Night Music

by Jenn Marie Thorne

  His shoulders were stiff up at that podium, but he was concentrating hard, fighting to stay on that tight rope. The violinist was standing, playing her solo more beautifully than ever. I stepped into the auditorium, and saw her eyes drift toward me.

  Her instrument screeched.

  Oscar let the next two bars play out, then motioned them to stop.

  “Sorry! Sorry,” she said. “I . . .”

  Everyone was staring now and it finally occurred to me to glance at myself—sodden legs, broken heels, muddy wreck of a dress. I nearly started laughing. My transformation into a low-budget horror ghost was now complete.

  But Oscar didn’t seem to notice the mud at all. A grin broke over his face.

  “Take five,” he said, and the orchestra relaxed, watching with bald curiosity as he hopped off the stage and jogged wordlessly to me.

  We stepped into the empty lobby and turned to each other so quickly I couldn’t even get a breath in before we were kissing, fighting over who deserved to say “I’m sorry,” kissing again, arms clenched tight around each other’s shoulders.

  We were each other’s life rafts, finding balance while the river beat on around us.

  “It’s gonna be okay,” Oscar said.

  “Yeah,” I whispered. “It is.”

  38.

  i woke up steaming, the sun sinking hot through the high window onto my skin, bare to the world apart from the sheets tangled around my ankles. Oscar’s arm curved over my waist and I adjusted myself slowly so I could gawk at him without waking him up—marvel afresh at how very naked we were.

  The mussed bed contrasted with the rest of his newly cleaned apartment, the wood floor cleared of detritus and shining around us like the frame of a painting. We were the messiest things in here. And the most spectacular.

  My heart thudded with sudden panic. I hadn’t told Dad where I was staying last night. Maybe he’d assumed I was with Jules. Maybe he knew I was with Oscar. Maybe he didn’t care either way, now that Oscar had finished his symphony. But the thought of him coming down and knocking on the door was a bit much for me.

  I slipped out of bed and into underwear. Oscar opened one eye, then the other.

  “Morning,” I whispered.

  “Noooooo,” he said, burying his face in the mattress. “I’m not ready.”

  I crawled onto the bed to kiss the back of his neck. “You are, though. Completely. And it’s ready too.”

  He rolled to peer up at me. “Really?”

  “Really really.”

  “Well, then, what do they need me for?” He swooped me up and pulled me under him while I laughed. “I’ll skip the dress rehearsal and stay here with you, instead.”

  “I’m going to the dress rehearsal. And the performance. And I will be a very angry customer if the main attraction doesn’t turn up.”

  “I’m your main attraction?” He grinned wolfishly.

  “Wildly attractive attraction,” I said, kissing him. “But come on. Don’t be late on my account. I’m already persona non grata, let’s not add to the list.”

  “Not true,” he said, but got out of bed anyway.

  I was past caring about the opinion of anybody at Amberley—whether they thought I was my mom in miniature, or Nora Junior, or a deranged mud-covered stalker. That talk with Jules had done its work. I felt a new sense of pride in what had happened in April. They’d tried to pull me back in. I’d refused. And as stupid as I’d been in not identifying Nora’s brochures as one big stack of ulterior motives, my eyes were open now.

  I would keep refusing. My presence at Amberley for the next two days would be for Oscar alone. I wouldn’t engage with anyone I didn’t expressly need to—not even Dad. I would witness the Summer Symphony’s premiere on my own terms.

  Oscar had paused halfway through getting dressed, staring at himself in the bathroom mirror as if confused by his reflection.

  “You’re going to be great.” I hugged his waist. “Seriously, there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I know,” he said, snapping back to life. “I’ll crack a joke, get back into it, like yesterday. It’ll be fine. I just need to tune out the bullshit, focus on the music.”

  “Is there more bullshit?” I asked, wondering what else he hadn’t told me.

  He leaned against the wall to button his shirt. “Things are kind of weird with my parents.”

  I wavered, surprised, but didn’t say anything.

