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The concert began and we didn’t speak again until Charlotte took the stage. Then Marit grabbed my arm. “Oh, Noah,” she whispered. “She is so very beautiful. I can see from here. She glows.”
I nodded and clenched my jaw, thankful I had new sunglasses to conceal my eyes. But when Charlotte began to play, I couldn’t hold it back. How close had I come to ruining this? Her music was so achingly beautiful, her talent so rich and vibrant. I felt Marit clutching my arm, sniffling now and then, and the ice in me that had begun to crack back at the hotel shattered completely.
I grabbed for Marit’s hand and squeezed, my other hand holding my head as I bent over, wracked by sobs I tried my best to keep quiet. I broke open, broke apart, and let all the rage and pain and bitterness go. It was too hard to hold on to, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I thought I was holding on to my old life, but there wasn’t anything left of it. Only ugly residue, and that, I finally realized, wasn’t worth holding on to.
Everything I thought I knew about what it meant to be a man was stripped away. What remained was what it meant to be a man who loved a woman as much as I did. To be a human being experiencing this life in all its ugliness, its beauty, its pain and hate; good and evil; love and death.
So yeah, I sobbed like a goddamn baby, but I’d never felt more like myself—whatever that was or whatever it was going to be—than at that moment.
After, Marit took me back to the hotel. I tried to get her phone number or email to keep in touch, but she refused.
“You’re like a UFO sighting,” she said. “You crash-landed at my work, and we had an adventure, but now you have to go back.” She laughed shyly. “I could tell people what happened, but no one would believe me.”
I gripped my new white cane and felt the reassuring weight of my new phone in my pocket. “Thank you, Marit. I can’t say that enough.”
“So…remember when I told you it was crazy, what you were doing?”
“Change your mind?”
“No,” she laughed. “But it’s kind of heroic, Noah. I don’t think you see it that way, but maybe you should.”
I smiled. “I think you read too many comic books.”
“Probably,” she said, and I could hear her voice retreating down the hall. “But I love them because, in the end, the hero always gets the girl.”
Through the next few cities, I noticed the change. Copenhagen, Warsaw, Prague… None of it was easy. Not one minute. But the frustrations didn’t weigh me down until they buried me. I got pissed now and then, but the anger didn’t consume me. I let the experiences in, and I took the best of them with me, discarding the rest and starting over fresh with each new day. I talked to people now. I chatted, laughed; had lunches and coffee.
In Prague, a young Swiss couple on their honeymoon walked with me across the Charles Bridge, describing the city’s beauty in both French and English, with the hopes I would see it even more clearly in two languages.
In Warsaw, a little old lady helpedmecross the street and then took me to her flat for borscht and bread. I spoke not a word of Polish and she not a word of English, but she gabbled at me the whole time. When it came time for me to leave, she kissed me goodbye on both cheeks, and I felt my chest tighten. Apparently, I’d become a huge sap, and I was glad Ava wasn’t there to see me blink my eyes dry or I’d never have heard the end of it.
In Berlin, I asked the concierge at my hotel for a quiet place I could stroll away from the crowds, and he rattled off a list of famous landmarks.
“Wait, say that last one again,” I said.
“Charlottenburg Palace?”
I grinned like an idiot. “Yes, there. I’ll give that one a try.”
The tour was weeks away from ending, but I felt peace swell in my heart, washing away all the bitterness and anger. Still, I didn’t think about meeting Charlotte until the end, in Vienna. I had to make sure this peace wasn’t transitory, that I wouldn’t wake up one morning and feel as angry as I had in Rome, or panicked as in Barcelona, or the horrific nothing of Amsterdam.
I never did.
I managed everything instead of fighting it, and while it was still incredibly difficult and stressful, I knew I was going to make it.
And then I woke one morning to feel the sunrise streaming through my Munich hotel room. I felt the gold and orange of the sun on my skin. A new day. The tour moved on to Salzburg today and then to Vienna to wrap it up. But I couldn’t wait anymore. I didn’t need to. The time had come. Tonight, in Salzburg, I would attend Charlotte’s show and then after…
I closed my eyes and smiled while the sun warmed my face, rising high and dispelling the night for good.
chapter forty-eight
The tour moved on through Eastern Europe. I felt like I’d had a reset. What Lucien had said soothed me enough to keep going. Whatever Noah was doing had to be infinitely harder than playing music in the most beautiful concert halls in the world.
“Trust,” I said, breathing it out like a prayer.
In early August, our violin soloist, Gian Medeiros, got drunk in Munich, fell off the back of a park bench and broke his wrist. We were set to return to Austria the next night, to Salzburg, and perform an entirely Mozart series in honor of his birthplace.
Sabina gathered us together in the Munich Central Station while we waited for our train, and she, along with our conductor, told us that Gian was out for the rest of the tour. Sabina picked me out of the crowd and said, “Charlotte. You will be our soloist for the Concerto, No. 5.”
