by Kristen Mae
Standing at the near-empty sink in my bra and underwear, I wash the remaining bowl and pan and set them in the drying rack.
Still nothing from Garrett. I pull a dishtowel from the drawer and dry all the dishes, put them away.
Not all.
There is one thing left on the counter: a knife, with a seductive, shining blade nearly the length of my forearm. I pick it up and hold it like a torch in my right hand, test how dangerous it can make me feel. See if it can tell me anything about who I am. That night with the boxing, the night Garrett choked me with his dick and grabbed my head and forced me to swallow his cum—that’s the night he told me who he was.
And I refused to listen.
“Watch,” I say, and I lay the knife’s edge across my wrist and press down, but not hard enough to draw blood. Am I as brave as my mother? I turn my eyes up to Garrett’s face.
His nostrils are flaring the same way they do when he watches me get myself off—he’s turned on by this. My eyes fill with hate but he holds my gaze, dares me to carry on with whatever game I think I’m playing, and after a while my hatred seeps away, replaced with resignation. I put the knife away in the drawer.
I’m supposed to be nervous about my audition tomorrow, but instead, here I am floating through the kitchen, floating over Garrett while he strips and fucks me, and that’s my tragic little shell down there with her face buried in a pillow, Superman whispering a reassuring mantra at her ear. Whispering You like it don’t you, you like being my fuck toy… Now more than ever his breath smells of wintergreen: cool and clean and refreshing.
* * *
I’m so chill about this audition I think I might actually be intimidating the other cellists who have yet to play. They’re all wide-eyed and fidgety; I am extraordinarily relaxed.
And I’m next. I’m about to play, about to have my final chance to prove that I’m good, or at least as good as a few believed I was. I guess I won’t get to know the end result, but nobody ever really does, do they? Because there is no end, ever, to anything. You’re either like this forever, in agony, or you’re fucking dead and it doesn’t matter anyway. And death is forever, too.
We might as well go in swinging and whatever happens, happens.
The door is opening, and someone is coming out of the room, one of the upperclassmen. He gives me a nod and a tight smile. He did great, actually—I heard him through the door—and I tell him so. His smile widens and he thanks me as I walk through the open door.
I don’t know what I expected—an audition panel, maybe, several judges in a lineup with pencils in hand, ready to jot notes about my playing. But it’s just one woman and a video camera on a tripod. She’s not taking notes at all. She might not even be a musician.
Whatever.
She greets me with a “Hello, how are you doing today?” and shakes my hand, and then I sit in the chair in the middle of the room. It’s the strangest thing, how light I feel, as if the Earth has lost some of its gravity. I’ve been waiting all day for anxiety to begin its squeeze on my heart because, whether my future in this body plays out or not, this was supposed to be my Big Moment to shine. But…nothing. I’m so relaxed I think I might actually float away.
I place my cello’s endpin into the rubber stopper on the floor and check the pitch of each string. The woman, who has told me her name but I’ve already forgotten it, reminds me to play my audition in the order posted on the flyer outside the room—Bach, Concerto, Orchestral Excerpts—and then asks me to state my name and school.
“Malory Shoemaker,” I say, looking into the camera’s round black eye. “Florida East Coast University.”
I open with the Bach, the prelude to the sixth suite, and immediately lose myself in the notes. The room has a wooden floor, a high ceiling, and only a few hard chairs as furniture, so every note echoes beautifully, as if I’m performing in a bathroom. I’m not using sheet music, but after I’ve played through what I know is two pages, the woman waves a hand at me to stop. “Next, please.” Her voice is free from inflection, neutral, probably so as not to give candidates any indication as to how well they’re doing.
I nod, and after a preparatory inhale—not from nerves but because it’s necessary with the Elgar—I begin. My thoughts go straight to my mother now, to her high, round cheekbones when she smiled, her pearl-white teeth, and then to the sadness that overcame her and carried her away. I wonder if she felt truly sad, a crying, desolate, hopeless kind of sad, or if she felt more the way I do: that ending it was simply inevitable, an obvious choice when compared with the alternative of living with herself.
