In the Closet: A Triad

By Geri Gale

S. lives with her grandparents in their house in Ossining, New York, where she has been abandoned by her mother, and S. is in the closet. The closet is a safe place to hide, to think, to ruminate. In the Closet is a triptych and each third has two parts.

           In part one

• Language: English
• Publisher: PK & Alex Co.
• Release date: Apr 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9780986059070

Geri Gale

Geri Gale is a poet and writer of prose. In the Closet: a triad reveals her hybrid style of writing. She lives in Seattle and is in a constant state of creating a body of work. At night she draws. She is also a Moth StorySLAM winner and performed in the Moth Seattle Grand Slam.

Book preview

IN THE CLOSET

Also by Geri Gale

Patrice: a poemella

Waiting: prosepoems

Alex: The Double-Rescue Dog

IN THE CLOSET

Copyright © 2021 by Geri Gale

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-0-986-05906-3 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-986-05907-0 (EPUB)

ISBN: 978-0-986-05908-7 (MOBI)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021907325

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used here fictitiously. Any resemblance to any real persons or events is entirely coincidental.

Author’s Note: To write this work of fiction, it was necessary to re-create relevant and important biographical facts, identities, thoughts, and feelings of the characters in this triad, particularly Thelonious Monk, Emily Dickinson, and Diane Arbus. This was possible via consulting key texts (biographies, letters, poems, critical essays, websites, CDs, photographs, films), which are mentioned in the Bibliography & Credits & Notes. I owe the following authors thanks for having been able to write this novel: God’s Gym: The Silence of Thelonious Monk (John Edgar Wideman); Monk (Laurent De Wilde); Straight, No Chaser: The Life and Genius of Thelonious Monk (Leslie Gourse); Thelonious Monk: The Life and Time of an American Original (Robin D. G. Kelley); Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings (Marta Werner and Jen Bervin); Madness, Rack, and Honey: My Emily Dickinson (Mary Ruefle); My Emily Dickinson (Susan Howe); The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (edited by Thomas H. Johnson); The Life of Emily Dickinson (Richard B. Sewall); The Sister: A Novel of Emily Dickinson (Paola Kaufmann); An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus (William Todd Schultz); Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph (Diane Arbus); Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer (Arthur Lubow); Diane Arbus: Revelations (Diane Arbus); Diane Arbus (Patricia Bosworth).

Cover and design by Joanna Price.

Production by Booknook.biz.

Editing/Proofreading by Elisa Gonzalez and Sharon Frajlich.

First Edition. Printed in the United States of America.

  4616 25th Avenue NE #363, Seattle, WA 98105

For Thelonious Monk, Emily Dickinson, and Diane Arbus

This is fiction. Ossining is a real place in New York. Teatown Lake is not a contaminated lake—its contamination is a metaphor for cancerous elements and toxic environmental water issues that were spreading throughout the country while I wrote this story. I have never met Emily Dickinson, Thelonious Monk, or Diane Arbus. I relied on information about their lives gathered by other writers. In my acknowledgments, I thank these remarkable, generous authors for their inspiration. Without their research and biographies—and without the work of these artists—Thelonious Monk, the musician; Emily Dickinson, the poet; Diane Arbus, the photographer—this novel and the life of S. could never have been conceived.

One: Thelonious Monk

Two: Emily Dickinson

Three: Diane Arbus

ONE

THELONIOUS MONK

The autumnal earth was in perfect alignment with the moon. S., her grandmother, and her grandfather were together inside the house on Spring Valley Road, listening to her grandfather play a familiar riff of piano jazz. Outside in the darkness, a moonbeam shined brilliance. A pinhole of celestial light sneaked through the closed curtains and left a spot of illumination on the piano. On the black shiny surface, S. saw a body of still water. When the song was over, she kissed her grandparents goodnight and walked upstairs to bed, longing for her mother.

That night she lay on her back full of jazz. She covered her face with a down blanket, laid her hands at her sides, and like a corpse fell into a deep dream of the lake as she did every night since her mother had left her at her grandparents’ house.

Monk’s fingers, so delicate, grew a tracery of veins that climbed up every staircase and thrust into every stair, every subway, every train, every bedroom, every windowpane.

In the morning on the day of the party—after S. and her grandparents ate their Saturday breakfast—S. and her grandmother stood at the kitchen sink facing the garden, washing and drying the dishes while listening to her grandfather play the Steinway in the northwest corner of the living room.

