The Distance Between Us (7 page)

But what could I do? The gift was mine.

I have been asked many times in my life if I wished I’d had a more conventional upbringing. People want to know if I balked at all the practicing, or if I craved more friendship and romance than what I had, or if I ever had any desire to just run out of the house, away from the piano, and flit about in the sunshine like a normal girl.

I tell them I don’t remember, but I’m lying.

When I was eleven years old, I won my first national competition playing Beethoven’s
Emperor Concerto.
I still have the reel-to-reel recording of that performance; it’s one of my best. While my peers were tanning themselves on the beach and guzzling Coca-Cola at the movies, I was making music like few people ever get a chance to make it. While school acquaintances quarreled with their boyfriends and consulted each other about what outfit to wear next
Tuesday, I was casting spells over audiences in every major city in the world, and resurrecting Liszt and Brahms and Tschaikovsky from their respective graves.

I’ve heard music critics argue that child prodigies are nothing more than highly skilled mimics, with clever fingers and a good ear for aping the subtleties of more mature musicians, but I can tell you that even at eleven I had my own distinct style that had nothing to do with anything I’d heard or been taught. My musical “voice” (and what I had to say with it) has always been my own.

Whatever else I’ve been called in my life—and the list is endless—no one has ever accused me of being unoriginal. Not even Arthur or my children.

How can I tell you what it was like? What words will serve? For a time, my fingers were full of magic. Sometimes it felt as if I could make a stone dance, or a tree do somersaults, or a river run backwards. I knew the power of walking onstage to bored, polite applause from an audience that had never heard me play, and within the space of an hour, transforming their indifference into a boisterous standing ovation at the end of my performance. On countless occasions, I moved thousands of men and women to tears, and I made them beg for more when I was through, always demanding—and getting—at least three curtain calls before I’d consent to an encore.

God, I loved it all so. And not just because it fed my colossal, preadolescent ego. I also loved it (and I’m fully aware how naïve this sounds) because it gave me a chance, night after night, to make something beautiful, and to share it with the world. Laugh if you will, but I felt like a conduit between heaven and earth. And I never once took it for granted, because my mother was always with me, standing offstage with a wistful look on her face.

So here’s the simple truth: I would no more exchange those early years of my life for a “regular” childhood than I’d trade a twelve-ounce filet mignon for a can of pickled pig’s feet. Arthur accuses me of false modesty for not being more forthright about this, but since there’s no way to say something along these lines to people without coming off as even more of a pompous ass than
he
is, I lie to them instead, and tell them I don’t remember.

Of all my children, Caitlin has always been, by far, the brightest. In her chosen field—English Literature—she’s a respected and widely published scholar, and she’s also a surprisingly effective teacher (in spite of a notable lack of patience), as evidenced by her winning Pritchard University’s coveted Teacher of the Year Award three times in the last five years. Her critical essays frequently turn up in prominent magazines like
The New York Review of Books
and
Harper’s,
and she’s considered one of the top experts in the world on both Milton and Donne. She does a great deal of traveling as a guest lecturer to various institutions around the country, where she’s wined and dined and treated as royalty, and ever since she assumed the chairmanship of her department seven years ago, the number of English majors at Pritchard has nearly tripled.

She’s equally impressive outside her work. Her lifelong hobby of oil painting has always earned her enormous praise, and a few years ago a small but posh contemporary art museum in Chicago even purchased half a dozen of her still lifes to hang in its foyer for a season. Besides that, she can also cook as well as almost any professional chef; her specialty is Italian food, and her dinner parties, though extravagant and far too formal, are the stuff of local legend.

What’s not so well known anymore is how good an athlete she is. When she was a young woman she was formidable at both tennis and soccer, and to see her swim was like watching a plump white seal slice through the water. She was preternaturally good at skiing, too, even though she only did it once, on a rare family vacation to Montana.

