Somebody's Song

The coffee at the community center tasted like it had been brewing since Tuesday. Maya liked it anyway, because it was free and warm and the act of holding a cup gave her hands something to do besides fidget.

It was a Wednesday. Wednesday was the day he came.

Adam Walsh taught volunteer computer classes on Wednesday evenings—basic skills, resume writing, the kind of things that sounded small until you realized they were the only things standing between someone and a job. He was patient in the way that people are patient when they've been disappointed enough times to stop expecting anything different.

Maya came every Wednesday. She came fifteen minutes after the class ended, when most people had gone home and the two remaining students—two teenagers from the South Side who were learning to use Word because their mother's diner needed someone who could type an order—were still hunched over keyboards, trying to make the font do what their fingers wouldn't.

She would sit in the corner chair, the one with the torn armrest, and drink her coffee and watch Adam help the teenagers and say things like "you're doing great" and "let's try it together" in a voice that made you believe, for exactly three seconds, that maybe the world wasn't as broken as it looked.

She had been doing this for three years.

Three years of showing up fifteen minutes late. Three years of sitting in the corner. Three years of telling herself it was because she didn't need the instruction, that she came because the coffee was good, that she came because the heating worked and her apartment was cold.

She did not tell herself the truth: that she came because Adam Walsh existed on this planet, and that was both the most beautiful and the most terrifying fact she knew.

The first time she had seen him, he was standing in front of a whiteboard explaining how to create an email account. She was twenty-five and had never wanted anything in her life that she couldn't get by keeping her mouth shut and her head down. Adam Walsh wanted her to open an email account and send a message to herself, and she could not have imagined a more mundane task, and he made it sound like an act of creation.

"You're telling the world you exist," he said, and that was the problem. That was the sentence that hooked her. "Even if the world is just you and your inbox. That's a start."

She had an inbox then. Or she would have, if she'd known how to make one. She was good at many things—singing, mostly, though she never called it that. She called it "making noise so the apartment doesn't feel so empty." She sang in the break room at the diner where she worked. She sang in the shower. She sang to her mother's photograph on the days when the silence at home got too loud.

She never sang for Adam. She wished she could. She pictured it sometimes: standing in this very community center, in front of these very people, opening her mouth and letting the sound come out the way it did in the shower—clear and unafraid and unedited. She imagined his face. She imagined it softening.

But the image never progressed beyond his face. She couldn't see what happened next. Couldn't see herself stepping down from whatever imaginary stage she'd constructed. Couldn't see herself speaking to him after, saying anything that wasn't "goodnight" or "see you next week" or nothing at all.

Once, in November, he asked the class if anyone had hobbies. One of the teenagers mentioned basketball. The other mentioned cooking for his mother's restaurant. Adam turned to the room and looked, by coincidence or design, in her direction.

"And you?" he asked her.

She thought about saying "singing." She thought about it so hard that weeks later, in the shower, she thought about it some more and wished she had.

"Nothing special," she said.

"That's a good answer," he said. "Most people feel like they need to say something impressive."

Maybe she needed to. Maybe that was it. Maybe the reason she couldn't say the truth—that she sang, that she sang every night in the diner while people ate their breakfast and glanced over without looking really looking, that she sang like someone singing at the bottom of a well hoping the surface heard her—maybe that was the reason she couldn't say it because singing was not impressive. Singing was just what she did to stay alive. And how do you tell a man you're attracted to that the only thing you're good at is surviving?

She had rehearsed the conversation a hundred times. In the shower. In the car on the way home from the diner. In the moments before sleep when the apartment was quiet enough for her thoughts to become loud.

Hey, I'm Maya. I've been coming to your classes for three years. I sit in the corner because I'm afraid that if I sit in the front row you'll notice I'm not here to learn computers. I'm here to learn how to be the kind of woman who can stand in front of you and say: I like you. I have liked you for three years. Would you like to get coffee sometime?

In her head, he always said yes. In her head, he smiled the way he smiled at the teenagers—softly, with the kind of attention that made you feel real. In her head, they went for coffee and talked about books and he told her he loved her voice and she told him she'd been singing since she was a girl and he said something charming about wells and surfaces and she laughed and the laugh sounded like a song she couldn't quite remember.

In reality, she said: "Nothing special."

The community center closed on a Thursday in March.

Maya found out because Mrs. Delgado, the director, called her at the diner and said, "They ran out of money, honey. The grant didn't renew. Last Wednesday is last Wednesday."

Maya hung up the phone and stared at the fryer for four minutes while a customer named Mr. Kowalski waved his menu and asked if the coffee was ready. She carried the coffee to his table with her left hand because her right hand couldn't stop shaking.

Last Wednesday arrived with a cold rain that sounded like static against the community center windows. Only three students showed up—the two teenagers and an older man named Mr. Tran who had returned every Wednesday for two years, ever since his wife died, because "the heating is free and the people are kind."

Adam stood at the front of the room with his notes in his hands and did not read them. He let them fall, one by one, onto the table.

