Chapter Eight
Jenny
I wake Thursday morning and the room is full of weak winter sun.
I haven't woken up to first light in months.
My shift schedule has me out of bed before the sun comes up most days, and on the days when I sleep in I usually sleep through to noon and miss the light entirely.
The thin gold along the edge of the curtain is a thing I don't remember the look of. I lie in bed letting it sit on my face.
I feel strange. It takes me a while to identify what the strangeness is, and when I do, I almost don't believe it.
I feel rested.
I'm twenty-three years old and I haven't felt rested in two and a half years.
The feeling is so unfamiliar that for a few minutes I lie in bed and stare up at the ceiling.
The deep weight of being tired that I've been carrying since the second semester of organic chemistry isn't in me this morning.
My eyes don't burn. My shoulders aren't knotted.
I'm not bracing against the day before it's started.
I sit up. The blanket falls away. The cool edge that's been in the room every morning this week isn't in the room today. There's only the heat of the radiator and the thin gold light and the clean smell of my own room.
He stayed. The thought arrives before I can stop it. He stayed all night. That's why I slept like this. That's why I'm rested.
I don't know how I know it, and I have no proof. I have only the feeling of having been watched over by something that didn't want to be anywhere else.
I get up.
The violin case is on the floor where I left it last night, lid closed but not latched. The rosin boxes are stacked on the desk. The dying jasmine in its paper cup. The stone. The room looks the way it's looked for days.
I dress and stand at the window with my coffee, looking down at the parking lot where the new snow has crusted around the cars. The light is so pale it's almost blue.
I drive to the mall. The shift starts at noon.
Tammy is at the register when I come in. She's wearing the puffy red coat over her uniform because Dale has done his thing with the thermostat again. She looks up and her eyes narrow.
"What."
"What what?"
"You look different."
"I don't."
"You do." She tilts her head and studies me with the kind of slow attention she usually reserves for figuring out if Marcus is lying about brushing his teeth. "You look — I don't know. Less dead."
"Thank you, Tammy."
"You know what I mean."
I do know what she means. I tie on my apron and try not to smile.
The shift is busy. There's some kind of holiday shopping push happening — the radio in the mall corridor is playing Christmas music on a loop, and the parents who have given up on doing it themselves are eating their feelings at the food court.
We don't stop for two hours. Tammy keeps glancing at me sideways like she's going to say something else and never quite does.
Around three I'm scraping the grill between rushes and she comes up beside me.
"Did something happen?"
I don't look up. "No."
"Jenny."
"Nothing happened. I just slept well."
"Mm-hm."
"Tammy."
"All right." She holds her hands up. "All right. I'm not asking." She bumps me with her hip on her way back to the register. "But you let me know when you want to tell me about him."
I almost drop the spatula.
"Tammy."
"I'm just saying." She's grinning. She's grinning as she did when I brought in the jasmine. "When you're ready."
I don't respond. I scrape the grill. The heat from the metal is rising into my face and I tell myself it's the heat.
I close at nine. Tammy and I walk out together and the lot is colder than it was last night. The wind has shifted. I sit in the Granada with my hands on the wheel and let the engine settle and I drive home through the same neighborhood and the same streets.
Lisa isn't home when I get in. Note on the counter: Study group at Heather's. Back late. Dee's door is open and her bed is unmade and her keys aren't on the hook, which means Kevin again. I make a sandwich and eat it standing at the counter.
I go to my room.
I don't turn on the overhead light. I turn on the desk lamp. The room goes warm and yellow.
The violin case is on the floor. I look at it for a while. Then I sit down beside it and open the lid and lift out the violin.
I don't play scales tonight. My fingers are still tender from yesterday and I don't want to do anything that'd make Lisa knock on the wall again.
I just hold it under my chin for a while, the wood warm and familiar against my collarbone, the bow loose in my right hand.
I draw the bow across the open strings slowly.
A G. A D. An A. An E. The intervals come into the room.
I put the violin away. I don't latch the case.
I get ready for bed and turn off the desk lamp. The room goes dark.
I get into bed.
I lie on my back. The window is closed and the curtain is drawn. The cool edge has been gone all day, but it's starting to come back. A thin thread of cold along the edge of the room.
I don't turn on the lamp.
