Sneak Peak Hushed #2
I make myself smile, but the fear doesn’t obey.
If they find against me, my research goes radioactive and Fairhaven drops me, and my visa dies the day they do.
And then what—ICE at my door, a C-130 to Toronto-Pearson?
My attorney is whispering reassurances I can’t hear—he’s found his voice now, out here, where it’s free and there’s no committee to oppose.
Where was that in there? I want ask, but I can’t.
I’m hollow, scooped out by four hours of having my judgment dissected and found wanting, and defended by a man who couldn’t be bothered to look up from his notes.
I stumble out into the muggy DC afternoon.
Early August, the heat unbelievable, the air thick with hot pavement and exhaust. The white marble of the government buildings shimmers in the sun; tourists in shorts clutch water bottles between monuments.
Five years of doctoral work, two visas, countless immigration forms—all of it balanced on whether five strangers thought my emails were professional enough.
I need to move. I turn left and start walking, not sure where. I take one turn because a pigeon has landed in front of me and I don’t want to disturb it, another because there’s shade at the far end. Government workers in shirtsleeves, tourists with maps, joggers spending their lunch break.
And then, on a side street I have turned down for no reason at all, there is a piano.
It is a battered upright, painted in swirls of blue and yellow, standing against a wall between a fire door and a stack of pallets. There is a hand-lettered sign propped on the music stand.
Play Me, I’m Yours!
There is nobody at it. There is nobody anywhere near it. It has been put out on a street in August for anybody at all, and nobody has come.
Those awful childhood piano lessons suddenly do not feel so distant. I could do that. I want to do that—to get out there and make a spectacle of myself in front of strangers.
Those awful childhood piano lessons suddenly don’t feel so distant. I could do that. I want to do that—get out there and make a spectacle of myself. Play something.
Instead I duck into a clothing store. Cold air, new fabric, and I realize I’ve sweated clean through my shirt; for once I’m grateful for the coat. Through the window I mean to look for the trumpeter, but instead there’s a young man across the street, off to one side, texting.
I swallow hard. Dark brown hair falling over his forehead, and even from here his eyes are a startling, improbable blue, and he is built like somebody who does something outdoors for a living.
He is, I think, the best-looking man I have seen in about a decade.
And, like I always do with a man I can’t have, I spin him a story.
He’s texting his girlfriend. Crazy about her—you can tell.
Her name is Charlotte, but she hates that, so she goes by Charlie.
She’s appropriated all his plaid shirts and looks sensational in them.
He’s already bought the ring. He knew on day one.
She’s found it, of course—he hid it somewhere stupid like the sock drawer—but he doesn’t know she knows.
“What are you doing, Mr. Man?” I murmur.
He’s scanning the windows now, still smiling, like he’s looking for something. Then he turns a slow circle, up and down the street, and the smile is so big and warm that I want it pointed at me. He could wave, and I’d wave back, and—I don’t know what comes after that.
His eyes glide past my window. I exhale, relief and disappointment in the same breath. And then they come back, and stop, and he is looking directly at me—
A bus slides between usI step back into the shadows like a schoolboy. Caught staring at a stranger in the street, at thirty-one years of age, in a shop I cannot afford.
“Can I help you, sir?” A saleswoman.
“No, thank you. Just looking.”
“For yourself, or for someone else?” She gives my wardrobe a professional once-over.
The bus clears. He’s still there, but not smiling now—brow furrowed, looking around, hesitantly texting again. Go back to Charlie, I tell him. I’d only complicate your life.
“Sir?”
I take in where I am: ripped jeans, models barely out of their teens with physiques Olympians would envy. This place is too young for me. I feel fifty-one, not thirty-one.
The dark-haired man starts to walk away, and I feel his absence so sharply I put a hand to my chest. I look at the too-trendy clothes that will never be right for someone like me, and I hate everything—the look I built this morning, the tie throttling me, the vest. Because I didn’t even wear a proper three-piece in one color; I mixed and matched like a popinjay, because I had to be defiant at the last possible moment.
“Well—let me know if there’s anything you want,” she says, starting to turn away.
I’m about to slink back out into the heat when my eye snags on a shirt.
“Yes,” I say, picking it up. “There is. This color is called Mexican Rose.”
“It is?”
“It symbolizes charisma and bravery. It’s everywhere in Mexico.
” I work the fabric between my fingers. I could never pull this off.
I know that. But something is cracking open in my chest—some wall that held for four hours of interrogation—and I can feel it going and I don’t care.
“Fuck it.” I pull the tie loose and drag it off over my head like a noose and drop it on the floor.
The saleswoman takes a step back.
“You know what I want?” I shuck the coat and start on the vest buttons, and I can hear how unhinged I sound.
“I want to play that piano like a goddamned badass.” The vest hits the floor.
I want to kiss a man so beautiful the image stays branded behind my eyes when I close them.
And most of all, I want to pretend, just for today, that I am not afraid of everything.
A man in his undershirt, standing over a pile of his own discarded armor, breathing hard in a store that was never built for him.
“The shirt,” I say. “And jeans. And shoes.” I hold out my wallet. “All of it. Please.”
She takes it without a word, her face caught somewhere between security and a therapist.
And standing there in my undershirt over a pile of my own discarded armor, with my hands shaking so badly that she has to hold the card reader steady for me, I hear myself say it out loud, in the voice my mother used on me when I was six and had done something inexplicable in a public place.
Voyons donc, Sébastien. Qu’est-ce que tu fais?
Come on now. What exactly do you think you are doing?
It is her voice and it is mine at the same time, and neither of us has an answer.
This won’t last. By the time I’m having coffee across the street the adrenaline will thin and the fear will seep back; by the time I reach Fairhaven, the shirt and the jeans and the shoes will be buried at the back of a closet.
But right now, in this ridiculous store, with my tie on the floor and a stranger’s alarm all over her face—right now, I don’t care.
Do your worst.