"Introducing Melissa"
Excerpted from:
NIGHT INTO DAY
a novel by Ryan Lewis Merritt
Melissa Peruggi stood in the middle of the living room of her parents’ house, surrounded by boxes. There were a dozen of them scattered across the gray carpet, lined along the edges of the small room, stacked two high in front of the fireplace, clusters of them where the Christmas tree would normally be. Papers and manuscripts, thousands of pages of music and notes and articles, rising out of the cardboard confines of their boxes.
This was the great remainder of her father’s life.
She crossed the room to her father’s record player – an enormous old Edison that anchored the room the way a television would most living rooms. She searched through the library of LPs on the wall and pulled out Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Mahler always helped her father concentrate.
She walked back through the boxes as the music faded in on the speakers embedded imperceptibly throughout the room. There were speakers throughout the entire house – one of her father’s few indulgences. She’d grown up in a house in which every movement, from the first light of morning to the moment the lights went off in the evening, was soundtracked by classical music. Every conversation, no matter how mundane or passionate, would have the backdrop of a concerto or a sonata or a symphony. She came to remember moments, sometimes, by which music they accompanied. Her sixth birthday party – Bach. Her high school graduation – Schumann. Her mother’s last birthday, five years ago – Shostakovich. And Christmases were Mozart – always Mozart.
So it was strange and unsettling to come home to a completely silent house that Sunday. Walking into the house at midday to find it oddly quiet, the music replaced by the never-heard sounds of electrical appliances humming and the suddenly ever-present chirping from the birds outside, all of it so amplified, and it was worse than she could have imagined – worse than she’d thought it’d be just to walk into the house and not see her father there in the living room or hear him shuffling out of his bedroom or his study at the sound of her coming in. A deep ache had flared in her chest and she’d rushed across the empty living room toward the record player to find it resting silent and dark, the arm fitted into its holder, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 motionless under the player’s tinted glass cover. She’d switched on the player and the speakers and sat, only a few steps away, in her father’s old high-backed leather chair, where he would sit and rest and think about things she was always too shy to ask him about. She listened to the piano’s first notes – the opening, the greeting, the handshake, as her father always said – and leaned back in the chair, pulling her legs up to her chest, closing her eyes, and folding her head down toward her knees so that all she saw was darkness and all she heard was the sound of her father’s favorite Sunday morning record playing.