by Tillie Cole
I didn’t give a shit about the look the cashier gave me as I slammed my fake ID and cash on the counter, covered in blood.
I ripped through Main Street, fighting the emotions that were threatening to consume me. My head pounded, and pressure built behind my eyes. I blasted a mix that beat in time with my heart. Loud bass notes blasted the cabin of the truck. They usually helped me block it all out. All of the fucked-up thoughts of Easton that were rushing in my head. But it didn’t help. It didn’t drown out the emotions, the feelings that were building in me so strongly that I needed to squash them with alcohol.
I slammed my truck into park. I ignored the stares and the whispers of the students as I stormed up the path to the music room, Jack in hand. I ripped the cap off and took a long sweet swig, waiting for the burn to take the emotions away. To numb them until I could breathe.
I shouldered the door to the building and staggered down the corridor until I entered the music room I usually used. I stood still as the instruments looked back at me. Mocking me. Crying out for me to use them. But anger took hold. Anger and frustration. I was just so damn sick and tired of it all. I took another swig of Jack then flew at the drum kit, knocking the whole thing over with one furious kick.
But it didn’t help. A cymbal crashed to the floor, but the emotions were still there, bright and vivid in my head. The neon colors almost blinding, the metallic taste of the pain, of the suffering, the helplessness, leaving the taste of burning acid on my tongue.
I shot out of the door and found myself at Lewis’s office. I didn’t think; everything in me was just too consuming to think. I pounded on the door, hot tears seeping from the corners of my eyes, scalding my skin. I slammed my fist on the heavy wood, the thuds building in both volume and tempo. Throbbing yellows filled my head. My breath echoed in my ears—olive green. My heart pounded in my chest—tan brown.
I hit the door harder, every sound, every emotion, every taste an assault on the senses. No, not an assault; a damn near air strike, obliterating everything in its path.
The door flew open and I fell into the room. Lewis was suddenly before me, eyes wide and staring at me in horror. “Christ, Cromwell! What happened?” I pushed him off and started to pace the room. I downed some more Jack, half the bottle gone. But this time the emotions were too strong for me to fend off.
I threw the bottle against the wall, hearing the glass smash and shatter. Tarnished gold spots sailed through my mind. I gripped my hair, pulling at the strands. I hit at my head until Lewis pulled my wrists away. He held them tight and made me look into his eyes.
“Cromwell.” His voice was harsh and strict. “Calm down.”
The fight drained from me, leaving only the florescent print of everything I was fighting in my mind. My tongue ring rolled in my mouth, trying to rid it of the bitterness.
“Cromwell!” Lewis shook me, and my shoulders sagged.
“I can’t take them,” I said, my voice breaking. Lewis’s eyes saddened. I stared down at the blood still on my hands. I hadn’t even washed off Easton’s blood. “He tried to kill himself.” My voice was shaking. I squeezed my eyes shut. “She’s dying.” I palmed my eyes, trying to take away the navy blue pigment that washed over any other color in my mind. A navy canvas, blotting out everything else.
I fucking hated navy blue.
“She’s waiting on a heart. But I don’t think it’s coming.” Lewis’s hold slackened, but he didn’t let me go. I stared at the painting of brightly colored swirls on his wall. “She’s getting weaker and weaker every day.” I shook my head, seeing Bonnie at the hospital. Being wheeled toward me, eyes sunken and huge. She looked so weak.
She looked like she was losing the fight.
“She’s going to die,” I whispered again. Pain so strong and blue so dark drilled themselves into my every cell, knocking the air from my lungs. “She made me want to play again.” I smacked my fist over my chest . . . over my still-working heart. “She made me listen to the music inside me again. She made me play. She inspired me . . . She made me me again.” I swallowed the lump that I was sick of feeling. “She can’t die.” All the fight drained from my body. “I love her. She’s my silver.”
