Page 28 of Nantucket Longing

The word rang through Madeline’s head.But as much as she wanted to resist it, as much as she wanted to say it wasn’t so, the minute he said it, she knew it was true.Her breath caught in her throat.

“She’s heard the recordings from your sessions here at the jazz bar,” Aleksander said, sniffing, clearly looking down at a place like this.“She’s quite impressed.”

Madeline felt woozy.Was she going to faint?

“She wants to talk to you about the next phase of your career,” he said, removing his business card and planting it in Madeline’s hand.

Madeline stared down at the card, at the Polish-looking last name that served as her ticket to someplace else, someplace better.This was far more than Juilliard.This was the grand stage.

“I haven’t played classical music in six years,” she said.

Aleksander scoffed.“We know all about you.”

Madeline flared her nostrils and looked at him.“You know what happened to my mother?”

Aleksander didn’t flinch.“It was a tragedy.Your grandmother has mourned her for years.”

Madeline’s first thought was that they were mourning alone when they should have been mourning together.Her next thought was why didn’t she reach out?

“She wants to meet you,” Aleksander repeated.“Contact me at that number so that we can make arrangements for you to come to Poland.”

“I’m going to Nantucket,” Madeline said, feeling silly and soft.“I’ll be out of Europe for Christmas.”And I’m moving to Los Angeles to be with my love.

But she found she couldn’t say that so easily.

“Tell me you’ll be in contact,” Aleksander said.“After Christmas is fine.”

Madeline felt herself nod.“Okay.”

Aleksander slipped past her, muttering in Polish when it looked like the crowd was going to obstruct his way.He gave her a final pointed look and said, “We’ll be waiting,” then disappeared into the night.

Madeline stood there with the card in her hand, feeling as though the world she’d once known no longer made sense to her.The rules were different.She wasn’t alone.

But that meant she never had been.And how could she make sense of that?How could she make sense of all the sleepless, aching nights, the starry sky over Los Angeles when she’d ached for her mother, for the love she’d once known?

It didn’t matter.Not now.She knew she had to go to Poland.She had to learn more about her mother, Poland, and her pianist past.

This was the reason she was a prodigy.Finally, the puzzle pieces were coming together, and she was going to understand herself—for the first time.

She tucked the card into her pocket and bit her tongue to keep from telling Henry she would run away to be with him.Maybe her career wasn’t finished quite yet.

ChapterFifteen

Madeline

Christmas on Nantucket Island

All the way back to Nantucket Island, Madeline didn’t have the nerve to talk to Henry, Greta, and Bernard about what had happened in Paris.Something about Aleksander and his confident and slightly sleazy demeanor didn’t sit in her stomach quite right, and she hardly touched her airline food—an Indian chicken meal that Henry said was the best he’d ever had on the plane.Madeline kept the foil on hers and tucked her head on his shoulder, watching the film he watched without earphones and pretending to know what was going on.Henry strung his fingers through hers.His eyelids flickered.In a few minutes, she knew he would be fast asleep.

Madeline got up to stretch her legs.Bernard and Greta were seated across the aisle and were both asleep, which was no surprise given all the Parisian exploring they’d done together over the past few days.Greta had had a list a mile long of all the Parisian sights she wanted to show both Madeline and Henry, and when her legs had tired out, she’d forced them back out onto the streets with a big list of both sights and bakeries.Madeline’s stomach ached from all that bread, but it had been worth it.

When Madeline returned to her seat, she connected her phone to the on-air Wi-Fi and googled Barbara Nowak for the first time since meeting Aleksander.The first image that appeared was of Barbara as a much older woman—probably as she looked now, with silver hair and powerful cheekbones and a shining epidermis that spoke of very good medical procedures and skincare.A quick calculation told Madeline that she was in her late sixties or early seventies, around Greta’s age and still, it seemed, very much influential in the classical music world.She’d recently given a talk about the “current worldwide benefit of teaching children classical music” in both Brussels and London, and she was set to give a concert in Poland in February.She was going to play Rachmaninoff—a piece Madeline herself had once perfected.In fact, she’d played it for her Juilliard audition and hadn’t listened to it once since.

It chilled her to the bone to learn that her grandmother was still playing it.She was still practicing eight, nine, maybe twelve hours a day.

Madeline darkened her phone and, not for the first time today, considered her mother, Diana.Why hadn’t she ever told Madeline about her super-famous pianist mother?Why had she kept it under wraps?Then again, Madeline reckoned how difficult it must have been to be a young girl with a very successful and busy mother.Eight hours of practicing a day meant eight hours during which she couldn’t have cared for her daughter.What had Diana done to fill the empty space?Madeline could only assume it had been incredibly difficult when Diana was very small.She’d probably screamed and cried at the sound of the piano.

So, the question for Madeline became: had Diana allowed Madeline to play the piano as a way to connect her to Poland and her roots?Or had she allowed Madeline to play the piano despite the painful connection to her mother?

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