by Paula Guran
“Things you see now,” a voice whispers, and Ada jerks her head around, scanning the room. Outside the half-moon in the door, moths crawl on the glass.
She turns back to the screen and the woman has straightened again, her face still too far above to see, and is turning, full breasts swinging, there’s a symbol drawn, tattooed on the swell of the nearer breast. A gorgeous, ungodly squeal fades in from the speakers, a stretched squelch. Ada’s eyes swim and her mouth waters, like coins held under her tongue. She grunts at the sudden heat she feels in her cheeks and below, where her legs meet.
“Things you hear now. The old place, where you told about Gram,” the voice says, sexless, inflectionless. The film bends in again at the right edge, another image intruding into the frame, the edge of a worn building.
“Go and see us now. Bring your instrument.”
A bluer shade of blackness returns, but the sound stays in a swishing of leaves. Once more the dark is brief, the sky lights up like a photo negative, the sky has the texture of hair. The camera pans left and right and picks out suggestions of people passing through the trees. The view straightens and someone is standing in its path. Ada knows at once it’s the same woman, Emma, as if an earlier sequence has been spliced onto the first. Then the picture blurs and stutters and snaps off.
She’s reaching for the keyboard when it cuts back in, teetering on the lip of the pit. Three figures crouch in its center, in the light of a moon brushing against the Earth. They’re draped with black sheets. A fourth lies sprawled and she sees, familiarly, it’s a dummy, smoothfaced, black hair scribbled on its head. Its body is stained white cloth.
That squelch goes on. The shot swivels up, for an instant showing the trees full of white faces, and the screen’s filled by another, shorter figure, standing above the hole, having just covered itself with its own dark sheet. Ada sees the afterimage of hands fallen, tugging, below the camera’s eye. The figure stiffens, staring out of its darkness, out of the screen, then steps quickly toward the camera, spreading its arms.
The tone is severed and the toolbar pops up over the blank video player. She taps the trackpad, sure it’s just frozen, this can’t be the end. The film starts over and she lets it play again. And again. She loses count. Each time she watches it the sky changes in that moment of antilight flash, showing her strange shapes filling it through the trees, almost familiar.
In the bedroom, after she’s wiped the slick of saliva from her chin, after the shaking has stopped, she crumples the black sheet and throws it at the closet door. She’s going mad, that’s all. Luke and Ada, both caught in his undertow, like calling to like. He knew Bluebeard’s wife would find his films and try to help him.
The old place. Finally, the easy clue she’s been waiting for. Three months after they met, they roughed it at a cabin outside of Candler, on the first rises of the Blue Ridge. She remembers the afternoon hike, finding the scorched ruins of a house in the woods, the one that so fascinated Luke. This early in her life after Gram, everything still fascinated her.
And it was the long sweet weekend when Luke took her virginity in his clumsy, quick way. When he told her he loved her. She’d never thought those words could sound like they did, like a chord, something to build a concerto around.
But it wasn’t the cabin or the burned house where he said it, it was after that, after they got back on the road home and saw an old severeroofed church in the distance. Something about its shape, or the way the forest stood guard behind it, made Luke turn down the snaking driveway. The door was not locked. Ada would have followed him into the deepest cave that day. Inside was an air of God abandoning His flock, but the place was clean and still used, no dust on the pews, which were well polished with hymnals in little cubbies along the back of each.
He needed a few minutes in one of those pews before he took her hands. I love you, Ada. She can’t even remember the name of that church. It was just the old place, when they were new people. But the thrill she has now, what makes her more Ada Blount than she’s been in months, is from his choice to mention not the I love you but what came after, when she opened up and told him what her life had been.
About how Gram had taken her in when she was three, orphaned in a car accident that had killed her parents instantly without even scratching Ada. How Gram raised a friendless and timid mouse, never let Ada out of sight. Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings to their tiny church, the grocery store on the fifteenth and the thirtieth, and the rest of it was the house, hiding from a white world in an unlocked cage. They slept side by side in the bedroom off the kitchen. The bathtub was her one privacy, the one place she would sing, always in her softest voice because Gram wouldn’t allow song. There was sin in Ada’s voice, somehow.
