Red Water: A Novel

by Kristen Mae

  “Malory.” Her eyes are on me, and I have a vague idea of what she sees, because I saw it myself only moments ago in the bathroom mirror. I do not look well. My illness lingers, but it’s more than that—my eyes are sunken and vacant, my forehead tight with the strain of knowing that everything in my life is wrong but that I am powerless to undo it. My throat seizes every few minutes like I’m going to vomit. I keep hearing the sickening crack of Garrett’s knuckles hitting the wall, feeling the warm blood trickle down the side of my face as I stifled my gag reflex and tried desperately to find the air. That choking feeling is still with me.

  I cannot breathe.

  Yet I’ve been obsessively checking my phone for a message from him. Even now I become wet with ecstasy thinking of that first time he set me up on the counter and made me beg him to put his fingers inside me. I think of that day on the riverbank, too, my face smashed into the mud, how even then I’d known it was not a game, but I’d gone ahead and liked it anyway.

  I’m a very sick person.

  Yarvik is still watching me. “What will you play for me today, Malory?”

  I stare blankly at her, daring her to pry. I’m not even sure why I’m here. I almost stayed in bed this morning, my back turned to Daphne as she tinkered about the room getting ready for class. I skipped my morning practice with Bethany, too—didn’t even message her. I think I’m here now because it’s easier than explaining myself. Or maybe because staying in bed would be a step closer to falling apart completely. My mom used to spend an awful lot of time in bed.

  “Why don’t you play me your audition, and we’ll take it from there.” Yarvik leans back in her chair and smiles encouragingly.

  So I play, using the same robotic movements that seem to take over every time I pick up the bow lately. I can’t make the notes sing anymore. I trip over my fingers when I get to the tricky parts, and then I begin shaking. I can’t pull myself together. I want to stop, but I force myself to bumble and lurch through the whole miserable movement, and Yarvik lets me, her face a mask as she watches me struggle.

  When it’s over, I can’t even look at her. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I say, staring down at my cello strings.

  She’s quiet for a moment, and when she speaks, her voice is clear and matter-of-fact. “You obviously do not want to tell me what is happening to you, Malory, and as you are an adult, I cannot force you to talk about it. So I will try another tack: Have you tried putting whatever is going on with you into your playing?”

  I chew my cheek for a long time before answering her. I think of how I got angry and attacked my instrument downtown, how I earned so much money, and what Garrett thought about that. “Maybe sometimes. When I improvise.”

  “You improvise? I didn’t realize. Would you be willing to show me?”

  Do not let other people hear you play that way. I want it to be just for me.

  But it’s not as if Garrett will show up to my lesson, right? “I can try.” I take a deep breath, trying to recall that feeling I had downtown, that feeling I got when I played for Garrett, when the fire welled up inside and took over. I liked that feeling—it wasn’t meant to be sexual, and it isn’t fair that Garrett has tarnished it and perverted it and made it something that is just for him. And yet…I want it to be only for him. I like that he wants to possess me, or at least, to possess that part of me. It means I’m not completely nothing after all.

  Yarvik nods and rests her hands against the shoulder of her cello. “Please.”

  This time it only takes me closing my eyes, touching the hairs of my bow to the string, and soon I’m playing just as I played downtown, just as I played for Garrett in the music room the day he threw me against the piano. I can still feel the cold ivory digging into my forearms, can still hear the dissonance of the tinkling keys as I fell into them. God, what a sick, sick song that was. I can play it, in a way—I can let the memory of that biting pain course through my fingers and into my cello, an unsettling facsimile of that music: inadvertent, unharmonious. But it’s mine now. The pain started with Garrett, it started as his, but now I’ve transformed it and made it my own. And he might claim me as his private performer, and maybe I am, but music, even if I were willing to surrender it, is not something that can be taken. I rip a dissonant seventh chord from my cello, Fuck you, Garrett, and then Yarvik stops me. She’s looking at me sternly, eyes narrowed, and she says, “Well. You’re very, very angry, aren’t you?”

