Wildalone

  “Who plays on the second one?”

  “The devil himself. We often hold competitions.” He smiled, not realizing how believable that sounded. “Play something for me.”

  “No, you play for me this time.” He had already heard me once, it was my turn to listen. “We’ll consider it payback.”

  “You mean advance?”

  That wasn’t at all what I meant, but maybe Alexander Hall mattered less to him than it did to me.

  “All right, give me your favorite.” He walked over to the piano on the left and sat down, waiting for me to choose, as if he could play anything on the spot, without scores.

  “I think you know my taste.”

  “Your taste . . . the moody Pole? Come on, does it have to be him?”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s too saccharine.” A few measures from a polonaise trickled from the keyboard. “So intent on melting you. It can get unbearable.”

  I remembered him making a similar comment that night at Louisa’s, and it unsettled me. Had I been wrong about him? My quick assumption that he understood Chopin’s music (and, by extension, everything else) the same way I did now seemed just a trick of my homesick imagination.

  “This one’s better—” He started a mazurka, only to cut it off abruptly. “Except it gets so sugary, I just have to stop right there.” One look at my face, though, and he knew he had gone too far. “Fine, the moody Pole it is!”

  This time he really began playing. Sounds filled the room—flawless, merciless in their beauty: the Fantaisie-Impromptu in C-sharp Minor, one of Chopin’s most virtuosic works. Incredibly fast at times. Heartbreakingly lyrical at others. Rhys had called this music saccharine, yet for a moment even he seemed swept by it. There was nothing sweet, or condescending, in the way he played. The piece poured out of him as if he was improvising on the spot, charging each note with as much intensity as it could possibly carry.

  I do play. And your Chopin is stunning. It had sounded so casual when he said it; as if, compared to me, he could barely hold a tune. Now he was turning out to be the far more accomplished pianist. We were a few years apart, granted. But age probably had nothing to do with it. He appeared to have a rare natural talent. An utter ease with the instrument that I had never heard, not even on recordings.

  Once again, the questions raided my mind. Who was he? Old Princeton money, of the kind Americans considered aristocracy? A musical prodigy? Both? Or just a young, rich, eccentric genius who had decided to withdraw from the world, on the outskirts of this famously secluded campus?

  Intimidated and shaken by all this, I absorbed each sound while he played. Yet in every single one, I also felt a sting from how, only moments earlier, he had dismissed this very music—the music that had brought me to him.

  Finally, his fingers ended their self-indulgent stroll above the keys. The last notes fell over the piano and dissipated, lost in the space between me and this guy whose presence, for the first time, felt irreversibly foreign. I still didn’t know if he was a student at Princeton, had been in the past, or had found some other access to the only local party scene—the eating clubs. Either way, I was getting my first taste of the Ivy crowd: impudent, at times arrogant, too good even for its own privileged surroundings. It was a world I hadn’t expected to ever be allowed into, let alone this quickly. And part of it already enticed me. The ease with which Rhys did everything. His confidence. Even the way he mocked Chopin, so different from the way people mocked things they didn’t understand. He knew Chopin’s music intimately and played it better than anyone, including me. What more could I possibly want?

  I tried to smile. To thank him politely. But my voice came to me through the silence—distant, as if belonging to someone else—telling him that his Chopin was stunning, then asking him to take me home.

  THE NEXT DAY I RECEIVED both things the Dean’s Office had promised me. First: a copy of Elza’s transcript. Greek Art. A seminar on Pompeii. Advanced Composition. Methods of Modern Music. Not exactly a surprise, with her two passions being music and archaeology.

  The second thing was a call from the counseling center, offering me an appointment that same afternoon.

  “I am really glad you decided to come in, Thea.” A warm handshake, brief and professional. “Jane Pratt. Sorry, McCosh is a bit of a mess these days. Was it easy to find us?”

  I figured she was referring to the elevators, temporarily shut down for maintenance. “The receptionist was very helpful, even gave me a map.”

  “Right, right . . . Please, take a seat.” She pointed to an armchair in the middle of the room, choosing for herself the couch across from it. “This is your first time, I take it?”

  “Luckily I haven’t been sick at Princeton yet, so no reason for health center visits.”

  “I didn’t mean McCosh. I meant whether you’ve been in”—her eyes narrowed in a sudden web of lines, adding at least a decade to a face whose delicate, densely freckled skin had made her look no more than thirty, barely out of medical school—“in therapy before.”

  “Me? No, I haven’t.”

  We observed each other in silence. I wasn’t trying to come across as hostile, but the calculated tact with which she had said the word therapy, and even the word itself, irritated me.

  “Dr. Pratt, the Dean’s Office asked me to see you for an informal handshake, whatever that means. So, to be honest, I didn’t realize this would be a therapy session. Or that I needed one.”

  “No one is saying you need therapy. Needing it and being able to benefit from it are very different things. We can all benefit from therapy, if it’s done correctly.”

  Sure, whatever. This was probably the usual spiel, to put my mind at ease while she “diagnosed” a long list of things I never knew were wrong with me.

