The Gathering Dark (3 page)

Not long after that, Pike had died and left them her college fund and the piano. The piano had arrived in a flurry of sweating, cursing men. She’d slept under it that night, rolling her purple sleeping bag out beneath the gleaming mahogany, staring at her five-year-old reflection in the polished brass that tipped the legs. The next day, she’d begged her mother to let her take piano lessons, but it was her father who finally relented.

“If it’s going to take up half our living room, at least one of us should know what to do with it,” he pointed out.

“Fine,” her mother snapped. “But if you start complaining every time you see me writing a check for those lessons, then so help me God—” And off they’d gone.

Again.

That time, Keira hadn’t even bothered with the sleeping bag. She’d just curled up on the worn carpet beneath the piano and put her hands over her ears. She’d fallen asleep to the sound of her parents arguing, as she huddled beneath the protective bulk of the piano.

Of course, once she’d actually started the lessons—once her
parents realized that the white keys were practically extensions of her own fingers—no one had complained about the piano at all.

Talent,
she heard them whispering, long after she was supposed to have gone to sleep.
Scholarship.
And then, eventually,
career.

Shaking off the memory, Keira sat down on the bench. The edge of the wood cut into her thighs in a familiar way. There was a fingerprint on the music stand. Keira pulled the cuff of her shirt down over her hand, rubbing at it until the wood shone.

Keira cracked the spine of her new music so that it would stay open, and clicked on the ugly brass floor lamp beside her. The unfamiliar spatter of black notes on the page stared at her. With a quick squint at the first line, she positioned her hands and began to play.

It was every bit as challenging as she’d been expecting. The music crashed over her like a froth-tipped wave, surrounding her. Driving her. She worked the first movement over and over, not even allowing herself to touch the Largo until she could run through the Allegro without stopping. Finally, the fingering started to take shape, her hands moving with the music rather than against it.

The creak of the front door interrupted her concentration.

“Keira? Honey? Why is it so dark in here?” Her mother’s voice drooped with fatigue. It sounded discordant and alien after the rich notes of the piano.

Keira turned to face her mother, her back popping in protest as she twisted. Her eyes swept past the clock that hung over the TV stand. It was nine o’clock.

“I was practicing,” Keira said, her tongue thick in her mouth, her mind still chasing the last trill.

“Did you stop to eat, at least?” Her mother sounded exasperated. The thought of food made Keira’s stomach growl.

She’d
meant
to eat.

“I thought I’d wait until someone else got home,” she said. Her mother’s face collapsed beneath the guilt-trip. A tiny landscape of wrinkles formed around her eyes and mouth.

“Your father isn’t here?”

Keira shook her head. “He left a message—he’ll be late again.”

“Well”—her mother shrugged out of her coat and kicked off her scuffed pumps—“we might as well have dinner together. Will you set the table while I change?”

Keira glanced back at the music. The last page of the movement beckoned. It dared her to play what came next.

Instead, she forced herself to stand up.

Twenty minutes to eat, and a half hour on the stupid history project. Then I’ll come back
. There’d be a little time left before her mother would go to bed—before she started to complain that the music was keeping her awake. With a last, promising touch to the keys, Keira headed into the kitchen.

•  •  •

She forced down the gummy chicken while her mother pretended she wasn’t scanning the driveway, ready to bolt at the first sign of her dad’s car.

“You know,” her mom said. “I don’t think I ever missed a meal when I was training.”

The chicken caught in Keira’s throat. Her mom almost never talked about her singing days. She’d sung opera. Well enough to get an offer to train with the Lyric Opera in Chicago. But after a month away from Sherwin, Keira’s dad had lured her back with an engagement ring.

There was no opera in Sherwin. The best Keira’s mom had been able to do was to join the local church choir. That’s where Pike had found her mother—singing solos on Sunday and the “Ave Maria” at weddings. He’d encouraged her to get serious about her music. But then Keira had come along, and her mother stalled her plans to care for Keira. When Keira was little, her mother had sung arias. She and Keira would meet Pike in the empty church, and Keira would sit on the scratched piano bench and listen while her mother’s voice bounced off the walls around her, stretching the Italian words.

