Chapter 9 – Emily
Emily
The anniversary is in nine days.
I count it out again the way I've counted it a hundred times this week, in the pause between phrases, in the little rest where the bow lifts and the room goes quiet before I draw it down again.
Nine days. Eight years and nine days since the rain and the ring and the reservation he couldn't wait for.
I wonder if he knows. I wonder if the date lives anywhere in him anymore, or if it's been filed away somewhere behind Osaka and the merger and the marketing floor Tara is redecorating in his image, filed away in that part of a man that used to hold you and now holds meetings.
He used to make an occasion of it that bordered on the absurd.
Our second year he flew me to a villa on a cliff in Amalfi where the sea went that impossible blue and he'd arranged, without telling me, for a table for two on a terrace with no one else on it, the whole restaurant closed, because he'd said once early on that he hated eating important meals with strangers watching.
He remembered that. He remembered everything then.
Our fourth year it was Kyoto, the maples just turning, and he stood behind me on a wooden bridge with his chin on the top of my head and said I can't believe I get to keep you, like keeping me was a thing he had to work at, a thing he was afraid of losing.
And our fifth year he gave me the cello.
It sits across the room now, in its case against the far wall, in the corner where the afternoon light can't reach it because he told me once that light is the enemy of old varnish.
I keep it there. I keep it the way you keep a thing you're half afraid to deserve.
He'd tracked it down through a dealer in Cremona over the course of, he told me later, almost a year of quiet emails—an instrument that had belonged to, that had been played by, the cellist I'd loved since I was twelve years old, the one whose recording of the Bach I wore thin on my father's record player until the grooves went soft.
Ben knew that. Ben had listened to me talk about her at two in the morning in our first apartment when we had nothing, and he'd held it in him for years, and then he'd handed me a case and I'd opened it and I had wept, actually wept, on the floor of a hotel suite in Vienna.
There you are, I'd thought, looking at him then. The same thing I thought that morning in the study doorway with the phone against his ear. I knew you were still in there.
I've hardly played it since. Isn't that a terrible thing to admit.
I keep it for special occasions the way I kept my grandmother's china for special occasions, and we both know now how well that guarding served me.
I've held it precious and untouched and afraid, and precious untouched afraid things get broken in this house, get used by other hands, get taken.
So today I take it out.
I don't let myself think about it too long, because thinking is how I talk myself into the small quiet corner where I keep everything.
I set my ordinary cello aside, the good workhorse one, and I unlatch the case and lift her out—she's lighter than she has any right to be, all that age making her almost weightless—and I settle her against my body, and the scroll comes to rest at my ear like something about to whisper a secret it's been keeping for two hundred years.
The first note undoes me a little.
It's the sound. It's a sound my other cello simply cannot make, a depth, a grain to it, the low string blooming out warm and enormous into a room that swallows everything and, for once, gives some of it back.
I play the Bach because the Bach always comes first, and then I don't play the Bach, I play the thing I never play, the Elgar, the concerto that broke me open at twelve, and I let myself be twelve again, I let myself be the girl with bleeding fingertips who believed the whole point of being alive was to make a sound this beautiful and give it to someone who'd stop everything to hear it.
I'm somewhere below thought when the knock comes.
Two knuckles against the doorframe, and then she's already opening it, already leaning in, because a closed door has never once in her life meant not you. Tara, in another of Ben's shirts, one hand pressed delicately to her temple.
"Sorry—Emily, sorry to interrupt." She winces, theatrical, the smallest flinch.
"I've just got this splitting headache, I've had it all morning, and I'm trying to get this concept board done for Ben's new campaign and I honestly can't hear myself think with all the—" a little apologetic gesture toward the cello, toward me, toward the sound I'm making "—the noise.
Do you think you could maybe give it a rest for a bit?
Just an hour or two. I'd be so grateful. "
The bow comes off the string. I hate that it does. It's reflex, eight years of reflex, the body folding before the mind can catch it.
"The noise," I say.
"You know what I mean. It carries. These walls are like paper."
Something climbs in me, warm, the thing that isn't the cool flat nothing.
"I've had a migraine every day since you moved in," I hear myself say.
"Every single day. From the fumes. The turpentine, the—whatever it is, the fixative, it comes straight through that wall and into this room and I wake up with my skull in a vise, and I have not once come to your door and asked you to stop. "
She blinks. The recalibration, the half-beat. "Well—you never said anything."
"I never say anything. That's rather the point, isn't it."
"Emily." She says it gently, the wounded-gentle, the one that makes anger look like cruelty.
"I didn't know. If I'd known I'd have—I can't help what materials I work in, they're just the materials.
But this—" the gesture again, at me, at the instrument "—this is a choice. You could just as easily play later."
"This is my music room." My voice isn't shrinking.
I notice it not shrinking, the way you notice a fever break.
"This has been my music room for eight years.
Ben gave you the room next to it. He gave you the east room, Tara, and it is beside mine, and that's already more than I agreed to, and I am not going to sit in silence in the one place in this entire house that is mine so that you can concentrate.
If the sound bothers you, then you go elsewhere. There's forty rooms. Take any of them."
And of course. Of course. I hear his tread in the hall before she's even answered, drawn to the pitch of me the way he's always drawn to it, and he fills the doorway behind her with his sleeves rolled and that line already between his brows.
"What's going on in here?"
"Nothing," Tara says immediately, small, backing off, one hand still at her temple. "It's nothing, it's my fault, I only asked if—I've got a headache and I asked if she could pause for a bit while I finish the boards, but it's fine, forget it, I'll figure something out?—"
"Emily." He looks at me over her shoulder. "She's asking you for one thing. She's got actual work to do, real work, on a deadline, for me, and you can't put the cello down for an hour? Come on. Don't be selfish about this."
Selfish. There it is, the old coin, the one that always comes up when he flips it.
I look at him. I look at him a long time, longer than I've let myself look in months, and I don't argue, because I've finally understood that arguing is a language he's decided not to hear from me. So I do something else instead.
"Fine," I say.
I set down the bow. I lift the old cello—her cello, the precious one, the one he chased across a continent for a year because he loved me once enough to remember—and I carry her back to her case in the corner where the light can't reach, and I lay her in the velvet, and I close the lid, and I latch it.
Both latches. I do it slowly and I do it with a care he will not recognize as grief because he has never once, in this whole long season, recognized my grief as anything but a mood.
Then I pick up the ordinary one, the workhorse, the one that doesn't matter, and I walk toward the door, and they part for me like water.
"Where are you going?" Ben says. "Emily. You're being dramatic."
I don't answer him. I've stopped answering him. I go out past both of them into the gold-drenched hall, past the studio with its open door and its fumes and its enormous canvas, and I hear behind me, pitched to carry the way her voice always carries in a house that loves the sound of her:
"Ben, I feel awful, I didn't mean to run her out of her own space, that's the last thing I?—"
"Don't be silly." His voice, warm again, warm the way it's never warm for me anymore, gone soft and low and reasonable the instant the door of her comfort needs tending. "You didn't do anything. She's just been in a mood lately. Ignore it. Show me the boards."
She's just been in a mood lately.
Eight years. Nine days. A cello he crossed an ocean for, shut in its case in the dark, and a man who no longer remembers he was ever the kind of person who'd do that, and I walk down the long hall of my own enormous house with the wrong instrument in my hands, looking for a room to be nobody in, and the house does its trick, throwing her small worried voice wide behind me and folding mine into the walls before it's even left my chest.
I find an empty room. There are so many empty rooms.
I sit down in it, and I don't play, and I don't cry, and I just hold the cello against me in the quiet and think: he doesn't even know what day it is.
He doesn't even know.