The Encore of Us novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Encore Interrupted
Linnea walks into the Brandvold benefit, breaks her no-contact order and tells Anders on stage that he has a six-year-old daughter who needs his kidney, and he counts the months aloud while his mother calls her a killer.
The doctor said the word donor, and then he said the word father.
I stood in the hallway of the children's hospital with my coat still buttoned.
Behind the glass, my daughter was asleep with a tube taped under her collarbone.
"Tove's blood type is B," the doctor said. "You and your sister are both type A."
"So we can't give her one."
"Not safely. A living donor has to be a B or an O."
Rhea gripped my sleeve. "What about the waiting list?"
"Her line is failing, and she's at the bottom of that list for another two years."
He lowered his voice.
"I can't promise she has two months. A parent would be the fastest match."
"Her father is the only parent we have left," Rhea said.
The doctor looked at me.
"He doesn't know she exists," I said.
Rhea let go of my sleeve.
She didn't argue, and that was how I knew she had been waiting for me to say it.
"It's on the bus ads all over the city," she said. "Tonight. The Brandvold Fall Benefit."
"I'm on supervised release, Rhea. I can't go within a block of that family."
"Then they send you back." Her voice cracked. "After she has a kidney."
I looked through the glass at the small braids on the pillow.
I went.
I took the bus downtown in my thrift-store coat, with my hair still smelling like the bakery's flour.
The front doors of Brandvold Hall were lit gold, and a man in a tuxedo was checking tickets.
I didn't have one.
I walked around the side of the building instead, down the alley to the loading dock.
The iron stairs were still there, fourteen steps up to the stage door.
I hadn't touched them in seven years.
I put my hand on the rail and climbed.
Inside, the wings smelled of dust and hot lights, and a stagehand in black stared at me.
"You can't be back here," he whispered.
"I know."
I kept walking.
Out on the stage, one piano was playing.
It was a piece I knew in my bones.
I had written the violin line for it in a practice room when I was twenty-two.
Anders was playing it alone.
He sat at the black grand piano in the pool of light, with his long hair tied back and his shoulders bowed over the keys.
He was thirty-one now.
Eleven hundred people sat in the dark, holding still for him.
In the front row, a woman in pearls and a camel coat watched his hands.
Ingrid Brandvold hadn't changed at all.
Her husband Halvard had conducted from this stage until the night he died.
I stepped out of the wings.
The stagehand hissed my name, and nobody heard it over the music.
I crossed the stage in my wet boots.
Somebody in the third row noticed first, and a ripple of whispers went through the hall.
Anders kept playing, because he always finished a phrase.
Then he lifted his eyes, and his hands stopped in the middle of a bar.
The last note hung in the air and died.
"Linnea," he said.
It was the first time he had said my name since the morning I told him I had never loved him.
I walked up to the edge of the piano and put my hand flat on the black lid.
"I'm sorry to do this here," I said.
My voice carried farther than I wanted.
"I'm not sorry about the rest."
"You're not allowed to be here." He said it low, almost kindly.
"Your daughter is six years old," I said. "Her name is Tove."
The whole hall went silent.
His hands slid off the keys.
"I don't have a daughter."
"She has a kidney disease and she's on dialysis three days a week."
"She needs a donor with type B blood, and so do you. I checked your name on the donor registry myself."
"Linnea, that is not funny."
"She was born in May," I said. "Count."
I watched him do it.
He went back through the months with his lips barely moving.
October. November. All the way to May.
I saw the exact moment he reached the end, because every drop of color left his face.
"You were pregnant," he said. "When you stood in my kitchen and told me you'd been with my father."
"Yes."
Ingrid rose from her seat in the front row.
Her pearls shook as she pointed at me with a gloved hand.
"That woman killed my husband," she said, in a voice made for the back of the balcony. "Somebody call the police."
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