Practice Room Confessions

The keycard Cherise lent me feels warm in my hand, like it knows it shouldn't be here either. She graduated from this college two years ago and never bothered returning her card when the semester ended, which means somewhere in the registrar's system there is a ghost with practice room privileges. I am that ghost tonight.

The building is locked up tight. Of course it is. It's after midnight and this is a community college, not a conservatory, nobody's practicing at this hour except desperate people like me. I tap the card, the little light goes green, and the door clicks open with a sound that seems way too loud in the quiet.

"Okay," I mutter to myself. "Okay, you're fine, this is fine."

It is not fine. Tomorrow at ten a.m. I audition for the principal chair of an actual orchestra with an actual salary, and I have not slept properly in four days. My cello case bangs against my knee as I walk the dark hallway, following the emergency lights like little orange breadcrumbs. My hands are doing that thing where they won't stay still, so I keep flexing them around the case handle.

The thing about nerves is that they live in my arms. Every cellist knows this. You can be calm in your head all you want, but your bow arm is a liar and it shakes when it wants to.

Down the hall, one practice room glows. Not the overhead light, which some genius has left on a dimmer, but the warm yellow lamp inside. Someone's in there. I stop in the hallway and listen, because old habits die hard, and I hear a piano, a few notes, deliberate, like someone testing something rather than playing it.

Great. Shared misery, then. I could turn around and find another room, but honestly the other rooms are cold and dark and I don't trust my nerves not to spiral alone in the dark. Misery with a witness it is.

I knock. The playing stops.

"Yeah?" calls a voice, and my stomach does something weird, because that voice is familiar in a way I can't place yet. Deep. Warm. I push the door open before my brain catches up with my hand.

He's sitting at the scarred upright piano with sheet music spread across the stand, a man in his thirties with a half-finished mug of tea and reading glasses pushed up into his hair. He looks up, and I watch his whole face do three things at once: confusion, recognition, and then something I don't have a name for.

"Lita," he says.

"Hamish," I say, because apparently I'm just going to say names at people tonight.

We haven't seen each other in ten years. Ten years, and here he is, in a practice room after midnight, holding a pencil like a baton. He looks good. Older, obviously, we both are, he's thirty-three now, but good. His hair is short. He's got a beard, trimmed neat. His forearms are still those forearms, the ones that used to make me lose my place in duets.

"You teach here?" I ask, because it's the first thing that comes out.

"Adjacent. I teach at the high school across town. I come here to write lesson plans when my apartment gets too quiet." He gestures at the second folding chair, the one against the wall. "You want to sit down?"

I sit down. The chair is cold and wobbly and exactly as uncomfortable as every folding chair in every practice room on earth. My cello case leans against my leg like a nervous dog.

"You're borrowing a keycard too?" he asks.

"Borrowing one from a former student, yeah. You?"

"Faculty in the district get building access. I'm legit." He says it with a small dry smile, like he knows I'm bracing for a lecture and he's not going to give me one. "Your secret's safe. Not that anyone patrols this place at one a.m."

"It's almost one?" I check my phone. It is indeed almost one. Wonderful. "God. Okay. That's fine. That's whatever."

"Rough night?"

"You could say that. I have an audition in nine hours. Big one. Principal chair." I hear my own voice go thin on the last words, and I hate it. "I came here because my apartment has neighbors and my nerves have a sound."

Hamish nods slowly. He picks up his pencil, puts it down, picks it up again. "What are you playing?"

"The Saint-Saëns. First concerto. Plus sight reading, plus excerpts, plus whatever mood the panel wakes up in."

"That's a lot."

"That's an understatement."

Silence settles over us, thick as wool. It's the kind of silence that has ten years of stuff packed into it, and neither of us seems to know where to start unpacking. I look at his sheet music. It's beginner cello arrangements, simplified, marked up in pencil with little encouraging notes. "Longer bows here!" one says. Another says "You've got this, George."

"You're teaching a beginner cello class," I say.

"George is fourteen and convinced his hands are too big for the instrument. They're not. He just needs someone to tell him forty more times."

I stare at the pencil marks and feel something in my chest go soft and stupid. "You were always good at that," I say. "Telling people they've got this."

"So are you," he says. "You just never believed it when you said it to yourself."

There it is. The thing he always did, saying the exact true thing while looking at his tea as if it were nothing. I used to find it maddening. I still find it maddening. Some things don't expire.

"You look good, Hamish," I say, because somebody has to break this silence and apparently it's going to be me. "I mean that. You seem, I don't know. Settled. Like you know where you are."

"I do know where I am. I'm in a practice room at one in the morning, which arguably undermines the whole settled thing." He smiles, though, and takes his glasses down out of his hair and puts them on, which is somehow the most familiar gesture I've seen all year. "You seem like you're hanging on by your fingernails, if we're doing honest updates."

"Oh, completely. I'm a wreck. My bow arm is going to betray me at ten a.m. in front of six people who hold my entire career in their hands." I laugh, and it comes out shaky. "Sorry. You didn't ask for a breakdown. You asked nothing, actually, you just observed it."

