Chapter 2
Viola
The weight on my back eased, barely.
I was kneeling at the door frame with my nails bent back in the wood and hadn't felt any of it. Behind me the bones kept breaking, one after another, less like anything human than anything I had ever heard come out of an instrument. Very little was left in my head. One sentence: I am not dying in this room.
The piano bench had fallen by my feet with one leg already snapped. I swung it at the glass door. The first blow did nothing. The second cracked the whole pane apart the way ice gives under a boot, and cold air poured in and I went through headfirst, catching my cheek on a jagged edge. Behind me a roar came out so low it hardly counted as a sound, and then everything in the room turned over at once.
I didn't look back. The corridor was long and the carpet ate my footsteps, every lamp along both walls lit as though someone had gone from one to the next turning them on, and not a soul in it. I passed the wall of portraits, crossed the garden over frozen gravel, and squeezed out the side door, my shoulder clipping the iron railing hard enough to bounce me back.
The street was cold. I stopped under the sign at the tram stop and stood bent over, breathing. A car went by too close and the wind of it swept my legs and made me jump, and that was when I saw I was still holding the broken half of the bench leg, my knuckles white around it. I dropped it in a bin and stood there a while longer, because I had no idea what to do next.
My scores were still in that room. The money had not been paid. I got out my phone to call my aunt and my fingers wouldn't work the lock, and the screen came away smeared red.
My aunt's sheet-music shop stood on a street that never quite dried out.
Her name was Isadora. She was my mother's younger sister, and when my parents died on that rainy night Elias and I were seven, and she cleared out the little room above the shop and took us both in and had been looking after us ever since. She never married and had no intention of it; the men who came courting when she was young were each walked politely to the door, and afterward she told us that one person, one shop, and two pots of flowers made a perfectly complete life.
Elias was my age, in one of the divisions that never goes onstage, as short of real money as I was, and at school he pretended not to know me. If we passed in a corridor he wouldn't even nod. That was a rule the two of us had agreed on.
I pushed the door open and she was behind the counter sorting old scores. She looked up and the paper fell out of her hands.
"What happened to you." She came around and dragged the medicine box out from underneath.
"Fell."
"Sit." She unscrewed the alcohol. "Give me your arm. Slow. I won't touch the cut."
I got up on the tall stool and pulled my sleeve to the shoulder. The gash had started closing under a dirty scab. She held my wrist, and her palm was warm.
"Not deep. Just grit in it." When the alcohol went on, my fingers jerked and she let go at once. "Hurts?"
"No."
"Stubborn." She took hold again, more gently. "Say something if it hurts. I'm not trying to win a fight with you."
I had been about to tell her it was nothing. Then I saw the way she was looking down at her work and swallowed it.
Then she reached out and tucked the rain-damp hair back from my forehead, both hands cupping my face a moment longer than there was any need for.
"You've had a hard time of it, child."
I didn't answer. She kept one hand against my cheek, warm, and let it stay there, and I let her, and that was the whole of it. Then she closed the box and said, "Keep your hand out of water. There's soup in the pot."
The soup was thin and it was warm all the way down. I didn't sleep. I sat at the old table behind the shop and rewrote my score.
I remembered the main theme. The countermelody I could hum. What I couldn't find were the three bars of transition before the modulation. I tapped a rhythm on the tabletop and heard it go wrong on the third pass, tried another, and it sounded like someone else's work. Lifting my hand pulled at the cut and the nib skidded. I crumpled a page, started over, crumpled another.
That was not three hours of work. It was three weeks. The class review next month wanted a finished piece.
The next morning I went to class as usual, sleeve pulled down over the bandage.
The air in the west corridor was wrong the moment I stepped into it. An awakened student came down the stairs and, three paces from me, drew himself up. The thing came at me like a wall I couldn't see, pressing my knees first and then my hands, and a ringing started in my ears. My legs gave before my mind issued any order at all and I lost a step.
"You haven't awakened, have you." He smiled pleasantly. "A full scholarship going to someone like you. Is the conservatory that short of money this year?"
I stood there with my face burning. I could have answered every word. But my body had already bowed to that thing, so plainly that everyone in the corridor saw it. A girl came past and put her shoulder into mine and my scores went across the floor. I crouched to pick them up, my arm folded, and the cut pulled open again and my hand stalled, and they laughed harder at that. Someone kicked the farthest page down the corridor.
For one second I wanted to throw the whole stack in his face.
My hand had barely come up before I thought about next term's tuition and the scholarship that could be taken from me at any moment. I gripped the papers until the corners bit my palm, then bent down and picked them up one at a time, walked to the end of the corridor for the page that had been kicked away, and knocked the print of a shoe off it. Six pages. Not one missing.
I didn't turn around. Not today, at least. I couldn't give them that.
I sat down and spread out the score.
The bell rang. The department announced a change: Professor Thorne was in the hospital, and a visiting professor would take over the classes from here and also sit on the assessment of some student work. The door opened. I was still bent over that one bar and glanced up.
The pen stopped.
He came in wearing a dark suit, cuffs straight, not one crease anywhere. He looked nothing like the thing from the night before, the thing with its back arched and its joints pushing out an inch at a time.
But I knew those eyes, and I knew the fingers on the hand he raised to straighten his cuff. The night before, those fingers had been braced against the carpet, growing black claws. My stomach closed into a knot and the nib dragged a line of ink across the page. Whether he remembered me. I put my head down and pretended to check my score.
