If I Stay

But in my family, playing music was still more important than the type of music you played, so when after a few months it became clear that my love for the cello was no passing crush, my parents rented me one so I could practice at home. Rusty scales and triads led to first attempts at “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” that eventually gave way to basic études until I was playing Bach suites. My middle school didn’t have much of a music program, so Mom found me a private teacher, a college student who came over once a week. Over the years there was a revolving batch of students who taught me, and then, as my skills surpassed theirs, my student teachers played with me.

This continued until ninth grade, when Dad, who’d known Professor Christie from when he’d worked at the music store, asked if she might be willing to offer me private lessons. She agreed to listen to me play, not expecting much, but as a favor to Dad, she later told me. She and Dad listened downstairs while I was up in my room practicing a Vivaldi sonata. When I came down for dinner, she offered to take over my training.

My first recital, though, was years before I met her. It was at a hall in town, a place that usually showcased local bands, so the acoustics were terrible for unamplified classical. I was playing a cello solo from Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”

Standing backstage, listening to other kids play scratchy violin and clunky piano compositions, I’d almost chickened out. I’d run to the stage door and huddled on the stoop outside, hyperventilating into my hands. My student teacher had flown into a minor panic and had sent out a search party.

Dad found me. He was just starting his hipster-to-square transformation, so he was wearing a vintage suit, with a studded leather belt and black ankle boots.

“You okay, Mia Oh-My-Uh?” he asked, sitting down next to me on the steps.

I shook my head, too ashamed to talk.

“What’s up?”

“I can’t do it,” I cried.

Dad cocked one of his bushy eyebrows and stared at me with his gray-blue eyes. I felt like some mysterious foreign species he was observing and trying to figure out. He’d been playing in bands forever. Obviously, he never got something as lame as stage fright.

“Well, that would be a shame,” Dad said. “I’ve got a dandy of a recital present for you. Better than flowers.”

“Give it to someone else. I can’t go out there. I’m not like you or Mom or even Teddy.” Teddy was just six months old at that point, but it was already clear that he had more personality, more verve, than I ever would. And of course, he was blond and blue-eyed. Even if he weren’t, he’d been born in a birthing center, not a hospital, so there was no chance of an accidental baby swapping.

“It’s true,” Dad mused. “When Teddy gave his first harp concert, he was cool as cucumber. Such a prodigy.”

I laughed through my tears. Dad put a gentle arm around my shoulder. “You know that I used to get the most ferocious jitters before a show.”

I looked at Dad, who always seemed absolutely sure of everything in the world. “You’re just saying that.”

He shook his head. “No, I’m not. It was god-awful. And I was the drummer, way in the back. No one even paid any attention to me.”

“So what did you do?” I asked.

“He got wasted,” Mom interjected, poking her head out the stage door. She was wearing a black vinyl miniskirt, a red tank top, and Teddy, droolingly happy from his Baby Björn. “A pair of forty-ouncers before the show. I don’t recommend that for you.”

“Your mother is probably right,” Dad said. “Social services frowns on drunk ten-year-olds. Besides, when I dropped my drumsticks and puked onstage, it was punk. If you drop your bow and smell like a brewery, it will look gauche. You classical-music people are so snobby that way.”

Now I was laughing. I was still scared, but it was somehow comforting to think that maybe stage fright was a trait I’d inherited from Dad; I wasn’t just some foundling, after all.

“What if I mess it up? What if I’m terrible?”

“I’ve got news for you, Mia. There’s going to be all kinds of terrible in there, so you won’t really stand out,” Mom said. Teddy gave a squeal of agreement.

“But seriously, how do you get over the jitters?”

Dad was still smiling but I could tell he had turned serious because he slowed down his speech. “You don’t. You just work through it. You just hang in there.”

So I went on. I didn’t blaze through the piece. I didn’t achieve glory or get a standing ovation, but I didn’t muck it up entirely, either. And after the recital, I got my present. It was sitting in the passenger seat of the car, looking as human as that cello I’d been drawn to two years earlier. It wasn’t a rental. It was mine.

10:12 A.M.