Beyond the Break

by Kristen Mae

  I sighed. “Everything in Italy is weird.”

  She slumped where she stood, looking withered and cold with little droplets of water clinging to her pale, goosebump-covered skin. Her hair was matted against her cheeks, and her nipples had shriveled from the cold. “How will we ever go back?” she asked sadly.

  I patted her dry and gave her a toothbrush to scrub the vomit out of her mouth.

  “You’re so nice,” she slurred between spits.

  It was drunk girl talk, I knew, but I smiled. “You’re nice, too.”

  I tucked her into bed and snuggled against her, spooning her naked back with my clothes still on. My heart ached for our ruined night, but I hung onto her sweet words, turned honest with drunkenness, as if they were the sex we would’ve had.

  “Hazel, my Hazel.” She sighed into the dark and sank her body against mine, molding herself to me like she wanted to remove every last molecule of air between us. “How did this happen? It was going to be a bit of fun. I didn’t expect to love you like this, you know?” Her words sliced me in half. My hand was in a tight fist, quaking at her chest. She picked it up and ran her soft lips across my knuckles. “But you were a surprise, Hazel. Does Oren know what a delicious surprise you are? I bet he doesn’t.” Her words blurred together so I could barely make out what she was saying. “You should show him, Hazel. You should show him what you’re really like.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  “Hey Claire, how’re you doing this morning?” Raymond said, his deep baritone voice easily reaching me from the back of the church. “You were pretty smashed last night.”

  My students rifled through their music on the makeshift stage. I sat down in the front pew with my back to Raymond and Claire, straining to hear Claire’s response.

  “Evidently, I barfed it all up,” Claire said. “I don’t feel hung over, but if I’m being totally honest, I might still be a little inebriated.”

  “I didn’t expect to love you like this.” But she’d been drunk, so it didn’t count.

  Raymond snickered. “Well, good thing not much brain power is required to observe a dress rehearsal.”

  “Yes, thank goodness,” Claire said, laughing too.

  Iris left her spot on the risers and approached me with her viola, and I straightened in the pew and smiled at her, grateful for the distraction. I had softened on her over the week, and in turn, she had given up a little more of her act. Without saying anything, we’d begun to understand each other. “What’s up?” I said.

  “Do you have an extra bow I could borrow? Mine isn’t tightening.”

  I took the bow from her and tried to wind the screw. The hair remained slack. “You don’t need another bow. You just stripped the screw on one side.” I detached the frog from the stick and turned the screw around so the fresh side was facing into the stick and would catch when she wound the hair tight. I had a flash of that morning back in May, the day of my audition, when I’d sabotaged a man’s violin. How that day had been like a hinge in my life, a fulcrum of change, swinging some doors shut and opening others. I held the bow out to Iris. “See?”

  She smiled. “That’s amazing!”

  “Don’t forget that trick.” I winked at her. “It’s so simple, but it always makes people think I’m a genius.”

  “You are!” She paused like she wanted to say something else, like words were working at her but she couldn’t get them out. I knew that feeling well.

  “You okay?”

  She checked over her shoulder as if to see if anyone was listening to our conversation and said in a low voice: “He came to the bar last night. After you left. To talk to me.”

  A swath of rage rushed over me like a brush fire. “What did he say? What did he do? Did he touch you?”

  She shook her head and cast her eyes down at the floor. “No! No…there were a lot of people around. I was with the other girls and they sort of blocked him. They knew he was bad news.”

  I put a hand on her arm, pulled it back when I saw I was trembling. “Are you sure you’re okay to play tonight?”

  She sighed. “I feel like I should be really depressed or something, but it makes me want to play more. Is that weird? Is something wrong with me?”

  “Oh, Iris, of course not. You would not believe the crazy things I’ve done to cope with my own stuff.” I imagined I felt Claire’s eyes on me from the back of the church, but I was too afraid to turn around.

  She took a deep breath and looked toward the risers where the rest of her group sat tuning their instruments.

