Wildalone

by Krassi Zourkova

  He took me to an adjacent room where we could be alone. “You won’t have to worry about Evan again.”

  Something about his tone made me nervous. “What do you mean?”

  “He’ll be gone from Princeton before school reopens.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Far from it. Evan has pulled this shit before; there are files and he knows it. So he’ll probably leave on his own, before it goes to disciplinary committee. Otherwise he’ll get expelled. Rhys and I will make sure he does.”

  “Expelled for what? For daring to come near the Estlin trophy girl?”

  “He would have done things to you that you can’t even imagine.”

  “Things to me? Just listen to yourself! He’s a kid who crossed the line because he drank too much. And you are ready to ruin his entire future over it?”

  “I don’t care about his future.”

  “Jake, what’s wrong with you? You sound exactly like your brother!”

  “I sound nothing like him. If Rhys had seen what I saw, Evan would be smashed to pieces by now. Getting expelled is a treat in comparison, trust me.”

  “But you realize it’s as much Rhys’s fault as it was Evan’s, right?”

  His voice turned steel-cold. “My brother has nothing to do with it.”

  “Of course he does. Evan considers Rhys a role model, so tonight he tried to do to me only what he’s seen your brother do to other girls, even during the so-called Thea phase. And why wouldn’t he? I’ve been with Rhys for months; clearly I must enjoy this kind of thing.”

  The response took a few seconds. “None of this is up for discussion, Thea. Evan will have to find another campus for his moronic fits.”

  “And if he refuses?”

  “It’s not a take-it-or-leave-it deal.”

  “No, it’s the usual Estlin deal. You’ll make him name his own price.”

  “I will . . . what?!” The anger exploded—in his face, his voice, his hands that tightened into fists instantly. “Rhys told you?”

  I avoided his eyes, the madness in them.

  “What exactly did he say?”

  “Jake, I don’t think we should—”

  “Oh yes, we should. How much did my dear brother dish out?” My silence only fueled his rage, confirming what he had already guessed. “Rhys can be quite the storyteller. Did he give you all the details? How she went after him, and begged him in the car, and told him she had wanted only him from the beginning?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “Why not? It’s a sexy story. Exactly the kind of story Rhys needs before he sweeps a girl off her feet and onto the piano. Was that when he told you? Or earlier, when the two of you were choosing Nora for me?”

  Everything in him was bursting—with fury, with pain, the long accumulated pain of having to step aside. To disappear. To erase himself from everyone’s life, including his own.

  “Is this how he won you from me, Thea? By telling you that I was once a fool because I let a woman walk all over me?”

  “He never tried to win me from you.”

  “No. He just took you, as soon as he decided he wanted you. Didn’t even let you make up your own mind.”

  “My mind was made up already.”

  “I don’t think so. That night in your room, when we stopped . . . it would have been your first time, wouldn’t it?”

  I couldn’t hear my own “yes.” But he did.

  “And when I saw you pushing him away on the piano, was it because of me?”

  Another “yes,” fainter than the first one.

  It was all he needed. His arms closed around me, for the first time without guilt, and he breathed me in—deep, as if until now his lungs had been robbed of air.

  “Jake, it’s too late . . .”

  “I don’t care.”

  “But I do. I am with Rhys and we can’t—”

  “None of this matters now.” He took my hand. “I can’t believe I waited this long. Come with me.”

  Come . . . where?

  As he led me out of Ivy, I tried to decide what to tell him in the car. That it was too late for the two of us. And that I really meant it. That the only place I needed to go was back to the house. Fast. Because his gift had to be put away until I could figure out how to explain to Rhys why his brother had been trying to buy a Chopin original for me back in September, long before he was supposed to know me. Before Rhys and I had even met.

  We passed by the car. He kept walking.

  “Where are you taking me? We should go back before Rhys comes home.”

  “We will, don’t worry.”