  “Is that how it sounds to you? Like…anger?” My face heats. I’m relieved she didn’t see what Garrett saw, what he said everyone saw, but this music that erupts from me is so much more than anger; it is something like indignation. Pride, even.

  She does not reply.

  I chew my cheek some more. You just belch out a bunch of random notes that make no sense and you think you’re making music? I wonder if she thinks what I just did was anything remotely like music. Or did she hear someone ripping at her cello strings—a pathetic, cacophonic racket?

  Finally she says, “So, do you think you could put…whatever that was…into the Elgar?”

  So she thought it was music. I take a deep breath and nod, and though part of me is reluctant, I almost love the idea of this tiny betrayal. My back straightens, and when I set my bow on the string, my hand is shaking again. I breathe several long breaths, filling my lungs and letting my shoulders drop with each exhale. My mind teems with the rich, jarring, percussive notes I’ve ripped from my cello in those moments I lost myself downtown and with Garrett.

  And yet it is not anger or indignation or pride that comes out as I begin to play those sad opening strains. It is hopelessness. I submerge myself beneath the notes, stunned by my rapid shift in mood but powerless to stop it, until soon I feel as though I am the music, like all I have to do is sing it in my mind and it will rush out. Then the hopelessness falls away, and the music turns into memories. I can almost hear the soft chords rising from the orchestra in support as I remember…

  My mother. I think suddenly of her heart-shaped face, her kind eyes. She had blue eyes like mine, pretty white teeth and a broad smile that, when she laughed, made everyone in the room want to smile and laugh with her. My eyes burn, but I grit my teeth, barely stopping the tears from falling, forcing myself to keep on. I close my eyes and try to hold onto a picture of my mother at her most beautiful: when she was happy, before she gave up and let my father’s lies consume her.

  But in my mind, her smile falters. She wilted like a sick plant under my father’s whispers, grew sallow and hunched and sad. She was drained of vitality long before she took her own life, though we didn’t know—how could we? In the cruel weeks before she did it, Liza and I thought she was coming back around to herself when she told our father to fuck off, that he couldn’t tell her what to do. He slapped her for it, and we crouched on the floor of the kitchen with her, proud and hissing and ready to fight. He stormed out that night.

  Her smile then had been victorious, and I can see it clearly now as my bow runs across the strings, my cello singing out the image of her proud shoulders as she peeled herself from the floor. We thought she was finally going to make him leave for good. But he came back, and a week later I was stammering into the phone for someone to please send an ambulance.

  How do you sing that? How do you play that? I exhale and dig my bow into the string, tear the notes from my instrument, reset the bow and tear the next, the next, the next, and then the chords turn and roll and become an elegy, and now I’m singing my mother’s death. Elgar, you wrote my mother’s death, how did you know?

  I keep playing, flipping through every memory of my mother that I have, especially the parts where I should have done something, where I could have fixed it. I could have saved her. I sing the entire movement this way, and I understand now that the emotion I keep trying to identify isn’t pride or incredulity or indignation or even hopelessness, no, not even that. It’s regret. Regret that I didn’t save her. I finish the final note and let my bow come to r
est on my knee. I’m panting like I’ve just finished one of Garrett’s sprints, and Yarvik is crying with her face buried in her hands.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Garrett is sitting in the hallway by my door when I arrive home from orchestra rehearsal that night. His blue eyes are wide but expressionless; his mouth, full and relaxed. He almost looks like a child, with that beautiful devil face.

  I’m not surprised that he’s here—we both know I belong to him.

  He stands and brushes the creases from his pants. “Do you always bring your cello back to the dorm with you?”

  “I felt like practicing here tonight.”

  “It doesn’t bother your neighbors?”

  “I don’t give a fuck who it bothers.”

  I think I see a flash of anger cross his eyes, but it disappears before I can be sure, and now his face is smooth again. “Last night,” he says, dropping his eyes, shoving his hands in his pockets, “what I did…it was wrong. I was wrong.”

