And my mother was changing. That's the only way I can put it. She was a small, quick woman with dark curly hair she kept short and a laugh that came out of her suddenly and loudly, like a sneeze, so that people in the grocery store turned around. She worked at Hamot Medical Center downtown, in medical records, a job she described as "keeping track of everybody's worst day," and she came home at four-thirty and made dinner and helped Sam with his spelling and did the crossword in the Times-News in pen. She was not a person who stood still.
But that December I would come home from school and find her standing in the living room in her coat, just standing there, looking at the piano. Or I'd come down for a glass of water at night and see the kitchen light on and her sitting at the table with a cup of Sanka gone cold, not reading anything, not doing anything. She stopped doing the crossword. She snapped at Sam over nothing, and then went into the downstairs bathroom and ran the water, and came out with her face pink and washed.
Once, I came home early because of a half day and heard, from the porch, through the front door, a single note on the piano. The black key. The same one. It rang and faded. When I came in, my mother was in the kitchen with her back to me, peeling potatoes, and Oliver was asleep on the radiator cover in the dining room, and the living room was empty.
"Was that you?" I asked.
"Was what me?"
"The piano. I heard it."
She kept peeling. A long curl of brown skin dropped into the sink. "It must have been the cat," she said.
But the cat was asleep, and I'd seen him, and she knew I'd seen him. Neither of us said so.
* * *
I decided I needed evidence, which is what Nancy Drew would have done, and also what Mr. Bauer, my science teacher, said you should do before you came to any conclusion about anything, even whether the sun would come up. "Hypothesis is a fancy word for guess," he said. "Evidence is what turns a guess into something worth saying out loud."
My evidence was going to come from my Panasonic tape recorder. It was a flat black rectangle with a built-in microphone and a handle that folded out, and I had gotten it for my eleventh birthday and used it mostly to tape songs off the radio, holding it up to the speaker of the clock radio with my thumb hovering over the Pause button so I could catch "Take On Me" without the DJ talking over the beginning. I had a ninety-minute Maxell tape that had a mix on side A and nothing yet on side B.
On Sunday night, after everyone was asleep, I crept down at 11:30 and set the recorder on the floor under the piano, behind the useless Victor traps, and pressed Record and Play together until they clicked down. Then I went back up and lay awake listening.