Chapter 12 – Emily
Emily
The gala fills the house with a version of itself I don't recognize.
They've done it in the east wing, in the great double-height room with the glass that looks out over the lawn where the caterers have strung little lights through the hedges, and everywhere there are people I half-know holding flutes of champagne, and everywhere there is the sound of Tara's name in mouths that have never once said mine with any warmth.
She planned all of it in four days. I'll grant her that.
She's good at the entrance, the sightline, the way a room should feel when you walk into it, and she's made this one feel like her coronation.
I'm wearing the grey silk again. The one from the empty chair at Falconer's.
I put it on tonight the way you'd put on armor you already know won't hold, and upstairs, in the back of my closet behind the winter coats, there's a bag.
One bag. Packed the way you pack when you've finally stopped pretending, which is to say lightly, and with your hands steady, and with a strange lack of grief because the grieving is already done, it's been done for weeks, done in a hallway and a kitchen and a restaurant window.
Tonight Ben chooses. I've decided that much.
Not in anger—I'm past the anger, mostly—but in the flat clean way you decide the last true thing.
Her or me. And depending on what he says, there's a bag, and there's a life somewhere on the other side of this night that I have not yet met but have begun, cautiously, to believe in.
"You look like a woman doing arithmetic," Connor says, appearing at my shoulder the way he does, out of nowhere and exactly when I need him. He has a glass in each hand and gives me one without asking. "The whole room's fawning and you're standing here doing math."
"I'm counting exits."
He laughs, but he watches me while he does it, those brown eyes going careful.
Across the room Tara is holding court by the windows, luminous in something silver, Maria at her elbow, Kyle laughing too loud at whatever she's said.
Connor doesn't look at her. Connor, alone in this entire glittering room, has his back half to her, and I love him for it in the uncomplicated way you can love a person who has never once asked you to be smaller.
"How'd the anniversary go?" he asks.
I go still.
"It went," I say. Then, because he's the only one who's earned it: "Thank you for the gift."
The card had come three days ago. A first edition of the Elgar's manuscript facsimile, the concerto that broke me open at twelve, with a note in his slanted hand—for the woman who actually listens.
No fuss. No fanfare. It had sat on my nightstand and I had wept over it more than I'd wept over anything Ben gave me in a year.
"Figured I'd send it straight to you." He sips. "Ben'd have lost his whole head if it weren't nailed to something with his name on it."
"He lost the anniversary too," I say, before I can decide not to.
Connor doesn't flinch. He doesn't do the thing everyone else does, the quick sympathetic wince, the reaching for the reasonable. He just looks at me for a long moment over the rim of his glass.
"No," he says slowly. "He didn't."
And there it is—the smallest correction, the thing Connor sees that no one else will say. That a man doesn't lose a date he crossed oceans to honor for five straight years. That losing is an accident. That what Ben did has another name.
"You're right," I say. "He didn't."
Connor nods, once, like I've passed something.
"So how's he making it up to you?"
"I don't know." I turn the glass in my fingers. "I haven't reminded him."
His eyebrows go up.
"I'm going to. Tonight." I hear how level it comes out, how full to the brim and not spilling. "We have a great many things to talk about tonight, Connor."
For a moment he says nothing. Then he lifts his glass an inch, that small private toast to no one that he did at the dinner all those weeks ago, and this time I understand it's for me.
"To my friend," he says quietly, "hopefully growing a brain to match his spine. God help him."
And I laugh, actually laugh, and it startles both of us.
Then Ben is there.
He crosses the floor toward me through all his guests and for the first time in longer than I can measure he's looking at me—really looking, the way he used to in the study doorway, the way he hasn't since before Tara's suitcases came through our front door—and something in his face softens as he takes me in.
"You look beautiful, Em," he says, and he sounds almost surprised by it, almost young. "That dress."
"Thank you." My heart does the traitor thing, the lift, and I let it, because in a moment I'm going to use this, I'm going to say Ben, come with me, there's something I need to say to you, and he'll hear it, tonight of all nights he might actually hear it?—
He half-lifts a hand toward mine. He's going to ask me to dance. I can see it forming, the invitation, the doorway I've been waiting for all night swinging open at last?—
"Oh, it's my song."
Tara. Materializing at his other side in a swirl of silver, one hand already on his forearm, her face turned up to his and bright with delight.
"Ben, it's my song, they're playing it—dance with me?
For old times' sake, just one." A little laugh, and then her eyes slide to me, wide and warm and utterly without doubt. "You don't mind, do you, Emily?"
The room seems to lean in.
"That's really a matter of whether Ben minds," I say, and I hold his eyes when I say it, because this is a test and we both know it, this small stupid moment is the whole thing in miniature, laid out clean on a silver platter for him to choose.
He minds nothing. That's the answer. I watch him decline to understand the question.
"It's one dance, Emily." He's already turning, already letting Tara draw him toward the floor. "You can have all the others."
