Looking back, I can see now that by asking me over for our coffee visits, Maria was trying to take my teenaged self under her wing, maybe because she knew what my father and I were going through.

But I also think she wanted company herself: her house looked so big and empty to me as I walked by. By then, the silhouettes of Maria and her husband could no longer be seen through the big windows, weaving past each other, apart, and together again. They used to look to me like they were dancing—my father had told me they lived for music—but I knew they were just walking around, moving things. They always seemed to be trying to sort out all their accumulated objects. It was sad to think of Maria alone in that still house, which had once seemed so alive.

Maria’s only child—Val, who was about five years older than me—had moved out when she was still in her teens. By the time I began visiting Maria I hadn’t seen Val around for quite a while. I didn’t think too much about Val’s choice to leave or what it meant; she had always seemed only somewhat real to me, like a character from a book or a painting, so in some ways her being gone felt more natural, though I knew that must not be how Maria felt about it. I was sure she wished her daughter had stayed or would at least visit. In any case, I certainly felt that I couldn’t refuse her invitations to come by.

She was always giving me things; any item in her house that I commented on would be wrapped up and sent home with me. So I should have been less surprised when she gave me the guitar. But I wasn’t prepared. It was the last thing I expected.

As far as the previous, smaller gifts went, I guess if I’m being honest I’d have to admit that at the time, I thought it was natural that an older woman who lived alone in a big house, like Maria did, would give me small things. She had so many things. I just took them, not knowing what else to do.

The first time I came over, she gave me a framed drawing that hung on the wall in her kitchen. As we stood in her kitchen while the coffee dripped into the pot, our cups waiting on the counter, I felt like I should say something to acknowledge the room’s personality—it seemed rude to ignore it. I came to prize the few fleeting moments I got to be quiet and alone in the house without having to talk, moments just for moving through her big, cluttered rooms, looking at all the pictures, objects, and furniture. But this wasn’t one of them. I had to say something.

I could have chosen any number of elements to comment on—the colour scheme, the art objects, the curtains, but I chose the picture.

“I like that drawing,” I said. “It’s like a metamorphosis. I did one in school.” The drawing was a small, striking framed ink illustration of a stave with musical notes on it against white space, but at the end of the stave the notes turned into a herd of what looked like tiny horned deer, galloping across and off the end of the lines into empty space.

“Thanks,” she said. “And you’re right, it’s a metamorphosis. Music turning into animals. I come from a musical family. Music turns us into something too, although I can’t say what exactly. It’s by an artist from home. From Spain. He was someone my father knew. The animals are ibexes—they run and jump across rocks faster than any other animal. They’re so graceful, even though they don’t look like it ‘till you see them move.”

I knew Maria was a dancer when she was young, as well as a musician. Her house showed me this as clearly as anything she said.

“The black and white goes with the rest of the room,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

I had noted with curiosity the way Maria had appeared to colour-code her life. I wondered if it was intentional, as I could only assume it was, and if so, what it meant. Everything was black and white, or black or white. I was at that time, and still am, distracted by visual details that it would be better to ignore.

“The black and white goes with my clothes too,” she said, responding to my thought as well as my comment. “As I’m sure you’ve noticed, I wear a lot of black. I know people think I’m strange. But it’s my way of remembering. My husband last year. My brother five years ago. My father before them. We all thought he’d live forever. These days, people wear anything, even to a funeral. An orange dress—any colour. Whatever they wear to work. Like it’s a stop on the way to or from something else.”

While she talked and poured our coffee, I gazed out the window into her backyard. As though to balance out the black, the garden in her backyard was entirely white: a sea of white-flowered thyme lay like confetti over a low, broad hill that sloped up the back of her property; a row of three white lilac trees stood at the base of the hill. She saw me looking at the trees.

“I’ll clip you some blooms when you leave. The white is nice enough. I wanted purple lilacs, but I was too cheap,” she said. “I cloned them all from that first tree. The father, I call him. The others are just like him.”

Maria was in front of me, just to my left, and behind her, enough of the window looking into the backyard was visible for me to see my reflection in the glass, my face swimming in the middle of wet, white clouds of blossoms above her, like I was in a thought bubble she was thinking. The blossoms looked heavy and light, the weighted branches moving in the breeze. I noticed how tired I looked. I rubbed my eyes.

“It doesn’t show on you,” she said. “The being tired. You’re too young. Don’t let yourself get too worn down, though,” she said. “You’ll feel better if you sleep.”

I thought that was true, but I hadn’t been able to find a solution to my sleeplessness. My dad’s doctor had prescribed a therapeutic syrup to help me sleep—something natural, he said—but up until that point I hadn’t wanted to try it. I had an idea that despite everything, my youth should be spent on things other than sleep or sleeping medication. It was supposed to be a time of awakening. I drank a lot of coffee.

“This helps,” I said, lifting my cup, trying to keep things moving along the surface.

“You like coffee,” Maria said. “Me too. Movement also gives you energy, though. I used to say dancing was like my drug. When I was young, some people drank or took pills. I could dance all night, with nothing but a glass of water to keep me going.”

Just as we were heading to the living room with our coffee, the phone rang in the kitchen. “It’s my daughter,” she said to me, covering the receiver. “There’s a TV upstairs in the sitting room, if you want to wait for me there.” As I started up the back staircase, I heard Maria’s voice starting to sound serious: “I know. I know,” she was saying. “Things aren’t what we thought. I just don’t see why you need to be stern.”