  “It won’t take more than an hour. Just give it a try.”

  “Try what exactly? Psychiatric tests?”

  “No, no.” She shook her head, a notch too eagerly. “We’ll talk about what happened in the past and how it might—or whether it even should—impact your life here.”

  “I assume by ‘it’ you mean my sister’s death?”

  Of course she did. Like my Greek Art professor (and probably many other people I would meet at school), she had a hard time perceiving me as a separate person, outside the Elza context. Somehow, my behavior was expected to bear the mark of a tragedy that had taken place while I was still an infant. And for the first time, I caught myself thinking that maybe my parents were right. Maybe coming to Princeton had been a mistake.

  “Thea, we seem to have started off on the wrong foot. Why all this resistance?”

  “Where I’m from, nobody goes to a therapist. People are offended by the idea of having to hire a stranger to listen to their problems. That’s what family and friends are for.”

  “Except there is a science to how we feel, a complex chain of cause and effect that your friends and family might be unaware of.”

  “They know the most important thing: how my mind and heart work.”

  “I wouldn’t mind knowing that, too.” She smiled, sensing the first crack in the ice. “So, can I try? Just five minutes. And then if you still want to leave, I won’t insist, I promise.”

  She clasped her hands over her knees—bony hands, freckled, no rings. No other jewelry or makeup either. Gray pantsuit, a size too big. And sleek ash-blond hair, cut safely to just above shoulder length. It was as if she had wanted to be invisible. To merge with the room whose neutral, almost insultingly run-of-the-mill decor was probably a therapy device in itself.

  “All right. Let’s start with your home.”

  “What about it?”

  “How many windows does it have?”

  I did a mental run through our house in Sofia. “Seven.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I pretended to do another count. On the wall behind her, a framed print in the neurotic color blotches of Cézanne showed a still life with five pieces of fruit: three apples
, a lemon, and a quince. “Yes, I’m sure. Seven windows.”

  “And when you counted them just now, were you inside or outside the house?”

  “Inside . . . Why?”

  “Good, that’s all I needed to know. Now let’s see if I’ll be way off on the backstory.” She unclasped her hands and leaned forward, as if to reassure not so much me as herself. “You grew up as an only child, yes? Your parents never told you about Elza. Kept her belongings locked away in the house, perhaps in a room to which you gained access by accident—you were what, five or six years old?—and that’s where you found her piano. It wasn’t until much later, probably around the time you decided to come to America, that the family secret finally surfaced. And she began to haunt you. Strange episodes. Creepy, even. At times you could almost feel her physical presence like a ghost. Which made Princeton the natural choice for you. The only choice, really, if you were to ever be free of her. By the way, how am I doing so far?”

  I was stunned. For a moment, even the apples of Cézanne seemed to shudder in shock, about to roll out of the frame and topple to the floor.

  “I take your silence as a sign that I was right, at least about some of it?”

  “Yes. About all of it, actually, but . . . how did you figure these things out?”

  “That’s my job, Thea. The technical term is ‘replacement child syndrome.’ It gives a very accurate prediction of how a child’s behavior patterns will change following an older sibling’s death. Even Sigmund Freud himself—although not strictly a replacement child, since he was the firstborn—suffered from similar symptoms after the death of his younger brother Julius.”

  “Suffered from what exactly?”

  “From the burden of being viewed as a replacement child: the one who would fill the unfillable void, erase the loss, act as panacea. It’s obviously an impossible task, because children aren’t fungible and the agony of losing a child can never be healed simply by having another. Instead, parents should acknowledge the loss, allow the dead child a place in the family, and let the mourning process run its course. Failure to do so would project their trauma onto the surviving children, triggering the syndrome.”

  “What makes you think my parents failed?”

  “Most people assume that the best way to heal is by suppressing the pain or blocking it out altogether—even if this means permanently erasing the dead child from the family history, locking up the physical reminders out of reach, and so on. This is especially true of parents who never had a chance to grieve properly. For example . . .” She looked away, as if no longer sure that giving an example was a good idea. “Historically, women whose babies had died at birth weren’t allowed to hold or even see them—it was considered harmful to the mother. Clinical studies have now shown that such denial only leaves the grief unresolved. And the wound, so to speak, forever open.”

  I finally realized where she was going with this. The disappearance of Elza’s body had left my parents’ grief as unresolved as grief could be.

  “In such cases, people either withdraw and neglect their other children, or become overprotective, doting on the children too much. You counted the windows from the inside, which meant you must have been a happy child raised in an inclusive, loving home. I know many who aren’t as lucky.”

  “They count the windows from the outside?”

  “Almost invariably. Alienated children are outsiders. Some report feeling literally invisible in the family.”

  “Yet counting from the inside doesn’t necessarily mean a loving home. It could be just the opposite: a home perceived as a prison.”

  “You’re absolutely right.” She smiled again, but so confidently that it probably meant I wasn’t. “Except a prisoner would know the windows right off the bat, no? There would hardly be a need to count them for me. And certainly not a second time, as you did.”

