Girl, Unstrung

by Claire Handscombe

  I’m thirsty, though, what with all that thinking. I forgot to bring a glass of water to bed. Can I sleep without it? I assume the position, lie under my cotton sheets on my back with my arms at my side. I count back form 99 in threes. Usually I’m asleep way before I get to 0, but I get to 0 and I’m still thirsty and awake, so I roll out of bed and shuffle out of my bedroom and down the stairs to the kitchen for some ice water. I’m getting a glass from the cabinet when I notice Ebba at the table, tapping away at her laptop at the kitchen island, her forehead creased, like she’s deeply immersed in puzzling something out.

  “Oh, hey,” I say. “I didn’t see you there.”

  She looks up and smiles. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  I shrug. I’m not someone who falters at the slightest challenge. “Just thirsty, is all.”

  “If it was me,” she says, “I wouldn’t be able to sleep.”

  Well, yes, I want to say. Lesser mortals. But then I remember that she was the one who videoed me, who got me to do it right.

  “Thank you,” I say, though I’m pretty sure I already said it. “For helping me out.”

  “You’re welcome,” she says, sounding like she means it. I fill the glass with water from the fridge dispenser then turn to go, but the conversation doesn’t feel finished.

  “Come sit with me,” Ebba says, so she must feel it too. She taps the high wooden chair next to hers. “Come talk to me.”

  I don’t really want to talk to anyone, and if I did it would certainly not be to her, but okay. I can be nice. She’s earned it.

  “How do you feel?” she asks me. “Really.”

  “Relieved. Excited. Nervous. Terrified.” I don’t know why I’m suddenly being so honest. There is something about late-night heart-to-hearts. Maybe that’s it.

  “Sounds about right.”

  We sit in silence for a while. She’s sipping at her tea. I’m drinking the water.

  “Well,” I say. “I should probably –”

  “Are you proud of yourself?” she asks me. I consider this. Getting the audition is no more than I’d expected, really. I’m not sure I’m proud of myself, but I know I would have been super disappointment with myself if I hadn’t gotten it.

  “I guess,” I say.

  “You should be. Your dad and me, we’re so proud of you.”

  “Thank you,” I say. An automatic reflex, even though I hate the we, I hate the your dad and me. Like, he can speak for himself. You don’t have to do it for him. I wonder if I can go now. I think the Advil PM might be kicking in.

  “We love you,” she says. The we again. How am I supposed to respond to this? She doesn’t pause long enough for me to need to respond, thankfully. “And you know our love for you has nothing to do with your achievements, right?”

  Where is she going with this? I sip my water.

  “We’ll still love you just as much if you don’t get into LACHSA. You know that, right?”

  I almost choke on my water. “You don’t think I’ll get in?”

  “No,” she says, shaking her head hard, like that’s going to erase the words from the air, from my memory. “That’s not what I meant. I know what it’s like to want something so badly. To feel like who you are is this thing you do, and do so well, and love doing. But you’re not just a viola player, Clara. You’re a wonderful young woman. I wish you could see that about yourself.”

  A lump is forming in my throat. Don’t cry, I tell myself. Do not show weakness.

  “I can’t believe you don’t think I can do it,” I say, and I hope off the chair and make it all the way back to my bedroom and under my comforter before I start to cry.

  Thirty-Seven

  I know the PT said to take it easy, but the PT also doesn’t know me and my determination, and she doesn’t know what’s at stake. When I explain it to her she still doesn’t seem to get it. I know it seems like getting into LACHSA is the most important thing right now, but your long-term well-being is actually more important. She says this like the two things are separate, like my long-term well-being isn’t fundamentally connected to my LACHSA-Juilliard-Symphony plan. What am I supposed to aim for, if I’m not going to aim for that? I need goals in life. Everybody does. And if I’m not the Girl Who Gets Into LACHSA, Who Gets Into Juilliard, Who Plays Second Chair in the London Symphony Orchestra And Then First Chair in the LA Philharmonic, then who am I? And how are people going to know I have my own worth separate to my dad’s mediocre fame?

  The PT’s given me these exercises to do with a red ball I’m supposed to squeeze. Dad says that apart from anything else, that’ll be good for my stress levels.

  “You’ve got to admit it, Clara, you’re pretty highly strung,” he says in the car on the way to dropping us off at mom’s that last Sunday of January. Then he adds, “no pun intended,” which is always what he says when the pun is totally intended but hasn’t had the desired effect of making its audience either laugh or groan. It really means, did you notice my pun back there? Because it seems like you didn’t notice. I turn my head to see if he’s doing his so-pleased-with-himself smile, and yup.

  “Haha,” I say, like the dutiful daughter I am. In the back, Rosie and Juliette are singing How Far I’ll Go from Moana for the eleventy billionth time this week. Harry has his hands over his ears and is begging them, on behalf of all of us, to stop. It feels good to stay out of that and have this semi-adult conversation with dad instead.

  “Glad you appreciate the pun,” he says.

  “Appreciate is a little strong,” I say, trying to not get to vehement about it, in case I accidentally prove him right about me being highly strung.

  “Nonetheless,” he says. “You heard the PT. Take it easy with the viola playing, okay?”

