Healing You in Silence

1. Millie

CHAPTER ONE

MILLIE

This has to mean something.

No, I don’t believe in things like that. I am a grown woman who does not think the universe arranges traffic lights to send messages. The universe has bigger things to worry about. Wars. Comet trajectories. The Kardashians.

And yet.

This morning I knocked my favorite mug off the counter while reaching for my keys.

The cream one with the chipped handle I have had since college, the one I drink from every morning because the shape of it in my hand is part of how I know I am awake.

It hit the tile and shattered into a constellation of pieces too small to glue back together.

I stood over it in my socks and did not even try to clean it up.

I just stared at it until the kitchen timer went off and reminded me I was supposed to be leaving.

Then I locked myself out of my apartment.

I don't lock myself out. I'm the person with a key hook by the door and a spare hook behind it. The fact that today of all days I forgot to grab them off the kitchen counter, where they fell with the mug shrapnel, is not an omen.

It isn't. I waited twelve minutes in the hallway, trying not to think about how ridiculous this already felt.

Mr. Halvorsen from 2A came home with his groceries and asked in his slow, kind voice if I was okay.

I nodded too many times. The super finally came up looking like he'd jogged up the stairs.

He let me back in. I grabbed my keys. I left again.

So. Two things. Not an omen. Three would count.

I take a cab. I stop at the cafe two blocks from the venue because without my comfort drink I might not function.

I order an iced chai and feel the first hint of calm.

I am halfway out the door, chai in my left hand and violin case in my right, when a woman in a beautiful camel coat turns too quickly and sends the entire cup of chai down my white blouse.

Strike three.

She gasps. "Oh my god! I am so sorry, let me buy you a new one. Let me at least get you a new shirt."

I shake my head and step back. The cold is already soaking through to my bra, and I have fourteen minutes before I need to be in the green room with a tuned violin and a face that does not say I have been baptized in spiced tea.

"Please," she says, grabbing my arm. "I insist. Let me buy you a drink and pay for a new blouse."

I am late, and I cannot have this conversation. Please release my arm before I burst into tears in front of you and ruin your morning too is what I want to communicate. What I actually do is tap the face of my watch, shake my head, and hope my eyes say the rest.

She doesn't get it. She keeps talking, convinced I am being polite.

I pull my arm gently and mouth I'm late.

My breath shapes the words, the soft hiss of the t and the m on my lips.

She watches me mouth it, and her face shifts.

The pity arrives, right on time. I hate that it always does.

I would rather have the chai still in my shirt and her still talking than the look she is giving me now.

I leave.

Outside, the cold hits the wet patch on my chest. I spent more time escaping that apology than I would have spent letting her buy me a new drink.

Four minutes. Both of us tried. Neither of us got what we needed.

And now here I am, walking to the most important audition of my life with a stain shaped roughly like Florida across my front.

I push through the double doors of the venue with one minute to spare and a rising sense that the day is already too full.

Vivienne is in the hallway by the green room. She sees me, and her whole face brightens.

"Millie. Oh, thank god. I was starting to spiral." She zips toward me, takes me by the shoulders, then sees the stain. "Oh no. Honey, what happened?"

Don't you know? Chai stains are a fashion statement now.

Is what I wanted to say, but instead, I mime a cup tipping. The joke lives and dies inside my head, where all my best jokes go to be buried.

"Someone bumped you?"

I nod.

"Tell me they at least apologized."

I nod and widen my eyes. She laughs.

I reach into my bag and pull out the long camel cardigan I folded in there just in case, because that is exactly the sort of thing I do. I pack a backup cardigan for a violin audition because the weather is unpredictable and because I do not trust the universe. I hold it up and tilt my head.

Vivienne gives me a thumbs up and a real smile. "Smart girl. You're always prepared."

I slip the cardigan on, the familiar wool warm against the cold-wet patch on my chest. It hides the stain perfectly, and I look like someone who did not just have a chaotic morning.

