Berceuse- a short story

So this is my first attempt at a short story...what say you? 

Berceuse

The baby was up again. Her sneeze bounced off the newly painted walls of the brand new house—green, like the evergreen leaves and twigs her father brought home that first day, setting them on the windowsill at the head of the golden, maple wood crib. Her sneezing had made her mother giggle at first, but the sneezes turned into coughs and the coughs into weak sobbing. The sobs would finally turn into long silences that lasted until the snow outside sent sparkling reflections of the morning light creeping through the window of the little house on Oak Street.

 It was an early winter, and the freeze had shocked the countryside with a thin layer of white. The baby loved to watch the snowflakes drift down and cover the big evergreens outside the picture window at the far side of the nursery. She rarely had energy to do much else, so her eyes followed the flakes till they were lost beneath the windowsill. They called her baby Jane, named after her mother’s grandmother. She was a happy baby, at least until this cold had shaken her fragile body. She was quiet. In fact no one had ever heard a sound from her, even her cries were silent. She often played with the mobile in her crib that spun around a wooden dowel and held tiny portraits of her mother, father, grandmother, and grandfather. She would smile at her father’s furry mustache when he entered her room, beaming and bringing some new kind of leaf or holly branch to place in her windowsill. He was worried about her, they both were, he and his wife. They took her to specialists to see why they had not yet heard the natural gurgling and cooing of a baby her age. Even Jane could not adequately express her frustration with sound as she cried soundlessly from the coughs that rattled her little chest. Baby Jane did react to sound though.  Like her musically gifted parents, it was obvious from the start that she loved the classical pieces that filled the house. She would grin and her eyes light up when her mother would float into the room in her light blue dress and wool stockings humming Mozart or Chopin after playing it on their baby grand piano down the hall—hushed, just in case the baby was sleeping. But that was rarely the case. 

            One particularly cold morning Jane’s mother came into her room, weary after another night of coughing and tears. She was prepared to see her lethargic and feverish infant but was surprised to behold her smiling baby, playing with the portraits of those who loved her above her head. This child who was so happy and loved could not be the same who had choked and wriggled lamely in her arms the night before. With a new joy in her step she passed the rocking chair her mother had passed down to her before the baby came and tried not to feel a little contempt for it. She’d spent countless nights rocking back and forth, back and forth, every night for the past few weeks, singing and coaxing her baby to sleep. She tried to remember the love in her father’s voice as he explained how he had hand-crafted it to her mother’s exact size and comfort when they had her so few years ago, it seemed now. She swept Jane into her arms and cooed sweet nonsensical words, the baby just smiled silently and looked at her mother’s lovely lips. Wrapped up in the light green quilt her mother had made to match the room, mother and daughter rocked back and forth for this short-lived moment of peace. The chair’s days were numbered in use anyway, thought the mother. She couldn't have known the truth of those thoughts, or with what swiftness they would come to pass.

            .

“Renee! You’re awake!”

“John! I thought you had to work with the director all day today. Is something wrong?”

“Ah, the choir can do without it’s pianist for one day! You were up all night with Jane, and it’s been like this for weeks, you need to rest before you tire yourself out.”

Renee looked at her child in her arms and smiled. Jane, a beautiful baby girl, perhaps a little small for a five month old but lovely, with soft hair and green eyes just like her father’s. John was a big man, but lithe with strong arms and long fingers. Renee remembered when she knew she loved him. He’d sat behind the old piano at the chapel, his green eyes blazing as he played Chopin’s Berceuse for an invisible audience. As he finished, she’d crept back into the corridor, from her hiding place behind the pews, where he’d promised to meet her after her meeting with the ladies of the local church group. It was not his handsome physique that made her love him, but the way his hands flew across the ivories. She of course played the piano, if not as beautifully as he then well enough, and he had promised to give her a few lessons.

She doubted that she could ever have as much passion as he when he played. As he played, she would sit in the room in a trance, warmed through by the sweet melodies. It was fascinating to watch him then and still now as he played for the church choir every Sunday. This week the pastors’ family was in town and the choral director insisted on practicing a few extra hours. John didn’t need the practice, but in Renee and the director’s opinion the choir left a little more to be desired.