I don't speak.
I lie on my back and I listen.
The wind is up tonight. The pipes click. Somewhere in the building, a door closes. The faint hum of the refrigerator through the wall.
I'm not afraid.
I don't know when I stopped being afraid. The fear has been gone for days, ever since I picked up the rosin boxes from the ledge and brought them inside. Somewhere in that hour something in me decided that whatever this was, it wasn't the thing it should have been.
I wait.
The minutes pass. I don't know how many. I don't look at the clock. The cool edge in the room is steady now. It doesn't move.
Something shifts at the foot of my bed.
I don't move or open my eyes. My heart pounds.
The weight on the bed shifts. Closer. The cold radiating off it moves with it.
Then something brushes my hair from my face.
The touch is so light I almost don't feel it.
A long finger — longer than a finger should be — sliding the loose strand of hair back from my cheek and tucking it behind my ear.
The finger is cold. Colder than the air.
Colder than anything that should be in a heated bedroom in Nebraska.
The cold runs along the side of my face where the finger has touched and then settles into the skin like a bright shock.
I keep my eyes closed. I'm breathing. I'm breathing slowly, carefully, the way I've learned to breathe when I'm trying not to give myself away.
The finger lifts.
I think it's gone. The cold is still there but the touch is gone. I'm sure the touch is gone.
It returns.
This time the back of the finger draws along my jawline. Slowly. From the soft place behind my ear to the curve of my chin. The cold trails behind it. My skin rises into the contact without asking my permission. I'm pressing my jaw up to meet it. My body has decided things without me.
The finger reaches my chin and stops.
I exhale.
The cold against my jaw stays where it is. The whole room goes still in a way I've never felt a room go still before. The hum of the refrigerator hasn't changed. The wind hasn't stopped. But everything close to me has stopped — the cold, the shape on the bed, the breath that isn't mine.
I don't move or open my eyes.
I wait.
The finger lifts. The weight on the bed shifts. The cold recedes. The shifting at the foot of the bed pulls back.
I lie there.
I don't hear footsteps, or the latch, or the window. I don't hear anything except the wind and the hum of the refrigerator. The cold edge in the room thins and fades.
I open my eyes.
The room is empty. The curtain is drawn. The window is closed. The desk lamp is dark. The violin case is on the floor where I left it.
I sit up.
My hands are shaking. Not the way they shook the morning of the rosin boxes. This is the shaking that comes when something inside you has woken up and doesn't know what to do with itself.
I touch my own jaw. I run the pad of my finger along the path the cold finger took. My skin is hot. There's no mark, nothing to show that I wasn't alone a minute ago.
I lie back down.
I don't sleep. I lie on my back and look at the ceiling and replay it in my body until morning starts to find the edges of the curtain, thin and gray.
* * *
Farkas
The day is harder than the last two.
I sit in the room with no windows and the sun moves overhead and I can't find the still place in myself where the hours pass without me.
The hours pass and I'm in them. I'm awake.
I'm thinking. I'm replaying. The line of her under the blanket.
The sound of her speaking to the dark. Thank you for the rosin.
The way her body softened into sleep two feet from my hand.
When the light fades I rise and I'm already moving.
I don't eat. The hunger is dull and uninteresting. I take the keys to the van from the table.
I'm at her apartment in twenty minutes.
The light in her window is on. I wait at the base of the building and look up. The wind is coming off the field at the edge of the complex and it's colder than it's been. The first true cold of the week.
I climb.
The window is closed and the curtain is drawn. The light bleeds yellow around the edges. I crouch on the ledge and listen. She isn't playing. She's moving in the room. The soft noises of a person getting ready for bed.
The light goes out.
I wait.
I don't work the latch immediately. I wait until I hear the soft rustle of her getting into bed, until the shifting of the mattress goes still, until I can hear the rhythm of her body settling.
Then I work the latch.
I let myself in and close the window behind me.
The room is dark. She's in the bed.
She's awake.
The same as last night. She's on her back. Her eyes are closed but her breathing isn't the slow breathing of sleep. She's lying there. She's listening.
I don't go to the corner this time.
I cross to the foot of the bed.
She doesn't move. I can hear her heartbeat from here, steady but quick. Quicker than last night. Quicker, and not slowing.