Chapter Five #2
She doesn't sit. She's very still. Her eyes don't leave my face. I can see her trying to understand what I am, and I can see her failing, and I can see the moment when she decides that running won't help her.
"What do you want?" she asks. Her voice is steady.
"To know about a student of yours."
"What student."
"Jenny Lin."
Her eyes change. The fear doesn't leave. But something else enters with it — a complication, a tenderness, a small flicker of grief.
"Jenny," she says. "I haven't seen Jenny in two years."
"I know. Sit down."
She sits. She lowers herself slowly into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. I move around the table and sit beside her. I keep my hands on the surface where she can see them. The claws look worse against the white painted wood than they do in the dark. She looks at them and she swallows.
"What do you want to know," she says.
"I want to remember her the way you do."
She doesn't understand. The understanding isn't necessary.
I reach across the table. My hand closes around the back of her neck, gentle as I can make it. She doesn't fight. I pull her forward until her head rests against my shoulder. I open my mouth at her throat.
The blood is older than the others have been. Slower. She tastes of tea and salt and something I've learned to recognize as the particular flavor of a body that's been alone a long time. I don't take much. I don't need to.
Her memories open.
I reach.
Jenny is there at once. The depth and clarity of these memories is different from the others. This is a teacher who paid attention to her student. Every memory is sharp.
Jenny at eighteen, auditioning. Sitting on a chair in a practice room with the violin against her shoulder, her face set and her dark hair pulled back. The first notes of a Bach partita. The shock on Dr. Reeves's face when she heard them.
Jenny at nineteen, in a recital hall on a Friday evening, playing the second movement of a Brahms concerto. The audience small but quiet. Her bow arm steady. Her face transformed by the work of it.
Jenny at twenty, in Dr. Reeves's office on a winter afternoon much like this one, her hands twisted in her lap.
I have to drop the lessons. I can't keep up with both.
Jenny. Drop the pre-med.
I can't drop the pre-med.
You can. You can. You can do this. I've been teaching for thirty years and I'm telling you. You can.
My father.
Your father has his own life. This is yours.
Dr. Reeves.
Jenny. Please. Please listen to me.
I can't.
The conversation goes on. Dr. Reeves did everything she could. She offered to call Jenny's father herself. She offered to write to the music school admissions office on Jenny's behalf. She offered private lessons through the summer for free. Jenny shook her head to all of it.
The next memory is Dr. Reeves in the same office a month later, sitting alone, looking at the empty chair across the desk and grieving the loss of a student who hadn't died.
I pull back from the feeding.
I lower Dr. Reeves gently against the back of her chair. Her head lolls to the side. Her eyes are half-closed. Her breath is shallow but steady.
I rise. I cross to the sink. I rinse my mouth at her faucet and dry my face on a dishtowel that has cats embroidered along the hem.
I look at her for a moment before I go.
She'll wake in an hour or two. She'll be cold. She won't remember the last hour. She'll have a wound on her neck that she won't be able to explain to her doctor. She'll be afraid for a long time.
I'm sorry for this. I'm not sorry enough to undo it.
I leave the way I came in. The back door clicks shut behind me. The kitchen light is still on over the sink. The kettle is sitting where she left it.
I walk to the van.
* * *
The music shop is on Sixteenth Street near the campus. It's a narrow storefront wedged between a sandwich place and a bicycle repair. The sign above the door reads JENSEN STRINGS in faded gold paint. The hours on the door say it closes at six on Mondays.
It's past nine. The shop is dark.
I park behind the building. I check the alley. The alley is empty. I let myself in through the back door, which gives even more easily than Dr. Reeves's did.
The shop inside is dim. The smell of varnish and rosin and the resin-soft scent of horsehair. Violins hang from pegs along the walls. Cases are stacked in the corners. The counter has a glass case with strings and shoulder rests and accessories.
I stand in the middle of the shop and breathe in. It's a particular kind of smell. A craftsperson's smell. The smell of something built and maintained by people who care about it.
I cross to the counter. The case holds the rosin.
I don't know which kind she used. I know only that she used something good.
I look at the labels. Pirastro, Hill, Bernardel, Andrea.
The Hill catches my eye — a small dark brick of amber rosin in a wooden case lined with cloth.
The Hill is the rosin a serious student would have used in the early eighties.
The kind a teacher like Dr. Reeves would have insisted on.
I open the glass case. I take out the Hill rosin. I look at it in my hand. The case is small and the rosin inside is the color of dark honey.
I take out three of them. I don't know which she'd have used. The Light or the Dark or the violin-specific. I'll give her all three.
I leave the cash on the counter. More than enough. I weight it down with a metal practice mute from the display.
I close the case. I leave through the back the way I came. I lock the door behind me with a piece of wire and the kind of patience that comes from never being in a hurry.
* * *
The drive back to Millfield takes ninety minutes. The wind has picked up and the snow has started again, the same dry pellets that have been falling for three nights now. I park the van half a block from the apartment complex. I walk.
The Granada is buried under snow in its usual spot. I don't approach it. I cross the lot and stand at the base of the southeast corner of the building. The window on the second floor is dark. The latch is closed.
I climb.
The ledge is narrow. Maybe four inches. Wide enough for the wooden boxes if I place them carefully.
I take the three rosin cases from the inside pocket of my coat and I arrange them on the ledge in a neat row, the labels facing inward toward the window so she can read them through the glass when she opens her curtain in the morning.
I look at the cases. They're small. They're nothing. They're the closest thing I have ever come to a confession.
The window is dark behind them. She's inside. She's sleeping.
I want to open the latch. I want to slip into the room and watch her sleep as I did before. I want to look at her hand on the pillow, the way her hair comes loose while she sleeps.
I don't open the latch.
I climb back down. I cross the lot. I walk back to the van.
I drive home with the first weak light of dawn graying the eastern horizon. The house is dark when I let myself in. I cross to the room with no windows and I sit on the floor and I go still.
Behind my closed eyes, Dr. Reeves is in her office, looking at the empty chair across the desk.
You can. You can. You can do this.
I stay with it until the day passes over me.