The emotions rose higher again, like a tsunami ready to demolish an unsuspecting shore. Then Lewis was leading me somewhere, his hand on my arm. I didn’t even register where we were going until I blinked and we were in a music studio. Only this was better than any I’d seen since I’d gotten here. I looked around the polished room, at the instruments perfectly laid out and ready to play. They were all new and high spec. And then my eyes drifted to a grand piano in the corner. The glossy black finish was like a magnet to me. My feet were moving across the light wooden floor. I felt I was gliding as I arrived at the piano I’d played on numerous times in concert as a kid. As packed theaters heard me play . . . as my dad stood in the wings and watched his synesthete son share the colors of his soul.
“You must play,” Lewis said. He was standing in the center of the room, watching me. In this moment, he looked like the composer I’d watched all those years ago in the Albert Hall.
Tyler Lewis.
I winced as the emotions took their hold. My head felt like it was in a vice, pounding, throbbing. “Release them,” he said. I let his voice hit my ears.
His voice was burgundy.
I liked burgundy.
My hands spread on the keys. The minute I felt the cold of the ivories under my fingertips, everything calmed. I kept my eyes closed as everything from tonight morphed from images into colors. Into shapes that danced and shimmered, stabbed and flexed.
And I followed them, just like my heart told me to. With every key, with every chord played, the emotions lessened. I played and played until I no longer thought. I let the music lead me, eyes closed, into the dark. I breathed, my chest relaxing. My muscles became one with the piano, the tension seeping from the fibers into the melody. And with the sonata that was materializing in this music room, the emotions were appeased. My head lost its ache as the notes danced and scattered into the air, lifting their burden from my body.
I played and I played until the music chose to end, and I was replete.
I breathed. I inhaled and exhaled, in and out, until my hands chose to fall to my side. I blinked my eyes open and stared at the black and white keys. Despite tonight, despite the pain and sadness that I knew was only going to get worse, I smiled.
Bonnie would have loved that smile.
When I looked up, Lewis was still standing where he had been when I started playing. Only his expression was something else entirely. And his eyes were wet.
“That, Cromwell,” he said, voice hoarse, “was why I wanted you here, at this school.” He took a step closer. “I’ve never heard anything like that, son. Not in all my years of composing and conducting have I heard anything as raw, as real, as I just witnessed.”
He came to the piano and leaned on its top. He was silent. I stared down at the piano, running my hands over the black gloss.
“I want this,” I whispered, and felt the final string that tightly bound my passion for chords and melodies, rhapsodies and symphonies, break free. The lump that had been clogging my throat all but disappeared. I breathed, and I felt my lungs truly exhale for the first time in years—maybe even since before I lost my dad—because this was my choice.
The music had been screaming at me to compose from the minute I was born . . . and now I was ready to listen. “I want this,” I said louder, with a conviction I hadn’t ever had before. I looked up at Lewis. “I need to do this.” I needed to create. Compose.
Then I thought of tonight, and the story this Steinway had just told. I felt the sadness well up inside me, clawing its way to the surface. My finger dropped to a single key, and I pressed on the E. E, I always liked. It was mint green.
“He slit his wrists.” I moved on to the G. “Bonnie’s brother, Easton. He tried to kill himself tonight.” A scale started as I walked my way up the keys. “I fo
und him.” My voice sounded like razorblades.
“Is he . . . ?”
“He’s stable. That’s what his dad said.” Scale after scale tapped its way along the piano. I put my free hand on my chest. “The emotions . . .” I shook my head, not knowing how to explain it.
“They consumed you,” Lewis said. “Broke you.”
My hand froze on the keys. I met his eyes. “Yeah.” I drowned in confusion. He’d understood.
Lewis pulled an orchestra chair beside me. His fingers found their way to the keys too. I watched as his hands moved as if of their own accord. I saw the colors in my mind. So I started playing similar colors that meshed. I played a harmony. Lewis’s lip hooked into a smirk. I followed his cues. Spectrums refracted in my mind. And I chased them until Lewis pulled his hands back and dropped them to his lap.
