Wildalone

  “Enjoy the journey back. Back home, and back through time.” He smiled and handed me the paper. “It is truly a mysterious part of the world, yours.”

  I asked if I could photocopy the pages, but he had already done it.

  “You can keep the original. I figured you might want it in case you . . . for its sentimental value.”

  Before I could thank him, a phone rang on his desk and I saw all signs of emotion wash off his face as he reached to answer it.

  I LEFT THE ART BUILDING in a daze, with the paper tucked inside my bag like a secret heirloom. But as soon as I reached Forbes and started reading, I realized that this was not the kind of heirloom I wanted.

  THE TWO DEATHS OF ORPHEUS

  by Elza Slavin

  I had known her name for several months now. She had typed it herself, probably the way we all type our names: by habit, without thinking. Yet seeing it felt unsettling, wrong, as if I had put my own name on a school paper and then someone had erased me from the page, replacing me with her:

  Elza.

  Giles was right about her writing—powerful, and somehow dreamy. It engulfed you in a world of myths and visions and, before you noticed, it had carried you back into the bizarre darkness of its universe.

  A universe permeated by death, intoxicated with it. I saw the madness of nocturnal rituals where people drank, danced, and copulated under a strangely detached moon. Among them was a young musician. Lost in sadness. Haunted by his doom. Ready to die—wanting to die—just like everybody else around him. In that world, death seemed to be the answer to everything. Death as a cure. As the ultimate ecstasy. A long-awaited end, then a rebirth. And above all, death as a sacrifice that would enable love to last forever.

  From beginning to end, the paper was exactly as Giles had said. Except one thing: it didn’t sound like a theory at all. Dreamy as her writing was, I knew—and this intuitive certainty frightened me—that what Elza had put down on those pages hadn’t been a theory, at least not to her. She had written it with a chilling confidence, the way a surgeon dips the scalpel for an incision through the skin. And the suicide of Orpheus, each gory detail, was described as if she had been there and witnessed it.

  All this, of course, had fascinated our art professor. To him it was just scholarship—brilliant, but still only an academic exercise creating fiction out of ancient pottery. To me, it was a glimpse into the madness of my sister. Whether that madness fit within strict medical definitions or not, Elza had died at Princeton. Maybe, by the time she wrote that paper, she had already wanted to die. Now I was no longer sure that these pages (an afflicted girl’s fantasy, as Giles had called them) didn’t have something to do with it.

  And what if they did? A paper in itself proved nothing. It offered no leads I could follow, no insights into her life or who might have ended it. None, except the vaguely disturbing hope that maybe the past wasn’t buried as deeply as everyone said it was.

  I opened the window. All the way—the room needed air. Then I slipped the paper among the Chopin scores at the bottom of my suitcase and turned off the light.

  In darkness, places begin to feel alike. I remembered another dark room, not too long ago, where a guy had whispered to me before I even knew who he was, telling me that I should write about Orpheus. And something else, the first thing he had ever said to me: It must be a maenad, back there.

  The singular.

  How had he known?

  I sneaked under the covers, curled into a ball, and tried to summon sleep under my burning eyelids.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Devil Himself

  THE SCHUBERT RECITAL with Ben would have been a magical evening (tiny church off campus; violin music by candlelight) if I had managed to stay focused on where I was and not think about Rhys.

  Almost a week had passed since the incident on Mercer Street, and I never heard from him. It was better this way—I had nothing to say to someone who would drop me without a word simply because I refused to have sex in public. He probably had nothing to say to me either. The kind of girl who could keep up with him was not a shy freshman from Bulgaria, and he must have figured it out right there, under those trees.

  Still, I couldn’t let go. Blaming him was the easy part. Yet what if it was my fault too? I felt insecure—not only with him, but in America. Expecting disaster at every step. Threatened by anything unknown, unfamiliar, foreign. Rhys was the opposite: nothing seemed to intimidate him. He didn’t look much older than the students at Princeton, but acted older. Late twenties, maybe. A man, not a boy. A man who knew what he wanted and went for it, confident that he would get his way.