  “Or else there’ll be treble?”

  “That’s my girl,” he says, putting the indicator on to turn into mom’s street, so proud of my punning that he completely missed that I haven’t actually agreed to take it easy at all. Then again, he’s been telling me to take it easy my whole life; my whole life, I’ve been ignoring him. I don’t know why he’d think this time would be any different. It’s quite possible that he realizes full well I am going to ignore him, and he is just doing his due diligence, that he realizes that as soon as his or mom’s backs are turned I’ll be in my room coaxing my left hand into the long-familiar shapes and my wizened arm into holding my viola up.

  It hurts, though. Holding my viola up for more than about a minute feels like a tremendous feat. My arm starts to hurt the way my stomach did that summer when Katie and I got obsessed with doing sit-ups so we’d have perfectly flat stomachs for the beach. It feels kind of trembly. My wrist spasms a little sometimes, too, and then I have to put my viola down and practice with just the fingering and the bow.

  Dad said he’d speak to the LACSHA people about getting me a deferred audition date, and you know what, unfair advantage or not, I’ll take it. But I’m so behind, so behind. I don’t know how to make my arm get better faster. My fingers know what they’re supposed to be doing, but they don’t seem to respond as fast. My vibrato is shaky, and not in a good way. And now I have to be doubly careful about practicing because my parents need to not realize how much of it I’m doing. It helps to put viola music on really loudly and either play so softly they can’t hear it over the recording, or just to sit, miming with my left elbow resting on my leg so it gets used to more-or-less the right position again.

  I do some variation on these things for four hours a day, and it’s boring and joyless, because I can’t hear what I’m “playing”, I can’t feel the strings vibrating below my fingers and reverberating through my body. But I have to bear in mind the end result, like I always have with practice. It isn’t always joy-filled and fun, but that’s not what it’s ultimately about. It’s about hard work, so you can get to where it is you want to go. LACHSA-Juilliard-Symphony. So it hurts. When I rotate my wrist to reach for the C string, pain shoots up my arm and into my fingertips. But like the actress who playe
d Liesl von Trapp, I have to grit my teeth and play through it. They were above budget and behind schedule and there’s no budget for me but there is a schedule and I’m really, really behind. I have to make this work somehow. Pain or no pain.

  Thirty-Eight

  Somewhere in this house there have got to be some painkillers. Actual, real painkillers, not just Advil. Percocet. Something. I can’t believe I used up all of mine when all I was doing was sitting around with a cast on. Sure, it hurt, but I shouldn’t have been such a wimp about it. Maybe the fall affected my usually more-than-capable brain, too. I should probably get checked for long-term concussion. Now’s when I really need the pills, now that I can’t just distract myself from the pain by calling Katie or watching Crazy Ex-Girlfriend – now that I need to lean into the pain, to play through it. I’ve had one pathetic week of “taking it easy”, and I’ve only get eleven days until the audition, and I have to do whatever it takes.

  I’ve looked through the downstairs bathroom cabinet; I’ve searched every nook and cranny in my bathroom in case I dropped something somewhere, even though of course I didn’t, because I’m organized; I would know if I was missing a pill, and my bathroom is clean and tidy, even inside the cabinets, bottles and boxes and bottles of nail polish lined up neatly in color order, because I am a civilized human. I would have noticed immediately if I’d dropped a pill somewhere.

  There’s nothing for it now but to sneak into dad and Ebba’s bathroom, and hope that Ebba’s Achilles tendon still hurts enough sometimes from when she snapped it years ago for them to have a stockpile of something strong. I’m not proud of it, but desperate times, desperate measures. Besides, I’m pretty stealthy; they’ll never know I was here. I won’t do anything stupid like steal the whole little orange bottle. That’s way too obvious. I’ll just take a couple of pills at a time, so the bottle will dwindle gradually, like it would if you were taking them normally, just maybe a bit faster, but who knows, maybe you weren’t paying attention so you can’t be sure.

  I wait for them to leave – Ebba to a ballet class, dad to a work function, which is what he calls Hollywood parties to make them sound like Serious Work – and I sneak in. The little kids are watching something on TV, and Rosie, obviously, is reading. Nobody will ever know.

  I don’t love going into dad and Ebba’s room, even though it has windows on two sides and tons of light, and that gorgeous brown rug with blue squiggly patterns, and objectively would be a nice bedroom under any other circumstances. I’ve gotten used to having Ebba around the house, that’s one thing, but bedrooms are squicky. Bedrooms are where babies get made. I can’t look at their bed without thinking about that. I want to believe that I’m wrong about the whole pregnancy thing, that if I’m not then they did it just that one time, but I know that adults have sex all the time. Gross, gross, gross. They’re too old for this stuff.

  And I’m definitely too old to be a big sister again. I’ll be fifteen and a half when it’s born. I’ll probably be made to feed and burp it and it won’t do anything for my social status at school if I come in smelling of spit-up. And what if they want to use the guest room next to my room for it? I can’t be woken up three times every night. I need to wake up fresh and rested every day, ready for my first instalment of viola practice. And what if I’m not allowed viola practice after dinner, so the baby doesn’t wake up? Has dad seriously thought any of this through? I’m guessing probably not, since this baby is Ebba’s, and he loves Ebba and not mom now, so it follows that he’ll love this baby more than he loves us. Ugh. It was bad enough when their bed just made me think of sex. This is so much worse. Forget the Percocet; I’m going to need some Xanax.