She remembered Uncle Pike nudging her with a friendly elbow. “Do you think you’ll be a singer too?” he asked.

Keira had shaken her head.

Her uncle hadn’t looked disappointed exactly, but he had frowned the littlest bit. Pike never frowned. “But you would like to be a musician, wouldn’t you?”

Even though she couldn’t have been more than four, Keira knew that the answer was yes.

“So, what will you play? Guitar? Flute?”

Keira had looked around the church, her eyes drawn—as they always were—to the scuffed baby grand that squatted next to the dais. She’d pointed at it, the keys smiling back at her with their chipped-tooth grin.

“That’s a wonderful choice,” he said, giving her ponytail a gentle tug. “You’ll make a remarkable pianist.”

“But we don’t have a piano, Uncle Pike.” As young as she was, she knew that she couldn’t play something she didn’t have.

“You will, baby girl,” he’d promised her. “When the time comes, you will.”

And then not even a year later, Pike had died.

Afterward, her mother barely sang “Happy Birthday,” much less Italian arias. She’d given up church choir for extra hours doing medical transcription.

The only music left in the Brannon house came from Keira. She couldn’t imagine giving up her music for some crappy job and crappy house in Sherwin. Sometimes, she wasn’t sure her mother could really imagine it either.

Keira watched her, toying with the remains of her dinner. “You really never even skipped a lunch because you were practicing?”

Her mother pushed away her plate. “My stomach would get sour and twisty if I did. It made my voice funny.” She cleared her
throat. “So. Do you have homework, or are you going to practice?”

“Homework,” Keira admitted.

Her mother stacked their dishes. “Well, get to it. I know you want to get back to the piano tonight.”

That was the best thing about her mom: She understood how badly Keira needed music. She didn’t push Keira. Keira pushed herself. Her mom got out of the way and let Keira play.

Keira escaped to her room. Folding herself up on her bed, she glanced down at her sleeve—the hole stared at her like an accusing eye. She stripped off her shirt, and then hesitated, the wad of fabric dangling from her fist. It was her favorite. And there wasn’t exactly money lying around to run out and buy another one. But every time she looked at it, she knew she’d see Mr. Seever’s disappointed face and feel Jeremy and his cigarette pressed up against her.

With a sigh, she dropped it into the trash and pulled on an old sweatshirt before getting out her history textbook.

She’d only flipped through a couple of pages when the phone rang, and Keira leaned over to answer it, grateful for an excuse to put off her homework.

“Hey,” Susan said. “Are you busy?”

“I was going to start on the misery of that history project, but I just—”

“Don’t care?” Susan finished.

“Exactly.” Keira shoved the book away and rolled over onto her back.

“So, how was the rest of your afternoon? Did you get home okay? I was kind of worried. It’s not every day you get branded by Jeremy Reynolds and fired in the same afternoon.”

“Thanks for reminding me. I’m fine.”

The sound of Mrs. Kim harping at Susan crackled across the phone line. Even though Keira couldn’t understand a word of Korean, irritation and suspicion had the same timbre in any language.

“Yeah, Mom. I’m getting to it,” Susan huffed.

Keira heard Susan’s bedroom door snap shut.

“Sorry,” Susan sighed. “Did you know they immigrated here to give me a chance at a better life and I’m
wasting
it on the phone while she
works her fingers to the bone
?” Her voice was soaked with sarcasm.

“Actually, I think I
have
heard that somewhere before.” It was pretty much the way Mrs. Kim started every conversation she had with Susan.

“Well, at least it was
you
I was talking to. If it’d been Tommy, she would have hung up the phone herself.”

Susan had been dating Tommy for almost two months and her parents were still suspicious of the whole thing. Susan spent as much time worrying about how to get around her parents’ dating rules as she did actually
dating
Tommy. Keira couldn’t imagine spending that much time on a guy.

Walker leapt to mind. Keira rubbed a hand across her eyes as if she could erase his image and then sat up suddenly.
“Hey, you buy your music at Take Note sometimes, right?”

“Sure, why?”

