Chapter Seven
Jenny
I wake on Wednesday and the apartment feels different again.
It's the same cool edge I've felt twice now.
The same sense of a room that's been entered recently and then left.
I've stopped pretending I'm imagining it.
I lie in bed for a while with the blanket pulled up to my chin and I let myself believe it.
Someone was in this room last night. Someone has been in this room more than once.
I should be afraid. I'm not. I should call someone. I don't.
I get up.
The violin case is on the floor where I left it yesterday. The rosin boxes are stacked on the desk. The cup with the dropping jasmine. The black stone. The room is exactly the way I left it, except for the cool edge in the air, and the cool edge is already fading as the heat works on it.
I get ready while it lightens outside. By the time I scrape the windshield clear and drive to the mall, the gray morning has gone almost blue with the cold.
The shift is busy. Tammy is in a good mood.
Marcus drew her a picture of a fire truck at school and she has taped it to the back of the register where only she can see it.
Every time she rings up a customer she glances at it and her face does the slight involuntary thing it does when she thinks of her son.
Around three, Diane the new security guard comes to the counter. It's the first time she's spoken to me directly. She's a short broad woman in her forties with a brown bob and an expression that looks permanently impatient.
"Small coffee."
I pour her one. She slides a dollar across the counter.
"Thanks."
"Sure."
She doesn't leave. She takes a sip and makes a face, then looks at me over the rim.
"Did you know the last guard? Craig?"
I freeze halfway through wiping the counter. "A little."
"Did he say anything to you? About leaving?"
"No."
She nods. "Doesn't surprise me. The guy ghosted his apartment too.
Left his clothes, left his TV. Wife got tired of waiting and packed it all up last weekend.
" Diane sips her coffee again and grimaces again.
"Cops don't think much of it. Apparently he'd been talking about going to Vegas. " She shrugs. "Some men just leave."
"Some do."
She nods again. She lifts the coffee in a brief toast and walks back to the food court entrance to continue her patrol. I watch her go. I wipe the counter that I've just finished wiping.
Tammy slides up beside me. "Drama."
"Yeah."
"He had a wife?"
"Apparently."
"Huh." Tammy shakes her head. "I knew he was a creep. I didn't know he was that kind of creep."
We close at nine. The lot is dark and crusted with old snow, and the Granada starts. I sit in it with my hands on the wheel for a moment before I pull out, listening to the engine settle.
I drive home through the same neighborhood and the same streets, park in my usual spot, and climb the cold stairs to the second floor. The phone is ringing as I let myself in.
It's nine-forty. She always calls about now. I drop my bag on the counter and pick up the receiver on the third ring.
"Hello."
"???."
"Hi, Umma."
"Did you eat?"
"I ate at work."
"What did you eat?"
"A burger."
"That isn't eating. That's fuel."
"Umma. It was food."
"I made galbi tonight." She's doing the dishes again. I can hear the water. "I always make too much. I can't help it. Your father will take some to work tomorrow but there's still half a tray in the fridge."
"Save me some."
The pause on the other end of the line is sudden.
"What?"
"Save me some. I'll come get it sometime this week."
"Jenny." Her voice has changed. The professional softness she uses on me has fallen away. There's something raw in it. "You'll come?"
"To pick up galbi. I won't stay."
"Of course. Of course you don't have to stay. When?"
"I don't know yet. This week. I'll call you."
"You'll call me."
"I'll call you."
She's quiet. I can hear her breathing on the other end of the line. The water has stopped running. I don't know what she's doing.
"?? ?," she says.
"Umma."
"Yes. Okay. Yes. I'll save you some. I'll save you the most. I'll save you all of it. Just come."
"I'll call you."
"I love you."
"I love you too."
I hang up the phone. My hand stays on the receiver.
I don't know why I said it. I'm not going to go. I'm going to make an excuse later in the week and not call her back and the galbi will sit in their refrigerator until my father throws it out.
