Lennie’s clarinet

Lennie’s clarinet is both a musical instrument and the material focus of her changing relationship to grief, performance, and self-expression. Chosen instinctively in childhood, it becomes an object she avoids when music feels frightening and emotionally sealed off; later, playing it lets grief break through in sound, enables an intimate duet with Joe Fontaine, and becomes the means by which Lennie imagines continuing to communicate with Bailey Walker. The instrument’s significance lies in that shift: it does not simply carry music Lennie already understands, but helps her discover what she has been unable to say.

A chosen instrument, then an abandoned one

Lennie’s attachment to the clarinet begins early. In fifth-grade music class, while the other girls hurry toward the flutes, she beelines for a clarinet because it reminds her of herself. The choice is presented as immediate and personal, not as the result of outside instruction. That sense of recognition makes the later estrangement from playing more than a loss of a school activity: Lennie has become distant from something she once felt expressed her.

After Bailey’s death, the clarinet sits abandoned in its case on Lennie’s playing chair. Looking at it, Lennie thinks of a coffin, then tries to take the thought back. The image makes the case a container for feared silence as much as for an instrument. Lennie unlatches it but does not play. At this point, even approaching the clarinet brings her close to the associations of death that she would rather resist.

Her retreat from music is also bound up with fear of performance. Lennie admits to Joe that she deliberately blew her chair audition and did not want first chair or solos. She had not told anyone this before. For over a year, playing has felt less like self-expression than being crammed and frightened inside herself, like a jack-in-the-box without a spring. She likens soloing to jumping from rock to rock in the river through thick fog, alone, with each step uncertain. The clarinet is therefore not simply a symbol of talent waiting to be recovered: playing it has become an exposed, frightening act that Lennie has actively tried to avoid.

From private grief to an uncontained sound

Joe offers a different way into playing. He suggests trying a guitar-and-clarinet duet, calling the combination untapped, and begins turning through handwritten sheet music. Lennie initially deflects him, but watching his absorbed attention to the guitar makes her briefly want to play beside him. His presence does not immediately solve her fear; it makes a new possibility visible, one based on shared sound rather than a solo performance.

The first major release comes when Joe plays soft chords in G minor on the porch. Lennie is too unsettled to meet their gentleness. Toby’s call and kisses, the stillness of objects in the house, the shifting St. Anthony statues, and Bailey’s childhood drawing in which she left herself out of the family all crowd into the moment. Lennie then thinks of everything she has not said since Bailey died: words held inside her and in the orange bedroom, too sad, enraged, devastated, or guilty to emerge. She draws in air and sends it through the clarinet as one prolonged, wild note.

The sound carries memories rather than a composed account of them: Lennie and Bailey at the river and the ocean, in their room, in car backseats and bathtubs, and running through the trees through years spent without their mother. In the same rush of imagined destruction, Lennie breaks windows and walls, burns through the past, pushes Toby away, and hurls the Lennie houseplant toward the sea. The instrument gives breath and force to grief that has remained unsaid; when Lennie opens her eyes, Joe is staring at her, astonished, and the dogs next door are barking. The outburst changes the clarinet from an emblem of withheld performance into a channel through which the scale of her loss becomes audible.

Afterward, Lennie recognizes the difference between playing music and treating music as something trapped inside an instrument. She recalls Marguerite St. Denis urging her to play the music rather than the instrument and Mr. James telling her to let the instrument play her. She understands these instructions only after the porch outburst: the music was not locked in the clarinet, but in herself. Her new thought is that music may be what escapes when a heart breaks. The clarinet has not removed her sadness; it has given that sadness a form that can move beyond her body.

A duet, and the sound of Bailey’s presence

The clarinet’s relation to Joe develops through awkwardness before fluency. When they first attempt their duet, guitar and clarinet stumble over each other. They look up in embarrassment and begin again; gradually, they click. When either is unsure where the other is going, they watch and listen closely. Lennie describes those moments as feeling like their souls are talking. Joe praises her tone as lonely, like a day without birds, but Lennie does not feel lonely while they play. She feels that Bailey is listening.

Joe later leaves Lennie a damp sheet of music dedicated to a soulful, beautiful clarinetist, with the promise of a second part to come. Unable to hear the melody clearly in her head, Lennie retrieves her clarinet and plays it. The tune seems to her full of birds flying from its end and filling the trees and sky. She repeats it until she knows it by heart. At two in the morning she still cannot sleep, and the music sharpens her awareness of the sister she longs to have beside her: she wants Bailey sprawled on her bed, wants to tell her about Joe, and wants to play her the song. The clarinet brings musical intimacy and bereavement into the same room; the new melody is pleasurable precisely as it makes Lennie feel Bailey’s absence more sharply.

Returning to music on her own terms

Playing does not make Lennie’s grief or anxiety vanish. During rehearsal for the upcoming River Festival, she initially finds the keys and moves through the pieces Mr. James has chosen, absorbed in the music and imagining that she is playing with Joe alone. Then dread about Toby and the previous night’s conversation breaks into her concentration. She becomes painfully alert and follows the arrangement without deviation. The contrast recalls her earlier fear of performance: musical engagement is possible, but emotional distress can still narrow it into cautious compliance.

Later, while Lennie plays Joe’s melody repeatedly on the porch, Gram comes out of the art room carrying a mahogany box from the attic. She remarks that the melody is lovely and that it is good to hear Lennie playing again. Lennie tells her she plans to try for first chair in the fall. The announcement reverses the deliberate failure she had confessed to Joe: returning to the clarinet now includes choosing to face an audition she once evaded. Her decision does not erase the fear that kept her from playing freely, but it marks a change in how she relates to it.

The clarinet as continuing connection

At the novel’s close, Lennie’s poem imagines a girl whose earthbound sister comes to hear music in heaven. After that, the living sister gives her everything she needs to say through her clarinet. This ending gathers together the instrument’s earlier roles: childhood recognition, the coffin-like case, the uncontrolled note of mourning, Joe’s duet, and the melody that Lennie plays until she knows it by heart. The clarinet cannot restore Bailey or make their conversation literal. Instead, it offers Lennie an ongoing practice for carrying love and grief together, and for giving a voice to what she can no longer tell her sister face to face.