One day you will write your mother’s story, her grandmother said.

S. looked into her grandmother’s fawn-brown eyes and wondered if the story would have a happy ending. Would her mother come tonight to her grandfather’s seventy-eighth birthday party?

S.’s grandmother was poised. She had lived through violence. She was unhurried. Kept an even pace. She was sad but unburdened by sadness. She was broken but preserved an unbroken heart. She was old but had a young poetic mind. She was obsessed with Emily Dickinson.

Her grandmother said when they lived in Russia they did not believe in god. They believed in bringing food and drink to the table and dancing at night to violins. They danced in their living rooms under the moonbeams of love, until the Nazi German soldiers massacred the women and children first as the men watched, and then shot the men.

Her grandmother and grandfather had hidden underneath the floorboards and listened to the rape of the women, heard the stabbings and cutting of limbs, smelled the fired bullets. Concealed under the floor with their skin pressed against the dank earth, they swore to each other if they lived they would leave Russia together. They would live in America and never be a part of genocide again.

To keep silent, they held each other and covered each other’s eyes. They breathed into each other’s skin. When the massacre was over and the soldiers moved on to the next house, S.’s grandfather let go of her grandmother and licked the tears that fell from her eyes, and she let go of him and ran her fingers through his hair, digging her nails into his neck, blaming him—a young man, a musician—for every terrible thing that was happening in Stalingrad.

Water was essential to S. Water charmed her body into believing it was cleansed and pure, and she was capable of drifting like a buoy on top, never to be swallowed or drowned. To get to sleep at night, she imagined Teatown Lake.

Every night since her mother had dropped S. off at her grandparents’ house in the country, S. listened to her grandfather play Thelonious Monk on his piano, and as she dreamed of the lake, images of her mother, her grandparents, and their past swelled like rivulets of waves in water.

Monk’s fingers splayed open and closed—his sound spreading, his notes traveling, swelling, and throbbing uncountable sound, numberless sound—unknown sound dropping and descending to a quiet, soft void.

On April 14, 1995, her mother had brought S. and one brown leather suitcase to her grandparents’ house and driven away. S. expected her mother would come back two days later on Sunday. That was the pattern: a dropoff on Friday and a pickup on Sunday. On April 16, S. waited in the wicker chair on the front porch for her mother to drive up the road, honking the horn, waving her Instamatic camera out the window.

Spring passed. Summer came. S. was still motherless with one suitcase at her grandparents’ house.

On the beach, two months after her mother had dropped her off, the June sun pierced S.’s skin as she stood beside her grandfather, their feet sinking in the wet sand. S. kept quiet. She waited for him to speak.

The dialogue between them was short and random, almost like Morse code.

The sun is in its zenith, her grandfather said.

They walked to the left for a minute longer.

How fortunate you are.

At that moment, she felt fortunate to be alone with the grand-man. S. knew he chose only her to be with him on his walks around the lake. Everyone wanted to be with him. He was a jazz musician and made a living as a piano-tuner. He was obsessed with Thelonious Monk. Often people came to see him. He doled out advice to those wishing to know their future. They told him their secrets. They confessed their innermost shame. What they had done to others. What they planned to do to others. What they had done to themselves.

Her grandfather insisted they walk counterclockwise around the lake. When he stopped, she stopped. When he pointed, she looked. Her ten-year-old eyes saw the fish bones of perch, crappies, and sunnies lying on the beach. Broken skeletal pieces. Jagged white edges. Sharp arrow-shaped bones. They reminded her of her mother’s photograph that hung in their bathroom in their apartment in Brooklyn. Her mother had taken hundreds of fish-bone photographs at Teatown Lake.

My father said not to trust anyone except yourself, her grandfather said, throwing fish bones into the lake. I want you to remember that.

Those were the only words S. ever heard her grandfather say about his father. S. looked at his face and underneath a face mask of grandfatherly greatness, she saw the same tortured and fractured soul she wore. What about my mother? she asked.

I want to trust her. She’s my daughter. I really do. More than anything in the world, I want her to come in October for my birthday party.

Me too.

Everyone will be there. If she comes, she’ll be coming for you, her grandfather said, heaving a branch like a spear into the peaceful man-made lake.