  He lifts his eyes to me, and his face is wrought with contrition. Against my better judgment, I soften.

  “Will you come home with me?”

  My stomach twists. With dread. With desire. “I shouldn’t,” I say.

  “Then don’t. I just wanted to say sorry.”

  But it is clear in the way he fixes his eyes on me, in the way he makes no move to leave: he knows I will go. He knows he can shrug and be indifferent and that I will be the one to cave. I exhale slowly as the last bit of fight—if there ever was any—goes out of me. “Let me pack a few things.”

  “Bring your cello.”

  That night he broils a steak and serves it with spinach salad, wine, and strawberries. I’m wearing a sweater, but I’m still freezing, and by some insane trick of the imagination, I feel like it’s my first time at his house again—like everything is new. I notice, as if I’ve never noticed it before, how remarkably dust-free Garrett’s home is. I can’t seem to shake the feeling that this is a revelation.

  “Shower with me,” he says after the dishes are done, and I think, this is new, he wants me in his shower, his private place, and my poor, eager heart stutters and dances in my chest like the village idiot. I hear the echo of Garrett’s fist hitting the cinder block behind my head—I hear it often—but his efforts at closeness make the memory seem exaggerated, blown out of proportion. I must have overreacted.

  In the shower, he kisses me under the running water, and though I’m sure my mouth tastes like garlic and wine, somehow, unbelievably, his still tastes of wintergreen. It makes me afraid to breathe. I lather his statuesque body with soap, reveling in the privilege: I am the girl who gets to trace the topography of his perfect, rippled muscles. I wash his penis for a long time, staring into his blue eyes and watching his mouth twitch while he tries to remain stoic. He stops me before he comes—I think he doesn’t want me to see his face when it happens.

  He washes me too, then, massaging my back and breasts, lathering the hair between my legs but lingering only long enough to leave me throbbing with desire. I’m freezing when we get out, every inch of me covered in goose bumps, and though I want his hands on me, my teeth are chattering—I want to dress or at least get under the covers to escape the cold. But he takes my hand, gently, as I reach for my sweatshirt. “I want you to stay undressed,” he says, “and play for me.”

  I remember last time I played for him, how my cello sent thrilling vibrations up my thighs, how I gasped and came, how he punished me by ramming me into the practice room piano. My nipples have gone hard, though this time I don’t know if it’s from the temperature in Garrett’s house or if it’s because I am a sick little slut who gets off on being angry-fucked.

  I roll my cello case from the living room to Garrett’s bedroom and unsnap the latches, then sit in a wooden chair in the corner of the room. Goose bumps tighten the skin of my arms and legs. Garrett is watching me with that same little half-smile I’ve grown used to, his dimple a shadow in his cheek: Garrett, settled on his bed, my riveted audience of one.

  I have not played the Elgar for him before, but after today’s lesson, I think I can do it. I close my eyes and let my memories of my mother take over the way I did when I played for Yarvik, and though I know instinctively that I should not allow Garrett access to this sorrow, I also think that maybe my playing will impress him. I want him to be impressed by me. The opening notes echo against the walls of the room, filling it so completely that, with my eyes closed, I almost forget where I am. Soon I am impervious to the cold, putting every last shred of myself into the music—letting myself sink beneath the melancholy strains while memories of my mother and all the attendant regrets sweep me away, just like before.

  When I finish the movement, I open my eyes, terrified to look up and see the expression on Garrett’s face. Terrified he’ll be bored by me. But then I see his feet—he has moved from the bed to stand beside me.

  I raise my face to his and am a little surprised to see that he is panting, his eyes alight with some emotion I can’t identify. At first I think I’ve angered him again, but his eyes are so shiny I could almost believe he’s about to cry. He takes a step closer to me, his breath thick and heavy and labored, and now I understand that I have captured him—I’ve finally done something worthy of his attention. Oh yes, I’ve done well. He is erect, openly wanting me.

