by Paula Guran
At the window she stares out at the masked trees, outriders of the greater woods that stretch away toward the mountains. Her mountains. She imagines again some part of her approaching the sunken hole, wherever it is. Imagines Luke appearing above her, his face hidden behind the camera. She’s learned to look around it.
Ada’s heard the word codependent, she knows what it means, started reading a book about it. It’s under the bed now, the bookmark in chapter two mocking her like a tongue. Gram would tell her she’s being a foolish child, didn’t she raise her better? But Gram and her impossible love have been gone a long time.
The trouble is, Ada’s never been alone. From the moment Ada’s parents died when she was three, there was always Gram. There was never any rest from her.
And there was always Luke, after. She’d only taken her first hesitant steps into the world when she met him in a produce aisle. He showed her the world wasn’t out to get her. He showed her how, in fact, the world seemed hardly to care. She learned she could be the only one in a room, or by herself in a car, and still be held by the one who loves her. It still surprises her, sometimes, that there are so many little things like these, things wider and deeper than she could understand for a long time, if she even understands them now.
The thought of figuring out how to do this makes her lightheaded. She leans her forehead against the window, sighs an oblong fog onto the glass. The word LEAVE blooms in it, in reverse, and she’d recognize Luke’s handwriting anywhere. She breathes all around the word but there’s nothing more. One final exhale, then she smears the E and the A into a circle and smiles at LOVE.
“Here’s what you do,” Regan tells Ada over the noise of the bar, “be an alcoholic until you get this job or you puke the last of your ex up, whichever comes second.”
Ada shakes her head. She’s never had the stomach for alcohol. “Dangerous when I’m a five-three lightweight,” she says.
Regan throws back the last of her second bourbon. She does everything this way, with quick ease. Ada’s known her for so long, even though it’s only been three years. It’s what your first friend feels like. Regan’s taller, full of the real world, with hair she can actually style and real cleavage, the jackpot of a white girl’s proportions – a long list of needless, absurd comparisons Ada still measures herself against. And now Regan’s staring her down. “Have you talked to him?”
Ada hasn’t, and she’s trying not to talk about him, though she’s worried sick. Four weeks and three days. She’s tried to put everything but her own elusive music out of her mind, but all she’s done is listen for that strange cello note in everything, the idling engine of her car, the refrigerator’s hum. It reminds her of what music directors have said about her own playing – too intense for us, Mrs. Blount, we’re sorry. The interview at Haywood – where she hopes to step foot inside a college for the first time, if only as an admissions clerk – went well, she’s letting herself think. Luke’s deleted his Facebook and Twitter accounts. She wants to respect his space, hasn’t broken down and left him a voicemail in days, and the easiest way to keep that going is to stay away from his things, his office. The rest of those videos.
“No,” she says. “Can we just – what is it?”
Regan never bites her lip like this unless it’s a new guy or a secret. “Nothing. You’ve only had the one drink.”
“I don’t want it, really. Six years, Regan. I met him when I was twenty. I’d never met anybody.” She’s doing it, taking her finger out of the dam, watching the cracks spider. “What do you do with six years?”
“You lived them. That’s what they were for. They got you closer.” Regan laces her fingers through Ada’s and squeezes too hard. “Now you file them away on the L shelf and start thinking about yourself. For yourself. The A shelf, just Ada, and screw the rest of the alphabet.”
“I just—” Ada wonders if the dam will break now and what sad clichés will spill out “—I don’t want to be some uneducated musician who has to file papers because violist isn’t a real job. Most people don’t think it’s a real instrument, even.” She breathes, she says, “But I don’t want any next phase, either. I want last year, and the year before that. There’s never been anybody but him. I want him to call. I want him to want a baby. I wish I smoked.”
“Well, honey,” Regan says, “you live in Asheville. You can busk on the street or you can move to a city with at least four skyscrapers, where they have people who listen to dead-white-guy music. Playing on kids’ records every few months is cool, the ASO’s nice to shoot for, but I don’t see this stuff taking you to great heights.”
