Music

Her name is Lynnea. I don’t know anything else about her except that she hums. I like it when she hums. It reminds me of snowflakes falling on a frozen pond, like in the little wind-up snow globe Dad brought me from Stockholm.

Not that I ever say anything to her. It’s like she’s cast a spell over me, with her long pale locks and the lilting accents of her mother tongue—like the frost fairy in the legend—so that all I can do is sit there, frozen, stuttering out the little Swedish I know like our broken player piano.

Which, by the way, can only play three songs.

And since you can't get to know someone with only ‘May I use the bathroom?’, ‘Could you please repeat that?’, and ‘Thank you’, I don’t say anything to her. Not when she’s humming and penciling notes on her choir music. Not when she’s humming and drawing little pictures in the window frost. Not even when she’s humming and standing right next to me in the lunch line. Instead, I eat lunch with the piano in the band room because, at least, I can understand it and I can play more than three songs on it.

I don’t even notice she’s come in until she leans on the piano and starts humming. I stop and meet her eyes, and wonder what she would be doing here, but don’t say anything. I hope that I’ll understand whatever she’s going to say, but I hope even more that whatever she says won’t be a question.

“Det var vackert,” she says.

“What?” I ask.

“That...was...beautiful,” she says slowly.

“Oh,” I say, staring at my hands. “Thanks. I—” I pause, a blizzard of words hammering at my lips, yet at the same time, none of them are words she would understand. “Thanks,” I end up saying again.

“Tänker du fortsätta?” Lynnea asks, her pink lips turning up into a shy smile.

“What?” I ask again.

“Tänker du...” Lynnea trails off, watching my face. She reaches out a hand and plays a C chord. She points to me and motions with her hand.

“More?” I ask.

She nods, the smile creeping back up into her rosy cheeks as she leans against the piano. I start playing again and she hums along, the notes blending with my waltz.

She’s back the next day. She stands there, hands folded, humming until I stop.

“What is your name?” she asks me. I understand it the first time. Possibly because she’s speaking so slowly it takes her five seconds just to say those four words.

“Zach,” I say.

“My name is Lynnea,” she says.

“Yeah, I know,” I say before I can stop myself.

She blinks once, her pale eyelashes flicking, and then she smiles. “It is nice to meet you, Zach,” she says. She says my name more like ‘Sach’—I guess because there’s no ‘Z’ in Swedish, but I don’t really mind.

She’s back the next day too, this time with her little metal lunchbox. We eat in silence until Lynnea holds something out to me. It looks like a small cinnamon roll.

“Till dig,” she says. “Den är en kanelbulle.”

“It’s a what?” I ask, unsure if she’s showing it or giving it to me.

“Kanelbulle,” she says, stretching the word like a piece of gum.

I’ve never heard that word, but she holds it out to me again, so I take it and bite into it very slowly. It tastes like cinnamon and some spice that tastes like a cross between lemon and gingersnaps.

“It’s good,” I tell her. “Tack. Thanks.”

She smiles, those gray eyes of hers looking down as she takes a bite out of her own kanelbulle. “You’re welcome.”

She comes in every day after that. We eat lunch and then play at the piano until the lunch hour is over, but we can never say much to each other without a lot of “what’s” on my part. It reminds me of my snow globe. There are two little figures skating on the pond. They never move any closer or farther as the same song plays over and over.

One day, she actually sits on the bench with me. I can see her fingers, slim and dainty, tapping on the top of the piano. Her pale hair hides most of her face but I can tell that she’s smiling. I wonder how she can be so happy, sitting next to someone who can’t even tell her how beautiful she looks. Someone who hides behind a piano because a big block of wood sounds better than he does.

I stop playing mid-chord. Lynnea looks up, the finger that was tapping now pushing her pale hair back behind her ear. Even though she doesn’t speak, the look in her eyes and the little crease on her brow says, ‘why did you stop?’

I take my hands off the keys, surrendering to the silence. The silence that’s always there, behind the music, behind the humming.

“I’m…sorry,” I say.

She tilts her head to the side like a sparrow, the crease deepening. “Why?”

“Because I can’t… I’m…” I don’t even know enough words to apologize. I shake my head. “Jag kan inte... prata... svenska.”

Lynnea’s lips part and she smiles. Then she laughs. “You don't need to.” She reaches out and places her hand on top of mine. Her fingers are warm and the tips soft. She lifts my hand and places it back on top of the keys. “I like this,” she says. “I like music.” And then she pauses. “I like you. Jag gillar dig.”

I smile and then I repeat the words back to her. She smiles. Her smile looks like snow gleaming in the sunshine, so I guess I said it right.

So I start playing the piano again and Lynnea hums along. And neither of us says anything more.