That particular trip was an ill-conceived notion Arthur dreamed up thirty-some years ago during a long and irritating Christmas break. He’d jammed his fingers at the end of the term and was unable to practice for a few days, and without access to his beloved violin he couldn’t tolerate “just sitting around the house.” Somehow he got it in his head that a ski trip was the answer to his boredom.

I told him he was out of his mind. “What about Paul? Have you forgotten what he’s like whenever he leaves Bolton? We’ll have to sedate him to even get him in the car.”

“Nonsense. He’ll be fine.” Arthur always pretended that Paul’s
strange aversion to travelling wasn’t a problem. He was the same about Jeremy’s morbid fear of heights, and Caitlin’s bizarre daily craving for peanut butter and mustard sandwiches.

My children were, and are, the most neurotic people on the planet.

“Right,” I muttered. “We’ll get somewhere in the middle of Nebraska and he’ll start screaming for us to take him home. We’ll have to abandon him at a rest area to get any peace.”

He ignored me and I watched him dig our suitcases out of the closet, noticing that his stomach was slightly bigger than when we’d first met.

“Stop that at once, Arthur,” I demanded. “You’re not thinking clearly. Even if Paul doesn’t have a meltdown on the way, you can’t hold a ski pole with your fingers like that, and I’m not about to take the chance of destroying my other wrist, too. What do you expect us to do when we get there?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Read a book. Drink Irish coffee.” His eyes flickered. “Take off our clothes by the fire in our room, and have a lengthy discussion while the children frolic on the mountainside.”

That kind of suggestion from him used to make my breath quicken and my knees go weak.

Anyway, against my better judgment, we packed the children into our ancient blue Cadillac—Paul began bellowing in the backseat the instant we crossed the Mississippi—and we argued our way across half the country, finally ending up in a sweet little town called Fortune, just north of the Montana border with Wyoming.

Arthur and I spent most of the week in the lodge by the fireplace. I still remember sitting with him on our first day there, nursing a mug of hot cocoa and peppermint schnapps and watching through the large picture window at the front of the building as Paul and Jeremy fell all over each other out on the bunny slope. None of the children had skied before, but after one lesson Caitlin scooted off like a pro, abandoning her ungainly older brothers with a disgusted look on her face. Paul was trying to show Jeremy how to snowplow, but neither of them could get the hang of it and both
of them kept tipping over, face first, onto the icy ground. Arthur and I laughed until our sides hurt.

“See?” he said, putting an arm around me on the couch. “Isn’t this fun?”

I nodded and smiled. “I had no idea our boys were so good at slapstick. Now all we need is for Caitlin to run over them while they’re on the ground, and we’ll have enough material for a vaudeville act. Where is she, by the way?”

We scanned the slope and couldn’t find her. Arthur frowned and stepped over to the window, but after a moment he turned around again, perplexed.

“I don’t see her.”

We waited a little longer for her to reappear, but after fifteen minutes had passed I became worried and sent him out to look for her. Just as he got his coat on and headed toward the door, though, Caitlin came winging into sight from under the trees near the bottom of the most challenging adult slope. She must have gotten on the T-bar and ridden it up the mountain all by herself. I called out to Arthur and I rose to my feet to watch her finish her descent.

She had on a purple and white stocking cap with a long tail, and her coat was brown with a furry collar. She flew out of the woods with her knees bent and her upper body crouched low over her skis, and the tail of her cap twitched around on her back like a spastic snake. She passed several slower skiers who were headed toward the clearly marked shute that would eventually disgorge them into a fenced-in corral at the bottom of the slope, where they could either get back on the lift for another ride up the mountain or remove their skis and return to the lodge. Caitlin weaved around the others in line with astonishing competence, and I murmured to myself in appreciation of her newly acquired skill.

She safely reached the upper lip of the shute, but then with no warning she broke away at full speed from the line of skiers, and without so much as a glance at them or at the signs pointing the direction she should go to end her run, she dodged under a flimsy wire barrier and shot across the flat, icy ground directly in front of the lodge. She dug her poles into the wet snow by a sign that read “
NO SKIING ALLOWED THIS SIDE OF FENCE
,” and aimed herself like an arrow at where I stood watching from inside.