Up the stairs, a series of framed black-and-white photographs hung on the wall, ascending with the stairs. They all featured a young woman with dark hair, posed in low, sleek dancing shoes and a full skirt, holding a classical guitar. They looked like they’d been taken at a performance. In one, she was posed with her face resting on her guitar’s neck. For a moment I thought the woman in the photo was Val.

Though I had seen Val on our street while I was growing up, I didn’t think she knew who I was. My father and I didn’t know Maria’s family very well until after Val left home. I couldn’t recall her ever saying hi to me or even looking at me. In my recollections of her, she was somehow always in profile, looking ahead, not at me. Like a moving picture. One day she’d walked past our house, her black coat flying behind her in the rain, her face serious, and my dad commented that Val was one of those types who’s in a fight with the world. I wasn’t sure if he meant it as a good or a bad thing, but it made her even more interesting to me. I’d seen her a few other notable times; once, wandering around at a small outdoor music festival on a summer night, I approached a tent and saw her there, playing a classical guitar. I recognized her from our street, but she looked altered—like she belonged to a different, unfamiliar layer of our small town that I somehow never knew was there—with her unkempt hair, dark clothes, and bare feet. Her face was striped with shadow by a candle in a metal cage on a table beside her. She always looked like she’d just been running, or sleeping—some activity that had disordered her appearance.

The woman in these pictures along the stairs had the same face as Val, but she looked immaculate, crisp, and composed. In one, she sat holding her guitar in the centre of a circle of people; she was laughing, her hand draped over the silent strings, leaning in toward a man in a dark suit beside her, the neck of his shirt loose, his smiling face turned toward his guitar while he tuned it. The two of them were lost in their laughter; the audience seated around them, frozen with cigarettes or wine glasses held aloft, was in rapt focus on the man, despite the radiant, uplifted face of the woman beside him.

“Hana,” Maria called up the stairs. “I’m off the phone.”

Downstairs, in the tall, dark living room, we sat down and drifted into what would become our usual pattern of conversation, talking about and through the objects around us in the room, or objects she brought out to show me. She brought out one of her classical guitars. As she sat in a circle of lamplight and showed me the right way to hold it, she looked just like the pictures.

“I saw the photos of you upstairs,” I said. “I thought it was Val at first.”

“Val and I look the same,” she said. “If only we were similar inside as well as out. She’s my daughter, but I’m still getting to know her. I always expect her to act and feel a certain way, and then I’m wrong.”

“She’s a guitarist too, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “At least she must still know how to play, but I don’t know how much she does play. She teaches music now, in the city, at the university. She says she likes thinking about music. It gives her a sense of control. So she’s not just feeling it. I guess she likes to keep her distance. From music, from me. It’s her choice. It’s fine for me, if she’s happy. I wish at least she would have taken her grandfather’s guitar with her. I think it would have brought her happiness.”

“Her grandfather,” I said. “He was the man in the picture with you, upstairs.”

“My father. The guitarist. A famous one, but not as famous as some of his friends. I don’t even bother telling Val much about him anymore. Which basically means I don’t have much to say. When you write a book about someone, they are all you tend to think about.” She got up and went to a desk. She returned with a thick manuscript and placed it on the table between us.

“Here it is,” she said. “The space I live in now, where no one else goes but me.”

The title page read, “Ángel Abelló—a Musical Life.”

I picked up the manuscript and turned to the section in the middle with copies of photos. One, dim and grainy, looked like it had been taken on a yacht. The man in black from the photos on the stairs sat at a table drinking wine with a heavy-lidded man who was saying something to a tall, thin woman with her hair tied in an elegant kerchief. Ángel on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht, the caption read.

“Is that Jackie Kennedy?” I asked.

“Jackie O. by then,” she said. “My dad was on tour with Narciso Yepes, the famous guitar virtuoso, and they were both invited for dinner after a show. They had wanted to hear Narciso play for them in person, but apparently fell under my dad’s spell, without him caring whether they did or not. My dad said he had no interest in celebrity. He always said he was a man of depth forced to live on the surface too much of the time. When I see pictures like these though, it doesn’t look too forced. But then, he had a way of looking natural. He had practice.”

The phone rang again. She didn’t answer it.

“I’ll call her back after you’ve gone,” she said.

“I should go now,” I said. “I want to see how my dad is.”

It was never made explicit that Maria was concerned about me—about me and my father—but sometimes she made comments. And there were the offerings. The lilac blooms, dripping their dew down my sleeve as I carried them across the road to the bungalow my dad and I lived in, the framed picture of the musical-note ibexes wrapped in newspaper in my other hand.

At home, I put the lilacs in a vase and placed them on our kitchen table. I thought of bringing the vase to my dad, letting their wet, dark smell break open the dry air in the dim bedroom where he stayed almost all the time those days. But I didn’t want to make my dad feel more like a sick person than he already did. I would let him discover them, I decided: I’d let him come down the stairs to catch that unexpected scent, to be drawn into the kitchen, maybe feel a little energy in his limbs, an interest in going outside, even. But a week later, the last of the blossoms had gone brown and the branches were drooped right over so that the tips of the flowers touched the table without him having seen them. I put them outside with the yard waste, bending them into a small clump as though hiding incriminating evidence.

And then, the fourth or fifth time I visited Maria, as we sat down in her living room, I saw that another guitar stood in a stand beside the one she had shown me during our first visit.

