Free The Sound of Letting Go by Stasia Ward Kehoe

departures.
    Like eating hot lunch, I acquiesce, accept
    what is dumped onto life’s tray before me,
    even try to enjoy the bland potatoes, flavorless soups.
    I allow people to simply exit doors,
    never invite them in.
     
    Yet despite Mom and Dad’s well-reasoned arguments,
    my own secret plans to escape from home
    for the summer,
    and my million silent wishes
    for a different life, something stirs in me
    when I picture them sending Steven away.
    I do not know if I can eat from this dish,
    if I can celebrate this freedom.
     
    Like a Civil War soldier pitted against his own kin,
    I know I cannot merely watch this plot unfold,
    that I must take my own stand.
    Even if my greatest rebellion until now
    has been flicking the channel
    from the Cartoon Network to HBO,
    even if I’m not sure what is right
    or how to make myself heard,
    I cannot just let Steven go.
     

61
     
     
    “Hi, Daisy, how was orchestra?”
    Aggie opens her studio door at my knock,
    pushes up her sleeves. I see
    the trickling lines of tattooed flowers,
    music notes, and tangled vines
    that end just below her elbows.
     
    I used to meet with Aggie every week,
    but school and bands and competitions and growing up
    and Steven got in the way and now
    it’s only two or three lessons a month,
    squeezed in with a bit of luck.
     
    I’m likely the last student she’ll see today
    before heading down to Boston to play a nighttime gig.
    Aggie is badass
    in a totally different way from Dave Miller.
    She looks like a pit girl, tatted and ringed—
    not so much eyeliner, though—
    and bleached-white hair shorn close to her scalp.
    She can play any brass thing with a valve—hell,
    practically anything made of metal:
    trumpet,
    coronet,
    French horn,
    sax.
     
    A year or two ago, she said,
    “There’s nothing left I can teach you, Daisy.
    You should go down to the Conservatory in Boston
    or over to Portsmouth to study with one of the teachers
    at the U.”
     
    But Mom and Dad couldn’t go looking
    for some fancy teacher for their musically gifted girl.
    Any energy they might’ve had for that
    was spent on Internet searches
    for teaching autistics to verbalize, for specialists, doctors—
    flashing online dreams, visions of some kind of better day,
    better week for their boy; for them.
    A night of uninterrupted sleep
    or just some daylight moments
    with enough safety to simply sit and be still.
     
    And I had known all of this
    in the instant it took to tear my glance
    away from Aggie’s, drop it down to the music stand, and say,
    “I don’t think my parents could manage that,”
    in a voice I’ve learned to use that’s clear and firm:
    don’t-pity-me yet uncontestable.
    There are things you learn from living like I do.
     
    “How about you play me the Ellington piece?”
    she asks now, rubbing her hands together
    as if she were getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner.
    I love that Aggie loves to hear me play.
    It makes the music all about the joy of sharing,
    not the advantages of escape.
     
    I lift my horn to my lips,
    release my desperation into the purity of sound.
     

62

     
     
    “So, Justine and Ned, sittin’ in a tree?”
    I squeeze between two pairs of jeans and a pile
    of sweaters sprawled across the rose chenille bedspread
    that is also playing host to half a dozen pairs of shoes.
     
    “K-i-s-s-i . . .” Justine stops, mid-rhyme,
    to smear her lips with silvery pink.
    “You like?”
     
    “That color should be called Sexy Robot!”
    I throw a metallic gray sweater in her direction.
    It is the fourth lipstick shade, the sixth outfit
    my usually decisive friend has tried.
     
    “Take that, Callum O’Casey!”
    Justine cinches her waist with a dark blue belt.
     
    “You only ever liked his accent anyway.”
     
    “But he can be such an ass. It just pisses me off.”
     
    “I saw him at the music school today,” I tell her.
    “He’s started lessons with Aggie.”
     
    Justine doesn’t say anything else, just turns sideways.
    She