  “Hey, are you all right?” Ben was waving at me, looking worried.

  I became aware of the noise, hands clapping from all sides. The concert had ended, even the last encore, and I hadn’t noticed any of it.

  We headed for the Street. By the time we arrived, it was close to eleven and the insanity had started. Hundreds of students, most of them already drunk, zigzagged in groups back and forth, from one club to the next. Rita texted me from Colonial and we found her in the crowd—everyone partying, shouting, spilling beer from disposable cups. Ben and I were too dressed up for the place, but nobody seemed to care what anyone else did or looked like, so we all danced for a while until Rita grabbed my hand.

  “Oh my God, Tesh, he’s gorgeous!”

  “Who?” I thought she was trying to sell me on the advantages of dating Ben.

  “There’s a guy who has been staring at you for the last five minutes. I bet it’s your stalker! Don’t turn, though, he’ll see it.”

  I didn’t need to turn—the stalker hadn’t left my thoughts all night.

  “He came in with the swimmers, but I doubt he’s on the team. I’ve seen them compete a few times, and I definitely would have remembered him.” She kept looking over my shoulder, across the room. “I’m surprised this guy would go to a Chopin concert, actually. He looks more like the lead of some Euro rock band. And, Tesh, much as I do hope you get to meet him this time, I think it’s too early for you to be mixing with the Ivy crowd.”

  “Why Ivy?”

  “The swimmers practically run that club. No one is allowed into their clique, and as far as dating goes—good luck counting on anything serious, no matter how sexy or cool you are. They commit only to the team.”

  “If that’s the case, then why are you worried about me mixing with them?”

  “Because I know you like this guy. And from what I’ve heard, their entire gang is not to be trusted.”

  “You never think anyone is to be trusted.”

  “Exactly. Most of the time, unfortunately, I turn out to be right.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather trust people and turn out to be wrong?”

  It was a reminder of how different Rita and I were. Although born in Hungary, she had grown up in America, where, from what I could tell, the smart thing to do was protect yourself against emotional impact from others. In my culture, we gave the benefit of the doubt until proven wrong.

  “Tesh, I’m serious. There’s nothing wrong with playing it safe.”

  “Actually, there is. I’ve been forced to play it safe all my life. Shouldn’t everyone be entitled to a mistake or two at some point?”

  She shook her head. “Your mistake just left, by the way. Too bad.”

  I turned around, only to see him walk out the door. That was it? He wouldn’t even come to say hi?

  The next half hour drifted through me without an imprint—I smiled, talked, danced, all as if an external force prompted my body to keep moving. When I headed out long before anybody else, Rita and Ben looked worried; he even offered to take me back to Forbes. I said I’d catch the campus shuttle, even though I had no intention of doing so. What I needed was a long, solitary walk.

  I also wanted to call my parents and tell them about Carnegie. I had been putting it off all week, waiting to be in a better mood so that nothing would sour the moment of giving them the news. Now I simply s
at down on one of the many campus benches and made the call.

  It was 7:00 A.M. in Bulgaria. Dad had been up for a while, but my mother sounded sleepy.

  “Huh? New York . . . what about it?”

  “I’ll be playing there in November, Mom. Carnegie Hall! Can you imagine?”

  There was no answer—she probably thought she was still dreaming. I wished I could see her face, the change on it as the news sank in. But this was the curse of the telephone: I would never know.

  Finally, Dad’s voice came through from the second handset: “Thea, baby, that’s terrific! Tell us everything! When? How?”

  I gave them the details: Albéniz, Wylie, the crazy intensity of it all. On the other end there was silence again.

  “Mom? Dad? Are you guys all right?”

  Yes, of course they were. So excited. And proud of me. And happy. Then came the sentence that broke my heart:

  “You must promise to take a lot of pictures.”

