Chapter Nine #2
The mother knows. The mother watches him do it and says nothing. The mother has spent twenty years not contradicting her husband in front of their daughter and she doesn't start now. She'll regret this for the rest of her life. She regrets it as I'm sitting on her kitchen floor.
The day Jenny tells them she's chosen the University of Nebraska. The father is so happy he cries. The mother smiles at her daughter and her daughter smiles back and the conservatory letters are still in the drawer in the study and neither of them mentions them.
Jenny at nineteen, home for Christmas. Different. Tired. Thinner. The mother sees the violin case in her room and notices it hasn't been opened in months. The mother doesn't ask why.
Jenny at twenty, home for spring break. Worse. She comes down to breakfast late. She doesn't laugh at her father's jokes. She doesn't bring the violin home.
The phone call. Jenny's voice on the line.
I can't do this anymore. The father in the kitchen with his hand over his eyes.
The mother taking the phone from him and saying — Come home, sweetheart.
Come home. We'll talk. Jenny saying — I'm not going to be a doctor.
The father in the background — Don't you dare.
Don't you dare quit. Not after everything—
The slamming of the phone.
The two-week silence.
Jenny coming home. The father in the front hall with his arms crossed. The argument. The shouting. Things said in the kitchen that none of them will recover from for a long time. The mother trying to hold both of them and failing.
The day Jenny leaves with her things in two suitcases and a violin case. The mother in the driveway watching the car pull away. The mother walking back into the house. The father in his study with the door closed.
The next two years.
The phone calls every Wednesday at nine forty-five. The father never on the line. The mother always asking Jenny to come for dinner. Jenny always declining. The galbi sitting in the refrigerator until the father throws it out.
The photograph on the nightstand. Jenny at seventeen in the dark dress, mid-bow, the violin against her shoulder, her face transformed. The photograph the mother keeps and the father pretends not to see and never asks her to put away.
The conversation the mother had with the father six months ago, in their bed in the dark, the mother saying: I should have stopped you. I should have stopped you with the letters. The father saying nothing for a long time. The father saying, finally: I know.
I pull back from the feeding.
I lower the woman the rest of the way to the floor. Her head tilts to the side. Her breath is slow and steady. The wound on her neck is already clotting.
I sit beside her on the kitchen tile.
The Massenet is in my head. I don't know music as these people know it — I haven't let music into me in centuries — but I know what I've just heard and I know what it did to the father and I know what Jenny had to do to make it sound like that.
I lift her gently and carry her to the couch in the room beyond the kitchen — a family room with photographs on the walls. I lay her down. I tuck a throw blanket over her. I arrange her so it'll look as though she came in here and sat down and fell asleep.
I look at the photographs on the wall.
Jenny is in many of them. Jenny as a baby. Jenny at the beach with a sand bucket. Jenny in a school uniform. Jenny with the quarter-violin under her chin, age six. Jenny in a dark dress at a music stand.
I find the photograph at the end of the row.
It's the one. The senior recital. The dark dress. The mid-bow. The violin under her chin. Her face transformed.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I leave.
The back door clicks shut behind me. The yard is dark. I walk to the gate, to the corner, to the van.
I drive west toward Millfield.
I don't need to stop at a music shop tonight. I know what I need. The Massenet. The violin part for the Meditation from Tha?s. I'll find it. The London firm can have it to me by tomorrow afternoon if I make the call when I get home.
The road unspools through the dark. The sky beyond the windshield is full of stars and the moon is a thin crescent low on the horizon.
Jenny.
The shape of the name has changed in me. It has weight now. It has years now. I know how she came to be the woman sleeping in the bedroom of the apartment in Millfield. I know what was taken from her. I know who took it.
I know what I'll give back.
The sky is going pale when I pull into the driveway of the farmhouse. I've been awake too long. I've been moving too long.
I make the phone call from the kitchen.
Whitfield answers on the second ring. He never sounds as though he's been asleep.
"Sir."
"I need a piece of sheet music. Meditation from Tha?s, by Massenet. The violin part with piano accompaniment."
"Yes, sir."
"By tomorrow afternoon."
"By noon, sir."
"Thank you."
I hang up. I cross to the room with no windows. I lower myself to the floor with my back against the wall.
The day comes.
I let it come.
I sit with what I now know — all of it, the whole long shape of her — until the sun moves overhead and the house above me goes still.
* * *
Jenny
I don't sleep.
Morning comes to the edges of the curtain and I'm still lying on my back in the same position, my hand resting against my own jaw where the cold finger traced me.
The shaking hasn't stopped. It's changed — it's faint now, low, a thing that lives in my chest more than in my hands — but it hasn't stopped.
I don't move after the sun comes up. The room slowly fills with the thin winter light. The shape of the violin case on the floor. The boxes of rosin on the desk. The dying jasmine in its paper cup.
The phone in the kitchen rings at seven.
I know who it is. Tammy calls Friday mornings before her early shift to make sure I'm up. I have never not been up.
I get out of bed and go to the kitchen. I pick up the receiver on the fourth ring.
"Hello."
"Why do you sound like that?"
"I'm sick."
"Bullshit."
"Tammy."
"Are you actually sick? Like, throwing up?"
"I'm not coming in."
There's a pause. I can hear the kitchen noises in her apartment behind her — the radio on low, Marcus saying something in the background.
"Jenny."
"I'm not coming in. Please."
She doesn't push. I have never asked her for anything in eight months. I think this might be the first time I have asked her for anything.
"Okay. Okay. I'll tell Dale. He's going to be a dick about it."
"He's always a dick about it."
"True." Another pause. "Are you safe?"
The question lands wrong somehow. I'm safe. I'm not safe in any way I can explain to Tammy. I'm both of these things at once.
"I'm safe."
"Okay." Her voice has dropped. The voice she uses with Marcus when he comes home from school upset. "Call me later if you need anything. I mean it."
"I will. Thank you."
I hang up the receiver. The kitchen is gray and quiet. I stand at the counter with my hand on the phone.
I go back to my room.
I take the violin out of the case.
I don't check the time. I don't eat. I don't change out of the T-shirt I slept in. I sit on the edge of the bed and I tune the violin and I rosin the bow and I begin to play.
I play scales. I play arpeggios. I play exercises I haven't played in three years. I play until my fingers bleed a little at the tips, and then I keep playing.
* * *