The Lucy Variations by Sara Zarr

goodbye, he owed it to her.
    “All right, smarty. Then you’re getting in bed, since you’re sick enough to come home from school.”
    Her grandfather’s study used to be a bewitching place for Lucy. Mysterious. The walls were lined with records, reel-to-reels, CDs, cassette tapes. Mostly records – vinyl, with fold-out covers and long sleeve notes. They had a smell. Mould, dust, a little bit of Pour Monsieur. He’d taught her how to use his turntable. He wasn’t stingy or controlling that way; he’d wanted her to know his collection as well as he did. Once upon a time.
    He wasn’t actually there at the moment. Maybe napping. Which was fine, because now that she’d reached the threshold of his space, she’d lost her nerve about Grandma. She went in, anyway, nudging the door open with her foot.
    It was dark. He kept the blinds closed to protect the recordings from sun and heat. She went to his desk and clicked on the banker’s lamp; a pool of light warmed the room. The items on his desk never changed: a blotter, a stack of index cards, his pen set and stand, the framed picture of Grandma. Lucy sat in his chair and touched everything and neatened his stack of index cards.
    They were for his catalogue.
    Every single recording in the room had an index card that went with it, and written on that card was his critique, what Lucy thought of as his “I know better than anyone” notes.
    Sometimes his careful cursive covered the whole card. Sometimes there were just a few words, about the piece or the recording or the conductor or the soloist:
    A disappointment.
    First movement compelling but as a whole fails.
    Colourful and energetic in the scherzo, with an appropriately sorrowful adagio. Lovely acoustics for a live recording. I would have liked to have been there.
    Mediocrity wins again! Why does this man still have a career?
    She got up and scanned the shelves until she found the recording she was looking for, exactly where it should be, with the Early Romantics: Schubert and Schumann, Berlioz, Verdi. It was an LP of a lesser-known composer from that era, something Lucy’d discovered years ago during a time of insatiable longing to know everything her grandfather did. When she had cared about her music more than anything.
    It had its index card, too, of course. She slid the record out and put it on the turntable to play, easing the noise-cancelling headphones on, and stood there reading the album’s index card, almost from memory:
    Acceptable recording of a beautiful piece. The execution of the free cadenza is astute, and lives up to what a free cadenza should be. Jubilant. Vivid. It brings to mind Hannah. Whenever I listen, I find myself remembering our barefoot walks through the leaves in those first few autumns of our marriage, and how she would let her long hair fall down her back. I always wanted to reach out to touch it, and now I cannot remember if I did.
    How time betrays us.
    Lucy had often wondered why he left something so personal in a place he knew she’d find it. There were other personal notes and memories scattered throughout this collection, but none like this. The conclusion she’d come to was that this was how he expressed himself. Maybe the only way.
    If she didn’t know he’d notice, she’d steal the card.
    The music described on it now flowed into her ears, and her heart. She imagined her grandfather and grandmother, Hannah, walking barefoot through leaves. The cool crunch of it. Her grandmother’s dark hair, which Lucy had only known as bobbed and grey, cascading down her back and her grandfather extending a hand to touch it, and then changing his mind.
    And she wondered what his last line had meant, and if he’d ever told her grandmother how this music made him feel.
    That’s what music did. It made you feel. If you were Grandpa Beck, it
allowed
you to feel. Listening to it and reading his words and imagining how his memories felt to him let Lucy see him as more than the stony heart