oh, it’s just that you had a piano for sale about three months ago. But it’s gone now. I’m too late.”

“You are actually not too late at all. We just moved the piano to the back because no one was interested in it in months. Music is a luxury many people can’t afford these days.”

“It is in the back? Can I see it? Maybe it’s a different one. I mean that beautiful black piano that sounded like a ray of sunshine.”

“We only had one piano for sale all year, we must be talking about the same one.”

“I need to make sure, regardless.”

After he had led her to the back, Lucy saw with delight that it was indeed the same piano, but she asked Mr Roberts to play it for her, just to see whether it still warmed her heart. He offered her to play it herself instead, so she admitted with slight embarrassment that she couldn’t play the piano yet. He just smiled, sat down, and played a simple tune. But even in its simplicity, the melody rose from the instrument like the morning sun.

Next thing she knew, Lucy was standing at the cash register. She felt slightly upset because the price displayed on it was clearly wrong. It was lower than it had been three months ago, so much so that Lucy could have bought a big pot roast that very night to celebrate the acquisition of her beloved piano. When Lucy pointed the error out, Mr Roberts told her that, since nobody had bought the instrument in months, he had lowered the price two weeks ago. Lucy insisted on paying the original price, and the shop owner insisted on her paying the new price. They almost couldn’t agree on the sale until Mr Roberts offered her to add two very important books to go with the piano for free. Those books would be used in Lucy’s family for generations – they were the two first books of a whole series of piano lessons: a beginners’ guide and one for the intermediate player, which was enough for all the ladies of the family to fall in love with the instrument for the rest of their lives.

The shop delivered the piano in the afternoon of the same day and after dinner that night, Lucy sat down at the piano for the first time, playing the first of many notes, which immediately became one of her life’s biggest passions. Over the years, Lucy got better and better, and when her three boys were the right age, she tired to teach them, but they just didn’t care for it. So when Lucy had found her one and only daughter – a girl Lucy had in her late thirties, almost ten years after she had had her last boy – climbing onto the piano stool as a mere five year old, Lucy had cried tears of joy because she could finally share her biggest passion with one of her children. She looked at her daughter then, remembering the other time she had cried tears of joy at her sight, which was when she first held her baby daughter in her arms. Lucy had named her after just that emotion. Joy. Her little ray of sunshine born in the summer of love.

Both Joy and her daughter Phoebe would come to share Lucy’s passion and play with the same grace, the same loving concentration, the same fervour Lucy had, and Phoebe was displaying it right now, lost in her own world, surrounded by light. But then she stopped abruptly in the middle of the beautiful melody, shivering slightly, saying, “Sometimes, I almost feel like Grandma Lucy is with me when I play. Even more so when I play her piano. Isn’t that strange? It’s like I can feel her presence. I don’t think it’s bad or anything, but it still frightens me a bit.”

“Don’t be afraid. Even though she never met you, your grandma loved you very much, and she loved this piano. If she visits you, then only to embrace you.”

“It does almost feel like an embrace, like I’m engulfed in a loving bright light.”

“Has she ever shown you that melody? No, of course not, she couldn’t have. Maybe your mother taught it to you when you were younger.”

“What melody? The one I just played? I can’t remember ever hearing it before, except for in my head. It’s been with me ever since I started playing, and lately, it’s been on my mind a lot. I actually played it at the conservatory without even noticing. It slipped into my improv and when one of my professors walked by and heard it, she said that I should work on it as my next composition. I’ve been wondering what to call it, racking my brain, really. But I know now. Since it has always made me think of grandma, I thought I might call it ‘Lucy’, but it didn’t feel quite right. Now I know that its name is ‘Bright Light’, after the feeling I get every time I play it.”

A tear was running down Albert’s cheek when Phoebe said, “Thank you, Grandma Lucy,” and continued playing their song. As the melody rose, the light engulfing her got brighter.

—Submitted by Lone-Eyed

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