The chord of Thelonious Monk held the dulled fragments of Monk’s wounds, his brush with life, his grip of death, his pain, his grief, his suffering playing his disquieting stain, his sunstruck notes, and the harrowing brass of his lament.

In S.’s brown leather suitcase, her mother had packed three sets of clothes, slippers, a bathrobe, a sweater, a raincoat, underpants, socks, a stuffed tiger, a flashlight, Alice in Wonderland, the January 1995 Life magazine with Jackie Kennedy on the cover, an Instamatic camera, a brush and comb, toothbrush and toothpaste, shampoo, a handkerchief embroidered with a red rose, and a photograph of S. and her parents at JFK’s grave in Arlington Cemetery. S. zipped and unzipped the suitcase a hundred times looking for a letter from her mother. She never found any words, but each time S. opened the suitcase, she smelled her mother’s darkroom and it made her feel as if her mother were in the room with her.

At night before she went to sleep, S. left the suitcase open on the oval woven rug beside her bed. On the back of the walnut nightstand, she drew a white-crayon slash for the first night her mother didn’t return. She slept with her socks and slippers on her feet. Under her pillow, she clutched her great-grandmother’s embroidered red rose handkerchief and the Scotch-taped photograph of her and her parents standing in front of JFK’s eternal flame.

Two weeks after S. had been dropped off at her grandparents’ house, it rained for three days. On the fourth day, S.’s grandfather ran a few figure eights around the antiques in the living room and he knocked and smashed one of S.’s grandmother’s most valued treasures into tiny pieces. The clay sculpture of a thin, naked African woman, fell from the desk and lay on the wood floor, a shattered relic.

S.’s grandmother did not speak to him for a whole week. S.’s grandfather knew a doctor who traveled regularly to Africa. He worked with Doctors Without Borders. S.’s grandfather asked him to bring back another sculpture of an African woman. S.’s grandmother opened the gift and shouted, She’s not replaceable. You’re just like your daughter. You can’t just replace everything you break.

She threw the sculpture on the floor. The African woman’s right breast broke and slid across the wood floor. The three of them spent the afternoon looking for the breast. The breast remained undiscovered and the breastless sculpture was placed in her grandparents’ closet where it would remain until the breast was found, even though they all knew the breast would never be found.

S. stood next to her grandfather’s monument of a piano. Alone in the living room, she touched a piano key softly. She could still feel a vibration left from her grandfather even though he had exited the house an hour ago to pick up groceries. The silver bracelet on her wrist glittered in the golden light pouring through the divide in the white sheer curtains that hung from the iron rung. The word SOPHIE, engraved in the silver heart, dangled on her wrist.

In the gallows of morning effervescence, S. heard the length and longevity of a jazz piano chord as she waited for her mother to come.

Monk buried his past in the piano, dug his future in the piano, resurrected his divided self in the gallows of the piano.

Sophie was S.’s best friend. She lived one mile away. At 1:00 PM, seven hours before the birthday party, S. rode her bicycle down Spring Valley Road to Sophie’s house on Cedar Lane. It took only ten minutes to arrive.

Sophie was the only other person in the entire world who understood why S. needed her mother in her life. Sophie asked her own mother to adopt S., and Morgan said she would consider adopting S., if S.’s mother didn’t come to the birthday party.

When S. pulled up on her bicycle to Sophie’s house, Sophie reassured her. My mother says your mother’s coming tonight. She’s never missed a birthday party. She’s been photographing your grandfather’s birthday parties for years.

This time it’s different, S. said. We have to carry out our plan.

Thirty minutes later, S. lay on the side of the road on Cedar Lane underneath a fallen bicycle. She sent Sophie away and told her to hurry and call S.’s grandmother. Her leg was bleeding and she felt dizzy. S. had driven mightily over the rock that Sophie had placed to the right of the white painted line. She had braced herself, never realizing her fall would be so shattering. She closed her eyes to rid the hurt. She could not look at the blood seeping through the gash in her calf.

Sophie returned on her bike and held S.’s hand as they waited for someone to come. Within minutes they heard an engine speeding toward them. Sophie waved down S.’s grandfather’s car. She led him to the ditch. He carried S. to the backseat of his car and drove her to the Doctors Without Borders doctor’s house in Cold Spring, thirty miles from Ossining. He had just tuned the doctor’s piano a week ago, and the doctor was surprised and happy to see him again so soon. He led the doctor to the car and showed him his bloody granddaughter crouched in the backseat.

