The next night I set my alarm clock for 11:45 and slept with it under my pillow so the buzz wouldn't wake anyone. When it went off I lay still and listened.
At first there was nothing. Then a soft thump downstairs, a cat landing on wood. Then a scraping sound, small and patient, like someone trying to open a drawer with one finger. Then a sound I had never heard Oliver make, a low, rising, questioning cry, almost a word. Mrrrow? And again. Mrrrrow?
I crept down. The fallboard was closed, the way my mother had left it. Oliver was on the piano bench, standing on his hind legs with his front paws on the lip of the closed lid, and he was working one claw into the crack where the fallboard met the wood, pulling, pulling, and crying.
"It's shut," I whispered. "It's okay. You can't."
He looked at me then. I want to be careful about this, because I was twelve and I am telling it a long time later, and I know how memory takes the shape it wants. But I remember his face. It wasn't an angry face. It was the face Sam had when he was little and lost in the Boston Store downtown, that time, when I found him by the perfume counter. A face that has been sure of something its whole life and is suddenly not.
He cried again, louder.
"Shh. Shh. You'll wake up Mom."
A light came on at the top of the stairs. My mother stood there in her blue quilted robe, her hair flattened on one side from the pillow, holding the banister.
"Libby? What are you doing up?"
"It's Oliver. He wants to play it. He's trying to open it."
She came down slowly. Oliver stopped crying when he saw her and dropped down onto all fours on the bench and just watched her come, his tail twitching at the tip. My mother stopped at the bottom of the stairs. She was looking at the piano, not at him.
"Go to bed, sweetheart," she said.