  Down another block, just around the corner, was a building whose deserted lobby had a billboard of photos: WELCOME TO PRINCETON’S DEPARTMENT OF ENGINEERING.

  “Jake, what are we doing here?”

  Without a word, he headed down corridors where ceiling lamps emitted their intense, harrowing light along linoleum floors, as if marking the way to a hospital bed.

  Then I saw them. Pianos. Dozens of them, in all shades of black and brown, clustered under the endless brick walls of an atrium whose glass roof must have let the sky in during the day but now closed over us, sealed with night.

  “What is all this?”

  He smiled, without letting go of my hand. “A temporary rest stop. We’re donating these to high schools and small concert halls. They’ll get routed from here.”

  The simple words, the casual tone as always—as if he had shown me the most ordinary thing.

  “So this is just storage space?”

  “For a week. We asked and the school said yes.”

  “Who is ‘we’?”

  “Rhys and I.”

  He took me past the nearest uprights. A black Yamaha. A mahogany Steinway. A Knabe in rich soft cherry. Then suddenly in the middle, set apart from the others—a white grand piano. Cream white that made you wish for doors wide open out onto a summer field, for insistent sunbeams, for the opium of tiny flowers, and for the touch of lips—unpredictable, like the first notes of music chosen for you by someone else.

  He sat down and began playing: softly, as if it was nothing, and without taking his eyes off me, having gone over the étude probably hundreds of times. I had heard so much about his talent, about his magic over the piano—but none of it had done him justice. He owned the keys completely. Every nuance. Every shade of sound that could possibly be drawn from them. The unforgiving fragility of his touch made the music ache for his fingers, seduced into rhythms that were never intended for it, shattered by him ruthlessly then healed back into phrases of absolute beauty. The étude itself was unrecognizable. It poured out of him with the violent sweep of an ocean afflicted by storm—raging, hurling its furious waves of sound—until he decided to hush it back in, console it, lull it with the peace of a few final notes and then end it quietly, distilling into a single last chord the vast darkness of its despair.

  When he rose from the bench, I knew what was going to happen and that I couldn’t stop him, or myself, even if I tried. In some distant corner of my mind, it felt wrong. But I was hypnotized by his music, by the sadness in his eyes while he played, by his lips that had taken mine once and were now finding them again, erasing everything else, absolutely everything—

  “Is this how you take care of my girl?!”

  The enraged voice shot its thunder through the building and something hit the piano, smashing it to pieces. The entire atrium shuddered.

  “How long have you been after her? Since you ordered your little gift?”

  I watched in horror as Rhys grabbed Jake by the shoulders and hurled him against one of the pianos. Jake’s body hit the wood and the impact left him bent over, before Rhys grabbed him again.

  “Answer me! How long? And did you think I wouldn’t figure out where you’d take her? Rushing to get these fucking pianos in here, so you can screw around with her behind my back?”

  He hurled Jake once more, against a different piano. I screamed and tried to
get to them, but he shouted at me to stay away.

  “Why the hell did you do this, Jake? I trusted you with my life!” He snatched Jake one last time and pulled him up, yelling in his face with deafening fury: “You’re my brother! Why?!”

  Jake didn’t fight, knowing he had no chance against a rage that wasn’t human. Only his quiet voice made it through: “She was mine before you even met her. I gave her up for you.”

  Rhys turned around, finding me instantly with terrified eyes whose disbelief demanded an answer but gave me only a second for it. Then they looked past me, and before I could say anything, he was gone.

  CHAPTER 21

  Underworlds

  IN THE HOURS that followed, Jake and I didn’t speak. He shut the door to his room while I went into the one across from it—the room that had come so close to becoming my own. Then everything sank in silence, a silence deeper than any I had ever known. And in that silence, each of us began to wait for Rhys.

  He didn’t come home—not the rest of the night, not the next day. Jake never emerged either, and when the starkly red Christmas sun bled its apathy and vanished through the lifeless trees outside, I threw on my coat and went for a walk.