  This bothered me more than anything else she had said so far—because I hadn’t counted them a second time. Then . . . could it be true? Over the years, piano practice had often made me feel trapped. And my parents were overprotective, sure. But I had never thought of my home as a prison. Or had I? After all, here I was. In a foreign world. By myself.

  “Are you thinking jails and shackles?”

  The choice of words startled me—a joke, clearly, but by now I knew better. If the human mind were a musical instrument, this woman would be no less of a virtuoso than Rhys had been the night before.

  “I’m just . . . I still don’t see how you guessed all those other things about my life.”

  “To be honest, it was a bit of a conundrum. Here you are, at Princeton. And a celebrated pianist, no less. In short: doing everything exactly like your sister. But why would your parents allow it?”

  “Maybe so I could become the ultimate replacement child?”

  “No, it doesn’t work that way. The overprotective pattern is to keep the replacement child—and I hope you don’t mind the term, I use it only descriptively—as close as possible. Not send her to another continent. And definitely not to the same school where the first child died. In other words, all those decisions must have been yours. The piano, for example. To achieve such a level of success, you’d need to start at a very early age. But a six-year-old doesn’t just wake up one day craving to play classical music, right? The parents must push for it. Yours, of course, would never do such a thing, as it was the piano that won Elza the accolades required for admission to Princeton. So there had to be some other trigger. Some event that, to a child, must have felt mysterious, and captivating, and enticed you to play despite Mom and Dad’s objections. Such as, let’s say, discovering a world that had been locked away. And in it—a piano waiting. Except your parents made a big mistake right there.”

  “By allowing me to play?”

  “No, by not telling you about your sister. Think about it—much of your childhood was still at their disposal. Plenty of time to ease you into the truth, shape your reaction, and ensure what they probably wanted most of all: to steer you away from the American bug that so many young people in Eastern Europe seem to catch just from breathing the post-Communist air. But instead they waited. And once you had a mind of your own, it was too late.”

  “Not entirely. When I found out what they had gone through, I offered to stay in Bulgaria.”

  “Their happiness in exchange for yours. What parent would accept such a bargain?”

  “I wasn’t bargaining. I really meant it.”

  “Of course you did. Empathy. Self-sacrifice. Early understanding of grief and loss. These are all typical, because a replacement child doesn’t expect to be the center of the universe. Huge difference there, between you and Elza.”

  The difference wasn’t quite as huge, given how I had chosen Princeton knowing it would devastate my parents. Yet there was something else, in that last statement of hers. It sounded personal. Not so much a deduction—a specific observation.

  “Dr. Pratt, how long have you been at Princeton?”

  She rose from the couch, walked over to a desk in the far corner of the room, and took a bottle of water from a stack next to it. “Would you like one?”

  “No, thanks.” A diploma in Latin above the desk had her name, that of Johns Hopkins University, and the year 1990. “You were here in ’92, weren’t you?”

  She unscrewed the cap and stared inside, as if the clear liquid held molecules of the past itself.

  “Did my sister come in for therapy too?”

  “Not voluntarily.”

  “You mean she needed . . . psychiatric help?” I almost choked on the words, wishing I had taken that water bottle.

  “I didn’t think so, at the time. But the school disagreed. Have you heard of the Nude Olympics?”

  It sounded like a Dionysian version of the Olympic Games. “Does that have anything to do with ancient Greece?”

  “Unfortunately, no.” The suggestion amused her. “It’s a Princeton tradition. Used to be, until 1999, when the Board of Trustees banned it.
Every winter, on the night of the first snowfall, sophomores would run naked in the Holder Courtyard over at Rocky College, and from there—out on the town, bolting into local stores and restaurants. Depending on the level of inebriation, there could be sex and vandalism too, leading to arrests, criminal charges, and even hospitalization.”

  “But my sister was never a sophomore.”

  “Right, she wasn’t. Which was part of the problem. That year, the first snow fell on December thirteenth—”

  “The same weekend her body disappeared from the funeral home?”

  “Yes, although I don’t think there’s a connection. The point is, in the winter of 1992—and, to my knowledge, for the first and only time in the school’s history—the Nude Olympics seemed to have happened twice. On December thirteenth, the night of the first snowfall. But also a month earlier, on November tenth, with a group of students starting at Holder and ending up in the woods south of campus. There was only one nonsophomore involved: your sister. Incidentally, she was also the only woman.”

  I felt my cheeks flush. Apparently, Elza had been much wilder than I had suspected. “Did anyone get arrested?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. Borough Police officers were dispatched after reports of the initial ruckus. The students, I believe there were six of them, faced disciplinary charges. It came down to just mandatory counseling, but at first there had been talks about suspension for the entire spring semester.”

  “Suspension? For running around naked?”

  “Well . . . there had been much more to it than running. I’m sure you can imagine.”

  I couldn’t quite. My sister. Naked. With five men in the forest. In the middle of the night. “I still don’t understand, though. Why would they do this a month early, instead of waiting for the first snow with the others?”

  “Because we don’t do what the others do. These were her exact words, when I asked her the same question. And besides, she said, it was first frost—doesn’t that sound more like freedom?”