Still, thanks for showing me your Strad, and for kissing me. You’re really good at it. (Both things. Playing the Strad and kissing.)
Your friend,
Alice
I looked around my bedroom, alarmed that I’d slept so late. I didn’t have to be anywhere, I was just upset that I’d slept through her exit. How had she gotten home? Had she walked to the Michelin building alone in the early morning darkness? I didn’t have her phone number to check that she got home all right. Damn it.
I needed some coffee. I headed toward the kitchen, then heard a soft snort from Blue. He was lying on the sofa nearest the fireplace, cuddling as well as he could against Alice’s reclining form. She’d pulled a blanket over herself, and slept with one arm tossed above her head. The other rested on Blue’s back.
So she hadn’t made it home yet. Good. She looked so comfortable on my couch with my dog, so cute and domestic. So sweet.
Too sweet.
While the coffee brewed, I picked up my phone from where I’d tossed it on the counter. As soon as I checked it, it rang, flashing my father’s number. I sent his call to voicemail, but one ring was enough to wake Alice. She blinked at me in the daylight sun, confused for a moment.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Good morning. I didn’t leave after all.”
“I see that.”
She ran her hand up Blue’s back. “He wouldn’t let me go out the door. Well, he didn’t want me to leave, and I was afraid he’d bark and wake you up.”
I fiddled with the coffee machine to hide my nerves. She was still here. We’d kissed. Things definitely still felt awkward. “Coffee?” I asked.
“Thanks. That sounds good.”
“Cream and sugar?”
“Just sugar.”
I could feel her eyes on me as I poured coffee into mugs and doctored hers with some sugar packets I kept around for my mom. “You didn’t have to sleep on the couch,” I said, stirring her drink.
“I intended to slink out of here before you woke up. That was a fail.”
“Awkward breakfasts are underrated.” I carried her coffee over and met her eyes, so she’d know everything would be okay. “There’s a great breakfast place downstairs on the corner. Blue, you wanna go out, boy?”
My dog detached himself from Alice’s side with a luxurious stretch and yawn, and followed me down the hall to his fake lawn on the back balcony. It was cold, so Blue did his business quickly, then skittered back inside, ready to eat breakfast and sleep for a few more hours. Alice curled on the couch while I fed Blue and changed his water. She drew her blanket around her like a shield, looking as disheveled as I felt.
“Oh, your phone rang while you were outside,” she said.
I checked the screen. My dad again. Whatever he wanted, it would have to wait, because I had no idea what to do with Alice now that daylight had come. Take her to breakfast, obviously. But what to say then, when we were facing each other across a table? Last night had happened, and neither of us would forget it, not for a while.
“It’s okay,” she said, as I looked at her in ponderous silence. “I get it. I understand.”
“What do you understand?”
“The friendship thing.” She shrugged. “I thought about it last night, and I get the reason you can’t see us surviving as a couple. You’ve known me too long. You knew me when I was immature and annoying.” She made a face. “Maybe I still annoy you.”
“You don’t annoy me.” I went to sit on the other sofa, near her, but not too near. “I hate to say something so stupid and worn out, but…it’s not you. It’s me. I wouldn’t be good for you.” That was true. I was being honest with her now. “I feel connected to you, Alice, in a pure and long-standing way, and I don’t want to ruin the history we share by exposing you to the relationship Milo, who’s really an asshole.”
“You seem pretty easy to get along with most of the time. I guess I don’t know you, not the way I think.”
She was skeptical. She thought I was bullshitting her. Fix this, I berated myself.
“I love you as a friend and I always will,” I said, and I meant it intensely. “But a relationship between us, a romantic relationship… Well, it would be a disaster.”
She sighed, looking down into her cup, and then gave a little laugh. “You’ve said that same thing, more or less, at least half a dozen times in the last twelve hours. I guess I have no choice but to believe you.”
“You must have tons of men pursuing you. You can’t be that hard up.”
