Keys

My finger throbbed the rest of the summer. And then it went numb. By the next spring, it was no longer tender to the touch, but I also couldn’t feel anything. At some point, while writing, I realized that I no longer used it at all. My other fingers hopped over it to press the “e,” “d,” and “c” keys on my laptop. My friend Kerry, a physical therapist, told me that I needed to retrain my brain to use the finger. I tried—but it was too much work. It took more time than I had to direct my finger: press “e,” press “r.”  I had too much to do, too much to say. And it was exhausting, getting that finger to work again. It felt as if my left hand were in the home stretch of a marathon. It made my whole body tired.

So I’ve learned to get along with a finger that doesn’t work right. It hasn’t affected my life, even my writing life, in any significant way. I’m only self-conscious of the awkward hopscotching I do across the keyboard when somebody is watching me type. It’s the piano that I’ve lost. I can’t play with a hand that doesn’t work right. The older boys take lessons, practicing at home on my grandma Heinkel’s Everett, which used to sit in the corner of the long, blue formal living room in her house in Illinois. My grandmother played that piano, as did my mother, then my siblings and me.  But it was my brother whom my grandmother most loved to hear. “I just love a man at the piano,” she’d say, pronouncing it pee-anna in her Midwestern drawl.

I love to listen to my boys play, too. I don’t even mind–because my grandmother would not have, either–that the keys of her pee-anna are often covered in their hand grub. They sit at that piano in their underwear, and their baseball uniforms, banging away at Mozart and Coldplay. Sometimes they’re happy and focused. Sometimes they’re weeping or furious. Sometimes they’re at the piano simply to escape something, or someone, in the house by drowning themselves in their music.

I used to do that, too.  I miss it.

There’s a piano in my mother’s house in Illinois. There’s a piano in my birth mother’s house in Colorado. This is one of those shared traits that the social workers made much of on our adoption paperwork. Both mothers play the piano! My fingers know well the piano in my mother’s house, but they have never touched my birth mother’s. Hers sits just outside the door of the basement bedroom where I stayed two years ago when I visited. In the midst of the emotional whirl of that visit, I longed to play it, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to with my dead finger. I wanted to ask her to play it for me, to connect the mothers and the childhood that was and wasn’t, but I didn’t do that, either. My mother often plays when she is here in Philadelphia visiting us. Her music wraps me up like a child again.

I’ve since started over myself, playing the same elementary music my boys are learning, hoping to retrain my finger to find its way among the keys. Some day, perhaps nobody will be able to tell again that something was lost from me. What you will hear is the put-together melody of tender hard work. It’s as real as anything you’ve ever heard. It’s not a facade. It’s not a stiff upper lip.  It’s not a grin that bears it.  Listen: this is the music of adoption. It is all the notes made amidst loss and found, played by a triad of broken people healed and healing.