Except I don't know that for sure.
Something in me is different tonight. When she said you'll come my mouth said yes before my brain could stop it.
I go to my room.
The violin case is on the floor.
I sit cross-legged on the rug beside it.
I lift the lid.
The violin is there, the bow in its slot. The smell is still in the case.
I pick up the violin.
I don't pick it up to play. I pick it up to feel its weight in my hands, and it's lighter than I remembered.
The wood is warm under my fingers. I tuck it under my chin without thinking, and the position is exactly what it was the last time I held it — the body remembering what the mind had long since given up on.
I lift the bow and check the hair. The hair is slack. I tighten the screw at the frog until the tension feels right, the motion automatic, my hand moving before my brain has decided to move it.
I open one of the rosin boxes. The Hill Dark. I draw the bow across the rosin two slow strokes the way Dr. Reeves taught me, and a faint puff of pale dust rises from the cake.
I tuck the violin back under my chin and draw the bow across the G string.
The note that comes out isn't music. It's the sound of a string that's been waiting too long, flat and dull, the wood under-resonating because it hasn't been warmed up. I draw the bow again, and the note is a little better.
I tune. The pegs are stiff and the strings are stubborn but I work them one by one until they're close enough to right.
I play an open G, a D, an A, an E, and the intervals come back to me.
I can't remember the last time I tuned an instrument.
The motion is so habitual I'm doing it before I've decided to.
I play a G major scale.
My fingers are stiff. The first finger comes down hard and ugly and the bow doesn't connect to the string the way it should. The scale stumbles. I stop in the middle and start again.
Three octaves. I play the scale three octaves up and three octaves down. I don't sound good. I sound like a beginner. The notes are flat or sharp, the bow squeaks, the shifting is clumsy.
I don't stop.
I play it again, and then a third time. I play it slowly with the metronome in my head. By the fourth pass I've stopped wincing at every note. By the fifth pass I'm beginning to remember what the scale is supposed to sound like.
I move to D major, then to A. The fingerings come back. The intervals come back. The shifting comes back, halting and ugly but there.
I don't know how long I play.
There's a knock on the wall behind my bed.
I stop, the bow lifting from the string, and look at the wall.
Lisa's voice comes through, muffled. "I can hear you. It's fine. Just — maybe earlier in the evening next time."
"Sorry."
"No, I mean it. It's fine. Just maybe not at midnight."
It's midnight.
"Sorry," I say again. "I lost track."
"It's okay. I didn't know you played."
I don't know what to say to that.
"I'll keep it earlier next time."
"Okay. Good night."
"Good night."
I lower the violin to my lap and look at it. My fingers hurt. The calluses I built up over fifteen years are mostly gone, and the pads of my left fingers are red and tender. The skin on the side of my neck where the chinrest sat is raw.
I haven't felt anything in my body like this in a long time.
I loosen the bow, lay the violin in the case, and close the lid without latching it. I cross to the dresser, pull on a clean T-shirt and underwear, and turn off the desk lamp.
The room goes dark.
I get into bed and lie on my back. The window is closed and the curtain is drawn. The room is dark except for the thin line of streetlight along the top of the curtain.
The cool edge is in the air.
I know now. I'm certain. There's no air conditioning in the apartment and the heat is on — there's nothing in this room that should be cold. The cool edge is the cool edge of something that's in the room with me.
I don't move.
I don't turn on the lamp.
I lie on my back and I look at the dark ceiling and I say, quietly, into the room:
"I don't know who you are."
The room doesn't answer.
"I don't know what you are."
The room doesn't answer.
"Thank you for the rosin."
The room doesn't answer.
I turn over onto my side, away from the window. I close my eyes.
I'm tired. My fingers hurt, my arms hurt, my neck hurts. My body is the body of a person who has used itself for the first time in months.
I sleep.
I sleep better than I have in years.