  “And hey,” I said, “I am sorry for the times I was gruff. I see myself in you, so I feel like I have some responsibility for you or something. That’s not fair to you.”

  She smiled at me, and I pursed my lips and nodded.

  “Now go knock ’em dead.”

  After the morning dress rehearsal, Claire and I went back to her place for a lunch of fruit and cheese. Then she pulled out her cello, and I stretched out on the couch to watch her play.

  I’d always thought the cello had a vaguely sexual quality to it, especially when played by a woman, because of how it was held between the knees. But now, having Claire all to myself while she ripped the sound from her instrument, her arm muscles flexing with the effort of making the cello sing, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to look at a cello again without losing my mind with lust.

  She played piece after piece, lost in a sound-world of her own creation, until I finally took her cello from her and replaced it with my body. She startled as if I’d awoken her from some disturbing dream, and even after she dragged me to the bedroom and wrapped herself up in me, her breath sounded tortured and her hands felt hungrier but less sure than before. She kept pulling away from me and examining my face, then diving back in to her kissing, licking, sucking. Other than her thick exhalations that sounded like whispers, she’d gone as quiet as the night I’d hit her.

  All the student groups performed well at the concert that night, drawing a sizable crowd and long applause. In the halls of the church behind the pulpit, as everyone packed up their instruments, I could hear the goodbye in the air even though no one was actually saying the word. It was a particular kind of sound, a palpable, bittersweet shift in the atmosphere that I remembered well from past festivals, the shuffling of music, zipping of instrument cases, hurrying of voices. Now was the time to say all the things that hadn’t yet been said. I thought of Claire and knew I couldn’t tell her everything I needed to in the two nights we had left. A lifetime would not have been enough.

  Our whole festival group celebrated at a different bar from the previous night, not as clean and trendy, but still cool. I got the feeling from the way the girls clumped protectively around Iris that the change in location had something to do with her run-in with the man who’d raped her. I wondered if she’d confided in one of them, if she’d managed to allow herself to be that vulnerable. She was letting loose now, talking and laughing and sipping a clear drink that probably wasn’t water, judging by how she tottered on her heels. My shoulders tensed up just watching her.

  I sat with the other faculty members in the center of the large room. Lanterns were strung up across its length, crisscrossing from one corner to the other and casting a dim, romantic glow over the wooden tables and people. The salmon-pink walls were dirty, and though seedier than what we were used to, the building had ample indoor space for dining and dancing. An upright piano stood against one wall, and there Paolo had taken a seat and was taking requests from other bar patrons, playing almost loudly enough to drown out the music blaring through the speakers overhead. An employee finally turned down the piped-in music and let Paolo have the floor to himself. Greg, the grad student from my first group, brought out his violin, and together he and Paolo launched into a bizarre pseudo-classical version of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog.” Some of the other students jumped up to gyrate their hips, Elvis-style. Ryan was sitting with another student over by the back wall, sipping a beer and laughing shyly at his fello
w musicians.

  Raymond, Katrina, and Frank half-watched the mirthful scene while reminiscing idly about the last few weeks. Claire sipped carbonated water beside me and listened to the other three with a wistful little smile on her face that made her look both content and melancholy. Under the table, I put my hand on her knee, a gesture I knew she would not mistake for a sexual advance; she would understand that I was just checking in.

  She smiled at me. “I’m fine. I am tired, though.”

  As Paolo began to bang out Michael Jackson hits, Katrina, Frank, and a few students pushed some tables aside to make more room for dancing. The barmaids kept the alcohol flowing, and Raymond downed a couple of drinks while he sat there with us, but Claire only shook her head each time drinks were offered. I took my time nursing a mojito and trying to think of something to say that could be said in front Raymond. There was nothing. He eventually got bored with our silence and left us sitting by ourselves so he could join the others with his weird, bird-like dance moves.

