Chapter Six
Jenny
I wake at seven-fifteen. The room is gray with morning light. The wind has died sometime in the night and the apartment is quiet in the way it gets after a long stretch of weather, the sudden absence of pressure that makes the silence feel deliberate.
I lie in bed. The cold edge feeling from yesterday isn't in the room today. I don't know if that's because there's nothing to feel or because I've stopped trusting myself to feel it. The two are different but they amount to the same thing in the morning.
I get up. I cross to the window to look at the weather.
I open the curtain.
There are three wooden boxes on the outside ledge of my window.
I stop with my hand still on the curtain.
The boxes are dark. The wood is varnished. They're about the size of matchboxes but thicker, and they're lined up in a neat row along the ledge with their labels turned toward the glass so I can read them.
Hill Dark. Hill Light. Hill Violin.
I don't move for a long time.
The morning is still gray. The wind hasn't picked up again. The boxes haven't stirred. They sit on the four inches of stone outside my second-floor window with the snow on the ledge around them like they've always been there.
I look up at the eaves above my window. The eaves are three feet above the top of the window frame. There's no tree near my window. The nearest tree is a bare elm on the far side of the parking lot, twenty yards away.
There's no way for a person to have put these on the ledge. And yet here they are.
I close the curtain and sit on the edge of the bed.
The room is dim and quiet. The heat kicks on.
I look down at my hands and they're shaking.
The shaking isn't because I'm afraid, exactly.
I'm not afraid. I don't know what I am. I'm shaking like someone who's been too long in the cold and finally come inside, everything held tight all day letting go.
I pull the curtain open and the boxes are still there.
Hill is the rosin Dr. Reeves used to insist on. Dr. Reeves who I haven't thought about in over a year and a half. Dr. Reeves with her cardigans and her tea and the little office where she let me sit for hours when I wasn't supposed to be in the music building because I was a pre-med student.
I lift the latch on the window. The latch sticks for a second and then gives. I push the window up. The cold air hits me.
I reach out and take the boxes from the ledge one at a time.
They're heavier than they look. The wood is smooth. The hinges are small brass. I bring them inside and close the window behind me. I lay all three on the desk beside the cup with the wilting jasmine and I look at them.
There's no note.
I open the Hill Dark first. The little brass hinge moves easily.
Inside, the cake of rosin is the color of dark honey.
The cloth lining the case is dark green.
The rosin has been used very lightly, just once or twice — there's a faint pale stripe across the top where someone has drawn a bow across it.
I close it.
I open the Hill Violin. The same. The cake inside is paler, more golden. Untouched.
I open the Hill Light. The cake is the lightest of the three, almost lemon-yellow under the cloth. Also untouched.
I close them all. I stack them carefully on the desk. The three boxes together would have cost more than my electric bill this month.
I sit on the edge of the bed again.
I don't know what to do.
I get dressed and make coffee, drinking it standing at the counter. Lisa is gone. Dee is gone. The apartment is empty and quiet.
I look at the clock on the microwave. I have three hours before my shift.
I go back to my room.
I look at the boxes of rosin on the desk.
I cross the room to the corner where the violin case has been leaning against the wall for months.
I crouch in front of it. I haven't opened it.
I haven't even moved it. It's sat in this corner since I packed it on the floor of my bedroom in my parents' house the week before I told my father I was dropping out.
I lay the case flat on the floor.
The latches are tarnished. I work the first one. It gives with a dry click. The second is harder. I have to push it sideways with my thumb. It opens.
I lift the lid.
The violin is exactly where I left it.
The wood is the same warm orange-brown it's always been.
The strings are dull from disuse. The bow is in its slot along the top of the case, the horsehair gone slightly slack.
There's a pocket beneath the chinrest where I used to keep my old rosin and my soft cloth and a half-broken pencil for marking music.
The smell hits me. It's the smell I'd forgotten I knew. Varnish and rosin and old wood and the particular dust that collects in an instrument case. I'd forgotten this smell. I'd forgotten I knew it as well as I know the smell of my own hair.
I don't pick up the violin.
I look at it. I lift the soft cloth that's been folded over it, and the white wood of the chinrest is the same and the fingerboard is the same and the gut strings under the pegs are the same. The instrument has waited for me. Instruments will do that. They'll wait.
I reach out and touch the A string. It's dull and quiet under my finger. It doesn't make a sound, only a soft thud against the wood.
I lower the cloth back over the violin. I close the case.
I don't latch it.
I leave it lying open on the floor of my room.
I go to work.
* * *
The shift is normal. I work the grill and take orders.
Tammy and I talk about Christmas and the snow and a movie she saw with Marcus on Saturday.
I don't tell her about the rosin, or the boxes on the ledge — I don't know how to explain it, how to say someone climbed to my second-floor window in the middle of the night and left me three boxes of expensive rosin.
The sentence wouldn't survive contact with the air.
I work, close, drive home.
The apartment is empty when I let myself in. Lisa has a lab tonight. Dee has Kevin. I eat, shower, and go to my room.
The violin case is on the floor where I left it. The boxes of rosin are on the desk. The cup of drooping jasmine. The black stone.
I get into bed.
I don't turn off the lamp at first. I lie there looking at the room. The case. The boxes. The shape of the violin under the soft cloth.
