The laughter came like a wave. Real laughter. Ugly laughter. The kind of laughter that came out of 500 throats when they realized they had been given permission to enjoy someone's humiliation.
"Play it, you." Vivian's voice was pure venom now. All pretense of a smile gone. "Sweetheart, that piano is older than your entire bloodline. It is worth more than every family you ever came from put together.
Get your hands away from it before I have you charged with attempted theft." "She reeks," a man shouted from three tables over. "Crawl back to whatever alley you came from," another voice. "Not on the piano. She'll break it just by breathing on it." "Wait.
Let her play," a voice roared from the back. A heavy-set man in a tuxedo, red-faced with champagne, standing up on his chair for a better view. "Free entertainment. Someone film this.
I want this on my story tonight." A ripple ran through the crowd. Phones went up like a field of black flowers. A hundred red recording dots blinked to life. Vivian's mouth twisted.
Priscilla was murmuring into her collar in a panic. "No, we cannot let this happen on camera. The live stream. Ma'am, please." But the crowd had already decided.
The crowd wanted the show. Vivian recovered. Vivian always recovered. She smoothed the curl of hair from her forehead, arranged her face into a pantomime of gracious hospitality, and swept an open hand toward the Steinway.
"By all means," she said, sweet as poison. "Give the girl her 15 seconds. Let's watch her make a fool of herself before we throw her out with the compost." Farah looked at Bradley. Bradley looked at his boss.
His boss, Priscilla, looked at Beatrice. Beatrice looked at the guests, at the phones, at the ruin already being written across her flawless livestream, and did the only thing a woman of her breeding could do. She smiled. Bradley released Farah's arm.
And then, from the second table on the aisle side, an old man stood up. Edmund Ashcroft did not raise his voice. He did not have to. He tapped the head of his ebony cane once against the floorboards, and the sound carried across the tent like a gavel.
"Let the girl play." He looked directly at Beatrice Whitmore. "And leave her the hell alone while she does it." For a long moment, nobody moved. Beatrice Whitmore opened her mouth to say something to Edmund Ashcroft and then closed it again. There were in the whole of the Eastern Seaboard perhaps four people whose opinions Beatrice actually feared.
And one of them had just spoken. She looked at her daughter. Vivian looked at her. Neither of them said a thing.
From her wheelchair, Rosalind Whitmore laid a spotted hand over Edmund's very gently and nodded her assent. The rules of the evening had, in the space of 2 seconds, been rewritten. Priscilla Vandermeer, whose entire professional talent lay in reading a room, understood this before anyone else. She murmured into her collar and the string quartet lowered their instruments in unison.
The videographer swung his camera off the bride and onto the girl in the hoodie. The live stream, which had been panning slowly across the champagne fountain, cut abruptly to a wide shot of the platform. 500 iPhones followed. Farah did not know any of that.
Farah was looking at the piano. She took the first step toward it, a small step, testing the way a person tests thin ice. And the raised cedar platform did not fall away under her. She took the second step.
A grain of gravel had lodged in the sole of her sneaker at the ferry station this morning and she felt it press into the arch of her foot as she climbed the three low stairs to the stage. She was aware of the sound of 500 people not breathing. The Steinway waited. She stopped in front of it and put her fingertips on the polished wood of the closed fallboard.
It was cool. It was cooler than her own skin, which was flushed hot from adrenaline. She had not touched an instrument in 22 months. Her hand shook and then it steadied.
The way her mother's had steadied when she had picked up a needle to give herself her own morphine. Farah lifted the fallboard. The keys underneath were the color of ancient ivory, the yellow of centuries, the yellow of teeth in an old family portrait, the yellow of things that had been touched by more hands than any one person could count. Her breath left her all at once.
She sat down on the bench. She adjusted at once. A small, deliberate scoot forward. She placed her feet on the pedals.
She reached under her sleeve and touched the small silver treble clef against the pulse in her wrist. Somewhere behind her, someone whispered, "This is going to be painful to watch." Farah closed her eyes. She listened to her own breath. She listened past it for a voice she had not heard in almost 2 years.