  I lay my bow in my lap and, with my cello still between my legs, take hold of Garrett’s penis and draw him closer, keeping my eyes on him as I take him in my mouth. He closes his eyes and loses himself in my sucking, and I feel a sudden rush of power at having him submit to me. This is forgiveness, what I am doing, because I denied him, made him punch a wall. I hurt him. And now, sucking him so greedily, swallowing easily when he finally lets go, I am conveying to him that I understand his frustration. It is me telling him You were right, this really isn’t so difficult, why the fuck do I have to make everything so difficult?

  The rest of the night, Garrett reads sports news on his iPad while I lie there beside him trying to study, wishing he would at least ask me to get myself off for him.

  Maybe I should have begged.

  * * *

  Before dawn the next morning, Garrett runs me harder than ever, dismissing me afterward as though he can hardly wait to get rid of me. I’m not upset—I know his indifference doesn’t mean he’s done with me. I’m his now. It isn’t like he can just walk away.

  I’m on time to meet Bethany at the practice rooms where she tells me she’s missed me and asks where I’ve been. I tell her honestly that I have been very sick, but I feel better now.

  “Oh,” she says. “I was wondering about those purple circles under your eyes. Now I get it.”

  Gee, thanks.

  In Twentieth-Century Europe, Rome grabs the seat next to mine, takes one look at me, and his jaw drops. He shakes his head.

  I tell him, “Save it, Rome.”

  “You can’t make me stop caring.”

  As always, I take more notes than he does. I write and write, and with my free hand I push and push and push my cuticles until my middle finger starts to bleed, but I don’t realize what I’ve done to myself until I smear a bit of blood on the paper. I cover it with my arm so Rome won’t see.

  That evening when I walk into Garrett’s place, he grabs me around the waist and kisses me for ages, intoxicating me with his minty mouth and strong hands, touching me and pulling at me like he loves me. I think it’s because of how I played last night; I think I’ve finally stirred something in him. Before dinner, he makes love to me on the couch; and after dinner, in his room, I am on top—I ride him, slow and controlled, grabbing my breasts and biting my lip at him and asking him how he likes my pussy, and he grits his teeth against the shudders when they overtake him and he finally comes.

  I ease myself off him, my face placid, but on the inside I’m thinking, How do you like me now, Garrett?

  * * *

  I practice at Garrett’s house every night now, naked. I’m like an a
rt fixture, my metronome ticking along as I fly up and down scales, pour over my etudes, and drill the runs in the Elgar.

  He stops me periodically, sometimes to wrench the cello from my hands so he can order me to finger myself, and sometimes because he wants me to suck him. I never say no. We are each other’s possession. We belong to one another. “I’m always wet for you,” I tell him. “Check anytime you want.”

  And he does, frequently. We are feral with lust, inseparable. He even comes downtown with me when I play Thursday night, and when he watches me I know he’s pretending I’m naked and so I lick my lips at him. He shakes his head at me—Not here in front of all these people, you little whore. I love that I can read his mind.

  Later, as we’re finishing dinner, he makes me scoot my chair out from the table, lift my skirt and finger myself for him, tell him what a dirty slut I am. I’m better at it now, making myself come while he watches.

  “Worthless little cunt,” he tells me as I’m orgasming, and I cry at his cruel words, but then he’s up and out of his chair, kissing me and sliding his fingers deep into me, thumbing my still-throbbing clitoris and making me come a second time, whispering again and again how sad it is that such a beautiful girl could be such a dirty, worthless whore, hissing that I’ll do whatever he asks no matter how fucked up it is, won’t I? And I say yes, yes, yes because it’s the truth. For some reason, the thought dries up my tears.

  That night, he sleeps with his arms wrapped tight around me, and sometime in the early morning he wakes me by spreading my legs and pressing himself into me. He is breathing hard and fast. I pull him close and wrap my legs around him, thrust my hips at him, appreciative of this small token of tenderness—that his desire for me was powerful enough to rouse him from sleep.