“Have you ever seen anyone—I mean, besides Mr. Palmer—working there?”

“Someone like who?” Susan sounded confused.

“A guy. Like, a guy our age. Curly hair, leather wrist cuffs, accent?” She hesitated.

“Cute?” Susan asked.

Keira closed her eyes, picturing Walker, his dark eyebrows drawn together in concentration as he stared at the ancient cash register. The curve of his shoulder beneath his flannel shirt. The gray of his eyes. “Yeah,” she admitted. “Cute.”

“No, I haven’t,” Susan said, “but I’d sure as hell love to see a guy that even
you
will admit is cute. Maybe we should stop by. My flute teacher’s after me to find something with ‘wow-factor’ for state—like that’s somehow going to help me.” She snorted. “You wanna go with me tomorrow afternoon? Is he cute enough to go to a movie with?”

“You know I don’t date.” Keira’s voice was harder than she’d meant it to be.

“I know,” Susan sighed. “But can you blame me for wishing you did? God, that’s one of so many reasons Jeremy should act normal for once. Then we could go on a double date together and my mother might not follow me to the theater and sit in the back, making sure I act like a ‘good girl.’ ”

The Movie Theater Incident was what had made Susan so
determined to date Tommy in spite of her parents’ old-fashioned rules. Keira tried to picture Susan and Tommy sitting in a dark theater, holding hands, while she and Jeremy shared a bucket of popcorn.

Only it wasn’t Jeremy she imagined herself with. It was Walker.

It should have seemed ridiculous. Instead, it sent a tingle through her.

And what? You’d miss three hours of piano practice while pretending you didn’t see Tommy and Susan slobbering all over each other? Come on, Keira.

She sucked in a breath and shook out her hands. “After he put his cigarette out on me, there’s no way I’d even
speak
to Jeremy, much less go on a date with him. I’ll absolutely go with you to Take Note, though. I got some new music today, and I know we can find something there that—” She started to say,
That you can play
, but there was no reason to rub it in. “That’ll impress the judges.”

“As long as it’s not too hard,” Susan hedged.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Hey, I should probably go—if I don’t get started on this poster for history, I won’t be able to practice any more tonight.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yep,” Keira said. She stared at the textbook in front of her and wished she were looking at her new music instead. “Tomorrow.”

She hung up and stretched out on the bed. The remembered sounds of the sonata rang in her ears, and while she listened, she saw Walker’s gray eyes staring back at her from her thoughts. She tried to see the notes instead, but no matter how much she worked at it, his eyes were still there, watching her from behind the music.

Chapter Four

W
HEN SHE WOKE UP
,
the clock on her nightstand said that it was three in the morning. Groggy, Keira sat up and looked at the textbook still splayed open on her bed. Crap. How could she have fallen asleep without doing any of her homework? She couldn’t let her grades slip any lower.

Cursing, she slid off the bed and stumbled down the hall toward the kitchen in search of a snack. She needed something that would keep her awake long enough to write a limerick about 1930s politics that Mrs. Eddiston would deem worthy of a passing grade.

The bluish glow of the streetlight filtered in through the
window, giving her barely enough light to see. On the counter next to the sink sat a single, lonely piece of fruit. A puddle of shadow surrounded it, like a spotlight in reverse. It looked like a banana, except the skin was as red and shiny as an apple’s.

Great. Dad’s shopping at the fancy grocery store again.

Her mother would have a fit—she was always griping about Keira’s dad’s “champagne tastes.” Exotic food wasn’t in the budget.

Keira reached for the fruit, but her fingers wouldn’t close around its smooth skin. They curled in on themselves, as though she’d grabbed at empty air. She blinked hard, clearing the last of the sleep-fog from her eyes. There was definitely something on the counter. She could see the stem, the bruised spot along one side. She reached for it again, her fingers slipping through the pool of inky shadow.

Her heart twisted in her chest. Something was wrong. Really wrong.

She grabbed for the fruit one more time, hoping it was all a dream. An optical illusion. A mistake.

The overhead light flicked on, flooding the kitchen with its glare, and Keira barely managed to bite down on a shriek before it escaped her mouth.