Everything You Are: A Novel Page 17

  He slides in behind the wheel, adjusts the seat. It’s been years since he actually drove. Hasn’t owned a car since he moved out of Lilian’s house. It’s been buses and taxis and the occasional Uber.

  Like riding a bicycle, he tells himself as he shifts into reverse and eases out of the parking space. You never forget.

  From the back, the cello ratchets the music up a notch, a funeral dirge.

  There is no curse, he chants to himself. The cello is inanimate. Allie comes first. He switches on the radio and scans through the channels for classic rock, turning up the volume until it thumps in his ears.

  Morning rush-hour traffic occupies his full attention. He wants to put distance between home and the scene of his upcoming crime. It takes him over an hour to get to Everett, and longer to find the Amtrak station. He pays for parking. The cello case feels like it’s been loaded with rocks when he goes to lift it out of the hatch, but the music has gone silent.

  Braden lugs the case into the station, then stands there for a few minutes, long enough for any bystanders to have moved on. Then he steps back outside and sets the cello down next to the front doors. He fakes a call on his phone, wandering away from the cello as if deep in conversation, then quickens his steps and almost runs back to the parking lot.

  It feels like abandoning a baby outside a church. Surely somebody will find her and sell her. She’ll be played. If he sells her himself, he’ll always know where she is, be tempted to go back for her. This is the only way he can think of, short of destroying her, to remove her from his life forever.

  Music swells in his head.

  Allie’s song, this time. The one he wrote when she was a baby and played for her every night after he’d tucked her into bed and given her a kiss. The song that started every practice session for him, the one that steadied his nerves and transitioned him into his best mind-set for practice. He needs to make it stop, but it follows him all the way home, and after he parks the car, it drives him back out onto the street, onto a bus, and into the nearest bar.

  Chapter Twenty

  ALLIE

  School is a nightmare, as Allie knew it would be.

  She can’t think, can barely manage to hold herself together. She wants to go back to bed, to bury herself under the covers and seek oblivion. Waking to find her father playing the cello last night, playing like he’d never damaged his hands, like he’d never left her, was worse in a way than the phone call about Mom and Trey.

  For just a moment, she’d believed that music had come home with her father, and that the accident was all a dream.

  Instead, she now knows once and for all that he never loved her, that he’s a hypocrite and a monster, and that everything her mother ever said about him was true.

  How she used to love him, adore and idolize him. She never believed what her mother had said, that he was faking about his hands. Why would he do that? But now there’s proof.

  An uneasy twist in her belly reminds her of the expression on his face, of the sound he made after he woke, but she dismisses it. She saw the bottle in the kitchen trash. He was drinking again last night and has no right to get on her case for doing what he does all the time.

  Forcing her to go to school today was just cruel. Her head hurts, the nausea is creeping back in. Curious gazes and whispers follow her. People will be talking about last night. They’ll be talking about her father walking her to school.

  She searches the crowded hallway for a glimpse of Ethan with equal parts hope that he’ll be here and that he won’t. He was meant to be an escape, and now he’s another complication. There’s no sign of him, and the press of kids propels her forward.

  The buzzer rings for class just as she walks through the door into English. Steph, always the optimist, has saved her a desk. When she sees Allie, her face lights up in a smile and then goes straight to a frown.

  “I thought maybe you were dead,” she whispers when Allie slides into the seat and starts digging in her backpack for her books.

  “I lost my phone,” Allie says. “Don’t be mad.”

  “It’s been over a week! How hard would it have been to let me know? I worried.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s just—”

  “Girls, if I could have your attention,” Mrs. Gardner cuts in. “Nice that you could join us, Allie,” she adds, without even a hint of irony, as if it’s normal for a kid with perfect attendance to skip a ton of school. Maybe it is normal, given the circumstances.

  Mrs. G. doesn’t create a scene, doesn’t offer sympathy or give the others time to stare at her with pity. She just starts right in, asking questions about Hamlet, and it turns out Allie is up to speed after all, because she read the play the first week it was assigned, all in one sitting.