  I tried to make myself enjoy the festivities, but all I could think of was getting Claire home where we could be alone. I didn’t expect to love you like this, she’d said, and now I wasn’t even sure she remembered she’d said it. My pulse quickened. Two nights. It was a blip of time, impossible. We’d been planning to spend the following day in Cinque Terre, a cliffside town on the sea, but I was already hoping to scrap our plans in favor of staying in bed. I wanted to make her moan in as many pitches as possible and record every one of them in my memory, wanted to pay closer attention to the feel of her skin under my hands, record that too. And the taste of her mouth. The taste of all of her. I hadn’t been working hard enough to memorize her.

  When I felt Claire’s hand on my forearm, I realized I’d been bouncing my leg impatiently and chewing my lip. “Me too,” she said, having to almost yell over the raucous music. “Five more minutes, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I looked up at the crowd, trying to pull myself out of my head. Iris and her friends had joined the throng of people at the center of the room and were jumping up and down in time to a warped arrangement of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Iris looked happy and carefree, waving her hands in the air, sloshing her drink over the sides of her glass.

  Suddenly her smile melted away. She marched to the bar, slammed her drink down, and stormed out. Her friends were dancing and didn’t see. Claire and I glanced at each other and leapt up out of our chairs at the same time. I skirted the table and pushed my way through the cramped walkway with Claire following close behind.

  When I next glimpsed Iris through a crowd of new arrivals, she was waving her arms and shouting something at a man with long, slicked-back hair. Him. The hairs on the back of my neck rose like a wolf’s hackles. I tried to shove my way through, but there were too many people and they were all too drunk to notice or care that I wanted to get by.

  Then Iris disappeared, and my heart went wild with panic. I gave one drunk guy an elbow to the ribs and managed to wedge myself deeper into the crowd. What the hell was she doing? The guy I’d elbowed yelled something at me that I couldn’t understand, but I ignored him and pushed more insistently against the flow of people. I emerged onto the cobblestone street in time to see Iris disappear around the corner with him.

  “Iris!” She was too far away to hear. I sprinted after them and peeked down the alley they’d taken.

  The street was deserted. I could see them, but barely, a few apartments down and shrouded in shadow. Iris’s arms were flying like she was attacking him, and he had his hands up as if in defense. For a second I thought she might be okay, that I could just walk up and pull her out of there, but as my eyes adjusted to the low light, I understood; he was laughing at her. Trey’s scathing laughter flashed in my memory and my spine turned to ice. Suddenly I could smell the soil in the cracks of the cobblestones, that muddy tang that always sent me right back to the woods.

  There was a muffled shriek as the man slapped down Iris’s arms with one hand and grabbed her around the neck with the other. She clawed at his face and forearms, kicked his shins, but he was too strong, and with his hands around her neck she was waning fast. She clawed at him once more, got her fingers around a lock of his hair, and yanked. He snarled in pain and slammed her into the wall, her head cracking sickly against the stucco before she sank to the ground. Fuck.

  I felt Claire at my back. She put her hand on my arm and I heard her inhale like she was preparing to speak, but I held up a finger to silence her. My nerves coiled like cobras.

  The man grabbed Iris around her neck again and lifted her as if she were a rag doll, growling something at her in Italian. She was still conscious, but fighting less than before, obviously dazed by the blow to her head.

  I crept toward them, snatching up a potted plant from the stoop of one of the inhabited buildings. The clay felt cool and hard and deadly in my hands. He sank further into the shadows with her, slipping into an alcove out of sight.

  Claire was still at my side, her breath coming in tiny wheezes. I held up my finger at her again and moved forward, leaving her behind.

  Iris’s grunting muffled my rapid approach. The man had her pinned facing away from him with her chest and face smashed against the wall as he wrestled her pants down. She still struggled against him, elbowing him in the stomach and throwing her head back trying to head-butt him. Her blows landed weakly, if at all.

  I took one long step to close the gap between us, lifting the flower pot high in the air, and then smashed the edge of it down on the back of the man’s skull. The pot cracked but held together. He stumbled backward, stunned, touching the spot where I’d hit him and turning to see where he should direct his fury.