  He was going to show up, eventually. He had to. “Funny how Princeton always keeps me on a tight leash: first my brother, now you,” he had said as a joke, once. But it was neither his brother’s hand nor mine that held the end of that leash. Something fated and undefeatable had imprisoned him on this campus, so even if he chose never to return to his house, I knew where to find him. Promptly on the next full moon, in one month minus a day.

  The rest was less clear in my mind. What should I say to him? Would he even listen? I was ready to explain, apologize, convince, beg, grovel. Yet sometimes in life, if you weren’t careful, things could become irreparably broken. Like those Andalucían gypsies—whose blood, I was starting to suspect, filled his own veins with talent and madness and everything else that had doomed Isabel—he probably found it hard to forgive.

  A man like that might fall for you, worship you, lay his life and his future at your feet. But once you trigger his jealousy, all bets are off . . .

  I shivered. With the sun gone, the temperature was dropping fast. And now there was also wind: the houses on both sides of the road had ended. This far down Mercer, away from the cozy glow of Christmas lights, a vast open land known as the Princeton Battlefield stretched under scattered pines and hueless sky.

  A good moment to turn around and go back, it occurred to me. But across the field I noticed the detached façade of a Greek temple. Or what was supposed to look like one: four Ionic columns, shooting their elegant verticals up, each topped with a volute as if a ram had been sacrificed at the base and the horns placed high onto the shaft, in praise of the gods.

  It turned out to be a monument. This is hallowed ground, a plaque read. Across these fields in the early light of the third of January 1777, Washington’s Continentals defeated British Regulars for the first time in the long struggle for American independence. And then, farther down: In the memorial grove beyond you, those who fell in the battle of Princeton, both American and British, lie buried. The historic portico in which you stand was re-erected here to mark the entrance to the tomb of these unknown soldiers of the Revolution.

  Hallowed ground. I liked the sound of it. I also liked the idea of a tomb where enemies were buried together, having finally won peace. In death, all were equal. Feuds no longer mattered. Nor did time. Under that colonnade, antiquity seemed just around the corner. The War of Independence—a blink away. And, somehow, it became plausible that a daemon from the ancient Greek legends could love a girl who was (or, more likely, wasn’t) a witch from the Bulgarian ones.

  Except Bulgarian legends didn’t have happy endings. Certainly not ours, the one about the samodivi, in which Vylla marries her shepherd, then falls deadly ill. Homesick for her forest. For her freedom. For moonsoaked nights on the meadow, away from human eyes. Only one thing can save her: to be released as a wild creature back into the night. But it means that the shepherd would never see her again. That he must shut his heart to the world for good.

  One quiet evening, when the stars spilled across the blinded sky, he took her hand as if to tell her: “It is time, my love.” And back he led her—across ravines and deaf hills and secret mountain paths—up to the lake whose waters had first revealed her to him. There, safely folded, hidden beneath the oak tree’s roots, lay a dress of woven moonlight . . .

  I ran the entire way back—frantic, out of breath, thinking perhaps that I could outrun fate. Jake was in the living room, sunk in one of the armchairs, staring at the floor.

  I stopped a few feet from him. “Any news?”

  Instead of a response, I heard the front door open and close. Not a slam. A normal click, of someone coming home on a night like any other.

  I rushed into the hallway—telling Rhys that I loved him, that we could fix things, mistakes and siblings notwithstanding—but he wouldn’t look at me. Passed at a safe distance and walked into the living room, heading straight over to his brother.

  “The two of you are going to Bulgaria. I changed my name on the ticket to yours.” A heavy envelope landed on the table. “The flight leaves in the morning.”

  “Rhys, she loves you, not me.”

  “I’ll see if a transfer to Harvard is possible, for both of you. The winter classes start in four weeks. By then, Ferry will take care of the move. All of her things. And yours.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Princeton can take papers instead of final exams. So just e-mail them in, no need to come back.”