“I have a gift for you,” she said. I expected her to reach for the guitar she’d shown me before, but she picked up the other one and handed it to me. “It was my father’s,” she said.

I sat even more mutely than usual as I took the guitar into my lap. I marvelled at the object’s beauty. It was the dark, rich, burnt orange colour of a flame, with soft nylon strings. Beside it, the other, more basic, yellow guitar looked like a prototype, an unfinished mock-up: the new one looked deeper and more solid—more fully-formed.

As I sat with the guitar in my lap, Maria placed a small block of a substance that looked like clear black soap on the table between us.

“Pick it up,” she said.

I took it in my hand and my nostrils filled with a faint, piny scent tinged with something pungent and unfamiliar.

“It’s for conditioning the strings. You rub it along them. It’s a combination of rosin—which comes from trees—and meteoric iron.”

“What’s meteoric iron?”

“It’s actually what it sounds like—iron from meteors. What I understand is that it comes from half-formed planets. They’re not really planets yet, but more like discs made of turning dust and metal from broken up meteors. A young version of a universe, as my father put it to me once. He said this material was like concentrated life force. Pure youth.”

What she said stayed with me, maybe because I understood so little of it in the moment, and thought about it so much later on.

She made a gesture with her hand that seemed to mean the same thing as a shrug, and laughed a little. She looked at the chunk of rosin, still in my hand, as though it might speak up and correct us about its origins. I held it up awkwardly, in my open palm, the back of my hand resting on my knee.

“That’s the kind of thing he used to say,” she said. “Although now I don’t know how much, if anything, to believe, out of all the things he told me. I don’t even feel sure that he believed the things he said he believed. You start to see a person differently by thinking about them as the subject of a book. He was an artist. When I look back, I see that lots of the things he said and did were acts of self-creating, if that term doesn’t make things less clear. That’s what he did. He was always creating himself. He even wore a black hat with a feather in it, if you can believe it. Men were more like peacocks in those days, at least among his set, but he took it to a new level. He was trying to be a myth. No one in a room with him could see anything else—you saw it captured in those pictures by the stairs. It shaped who I thought he was, who I thought we were. He even claimed to be descended from horse thieves.”

She paused, and looked around for a moment, as though looking for something that would illustrate what she was saying.

“He came back from a trip once with a beautiful blanket for me, dark fuchsia, hand-woven, with galloping horses on it, and he told me when I slept under it I’d dream of the past, before I was born. He must have known how the things he said would be burned into my mind. He said when I slept under that blanket I’d relive all kinds of things. That I’d recall ancient, wild rides across moors in the dead of night, driving a team of stolen horses. That I would hear the rhythm of their hooves pounding against the ground. As you can imagine, I used to stare for hours at those horses on the blanket, their flying manes. Once I almost thought I felt something, or even heard something.” She made the shrugging gesture again.

“I can’t accept this. This gift. I couldn’t,” I said. I thought the words would sound stark, forceful, or even rude, but they broke apart in the echoing air of that large room, as though too fragile to retain their meaning, an expression of thanks rather than refusal.

“I don’t want to be alone in this story anymore,” she said. “Sometimes I almost feel like I’ve become a character in the book I’m writing. I guess that’s what comes of too much time alone.” She looked down at her hands. I had never seen her look more lonely.

The guitar was mine. I would have to take it. I could feel it grow heavier in my lap, as though settling into me, as my arms fell slack. Not knowing what to say, I just kept thanking her, even as a feeling of mild panic began to set in, that I was a part of the family now, when I couldn’t even keep my own family whole.

She told me that I should treat the strings with the rosin each time I played it. She put the rosin in a little burgundy case for me, and with that in one hand and the guitar in its case in the other, I walked back toward my house, relieved to be leaving the gloom of Maria’s house, breathing in the wet spring air, inhaling the smell of the rain that had started to fall. I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to walk, despite the rain. But I didn’t want the guitar to get wet, so I climbed up the porch and went inside.

The story of my own relationship to that guitar, and to Maria, should have gone differently than it did.

I took lessons for a while, after Maria connected me with a small music school. When I called to make my first appointment, I told the teacher, Sohail, a man in his twenties, that I was mostly interested in learning to play rock and folk, but when I arrived and sat down for our first class, clicking open the case to reveal the gleaming orange guitar, Sohail looked at it with a muted, reverential expression.

“You’re going to have to learn classical on this,” he said. “Where did you get it?”

Without waiting for an answer, he took the guitar in his lap and played a simple, cascading, and sad song so beautiful that tears came to my eyes almost spontaneously, as though the music went straight to my brain, pulling down a trap door to a sensation that was both like a memory and also unfamiliar. It sounded unlike any guitar I had heard. The nylon strings’ reverberations seemed to wrap around the notes, holding their sound like an offering extended, but not fully released, and therefore still partly human—the played notes were still composed of the act of creating the sound, rather than sound flung off into the air, released. And yet they were also in the air, the sound enveloping us. I gazed at Sohail’s face, a sudden interest in him fluttering in my stomach.

Despite my crush, I stopped going shortly after starting the lessons. I soon lost all interest in the guitar, as adolescence swelled to its sodden crescendo, the combined culmination of my grief and worry over my dad’s long illness and a broken heart after a long, complicated relationship with a friend, none of which I could understand in relation to a larger world. Instead, I experienced these events as a vacuous cosmos unto itself, myself a tiny trapped mote roving without an orbit within its endless space.