A woman with a clipboard comes over. I recognize her. She is on the audition committee, the principal flutist who has been with the Pantheon for fifteen years and is, by all accounts, kind. She's smiling, the schedule balanced on top of her stack of papers.

"Vivienne, you're up second. Millie, you'll be fourth. We had a reshuffle." She looks at me. "Did you get the updated time? I sent the email last night."

I reach for my phone. My hand shakes. The screen unlocks on the third try.

I open the notes app and type, Yes, I got it, thank you.

It takes longer than it should because I'm trying not to make it obvious that my fingers are trembling.

The committee woman waits. She doesn't sigh or fidget. I appreciate that.

I turn the phone toward her. She reads and nods. Then she does the thing most people do when talking to me.

She gives me an enormous, exaggerated thumbs up, holds it there, and mouths with slow precision, THANK YOU. GOOD LUCK.

I smile and mouth thank you back because that is the routine. She walks off feeling like she did a kindness.

I'm not deaf. I can hear you perfectly. I could hear you whisper from across the hall. You don't need to mouth at me like a fish in a tank.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about being mute: most people think mute and deaf are a package deal, like fries and a drink. They're not. Mute is one thing. Deaf is another. You can have one without the other, both, or neither.

But I can hear perfectly well. I can hear the audition coordinator clear her throat from across the hall.

I can hear the elevator ding two floors away.

And I can hear Vivienne breathing too fast beside me.

She's nervous, which means I should probably be too—except I'm already there, already as wound up as a body can be without falling over.

Sometimes I think they are the deaf ones for not listening.

What I don't have is the equipment. It's structural.

I was born without the part of the throat that hums. I have everything else.

Tongue, teeth, lips, lungs, breath. If you watch me try to speak, I'm doing all the work.

My mouth makes the shapes. My breath rushes through them.

There's simply no string for the bow to pull across.

A violin without strings. That is what I am.

I have a body. I have the bridge. I have a perfectly fine f-hole and varnish.

I don't have the four little wires that turn motion into music.

So my mouth opens, my diaphragm pushes, and what comes out is air.

Sometimes you can hear it. The hiss of an s, the puff of a p, the small click of teeth meeting on a t.

The percussion of speech without the melody.

Vivienne sits beside me on the bench. She leans her shoulder into mine. "How are you feeling?"

I show her my phone. Super nervous. I feel like I am going to pass out.

"Yeah, me too." She lets out a long, controlled breath. "But we made it here. We're both auditioning for First Chair. That's already something, right?"

I smile and bump my knee against hers.

I met Vivienne in this building three years ago, on this same bench.

We sat beside each other waiting for our turn.

She started talking before I could explain anything.

When I held up my phone with the memo saying I'm mute, I can hear you fine, sorry, I can't talk, I waited for the small recalibration.

The shift in her face. The polite withdrawal.

Instead, she squinted at me and said, "Cool. Wait, are you a violinist too?"

I nodded, and that was the start.

We got close inside the orchestra after we both got in. Outside, I don't really know her. She's private about her life, and I don't push.

I've only guessed at it from the edges. Her clothes are too nice for a section player's paycheck.

Her posture is what years of being raised somewhere wealthy do to a spine.

She drives in from somewhere she calls a bit far and shrugs off the commute like it costs her nothing.

I have never been to her apartment. She has never been to mine.

I don't take it personally. There are corners of my life I don't show her either. Inside these walls, we have our own world. It's the smallest, warmest one I have. I love her for it.

I type. I know we're auditioning for the same thing, but good luck, Viv. I mean it. If it's you, I'll be cheering.

She reads it and her eyes go shiny. "Aw, Millie. Same. If it's not me, I want it to be you."

A voice from the doorway. "Vivienne Smith."

She squeezes my hand once and goes.

I sit alone with my violin.

I look at the case in my lap. It's old. My initials are scratched into the corner with a paperclip from when I was fifteen because I wanted everyone to know this thing was mine, this thing was made of me. I rest my fingers on the velvet and close my eyes.