  Her relief freezes in her chest when the discussion ends and the class begins taking turns reading lines out loud:

  Gertrude: Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,

  And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.

  Do not for ever with thy vailed lids

  Seek for thy noble father in the dust.

  Thou know’st ’tis common. All that lives must die,

  Passing through nature to eternity.

  Hamlet: Ay, madam, it is common.

  Gertrude: If it be,

  Why seems it so particular with thee?

  The next line is Allie’s, and she can barely find her voice to read, “‘Seems? I know not seems . . .’”

  Heat rises in her cheeks, the walls start closing in. Her heart rattles against her ribs. She’s going to choke.

  “Sorry,” she mumbles, grabbing up her backpack and her book. “I’m sorry.” She flees the classroom, tripping over somebody’s foot and almost falling. Once in the hall, she puts her back against a wall and bends over, trying to catch her breath.

  A hand on her shoulder. A familiar voice. “Allie? Are you okay?”

  Mr. Collins, her orchestra teacher. Three weeks ago, she would have welcomed him. Would have been in his office telling him all about everything. Now he is the last person at school she wants to see.

  “I’m okay,” she manages. “Just had a moment.”

  “Not surprising. I’m glad to see you. We’ve missed you at orchestra.”

  “Sorry.”

  She straightens up, drags her sleeve across her watering eyes. Takes a breath and then another.

  “Nothing to be sorry about. We managed. Are you ready to come back?”

  “I’m not coming back.” She glances up at his face, expecting disappointment, surprised to see understanding.

  “I get it.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. Music makes us vulnerable. You’re not ready for that in a group setting right now.”

  He has the vulnerability part right, the rest all wrong.

  “I’m not playing at all,” she confesses, and he nods, as if he understands this, too.

  “You will. It will come back.”

  His words catch her off guard. Not the lecture she was expecting. Not a grilling. It’s like he’s looked right into her soul and sees everything except the guilt.

  She shakes her head, denying. “No. I won’t. Not now, not ever.”

  “Oh, Allie. I can’t imagine how hard this is for you. But music . . .” His face is so full of sympathy and kindness, it’s going to make her cry in a minute, and that would suck. “It will make you feel, yes, but it also heals.”

  The way he says it, she thinks maybe he does know something about what she’s going through. Like maybe he’s had his own grief and lived to tell about it. But her problem is more than grief.

  “Grief is a strange place, Allie. Everything is upside down. Don’t make any permanent decisions now.”

  The hallway is empty. He’s so understanding, the closest adult to her, really, outside of her mother. Maybe she’ll tell him. Maybe it would help if somebody knew.

  “How did the audition go?” he asks, as if reading her mind. “You’ll need to stay in practice to b
e at your best when university starts in the fall. If it would help, we could set up some structured time to play together to help you ease back in.” He notices, three steps too late, that she’s stopped walking and comes back to her.

  “What is it? Did the audition go badly? Nerves?”

  She opens her mouth to tell him, all of it, but then the buzzer signals the end of class. She jumps half out of her skin. Doors slam open, and kids fill up the hall as if summoned by magic.

  “Come by my office.” Mr. Collins raises his voice above the chaos. “We’ll talk. We can get you another audition. Or I’ll help you apply somewhere else, if you’d rather.”

  “Later,” Allie lies, taking cover in the crowd.

  Promise or no promise, she is not going to calculus or any other classes. She won’t go and talk to Mr. Collins, either, or set up an audition anywhere else. Nobody tries to stop her as she walks out the front doors and keeps going until she is down the street and well away. Dazed, disoriented, she tries to remember where she parked the car, before memory comes rushing in.

  Her father. Making her come to school, taking her keys, and leaving her blowing in the wind again, just like when she was a kid, just like the morning of the audition.