But the viola, Gram almost worshiped that thing, though she knew little of it. Practice after breakfast, before dinner and bed. Even the Bible lessons weren’t as strict – Ada’s mama, she was supposed to be in a famous symphony some day, but the Lord had told Gram that Ada would do even greater things. For all Ada knew, her mama had only left behind her proud instrument. Ada pretended she could smell her in the wood.
Didn’t you go to school? Luke asked, and looked away for a second, just the one second, when she told him no, she’d even learned to tell time with only a sundial. She’d learned to read by the scriptures, made her friends out of her father’s records, full of music written by long-buried men. The mountains locked the sky in with her. Gram, always right there, broad and tired and feeling stomachachy, the lines sinking into her face like a sped-up geology. That was her whole world, days strung together into a forever that could have ended sooner than it did. Ada’s curiosity was growing right along with her body. But one afternoon, she was seventeen and humming nonsense under her breath in the tub, she heard a soft thunder from the kitchen and there lay Gram on the floor, the oven door open in surprise.
Ada became less a granddaughter than a nurse. The cancer ate Gram’s bowels first before spreading its fingers into all her nooks and crannies. She refused chemo, refused hospice, had all she needed with her little Ada.
Gram lasted nearly three years. They called for a hard, dark love but Ada gave it. She sat between their twin beds and played, and Gram talked to Ada’s Grampa, who’d passed long before Ada was a dream of a thought. She wailed at that drunken Irish fool who’d killed her daughter and only spent a year in prison. She reached her hands up, her palms white as the pages of her Bible, and clutched at Ada, still trying to protect her.
Ada felt her kinship with the viola deepen in those years. She grew to understand the depth of its androgyny, in its delicate bridging of violin and cello. The notes it wrought were like pheromones.
And the pounds melted from Gram like winter. She died just five months before the day Ada told Luke about her, and it felt like minutes and a lifetime since the brash, vibrant world opened up to a girl of twenty who had only the faintest idea of what to do with it. She’d never been educated. Never known anyone her age. She stood in a doorway with no threshold.
What she didn’t tell Luke, though it pounded in her: She couldn’t even remember Gram’s funeral, or all the strange lonely quiet after. It hadn’t gone on long enough, only until she ran out of food and built up her nerve to go to the store. And there had been the answer, smiling, hazel-eyed by the tomatoes.
I love you. The second time he said it was sweeter than the first, more first than the first, somehow. And she loved him back more than he could ever know, because she had never known.
—We’ve looked for you.
Something stirs in the attic, boxes shifting, and her daze breaks apart. When does Luke need her to come? The voice in the film said now. It’s late already but the old place can’t be more than half an hour south, right inside the cusp of the Blue Ridge.
She picks up her viola. “Is he in trouble?” she asks the ceiling. The shuffling above her stops, waiting, is it breathing at her? Then one long nail of something drags across the inside of the closet do
or.
“Yes, why don’t you go rescue him?” a voice says from the closet, and laughs.
Ada recognizes the voice – her neighbor? “Ms. Hursh?” she says, stepping back until the bed presses into her legs.
“I’m only wearing her, dear. I’ve watched you. We’ve come far. And Luke saved you,” Ms. Hursh says, only it’s started to sound nothing like her. “He gave you a world outside of your grandmother.” It’s almost Regan’s voice now. “Like a birth,” now it’s Gram, it’s someone much, much older, “like a father.”
These are Ada’s own thoughts, thrown back at her. A challenge, a rite of passage. She takes the wadded sheet from the floor and holds it like a shield.
“I’ll show you how we look underneath,” that old voice says. There’s a wet stretching, a breaking-bone sort of sound from the closet, something growing, and the doorknob begins to turn. She snatches up the viola and runs outside, where the moths are boiling, parting for her like a sea of ash.
