I will give you my second present soon.

I love you, Eleanor.

She read through the note one more time before picking up the stopwatch. She slid out of her seat and knelt at the balcony railing.

The discordant sound of tuning died away. The conductor tapped his music stand.

He raised his arms.

She hit the start button.

The music began.

First came the initial blast of sound. She hadn’t expected such a powerful beginning. Then all went quiet again. The sounds danced a little, skipped down steps and back up again. One long note lingered in the air before it rolled down the steps after the other notes. The piece started to dance again. Sometimes playful, sometimes somber.

A high note, it floated above her head. Quiet … How could an orchestra of so many people sound so quiet?

And then she heard it. The hint of a familiar melody. Where had she heard it before? A hymn. This was a hymn. Wasn’t it? It didn’t matter. She kept listening.

At two minutes and fifty seconds, the melody came again, whispering over the floor like a secret the composer wanted to keep. She strained her ears to hear more.

It grew louder then, but only a little louder as another section picked up the melody and carried it to her. She accepted it with open arms.

Her hands shook and her toes tightened in her shoes. The music backed up like a river dammed around her.

At five minutes and seven seconds the world turned into music. It erupted around her, went off like a bomb that showered joy and happiness all around her. Tears ran down her face as sounds more beautiful than she’d ever heard in her life wrapped around her and lifted her like hands to the very roof of the concert hall and higher and higher until for one brief second she looked into the eyes of God.

She sensed footsteps behind her but she ignored them. The music had her now and wouldn’t let go. The melody disappeared and came back with a vengeance. She couldn’t get enough of it. No alcohol had ever intoxicated her so much. How did musicians stand it? How did they stop themselves and put down their instruments long enough to eat or drink or sleep? If she could make sounds like this, her hands would never leave her instrument. She would play until her fingers bled. She would make noise like this until they locked her away.

The piece hit a final swelling note that left her aching for something … not something, somewhere, before it died. The conductor lowered his arms, turned and looked up at the balcony.

The applause of one humbled young woman filled the hall.

“Thank you,” she called out to the orchestra.

“Happy birthday,” the conductor replied.

She turned around and saw Søren sitting behind her.

“If only Beethoven had written a piano part for his Ninth Symphony, my life would be complete,” he said with a wistful sigh. The symphony started a new piece now, beautiful but less arresting. She turned the stopwatch off and rested her chin on Søren’s knee.

“That was Beethoven?”

“The Ninth Symphony, Fourth Movement. Otherwise known as the ‘Ode to Joy.’”

“No piano part?”

“I believe Beethoven simply felt the other instruments would be overpowered by the piano. It’s a large instrument. Some people find it intimidating.”

He winked at her and Eleanor laughed, grinning up at him.

“It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard. I think I saw God. He smiled at me.”

“I never appreciated the Ninth Symphony until I met you, Eleanor. When I saw you I heard it for the first time coming from inside my own heart. I was seventeen when I first dreamed of you. Kingsley and I were talking, fantasizing about the perfect woman. Green eyes and black hair or black eyes and green hair, we didn’t care, as long as she was wilder than the both of us together. Only a dream … and then you.”

“Mom asked me once what it would take for me to believe in God. I told her if I could meet one person who seemed like he was created in God’s image, I would start believing. And then you.”

They stared at each other as if they were two people who’d met in a dream and upon waking found they still saw each other.

“They say there are no atheists in foxholes. I can’t imagine there are many of them in symphonies. God created Beethoven and Beethoven created this…. You can hear hints of the melody in a much earlier work called the ‘Choral Fantasy.’ He dreamed of it long before he wrote it. Even the angels bend their ears to earth when the ‘Ode to Joy’ is performed. When you hear music so beautiful it gives you chills, those are angel wings brushing against you.”

“I have chills now,” she whispered.

“Angels have haloes and wings. We have free will and Beethoven.”

“I think we got the better deal.”

Søren smiled into the distance.

“Beethoven was deaf when he composed this piece. He couldn’t hear his own masterpiece anywhere but in his own head. But we are all deaf in a way. Life is a symphony composed by God, played by us with preludes, themes, movements, passages … and wrong notes, so many wrong notes. Heaven is where we get to hear the music played perfectly for the first time.”

“I think life is a book,” Eleanor said. “God writes it. We’re His characters. He knows what happens on the next page, but we don’t. Heaven is where we get to read the book cover to cover and see how it all makes sense.”

Søren cupped the back of Eleanor’s neck and she rose up on her knees to meet his lips.