  There was no need to explain to one another how we felt at that moment. How they would sit quietly at home on the night of my big piano triumph, or how, in the few seconds of applause, I would look from the Carnegie stage to see just an empty hall, a world in which I knew and loved no one.

  In all the years of hard work, of me practicing endlessly and both my parents taking extra shifts to pay for piano lessons and music camps and recording studios and contest fees, none of us had seen this coming. That one day I would live in America. That the flight from home and a week’s hotel stay in New York would cost more than their annual salary. More than I could earn in the dining hall the entire freshman year.

  I hung up the phone feeling so sad I almost went back to Colonial. But that would have accomplished nothing (except maybe elicit more worried looks from my friends), so I headed to Forbes instead—down bleak alleys, through courtyards stirred only now and then by an insect crashing into a wall lantern or the blink of a window turning black. The campus had sunk into the languor of an early-October night, a crease between seasons when the dense heat of summer still smolders inside stone and bark, but less so with each day, weakened by shivers from the approaching fall.

  Finally, Forbes glimmered in the distance. On a Thursday night, when everyone went partying, the dorm had the vibe of a sinking ship: abandoned yet still brightly lit, dragged down by its own silence. I walked along the empty corridors to my room, took my key out, and slipped it in the lock—

  “I was worried you might not be coming back alone.” A hand reached and pushed the door open for me.

  “Rhys? I don’t appreciate the scare . . .” Only a second ago, I could have sworn the hallway was deserted. “Who told you where I live?”

  “Serial killers have tricks. Blackmail. Bribery.” He saw that his old joke was creeping me out again. “Or, in this case, extortion of Forbes staff. Which was a challenge, given that I still don’t know almost anything about you.”

  “And so what if you don’t? You said you didn’t need to know me, right?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “What other way is there?”

  “Just . . . wanting someone. Without the kind of background checks you ran on me earlier—who I am, what I do, where I live.”

  “Well, yes, but I can’t go out with a guy unless I know whether he—”

  “Whether he’ll admit he screwed up? I acted like an ass back there. But it won’t happen again, I promise.”

  “What, you needing to ‘have me’?”

  “No. Me leaving you by yourself.”

  Something about his promise scared me. I realized how quickly I was starting to rely on another promise, one he hadn’t even implied: that he would continue to be in my life.

  “By the way, speaking of background checks—what was that girl telling you about me?”

  “Which girl?”

  “Your girlfriend at the club tonight. She was checking me out and clearly giving you some savvy advice. To stay away from me, I’m guessing?”

  “Why? Is this what I should do?”

  “You should do only what you want, not what anyone else says. Including me.” Somehow, his smile continued to imply the opposite. “So the question is: Do you want to stay away from me or not?”

  “I don’t. But I also don’t understand why you left Colonial as if we didn’t know each other.”

  “I hate public displays. Besides, it looked like you had a date.”

  “You mean my friend Ben?”

  “He seemed a bit too smitten for a friend. I hope you’re not planning on going out with him again.”

  “I wasn’t ‘out with him.’ He lives here in Forbes and we—”

  “There is no ‘we,’ Thea. I’m not going to share you.”

  “Share me? Rhys, what are you even saying?”

  “That I want you as my girl. And I absolutely mean it.” He kissed me, blocking any attempt to argue. “Now, if you still have energy left, I’d very much like to take you somewhere.”

  His girl. I tried to think clearly—about Rita’s warning, and the better question of why I would leave with him, in the middle of the night, to go to one more party or whatever else he had in mind—but he leaned over my ear and whispered:

  “I’ll behave this time. Come with me.”

  THE GOLF COURSE LOOKED AS it always had—dark, vast, and solemn. I had already walked out there at night, when I went to play in Procter Hall. But it wasn’t until we vanished deep into its hills that I sensed the difference: there was no moon this time. The grass rose and fell in invisible curves under our feet. The sounds of creatures had multiplied from all sides. And each tree appeared distant, then suddenly turned up next to us—a deformed giant, locked against the unending black of sky.

