Chapter 7
MILA
The therapist closes the door behind the last woman.
Sofia is already in the hallway with her notebook. She has been writing through the back half of group, head down, the pencil moving slowly. She holds the notebook against her chest and walks ahead of me toward the lobby.
I should follow her.
I don’t.
The music room is at the end of the corridor on the way back from group, the door half-open every Tuesday. The piano takes up most of the room. The violin on the stand against the far wall.
Today I stop.
Don’t.
I stop.
The room is empty, the piano lid down, a chair beside the violin’s stand and a second pushed against the far wall, the window above open and the late afternoon light coming through slow and syrup-thick.
The violin is old, Russian.
The scroll is cut pre-war Russian, the varnish amber underneath, the instrument played in cold rooms a long time.
My feet take me into the room.
I sit in the chair the way Papa taught me, spine straight and hands in my lap with my ankles crossed. His posture finds me even here.
I do not touch the violin or lift it from the stand. I look at the instrument the way you look at a thing you buried and find breathing.
My left hand starts to curl.
Stop.
It does not stop. The thumb finds the shape it used to make under the neck of a different violin.
The same shape this one has. The fingers fall into the spread they fell into when I was a child.
When I was a teenager standing in the third stand of the second violins at the Conservatory and the conductor had not yet looked up and seen me.
The fingertips do not have calluses anymore, have not had them in years. They remember anyway.
You don’t get to be her again.
My jaw remembers the weight of it on the left side of my chin, the pressure of the chin rest, the small place under the jaw where a different violin used to fit me. The bow arm comes next. The right shoulder drops loose without being asked.
Don’t.
My hand has come off my lap, in the air halfway to the neck of the instrument. I have not asked it to do this.
I put it back and sit with my hands in my lap and do not touch and do not look away.
The light through the window has moved across the floor. The room has no clock. The light is the clock.
I sit.
Cassia comes in without knocking.
She’s in the doorway before I look up, the folder against her hip, her step quiet. She does not speak.
She crosses the room and stops behind the chair beside the stand but does not sit. The folder is under one arm and a paperback is in her other hand.
She looks at the violin when she speaks.
“The wood is older than you are. Whoever owned her before you knew what they were doing.”
My face does not move.
My shoulders adjust before I can stop them. She does not turn her head or pause. She keeps her eyes on the scroll.
She moves to the second chair and sets the paperback down on the seat.
“This was on the third shelf for a long time,” she says, still to the violin. “There’s a new translation. The English is cleaner. I have my own copy.”
She does not say it is for you.
She walks toward the door.
My mouth opens.
“Thank.”
She is already halfway through the doorway when her step pauses for half a second. She keeps walking.
The door closes behind her.
I sit with the violin and the paperback on the chair beside me.
The room is very quiet.
I stand and my left hand closes on itself. I walk out without the violin and without the book, and the pull of the instrument is in my arm all the way to the door, a want I have not let myself feel in five years.
Izzy is at her laptop, the tattoo on her wrist, the mug at her elbow.
She looks up before I have stepped past the doorway.
She doesn’t speak. She stands, crosses to the side table, and pours from a thermos into a paper cup without looking at me, then carries it to the doorway and holds it out.
I take it.
She turns and goes back to her laptop without looking at me again.
I take a sip in the doorway of her office.
It tastes like Nonna’s blend, like the cup Maria leaves outside my door.
I keep the cup.
Sofia is at the music-room doorway when I come back down the hall.
She has the notebook in both hands, a small page torn out and held folded against her chest.
She holds it out to me.
The Italian word in her cramped, careful pencil handwriting:
Insieme. Together
From a film I saw when I was small.
Together.
She does not say it aloud. She turns and walks toward the lobby and I follow her.
I put the folded paper in the pocket of my sweater and keep the cup in my other hand.
He’s in the SUV at the curb, window down, sleeves pushed to his elbows, the Akhmatova cloth-bound and pale in the cup holder. He sees me from the lobby and doesn’t get out. He waits.
Sofia gets in the back. I get in the front and close the door myself, same as the first drive. I do not look at him.
The coffee cup is in my hand. I set it on the floor between my feet. He sees it and says nothing and puts the SUV in drive.
We move through the city in the late afternoon, the light the color of weak tea, the streetcar on the Riverbend run, the sky moving toward storm and the Spanish moss gone still before the rain.
I do not look at Nico or at the Akhmatova. I look at the road.
By Magazine Street my knees have angled toward him a quarter inch.
I do not move them back.
A few nights ago he had his hand on the door of my room from the outside and he did not open it.
I knew he was there.
He knew I knew.
I have the folded paper in my pocket, the empty cup at my feet, the word gone from my mouth.
I lean my head a fraction toward the window.
You don’t get to feel safe. Not with a man.
He doesn’t look at me once on the drive home, his breathing slow and even, and my hand hasn’t gone to my knife once since we left the curb.
With a man in the seat beside me, I let my eyes close.