Grace Silverstein is the protagonist of Prodigies, and she's generally a detached, sardonic young woman. Her past experiences include being discriminated against for her Black/Jewish ancestry, a childhood spent in residential schools for the arts with few visits from her parents, and her parents' death in a plane accident. She has recently learned she has an inborn talent to manipulate feelings with her music, and this talent is why she, her fellow prodigy Ichirou Shimizi, and his former instructor Ayana Hashimoto have been pursued by members of an international cabal.
At the time of this scene, Grace has been recently killed and resurrected by an acquaintance, Grzegorz Kozlowski. The four of them flee to decide what to do next. I didn't expect to write this scene:
It was a little over an hour to Mackinaw City and the bridge that connected the lower part with the Upper Peninsula. The UP was its own world, I remembered from my high school trip to Mackinac Island in high school, which seemed so very far away. I remembered trees, forests much like those we had traveled through, and a concert on the grounds of the Grand Hotel, which made the Palac Pugetow look like a mid-price family motel. I think I sighed aloud.
We stopped at a small independent coffeehouse with more atmosphere — offbeat and settled-in — than I expected in a small town. We wandered in, the four of us, and I wondered if the owners had had much experience meeting with a black woman, two Asians, and a man with long, fiery-red hair. They were nowhere to be seen, nor were any customers. To my relief, I noticed an isolated table sat in a back corner that looked as if it was designed for clandestine Internet use.
“Allow me,” Greg pushed past us to inspect the corner. Ayana snorted, and I admit that my eyes bugged out a little from the moment of intrigue. He waved us back, and I noted that the nook wasn’t only unoccupied and secluded, but abutted the back door.
We settled at the back bench, and Greg took our orders — coffees for me and Ichirou with cream and sugar, green tea for Ayana, black tea for Greg; and an assortment of breakfast pastry. “I’m not vegan enough to check the ingredients,” Ichirou assured.
Greg returned with the drinks and two Danish, three scones, a handful of biscotti, and what looked like scrambled eggs in a mug. Greg handed me the mug and growled, “You need more protein.”
“I just want a biscotti,” I growled back.
“We have those too, Miss Grace,” he muttered as he handed me one — and smiled, a fleeting smile that felt as if the sun had come up, no matter how briefly.
As we worked our way through breakfast, Ichirou pulled his laptop back out and set it on the table. We looked around —we were still the only ones in the store. Ayana pulled out a couple notebooks, and I wondered what was in them. Greg pulled out what looked like a thumb drive, then another thumb drive, and my curiosity was piqued by the depth of intrigue the objects on the table carried.
Ichirou had his computer, Ayana her notebooks, Greg his thumb drives, and I had nothing. I suddenly wondered if I had been kept in the dark for some reason. Did they think I was delicate? Just a girl? Were they afraid to depend on me because I had recently come back from the dead?
“Grace, I’d like you to try something,” Ayana said with her usual calm.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Do you have a song in your repertoire that says ‘This is not the table you’re looking for’?”
Hmm. I thought about that. There’s a whole range of moods that go with the message ‘go away’, and not all of them would be appropriate to a family-run coffeeshop with a Northwoods-meets-1940’s look.
I liked Ayana’s idea of ‘Nothing to see, move along’, but what song could be used to carry that?
What if the song had no words at all? Just feelings, maybe directions?
“You’re on, Grace,” Greg murmured as a short, stocky blond man wandered toward the back table.
I took a deep breath and began, pianissimo, with a whisper of a note which grew more solid as I crescendoed, then dropped back accarezzevole. The man stood still for a moment, as if something called to him, and he turned paler than I thought he could. I had no words, only emotion that gave him as if it were the most important gift I had, which it was. It was the first moment and the last moment I had spent in heaven.
The man looked at me with tears when I finished again in that caressing tone, remembering Ichirou’s graphics that had given me unconditional love. He had not moved, he had not fled. He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and grabbed my hands in his. “Thank you,” he said. “I needed to know that.” Before I could explain, apologize, anything, he said, “I will block the doorway to this section. I will not throw my guests to the mob.”
********
Foolishly, I had thought that the topic of Ayana's death experience would diminish in two days. Instead it has given her more power, but there will be a price for her to pay for it.
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