He sighed. “It’s how I started drinking. Taking the drugs.” He tapped his head, then his chest. “The emotions. The colors I would feel when things went wrong.” He shook his head. “I couldn’t cope. I used alcohol to numb the pain. And my life spiraled from there.”
“Your emotions get heightened too?” I stared at him, floored.
Lewis nodded. “I taste it too. And see colors.”
“I didn’t think synesthetes ever had such similar symptoms.” Lewis nodded. I felt a lightness in my chest I couldn’t describe. Because someone else knew. He understood. All of it. All of what sometimes buried me in so many sensations that I shut down. Built high walls to fortress the feelings. Who I really was.
Lewis closed his eyes, inhaled, then took something from his jacket’s inner pocket. He placed a silver hip flask on the top of the piano.
“It’s whiskey,” he said, staring at the hip flask. “I’ve been sober three years.”
I just listened.
“When I was asked to compose for the gala in a couple of months, I thought I could do it. I thought I’d mastered my demons.” He flicked his chin in the direction of the liquor. “I thought I had a grip on the emotions that rose in me when I played. When the colors came.” He laughed without humor. “When I opened up my soul.”
His gaze dropped to the piano keys. He played a single F note, the sound and bright pink hexagon vibrating in the air. “But I have too many regrets, Cromwell. Too many ghosts in my past that I’ll never escape from. The ones that always come and find me whenever I compose. Because they are what lives within me. My music wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t leave everything on the sheets of music.” He ran his finger down the filigree pattern on the flask. “But I can’t handle the emotions that come because of my synesthesia. I was stupid to think they wouldn’t resurface.”
“Have you drunk any?”
“Not yet.” He laughed again, but it sounded more like he was choking. “I just carry it around with me. To prove to myself that I can resist it.” Before I could say anything, he said, “I’m not composing at The National Philharmonic’s Gala.”
I frowned. Then Lewis turned to me. “I told them I had someone else who could debut instead.” As mentally exhausted as I was, it took me a few seconds to realize what he was getting at. A dormant heat that lived in my blood sparked to life as his words sank in. Shivers broke out along my skin and I felt my pulse race. “The way you just played . . .” He shook his head. “It’s up to you, Cromwell. But if you want it, the place is yours. The program director remembered you from your youth. They now want you more than me. The musical genius who just one day stopped playing, making his big return.”
My heart slammed in my chest. “There’s not enough time. It’s too soon. And I’d have to compose an entire symphony. I—”
“I’ll help you.”
I looked at him curiously. “Why do you want to help me so much? It can’t all be to repay my father.”
Lewis glanced away, then facing me again, said, “Let’s just say that I have a lot of errors I need to amend. It’s one of my twelve steps.” He went quiet, and I wondered what he was thinking. “But it’s also because I want to, Cromwell. I want to help you compose.”
Adrenaline pulsed through me at the thought of being back on a stage, an orchestra surrounding me, giving life to my creations. But then ice cooled that excitement. “Bonnie . . . I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t . . .” My jaw clenched when I pictured her on her bed. Then in the wheelchair, and her face when she saw Easton’s blood on me. “I don’t know if I can.”
Lewis’s hand came down on my shoulder. “You don’t have to make decisions now.” He shook his head, and his hand slipped away. “I shouldn’t have asked you right now. It was insensitive.”
“No,” I argued. “It wasn’t . . . I just . . .”
“Take your time. They’ll hold the place open for a while longer.” I nodded. Then I looked down at myself. I was covered in blood. My hands . . .
“The keys,” I said, not knowing what the hell else to say. I had left some blood on the keys. On a Steinway. I grabbed my shirt and started rubbing at them to get them clean. But the blood on the shirt only made it worse. Lewis put his hand on my arm and stopped me.
I was shaking again. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, pulling myself together.
“I’ll fix it, Cromwell. Get yourself home and cleaned up.”
I opened my eyes and walked to the door. Just as I was about to leave, I turned to Lewis, who was staring at the flask. “It was good,” I said gruffly. “To talk to someone who understands.”
He smiled. “Or just anyone at all.” I nodded as Lewis stared back at the flask. “Your mother was always that person for me.”