I’d started stealing my dad’s liquor; later, it didn’t really seem like stealing because it didn’t seem to belong to him anymore; nothing did, it was all both of ours. I could take all I wanted but it soon stopped helping, and became automatic: the glow of the rye that lit my brain, like light cast from my stomach, lapped like the shadow of a flame against stone, illuminating something barren and cold. The guitar was forgotten, a mute object of physical beauty in a corner of my room, its orange sheen commanding my eyes to pause on it, drawing them into the rich colour and texture of the wood before my glance moved on in search of more animate objects.

My neglect of the guitar was far from what Maria had envisioned when she gave it to me. I could pick up on her frustration and disappointment when I would see her on the street or visit her house. She would ask me how I was enjoying the guitar, and how my progress with it was going. I would have little to report, and she perceived it.

“You know,” she said one day as we stood talking on the sidewalk. “The word ‘instrument’ has a few different meanings. One of them is a thing that’s used to make something happen. It’s not an end in itself. If the guitar just sits there, its whole purpose is beside the point. It’s all potential, no reality.”

She seemed to feel aware that her tone had started to sound intense, almost scolding, and she put her hand on my shoulder.

“But you’re young,” she said. “And you have a lot going on. You just do what you need to. Though if you ever feel frustrated, you should think about trying to play a few notes. It’s a way of finding relief. Music can be like a cure.”

After we said goodbye that day, I broke into a half-run on my way home, filled with agitation at this pressure to play the guitar when it had nothing to do with me. I didn’t even have an ear for music, let alone this particular type. Classical. What did that cold, glass-like word mean to me, aside from vague images of tinkling, shining crystal goblets and chandeliers in some made up and irrelevant room in a mansion in some other world that I pictured fragmenting into pieces with age. I had never asked for the gift; and I couldn’t possibly have refused it. It sat in my room like an obligation, an emblem of unfulfillment that I caused by doing nothing and couldn’t un-cause.

From that moment, I vowed to block thoughts of the guitar from my mind, and didn’t start thinking about it again until later, when a new context made the object seem less familiar, and yet also more mine.

After I finished high school and moved to the city to begin university, the guitar rested in a stand in the corner in my new apartment. I liked its presence, and had forgotten the guilt I felt about not playing it as a teenager. As a familiar object, the guitar came to feel like a form of company; and it made me proud to watch people seeing it for the first time, looking at it with shining eyes; it suggested a much more appealing or interesting past than my real one to the strangers and friends I invited inside.

People often commented on how valuable it looked, and mused about how much it must be worth. I started to see that what I’d always thought about the guitar without putting into words was true. The word for it finally appeared to me one day, like a pearl in an oyster—simple and gleaming: priceless. The guitar had a value beyond money. And it was mine, an echo from another world that I didn’t have to be in, but could just partake of, in some vague, mysterious sense that could make me seem more interesting to the new world of people I was meeting.

The friends I met in my art history program comforted me and distracted me from worrying about my choice to leave home, and to leave my dad. The tears, long talks, and nights of drinking formed like a net that pulled us up and together, and somehow separated us from the rest of the world.

Sometimes, when these friends were over at my apartment, one of them would pick the guitar up and try to play it, but it was never in tune and the nylon strings hadn’t been kept in shape, so it would quickly be set back down among the bottles and glasses.

In my last year of university, I started dating my first boyfriend—a quick-talking painter with curly black hair named Jackson, who tended to toss things and bang into things when he was drinking. My friends didn’t like him but I was attracted to his unpredictability. One night at my place, he was trying to play the guitar, and knocked it against a metal table, chipping the guitar’s finish. I grabbed it from him. He stared at me unsteadily, and I said he should go. In the moments after he left, sobering after what suddenly felt like a tedious night that had spanned several years, I realized I wanted to be alone, not just in that moment, but for a long time.

I broke up with Jackson and gradually also broke off from my group of friends, and started spending most of my time by myself. I worked at a bookstore and thought I might stay working there forever. With my student days over, my thoughts of the past had space to come back, including feelings of guilt about the guitar. I became preoccupied with a vague but strong sense of regret about various mistakes big and small, messy ends to relationships, and time I felt I’d misspent—especially my time in the self-contained world I’d created within the city that didn’t touch the actual place. Out of this feeling, the guitar loomed up like a symbol of all the regret. I dwelled on it, maybe as a way to keep from thinking about other things.

It was wrong of me to keep it, at least once I had decided not to play it. I thought this over and over. It was wrong of me to keep it, and a dishonouring of the spirit of the gift. I hadn’t been fair to Maria, who was only trying to help me. I should have returned it to her if it was just going to sit there—an unplayed instrument, an image separated from sound or movement.

As I tried to push it down, the knowledge of what I had done swelled, mingling with the fact that I had let myself lose touch with Maria, and then took the shape of a new belief: the conviction that I had committed a form of theft. This solidified, and I began to feel certain that what I’d done was tantamount to stealing the guitar.

Maybe partially as a distraction from these thoughts, I applied for and began a Master’s program in art history the next September. If it had been distraction I was looking for, I soon got more of it than I’d expected, first in an unwelcome form, and then in the form of a new friendship.