  “While you were away, I couldn’t get a straight answer from anybody on tickets for them to come up for tomorrow night. It went from ‘Yeah, we’ll handle it, we’ll fly them out and put them up at the W’ to ‘We’ll make sure they’ve got seats for the performance’ to ‘We can talk about that later’ and—”

  “Who?” I stepped closer. “Who was saying all this?”

  “Your dad, mostly.” Oscar sighed. “He got distracted while you were gone. He’s been . . . I don’t know, pressured.”

  I glared at the ceiling.

  “And it wasn’t just that. I got the sense—and again, I might be totally paranoid here—but I feel like Ms. Visser doesn’t want them there. Like she’s been going around telling donors I’m an orphan.”

  Nora wouldn’t—I blinked. Yeah. She probably would.

  “Anyway, picture me explaining all this to my folks, trying to make it clear that I’m not disrespecting them, I really do want them to come, but I don’t want to step on anybody’s toes.” He groaned. “I keep getting texts from my boys at Farnwell too, saying they want to come up, where can they get tickets—”

  “Your parents are coming, though, right?” I leaned in to button his last button. “Please tell me they’re coming.”

  Oscar’s arms dropped. “I don’t think so. My mom got her back up about it, sent me an email saying she respects my space and is looking forward to listening to a recording of it. Smiley face, exclamation point.” He faked a grin to demonstrate. “Sometimes there’s no reasoning with her. And this is after the first argument we had . . .”

  He slumped against the wall. I shook my head.

  “Ah. Right. I didn’t tell you about that one either. In my own defense, I was working pretty hard to impress you at that point.” He smiled. “Didn’t want you to think I was an idiot.”

  I laughed, stealing his comb to sift through my curls. “Why would I think that?”

  “I signed something when I got here.” His face went abruptly grave. “I wanted to do it myself instead of running it by my mom like some little kid, so I read it, it seemed fine, I signed it.”

  “What was it?”

  “The rights to my symphony.”

  My skin went cold, a rolling tide. “You hadn’t written it.”

  “The publishing rights to anything I composed in the program. Which obviously includes—”

  “The Summer Symphony.” No. Nonononono. “When? I . . .”

  “Right before classes started. They said it was a barter agreement. In lieu of tuition, they’d accept my music as payment.” He groaned, sliding down the wall until he was sitting. “Like I said, it seemed fine, like a scholarship. I mean—who turns down a scholarship? So I signed, but then I told my mom and she was livid. I’ve kind of avoided talking to her since then.”

  “Since the beginning of the program?” I remembered the way he’d rushed me off the phone while I was gone, how confused it had made me. Then my brain hit rewind. “Wait, you keep saying ‘they.’ Who was there when this happened?”

  “Nora Visser, Bill Rustig, Sally Chen, the bursar . . .”

  I braced myself.

  “Marty.”

  A headache bloomed behind one eye, flashed, died. “Yeah.”

  Of all people, Dad would have known what this meant.

  Oscar leaned forward, trying to gauge my reaction. “It was a bad deal, wasn’t it?”

&n
bsp; These people were beyond despicable. Oscar spent weeks upon weeks pouring his blood and soul into this music, and he’d never see a dime from it for the rest of his life.

  This wasn’t just a bad deal. It was a Faustian one.

  But there was something flickering under Oscar’s watchful expression—a desperate kind of hope. He needed every ounce of confidence he could gather to make it to that podium tomorrow night. He had to show up. If he didn’t, it would destroy him creatively—not to mention obliterate all the momentum he’d made in building a name for himself this summer.

  “Don’t even think about it.” I kept my voice light. “You own it creatively, and who gives a shit about the rest, right? This is just the beginning of your career. But from now on, yes, you should probably have somebody else look at your contracts. And you should call your mom!”

  “I will.” He breathed hard, neck tensing. “As soon as the concert’s done and my head is clear and . . .”

  I picked his cell phone up from the stacked-luggage nightstand. “Why not now? Call her on the way to campus. I’ll be—”

  “I can’t.”

  I dropped the phone onto his bed. “Okay.”