* * *
Farkas
I climb the wall at eleven.
The light in her window is on. The curtain is drawn but I can see the warm yellow of the lamplight bleeding around the edges. I wait on the ledge and listen.
She's playing.
The sound comes through the glass thin and rough and beautiful. A scale, the same scale repeated, the notes ugly at first and then less ugly.
I stand on the ledge in the dark and I listen.
I've heard music in a thousand cities. I've stood in cathedrals while choirs sang and in fields while shepherds played pipes. None of it touched me.
It's touching me now.
She finishes the scale and starts again. The notes are still rough but the rhythm is steadier, the bow finds the string more cleanly. She's remembering. The shape of who she was three years ago is coming back into her body one stiff finger at a time.
I close my eyes on the ledge and listen.
I don't work the latch. The music is hers.
She plays for a long time. I lose count of the scales.
She moves to other things — exercises, intervals, a few measures of a piece I don't recognize.
Her playing strengthens over the hour with the slow, sure return of skill to a body coming back from a long layoff, the trained things returning in waves.
Her bow grows steadier. Her intonation finds its center.
There's a knock from somewhere beyond the wall. A muffled voice. The music stops.
I open my eyes.
The light in the room doesn't go off. I hear her moving inside, the soft rustle of an instrument being put away, the case closing.
I should go.
I don't go.
She moves around the room. The light goes off.
I wait on the ledge for another minute, then let myself in.
The room is dark.
She's on her back in the bed, her face a pale shape in the dark.
I close the window behind me. I take three steps from the window into the deeper shadow of the corner by the dresser, and stand still.
She's awake.
I can hear her heartbeat from here, steady but not slow. She's lying in the dark with her eyes open, and she's waiting.
I hold still.
She speaks.
"I don't know who you are."
Something in me stops.
"I don't know what you are."
She hasn't moved. She's on her back with her eyes open, looking at the ceiling, not looking at me.
"Thank you for the rosin."
The room is silent.
I don't answer. The words land in me and break pieces of me I didn't know could be broken.
She turns over onto her side, away from the window, away from the corner where I'm standing.
I stay where I am.
She's still a while. Her breathing slows. Her body softens against the pillow. The hand under her chin loosens.
She sleeps.
I cross the room.
I move without sound. At the foot of her bed I look at her for a long time — the dark hair on the pillow, the line of her shoulder beneath the blanket, the soft rise and fall of her breath.
I lower myself to the edge of the bed.
The mattress barely registers my weight. The bed doesn't creak. She doesn't stir.
I can hear every breath, the slow steady drum of her heart. I'm closer to her now than I've ever been.
I look at her face. The crease between her brows is gone. Her lips are parted slightly and her breath moves across them. There's a piece of hair caught against her cheek.
I don't touch the hair.
I'm not afraid tonight.
The shaking that was in me last night is gone. I don't know what comes next, or what tomorrow looks like. But the wanting is sitting beside her now, and it's content to sit.
She thanked me.
The shape of the words is still in the room. Thank you for the rosin.
I sit on the edge of her bed and I listen to her sleep.
The hours pass.
The streetlight outside her window shifts as a cloud moves. The room goes darker and then lighter again. The wind is steady against the glass. Somewhere down the block a dog barks twice and falls silent. The radiator clicks.
She turns toward me in her sleep. Her face is close to mine. She murmurs something I can't make out and her breath moves my way, the faintest warmth.
I don't stir.
The window begins to gray at its edge. I rise. I look at her one more time — the dim form of her in the half-light, her body small under the blanket, her hair dark against the sheet.
I cross to the window. I open the latch and step out onto the ledge. I close the window behind me and climb down.
I walk to the van and drive home. The dawn is hard on me but I don't feel it as I have the last two mornings. I'm tired in a way I haven't been tired in centuries.
I sit in the room with no windows.
She thanked me.
I close my eyes.
I'll go back tonight.
There's no question anymore.