"Observing is part of the job now." He stands, and I track the movement without meaning to. There's a small electric kettle on the cabinet by the door, next to a box of generic tea bags. "I have water. I have tea. Both of which are more hospitality than this room usually offers. Which do you want?"

"Water, please. Tea after nine p.m. makes me insane."

He pours me a cup from the little dispenser and hands it over, and our fingers don't touch, but it's close, and I take the cup and hold it with both hands like it's something precious instead of lukewarm tap water.

"Thanks," I say.

"So," he says, sitting back down on the piano bench, turned sideways to face me. "Nine hours. Do you want to talk about it, or do you want to play, or do you want to sit here and not talk about it? All three are on the menu."

I drink the water. It helps more than it should. "The last one, probably. Then the second one. Then, if I'm honest, maybe the first one, at some hideous hour like three a.m."

"Fair. I'll be here. I've got forty lesson plans to fake my way through." He picks up his pencil, then pauses. "It's good to see you, Lita. I know we left things in a weird place."

"We left things in an unfinished place," I say. "Weird is different from unfinished. Weird has a shape."

He looks at me over his glasses, and for a second neither of us says anything, and the little lamp hums, and somewhere down the hall the emergency lights buzz their dumb orange buzz.

"Unfinished," he repeats. "Yeah. That's a word for it." He taps the pencil against the piano lid, twice, like a metronome finding a tempo. "Play something. Quietly. George needs the room next door at eight, but I think the walls here can take it."

I open the case. My cello comes out into the lamplight, and my hands are still shaking, but less.

I rosined the bow and played an open A, just to hear something true. It rang in the little room and died against the door.

"Still tune by feel," Hamish says. "You never used the pegs the normal way."

"The normal way is for people who trust machinery." I tune, slowly, listening to the fifths lock in one by one. It's the closest thing I have to a religion. Four strings agreeing with each other, that's all it is, and most days I can't even manage it.

"So why here?" he asks. "You've got an apartment. You mentioned neighbors."

"My neighbors have views about the cello at any hour. Well, they have views about everything. And the walls are thin and my hands are..." I hold one up. It's still doing the fine tremor thing, like a hummingbird that got in somewhere and couldn't get out. "See. This isn't an auditioning hand. This is a hand for holding a water glass and regretting things."

"You could try sleeping."

"I've tried sleeping. I've slept maybe nine hours total in the last four days, so do the math on how functional I am." I set the endpin down and it bites into the floor the way it always does, that little squeak of rubber. "And I couldn't just sit there listening to my own pulse, so I texted Cherise, and she lent me her old keycard, and here I am, breaking and entering at a moral remove."

"Cherise. She was in my theory section, I think. Small world."

"She says hi, probably, if she knew I'd run into you, which she didn't, because I didn't mention the keycard was for here specifically and she didn't ask, which tells you something about how much she trusts me not to do anything weird."

"You're doing something mildly weird."

"Thank you. I do try."

He laughs and it fills the room in a way his laugh never used to, lower now, easier. "Your turn to answer a question, then. Why are you here, Hamish, at one in the morning, in a locked building, writing fake lesson plans?"

The pencil stops. He looks at the mug of tea, the cold half of it, and I watch him decide to tell the truth, because that's a thing you can watch him do, it's always been a thing you can watch him do.

"My apartment has no heat," he says. "Boiler's been dead a week. Landlord says Tuesday. Landlord says a lot of things. So I come here, where the heat works and the lamp is yellow and nobody asks why I'm grading quizzes at midnight."

"That's awful."

"It's November. It's character building." He waves the pencil like he's conducting the sentence away. "I have a space heater shaped like a log cabin that does nothing, and I've slept in sweats and a coat for three nights, and honestly this chair is an upgrade."

"You should have said something. When I asked why here."

"I did say something. Just now. That took me about four seconds of deciding." He shrugs. "I'm out of practice telling people things, maybe. Or in practice, depending how you count."

There's a weight under that I could pull on, and I don't, not yet. Instead I set the bow on the string and play the first phrase of the Saint-Saëns, pianissimo, the way the audition will actually demand it, which is harder than loud, because pianissimo shows every flaw in your bow arm like a spotlight.

He lets me get four bars. Then his hand comes over and closes around my wrist, light as anything, just fingers on the pulse point, and stops me.

"You're rushing," he says. "There. Feel that? You press the tempo at the top of the slur. Every time."

I feel it. His hand, mostly, warm through my sleeve, and under that, yeah, the rush, the little surge I do when I'm scared, which is always.

"Do it again and watch for it," he says, and lets go, and my wrist keeps ringing where his fingers were, like a struck glass.

I play it again. I press it again.

"There," he says, and this time he taps the back of my hand with the pencil instead of grabbing it. "You're nervous, so you push. Everybody does. George does it. The trick is you have to be bored. Bored hands don't rush."

"Bored. At the concerto I've loved since I was twenty-two."

"Love it at the audition. Be bored tonight." He sits back on the bench. "You played that for me at twenty-two, you know. In the music hall at school, senior year, the same four bars, because it was all you had ready."

"You remember that?"

"You were wearing a red coat and you'd just