Two months into the new program, I got out of the shower one night in my apartment and padded into the living room in my towel and bare feet to find that someone had clearly been in there. A plant was on its side on the floor, its dirt scattered, some pillows had been pulled off the couch, and my desk drawer was open. I slowly walked around, staring, trying to take in what was here, what was moved, and what was missing. The guitar was still there. I glanced at it, wondering what it had witnessed, wishing it could talk.

Only a few things had been stolen. A bottle of Scotch was gone from the kitchen counter, and some cash I had in an envelope on the desk that I’d set aside for the rent. The worst loss, though, was my laptop, which contained my essays and notes from classes, and more importantly, some pictures of people, places, and occasions that I had no other copies of.

I called the police and an avuncular detective spent an hour on the phone with me, talking through everything. By the time I hung up I felt frustrated and ashamed that he had spent so much of his time talking to me about a minor property theft just because I was a middle-class white woman, especially because all he could say was that we would never know what happened, in words whose calmness made me bristle.

After I began to accept the loss of the objects, I found that I was deeply shaken by the experience of the intrusion itself. I started having lucid dreams where I would wake up and go into my living room to find that each object in the room was levitating. When I would try to reach for one, the whole set of objects would begin whirling, so that I couldn’t catch them, and I could only go down to the floor to avoid getting hit, stuck in place on my knees as everything I owned spun around above me.

In the aftermath of that experience, I found myself becoming immersed in one of the courses I was taking—a course on still life. I wasn’t applying myself much to school, but I loved the relief of being in that room, in the dark back corner, with luminous slides suspended on the screen against blackness, slides of seventeenth century paintings depicting tables piled with profusions of flowers and vegetables in opulent colours, their copiousness surreal, like anxiety dreams reinterpreted as fantasies of possession. I would sit in the back of the room by a window I’d prop open, letting the cool air and the low voice of Marjan, the instructor of the course, lull me. I loved to listen as she spoke into the darkness about eclectic topics, from tableaux vivants, in which people would pose with props and costumes to depict historical figures or famous events, to feng shui, chi, and traditions of placing objects in auspicious orientations in space using tools like astrological charts and compasses.

I wrote an essay for the course about objects in space, drawing from my dreams. In retrospect, I think maybe it was a cry for attention. It was basically a series of descriptions of groups of objects swirling in the air, including pictures of lost people.

After submitting the essay, I got an email from Marjan asking me to come see her during her office hours. Her door was open when I arrived, and I sat down across from her.

She asked me about the essay. I explained about the break-in and about the pictures I’d lost.

Marjan’s hands sat on her knees, and at one point they moved, as though to take mine as we talked, but then they fell back.

We started meeting for coffee and going for walks. We became friends. She was an artist, and I learned that she did still lifes of her own.

One day, one of our walks ended at the house she rented, and she invited me in to see her work. She had her paintings placed on the floor along the wall of her living room, across from an old empty fireplace. The still lifes were painted from photographs she took, of objects she arranged in tableaux. The photographs the paintings were based on were taped on the wall above each of the paintings. In one, a red bra was draped over the arm of a chair, with a potted Venus Fly Trap on the chair’s seat, and a black coat hung on the wall behind it. In another, a black hat was placed on a table beside a laptop and an apple. There was something a bit funny about them, and a bit sad. There was one red or reddish item in each of them, I noticed.

“They look like portraits of people who just left,” I said. “People who left their things behind.”

She told me she collected things from all over the place to use in them. Many of the things were items that people left behind or gave to her.

On my way out, on the porch, I noticed a sign in the window, Apartment for Rent. Marjan explained that her roommate had recently moved out and she needed to rent out the basement soon or she wouldn’t be able to afford the rent.

I moved into the basement in May, and despite Marjan’s efforts to talk me out of it, by June I had decided to officially withdraw from the Master’s program. I relished the way my student loan money sat in my bank account, not going anywhere—though I didn’t dare spend it, just seeing it there was a comfort. Eventually, I knew, there would be a reckoning—a phone call and an order to pay it back—but that was some months off.

Marjan and I spent a lot of time together that summer, drinking on the screened-in porch, or me watching her take her pictures. I took to wearing the black coat from her photos at night when we sat out late on the porch; it didn’t seem to be Marjan’s, or at least it didn’t look like anything she would ever wear. I asked her where she got it and she shrugged and said someone had forgotten it there. I wondered why she hadn’t returned it to them but got the feeling she didn’t welcome further questions on the subject. I asked her if it was okay with her if I wore the coat around.

“It’s not mine,” Marjan said, shrugging, somewhat dismissively. “Wear it if you want.”

I continued wearing the coat, however, liking its light fabric, although I thought I noticed when I wore it that Marjan seemed slightly irritable or nervous until I took it off.

I had brought the guitar with me to Marjan’s, of course; at first it sat in a corner of the basement, my part of the apartment, but soon it migrated up to the living room, as the boundaries separating our spaces disappeared and we essentially began living together, sharing one space equally. Marjan loved the guitar, as everyone who encountered it did, and she sometimes tried to play it, plucking at the strings and watching YouTube videos on tuning.

One night over dinner, I told her about Maria, and what Maria had told me about her dad, how he was an unreliable character in a pretentious black hat, the ultimate myth-making celebrity-artist.

“I can almost see him,” she said, her eyes gleaming.

“Here,” she said, getting up from the table. She grabbed the guitar from where it lay on the couch. She sat it on a chair and draped the black coat over the back of the chair, and placed the hat on the head of the guitar. She got her camera and snapped a picture.

