6. November Rain and a Borrowed Guitar

There was a guitar in the apartment that Nora had not paid attention to because it lived in the corner of the living room behind the now-functional futon and she had trained herself, in the interest of the five-year plan, to not pay attention to things that were not the five-year plan. Then on a Saturday in mid-November she came home rain-soaked from a shift that had run over, her umbrella having turned inside out somewhere around the fourth block, and found Eli sitting on the futon with the guitar across his knees and his eyes closed. He was playing something slow and uncomplicated, working through it the way you worked through something you were finding rather than something you already knew. She stood in the doorway for a moment, wet coat dripping, and listened. He opened his eyes. He saw her. He stopped. "Don't," she said immediately. He looked at her. "Don't stop," she said. "Sorry. I just — please don't stop on my account." He looked at her for another second, the guitar still under his hands, and then he looked back at the neck and started again, more quietly, as though adjusting for the new presence in the room. She took off her wet coat, draped it over the hall hook, and went to the kitchen for a towel and then came back and sat in the armchair that Sofia had acquired from a sidewalk and that was somehow the most comfortable thing in the apartment. She did not say anything. She did not do anything. She sat in the rain-grey afternoon light and listened to Eli play something that didn't have a name yet. He played for about fifteen minutes. Then he set the guitar aside and looked at her with the slightly exposed expression of someone who had been doing something private and was now managing the fact of having been watched. "That was new," she said. "It's nothing yet." "It was something." He looked at the guitar and then back at her with the expression she had started mentally cataloguing as his this-is-difficult face. "I opened the notebook," he said. "Last week. First time in —" He didn't finish the time estimate. "I wrote something. It wasn't good but I wrote it." "That's not nothing," Nora said. "No." He seemed to be deciding something. "Sofia says you're the reason." She blinked. "What?" "She said watching you deal with the scholarship thing — the way you just — adjusted and kept going — she said it made me think about stuff." He looked slightly uncomfortable, in the way of someone repeating something they'd been told rather than saying something they chose to say. "Her words, not mine. But she's — she's not wrong." Nora did not know what to do with this information. She held it at arm's length from the five-year plan portion of her brain and looked at it from a careful distance. "I didn't do anything," she said. "I just — kept going." "That's the thing, though," Eli said. "You make it look like a choice. Not like the only option. Like — like you decided to, even though it's hard. That's different from just surviving it." Nora looked at him. She had never thought of it as a choice. It had always felt like necessity. Like the only available response to a fixed set of circumstances. But he was looking at her as though he'd seen something she hadn't, and she had the unsettling experience of a new way of understanding something she thought she knew. "The song," she said, after a moment. "What's it about?" He picked up the guitar again, looked at the strings. "I don't know yet," he said. "It might be about my dad. It might be about —" He stopped. Strummed one chord. "I don't know. I'm finding out." "That seems like a good way to write." "It's the only way I know." He glanced at her. "You should do your studying. I know you have that statistics assignment." "How do you know I have a statistics assignment?" "You've said 'the statistics assignment' in a vaguely threatening tone four times in the past week." She laughed before she could stop herself. It came out genuine and slightly surprised, and he looked at her like her laugh had made an argument he'd been having with himself. She got up. She went to her room. She took out the statistics assignment and opened it and worked through five problems before she realized that she was still, in some quiet background layer of herself, listening for the sound of the guitar.