It’s remarkable, how she’s thinking about the end of her marriage from a distance now. Because she’s on her way to him, she supposes, but it seems more as though she’s just beginning to see Luke clearly, through a truer lens, one that’s her own. She can think of arguments they had, how they ran hotter than she told herself when she rewrote them the next day. And she’s playing music again, reaching deeper and deeper into her instrument. Her hands feel strong around the steering wheel. Headlights pick out the reds and yellows from the night, the trees leaning over the road, the mountains settling into the changing quilt.
Luke had been under a black cloud for days before the Breakup, and she’d had to beg him to get out of the house and just be with her. They sat in a booth in Locke’s Pub and Ada tore her napkin into strips. When there was nothing else to do with her hands, she mentioned the books Luke read in his studio, the time he spent on his computer, light bleeding onto his face at two, three most mornings. What was he doing when he hadn’t shown her any new work in months? Where did he go when he didn’t come home at night?
He got this look to him when she said something bad, it wasn’t quite often, but there it was now. “Nothing,” he muttered, the naked hanging bulb turning them both into suspects. A glass of something amber and oak-smelling sweated on the table in front of him. “Stay out of that stuff. It’s just research on this . . . group I hunted down.”
She heard the pause more than the words.
“I thought I was clever, finding them,” he said, turning his glass, a thin, circled scrape on the tabletop. “But they let me. They arranged it.”
“What kind of group?”
“Just please shut up,” he said, and glared across at her. He was almost shaking now. “I look for something. I find out it’s what I’ve been looking for all along, and it turns out I’m not . . . right for the part.” He swept the glass off the table, and all her hope seemed to follow it to the floor.
The only hard part is which section of 151 the church is set back from in the dark, but she finds it, easily as muscle memory. Or it finds her. There’s not a car in sight, but the high-peaked, planked building brims with presence. Every window bleeds light.
The stars tipped across the sky ignore her as she gets out of the car. The earth must cast a small shadow, being in the way of all their old light. The moon’s over halfway drawn, she imagines God getting a wrist cramp, like hers, and putting the pencil down on a cloud to massage His hand. She laughs at the image, is aware it’s her first real laugh in weeks. She pulls the air in. It still holds the sweetness of the morning’s rain.
A woman came over to clean up the broken glass. “What about us?” Ada asked Luke. Making herself look at him, making herself keep it together.
“Yeah, that’s the question, what about you?” he said, voice lifting toward a shout even with the waitress bending over right there. “The beloveds, people give their lives up for them, it takes years to find the pieces, line them up. They left the door cracked open, but they don’t want me.”
“The beloveds? Is this for a film you’re doing?” Ada asked, scared now by the anguish she heard, the first prickle of something bigger than she understood. “Money for a project?”
“A film, are you kidding? Since when have I ever been this—” He clenched his teeth, his fists. “You know, at first, yes, it’s how I got onto their trail, this long-form piece I wanted to do. It was that burned-out house we found, and the vibe in that church. It got me hunting, I traced them back to the nineties when they settled there. But it’s grown into . . . I’m not giving up. So I’m done with us.”
Luke stood, not looking at her, his face in shadow above the hanging lamp now. “Done with us?” she said. “Done with us?” She kept trying, she kept failing to get past that.
“Done with you, yeah. As in divorce.” He threw a $20 bill on the table, and she watched it drink the ring of water where his glass had been. She reached out and took his hand. He looked up at the exposed ceiling and growled something animal. Then she was on him, using her weight to pull him back into his seat, screaming, Don’t go, don’t go, you can’t go.
She stares at the old place as she remembers this last part, the part where he shoved her against the table, drew his arm back like he’d done twice before in their six years, only this time he hit her in the face. Red-black stars bloomed between her eyes. And she remembers coming to, the same waitress holding a bag of ice, she remembers having to breathe through her mouth from the blood, but her memory can’t quite finish. It snaps shut on her, even as the sky above is all so clear now.