It’s harder to sing her death now, because now I just don’t miss her the way I did before. I don’t know what will come after, but I have a sweet glimmer of hope that I might get to see her, to tell her that I am sorry for not seeing what was right in front of me. That I am sorry for being so happy when I thought she was getting better. That I am sorry I made my father so angry. I failed her, I failed Liza, and I confirmed what my father had been telling me all along: that I am a stupid, gullible fool—weak. Impotent. And since she died, everything I’ve done, every achievement, every A, every scholarship, has been a vain effort to prove him wrong. And I failed at that, too.
Today, I am not singing my mother’s death. I’m singing my own.
* * *
Okay, now I’m nervous. I just played the best audition of my life and I sort of want to know if I won the fellowship to Aspen, but…that isn’t the plan. I mean, it was the plan before, but not now.
Instead I think of that knife in Garrett’s kitchen drawer, how sharp and shiny it is, and I think of the image I’ve been quietly painting in my head all this time, the one where I follow the path my mother laid, down into the red water. It’s fitting, isn’t it, for me to go that way? We’ll have come full circle, she and I.
I’ll write a letter to Liza. Poor Liza. From the day I saw our mother in that bathtub full of blood, I thought of Liza as my one good reason not to succumb. But Liza doesn’t need me—she’s strong. She’s smart. She was the first to recognize what my father was, the first to distrust him. I can remember my mother playfully nudging her—Liza, don’t be disrespectful to your father, he’s just pretending—when Liza would yell at him because he was teasing the dog by dangling a piece of steak over his snout. And when she told me the things she heard him whispering to our mother in the dark, I didn’t believe her. Didn’t until he started whispering those things to me too, but me, weak as I was, I couldn’t save my mother from him, any more than I could save myself. You’re book smart, but you have no common sense, Malory. With a body like yours, you’re destined to be a whore. And the one time I came unfrozen: If you tell, you will regret it. It’s easier to see truth in retrospect, but Liza saw it from the beginning. None of this is her fault. So I’ll write her a nice letter to make sure she understands that she is blameless.
Still. I’m nervous now, way more than I was at the audition. It’s like, now that it’s over, the Earth got all its gravity back and then some. I’d like to know how it went, how I compared. I’d like to know if I got the fellowship. That would be nice, to know.
Chapter Thirty-Five
There he is, standing in front of the dorm with his friends like always, with that ridiculous hat turned backward and his clothes—Why do you want to look like a thug, Rome? I don’t get it. Pull your fucking pants up. But he’s a good guy, the best kind of guy, and he leaves his friends and comes to me, grinning, and says “Knock knock.”
And I play along and pull my cello to a stop just a few feet in front of him. “Who’s there?”
“Bitch.”
“Bitch, who?”
“Betchyer gonna come chill with me up in my room and tell me all about your audition!”
I roll my eyes and laugh. I’m supposed to call Garrett but of course I will go with Rome for a moment—he’s my friend, isn’t he? So I pull my cello into the elevator behind us and drag it all the way to his room, and yes, I tell him about th
e audition, how at ease I felt, not nervous at all, how I played maybe better than I’d ever played. And his smile, his crinkling eyes, Oh, Rome, you sure know how to be happy for someone, don’t you?
He asks me to play my audition for him, tells me he’s jealous, that it’s not fair that he didn’t get to hear me play, and he’s right: that’s not so much to ask. So I unlatch my cello from its case—not my cello, actually, but someone’s cello, because someone is going to love this cello very, very much—and as I begin to play the Elgar, I feel jealous too. It’s not fair how I’m going to lose my cello, not fair that I can’t take it with me.