My heart leapt into my throat when I realized she was going much too fast to be able to stop before hitting the building. She obviously didn’t understand the peril she was in, because even though her lips were partly open and her eyes were squinting with concentration, there was not even a hint of fear in her face.

I put my hand to my mouth, and a woman next to me gasped and held up her arms toward the window as if that might stop the inevitable collision. I was dimly aware of Arthur calling out Caitlin’s name in panic from somewhere behind me, yet I couldn’t do anything but stand in mute horror and watch as my daughter raced toward a terrible smashup with the rough log walls and thick glass that separated us. She had to be going at least thirty miles an hour, and I was sure the impact would kill her.

I found my voice again and cried out just as Caitlin veered away from the lodge with a showy turn to her right, spraying an avalanche of snow at the window that pelted against the panes like a handful of gravel and blotted out my ability to see her. An instant later the spotty white curtain slid off the glass all at once, streaking it with water, and there was Caitlin standing before me, leaning on her ski poles in a studied, casual pose. She met my eyes and gave me a huge, impudent grin.

I swore and shook my fist at her and ran outside, screaming. I ordered her out of her ski boots and marched her back inside and up to our room past a crowd of amused strangers. Arthur and I then took turns yelling at her for nearly an hour, and afterwards she was confined to the lodge for the rest of the vacation, where she had to endure the torture of watching Paul and Jeremy cavort about on the bunny slope without her.

It felt like the right thing to do because of how she had frightened us, but in hindsight I think we were dead wrong to punish her like that. All I allowed her to see was my anger, and she deserved better.

I should also have told her how proud I was. Granted, it was a stupid stunt that almost got her maimed or worse, but she was
magnificent on those skis, and I wish I had reacted differently. Children sometimes take idiotic risks, but they ought to be forgiven anyway, to honor the sheer audacity required to attempt such things. I wish now I had rewarded her in some way for her courage, or at least applauded her briefly before confining her to her quarters.

My God, she was fearless that day. She was strong, and fast, and as graceful as a hawk plummeting out of the sky, and I’ll never forget it, especially because she’s since lost most of those qualities, and I miss seeing them in her.

But I digress.

Getting back to what I was saying before: my daughter has multiple skills—teaching, writing, painting, cooking, athletics. She’s terrifyingly smart, and she used to be brave, and if she’s not exactly kind, she’s at least capable of mercy on occasion.

But none of that has ever mattered to her.

What Caitlin has always wanted more than anything else is to be a musician. Her heart and soul are stuffed with an almost indecent love of music—especially the meaty, sprawling piano concertos from the Romantic period—and ever since she was a small child, she’s dreamed of one day being able to play Tschaikovsky and Brahms and Chopin. When she’s not teaching, she’s glued to classical music stations on the radio, and she’s a walking library of obscure musicological facts about every composer from Binchois to Stravinsky.

Unfortunately, she’s also the only person in our family with no musical aptitude whatsoever.

I suppose I shouldn’t say
no
musical aptitude; she slogged her way through some semi-difficult repertoire on her flute in high school, and she also managed to play, eventually, one or two medium-level sonatas on the piano that were nearly recognizable as Beethoven and Schubert by the time she performed them. But when your parents are Arthur Donovan and Hester Parker, and your brothers are Paul and Jeremy Donovan, if you aren’t a virtuoso, too, you stick out like a gangrenous thumb.

And she’s never forgiven Arthur and me for that. She wanted our
talent, and to this very day she seems to believe we somehow deliberately deprived her of it when we conceived her, for no reason but to spite her. Jeremy and Paul, in contrast, have never been the targets of her jealousy; I daresay when you detest your parents as much as she does, you have no rage to spare for something as trivial as sibling rivalry.

“N
o, no, no, Miranda.” I lean down and push her right hand out of the way to make room for mine on the keyboard. “You’re making it sound like elevator music, for God’s sake. Do it like this.”