  That was supposed to be the best day ever, the one that set her free from her mother’s insistence on med school. The one where she embarked on a life of music.

  The one that reconnected her with her father.

  She’d schemed for years to get that audition at the University of Washington while keeping her intentions to herself. Mom’s plan was for Allie to be a doctor, and she’d gone along with the admission process to premed, keeping her dreams secret.

  Mom would have listened if she’d had some valid alternative to medical school—teaching, accounting, science, whatever, but Mom had a block about music. She tolerated Allie’s playing in the orchestra, but no way was she going to countenance a waste of time and brainpower on a music degree.

  Once Allie had her acceptance to UW, though, it was easy to request an audition into the music school and to keep it a secret from her mother. When and if she was accepted, then she’d have ammunition for that battle. Easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

  Mr. Collins and Mr. Blair, the private teacher she’d worked with since sixth grade, had both helped her prepare for the audition. Why she’d ever been allowed to work with Mr. Blair in the first place was always a bit of a mystery, because Mom hated music, always had as far back as Allie could remember, unless it was hymns in church.

  This is lesson day, she realizes with a keening note of loss that takes her back to that very first lesson on that very first day.

  A terrible day. For some reason Allie can’t understand, the girls in her class at school have turned on her. There have been snide comments and cold shoulders, rolled eyes and colder laughter all day long.

  And when Mom shows up to pick them up after school, both Allie and Trey can tell at once that something is wrong.

  “Uh-oh,” Trey says before the car rolls to a stop. “It’s one of those days.”

  First sign, Mom’s got her hair twisted up into a bun. Her lipstick is red. She sits staring straight ahead, hands on the steering wheel at precisely ten and two.

  “You get shotgun,” Allie shouts, racing for the car. The last thing she needs is to be stuck in the front seat with Mom when she’s in a mood.

  She skids to a halt when she reaches the car, staring through the window in confusion.

  The back seat is full of cello.

  Dad’s cello. Or, at least, Dad’s cello case. When he left, it vanished with him and she hasn’t seen it since. Her heart gets stuck in her throat, and the rest of her body goes numb. A thread of Bach finds its way through the closed window and onto the sidewalk, wraps around her heart, and tugs.

  Trey is already in place in the front seat, smart enough to keep his mouth shut.

  “Get in, already,” her mom says. “Some people might have all day, I do not.”

  Allie squeezes into the back seat beside the cello case. She can’t draw a proper breath, maybe because the cello is crowding her, but mostly because she’s caught between hope and fear.

  She hasn’t seen the cello since Dad left, has always thought he took it with him. Did he come home? Or has the cello been at the house all along? But if that’s true, then why is it in the car now? Maybe Mom is going to sell it.

  Allie remembers being so small she could stand tucked between Dad’s legs and the cello, dwarfed by its magnificence. Remembers the hum running through the wood and continuing on into her body.

  “Feel that, little bird?” he’d asked. “That’s as close to magic as we get in this lifetime.”

  Allie touches the case. Lightly, questing, feeling the impossible vibrations. Nobody is playing. The cello is in its case, and still the music circles up and around her.

  Her mother slams on the brakes hard enough to jolt Allie into her seat belt.

  She doesn’t recognize this place where they’ve stopped, on a quiet, tree-lined street.

  “What are we doing?” Trey demands. “Why are we stopping here? I’m hungry.”

  “Allie is going to have a music lesson.” Mom’s voice is cold and sharp. It cuts.

  “I’m what?”

  “Don’t be difficult, Allie,” her mother says, as if she’s thrown a tantrum instead of asking a reasonable question. “Your father wants you to have cello lessons; therefore, you are going to have cello lessons.”

  Tears fill Allie’s eyes, spill down over her cheeks. She can’t suppress a little sob. She doesn’t know why she’s crying, only that she can’t seem to stop.

  Her mother sits stiff and unbending, staring straight ahead. “Take the cello. Go into the house. Your teacher is a Mr. Blair, and he is waiting for you. You’ll be coming here once a week for lessons.”