“Hard up? Wanting you is ‘hard up’?” She shook her head. “Whatever. To answer your question, I’m pretty picky when it comes to men. There’ve been a few who seemed promising, but they always disappoint me.”
Because you’re perfect and lovely, and newsflash, I’d disappoint you too. Or horrify you. Or both.
My phone rang again, my dad calling for the third time in fifteen minutes. “I’d better take this,” I said, swiping to pick up. “Hi, Pop. What’s going on?”
My father’s voice sounded rough. “I’m calling about Lala. Alice.”
My mother grabbed the phone, her voice loud and hysterical. “They can’t find her, and she’s not answering her phone.”
My dad broke in. “There was an explosion. They’ve called and called her cell and she’s not answering.”
“Ah, Massimiliano!” I could tell by her voice that my mother was crying. “We were afraid for you too, because you took her home.”
“Wait, Ma. What? What kind of explosion? When?”
“Early morning hours, the whole Michelin building, and half the building next door. Stefan and Freja called us because they can’t reach her. They want you to go check…” Her high-pitched voice dissolved into a fit of sobs, and my father took back the phone.
“There was an explosion,” he said. “A gas line, early this morning. Half the building was blown away, and the other half caught fire. They can’t find her, Milo. No one can find her among the…among the casualties.”
“Papa, stop. Alice is okay. She’s here right now, sitting on my couch.” In fact, she was staring at me, wide eyed. My mind reeled. An explosion early this morning? Holy fuck. “She slept here last night, Pop. In my guest room,” I added, because they were Catholic, and those things mattered even when you were recently afraid someone might be dead.
Alice mouthed, “Is everything okay?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. On the phone, my parents both sounded like they were crying now. “She’s there?” my mother sobbed. “Lala is there with you?”
“Yes. She came up last night to see my Stradivarius. We started talking and it got so late, she slept in the guest room rather than go home. We’re just having coffee. She’s right here.”
On the other end of the line, my emotionally stressed parents repeated oh my God, Praise God, and Thank you, God several times, although it had been Blue, not God, who stopped her from going back to her apartment where she might have been…
Holy Christ. Where she might have been killed in a gas explosion early this morning. It hit me, and I rested a hand on Blue’s head. “Thank God,” I said, just like my parents. “Thank God you wouldn’t let her go home, buddy.”
“Keep her there, Milo,” said my father. “And don’t turn on the news where she can see. It’s a terrible scene. She’ll be upset.”
“Take care of that girl,” my mother yelled.
“I have to hang up and call the Nyquists,” my father said, talking over her. “Tell Lala to call her parents too, they’re hysterical.” With one last Thank you, God, he ended the call.
“What was that about?” she asked.
I looked at her, dazed. “There was a gas explosion this morning at your building. Your parents couldn’t reach you, and they didn’t know where you were.”
“What?”
“An explosion. Some gas line problem, I guess, and a fire. Everyone was in a panic because they couldn’t reach you.”
She g
rabbed her phone. “Shit. It died last night, and I didn’t have my charger.”
“Don’t worry, my parents are calling your parents. Give me your phone. I’ll charge it.” She held it out, her fingers shaking. “You can call them from my phone when you’re ready, so you can let them know you’re okay.”
Here we were, fucking around with our phones and chargers when she’d almost fucking died. I left her phone on the counter and took her mug as she sat frozen in place. “An explosion,” she said to herself. “My apartment?”
I sat beside her. “The Michelin building. I think it must have been pretty bad.”
“But we didn’t hear anything. Wouldn’t we have heard it? I live just a few blocks away.”
Did she want me to tell her it was all a mistake? That it probably hadn’t happened after all? My parents’ hysteria said otherwise. “I’m sorry. Do you want me to find more information? We can look online.”
“Oh no,” she cried, covering her face. “Oh no, oh no.”
