The Missing

“Well, hell, the Kate Adams is makin’ a New Orleans run. Why don’t you take her all the way down?”

He looked out toward the river and noticed a big wooden crate outside on the dock. “All in all, the train ride’ll be quicker.”

“The America might stop northbound tonight, if it don’t sink from old age first.”

Sam cocked his head. “Wasn’t that crate here when I got off the other day?”

“Yes, by damn. The lady ordered it didn’t come get it when she should, and it rained before she finally did show up with a dray. Said she didn’t want no piano been left out in a thunderstorm.”

“A piano. What’ll happen to it?”

“The shipper’s insurance already paid off. The agent sent me a wire to sell it for sixty bucks, but hell, I don’t have no way to sell it, and I ain’t about to drag it inside my warehouse. They’ll probably send me a note in a month to ship it off somewheres.”

Sam pointed behind the agent. “Let me see your little crowbar there.” He walked over and read the shipping label. The piano was a high-grade Knabe. He pried up one of the top planks and saw a full upright sheathed in heavy waxed paper, and the little rip he made in the covering showed a golden oak veneer. He banged the board back in place and ran his hand carefully over the rough-cut poplar case.

That afternoon found him standing on the forecastle of the Kate Adams as the sidewheeler huffed southbound. Behind him was the new Knabe, and he fought the urge to uncrate it and play right there in the open afternoon. He stayed out until they passed Island Sixty-five, the domain of the infirm and mind-darkened Cloats. He stared at the river-thrown sand and twisted willow brakes, trying to imagine how those people came to be. He thought about it until sundown and he could come to grips with snakebite, random illness, war, lightning strikes, and the death of loved ones, but the Cloats remained for him a mystery. Then he remembered what Constable Soner had said two nights before: the worst thing that ever happened to them was each other.

Chapter Forty

BY EARLY NOVEMBER he had gotten a steady, contracted job playing downtown in the orchestra of the Hotel Sterling. The Sterling was an impressive venue, and its ballroom showed off the plasterwork of a Vie

He encouraged Lily to sing, but whatever spark she’d had for that was gone. She willingly played simple tunes on the oak Knabe every day, and he half expected to come home and find her working patiently through a more complicated fox-trot. What he did hear as he was coming up the walk one afternoon was a simple Chopin waltz. The piano bench had come loaded with a begi

One day in mid-February of 1923 he handed Linda an envelope full of five-dollar bills for the month’s household expenses, and she took it and pressed it against her stomach.

“You might have to start including an extra fiver.”

“How’s that?”

“I’m pregnant.”

He pulled her close. “You can have whatever I’ve got.”

“I know.”

“Don’t worry about anything. We’re doing swell.”

Lily walked in leading wobbly Christopher by the hand and looked up at them. “Why’re you hugging?”

He put a hand on top of her braided hair. “You’re going to get a new sister or brother, kiddo.”

She gave them each in turn a distant look, then dropped Christopher’s hand and walked out of the room without a word.

“So, it’s like that,” Linda said. “It’s going to take years.”

He stepped back and looked into the other room, where Lily sat holding a doll on the piano bench. It was an old doll dressed in seersucker. “She’s ours now.”

“She might understand it, but she doesn’t feel it. You of all people should know.”

“What?”

“Can you speak German to her? Are you a cheerleader for smart and fu

LATE SUMMER of 1923 saw the birth of Lisette, fair-ski

Christopher was a year and a half when Lisette was brought home, and though he looked up to August and tolerated Lily’s bossing, he seemed to sense the blood bond with his sister, and when she was in Sam’s lap, he wanted up on the other knee. When he was two, Sam found him on the bedroom floor, holding one of Lisette’s baby books upside down, pretending to read to her. He motioned for Linda to come out of the kitchen and see.

“They’re just playing,” Linda said. Then she watched his eyes. “It’s what it’s like between brothers and sisters. It’s what you missed, honey, and now you can see it. All you want.”

It was a blossoming year for August as well, who earned high marks in a school that was full of musicians, rawboned German kids playing accordions and Italians with their clarinets and drums, and when he was playing in the Sterling orchestra, the other musicians watched him during his solos, his animation and precision building fire under their own notes. He kept getting taller and began smoking cigarettes, but when Sam saw him slip a silver flask into his jacket one evening, he demanded that he hand it over. Though the boy was sullen about it for a few days, there was no rift between them that couldn’t be bridged by the music.

Lily, though, by her fifth birthday had become an island unto herself. Through her sixth and seventh Sam taught her, treated her as his own, and paid for lessons when it became clear that she was an artist rising beyond what he knew. Sometimes when she was practicing, he would sit beside her and take over the left hand. Another child might have looked up and smiled, scooted closer or moved away to make room, but Lily treated him as if he were an anonymous brown sparrow that had landed on her bench, and she kept her eyes on the music, stretching her growing fingers out to the sharps next to his hand, but never touching him.

His own children were slobbering babies crawling over him like puppies, and he took his time with them, but they needed no convincing that they were part of his life. Lily went wherever the family went, downtown for doughnuts, to church, out to the lake for a picnic and a swim. She played with the younger children and cared for them, but at any idle moment she would seem to be elsewhere in her thoughts, separate, more like a visiting child than a member of the family. Watching her, Sam would feel a subtle lack of co