"There's something I need to tell you," he said. "This is the last class. Not for a while. Not forever, I hope. But for now, this is it."

The teenagers were polite about it. Mr. Tran nodded slowly and said, "You've done good work here, son." Adam smiled—the tired smile of a man who has given something to a room and knows the room may never give it back.

Maya sat in the corner chair, the one with the torn armrest, and held her coffee cup with both hands and said nothing. She had rehearsed a thousand things to say in three years and not one of them was available now, as if the rehearsal had exhausted them all and left her with an empty vocabulary at the precise moment she needed words.

Adam began packing his bag. He put away the markers, folded the chairs, turned off the lights. The room grew darker in stages, like a scene in a play where nobody notices the lighting change until it's too late to adjust it.

Maya stood up. Her legs moved without her permission—the way they had moved toward the piano in Auburn Hall, the way they had moved toward the microphone at the Velvet Stage, the way they always moved toward the things she wanted most, directly and without hesitation, while her mind argued with herself in a language she couldn't understand.

She stood in front of Adam. He looked up, surprised—not by her presence but by the timing. She had never, in three years, been in this room during the class itself.

"Maya," he said. He remembered her name. Of course he did. He remembered every student's name. That was the problem.

"I'm sorry," she said. And then, because sorry wasn't enough and never had been: "I've been coming here for three years."

"I know."

"I sit in the corner."

"I know."

"I've wanted to say something to you for three years."

The rain filled the silence between them. Adam set down the bag he was holding and looked at her with an expression she could not read—not sympathy, not pity, not interest exactly. Something harder to name. The recognition of a shared condition.

"What did you want to say?"

She opened her mouth. The words that came out were not the words she had rehearsed. They were simpler and less elegant and infinitely more honest.

"I was going to write this on a resume. 'Likes to sing.' But I never did, because it doesn't belong on a resume. And I didn't know where else to put it. So I put it here." She tapped her chest, right over her heart, and felt it beating like a bird that knew the cage was open and was too afraid to fly.

Adam looked at her for a long time. The community center smelled like old coffee and wet wool and the particular scent that buildings get when they've been useful and are now being abandoned.

"Maya," he said. "A resume is not the right place for that sentence. You're right."

He paused. The rain continued. Somewhere down the hall, a faucet dripped.

"But it's the right sentence for a lot of other things."

She waited. She had waited three years. She could wait a few more seconds.

"I'm moving to Cleveland," he said. "I took a job at a logistics company. Data entry. It doesn't— it's not what I thought I wanted, but it pays the rent. And I'm tired of being tired."

"I know what that's like," she said. And she did. She knew what it was like to be tired of singing in a diner where nobody listened. Tired of the fryer grease and the early mornings and the way the world treated you like something that existed to serve it and nothing more.

"Yeah," he said. "I figured you did."

He packed the last of his things into the bag. He zipped it up. He picked it up. He stood in the doorway for one more second—a second that felt like an entire conversation—and then he was gone.

Maya sat in the corner chair and drank her coffee. It was cold now. It tasted like Wednesday.

The community center closed two weeks later. The doors were locked, the windows taped, a piece of paper on the main door that said in Mrs. Delgado's neat handwriting: Thank you for your patience during this transition.

Maya went there on Saturday, when she knew the cleaners wouldn't be around. The building smelled like nothing—like a room that has been emptied of everything it was supposed to hold, including hope.

In the music room—which was actually just the main classroom with a broken piano that nobody had bothered to remove—she found the piano. It was in the same state as the rest of the building: covered in dust, silent, abandoned.

She sat on the bench. It was the same bench she had sat on a hundred times after class, drinking coffee and pretending not to listen. She pressed a key.

It was flat. Everything here was flat.

She took out her wallet and found a receipt—the same receipt she had used three years ago to write something she had never sent. The ink had faded but the words were still legible. She traced them with her thumb:

I like to sing.

She peeled the receipt from the wallet, folded it once, and placed it on the piano lid. Then she stood up, walked out of the building, and did not look back.

In Cleveland, Adam Walsh worked at a logistics company from nine to five and came home to an apartment that was smaller than the one in Chicago and warmer because he had finally bought a radiator that worked. He played music sometimes—in the evenings, when the city was loud and the people next door were arguing and the trucking company on Route 80 was honking its horns at 3 AM in a rhythm that almost sounded like a song.

He never heard from Maya again. He told himself this was fine. He told himself that people drift apart and that three years of watching someone from a corner chair was not the same as knowing them.

But sometimes, on the way to work, he would pass a diner with a neon sign that flickered in a way that made it look like it was trying to spell something. And he would think: Maybe she's singing there. Maybe she's singing somewhere. And maybe that's enough.

Maybe it wasn't. But it had to be. Because some songs are never heard by anyone but the singer, and that doesn't make them less real. It just makes them private. And some loves are never spoken, and that doesn't make them less true. It just makes them the kind of love that lives in the space between words.

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Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: