“Give us some time. We’ll be fine.”
Warily, Beth retreated. Hovering was her way, and if there was one thing I learned from seeing Lucas three times per week for the past year, it was that Beth would lie down in traffic for her kid. She’d fight and argue and nag for him, and she wouldn’t stop until he had the very best of everything: doctors, therapists, dietary consultants, teachers.
I wasn’t sure where I fit into that particular ecosystem, but jamming with Lucas was almost as entertaining as performing a live show. According to Beth, he loved music as a baby, and long before he received an official autism spectrum diagnosis, she found that music was the only thing that truly soothed him.
I studied him for several minutes, listening as he worked through the Fifth Symphony’s first movement. It wasn’t a typical repertoire piece for violinists, but I knew it well.
Miss Michaels, my middle school orchestra teacher, loved Beethoven. She tried her damnedest to get a bunch of kids from suburban New Jersey to play the Ninth Symphony without sounding like a dying trash compactor, and for that I’d always admire her.
I never felt like I didn’t belong in that classroom. It didn’t matter to anyone whether I was the weird girl who couldn’t sit still. In that classroom, everything made sense.
If it weren’t for Miss Michaels, I’d probably still be in New Jersey. She convinced me to apply for a private conservatory high school, and then persuaded my parents to let me attend when the admissions letter arrived. She spent months helping me practice for my Juilliard audition, and though my family was minimally pleased when I was accepted, it was Miss Michaels who said, “You have no idea how special you really are, do you?”
When Lucas started the movement again, I secured my violin in place and joined at the strings cue after the first eight notes. He turned when he heard me, his fingers moving as if independent entities, and a slight smile broke across his face. Shifting closer, I positioned myself in his line of sight as we played.
He wasn’t comfortable with eye contact, but he did like watching my fingers.
We worked through the piece twice more, and then I showed Lucas how to gradually change the tempo—themolto ritardandomotif—and we played that for another hour.
As we approached the final notes of the movement, his fingers stilled over the keys. He glanced at me and nodded, then hopped off the bench and left the room.
That was how our sessions typically ended.
I tucked away my instrument—I called her Jezebel because she’d seen it all—and Beth intercepted me before I could leave.
“Can I just hug you?” she asked as she wrapped her arms around me. She was oddly strong for such a skinny woman, and I squeaked at the force of her embrace. “I don’t know how you do it, Tiel.”
I wanted to tell her and all the families I worked with that I wasn’t doing anything remarkable. We were messing around with the algorithms of music and manipulating the notes to bring order to the chaos in our worlds, and I enjoyed it as much as these kids.
But they didn’t understand it the way we did. It wasn’t just sound; it was our operating system.
My new friend, Seraphina, was the exact same way. She didn’t talk, and spent our first session crouching in a corner, her head tucked against her chest as she drew her finger back and forth over her knee. The repetitive motion gave her a constant to focus on while the texture of her jeans against her finger gradually dulled to soothing pressure. These were the little mechanisms our brains invented to deal with stressful situations.
I played some One Direction songs on my guitar while she tried to melt into that corner, but after the fourth song, I noticed her glancing at me. Sometimes interest was enough to suspend fear, even for brief moments.
I wasn’t in much of a hurry, so instead of heading directly for the T station, I stopped in Copley Square and settled on the grass. I loved these crisp, sunny late October days, and I wanted to soak it all up before wintery slush became the norm.
With my sunglasses in place, I lay back, watched the clouds, and hummed U2’s ‘Staring at the Sun.’ It was amazing to me how, in the middle of a bustling city, I could always find moments of tranquility. My cloud-gazing gradually descended into napping until my phone vibrated beside me. Glancing at the name on the screen, I considered letting it go to voicemail.
But that just meant I’d need to call him later.
“Hi, Dad,” I said.
“Hello, Tiel!” he said. “I didn’t expect you’d answer.”
Yeah, that pretty much summarized my relationship with my family. But he should have understood. He knew what it was like to be an outsider in this family, to surrender so much of himself in order to assimilate.
Then again, it wasn’t as though I’d surrendered anything.
My parents met when he was in college, and he interned at the accounting firm down the street from the restaurant. It was sweet, really, and if I removed it from the context of them being terribly disinterested in me as their child, I could admire the beauty of their story.
My mother usually covered the day shifts and spent the evenings looking after her nieces and nephews so the rest of my family could work the dinner rush. That was the order of things: life revolved around the restaurant. Instead of getting lunch to go, he started sitting at the counter and talking to my mother while she worked. They married less than a year later, and Dad had been managing the restaurant’s finances ever since. Her parents weren’t thrilled about her marrying a non-Greek, non-Christian guy, but considering they let him handle all the money, I assumed they made peace with it.
But that didn’t mean our home wasn’t a tidy melding of cultures. We were first and foremost Greek, and when the opportunity suited the situation, we were also Indian. The only outward sign of mixed ethnicity was my strange name.
Looking in from the outside, no one would guess that my father grew up in a traditional Hindu home. He embraced my mother’s culture, customs, and faith. His Hinduism was like sprinkles on the sundae: an extra, a bonus, an if-we-have-room.
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” I said. “I’ve been a little . . . disorganized recently.”