I put an arm around her, wanting to offer comfort, but how did you comfort someone who’d just lost her home and everything in it? “I’m so sorry,” I said. “But thank God you weren’t there. If Blue hadn’t kept you here…”
She shook her head. “I can’t… I can’t…”
“Take a deep breath. Everything’s going to be okay. I’m so sorry, Alice.” I pulled her closer as she dissolved in tears. “Things are replaceable,” I said gently.
“Not everything! My violin,” she sobbed. “My Grapeleaf. My Fierro.” She gazed at me, her wet eyes tormented. “It was my own beating heart.”
She turned her face into my chest. I held her, stroking her hair. “It’s going to be okay. The Fierro is replaceable.”
“No, it’s not replaceable. Not that one. I loved it. It was perfect for me. I’ll never find another one like it.”
I hugged her, offering silent support as she trembled and cried for her lost instrument. To a musician at her level, it was an indescribable loss. Her “Grapeleaf” Fierro had been made by my father, with special care for his best friend’s daughter. He’d crafted an instrument for a prodigy, a violin that could be passed from her and her family to musicians and collectors hundreds of years into the future, to become their heart.
I remembered when my father gave it to her on her seventeenth birthday. I remembered it vividly, because I’d done secret work on that violin, etching a heart into the back of the body, curving the edges so it would blend in with the maple as I varnished it. Varnishing was all my father trusted me with at that stage. It will make it sound better, I told myself, scratching the infinitesimal curves like a shaman casting a spell.
Somehow, he never noticed the heart, although I could pick it out from any distance. Alice didn’t notice it either, not in the uproar of applause and congratulations at her party. I remembered the trembling, reverent way she’d accepted the violin from my pop. She’d played it for all of us, her eyes shining with tears. My father had known, as any good maker knows, how to craft a violin that would complete her, and I’d put my spell on it too.
Now it was gone. There’d been an explosion, and my handiwork was gone, along with her musical heart, and nearly, her life.
“You should call your parents,” I said, after she’d cried enough to wet my tee shirt. “They’ll need to hear your voice.”
*
My mom and dad arrived from Chappaqua within the hour, bringing clothes, coats, and shoes from my mother’s closet, even though she was shorter than Alice.
“Everything will be all right,” my mother assured her, over and over. “You poor girl.”
I was glad she was there, taking charge. I used Blue as an excuse to go out on my balcony to collect myself. I felt numb, encased in unresolved feelings. I was anxious and sad for Alice, and freaked out at what might have been, but I also kept thinking about last night’s makeout session, which seemed extremely crass under the circumstances. I thought about the warmth of her body against mine, the way it felt so perfect and necessary. I remembered kissing her, a kiss that had simmered for untold years, then caught fire in five reckless minutes before I regained control.
No, I couldn’t think about fire. I stroked Blue’s smooth fur to keep him warm, and waited in the wind for my hands to stop shaking. My cheeks grew irritated by the winter air.
“Let’s go back in,” I told Blue, and he traipsed down the hall before me, energized by his foray outside. He went right to Alice, shoving his muzzle into her welcoming embrace.
“What a cold nose you have,” she said, petting him. Her voice was thick from crying. “And what a good dog you are, bud. Thanks for making me stay.”
While she gazed at Blue, my mother and father started a fierce conversation in Italian, softly, under their breath. They were arguing about where Alice would go, whom she should live with until she found another place. They lived too far away for her to be able to commute to the city, and having just moved here, Alice didn’t have any friends she knew well enough to move in with.
“The building’s insurance,” I said in Italian, interrupting their whispered fretting. “They’ll find her a temporary place to live.”
“When?” my mother replied. “It’s the holidays. And where? A hotel in a bad part of town?”
“I don’t know, Ma. I don’t know how it works.”
We paused and looked at Alice, curled in the corner of my couch, her head held high, but her eyes closed.
“She might as well stay here,” said my father, in English.
My mother frowned at him, and they were off in Italian again. “Look at her,” said my dad. “She’s tired and traumatized. She needs his protection.”