That night, after she went to bed, I stayed up for a while reading; at one point, looking up from a burst of concentration, I saw the guitar as a human form in the dark, with its hat, sitting at the table. I got up and moved the guitar back to the couch, threw the hat into the closet, and hung up the coat. The next morning, I came down to find the developed photo of the still life with the guitar taped up beside the fireplace, an empty canvas propped below it. I asked her not to do a painting of that photo, and said it made me feel nervous; she seemed to agree not to.

Later that afternoon, after too much time alone inside Marjan’s dark house, which was circled by tall cedar trees that kept it cool and shaded, I decided to try to do some work in the small patch of garden in the front yard. I was working out there on my knees, weeding, when I felt something land on my head from above. I reached up and felt the black hat from Marjan’s picture. My heart started racing. I hadn’t realized she was home.

“There,” she said. “You shouldn’t be out in this sun without protection. Besides, it suits you.” I looked up and saw her standing over me in the garden, the sun glinting from behind her head so that it was difficult to look straight at her face. But her expression, from what I could make out, was warm and playful, a change to the distance that had recently started creeping between us.

Inside, looking in the mirror, I saw that she was right—that the hat did suit me. I took to wearing it around, in the house or when I went out.

That summer I had awful insomnia. Maybe because of this, my personality began changing. When Marjan commented on this change, I rejected the idea outwardly, but I had noticed it myself.

The change may have been due to the medication I’d begun taking for my sleeplessness. The family doctor back home would renew my prescription for the syrup over the phone any time I called a refill request into the pharmacy. I was finding though, that rather than make me tired, the syrup set off little explosions of thoughts and images in my mind. I hoped this effect would pass as my body adjusted to it, and besides, I found that handing control over my mind to another mediating influence helped me get through the long nights. So, unable to sleep, as teeming thoughts seemed to congregate in the stifling air above me in bed, I started going out for long walks at night.

The fact is, when I say I had begun changing, that change felt almost literal. At night, I almost felt like I became someone else, walking around in an altered state, wearing the black hat that Marjan had given me, feeling half-drunk and almost giddy, like I was in disguise. Sometimes I would wander through construction sites or empty lots, tossing rocks and sending dust swirling up around me. Sometimes I would run, my feet pounding against the pavement at first, and then silence and only wind and coolness and thinning atmosphere until I felt a form of happiness that I’d never felt before: one that was secret, mine only, and that I would never share. Being apart. I started smoking, buying packs of cigarettes at stores just before they closed at eleven, and then smoking them one after another until I was dizzy and saw stars. Once, walking along a dirty sidewalk, I saw the sidewalk rising to meet me, and saw my hands go down, and for a moment, I was flying along on all fours, but also not on the ground at all.

Marjan didn’t always know about the walks—sometimes I went out well after she fell asleep. We never really talked about the nature of our relationship, but we did sometimes sleep together in the same bed. On some nights, she would fall asleep beside me and wake up to find me gone. During the day, I was tired, sullen, and moody and we would hardly talk.

One early morning I came home from one of the walks, and she was gone; the door was locked, and I found that I either hadn’t brought my key or had lost it.

Not knowing what else to do, I walked over to campus to see if Marjan could lend me her key. But when I came to her office door, it was closed, except for a crack, and I could hear lowered voices inside, speaking in warm, familiar tones, their rise and fall seeming to hold something personal. As the door began to open, I darted down to the end of the hall and grabbed a newspaper that was lying on a ledge—some student gazette—and started running my eyes over random words, trying to look focused by actually reading them: “annual street party: a disgrace, or a matter of students’ rights?”

“Thank you,” I heard a woman’s voice say, with unvarnished, sincere emphasis. “For everything.” Footsteps echoed in the hall; the sound moved away from me, not toward me. I glanced up and saw a tall, black-haired woman turn the corner. I knew at once who it was, even seeing her just from behind.

I wasn’t surprised to see her on campus. Val, Maria’s daughter; I had seen her around the building before—always from afar—and knew that she was a professor in the music department. I often saw her striding along, always from a distance, and from the few times our paths had come close to crossing, she seemed not to remember me, if she’d ever even known who I was. None of that struck me as strange; but what was strange was that I’d never had any inkling that she knew Marjan, and I had never heard Marjan speak of her.

Marjan and I had fallen into each other’s lives, and I cared about her, but I found myself looking at her differently after that day. Maybe I wasn’t the only one who had been behaving strangely. Why, after all, had she let a student move in with her? Surely, that wasn’t entirely normal. And her art was odd, almost inhuman, the way people were pushed out of the picture, to make room for objects that seemed to replace them. And now, finding that she knew Val, when she had never mentioned Val to me, I didn’t know what to think. I thought about asking Marjan about it, but I felt like I either couldn’t or shouldn’t mention it.

After a period of distance in the following weeks, toward the end of the summer, Marjan and I decided that I should move out. I lived there for a strange, sad final week, sleeping on a mattress on the floor of her screened-in porch, listening to the pulsing sound of crickets outside. During those nights, Marjan would sometimes sit out there with me, on a kitchen chair, her long legs crossed and a glass of wine balanced on her knee, and I wondered if she was staying up with me to prevent my nocturnal walks. Sitting above me on the chair, she tried to give me advice about the next steps of my life, but I wouldn’t respond much.

I left one day while Marjan was out. I brought the guitar, of course, and also took the black coat and the hat. I rented a new apartment, alone, and I went back to work at the bookstore.