Bring her into the house and put her on the couch. I’ll get my bag, the doctor said.

Her grandfather scooped S. in his arms and carried her up the front porch. You’re in good hands. Damian travels to Africa and helps everyone who can’t afford a doctor. He’s originally from Ethiopia, but he’s lived here since he was ten. He’s the one who got your grandmother the sculpture. He spent days looking for it. I promise he’ll make you all better.

The doctor returned with his black leather bag. S. studied him. His dark skin was smooth. He seemed young for a doctor. Her doctor in the city was as old as her grandfather. He said, Play Thelonious Monk.

Her grandfather obeyed and played the piano. The doctor gave S. a shot of Novocaine and they all waited for her leg to numb. Then her grandfather walked to the record player. He never compromised his music, his vision, he said, pulling out the black vinyl from the Thelonious Monk album cover as if he were pulling out the secret he carried inside himself. Once the needle began to spin the same Trinkle, Tinkle song her grandfather had just played, her grandfather stood behind the doctor while the doctor sewed seven stitches into the calf of S.’s left leg.

With each knot, S. felt a tightness that made her feel safe and certain there was an order to all things—all things could be put back together again—all things could be mended when her grandfather and Thelonious Monk played Trinkle, Tinkle.

She imagined her grandmother would call her mother and tell her about the bicycle accident. Her mother’s motherly instincts would surge and she would come to the birthday party bearing gifts for her seventy-eight-year-old father and her ten-year-old daughter with the injured leg, both of whom still loved and trusted her.

Monk spoke a vocabulary of notes on the surface of the black-and-elephant-white-ivory keys, his ingenuity and his virtuosity, the reservoir of his strength, his necessity, obliterating his memory of pain.

S. stepped into her white lace dress careful not to tear off the bandage on her left leg. She could not bear to look at the stitches. Thinking about them made her sick to her stomach. She had inhaled the hydrogen peroxide and kept her eyes shut the entire time that the doctor had sewn up the two-inch gash in her skin. The doctor had given S. pain medicine. She still felt the tightness in her calf, but she also carried lightheartedness in her chest. More than anything in the world, S. was certain her plan would work. She could feel her mother leaving Brooklyn, stopping at the gallery in SoHo, driving toward S. in the country. She could see her mother rolling down the window and she could hear her screaming as she drove over the Brooklyn Bridge. They always screamed out the window at the top of their lungs when they left Brooklyn. Her mother said, Women were born to scream when they exit a city on a bridge.

S. sat at the vanity table. She loved sitting in the cushioned chair and watching her grandmother standing behind her, combing S.’s hair. Her grandmother wore a man’s large silver wristwatch that projected beams of light like a wand. S. looked at herself and her grandmother in the mirror. Everyone said they looked alike. S. saw a very small part of herself in her grandmother’s sixty-three-year-old face. She saw the same fawn-brown eyes and the same mischievous smile. Her grandmother was the most beautiful woman in the world. That’s what her grandfather said and that’s what S. saw as she looked at herself and her grandmother in the mirror, thirty minutes before the party began.

The hair combing was a ritual. Usually her grandmother talked and the words out of her mouth always meant something akin to love, the swish of her Ss, the long Ls, and the softness of her vowels caressed S.’s skin as her grandmother divided S.’s knots with her fingers, delicately splitting them apart and running the comb through S.’s curls.

For the first time ever, her grandmother yanked at S.’s hair. Every knot counts, her grandmother said as she untangled S.’s curly brown hair with her comb. Every knot is there for a reason—to be discovered and separated and combed through.

Each downward pull felt as if the teeth of the comb were biting into the flesh of her leg wound. The doctor had said the stitches would stay if she took it easy. S. hadn’t moved much since she had been stitched up. Her grandfather had carried her around like a piece of porcelain and showered her with kisses.

Her grandmother was pissed. Her eyes squinted and her mischievous smile closed into pressed-shut lips. Don’t think I don’t know what you did. You’re just like me. I would have done the same thing.

I’m sorry, Grandma. I didn’t mean to upset you.

It has nothing to do with me. The thing is, now you’ll always have the scar on your leg to remind you of the day your mother disappointed you.

You called her, didn’t you?

I called her.

You told her what happened.

I told her.

She’ll be here.

She’s not coming.

She’s coming. You’ll see. I did this for Grandpa and me.