Regan can’t feel the smallness of Ada’s world. The thought of leaving her home, the air and the mountains, is terrifying, unthinkable. And her marriage is at least half that idea of home.
She starts to explain, even thinks she’ll bring up finding herself under a bed sheet, losing pieces of time, but something drifts close behind her. Ada looks up to see Ms. Hursh, her neighbor from across the street, grinning down at her. “Ms. Hursh?” Ada says. She’s a nice enough lady, mid-fifties, but they’ve shared only waves and maybe a hundred words in Ada’s three years on Pinewood Trail. She seems even less a bar type than Ada does. But the woman just stands and grins for several long seconds – Ada has time to glance at Regan, whose face scrunches up, then back – before she winks and shuffles away.
“Okay, that was weird,” Regan says, but she’s distracted, biting her lip again.
“Never mind that,” Ada says, “spill it, what’s the big secret?”
“It’s nothing. Cheryl saw him the other day, that’s all.”
“Luke? She saw Luke.” And to skip right to it: “Who was he with?”
“Some girl, I don’t know. Cheryl only said she was tall, almost freakish tall. And white.” She catches the waiter’s attention, points down at her glass. “Look, Ada, don’t do the ‘other woman’ hang-up. Think of how long he’s been gone. Without so much as a phone call. Think of what he did that last night.”
“He’d never done that before, not all the way like that. I don’t even know why he left, Regan. Can you see that? I think he got obsessed with some cult or something. I don’t care how long it’s been. I’m worried about him.”
Regan sighs and looks away. It’s clear she doesn’t share Ada’s concern. “Okay. But don’t open that door. Easier said than done, right? But come New Year’s, your birthday, tops, you’ll start to understand this’ll make it easier, that he could be so quick with someone else. I don’t want to see you be the woman who defines herself by her man. I can’t imagine growing up like you did, hidden from the world until you’re twenty, for God’s sake. I’d be up to my neck in therapists. But you have to find your own strength sometime.” Regan snatches up her bourbon the second the shaggy-haired kid sets it down. “Lecture over. Let’s watch movies. Stay over at my place, eat those dollar pizzas I keep buying.”
The constant drone of the bar has swelled to a roar. At least she knows Luke’s alive, out there in the near world. But Ada imagines her computer screen as though it’s open on the table in front of her. The file labeled bed. She sees her finger tapping a single time, she sees a woman rising up from cream silk sheets, a long elegant back arched above the grinding hips, Luke’s reaching hands, and when she tries to turn her mind from it she sees a different woman’s feet sprawled on turned earth in a hole.
“I—” For a moment that single syllable is all she can find. Coming here, it was a mistake.
“Ada, I’m sorry. Let’s get you home.”
“I can’t. No, I mean, I can drive myself. I’ll call you. I’m leaving.”
That sound of I – it’s all she is, now – follows her out into the October cold. If Regan doesn’t know, if Luke won’t know, no one can. She wasn’t a person until she met Luke. She had only ever been a granddaughter until she met Luke.
The mountains are turning to russet and fire out there in the dark. She looks above their silhouettes, to the sky, she bites
her tongue against tears wanting to brim. The sun, long slipped behind the mountains, the clouds and their shapes, the moon vague as a nickel dropped in water. All of it wavering.
She thinks of the sundial that stood behind Gram’s house. There’s no such thing as time when the moon’s awake and we’re all in shadow. She doesn’t have to count the hours. From the far edge of the parking lot a black shape watches her. When it stands up she can tell it’s not Luke. Her car chirps at her when she presses the key.
—We’ve looked for you. —You’ll happen quickly, now.
Whispering. Ada hears the hall window closing again, the same slide and click as the other night, but when she looks nothing’s there. Just the black sheet still pooled on the floor by Luke’s office. The thumb drive’s on his rug. If she’s going to turn away it has to be now, but she scoops it up and goes into the living room, stabs the drive into the laptop’s USB port. EMMA, so loud a name, so lightly etched in the plastic. The rush of blood in her head’s like the bar noise she left behind.