My eyebrows pulled down. “My mum?”
“Yeah. She never told you I knew her?” His face paled a little. Like he’d just shared something he shouldn’t have. I shook my head. I had no clue what he was talking about. “We went to college together. That’s how she knew me. How your father knew to contact me.”
“She never said.” I wondered why she hadn’t. Then again, I had never asked her. Just assumed she’d heard of him from the world I was in. But there was no space in my mind to wonder any more about that tonight.
“Night, Professor.” I left him in the room with his demons and temptation. I walked back to the dorm, my feet feeling like heavy weights. When I got back to the room, it had been cleaned, I assumed by the college’s cleaning staff. Only faint stains remained on the wooden floor where Easton’s blood had pooled. The debris he’d thrown around the room had been swept up. I showered then sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the black paint he’d thrown on the walls. At the swirling eyes that he’d drawn every few feet. Eyes that watched every move you made.
Exhaustion wrapped around me, and I lay down in my bed. I pulled out my phone, brought up Bonnie’s name, and sent her a simple message:
I love you.
Simple. Yet, to me, it meant the world.
*****
I blinked awake to the sound of knocking at my door. I rubbed my eyes and threw back the cover. Light from the sun sliced into the room around the edges of the thick curtains. Birds were singing.
I opened the door, and I stilled. Bonnie sat in her chair, looking at me. I swallowed. “Farraday,” I rasped. At the end of the corridor, Mr. Farraday was walking away. He gave me a tight smile.
A hand slid into mine. Bonnie was looking up at me, her eyes tired, her lips shaking. “Bonnie,” I whispered and held her hand tight. I only let go so I could move to the back of her chair and push her into the room. As I shut the door, I heard a tiny gasp slip from Bonnie’s mouth.
My stomach sank. Bonnie’s hand moved to her mouth as she stared at the black-smeared wall. I tried to move around her to stop her from looking to the right. But I didn’t make it in time. Silent tears tracked down Bonnie’s cheeks when she saw the bloodstained floor.
I grabbed the blanket off my bed and covered the floor. I bent down to Bonnie and lifted her chin with my finger. Her gaze finally ripped away from that corner. “You don’t need to see that.”
I held her tight, feeling the rising emotions I could never fight off. She cried so much that she suddenly struggled to breathe. I cupped her face and pulled her back from me. Her cheeks were mottled and her skin was turning white from too little air. “Breathe, baby,” I said. Panic swelled inside me, but I kept it under control as Bonnie started trying to take deep breaths.
It took minutes for her to calm enough for her breathing to return to what now passed as normal.
“You okay?” I asked. Bonnie nodded. Her eyes were dull with exhaustion. “Come to bed.” I made sure the chair was close enough to the bed so that her IV and oxygen would be okay, then I picked her up. Her arms draped weakly around my neck. I paused, just drinking in her face. How pretty she was. Bonnie turned her face to me and gave me a small smile. She killed me then. Killed me with one simple smile.
Leaning in, I kissed her, lingering as long as I could before she needed to breathe. When I pulled back, I saw her lips tremble. “I got you,” I said, hoping she knew that I meant more than just right now.
I laid Bonnie down on the bed and crawled beside her. She was wearing leggings and a sweater, and her hair was in a plait down her back. She couldn’t have looked more beautiful if she tried.
I wanted to say something as her brown eyes stared into mine. But I didn’t know what to say. My heart beat at a million miles an hour. Then she whispered, “Thank you.”
Bonnie moved her tired arm to my chest and shuffled closer to me. “You . . . saved him.” My eyes closed. “No,” she said, more firmly than I’d heard her speak in a while. I opened my eyes. Her hand lifted to my cheek. “I love to see your eyes.”
“Bonnie.” I shook my head. “Is he okay?”
Bonnie’s expression changed. She stared over my shoulder. “East is bipolar.” I stopped breathing, everything stilling. My lips parted, and Bonnie continued. “He has always found life . . . hard.” But . . . he’d been better lately.”