“What were you thinking about?” Reanne had asked Mara, sitting on her rug in her living room, watching a reality tv show while Mara was hiding in the huge oversized comfy chair.

“How can you watch this show?” Mara asked her.

“It’s something I do for me,” Reanne replied.

“There are so many other things you could do with your time!  This show is trashy!”

“That’s why I like it!” Reanne grinned, turning back towards the screen.  “You going to LA for that conference?”
“No…” Mara sighed.  “I was going to, but my mother broke her wrist.”

Reanne turned around.  “No way!  Is she okay?”

“She says she’s not!” Mara answered. “You’d think she was in a body cast!”

“But you’ve been looking forward to this trip for a month.  You were going to go to the ocean, see Venice Beach…”

“I know.  I can go next year.”

“Next year it won’t be in Los Angeles,” Reanne reminded her.

“Well, I can go to Los Angeles some other time,” Mara reasoned.

“Like when?”

“Whenever I want!” Mara snapped.

Reanne laughed again.  “Girl, you haven’t gone anywhere in five years.  Every time you—“

“Don’t say it.”

“—make a plan, something happens to your Mamma.”

“Don’t say that!  It isn’t true .”

“And you decide you have to stay.”

“Well, what would you do?” Mara demanded.

Reanne paused for a second, surprised.  Then she shook her head slowly. “I don’t want to die knowing I never took care of me.”

There came a rhythmic knock on her office door.  “Come in,” she muttered.  In walked Soren, another stack of papers in his hands.

“I’ve finished these,” he said.  He set them by her side on the Bench.  “You made two errors,” he offered, like a cat laying a dead mole on his owner’s doorstep.  His eyes caught the surface of the page.  “What are you playing?”

She wondered too late if she should have hidden the evidence from him.  “Oh, nothing,” she remarked, pulling the paper down.  “Just a piece for the harp...”  In her haste, the sheets fell to the ground below her piano bench.  Quickly, Soren bent to pick up the papers before she could stop him. 

Soren saw that the music was hand-written.  “Did you compose this?” he asked, smiling a little.

“Uh…yes…” she lied, taking the sheets hastily away from him.

“I didn’t know you wrote!”

“Oh, well, I don’t tell people about it much.”

“For harp, you said?”

“Yes, oh, yes, I’ve always loved the harp.”

“It looks pretty dissonant,” Soren commented.  He wasn’t looking at the piece now.  He was looking at her, regarding her with a new fascination.

“Yes,” she replied, nodding quickly.  Mara tried to hide the deception in her voice.  “I’m a pretty dissonant person.”

“Well, you obviously can’t play a couple of those passages,” he said.

“What?”  Mara scowled in irritation.  “What do you mean?”  Her piano playing wasn’t that bad.

“I mean, on the harp,” Soren said.  “They’re not playable on the harp.”

“What?”  Mara asked again.  She looked quickly down at the notes.  They all seemed the same to her.

“Yes, here, see?”  Soren said, pointing his bony index finger at a cluster of notes.  “And here,” he said, moving his arm to the left and down where the music continued.  His shoulder pressed up against her, and he straightened quickly, embarrassed.  With a little start, he cleared his throat and moved a couple of steps across the room.

“Ahhhh!” Mara said, smiling.   She saw it now.  “Good job, Soren!  Tell me why.”

“Those are clusters,” Soren said, looking down.  “Four notes right next to one another, played at the same time…you can’t do that on a harp.”

Mara gazed at the oddity Soren had beaten her to.  The cluster looked like a small bunch of grapes, the four circles shoved together, connected by a single stem.

Soren continued, pointing at the cluster with a bony, informed fingertip.  “The way the harp works, with its pedals, there are some combinations of notes you can’t play at the same time.  Like what you’ve got there, A, B-flat, B, and C.”

“Huh,” said Mara.  “Silly me.”

Soren went on.  “I lost ten points on an orchestration exam for not knowing that.”

Mara was so absorbed in the score that she did not reply.

Soren blushed and backed into the wall.  “I’ve got to go,” he said quickly.  “Call me when…”  The remainder of his sentence was lost in the hallway.

Mara looked at the paper with newfound interest.  She circled the cluster of notes several times, in several places in the manuscript.  Adastra’s use of the cluster was no accident.

Why, Mara wondered, would an expert harpist, writing out a piece for a single harp, include several examples of a cluster she knew could not be played on it?  Was it for the harp?