Innocence

She said, “I had no close relatives, only one friend, who was also my guardian, so there was little risk of an advocate stepping forth to ask that, in my interest, the court investigate my current condition and treatment. Besides, the bureaucracy in this city is so indifferent that Child Protective Services as often as not assigns kids to temporary homes where they’re beaten or sexually abused, or overdrugged for ADHD until the clean sharp edges are worn off their souls, and everyone knows it. No one would think a foster home in this town is automatically superior to an expensive asylum.”

After a brief silence, I said, “I’m sorry you had to see your father dead, in the condition that he was.”

“I thought I turned away too quickly for the image to stay in my memory. But it remains. Vivid and terrible. There will never be any forgetting it.”

Into my mind’s eye came an image of my father’s broken face, one eye obscured by blood pooling in the socket.

She pushed her chair back from the table and got to her feet. “I promised to play the piano for you.”

I followed her into the living room, where the candles flickered in red-glass cups, though the ambience was no less melancholy than it had been under the influence of blue glass.

When I stood beside the bench on which she sat to play, Gwyneth said, “Don’t crowd me, Addison. Since Daddy died, in order to play well, I have to feel that I’m playing just for me and him. Go sit and leave me to it.”

Another candle glowed on the small table beside an armchair, and I settled there to listen.

With her back to me, she said, “‘Sonata quasi una fantasia,’ in C-sharp minor.”

The moment that Gwyneth began to play, I recognized Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” and I came to my feet, shaken, because of all the music that Father and I had listened to on our CD player, this was the one piece that moved us equally, that we could never hear too often. It is music that speaks to the deepest reaches of your soul, and you are lifted higher, ever higher, by the adagio, in my opinion more so even than in any of the masses that Beethoven composed.

I went to the wall of windows and stood gazing out at the snow, which fell no less heavily than before. The wind had abated somewhat and had become capricious, though lazily so. The flakes were no longer driven at an angle through the street. Instead, they gathered into half-formed figures that dissolved a moment after they took shape, an eternal procession of spirits, settling softly to the Earth like crystalized notes of music, bringing the melodies of a higher sphere.

The title “Moonlight Sonata” had not been Beethoven’s, but had been appended to the piece by a friend to whom the music brought to mind the beauties of Lake Lucerne as one glided across the water in a boat, by moonlight.

In the night, through the snow, came three Clears, the same that earlier I had seen on the roofs of buildings across the street, two men and a woman, she dressed in hospital whites and they in hospital blues. As Clears sometimes do, these three didn’t merely walk into view, but glided through the air, standing upright, as if being flown by wires in a stage production.

Two of them touched down in the street and stood looking this way and that, but the woman floated to the windows, as if drawn by the music. When she passed through those panes, a few feet to the right of me, no glass shattered. She walked now as if gravity limited her, when obviously it did not, and as she crossed the room, she was a lamp from which darkness shrank before creeping back in her wake. She stepped out of the living room, through the dining area, through the open archway to the kitchen, where she moved out of sight. She must have gone into other rooms, because shortly she returned, not by a door, but manifested out of lath and plaster, passing through a wall as easily as I could stroll through curtains of fog.

The Clear went to the piano and stood gazing down at Gwyneth, neither smiling nor frowning, watching with calm interest. The girl wasn’t aware of being observed, nor could she see the soft glow of the Clear, which fell upon her and across part of the keyboard. She played as if only I and the memory of her father were with her.

After a moment, the visitor turned from the piano and walked toward me. Obeying Father’s admonition, I looked out of the window, avoiding her eyes. I imagined that meeting her stare might transform me as, in classic mythology, meeting the stare of Medusa could turn flesh to stone. Father had never explained what would happen to me if I insisted on being eye-to-eye with a Clear, but he had been wise in all things, and I had no reason to doubt his advice.