She almost clicks on the last file, untitled-1. Its anonymity feels powerfully safe to her. It could be anything, a beach at sunset, something less haunted by sex or darkness. But it won’t be, and even so, she knows she’d watch it with half her mind on the other.
So she taps bed. More soundless night, of course, eleven minutes on the timer. It’s an incomplete dark, gauzy. As if lost light is nearby. The dark moves – it turns, as if to look elsewhere, and the light grows and concentrates on the left side of the frame. Ada clicks maximize and the video window jumps to fill the screen. Nothing happens for more than a minute, only that far light hanging in the black, and the dark shifts again, slow, sliding. It slithers down and off the camera like a solid thing, and she realizes it’s a covering. A black sheet, maybe. The light is a small shaded lamp to the left of a bed. A woman is sleeping on the bed. It’s not the faceless Emma she’s feared. Ada recognizes the lamp at once, because she bought it at a flea market years ago, and only moved it into the bedroom after Luke left. For a long moment she only looks at the lamp. She won’t look at the woman on the bed, the woman’s shortcropped black hair, the skin a lighter brown than Gram’s favorite quilt pulled up to her shoulder. She won’t let herself think of the camera, of who is holding it and watching her sleep.
The shot creeps across to the bed, the mattress she and Luke kept planning to replace, toward sleeping Ada, and looks down at her. Ada, too, watches herself. Eight minutes leak away, the camera just there, staring, and the lack of sound is almost the worst part, until the shot dips and the screen goes blank. The picture clicks back right away but she knows that time has passed, doesn’t want to think about what might have happened during it. Because something’s changed, more than just the steeper angle, the deeper orange of the light.
A shape moves in the back of the room, in the right corner beyond the bed. A face peers through the window, right at her, at both of her, somehow. It’s too pale to be Ada’s face, but it is, her wide eyes and her wider mouth stretching into a grin. And – it’s Luke’s face, too, his dusting of freckles on her dull cheekbones, his narrower green-flecked eyes. A somehow beautiful amalgam, or a cruel imagining of the child it’s never been time to have.
She half-sobs, lowers her hand to the computer. It gets halfway there before reaching for her face instead, checking for a secret grin there, as if to convince herself it’s an absurd mirror she’s seeing inside the film. But the face in the window just keeps grinning with Ada’s mouth. The camera slides back and away from the bed. She sees the insubstantial shape of a white arm to the right. It lifts the dark up and slips it back over the camera.
And in the final seconds, it retreats farther. The same arm – it could be Luke’s, she’s not sure – reaches outside the dark to grasp the closet door and pull it shut, enclosing itself and extinguishing that sad rumor of lamplight.
The instant the video ends she closes the laptop, shoves the thumb drive in her purse and leaves. She makes it to the bottom of the driveway, the Volvo’s rear wheels in the street, before she stops.
Leave, Ada. Call the police. Call Regan. Make these calls now. She has the video but she knows everyone will think it was Luke. His camera, his storage device, his key to the house. A videographer who dabbles in the experimental genre isn’t a stretch to make a creepy movie of his estranged wife. Yes, it has to be Luke. Relief balloons inside her.
Angry confusion flushes much of the fear away as she looks up the sloping driveway at the little brick house, but what remains in the dregs of adrenalin is more a desperate sadness. A shameful ebbing, that she was here, is here, in all of here’s meanings.
She digs her phone out of her bag and calls him. It goes to voicemail, as always, a crackle of static over his warm voice. “I need to know you’re okay,” she says, and hangs up before those words can get their momentum going. In the rearview mirror she sees a group of silhouettes scuttle over the roof of Ms. Hursh’s house and vanish. “They aren’t even there,” she whispers. Ms. Hursh is, though, an irrefutable lump of shadow standing across the street next to her fading wisteria.
But what makes Ada go back is the viola. It’s her third arm, all she has of her mother, yes, but even so she can’t articulate how it pulls at her just now. She stands at the front door for several minutes, listening to the silence, the fall hush of insects dying out in the woods, watching Ms. Hursh watch her. Inside she wanders to the bedroom, deep breaths in front of the closet. Her hand reaches out to the doorknob, then falls away.
