Chapter 7 – Emily
Emily
The box is back.
I know it the moment I open the music room door, because there it is, square in the middle of my floor where the light falls best in the late afternoon, stamped with the expensive catalog's name and taped shut and heavy with something I don't need to open to understand—more of her, more of the endless supply of her, spilling across the one border I have left.
It sits on my rug like a thing that belongs, like it has always been here, like I am the intruder who arrived and found it waiting.
I stand over it for a long moment. I have practiced not feeling things for so many years that the not-feeling has become its own kind of muscle, and I flex it now, I reach for the cool flat nothing I usually keep close, and it isn't there.
What's there instead is something with a heat to it, something that climbs.
So I bend, and I get my arms around the box, and it's heavier than I expected and the corner digs into my forearm, and I carry it out.
Not far. I don't march it down the stairs and set it burning on the lawn the way Ana would have me do, the way some braver woman in some braver life would.
I just carry it over the threshold of my room and set it down in the hall, out, out, on the far side of the door where the studio and its nauseating fumes and its drafting desk and its whole encroaching country begins.
I set it down with more force than I mean to, and the tape crackles, and something inside shifts.
Then I go back in and I close the door, and I sit, and I take up my cello.
There is a mercy in the third mile and there is a mercy in this, too.
The Bach comes first because the Bach always comes first, the way you'd wash your hands before you touched anything that mattered, the prelude in its endless patient turning, and I let it move through my fingers and out into the room that swallows sound, and for the first time in weeks the swallowing feels like a gift instead of a theft.
Let it swallow this. Let the house take my sound for once and fold it into the walls, because it is mine, it is the one thing I make that no one arranged for me, that no one flew in, that no one bought with a card number read off in a warm loose voice through a study door.
I close my eyes. I find the place I go when the playing is right, the place below thought, and I am nearly there, I am almost gone into it?—
—when I hear the crash.
It isn't much of a crash. That's the thing I'll think about later, lying awake.
A soft thud, a scrape, a small clatter of something spilling, and then a cry that goes up too quickly and holds too long, a cry that has an audience already built into it, and I know that cry, I have been living underneath that cry for three weeks, and my bow comes off the string.
I sit for one second more. I want it on the record, somewhere, even if only in the private ledger I keep behind my sternum: I sit for one full second, and I think, don't, I think let it be, let her have it, go back to the Bach.
And then I am who I am, and I set the cello on its side and I go to the door.
Tara is on the floor of the hall. Of course she is.
She's half-sitting, half-sprawled against the wall with one leg out and the box tipped over beside her, its flaps burst open, and a scatter of pastels or charcoals or something has gone across the runner like spilled teeth, and she's got one hand pressed to her knee where the linen has ridden up and there's a scrape there, a real one, I'll grant her that, a thin bright line beading red.
"Oh," she says, when she sees me, and the cry changes register, deepens, finds its purpose. "Oh, ow?—"
"Are you—" I start, and I don't even know what I'm going to ask, whether I'm going to be kind, whether the muscle of it will fire the way it always fires, but I don't get to find out, because Ben is already there.
He comes down the hall at a near-run, in his shirtsleeves, phone still in his hand, and he drops to his knees beside her on my runner with a tenderness in his whole body that I have not been on the receiving end of in so long I've stopped being able to remember its weather.
"Hey—hey, I've got you, what happened, are you okay?—"
"I just tripped, I wasn't looking, it's stupid—" She's laughing and wincing at once, brave about it, so brave, one hand fluttering at the scrape. "God, I feel like an idiot."
"You're not an idiot. Let me see." He's got her knee, he's turning it gently toward the light, and I stand in my own doorway and watch my husband cradle another woman's leg in both his hands with more care than he has shown me across an entire season, and something in me goes very quiet, the way it went that first morning.
Very quiet and very cold and very clear.
"Why were these even out here?" Tara says, and she says it small, wounded, to the middle distance, but the words find their target the way her words always find their target. "Right in the middle of the—who leaves a box in the middle of a hallway?"
"Because you had them put in my room again," I say.
It comes out level. It surprises me, how level.
She turns her wet blue eyes up at me. "Emily. It was an accident. The girl got confused, they're right next to each other, she just—she carried it into the wrong door, it's an honest mistake, I didn't even know it was in there?—"
"Her name is Julia." I hear myself and I don't stop myself. "And she isn't to blame for this. She puts things where she's told to put them. So don't."
"Emily." Ben doesn't look up from the knee. He says my name the way he sets down something heavy. "Enough."
"Ben—"
"Do you understand what could have happened here?
" And now he does look up, and his face has that thing in it, that decided thing, the villain already cast, the scene already scored, and it isn't grief in it and it isn't worry, it's something closer to disgust, and it's aimed at me.
"She could have really been hurt. You left a box—a heavy box—in the middle of a hallway, and she came through and went right over it.
Do you have any idea—if this were anyone else, if this were a guest who wasn't family, we could be looking at a lawsuit.
A serious one. People sue over less than this. "
I stare at him. I open my mouth and the air comes out of it with nothing on it.
"I carried it out of my room," I say finally.
"I carried it out because she keeps having it moved in.
I put it down for two minutes to play, Ben, in the one room in this entire house that is supposed to be—" and there it is, the shrink, the fall, the voice going down into the small place, and I hate it, I hate that it happens exactly when I need it most, "—that is supposed to be mine. "
"Listen to yourself." He shakes his head.
He's not even angry now, which is worse; he's tired of me, tired in the way you get tired of a thing that keeps failing to be what you wanted.
"A woman is bleeding on the floor and you're standing there talking about whose room is whose.
This is—this is petty, Emily. This is genuinely petty.
" He turns back to Tara, gathers her, one arm around her shoulders as he helps her up.
"Come on. Come on, let's get you cleaned up, there's a first aid kit in the—Marta will know.
Can you put weight on it? Easy. I've got you. "
"It's fine, it's really fine, I don't want to make a thing of it—" she's saying, making a thing of it, leaning into him, her arm around his waist, and the two of them go down the hall together like that, like survivors of something, her limping just slightly and him bearing her up, and over his shoulder she doesn't look back at me, she doesn't have to, she has already won everything there is to win in this hallway and she knows it.
The pastels lie scattered across the runner. Little sticks of color, cobalt and ochre and a deep bruised red, snapped in places. Nobody picks them up. Nobody is going to.
I stand there a while.
Then I go back into the music room, and I close the door, quiet, the way I close everything, and I lift the cello off its side and settle it back against my body, the scroll at my ear like something whispering, and I put the bow to the string.
My hands are shaking. I let them. I play through the shaking until it's gone, until the sound comes clean, and I do not think about the box or the knee or the word petty sitting in the air of the hall where he left it.
She can have the kitchen. She has taken the kitchen, the china, the dinner, the department, the study, the laugh, the man.
She has taken the whole vast echoing glass-and-stone country of my life and redrawn its borders while I stood at the edges holding a wine I was told to decant.
But not this. Not the four walls of this. She can leave her boxes at my door until the end of the world and I will carry every single one of them back out, and I will sit in this room, and I will play.
The Bach turns and turns and turns, patient, and the house swallows every note, and for once I am glad to feed it.