I was still taking the sleeping syrup at night. I would go out walking, the drug in my system making movements feel exaggerated and the colours around me blue and blurred until the sky seemed to fill with shapes and movement. My aloneness seemed complete, like a debt paid in full.

One night, after walking for a few hours, I came home and picked up the guitar from its place on the stand in the corner. I could only remember the opening notes of one song, but as I played it, more came back to me. It was out of tune, but I fiddled with the keys and brought it closer to being in-tune. The feeling of the strings against the pads of my fingers felt good, like a pinch that helps you wake up. After playing for a few minutes, I felt steadier than I had for a while.

That night, I slept for twelve hours, a welcome and rare uninterrupted and dreamless sleep. I only woke up because my phone was ringing. I looked at the time as I answered it. It was 2:30 pm. I didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello, Hana,” a woman’s voice said. “We don’t know each other, but you knew my mother, Maria.”

It took me a moment, not so much to remember Maria but to fully wake up. I was still groggy, rubbing my eyes to make them focus.

“Maria…yes, Maria. From Earl Street.” As I said the words, I realized that saying nothing would have made more sense.

“Well, I’m calling you about her.”

I felt fully awake now, and I stood up and walked to the window. Looking out, I saw what I had heard: that it was raining. I slid the window open and cool air blew in.

“I hope she’s doing okay,” I said. I wondered if I should ask Val about Marjan, and whether Marjan had given her my number. “Maria, I mean. Your mother. I hope she’s doing okay.”

“Thank you. She’s good at keeping busy. Well, you remember what she’s like.”

I felt like I should offer something to show that I had changed, or at least to bring us onto some kind of even footing.

“She was so nice to me when I was young.” It didn’t sound like I hoped it would. My mouth was dry. My words came out thick and almost slurred.

“So I understand.”

Something in her voice made me pause, pull back, and reconsider the nature of the call and her feeling toward me, whatever it was. My own feelings of guilt about not returning the guitar came back. Surely this was the moment of reckoning that I’d once felt certain was coming.

“She was generous to me,” I said.

“Yes. I heard about that.”

I was trying to gauge the tone of her voice. She seemed like she was trying not to say something, or, alternatively, trying to communicate something by not saying something. But I hesitated to address the uncertainty. Somehow, I sensed that doing so might make things worse.

“I’m calling because Mum has been revisiting her estate. Getting her things in order. She wanted me to get in touch with you about a guitar she gave you.”

I stayed quiet.

“This must be a strange call to get out of nowhere, after all this time. I’m wondering if it might be easier to meet in person.”

“Yes,” I said. “Only…”. For a wild moment I thought about saying that I’d lost it, or sold it, or given it away.

“I’m sorry to seem so cryptic,” she said. “I’m a friend of Marjan’s. A colleague. My name is Val. We have two connections. It seems so odd that we’ve never met.”

The conversation I thought I was having turned in my mind, revealing itself as something else. It was a relief to talk to someone from the past, from where I’d been before.

“I think I remember you,” I said.

“I’m glad,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you too. I’m wondering if it would be possible for us to talk. It’s hard to go over everything on the phone. I was going to suggest we meet at a coffee shop, but you’re also welcome to come here if you’re comfortable. I’m at Marjan’s.”

I heard myself telling her that I would call a cab. I felt flushed and slightly queasy, my stomach churning and my face hot. For a second, questions and ideas about the connection between Val, Marjan, and Maria surged together, overlapping and framing each other.

“One more thing,” Val said. “Could you please bring the guitar?”

She didn’t have to say it; I had already picked it up to bring with me, still holding the phone in my other hand.

When I hung up, I looked at my bed. I could just lie down, put the guitar back in its stand, and forget about the conversation. I would take lessons again, and get as good as possible at playing through hard work alone, even if natural talent would never be mine. I would apply myself, and make the guitar my life, and prove myself worthy of it, and it would be like the intervening years had never happened.

But after a few moments passed, I called the cab and gave Marjan’s address, which rolled off my tongue, still more deeply ingrained in my memory than my own address was.

When I arrived at Marjan’s, the guitar in its hard case hanging from one hand, the house appeared dark, but as I walked through the screen door and into the porch where I’d once slept, I saw through the inner door that a fire was burning in the living room fireplace. I thought it was odd that they had a fire going. Although it was raining now, the days before the rain came had been scorching and humid.

Without thinking about what I was doing, I opened the door partway. The familiarity of the building made it feel like I was coming home, but a home I didn’t know anymore. I had been absent for its recent comings and goings, uncertain of the lives it now held.

“Hello?” I called.

“Hello!” It was Val’s voice. I walked to the back room, uneasy and nervous but also already smiling at the thought of seeing someone continuous with my life back home, even if I was walking into some kind of a reckoning.

Val stood up from the couch, put her hand out, and for an awkward moment we shook hands over the coffee table where Marjan and I had once played cards and Scrabble into the night. She looked different in this house. I’d only ever seen her with her coat on from a distance, her hair and scarf flying behind her. Now, here before me, she wore jeans and a red button-up shirt. She looked tired. But I could see the resemblance to Maria in her mouth and around her eyes, behind her glasses, and seeing Maria in her made me feel more comfortable.

I sat down across from her. I placed the guitar on the table and opened the case so that the gleaming orange instrument was before us.