After her grandmother tied a small red rose in S.’s hair, the silence was terrible.

S. looked at herself all made up. She looked like someone in one of her mother’s glossy fashion magazines. She wore a white-lace party dress, white-lace socks, black-patent-leather shoes, and a red rose in her brown hair. She carried a white-beaded purse filled with her embroidered red rose handkerchief, butter rum Life Savers, and a key. She rubbed the bone on her forehead above her left eye.

Her grandmother applied a subtle shade of pink lipstick on her lips. Your mother doesn’t approve, but we won’t tell her, will we?

Not me.

The taste of her grandmother’s lipstick lingered on S.’s lower lip as she inhaled the smell of its waxy sweetness. The lipstick made the party she feared exciting. The lipstick would shield her from the shyness she kept in the well of her throat in a room full of grownups. Grownups always lied. They always told her how nice she looked, how she looked like her father, how she looked like her mother, how she was so smart. Lies. Lies. Lies. They never mentioned her brother. No one ever talked about her brother.

S. kept a vigilant eye on the front door. The lace on her dress and her socks scratched her skin. She wanted to tear open her scar. Each time the door opened, S. expected to see her mother. Instead, one by one, her grandparents’ guests came to celebrate her grandfather’s seventy-eighth birthday. They came carrying plates of food, bottled drinks, and wrapped bowed gifts. They came ready to party. They came to hear her grandfather’s music. They came to dance and get drunk and be entertained.

The guests sipped wine, spoke long, luxurious phrases, and swayed to Monk on the record player going round and round.

Round and round, Thelonious Monk, a keeper of time, ushering in a harmonic asymmetry, a transient artist’s life from one town to the next town, playing a conflicted chord, his restless tempo, lapses into vacancies, periods of pause, leaps and then long rests, seconds later releasing a clashing note, summoning chaos and breaking the chord, carrying listeners out from the pit with his piano-playing hands, under the light steam rising from his skin, round and round his pacing back and forth for hours on end.

S. slipped out of the living room and walked upstairs into her grandparents’ room. The brass antique clock on her grandmother’s nightstand read 8:45 PM. She opened the closet door and sat on the floor. The closet had once been the attic. Her grandparents had remodeled the house and designed a walk-in closet with a secret door that slid open when a switch was pressed. The first time S. found the switch, she couldn’t stop opening and shutting the door to the secret chamber.

The closet was the one place in the house where S.’s grandparents’ things were undisturbed, his shoes, her shoes, his clothes, her clothes. The air in the closet smelled of their smells. S. felt a chill as their scents intersected and became one. Her grandmother’s sweetness and her grandfather’s reverence.

S. felt the terrain. The landscape where she sat in the cedar closet was solitary and quiet and hard. The landscape she had left downstairs was filled with loud conversation and Monk’s unhinged tonalities by adding a minor.

S. closed her eyes and placed her palm on top of the bandage on her calf. She could feel the skin tightening like a cord. Maybe the doctor had damaged her leg. Maybe she would never be able to walk again. If she were in a wheelchair, maybe her mother would come. If she were blind, maybe her mother would come.

Monk, a seer, a visionary, a mad artist, abandoned the dominant for the love of the minor. Monk, a nonconformist, renounced the strong for the weak. Housing his music in the piano, he housed his grief in the piano, housed his manhood in the piano.

S. traced the bridge of her nose with her little finger and rocked back and forth in the closet. She remembered sitting in the wicker chair on her grandparents’ front porch, rocking back and forth waiting for her mother to come. She had spent the weekend with her grandparents, as usual. It was Sunday. Now her mother would come. The sun had pricked her skin. She closed her eyes, shutting the world from her view. But even with eyes tightly closed, S. saw circles of color. Fragments of colored dots swimming and drifting. Spinning stars. Careening crescent shapes. When she opened her eyes, S. expected to see her mother, camera in hand.

S. remembered getting tired of waiting for her mother on the front porch, going into the house and standing by her grandfather’s piano. The grand size, black luster, and all the emotions the piano held inside its body gave her hope. The room held coolness, while the sun blared outside. S. roamed the room, touching everything with her fingertips. The veneer of the piano and the wood table. A metal music stand. A doily’s crochet pattern. A cast-iron Japanese teapot. A jeweled elephant figurine. A wood grandfather clock with a brass pendulum. A maroon Conga drum. Bamboo poles. A French balance scale with weights. The spines of her grandmother’s books. A locked desk drawer.