  I had no idea where he was taking me, but I knew what would happen once we arrived there. Awkward scenarios ran through my mind, about whether—or how and when—to tell him that I hadn’t had sex before. Turning it down in high school had been easy, especially after seeing a few of my girlfriends get their hearts broken when they wouldn’t wait for the right guy. Now I wished I had just done it, with one of the nervous boys who swore their eternal love to me back then. It would have made things with Rhys much easier. No strained moments. No need for explanations.

  Mercer Street was fully dark. There were no streetlamps, only houses whose dim light faded long before it reached the sidewalk. He led me in silence, absorbed in his own thoughts.

  I was a mess. How did other girls do it? I had been to a few parties at Princeton, enough to know that in college sex wasn’t a big deal—after a few beers, there was hardly anything people didn’t do in front of everyone. It happened casually, with rehearsed nonchalance, as if a single glance and a quick cheers! was all it took to agree on the rest. And “the rest” was an even bigger mystery. Somehow, you were supposed to not care. To detach your body from any source of complications (the mind, the heart), and walk away afterward as if nothing had happened.

  We reached a cluster of trees—the same trees under which he had left me the last time—and came out on the lawn. There was no light in the mansion. No trace of moon or stars; clouds had wiped out the entire sky. I could barely see his face but I felt his breath, the question in it.

  “Will you come where I want to take you?”

  The night had hushed around us, not a trace of wind left.

  “Yes.”

  He headed straight for the mansion. Several stairs separated the lawn from the French doors that looked out over it. Before we had even reached the top stair, before his hand had found the unlocked handle—perfectly sure of its location in the dark—and opened the glass frame to let me in, I already knew. I knew where he was taking me now, where he had wanted to take me before, and why my stubborn refusal to walk through the lawn had amused him earlier.

  This was his house.

  “YOU SAID YOU WANTED TO know where I live. So here you are, in the den of your lynx.”

  I had said it, yes. But now the “den�
�� made me feel out of place—Cinderella at the ball, arrived way past midnight.

  He flipped a switch. Several lights shimmered along the wall, creating an illusion that candles were being lit all around us. I heard a noise and instinctively squeezed his hand: a figure had appeared under the arched entryway. Dark, well-fitted jacket. The shirt strikingly white, as if a black light had been turned on somewhere.

  “Ferry! Why are you up this late, my friend?” Rhys took a few steps in the man’s direction, without letting go of my hand.

  “I was under the impression that the master had returned to New York and would not be expected back in Pebbles for a while.”

  “Well, I’ve decided not to leave—now or anytime soon.” He looked at me and smiled. “Thea, meet Ferguson, the man behind the scenes who runs this household. Ferry is practically family, but he insists on calling himself our ‘butler.’ Brings back Europe for him, I guess. So we indulge his fetish for old traditions.”

  “Pleased to meet you, sir.” I had no idea how to address a butler, especially one in his seventies who looked and spoke as if he belonged in a Victorian novel.

  “Likewise, miss.” His eyes lingered on my face—a subtle curiosity, or an attempt to assess how long the attention of a guy like Rhys could stay focused on someone like me. “Will the master be requiring anything?”

  “No, not tonight. Thea?”

  I looked at Rhys, unsure what he was asking. “I don’t need anything, thank you.”

  “We’re all set then, Ferry. Go get some rest.”

  When the man left, I finally looked around. There wasn’t a hint of the heavy dark wood that filled such mansions in movies and magazines. A white marble floor made everything appear weightless, floating on air, all the way to a fireplace carved from the same stone (or maybe the floor had risen in a wave and splashed against the wall). In the corners facing it, lush palm leaves balanced their fans over Chinese ceramic pots, while in the middle an Oriental carpet burst its geometric patterns of red, green, black, blue. A sofa and two armchairs completed the setup, all in a leather whose white rivaled that of the walls. But by far the most striking objects in the room were two black grand pianos, placed opposite each other across from the windows.