Why does almost nothing bother me but that? There are people who love me—not very many, but there are a few. They’ll be pissed, and hurt, and maybe even a little depressed. Then they’ll move on…and I? Will be free. For now, though, here, with Rome, with his sweet brown eyes all filled with longing as he watches and listens to me breathe the music in and exhale it out…this feels like something, not freedom exactly, but something softer, like contentment. He’s leaning at me with a posture of devotion—edge of the bed, hand on his knee, arching toward me with his mouth slightly open like he needs to catch more air, like his nostrils aren’t enough. He’s practically crying. Haven’t you heard this before, Rome? Why do you look like you’re about to fall apart?
His emotion is palpable, blasting out from him like a nuclear shock wave, and I feel like it will hit me and I’ll be blown against the back of the chair. I do sit back, actually, and there’s something on my cheek—am I crying? When did that start?
“Malory. Please. Please, I don’t know what to say. How can I help you?”
Geez, Rome, would you stop looking inside my soul like that? “There’s nothing wrong with me,” I say, but my chest spasms as I’m speaking. My body has always been such a fucking snitch.
“I can feel it, Malory. Really. It’s—”
“You can’t feel shit. I’m crying, I know. It’s obvious I’m…struggling.” I pop up out of the chair and shove my cello—the cello, not mine—back into its case, latch it in fast like it’s a bad dream I need to forget.
“No, it’s more than that,” Rome says, and he reaches over to grab my wrist, pulls me to him, presses my arm to his face like before, inhaling my skin with his eyes closed like he’s trying to drink me. I take his hat off and toss it on his desk, then stroke my fingertips through his hair.
“Tell me,” he says in his gentle voice, and though I hesitate, because I really don’t want to go there, I kind of can’t stop myself. Also, it doesn’t matter anymore.
With my arm still pressed against his nose and lips, I say, very soft like a whisper, “I don’t expect you to understand. And I know you’ll disagree, and I think you might even be right that I have a warped image of myself, but you can’t change what’s in my head.” I inhale, let the resolve well up in me. “I…I’m not good enough.”
He makes a sound like he wants to speak, but I talk over him: “Not good enough for anything. Not to be a good cellist, not to succeed at a career, not to be a good daughter, or girlfriend, or wife, or mother, or any of the things I could ever be. And even if you don’t agree with me, it’s how I feel in my bones, Rome, in my gut, in the vacant spot where my heart is supposed to be. And you know what? I am sick of pretending it’s any other way.”
For so long I’ve been pretending like this, feigning indifference to these thoughts, these truths that are right there nibbling at the edges of my consciousness. I am fucking exhausted from trying to stuff these voices down, trying to overcome, trying to be something I’m not.
“It’s every goddamn day,” I say, “all day long, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second, convincing myself I’m enough, I’m enough, I’m enough, but there’s another voice that is so much louder than the first one, and it’s screaming LIAR, LIAR, LIAR.”
Rome opens his mouth to speak but I hold up my hand.
“You know what would be nice? Just a few minutes to stop pretending, for someone else to say it’s okay to believe this about myself, to validate that it’s really true that I am a piece of shit. It would be so fucking nice.”
He’s looking up at me and shaking his head, and his forehead is very wrinkled, his nostrils flared. He thinks I’m insane. And I know I sound insane to him, I really do know. I mean, who gets tired of thinking positive things about themselves? Who doesn’t want to believe they are a decent human being? There is something very, very wrong with me at the core of who I am. That is the truth: I don’t know how to be anything but a nothing.
Rome lets out a whoosh of air, his chest caving in as though my words are a bag of bricks I just flung at his gut. He is sitting back now, pulled away from me, so maybe I’ve gone too far, but that’s okay—it was the right thing to do. Maybe he’ll understand now. Maybe he’ll be the one to explain that I did what I had to do. That it was inevitable.
“Did he—Garrett—did he do this to you?” He’s breathing so hard, his gaze darting all over the place, scanning the room…is this rage? His tongue darts out of his mouth, quick, to wet his lips, and he swallows, hard, audibly. Yes, he’s very angry right now.
“No, Rome,” I say, just as calm as I was in my audition this morning. “I did this to myself.”