  I’ve made it through the emotional assault course that is the bedroom, and I’m in their bathroom now, trying to be as quiet as I can as I open and close drawers and cabinets. It smells like Ebba’s shampoo, and like her perfume, hints of jasmine and vanilla and rose. There’s got to be something here. Dad threw his shoulder out during a play a couple of years ago. Does Percocet last that long? I don’t know. I find it behind the other, crappier painkillers. The use-by date on it is a year from now. The name on the label is Ebba’s. I guess her heel does still hurts sometimes, that she has to dance through it. I admire her for that. We’re a family of hard workers, of survivors. We don’t let a little pain stand in our way. So I guess, in a way, she does fit in with us after all. She’ll understand if she does figure out I’m taking them, or if I have to ask for more once the bottle is done. The show must go on, after all. It always does.

  I’m almost out of the bedroom when Juliette bounds up the stairs. “Hey,” she says, her pony tails still swinging. “What are you snooping around in here for?”

  “Nothing.” I close my fist tighter around the two pink pills. “I’m not snooping.”

  “I’m here because Ebba said I can borrow one of her ballet books,” she announces self-importantly, as if I’d care.

  “Okay.”

  “But you’re holding something.” The Cassidy persistence trait in evidence once more. I guess it’s not always a good thing. I think quickly. Juliette is a goody-goody, and therefore also a tattle-tale. She plays by the rules and she makes sure everyone else does too. A commendable quality, but also one that, right now, is mightily inconvenient. Instead of begging her not to tell, because she’ll totally tell if I do that, I make it seem like it’s no big deal.

  “I’m just getting some Advil from their bathroom cabinet,” I say. I open my hand and show her.

  “Oh.” She looks at me with her big, beautiful eyes, her blue eyes like mom’s and Ebba’s, and she doesn’t say anything about how Advil isn’t normally pink. Instead, she asks me: “Does your wrist still hurt when you play?”

  “Only a little,” I say, which might be the biggest lie I’ve told so far in this conversation.

  “That’s too bad,” she says. She walks over to the bookshelf and I make my escape.

  Thirty-Nine

  The next day, dad texts to say he’ll be waiting for me after school, which never happens, since his house is only ten minutes away on foot and he claims it’s good for us to walk.

  Cool, I reply. Are we going on an adventure?

  I know from the read receipt that he’s seen it, but he doesn’t reply. I’ve got nothing to be nervous about – almost nothing – but still, I feel a little sick to my stomach, the way I do when mom uses my full name to call me. I know I’m about to be in trouble, even if I’m not 100% sure what for.

  “Hello, father,” I say when I open the Prius door. (My parents have the exact same cars, in different colors. It’s kind of ridiculous.) “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  His face is giving nothing away. He doesn’t even crack a smile at my sudden and unaccountable formality.

  “Get in the car,” he says.

  I throw my backpack on the ground, sit, do up my seatbelt, and shut the door, all in silence, no music, nothing, and only once we’re on the freeway does he speak.

  “What were you getting from our room when Juliette saw you?”

  Damn it. The little snitch. Unlike mom when she does this, dad takes his eyes off the road long enough to make glancing eye contact with me. I don’t look away, because only the guilty do that.

  “Just some Advil,” I say, forcing myself to sound breezy. “Why?”

  He doesn’t answer. I’m seriously nervous now. My palms are sweating in that way they normally reserve for a Tim sighting or a viola recital.

  We’ve been in the car not even ten minutes when we turn off and then pull into a driveway. A doctor’s driveway.

  “I’m going to ask you one more time,” dad says, slowing to a stop. “What were you looking for in our bathroom cabinet?”

  He knows. He has to know.

  “Something stronger than Advil,” I mumble. Looking at the dashboard, at my nails (red, because it’s February), anywhere but at my dad’s disappointed face. In our family, we snipe and snark and sometimes yell. But we don’t lie.
Or at least not with impunity. Lying is the Unforgivable Sin.

  “Why?”

  “So I can keep playing.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  I hate that he isn’t losing his cool, or at least not outwardly. He gets out the car, closes the door. It’s more of a slam. I do the same, only I slam it a little harder.

  We don’t have to wait long for the doctor. My dad has obviously pulled some strings. (Ha. Now’s not the moment for a pun, though.) Getting to see a doctor at a moment’s notice should probably be filed under Things That Are Great When You’re Famous! but in this particular case, I think I’ll take it as Exhibit Whatever of how much it sucks to be the daughter of a famous(ish) actor.

  Dad comes in with me and sits silently as I’m prodded and poked and interrogated. It smells so strongly of disinfectant in here that I’m almost distracted.

  “How many hours do you practice?” the doctor asks. It’s a woman this time, which I’m thankful for. I bring out the maternal instinct in women my mom’s age. It must be the clump of freckles. At least they’re good for something.