That’s precisely what the pianoforte became for me in those long summer days at Hurstwell. It grew more manageable to sit straight and quiet on those hard benches, to walk about with my head down, to swallow the slimy cabbage and old bread without complaint when I knew I could return to the candlelit room at the end of the day and slowly draw out the beauty of an old, forgotten relic. Several nights a week I slipped into that room for an hour or two, gingerly scrubbing rust from the strings and cleaning dust and grime off every crevice I could reach.

It breathed life back into my gray soul, watching this thing of beauty be uncovered and restored to brilliance. In time, rotted spots on hammers were replaced by carefully filed-down scrap wood, the cloth under the key levers was cut out and paper spacers put in its place to level the keys. I’d used a small wrench to carefully tighten each pin and bring the strings into tune, grateful for the exacting father who had taught me to tune nearly perfectly by ear, and thus I sank quite easily into the simple tasks that had made up so much of my life before.

Things were different than I’d envisioned for my life, but I’d let circumstances paralyze me for too long when before they had always mobilized me. Inspired me to act. My heart still wished to pursue normalcy, freedom, and my idealized set of circumstances, but this was my locked larder now, and merely enduring it would be a waste of life and heart.

Summer became fall, and in that abandoned wing a sense of normalcy returned, an undercurrent of music stirring within me. I hummed that enchanting forgotten melody from my dreams as I worked, picturing Rosamond’s sweet face, head tipped with lips pinched in a secret smile that made her eyes shine.

Those days many of us were shuffled outside to clean up the gardens, collecting leaves and trimming down roses. There was a great deal of freedom in this work, for the yard was Dr. Turner’s domain and the nurses did his bidding outdoors.

I watched Dr. Turner across the short hedge of roses, present among us yet somehow absent too. Lost in his own troubles. How familiar that figure seemed to me now, yet I knew him so little. Only through his actions, his bearing toward the patients, could I catch a hint of his melody.