He stands up. I step back. He steps toward me, I retreat. My hand reaches for the cello case, fumbles for the handle. Grasps it.
“He…I know it’s something to do with him, Malory. I saw…I saw the bruises. I saw them.” He puts his hands up to his head like he’s looking for his hat, but there’s nothing there. “Fuck, and I did nothing. I did nothing.”
“Stop, Rome.” I don’t want to see him get worked up like this.
“I thought I could…I don’t know, show you that there is a better way to be loved, that it doesn’t have to be his way. I thought—”
“Oh, really, Rome? I was your project?” He was playing games, too—just like Garrett. And suddenly I’m boiling with rage, a volcano. “That’s nice, Rome. That’s nice to know.”
“What? No, you’re taking it wrong, Malory, that’s not what I—”
“I am really nothing but a fucking puppet. It’s incredible. And you puppet masters, you and Garrett, both of you, literally with your hands up my ass.”
“Don’t compare me to him. I would never—”
“Nope. I’m done. I’m fucking done.” I grab my cello and yank the door open, ignoring Rome when he comes after me, even while I stand there like an idiot waiting for the goddamn elevator door to open. God, I wish he’d stop looking at me like that. He is pathetic, trying to fix the unfixable.
He tries to get in the elevator with me. “Don’t follow me.” I’m ready now. I’m ready to be done. I’m boiling and calming, sizzling and cooling at the same time, and it’s tearing me apart on the inside. Yes, I am done.
“Malory, hey, can I just come sit with you?”
God, does he know? Can he see it in my eyes? “I’m going for a run,” I tell him, and it’s true; I am going for a run. I’m not lying.
He’s holding the elevator door open, leaning through the opening like a desperate fool. He doesn’t believe me.
“Rome,” I say, shrugging and huffing like a child. “Let the door go. Some time in nature will do me good. If you’re so worried about me, let me go run off some steam.”
He holds my gaze a little longer, then slowly, reluctantly, his hand lowers from the rubber lining of the elevator door pocket. “I’ll check in with you later.”
“Whatever.”
His arm drops to his side, the elevator slides shut and I drift down away from him, away from Rome, alone.
Chapter Thirty-Six
I’ve finally gotten to the point with running where I don’t labor over it so much, where I don’t have to think the whole time Keep going, keep going, you’ve got this. Isn’t it funny that I’ve mastered this right as I’m about to give up on everything else? I think it’s funny. Not funny ha-ha or funny weird. Funny like OH MY GOD
WHAT THE FUCK.
Betchyer gonna come chill with me up in my room and tell me all about your audition!
Sigh.
Crunch, crunch, crunch. My feet sound so good on the dirt. My breath is beautiful against the cool, still air. It smells so clean out here, so crisp and earthy. Palm fronds reach out into the path, brush my arms as I whisk by, and I feel they’re cheering me on like the spectators along a race course who slap hands with the runners as they pass. That’s nice, isn’t it, that thing that happens during a race? Once when I was little, back when our family was still “perfect,” we went to Disney World without realizing it was the day of the Disney Princess Marathon. I was little and didn’t understand all the commotion, why we had to wait at the ropes before we could cross over to Tomorrowland to ride Space Mountain. I looked up at my mom, who’d extended her arm out over the ropes to slap hands with the sweaty, exhausted runners as they flew by. She had tears in her eyes.
“Why are you crying?” I asked, worried.
She shook her head, her nostrils flaring with the effort of holding back tears, but her whole face was pink. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s just so amazing. Can you feel the energy?”
I can feel it now. I’m all by myself in the woods, but I can feel it. It’s under the ground and in the trees and in the air, and of course in the palm fronds as they slap my shoulders when I run past under the bright afternoon sun, encouraging me and pushing me forward.
You can do this.
The river is up ahead already—it seems like I’ve gotten here much quicker than usual. I wonder if it has to do with the energy being different today, or maybe I’m imagining that too. Maybe I am just too confident in myself right now.