  “You know I’d do anything for you, but not this way—” Jake’s voice fractured.

  “You aren’t doing it for me. You’re doing it for Thea. And if you break her heart, you will no longer be a brother to me. I’ll kill you with my own hands.”

  He went to one of the pianos, sat down, and smiled at Jake.

  “Last playoff?” A brief variation on a Liszt theme, then he tapped on the wood. “Your turn.”

  No response.

  “Jake, come on, don’t get all soft on me. It’s just a few notes.”

  Jake slid on the other bench, forcing his fingers to repeat the same tune—mechanically, as if playing in his sleep.

  “That’s shameful. Try again.” Another Liszt, slightly faster.

  Jake followed, and the first signs of energy trickled out as he played.

  “Much better! How about this—”

  The two of them kept playing, racing each other over the keys as they had to have done countless times before I came into their life. With each turn, the strength was slowly returning to Jake. It was probably what Rhys intended, the music being just a pretext, a way of forcing his brother to own up, to shake off the guilt and start a future with me—the same future that Rhys had wanted for himself.

  Then he looked at his watch. His hands clutched his knees so hard the skin around the knuckles turned white, and his eyes lifted into mine, letting me know that he wasn’t done playing. That the last sounds from his fingers that night would be for me.

  A chord slipped out. Cautious, followed by two more, closer together and lower on the keys. Then two more, even lower. And then one final chord—quicker than the others, a hurried question mark. My heart sank as I recognized the piece: the fiercely private Nocturne in C-sharp Minor that Chopin refused to publish during his life. The six chords again, this time charged with force, insistent—not a question but a threat.

  Followed by silence. The same silence that the written score had intended to last a mere second had now become merciless in his hands—agonizing, unending, silence in whose grip it was impossible to breathe, in which time itself had vanished until the only thing left was the terrified anticipation of the music that was about to follow. And it did; it finally came. Music as unforgiving as I never knew music could be. Music of absolute, desperate aching.

  It began with a single note
: high, disarmingly fragile. The right hand took it and curled it into a phrase of crystal beauty, lifting it, letting it drop deep, then repeating the entire move only to reach impossibly high, even higher than before, and roll down a cascade of keys as if a quick venom had drained it of its strength.

  Only his hands and arms moved while he played. Yet I could sense the tension in him, in the rest of his body, its hundreds of muscles willing his fingers to deliver this incredible music with a precision I had never thought possible. I wished he would stop halfway through, before the softer middle part—softness I knew he couldn’t stand—but he played on, and the harmonies he would have called “saccharine” once were now unfolding into one another with stunning simplicity, until the rhythm broke into syncopated strokes and shattered over the keys, hushing up the higher octaves to a delicate final note—warm and brief, like the touch of a blessing.

  Then his silence again. The impossibility of breathing. I imagined him turning around and smiling, letting me go to him. But he sat there without a trace of movement, eyes closed, the eyelids bulging almost imperceptibly until the first tears I had ever seen on him came quietly down his cheeks. Jake sat across from him, bent over in a collapsed heap.

  The music resumed—lavishly simple, complete as no music is ever complete. And inconsolable. Hopeless.

  I had wondered many times whether Rhys would leave me one day. Now I knew: this was his good-bye. This music, which left no doubt of his intent yet made the thought of living without him feel like death. Music with which he was breaking his own heart, giving his brother a chance to mend mine.

  I wanted the nocturne to end, so I could tell him that life didn’t have to imitate the legends this time. That, for once, we needed to decide our future instead of leaving it up to others or to chance or, worst of all, to fate. But he stopped playing way before the final notes. His shaking hands lingered on the wood for one last second, then he jumped from the piano like a chased animal and ran out of the room—

  As if running away could solve anything. I loved him. More than life. More than I feared dying. Which meant that nothing was irreversible, and one day I would get him back—I just had to figure out how.