“Thanks for coming over,” said Val, looking at the guitar with what seemed like practiced indifference. “I’m sorry this whole situation is weird. I just thought it would be easier to talk in person. I think this will only be easier if I come straight to the point. The fact is, Mum has had a change of heart about the guitar.”

At that moment, the fire sparked, and as I glanced over at it my eye caught the photo taped to the wall beside the mantel. The picture of the tableau Marjan had made of the guitar, coat, and hat after I told her about Maria’s father and the story of the instrument.

Val saw me looking at the photo.

“Maybe you can imagine how I felt walking in here and seeing that.”

I nodded. “I completely understand if Maria wants the guitar back,” I said. “I should never have kept it.”

“No. She doesn’t want it back.” She paused, and I sat up, seeing for the first time the way her eyes were glistening. She looked at the fire, and cleared her throat, and then looked back at me. “The truth is, she wants me to burn it.”

I looked at her, pausing my breath. But then I saw a smile playing at the edges of her mouth, and felt relieved. She was joking. This was a way of breaking the tension and deflating the meaning the guitar had taken on. It was just an object, and we were just two people, trying to get through an awkward conversation.

“Ah,” I said, and smiled to acknowledge the joke. But Val’s eyes remained on the fire, her smile still there but harder to read now.

“I know it sounds extreme and weird, but I’m serious. It’s what she wants. I wasn’t sure if she was serious when she said it, but she was.” Val shrugged. “Seeing that picture was like seeing a portrait of my grandfather’s soul. A stolen guitar hidden under a disguise. It’s how I always saw him. Now she sees the same thing; now that the book is in the world—you know she wrote his biography. Well, after it was published, the real story started coming out, slowly but surely. Half of the things he told her about his career and past turned out not to be true. He didn’t know half of the people he said he knew. He claimed that guitar had been given to him, but it turns out he stole it from another musician. It wasn’t his to leave to her, and it wasn’t hers to give away either. We tried to get in touch with the family of the person we think it belonged to, but it doesn’t seem like there’s anyone left.”

I heard a creak; someone was in the basement. My heart flared up at the thought of seeing Marjan. I realized how much I’d missed her.

“My mom is downstairs,” Val said. “She’s resting. She wanted to see you, but today she’s too tired. It’s been a long day of too much talking. We’re staying here for a few days, while she visits. My place is too tiny. Here, we have room.”

“Where’s Marjan?” I asked.

“She’s out right now,” Val said. “She thought she would give us some space. She won’t be back for a while.”

A log in the fire tumbled over in the fireplace, and Val and I turned and looked at it. A small burst of smoke, ash, and sparks rose up, and as we watched, it whirled into a tiny, circular plume of smoke that rose into the air above us and disappeared. Val and I looked at each other. She leaned forward, closer. I could hear her breathing, steadily but heavily.

My eyes fell to the coat that was draped on the back of the couch. It was similar to the coat I’d taken from Marjan’s—the coat from the portrait. The black fabric of it drew my eyes in, like a rest from thinking about the scene unfolding around me. I imagined the coat lifting up into the air so that I could see it, hanging in the air behind Val, so that I could look at it and still look in her direction. I saw that it was too similar to the one I had taken from Marjan’s to be a coincidence. It could only have been Val who had left that black coat behind. Then, thinking it was lost, or being unable to reclaim it, she had bought another, similar coat, which she’d worn here tonight, despite the recently hot weather. Maybe remembering the coldness of Marjan’s house, the need for an extra layer in the house at night, after the cedars had shaded the house from the sun all day. She clearly knew the house well, in a way I’d never guessed.

Fragments of knowing fell together like a glass breaking in reverse, becoming whole, but through the reassembly of narrow jagged shards that retained the imprint of shattering in their healing.

I understood then, if in fragments glued together. Val had lived with Marjan before I had moved in, or at least visited and left that coat behind. Maybe Val had moved out so that I could move in. Maybe Marjan had pretended to care about me because Val wanted the guitar.

The remaining question was one that I realized had been sitting at the back of my mind since I was a teenager. Why hadn’t Val taken the guitar with her when she was young, if she wanted it now so badly? Maria had wanted her to take it then, and Val had refused.

The answer hung in the air where I’d imagined the coat hanging, behind Val, forming in intangible sentences that shimmered and changed: she didn’t want the burden of the gift. She was someone different now. She hadn’t realized its value. Or something else: she had needed her mother’s permission to destroy it and now maybe she had that.

I felt the need to act, to cut through speculation and bring things into the reality of the room and the meeting and our capacity to make something happen while we were together.

“Let’s burn it,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“I want to wait until tomorrow,” Val said. “I want my mother to be there for it—to see it broken and burned, and then gone, and not coming back.”

I nodded and eased back into the couch. It was simpler to go with the story that let us both out. The story where I would stop wondering. I knew that I would soon get up and go. But for the moment we were still, floating in the low light of the fire across from each other, the guitar between us, reflecting the moving light like a kind of sun.

Writer and editor Emily Anglin grew up in Waterloo, Ontario, and now lives in Toronto. Emily Anglin’s first collection of short stories, The Third Person (Book*hug), was published in 2017; her writing has also appeared in carte blanche, The New Quarterly, The Whitewall Review, and in the chapbook The Mysteries of Jupiter. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University and a PhD in English Literature from Queen’s University. She is currently working on a novel.

Image by Shinnosuke Kawabe @shin1515