Free Nocturne by Helen Humphreys Page B

familiar. I had woken to these same objects many times over the years, in all of the places you had lived.
    After you died, when I was coming back to your apartment to clean it out, I was looking forward to seeing your space with your things as you had arranged them. But there had been an infestation of bedbugs in your building in my absence, and your landlady had sprayed your apartment, and to do that she’d had to move everything away from the walls, so that your stuff was just a piled jumble in the centre of each room. All the careful placement of your items, that delicate arrangement, gone.
    The sunrise was visible from the hospital corridor windows on the walk to your room in the ICU. I remember stopping at the windows for a moment before continuing in to see you, and just watching the deep red of the sky. That afternoon, after you died, the sky was the same colour over the mountains on the way out of the hospital. It almost felt as if time hadn’t advanced at all, that the hours between the sunrise and sunset had never happened.
    When I stood at the window that morning, watching the sunrise, I knew that you were going to die that day. The doctor had said to us the afternoon before, “We need to think about letting him go.”
    This sunrise isn’t quite as good as that one. Maybe the cold air over the mountains helped to stain the sky such a dark red that morning. Here, the space above the fields is infused with pink, a smudge of colour over the dark trees.
    I’m on my way back from a reading. The book we went to Paris to research is finally out and I’ve been travelling around to promote it. Maybe you would like it, Martin. I’m not sure, because you never read my books. I don’t know why. You kept all my reviews, though. I found them after you died. I asked you several times why you didn’t read my books, but you never gave me a real answer. In the last few months you did make an effort to right this, by starting one of my novels, but you only got to page 54.
    My novel was by your bed in your Vancouver apartment when I got there. I guess you were still trying to read it. The objects in the orbit of a bed are the objects most in use, and that was certainly the case with you. The space around your bed was strewn with books, papers, your cell phone and charger,clothes, a glass of water. Everything you needed, every night, close at hand.
    I used to be upset that you didn’t read my books, but it no longer matters. I understand that it cost you to be a child prodigy, that starting piano so young and having an art that was public meant that for years, you felt people only liked you for your music, and not for yourself.
    Two women are sitting behind me on the train. They’ve been talking the whole time, crazy talk. “I used to have a lot of friends before my head injury,” one of them says. The other one counters with, “Do you know what the leading cause of death for women in Canada is? Urinary tract infections.” I love every crazy sentence that comes out of their mouths. I love their absolute belief that they’re being ripped off, and that everything that happens to them is someone else’s fault.
    The sun is up now, Martin, and the fields are gold and green, and the trees mass green at the edges, and the train lurches forward, and the sunrise has evaporated, and this day is fully underway.

20
    You were practising three piano pieces during the fall you were dying. The first was the
Menuet antique
by Ravel, the piece you told Mum was like a prayer.
    The
Menuet
was the first of Ravel’s compositions to be published. It was a piece written in youth, when he was twenty years old. Like you, Ravel was an owl rather than a lark, preferring to work at night, and often taking long walks in the dark. He liked the darkness so much that he had the shapes of stars cut into the wooden shutters in his house, so he could imagine the night sky during the daylight hours.
    Music was his only intimate and he never married or,