After a while I turn off the lamp.
The room goes dark.
I lie on my back and I listen.
I don't know what I'm waiting for, or what I want to come.
I lie there for a long time. The wind has started up again somewhere outside. I hear a car pass on the street below.
Nothing in the room moves.
Eventually I fall asleep.
In the half-second before sleep takes me, I think I feel a coolness in the air that doesn't belong to me. The kind of coolness I felt yesterday morning and the morning before. I can't tell if it's real or if I'm imagining it. I can't tell which I want it to be.
* * *
Farkas
I rise at five. The dark has just come and the wind is pushing snow against the eastern side of the farmhouse.
I don't eat. The feeding from Dr. Reeves last night still holds, and the hunger is dull. I dress. The keys to the van are on the kitchen table. I take them leave.
I'm at the apartment complex in twenty minutes.
I don't wait. I cross the parking lot in the dark and stand at the base of the southeast corner of the building and look up. The light in her room is off. The curtain is drawn.
I climb.
I'm at the ledge in under a minute. The rosin boxes are gone. The ledge is empty except for the thin drift of snow that's gathered along the inside corner.
She found them.
The thought arrives with a force that's disproportionate to the simple fact of it. She found them. She brought them inside. She held them in her hands.
I work the latch and step through.
The room is dark.
She's in the bed.
I look at the desk.
The three rosin boxes are stacked there, and the violin case is open on the floor.
I crouch beside it. The case is open and the violin is inside, still wrapped in its soft cloth, the bow in its slot along the lid.
The case is sitting in the middle of her floor as if she's set it down and forgotten about it.
She hasn't forgotten about it. She's opened it.
The dust along the seam is gone. The latches have been disturbed.
She opened it tonight or last night or sometime in the last day, for the first time in many months.
The thing in my chest that I've been calling hunger isn't hunger. I don't know what it is. It has shape and weight. It presses against the inside of my ribs and it doesn't move.
I rise from the case.
I cross to the bed.
She's on her side. Her hand is tucked under her chin and a single strand has worked loose against her cheek.
I lower myself to my knees beside the bed.
I've been here three times now. I've looked at her face three times now in the half-light of streetlamps through curtains. Each time I've looked, the looking hasn't been enough. Tonight the looking isn't enough either. Tonight the looking is worse than not enough.
I want to touch her.
The wanting is in my hands. They haven't touched a thing in love or kindness in millennia. They've torn and they've clawed and they have killed but they haven't touched. They want to touch.
I look at the strand that's come loose against her face.
I lift my hand. A claw is a quarter inch from the loose strand of her hair,, and I can feel the warmth of her face on the back of my finger.
She sighs in her sleep. I lower my hand, drawing it back to my side. I'm still on my knees beside the bed. Close, but not close enough.
I look at her. I look at her face and her hand and her hair on the pillow and the thin white scar on the back of her left hand that I noticed the first night I came here. I look at all of these things and the wanting doesn't lessen. It grows. It grows until it's enormous in the small room.
I have to leave.
I don't want to leave.
I have to leave.
I rise and cross to the window. The latch gives under my hand. I step out onto the ledge and close the window behind me, slow and exact — even though my hands have started to shake.
I climb down. I stay in the snow at the base of the building, but the shaking doesn't stop.
I look up at her window. The window is dark. The curtain is closed. She's in the bed she's been in for the last hour. She's sleeping. She doesn't know I was there.
I almost touched her.
A few hours ago I was forty miles away pulling memories out of an old woman's head in a kitchen that smelled of tea.
A few weeks ago I was a thing that drifted at the edges of small towns and fed without thinking and felt nothing.
Now I'm standing in a parking lot in Nebraska with my hands shaking because a sleeping woman exhaled in her sleep.
I don't know what's happening to me.
I do know. I'm afraid to name it.
I walk away from the building. I cross the parking lot. I cross the street. I walk past the elm and I keep walking. The cold air is in my face and the wind is finding the gaps in my coat but the cold doesn't reach me.
I shouldn't come back tomorrow.
I know already that I will.
I walk to the van and I get in and I sit in the driver's seat with my hands on the wheel and I don't start the engine for a long time. The shaking has slowed but not stopped. I look at my hands. The hands of something that was a man once. The hands that almost touched her hair.
I close my eyes.
I've lived for a thousand years and more.
I have outlived empires. I've watched the long slow rise and fall of cities.
I've stood in the dark of every century since I rose from the field of corpses and I've felt nothing, and the not-feeling has been a kind of safety I didn't know I valued until it was taken away.
It's gone. It's been gone for two weeks.
I'm afraid of myself. I'm afraid of what I almost did tonight. I'm afraid of what I'll do tomorrow when I come back and the wanting is in my hands again and she's there in the dark, sleeping, peacefully.
I start the engine. I drive home.
I sit in the room with no windows. I don't move for the rest of the night. I think about that soft sigh and the violin case open on the floor.
I think about all of these things and the dawn comes and the day weighs me down and I sit there with my back against the wall and my eyes closed and I don't know what I'm becoming.
I know I'm not going back.
I know I'm going back tomorrow.
Both things are true. They sit in me side by side like two stones.