She sits down on the bed, expectant and somehow bashful. Once the viola’s out of its case and tucked beneath her chin, she plays. For her husband or for something else, she doesn’t know. She glides the bow with the old graceful tremble, lento. She plucks, pizzicato. The secret magic comes back to her. The feeling of her skin against the glossed wood feels true as ever, and the Reger suite pours out like something too long corked into a bottle. It was the first thing she ever played for an audience, two years ago. Fourth viola, the least important, feeling sweat trickle down her sides. She wasn’t invited back. The memory feels far away.
The Reger loses its form and withers into a sustained note, her concentration holding it in place like a vise. Her precise wrist sways. She plays and sometime later she wakes, muddy light and rain whispering against the house. A plate of dry toast and she starts again, Bach, Berlioz, Bartók, Mansurian. She plays until the works for viola begin to dwindle away, which is always too soon, then wades into the vast pool of music for violin, that movie star of strings. Everything she plays, every movement and measure, threads into that single note, she wanders through variations deep inside it. Soon she abandons all the music she’s learned. She opens the first video, clicks past the creek to that moonlit cello note, repeats it and repeats it. Plays on top of it, thinking of her bow as an insect leg, each of its hairs brushing the strings with its own added vibrato.
It’s past noon when her wrist seizes on her, a carpal flare that clatters the bow across the floor, and only now does she return completely, blinking out the window at the gray sky that hangs over the day.
She stares at her computer and asks herself if she wants to see what untitled-1 wants to show her. Who is this tall girl, this Emma? It seems clear, by now, that she’s being drawn toward something, drawn surely as her bow, and it’s time to stop this until she learns what Luke’s doing, and why. Or else it’s time to follow it to him, blindly. Or else it’s time to fend for herself. She doesn’t know how to choose.
But when she can’t find the thumb drive, frantic and close to tears, throwing cushions and magazines to the floor, the decision seems made. She relaxes, sighs, like a drain unclogged. It’s in her purse. The relief is so deep it’s exhausting. She gives up to real sleep, falls into a sort of cavern of it.
Night’s thickening full around the house when Ada wakes beneath the black bed sheet. There’s a missed call from Haywood College and it takes her a moment to remember the job interview. Luke’s voicemail is
full. She turns on the porch light and movement projects through the quartered half-moon window in the front door. The quality of light shifts and speckles on the inside wall. She needs Luke’s height, even on tiptoes she can’t see outside, and the angle of the bay window shows her just the empty porch, the still swing.
She opens the door and sees the porch light crawling with moths. They assemble and reassemble themselves, wings pulsing in concert like a gray heart. They must have been worshiping the light before it even came on. She thinks of the drawer full of dirt in Luke’s office. The dead worms or larvae there. She thinks of the lamp beside her bed, checks the street for Ms. Hursh or the shapes on her roof. There’s nothing.
The last video is the only thing left in the house that seems to have any surety to it. Her wrist still aches, and she’s never been a singer. Gram’s old forbiddances of her voice still won’t let her go. But she senses that for the moment, some moment, at least, silence is necessary. Two laps around the living room. She inserts the thumb drive. A glass of water. She opens the found folder, sees yesterday in the Date Modified column, clicks on untitled-2, sure that it was a 1 there before.
Dark, again. But now there’s sound, two distant violins playing the same coiled notes a quartertone apart. Close, circling the tone the cello played in the first film. Soon there’s light, too, a woman’s naked back sliding into the frame, and Ada sucks in her breath. A beautiful back, seen from the neck down, the color of rich cream with blond hanks of hair pulled forward over the shoulders. Thin pine trees bunch and crowd the background, insects trailing comet tails through the air in the slow shutter speed. The picture warps, static crumbles vertically. The back flexes, the shoulder blades stretch out like the roots of wings, and the woman bends forward, down out of the shot. A hole looms in the ground, the heads of two figures protruding, hooded or cloaked.