"So I go into this terrible dark hallway, it smells like urine and there's garbage lying around, step into the elevator and then up to the seventh floor. It's better up there, not as dirty. There's music playing somewhere, television voices behind the doors and it seems less dangerous, just another place where people live their lives, and I'm feeling awfully judgmental all of a sudden for being afraid of the building. So I find the apartment, 7M, and a woman answers the door—"
"How old is she?"
" Maybe fifty? I'm bad with ages. She opens the door with the chain still on and asks me who I am through the crack, so I tell her who I am and that I have an appointment. And she says, 'Oh, Stanislaus is so looking forward to meeting you,' with a very faint Eastern European accent, like this isn't her first language but she's been here a long time. She opens the door and I'm face-to-face with this really elegant woman, her hair and makeup all done, nice clothes. I'm standing here in t-shirt and jeans, filthy from the restaurant, and it's embarrassing all of a sudden, like I should have dressed up to meet them.
"And then Stanislaus comes in and he's a wreck, maybe sixty, he drags his leg and he winces like he's in pain, you can tell his nose got broken once or twice, but his wife brings him his guitar and he starts playing, Anna, and I can't tell you. he can do things I can't, and it made me think of Jack, actually, this thing he used to say—"
Anna shifted in the bed. She was afraid she might have put Jack in danger. She didn't regret coming to Holloway College because if she hadn't gone there she wouldn't have met Liam, but the mention of Jack's name always filled her with guilt. Chloe whimpered in her sleep in the crib by the bed.
"This thing he used to say," Liam said, "when we were in school together." He said this as if the time when he'd been in school with Jack were much more distant than three weeks ago, as if Liam's belongings weren't still scattered in the dorm room in South Carolina where Jack still slept every night. "We'd be listening to a musician, someone really good, and Jack would go, 'Damn, he has the music,' or 'She has the music'—"
"He used to say that in high school too, but I don't think I really understood what he meant."
"The way I think of it," Liam said, "it means the musician's a conduit. It means music's something that moves through him, like religion or electricity. I'm up there in a tower in the scariest neighborhood I've ever set foot in, all these kids waiting to rob me out front, and here's this man who comes into the room half-crippled, he's a bit gruff and he doesn't really have much to say to me, just asks for the money for the lesson up front and I'm wondering if coming to Detroit to study with him was a terrible idea, but then he sits down and starts playing and it's like nothing I've heard. This man, he's broken-down and poor and he lives in a hellhole, but he has the music."
The idea of having the music— something you could hold inside yourself, a library of notes, a collection— made her happy. "Do you have the music?"
"I'm so close," Liam said. "I think I'm getting closer."
"To the music?"
"To the music," he said. "I can't really explain."
Anna fell asleep beside him and when she woke two hours later— Chloe was whimpering— he was gone from the bed. She found him in the living room, playing softly and haltingly in a style she'd never heard before. He smiled when he saw her but didn't stop.
Chloe liked the music. She flapped her arms and made excited small noises, she grinned toothlessly at Liam and kicked her feet, and after some time had passed Anna and Chloe fell asleep on the sofa. When they woke together Liam had gone to work. Anna redyed her hair and trimmed it while Chloe was napping. The sting of bleach on her head, the familiar ritual of turning herself blond, soft pieces falling around her ears. She sometimes didn't remember what she'd looked like in her old life. She sometimes didn't remember who she'd been. A distant version of herself had run away from home and gotten high in the park and skipped school to smoke cigarettes under an overpass, but there were days when these seemed like someone else's memories.
S h e c o u l d have gone outside but she didn't. She thought of Paul constantly and her memories of him made her heart beat faster, a panicked blackness at the edges of her vision. Their neighborhood was half-empty, every third or fourth building boarded up. There were cracks in all the sidewalks, and no one ever threatened her but she didn't feel safe. She felt watched when she walked down the street with Chloe, all the windows of all the buildings filled with malevolent eyes. There was nowhere to go but the park down the street and that was a broken-down place, swings hanging lopsided and rust on the slide. There was one swing meant for a small child that still hung the way it was supposed to, but that swing made a ghastly shrieking sound when she pushed Chloe on it— rust on the chain— and Chloe didn't like the noise.
When Liam came home at night he was tired and exhilarated. After his shift in the restaurant he would board a bus to the projects, where he rode an elevator to the seventh floor of a brick tower and spent two hours with Stanislaus. Later Anna sat on the floor of the living room and listened to him practice. She'd liked listening to the jazz quartet back in high school but this was different, this was something she didn't have words for. Chloe loved it too. When she was big enough to sit up, she sat on the carpet and stared at Liam while he played. There were moments of unbearable beauty when Anna closed her eyes in the living room while Liam played his guitar and everything rushed away from her until it was just the music, just Liam, just her daughter and the softness of the carpet where she lay on her back to listen to him, scents of cleaning products lingering in the air. The perfection of their lives together.
"I love your music," Anna said. He put down his guitar and kissed her. There were moments when everything was easy and bright.
Anna knew that Liam worried about her, the way she stayed indoors almost all the time. He pressed her sometimes to think about the future. "What are you going to do with your life?" he asked, near the beginning, when they'd just arrived in Detroit.
"I'm going to look after Chloe."
"What were you going to do before Chloe?"
"I wanted to be Brian Eno," she said.
"What?"
"I was going to be in the music industry in some way. I used to think I'd maybe be a producer or a DJ or something."
"You still can."
"I know," she said, "maybe I'll still do it." But the future was abstract and none of it mattered as much as Chloe did. The idea of leaving Chloe with a stranger was unthinkable. She was going to be a better parent than her parents had been. She was going to save Chloe from everything bad.
In t h e spring Liam asked if she'd mind moving to New York. He'd learned all he could from Stanislaus, he said. There was someone else, an old man in Queens who Stanislaus said was among the very best.
"My name is Liam Deval," he said quietly to himself in the mirror when he didn't know she could hear him, "and I am going to be famous." He said it sardonically now, as if he were only kidding, but his ambition was a winged and burning thing.