Her grandparents’ things were objects she wanted when they died. Her grandparents’ things smelled of time. Looked like antiques; came with a story; were not sold in today’s stores; were dusted and shined; were loved by her grandmother; were a burden to her grandfather who always wanted to purge all things except his piano. Your piano takes up the most room in our home. Why don’t we get rid of that? her grandmother shouted at him.

That Sunday her grandfather and grandmother had driven to Ossining. S. was left alone. She took off her shirt and wrapped it around her eyes, tied it at the back of her head in a double knot like a prisoner blindfolded. She felt cool air on her small breasts. The cloth covering her eyes dimmed everything, kept light from seeping between her lids, kept darkness underneath her lids, kept darkness on her mind.

She ran her hand along the locked desk drawer. The room became dark and darkness was quiet. Darkness was disturbing. Darkness forced S. to listen to sounds she had never heard before. Blindness brought on an even greater darkness. Even the books on the shelves seemed to whisper to her. Her grandmother called them accidental friends. Everyone has them. The kind of people you chance upon, only meet once, or are bound together by circumstance. My books are my accidental friends.

In the darkness, S. revisited the veneer on the wood table. Felt the once-smooth wood as splintered. Felt the table’s flaws. The dents and a nail. Splotches where the varnish had vanished. Years and years of wax buildup her grandmother had applied to maintain a sheen on a table that grew old, deteriorated over time, and was damaged by the sun pouring through the windows every day, coloring the table’s surface, erasing the table’s existence, while the piano’s shiny black veneer remained unchanged.

Now in the closet, when S. remembered those days she waited on the front porch for her mother to come, S. remembered what the terrorizing sun could do to a table.

In the closet, at first it was coal-black. Stars passed through her eyes and the blackness faded as a ray of dim light seeped through a crack. Her eyes drawn to the gray, erased the black like a stolen memory. S. dropped the pain from her hands onto the floor, and she rubbed the floor, sweeping gentleness into her palms as if rubbing the fur of a dog.

From the party downstairs, a tender tune came drifting upstairs—Thelonious Monk when he was a younger man. S. squeezed her shoulder blades and listened to tender Monk hush his own noise, as she rubbed gentleness into her hands like an ointment. Every note from the piano felt like a finger on her skin. Every note from this stranger felt like a friend.

Monk’s live tapestry, his woven jazz—a man who played and lived and loved New York—a boy who listened to his oldest sister Marion’s piano lessons from a West Indian teacher—a boy who sat and learned to play by listening, learned to read music over his sister’s shoulder, took piano lessons at age ten, learned to play by ear at twelve, dropped out of Stuyvesant High School to play piano—a teenager who played in a trio at the Apollo Theater’s Wednesday amateur nights, who won and won and won and was asked to never come back again.

In the closet listening to Thelonious Monk while the party carried on downstairs, S. missed the tints of pinkish flesh spreading across her body and the heat of summer’s color. The sun in the city was not as strong as the sun in the country. She could not stop remembering the July sun on her grandparents’ porch, as she waited for her mother to come. Three months after her mother had dropped S. off, the sun had swallowed the color of her pale face, and S. had wandered off the front porch and walked down Spring Valley Road for one mile.

As her face changed color, she had lost the order of time, forgot to go home at noon for lunch. Her grandparents searched for her, called the police, gathered a group of rescuers, who eventually found her standing in Teatown Lake up to her neck. They called out to her with a megaphone. She showed no signs of life. Justin, Mr. Graham’s son, the youngest in the group, swam to her, wrapped his arm around her waist, and led her back to the beach, hugging her torso as if he were clutching a dead body.

She was returned to her grandparents’ house in Mr. Graham’s pickup truck, which was high off the ground and rattled about-to-break-down noises. Justin, who had saved her, asked her if she was planning to drown herself. S. replied, No, I just wanted to be with the sun. As the truck pulled up the driveway, her grandparents ran off the front porch. From the cab of the Ford truck, S. saw her grandparents as if they were small children charging toward a curious machine that had risen from the ground. Her grandfather was crying. Between tears, he whimpered, I thought the world had swallowed you up. I thought you got kidnapped and killed. S. laughed and told them how the sun had swallowed her face, how she had never been around such a strong sun before, how the sun had taken her into the lake. Her grandmother held Mr. Graham’s hands. This isn’t easy for us. We were terrified. Thank you for bringing her back.