Jane sneezed again and the tears started rolling down her sallow cheeks before Renee could comfort her. Renee sat down in the old rocking chair and cradled the child, rocking back and forth. The weight of the small bundle felt like a load of bricks in her tired arms, but she smiled a half-hearted smile for John. He shook his head, hearing a rattle in his baby’s chest that hadn’t been there before, and found his way to the piano to play a lullaby for the loves of his life.

The same Berceuse played two weeks later, November seventeenth. Jane’s withered body laid cradled in the soft, green, satin-lined casket her grandfather had crafted. The snow on the ground crackled under the feet of the men as they carried the tiny load to the cemetery behind the church where a small grave had been prepared. John had insisted that a piano be set up at the site where he played Chopin’s Berceuse one last time. He remembered the way it made his child light up, and how his wife would hum along when he played as she rocked back and forth, calming the baby’s heaving coughs and filling the long silences that followed each new fit. Renee sat next to him on the piano bench, her eyes sore and tired. The tears would not end and she still had yet to get a decent night’s sleep. Without Jane all she could hear was the lullaby, the music releasing into a crescendo in the night, or in the middle of the day when she felt at her lowest point. It kept her awake at all hours. The couples’ bodies were folded towards one another, hunched and hollow, but the music drifted around the small crowd like a hostess among family and friends expressing the gratitude and sorrow.

“BBrrriiinnnnggg, BBrriiinnggg!”

“Dear gosh mother, do you really have to have that obnoxious ringtone?”

“It’s not that bad! It has a good old-fashiony flavor.”

“Well answer it already, I can’t stand it.”

“Hello? Yes this is Kim. Yeah I’d love to! Next week? The seventeenth?  Absolutely that would be great. That’s fine. Just leave the key under the mat and I’ll let myself in. Thanks Cindy, I hope you love it.”

“Who was that?”

“Cindy Martin wants me to paint a room in her house this next week! Finally the jobs are coming in!”

“That old house on Oak Street? I’m not sure I’d be too excited about that Mom, the house is a thousand years old and falling apart.”

“Well the Martin’s are trying to renovate it, make it into a sort of historical landmark or something. Maybe they’ll let me leave a few business cards in the entrance way? Oh well, a job is a job right?”

Kim left her daughter Sam sitting in the kitchen and went out to check on her flowers. The mums were dying and crowding the beds with their sick petals. She went to work dead-heading and weeding. The weather was unusually chilly for this time of year, just the beginning of November and she felt the cold seep through her jacket quickly. She thought of her new business. It had seen a rocky start, but as clients were impressed with her work, she was beginning to get a regular flow of customers seeking her services. She freshened wall colors, faux finished pillars, and rag rolled fire places—a naked wall was an unhappy wall, she always said. This would be her fifth house in three weeks and as tired as she was, she was happy making the little town a bit more beautiful through her work.

The seventeenth came with a thin frost blanketing the road Kim took to the house on Oak Street. Cindy had left the house key under the door; she and her husband had gone out looking for a little more info on the house at the local library, hoping to renovate it to look as it had 94 years ago when it was first built. Kim fumbled with the key in the cold air, but finally convinced the old knob to give in and scrambled into the comfort of the old house.

The entryway was grand, made for a hostess to greet her guests as they entered, mingling and admiring the spacious entrance. She draped her thick, winter parka over a bench near the door and left her shoes under it, out of the way of imagined company. The entry opened up into a great room—the family had placed a baby grand piano right in the middle, with various couches and poufs lining the two walls on either side. Past this was a long hall with a fork at the end. The left hall lead to a spacious kitchen, and the other to the bedrooms.

At the very end of the hall she found the bedroom to be painted. The walls had been covered in a bright red paisley wall paper, from the 60’s Kim guessed. The Martins had attempted to pull most of it off, revealing the original, light green shade of paint peeking out under the garish red paper curling off the wall here and there. Kim set to work, stripping the paper off in long sheets, then going back in and scraping the stuck bits off with a little wall paper remover and the broad end of a knife. She kept the knife on the empty windowsill as she rubbed the remover over the tough spots. Next she prepped the walls for color, patching up a few holes with plaster and rolling on a coat of primer so the color would spread on evenly. She carefully primed the hard to reach places with a small angle brush, and then used her mohair rollers for the best coverage over the wide walls.