  I wasn’t going to push him. Not now. He had to navigate this, and I had to find ways to help him that wouldn’t send him back into a locked rehearsal room.

  For today, linked arms and a stand-up routine consisting entirely of Popsicle stick jokes was enough to get him out the door and all the way to Lilly Hall, where I bid him good-bye with a kiss on the cheek and a cheerful wave.

  Then I turned, smile gone, spine straightening into a blade. Oscar needed to stay in the light, to focus on the music. I didn’t need a damn thing.

  I checked my phone—Find My Friends—watching grimly as Dad’s little circle popped up only a few meters away. He was in his office right now.

  I turned and headed there, nodding to the guard at the front desk. All the elevator readings were on the top floor, so I jogged up the steps, the burning in my legs nothing compared to how the rest of me felt.

  Halfway down the gilded hallway, I heard the echoes of familiar voices, speaking in such an unfamiliar tone that my feet locked in place. I backed up, one step, two, watching for the vent in the ceiling. Just the right spot to hear—

  “Since when are you a detective? I mean, come on.”

  “Bill, stop, he deserves an explanation.” Nora. Her voice was a purr.

  “Damn right I deserve an explanation. And so does every board member you’ve lied to.” Dad, quiet, frothing mad.

  All in his office.

  “Where did that money go?” Dad growled. “Close to a million missing from the endowment—how are you going to explain that?”

  The financial documents. Amberley in trouble. These were the papers Dad had been poring over.

  I pressed myself to the wall and listened, watching the hallway for passersby. It was empty. Everybody was at Oscar’s dress rehearsal.

  “It was . . . a personal loan,” Bill said, his voice a shade more conciliatory. “It was all meant to be paid back in January. I had my own investments. But then . . .”

  “Jesus,” Dad breathed. “You don’t mean to tell me you got swindled too?”

  What was happening here? I stared into the vacant hall, listening hard.

  Bill put the school’s money in a fund that went bust? What did he mean by “personal loan”?

  “A lot of good investors fell for it,” Nora cut in, her voice barely audible. “Some very savvy people.”

  “A lot of our donors, you mean.” Dad exhaled with a hiss. He must have been right under the vent. “But why in hell would you take out that much money? What possible reason—?”

  “I’m leaving Stephen,” Nora said quietly. “We needed a nest egg.”

  “So unnest it,” Dad said.

  We? Who is the we? And then, in a flash, I remembered. Nora and Bill-Is-Rusting in that empty room at the Wing Club, the way they’d darted away from each other like repelling magnets. The way she’d looked that day last month when I caught her leaving a taxi with someone else inside—frantic, a cornered deer. The cancelled lunch. The casual lie to her husband.

  The way Dad had talked about them for years. Nora and Bill are coming for dinner. Nora and Bill have big plans for the fall semester.

  Nora and Bill are ripping off the school.

  “The money’s gone,” Bill said bluntly. “We invested it in an off-shore account and the firm got raided.”

  His shoes made a squeak, like he was moving forward. I slunk back an inch.

  “Listen, our names weren’t anywhere near it. We’re not stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid?” Dad let out a thunderclap of a laugh. “You’re gonna stand here and tell me you’re not stupid?”

  “Come on, Marty,” Nora said, laughing sweetly. “We have a sold-out fundraiser in a matter of days, an unrestricted diversity campaign. We will recover and then some! And I’ll come up with—”

  “Nope. No. I’m not playing nice anymore. It was one thing to cover for you two because I care about you and I care about this school and—guess what? I care about Stephen too. He’s a good guy who doesn’t deserve this. But you’re not just cheaters now. You’re burglars. You’ve stolen from this school and I’m not going to stand here and watch you get away with it. You go to the board or I do. It’s your choice.”

  “It won’t survive the scandal.” Even through the vent, I could hear the spit coming out of Bill’s mouth as he whispered. “It’ll be the end of this place.”

  I’d never registered so much emotion in Bill Rustig’s voice before. It was jarring—like he’d been possessed.