“But they’re not married.”
“Don’t you think your son can be trusted? She’s an old family friend.”
My mother waved her hands in alarm. “And I want it to stay that way. What will Stefan and Freja think?”
“They’ll be grateful she’s taken care of. If you must play chaperone, you can move in with Milo and Alice until she finds another place.”
I raised my voice over their clipped conversation. “You should speak English in front of Alice.” I crossed to the couch and sat beside her. The numbness persisted, the urge to be businesslike and take care of things. It allowed me to shove aside the fact that it would be excruciating to have her stay with me, constant temptation within reach. “They’re wondering where you’re going to stay,” I said gently. “They want you to feel safe.”
She looked shocked, like she hadn’t even thought about that yet. “I…I don’t know.”
“You can get a hotel room if you’d like, something close to your work. Your insurance company should give you a stipend when your claim goes through. You could stay with my parents, if you don’t mind commuting from Chappaqua, or you could stay here for a while, in the guest room.” Jesus, if my parents knew that we’d made out on this same couch last night…
“If you don’t feel comfortable with that, we can find you something else,” my mother said quickly.
“But you would be safe here,” my father said with equal fervor. “Milo could look after you. You’ve had a difficult time.”
“But if you feel it’s not appropriate…” My mother, who’d been trying for years to engineer our wedding, got cold feet at the idea of emergency cohabitation. I loved my parents, but they were making a bad situation even worse.
“Live here,” I said. “At least until you’re back on your feet again. I have plenty of room, and Blue loves you. My parents are just worried we’ll be unable to control our physical urges while we’re cooped up in this apartment together without any supervision.”
“Massimiliano,” my mother chided. “That wasn’t what I said.”
“It’s what you implied.”
I saw the first shadow of a smile on Alice’s drawn features. “It’s okay, Mrs. Fierro. Milo and I are just friends. We have no romantic interest in each other, honestly.” She said it with an edge of
resignation. My parents probably didn’t hear it, but I did. She turned to me, and I saw how exhausted she was by everything. “If you don’t mind me staying here, that would be great.”
“I don’t mind at all.”
I said it quickly, and I meant it. The rest of my bullshit was secondary. My lust, my longing, I’d learn to overcome it.
“Hopefully it won’t take that long to find another place,” she said.
“It doesn’t matter. You can stay as long as you like.” I said this in a carefully modulated voice, even though my numbness was starting to wear off.
Shortly afterward, while my parents sat with her, I put on a coat and walked the three blocks to the Michelin building, or what was left of it. I wasn’t sure what I hoped to find there. Maybe a mostly-intact violin case lying in the gutter across the street, blown from her apartment’s window to safety. What I found was absolute destruction, a building reduced to rubble, and bricks melted by the magnitude of the fire that followed.
Fuck. Everything was gone. I’d hoped I’d find something to take back to her, some small thing that had survived, that was miraculously hers, but there was nothing but brick, metal, and ash strewn in the street, surrounded by a plastic security boundary. Danger. Do Not Cross.
I stared at the hole where her building had been, glad she wasn’t with me to see it. It was sad to lose the Grapeleaf violin, but if I’d taken her home when I’d wanted to…or if Blue had let her leave in the middle of the night…
If the world had lost both of them at once, Alice and the violin, I don’t think I could have lived with the tragedy. I kicked a scorched brick lying near my foot, imagining what might have been, and turned on my heel to walk away.
Chapter Four: Alice
Snow fell outside, a late December storm obscuring the holiday lights still blinking in the city. I curled in my bedroom’s shallow window seat, toying with the hem of a pale green sweater Milo had brought me the day before. He called them “presents,” and he bought me too much, but I didn’t feel strong enough to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe, so his kindness was appreciated. Christmas had passed without much merriment, bringing useful gifts and necessities. It was one of the few days in the last week that I got out of bed.
Dangerous Control Page 4