 Kim took great pride in her work, believing that every room deserved the utmost treatment, and to be as beautiful as she could make it—this room was no exception. The four walls were low and cozy, all converging towards the window in the very left hand corner across the room. The closet door  next to the entrance lay slightly ajar, a single, light-blue dress hanging inside. The silence in the room was eerie at first, but she was comfortable in that cozy, old house where the modern heater kept her warm while a light snow had begun to fall outside the window at the far end of the room.

Her arms moved fast and the heat from working warmed her cold body quickly. Taking a break, she sat to admire the first half of her paint job. The color was happy, the kind of green in mint chocolate chip ice cream, or the green hydrangeas she’d planted this summer. Hopefully next year they would bloom to twice their original size and she’d clip a couple to set in a vase for her bedroom window. She watched the snow falling in time to the silence, the wind blowing it back and forth, back and forth across the lawn and through the big Evergreens outside. If the snow were accompanied by music she imagined it would be something light, tumbling and slow—a  piano solo where the drifting notes would rise and fall with the snow flakes, making patterns on the patio outside. The sharp notes would be dulled with the pedal to blur the scales and give a feeling of continuity, lulling the listener to sleep.

“Hello? Is someone home? I’m just painting the back room, don’t mind me!”

Music really was playing in time to the snow, and the soft arpeggios had trickled into Kim’s thoughts alongside the green paint and warm room so that she hadn’t noticed right away. She calmly got up to see who could be home, moving down the long hall, still feeling the warm music in her limbs. She checked each room, making sure the big screen TV in the living room was turned off all the way. It was amazing that anyone could turn it on, much less figure out how to turn it off. The boom box in the kids’ room was switched to off, and so were the alarm clock radios in the office and master bedroom. There were no cars in the garage, and the driveway was empty except for the snow swirling across it, back and forth. School didn’t get out for another three hours, and the bus always took another hour after that. The house was empty. The music kept playing.

There didn’t seem to be an origin, it was as though the whole house had been rigged with a sound system with speakers behind every wall. The music lingered in the air, warm and thick, and covered the walls and beautiful wood floors with its rolling crescendos and diminuendos. But the house must have been too old to have that kind of system installed without obvious traces, and Kim saw no speakers or even an audio box to turn off.  She checked the basement, only the electrical box. The garage, nothing. There was nothing, just the old house and her, back in the room now, staring out the window at the falling snow.

The music was beautiful and Kim recognized it as a song her daughter Sam played at last years’ piano recital. Chopin, she thought, a lullaby of some sort. It moved through her like the warmth from the heater and her hard work. It must be a sound system after all, the control panel well hidden out of sight as if it might distract from the originality of the house. She continued her work back in the room, enjoying the music, since she had no way of turning it off. It calmed her as she finished the job, taking care to paint the room twice so that the color would be true and consistent. As she packed up her brushes and washed out the paint trays, the music got louder, coming to a crescendo then leveling off into rippling scales. She shivered, but the warmth soon swept through her body once again with a new vigor as she placed the last roller into her bag.

The room was complete, warm and bright with the new shade of green it was meant to have. Kim smiled as she backed out of the room, turning her back on it as she walked through the doorway. She wanted to stay in it, to enjoy the music and the color; it seemed to fill her up with joy and gratitude for its beauty. But she was too warm. The heavy jacket she brought lay crumpled in a pile by the front door and she slung it over her shoulder. She reached for her shoes under the bench and pulled them on as another chord echoed off the entrance way. The piano keys quivered in the next room, begging to be part of the music. The Berceuse was wrapping up slowly, sweetly.

She reached for the stubborn handle and the door swung open from a fierce wind. It was freezing out there. The snow swirled around her feet and threatened to knock her over as she struggled towards her car, wishing she had put on the jacket. She felt conspicuous, as though someone was safe behind the windows of the house watching her fling her bag into the back seat and flail toward the front seat. Embarrassed she didn’t look back when she pulled out of the drive, slowly so as not to spin out. Her skin prickled, the warmth gone and the car silent, she wondered if the music in the house was still playing for her.

As she turned the corner she chanced a glance back towards the picture window. She thought she saw, there in the windowsill, a single holly branch.