An Unfinished Score Read Online Free PDF

turned toward her, staring hard, voice angry. “Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”
    When he told her about the friend with the small plane, she said, “That’s the kind that goes down. But it’s back-page and not front-page news because only four people die at a time.”
    “I’m not afraid of dying in that sort of plane crash,” he explained. “It’s not like being hit by a bus. How awful that would be, everything just smashed and over before you knew what hit you. Going down in a small plane would be visceral. Falling and thinking, This really isn’t happening, except it is. This is a great thrill, and now I am dying. Look how high we are, how far we have to fall .”
    Suzanne despised the image, but she understood and told him so.
    “But I would hate to die in a big plane,” he said. “No view. Dying knowing that the last thing you’d see in life is some Tom Cruise movie or a fat woman in a pink track suit.”
    It was a full-sized jet, the one he’d gone down in.
    After dialing the 800 numbers advertised for family members, Suzanne spends the hour she is on hold cleaning the house with one arm, a crick in her neck. The phone is uncomfortable in the hollow of her chin. Unlike her viola, it is small and easily dropped. Its hardness feels cheap.
    Using lemon oil, she polishes the single piece of furniture she has from her mother: a heavy cypress buffet, plain except for its three drawers engraved with intricate leaves. She spends a long time in the depression of each leaf and accesses her clearest memories of the woman who hid birthday presents in the drawers. Avoiding the overwhelming new grief by returning to the old, Suzanne clicks through the mental pictures like a slideshow. Her mother, about a year after the Empire State Building visit, hair disheveled, fending off Suzanne’s father with a skillet as they back out the porch door for the last time. Her mother through a fogged passenger-side window, standing in the front yard of a tract house she desperately wants to sell so she can pay the rent on their apartment and continue Suzanne’s private lessons. Her mother, beauty evaporated by difficulty and illness, dying at home like Suzanne promised. But there are as many images of her mother not there: concert-hall seats filled by people who aren’t her mother. The vacant front-row seat at Suzanne’s graduation recital at the Curtis Institute, the empty seats in Charleston, the seated strangers at all her performances in St. Louis. Her mother didn’t live to see her succeed, though it was a future she always believed in, even when Suzanne did not.
    A young woman’s voice comes though the line, startling Suzanne from her crooked housework.
    “What was the movie on the plane, on the plane that dropped like a stone from the sky?” Suzanne’s words tumble into one another as she rushes them. “Do you know who the actor was?”
    “You’re horrible,” the high voice answers. “People died. Their wives and children are trying to find out information, and you’re playing pranks.”
    Suzanne thinks of Alex unwrapping his tray of food, struggling with the cellophane to extract the disposable fork, fumbling with the paper salt packet that might make the portions edible. “Wait,” she says, trying to suppress the crazed tone she hears. “This is more important. Was there a meal or a snack box? Was there a choice?”
    “You’re either a bad journalist or a bad person,” the young woman on the other end of the line says, her voice lifting and tight. “You’re a sick woman. You need help.”
    She hangs up before Suzanne can explain that it isn’t a prank, that it matters to her what her lover saw and tasted in the last minutes of his life. She hangs up before Suzanne can tell her that, yes, she is a bad person, that she is not Alex’s wife, but that she mattered to him and needs to know. She wants to say that Alex should have gone down in his friend’s plane, toward a screen of greenery,