  Trey swivels to look at Allie, his eyes big.

  She shrugs her shoulders at him, wipes her nose on her sleeve, and wrestles the cello case out of the car. It’s as big as she is, and it’s hard work lugging it up the sidewalk. Mr. Blair meets her at the door with a smile.

  He doesn’t look like a musician, is her first thought. All musicians in her mind look like her father, tall and thin and dark. Mr. Blair is old and tiny, and flits about with quick, unexpected movements that make her jumpy.

  He insists on taking the cello out of the case and setting it up for her, muttering all the while.

  “Stradivarius, my foot,” he says, peering through the sound hole at the label. “Fakes everywhere these days. Ah well, what does it matter for a girl so young? Good enough, good enough.”

  When the bow is rosined to his satisfaction, he gestures her into a chair. “Let me introduce you,” he begins, and Allie can’t help laughing.

  Her father made the only introduction that matters years ago. The cello is already an old friend.

  Was. Was an old friend. Because she won’t be playing anymore, and if her father keeps his promise, the cello will be gone when she gets home.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  PHEE

  Phee visits her grandfather’s grave every year on his death day to bring him a progress report and a shot of whiskey. Once, back in her drinking days, she brought herself a bottle and a violin and sat here playing jigs with some idea that he needed cheering up. A family of mourners had threatened to call the cops, and that was the end of dance tunes in the cemetery.

  Today, as she settles cross-legged beside the green mound that marks his spot, the only music she’s brought with her is the phantom cello that plays in her head these days, waking or sleeping.

  “We have a problem,” she says. “In case you didn’t notice.”

  He doesn’t answer, not that she expects him to. All he ever does is hang out in her head telling her what to do. He never tells her how she’s supposed to do it, and Phee is out of ideas.

  She unzips the gym bag she’s carrying with her and draws out a paper grocery sack, shoving aw
ay Celestine’s nose as she does so.

  “Sit. This is not for you.”

  The dog whines and drops onto his haunches, his nostrils twitching. Phee unwraps the bone she’s brought for him and tosses it a few feet away, and Celestine pursues it with glee. With the dog occupied, her next order of business is the customary libation.

  Quickly, before she can be tempted to drink it herself, she opens a pint-size mason jar and pours whiskey into the grass. The smell of it makes her mouth water, and she inhales with as much enthusiasm as the dog did over his bone. Temptation out of the way, she screws the lid back on and tucks the jar back into the bag. Celestine’s big head comes up as Phee pulls out the ham-and-cheese sandwich.

  “You’ve got yours,” she admonishes.

  Celestine whines, but only half-heartedly, and goes back to his bone.

  Phee sets half the sandwich on the headstone, in lieu of flowers, then takes a big bite of the other half.

  The food she brings always disappears, and she knows the birds will get it, most likely the raven that is already observing her from a nearby tree, but it seems rude not to bring Granddad something. She also feels the need to appease him. Not that she’s ever seen his ghost. Not that he’s spoken to her outright, or slammed doors in the apartment or set anything on fire. And when she thinks she hears him talking in her head, it’s just her own thoughts.

  Probably.

  But maybe she’ll hear him more clearly from here, and God knows she needs all of the clarity she can garner.

  “About the cello,” she says, tossing a piece of crust in the raven’s direction. “Braden really can’t play. So the whole thing is remarkably unfair. Isn’t there a release clause, somewhere? Because there ought to be, for special circumstances.”

  The raven tilts his head and makes a noise halfway between croak and knock, but he stays where he is.

  “I’m not talking to you,” Phee admonishes him. “Unless you’re a message bearer. Let me rephrase, Granddad. I’m not just venting. I’m asking.” She sets down the remains of her sandwich, clasps her hands, and intones, formally, “Please release Braden Healey from his contract with the cello due to extraordinary circumstances.”