You can have all the others.
He dances with Tara for three songs.
I stand at the edge with Connor and I watch, and somewhere around the second song I stop feeling anything at all, and I think, with a clarity that frightens me slightly: what am I even doing here?
Waiting at the edge of my own life for a dance that isn't coming, the way I've been waiting for a laugh that isn't for me, in a house full of strangers celebrating a deal I learned about over the corpse of my grandmother's china.
Then the music dips, and someone taps a glass, and Tara steps up onto the little raised platform they've built by the windows, flushed and radiant, and the room turns toward her.
"I won't keep you," she says, laughing, and everyone laughs with her. "But I want to show you what we've been building. The whole campaign, the heart of it—it's about empowering the creative spirit through technology. About the tools artists reach for, and what happens when we set them free."
She gestures behind her, to the long shrouded thing draped in white cloth that I'd assumed was more of the staging.
"Because creativity," she says, "shouldn't be locked away. It shouldn't be kept in the dark, guarded, gathering dust." Her eyes find mine across the room, just for a beat. "It should be used."
And she pulls the cloth away.
I gasp. I hear it leave me before I know I've made a sound.
Because there, mounted at the center of her installation, surrounded by paint-splashed brushes and a spattered typewriter and a violin dripping cobalt and gold—there, wearing the same violent smears of color across its two-hundred-year-old belly, its scroll, its impossible varnish that light itself is the enemy of?—
Is my cello.
The Cremona. The one he chased across a continent for a year. My cello.
I'm moving before I've decided to. Through the crowd, past Connor's hand reaching for my arm, up onto the platform with Tara still mid-sentence, and I hear my own voice come out of me enormous and unswallowed.
"That's mine. That's my cello!"
Tara's face does the recalibration, the warmth arriving over the flash beneath. "Emily—" a soft laugh, for the room, look at her "—Emily, this is part of the installation, it's?—"
"Emily." Ben, at the edge of the platform, low and urgent. "Emily, stop. That's not yours. Why would Tara have your cello? Look at yourself, you're—you're being insane in front of everyone?—"
"Look at it." I'm shaking. I point. "Look at the initials. In the back. Look at the initials carved in it, Ben."
He looks.
I watch the color go out of his face. I watch it go out of Tara's at the same instant, and it's her who breaks first, her hand coming to her mouth.
"It was in the sunroom," she says. "It was just—it was old, it was falling apart, I thought it was—it was trash, Emily, it was sitting there in a case, I thought?—"
"It was in the sunroom," I say, and my voice fills the whole silent glittering room, "because you chased me out of my own room."
No one moves. A hundred people, and not a sound but the caterers frozen with their trays.
"You ruined it." The tears are coming now and I let them, I don't wipe them, I let them fall on the grey silk in front of everyone. "You ruined it. You've ruined everything."
And Tara—Tara has the gall to look wounded.
"Emily, it's just paint." Ben's voice, reaching for reasonable, reaching for the hand he extends to people standing too close to an edge. "Come down. It'll come off. It's just paint, we'll have it cleaned, we'll?—"
"No, it won't." I round on him. "The wood, Ben. The sound. It's not a thing you clean. It's two hundred years old and it's irreplaceable and it's ruined and there is no fixing it, there was never going to be any fixing it?—"
He grabs my arm. To steady me, to quiet me, to make the scene stop, and I know which one it is, I know it's the last one, I can see it in his eyes darting to the crowd, to Maria, to the investors—he is not afraid for me, he is afraid of what the room is seeing—and I wrench free of him.
"You let her ruin it," I say. "Just like you let her ruin our marriage."
"Emily." He's white now, his jaw tight. "You're being hysterical. Lower your voice?—"
"I won't." And it's the strangest thing, but the wanting-to-be-quiet is simply gone, burned out of me clean.
"You chose her. Every single time. Her studio, her dinner, her party, her headache, her deadline—everything she wanted was important and everything I said was a mood.
You brought her into our home and you never once asked me.
You gave her the room next to the only room I had left.
You let her use my grandmother's china and when it broke you comforted her.
" The words are pouring now, months of them, years.
"You didn't even remember your own anniversary, Ben?—"
"That's not—" He shakes his head, and I can see him reaching, actually reaching, the old certainty failing him for once. "That's not fair, I couldn't have forgotten, it's—it's?—"
He can't find it. He stands in front of a hundred people and he cannot find the date.
"The sixth," Connor says quietly, from the edge of the platform. "It was the sixth, Ben."
Ben stares at him. Stares at me.
But I'm already stepping down. I'm already walking, through the parting silent crowd, past Maria's open mouth and Kyle's stunned face and Connor, who gives me the smallest nod, and behind me I hear Ben say my name once, and then again, sharper?—
"Emily. Emily."
I don't turn around.
There's a bag upstairs. There's a life somewhere past the hedges strung with little lights.
I go to meet it.