  Iris’s knees buckled and she fell gasping to the ground, struggling to pull her pants back up. The man was still in mid-turn, but before he could focus on me I slammed the pot into his face. The pot broke this time, and black soil erupted over my hands and rained down on him as he dropped to the cobblestone street like a bag of flour.

  I heard Trey’s voice then, echoing off the cold, earthen buildings as if he’d come back from the dead and was screeching at me from the other end of the alley—bitch cunt I’ll fucking kill you fucking cunt bitch. Incapacitation would not suffice. I grabbed the largest fragment from the shattered pot and, with both hands, brought it crashing down into his face. An image of Trey’s eyeless, gushing sockets flashed through my mind, so vivid I had to shake it away before I could see clearly again. The man’s body jerked. Blood spurted from his nostrils and the gash in his now-deformed nose. No. Still not enough. I raised my hands to hit him again, readied myself to slam the plate down, but from behind me I heard Claire’s tiny, scared voice: “Hazel, please.” I paused with the piece of ceramic still clutched overhead, surging with the need to hit him one final time, to shatter his face, to crush his nose all the way into his brain and make it so he could never hurt anyone ever again.

  “Hazel.”

  The deadly calm rushed out of me then, and my body was wracked by shivers so forceful I thought I could hear my bones clatter against each other. I held on to Claire’s voice like it was a delicate rope tethering me to sanity. Below me, blood poured from the man’s face, his body still. Dead? Maybe he was. Maybe I was okay with that. I dropped the piece of broken pot, brushed my hands on my skirt, and turned to Iris and Claire, who were huddled together gawking at me.

  I took a deep breath to steady myself, and when I spoke, my voice sounded as calm and sensible as if we were debating taking leave of a dinner party: “We should probably go.”

  THIRTY

  “I wanted to confront him. I didn’t think he would do something out in the open like that.”

  Iris was perched on the edge of the couch in my apartment, her whole body trembling and tears painting black mascara rivers down her face. Claire sat beside her, her face drawn and pale. She’d gotten Iris some ibuprofen and a glass of water but hadn’t spoken a word since we left the alley.

>   I stood at the sink watching the water rush over my shaking, soil-blackened hands. “You weren’t out in the open, Iris. He could have really hurt you. He could’ve—” A car horn beeped in the street below, and I almost jumped out of my skin.

  Iris shivered. “I know. I’m stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid.” I turned my back to them and scrubbed the last of the potting soil from under my fingernails. A trail of blood from a deep gash on my palm snaked down the stainless steel drain. I didn’t even remember being cut. “And it honestly doesn’t matter where you were, or what you thought or didn’t think, or said or didn’t say. You didn’t invite him to rape you. He’s the one to blame, not you.”

  “He didn’t…I mean…” She sniffled and rubbed her eyes. “I mean, Mrs. Duval, you got him before he—”

  “Good.” I dried my trembling hands on a towel. “And let’s maybe not talk about that again, the part where I showed up. Unless you want to go to the police?” I edged my eyes at her. My insides had been chattering like a pair of wind-up teeth since I shut the door to my apartment. My ears hurt from straining for the sound of police boots creeping stealthily up the stairs. Had I really killed that man? Panic enveloped me like a noxious fog.

  “No,” she said without hesitation, and my shoulders sagged with relief. “I’m okay now. I mean, I’ll be okay.” But even as she said it, she clenched and unclenched her fists on top of her shaking knees.

  Claire’s face was blank—I couldn’t read her. Did she think I was unstable? She’d seen me totally lose it on that man in the alley, and there had been terror in her voice when she begged me to stop. She met my eyes and looked away.

  I swallowed over a tightness in my throat and went to the bedroom to grab a pillow and blanket. I laid them down on the end of the couch for Iris, who gratefully accepted the offer to stretch out and give up on the day. Claire flicked the blanket over Iris’s body and tucked it around her chin the way a mother would tuck in a child. Iris smeared her mascara with her dirty index fingers and shrank further under the blanket, letting out an exhausted sigh.