She stared at the blue carpet on her office floor, her fingers seemingly searching for the right keys on a keyboard only she could see; she plucked at her skirt. The cream-colored walls had a spackled, unsmooth finish. There were two desks—the larger one with a computer on it, the smaller with a German dictionary. The stereo equipment was probably worth more than everything else in the office, including the small piano; there were more CDs than books on the bookshelves, and a bulletin board with a sepia photograph of Brahms tacked to it. There was also a postcard pinned to the bulletin board—a color photo of a very old-looking pianoforte, the kind of thing you’d find in a museum of musical history. A friend might have sent her the postcard—her Irish boyfriend, perhaps—or maybe William had sent it to her, if William was capable of sending a postcard.
“I want to get to know you a little at a time,” Heather said, still staring at the rug. She had Jack’s thin lips; her upper lip was a small, straight line.
“It’s a tight space, but nice,” Jack said, meaning her office.
“I don’t need more space—I need more time,” she told him. “The summer is good—no teaching, and I can get a lot of research done. In the school year, Easter is about the only time I have to do my writing.”
Jack nodded, glancing at the photo of Brahms—as if Brahms had understood what Heather meant. (Jack hadn’t a clue.)
Heather turned out the lights in her office. “You go first,” she said, before they started down the stairs. Maybe she found it easier to talk when he couldn’t look at her. “Daddy hides his hands, or he wears gloves, because of the deformities. The disfiguration of osteoarthritic joints is quite noticeable—not just a gnarling of the knuckles but actual bumps. They’re called Heberden’s nodes.”
“Where are the bumps?” Jack asked, descending the stairs ahead of her.
“At the far knuckles of his fingers—that junction between the middle bone of the finger and the little bone at the tip. But his hands don’t look as deformed as he imagines they do; it’s mainly how his hands hurt when he plays.”
“Can’t he stop playing?” Jack asked.
“He goes completely insane if he doesn’t play,” Heather said. “Of course he also wears gloves because he feels cold.”
“Some people with full-body tattoos feel cold,” Jack told her.
“No kidding,” his sister said. (He assumed that she got the sarcasm from her German mother.)
They walked through a parking lot, past more university buildings, down Charles Street to George Square. Heather was a fast walker; even when they were side by side, she wouldn’t look at Jack when she talked. “The arthritis has affected his playing for more than fifteen years,” she said. “The disease involves degeneration of cartilage and what they call hypertrophy—overgrowth of the bones of the joint. For a pianist or an organist, there’s a wear-and-tear factor. The pain of osteoarthritis is increased by activity, relieved by rest. The more he plays, the more it hurts. But the pain makes him feel warm.” She smiled at this. “He likes that about it.”
“There must be medication for it,” Jack said.
“He’s tried all the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs—they upset his stomach. He’s like you—he doesn’t eat. You don’t eat, do you?”
“He’s thin, you mean?”
“To put it mildly,” Heather said. They had passed some tents for the Festival and were walking through the Meadows—a large park, the paths lined with cherry trees. A woman with a tennis racquet was hitting a ball for her dog to fetch.
“Where are we going?” Jack asked his sister.
“You said you wanted to see where I lived.”
They passed Bruntsfield Links, a small golf course where a young man (without a golf ball) was practicing his swing; the fields, Heather told Jack matter-of-factly, had been an open mass grave during the plague.
“Daddy takes glucosamine sulfate, a supplement—it comes mixed with chondroitin, which is shark cartilage. He thinks this helps,” she said, in a way that implied she didn’t believe it did anything at all. “And he puts his hands in melted paraffin, which he mixes with olive oil. The hot wax dries on his hands. He makes quite a mess when he picks the wax off, but he seems to enjoy doing that. It fits right in with his obsessive-compulsive disorder.”
“His what?”
“We’re not talking about the mental part, not yet,” his sister told him. “He puts his hands in ice water, too— for as long as he can stand it. This is a bit masochistic for someone who feels cold most of the time, but the hot wax and the ice water work—at least they give him some temporary relief.”
It was a warm, windy day, but the way Heather walked—with her head down, her arms swinging, and her shoulders rolling forward—you would have thought that they were marching into a gale.
“All the years I was growing up, Daddy told me every day that he loved you as much as he loved me,” Heather said, still not looking at Jack. “Because he never got to be with you, he said that every minute he was with me, he loved me twice as much. He said he had to love me enough for two people.”
Her fingers were playing on an imaginary keyboard of air; there was no way for Jack to follow the music in his sister’s head. “Naturally, I hated you,” Heather said. “If he had to love me enough for two people, because of how much he missed you, I interpreted this to mean that he loved you
“You don’t
“That’s a work-in-progress, Jack.”
The street was busy—lots of small shops, a fair amount of traffic. Her apartment building was five or six stories tall—a wrought-iron fence surrounding it, a bright-red door. There were tiled walls in the foyer, a wood-and- iron banister, a stone staircase.
“You go first,” Heather said, pointing up the stairs.
Jack wondered if she was superstitious about stairs. He went up three flights before he turned to look at her. “Keep going,” she told him. “No woman in her right mind would want Jack Burns watching her go up or down stairs. I would be so self-conscious, I would probably trip and fall.”
“Why?” he asked her.
“I would be wondering how I compare to all the beautiful women you’ve seen—from behind and otherwise,” Heather said.
“Is the elevator broken?” Jack asked.
“There’s no lift,” she said. “It’s a fifth-floor walk-up. Lots of high ceilings in Edinburgh—high ceilings mean long flights of stairs.”
The colors in the hallway were warm but basic—mauve, cream, mahogany. The flat itself had the high ceilings Heather had mentioned, and brightly painted walls; the living room was red, the kitchen yellow. The only indication of the five roommates was the two stoves and two refrigerators in the kitchen. Everything was clean and neat—as it would have to be, to make living with five roommates tolerable. Jack didn’t ask how many bathrooms were in the flat. (There couldn’t have been enough for
Heather’s room—with a desk and a lot of bookshelves and a queen-size bed—had mulberry-colored walls and giant windows overlooking Bruntsfield Gardens. The books were mostly fiction, and—as at her office at the university—there were more CDs than books, and some serious-looking stereo equipment. There was a VCR and a DVD player, and a television facing the bed. Jack saw some of his films among the DVDs and videotapes on her bedside table.
“I watch you when I can’t fall asleep,” his sister said. “Sometimes without the sound.”
“Because of the roommates?” he asked.
She shrugged. “It doesn’t matter to them if the sound is on or off,” she said. “It’s because I know all your lines by heart, and sometimes I feel like saying them.”
There was nowhere to sit—only the one desk chair or the bed. It was basically a dormitory room, only larger and prettier.
“You can sit on the bed,” Heather said. “I’ll make some tea.”
On her desk was a framed photograph of a young-looking William Burns playing the organ with Heather-as- a-little-girl in his lap. When Jack sat down on the bed, Heather handed him a leather photo album. “The pictures are reasonably self-explanatory,” she said, leaving him alone in her room.
She was kind to have left him alone; she must have known he’d not seen many photographs of their father