  “It’ll be just fine,” Dad said, his own voice flat. “Better after you tender your resignations.”

  Bill snorted. “It’ll tick along, maybe. Maybe you’ll even be able to keep this campus. But it won’t be a school full of Oscars. It’ll be Rubys.”

  My hand flew to my mouth.

  “Is that what you really—hey!”

  A scuffle, a grunt, Nora shrieking. My body jolted back to life, and instinctively, I flew down the hall, grappled for the door handle, and burst inside.

  Dad’s hands were locked around Bill’s shoulders, Bill shoving him off, but Dad didn’t look like he was attacking. He looked like he was struggling for air.

  Nora’s eyes flashed in my direction, and in the space of less than a second, I saw every version of her I’d ever known—caring, caught, calculating, vulnerable, terrified.

  “Ah,” Dad said, staggering like he’d been pepper-sprayed.

  “Dad?” I ran to him. He barely seemed to see me.

  He pressed his hand to his chest and scrunched his eyes shut. “Ah!”

  Nora’s lips went white. She scrabbled in her pockets, then waved, frantic.

  Her eyes locked on mine and this time there was only one emotion in them—panic. “Ruby. Phone. 911.”

  39.

  i pulled my cell from my bag and Nora snatched it away to dial while I tried to hoist my father up. It was a losing battle—he crumpled quickly, slumping into the too-small Empire-style chair, the closest place for me to aim him.

  “Yes, we’re at 15 Lincoln Center Plaza, the Amberley School, Room 501, Administrative Building. I’m with Martin Chertok and he’s having a heart attack. I’ll stay on the line.”

  “N-no,” I sputtered. “That can’t be—”

  “I’ve seen it,” Nora said. “My husband . . .”

  He died, I remembered now. Her first husband died.

  “I’ll flag them from the lobby.” Bill rushed off in a rapid glide.

  “Dad, hang on,” I whispered, cupping his scruffy face in my hands. He was cold, clammy—conscious.

  “Ruby?” He blinked, winced. “Ah. God.”

  I glanced up after who knew how many
matching breaths, seeing an avalanche of EMTs rushing at us, then I backed out of the room to give them access. I looked for Nora, to thank her for her quick thinking, but I couldn’t find her anywhere—only my cell phone propped up against the fleur-de-lis wallpaper, waiting for me to discover it.

  She’d run off.

  My gratitude burned to ashes as I bent to pick my phone up off the floor. She was my godmother. She was cotton candy and meadow bunnies. She’d dialed 911. She’d cheated on her husband. Stolen from the school. Manipulated Oscar. Manipulated me. Disappeared while my dad lay curled up on the floor, fighting for his life. She was probably locked downstairs in her office suite, calling her lawyer even now.

  They stretchered Dad down the service elevator and out to the ambulance. A small crowd had already gathered outside, including a clutch of students. Some of them were crying. I felt like screaming at them, telling them they had no right—but they had every right, didn’t they? They spent as much time with him as I did.

  The EMTs started to slam the ambulance doors, when I let out a wordless cry.

  “Only family,” the female EMT said curtly.

  “I’m his daughter.”

  “Come on then, quick.”

  I sat in front with the driver, peering through the grill to stare at Dad’s hair instead of all the gear covering him, the needle they were injecting into his arm, the defibrillator they were charging and pressing to his chest.

  “Clear,” the EMT said, and a scream lodged itself in my throat, watching his chest judder upward.

  We were at the hospital before I had a chance to orient myself, and before I could even find the name of the hospital they’d taken us to, Dad was rolling away through doors I wasn’t allowed to enter, a nurse pulling me to a harshly lit waiting room, crouching in front of me and telling me they’d give me updates and was there someone she could call for me?

  “Your mom, honey?”

  I let out a frantic laugh, then clapped my hand over my mouth. She pressed her lips together.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m just really scared?”

  She rubbed my arms. “It’s okay. He’s awake now, he’s with the best doctors here and we’re going to do everything we can for him. Now . . . how old are you?”