Maybe there was something to simply being still. To working through the discomfort that she so often fled from. For the whole of her life, or at least since she’d first pulled out the piano bench in her parents’ apartment when she was five and her parents stumbled into realizing that she had perfect pitch, Frankie had been surrounded by noise. Her dad had inherited a grand piano from his own parents—an antique Steinway that he had tuned twice a year but otherwise went unused in their expansive living room. Her mom had been playing Simon & Garfunkel on the record player, and the story goes, Frankie just sat down at the piano and instinctively began playing “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” When she finished, she looked up, and her mom was standing in the precipice between their kitchen and the living room with pink oven mitts on and her mouth agape.

“How did you do that?” her mom said, and Frankie worried that she was mad at her. The truth was that Frankie didn’t know how she had done it. It was like she could see the notes the way she saw colors. They were there. Her brain knew that red was red. Her brain knew that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was set in E-flat minor, even if her brain couldn’t tell her that exactly. She started to cry, and her mom rushed over and wrapped her in her arms, the oven mitts still on, and whispered not to cry, that everything was going to be all right. Looking back, Frankie understood that her mom was barely twenty-six. She was playing dress-up as a wife and a mother, numbing herself to the dreary reality of waking up in a life she hadn’t planned on. Sometimes, she would stare wistfully at the wall for so long that Frankie, still little, thought maybe she’d mastered the art of falling asleep with her eyes open.

But when Frankie sat down at the piano that day, everything shifted. For the three of them. Now, they were surrounded by noise, and not just noise, they were surrounded by music. Music! What a joy that should have been, what a gift. It was only now, by the silence of the pool, with the filter occasionally bubbling and a sporadic hum of a motor, that Frankie felt something untangle in her, just by sitting in peace. Even the lump on her head seemed calmer, like she was beginning to heal from the inside out. She reached up, pressed it, found that it was still sore but less aggressively so.

She dragged her feet, ankle-deep, from the pool, tugged on her socks, and tied her Doc Martens. She unrolled the hems of her jeans and recounted exactly what she knew. These were the facts as Frankie understood them at the moment.