The bed sheet stays in the car, and the past, too, she tries to hope. Just her viola and a new Ada, crunching gravel under her slippers, the two-thirds moon hanging above her as she walks up the short steps and pulls on the windowed vestibule door. The sound that spills out like it’s been held in cupped hands, a secret from the world, is such an unexpected thing, she nearly lets go of the door handle. She smiles. Instruments – strings warming up, muted beyond the set of heavy wooden doors inside.
She passes through the small vestibule and pushes into the wide square room of the church beyond. Fifteen or so people sit scattered in the pews, facing the pulpit. Ada stares where they are staring: Two women and a man sit in small wooden chairs, dressed in white. A fourth chair waits off to the right. She pictures them standing in a creek. The first of the women is strikingly tall, even sitting down, even with the cello clasped between her thighs. The woman’s yellow hair hangs over her chest in two thick French braids. She smiles at Ada. A wash of dizziness, this has to be Emma, she pictures her with Luke, imagines her squeezing Luke between those thighs.
At last she can look away, ignoring the red-haired woman beside Emma, the bearded man with hair shorter than her own, almost shaved, each with a violin tipped under the chin. The voice of the empty chair does not even reach her. She’s looking for Luke, her attention skimming across the audience for him.
He’s not here. She knows he’s here.
But the trio has stopped, is ready, the silence swelling to a huge thing, and each head facing them turns on its neck to regard Ada. Ms. Hursh smiles at her from near the front, looking almost exactly like Ms. Hursh. Ada slips into the back row and sits, her forearms covering the viola in her lap, her gaze still darting and searching.
Then the cellist straightens her graceful long back and dips the bow across the strings, sweeps it back, a long mourning rind peels into the room. Ada thinks of the first time she sat here, she thinks of Gram at the end, reaching for her, clutching at her like she always, always did. Such a warmth, a blanket of sound, Ada’s lost in its folds. The violins slide in and she recognizes an arrangement of Barber’s Adagio, such a strange choice for the quality of darkness coming into the tone now, that’s been there all along, she realizes. There’s dirt in these creases.
The man directly in front of her is swaying his head from side to side. It’s a comforting rhythm, an easy metronome, as though this really is church. She lets the motion ancho
r her, fixating on the weathered skin on the back of his neck. Something peeks out of the man’s shirt collar. Small and dark. It wanders out, finally, and she sees it’s a moth. It wanders up the neck toward the ear. Another emerges from the man’s shirt, and another. Is there a light inside the man’s clothes, she wonders, and has to bite her tongue to hold her in the pew. The music and where Luke is, that empty chair and what it means, these things are making her want to get up and do, be, though she doesn’t know what or where.
A white-yellow cloud catches her eye, drifting into the right of her vision, leaning forward halfway down the pew. Ada turns her head. A plump old woman is smiling at her, showing her teeth. She looks like a white Gram, her hair thin as ground fog, insubstantial. Ada sees moths crawling on her scalp.
She shuts the woman out, those Gram eyes. The music’s crawling, too, Ada can’t imagine Barber holding so much shadow inside himself. Somehow this trio resonates like a small orchestra, the sound like it’s kneeling, in mud and storm and blood, suddenly they abandon the Barber and cut into the middle of Ligeti’s first string quartet, the manic depressive Métamorphoses nocturnes. Here is a darkness without its cloak.
But this is all a disappointment. Ada has no patience for it, beautiful and almost unprecedented though it is. She wants it to evolve, down into that one unwound, fibrous note she’s discovered. If she hears it, she’ll know. She’ll know this is right, all of it, and she’ll stay. But if the endless tone is there, the trio cannot find it. Ada doesn’t even hear an awareness of it.
The listeners turn and look back at her. The old woman, mouth smiling too wide, rises from the pew and steps toward the aisle, but Ada’s already stumbling into the vestibule and the night outside. Quiet as December, the trees crowding in a semicircle around the church, and the mountains a towering faith out beyond the closeness of the forest.