“Sure.” This was John Dalton’s chief sermon to new parents. How are you going to handle night feedings? Draw up a schedule so someone’s always on call and no one gets too ragged. How are you going to handle bathing and feeding and dressing and playtime so the kid has a regular—and hence comforting—routine? Draw up a schedule. Make a plan. Do you know how to handle an emergency? Anything from a collapsed crib to a choking incident? If you make a plan, you will, and nineteen times out of twenty, things will turn out fine.
“So that’s what we did. For the next three nights I slept on the sofa right across from the piano. On the third night the music started just as I was snugging down for the night. The cover on the Vogel was closed, so I hustled over and raised it. The keys weren’t moving. Which didn’t surprise me much, because I could tell the music wasn’t coming from the piano.”
“Beg pardon?”
“It was coming from above it. From thin air. By then, Lucy was in Abra’s room. The other times we hadn’t said anything, we were too stunned, but this time she was ready. She told Abra to play it again. There was a little pause . . . and then she did. I was standing so close I almost could have snatched those notes out of the air.”
Silence in John Dalton’s office. He had stopped writing on the pad. Chetta was looking at him gravely. At last he said, “Is this still going on?”
“No. Lucy took Abra on her lap and told her not to play anymore at night, because we couldn’t sleep. And that was the end of it.” He paused to consider. “Almost the end. Once, about three weeks later, we heard the music again, but very soft and coming from upstairs this time. From her room.”
“She was playing to herself,” Concetta said. “She woke up . . . she couldn’t get back to sleep right away . . . so she played herself a little lullaby.”
6
One Monday afternoon just about a year after the fall of the Twin Towers, Abra—walking by now and with recognizable words beginning to emerge from her all-but-constant gabble—teetered her way to the front door and plopped down there with her favorite doll in her lap.
“Whatcha doon, sweetheart?” Lucy asked. She was sitting at the piano, playing a Scott Joplin rag.
“Dada!” Abra announced.
“Honey, Dada won’t be home until supper,” Lucy said, but fifteen minutes later the Acura pulled up the drive and Dave got out, hauling his briefcase. There had been a water-main break in the building where he taught his Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes, and everything had been canceled.
“Lucy told me about that,” Concetta said, “and of course I already knew about the 9/11 crying jag and the phantom piano. I took a run up there a week or two later. I told Lucy not to say a word to Abra about my visit. But Abra knew. She planted herself in front of the door ten minutes before I showed up. When Lucy asked who was coming, Abra said, ‘Momo.’ ”
“She does that a lot,” David said. “Not every time someone’s coming, but if it’s someone she knows and likes . . . almost always.”
In the late spring of 2003, Lucy found her daughter in their bedroom, tugging at the second drawer of Lucy’s dresser.
“Mun!” she told her mother. “Mun, mun!”
“I don’t get you, sweetie,” Lucy said, “but you can look in the drawer if you want to. It’s just some old underwear and leftover cosmetics.”
But Abra had no interest in the drawer, it seemed; didn’t even look in it when Lucy pulled it out to show her what was inside.
“Hind! Mun!” Then, drawing a deep breath. “Mun hind, Mama!”
Parents never become absolutely fluent in Baby—there’s not enough time—but most learn to speak it to some degree, and Lucy finally understood that her daughter’s interest wasn’t in the contents of the dresser but in something behind it.
Curious, she pulled it out. Abra darted into the space immediately. Lucy, thinking that it would be dusty in there even if there weren’t bugs or mice, made a swipe for the back of the baby’s shirt and missed. By the time she got the dresser out far enough to slip into the gap herself, Abra was holding up a twenty-dollar bill that had found its way through the hole between the dresser’s surface and the bottom of the mirror. “Look!” she said gleefully. “Mun! My mun!”
“Nope,” Lucy said, plucking it out of the small fist, “babies don’t get mun because they don’t need mun. But you did just earn yourself an ice cream cone.”
“I-keem!” Abra shouted. “My i-keem!”
“Now tell Doctor John about Mrs. Judkins,” David said. “You were there for that.”
“Indeed I was,” Concetta said. “That was some Fourth of July weekend.”
By the summer of 2003, Abra had begun speaking in—more or less—full sentences. Concetta had come to spend the holiday weekend with the Stones. On the Sunday, which happened to be July sixth, Dave had gone to the 7-Eleven to buy a fresh canister of Blue Rhino for the backyard barbecue. Abra was playing with blocks in the living room. Lucy and Chetta were in the kitchen, one of them checking periodically on Abra to make sure she hadn’t decided to pull out the plug on the TV and chew it or go climbing Mount Sofa. But Abra showed no interest in those things; she was busy constructing what looked like a Stonehenge made out of her plastic toddler blocks.
Lucy and Chetta were unloading the dishwasher when Abra began to scream.