Now in the closet, she was once again lost without a trace and she wondered when her grandparents and Sophie would begin to search for her, if ever.

Monk sat at the piano looking backward and forward, closing and opening his eyes, seeing the movement of his independent hands and the meat of his fingertips moving life into his keys, each finger following the path of jazz away from family, away from friends.

S. sat cross-legged in the dark closet and held her palms face up toward the sky in the same position she had seen in one of her mother’s photography books. The Indian man in the picture wore very little clothing. His nakedness, a body of lean muscles and bones. His thinness made him look frail, yet S. knew he was strong. He could perform amazing feats. While other men wore machine guns slung from their shoulders, fighting in fields of war, this man, named Gandhi who practiced civil disobedience, her mother said, could bring two enemies together and make peace.

In her opened palms, S. prayed for her mother to come to the party. She did not know how to pray. No one had taught her to pray. She kept her eyes open and sent out rays of light to her right and left palms, asking the stars up above to make her dream come true, and telling the moon if her mother came to the party, she would stop lying and always tell the truth. For a moment, S. thought she heard her mother’s voice among the boisterous voices of the guests downstairs. She was mistaken.

Seconds later, S. heard Sophie’s mother, Morgan. S.’s mother and Morgan had gone to school together from kindergarten to high school. They had dreamed of having daughters who lived in the same town, went to the same schools, were best friends. But everything changed when S.’s mother left her small-town life for art school in New York City, and Morgan married her high-school boyfriend and became a nurse living in Ossining, never desiring to leave her hometown.

Sophie was a special daughter who should have died but miraculously lived. She was an identical twin. The doctor who delivered Sophie said she was the recipient twin, and her sister, Theodora, was the donor twin. They shared the same placenta, but Theodora’s placental share was too small to supply her with the nutrients she needed to grow into a healthy baby. The doctor called it twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS), and performed a Cesarean operation that delivered Sophie first, and then tried to save Theodora who came out of the womb dead.

Everyone said Sophie was a determined soul, had the face of an old soul, was a survivor against all odds. In the womb, Sophie had battled with her sister, consuming what she needed to survive, and when she was born, she fought to stay alive. Even though she had selfishly consumed the rich nutrients of her mother’s placenta, she was at risk from the moment she was born. For ten months after Sophie was born, she stayed in the hospital in an incubator hooked up to an oxygen machine. Sophie’s mother, Morgan, visited her every day and wept. Her mournful tears fell onto the dome that held Sophie protected from the world in a glass cocoon.

If S.’s mother did not come to the party, S. did not want to be adopted by Sophie’s parents. She would have to go to Catholic school and wear a uniform and a cross around her neck. One Sunday, S. had gone to church in Ossining with Sophie and her mother and father, and Sophie had showed her the confessional booth and the classroom where the nun had hit her with the ruler when Sophie refused to say she believed in Jesus. Even though Sophie’s father had told everyone that Jesus had saved her daughter, Sophie was a nonbeliever.

S. had sat in the pew staring at the blood-stained Jesus hanging from the crucifix and listened to the perfect sound of the piano her grandfather had tuned. S.’s grandfather had never played in a band. He was known in town, in Westchester County, and in the Village, as the soloist. Other musicians asked him to jam with them, but he refused. Every Sunday morning, her grandfather tuned his own piano, while Sophie and most of Ossining prayed and listened to the pianos he had tuned in their churches. He had made a steady income tuning church and synagogue pianos from the Village to all the way upstate New York.

At breakfast her grandfather had said, Don’t be afraid of church. Thelonious Monk’s music would have been different if he had not experienced the religion of the South. Imagine what god might have entered his bloodstream if he had not immersed himself in faith before he gave his heart to jazz?

S. rose in unison as the congregation rose and prayed and sang, and she stood in line to receive a wafer and sip Christ’s blood from a chalice. During the priest’s sermon, Sophie and S. slipped away to go to the bathroom. They sneaked into the confessional booth and Sophie confessed to S., I killed my sister. Do you forgive me?

I forgive you, S. said, kissing Sophie on the forehead.

My mother doesn’t forgive me. When I was in the hospital, I could hear her. My mother cried like a baby. Her tears were for Theodora, not me. Even now, every time my mother looks at me, she’s wishing I were my twin.

In the closet, S. decided she