The Broken String

by Diane Chamberlain

“That’s so far away.”

  “It’s right around the corner.” She sounded sad when she said that, and she let out a long sigh. “Could you do me a big favor, honey?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “You know where I keep my pills? That drawer by Daddy’s and my bed?”

  “Uh huh.” She had two bottles of pills in that drawer and a few more on the windowsill in the kitchen.

  “Could you run upstairs and get them for me?” She brushed my hair off my forehead. “Would you do that for me, please?”

  I couldn’t believe she was asking me to get her medicine! Sometimes she asked Danny, but this was a first for me and it made me feel very grown up. It probably had to do with turning six, I thought. “The tall bottle or the short bottle?” I asked as I got down from the couch.

  “The tall one,” she said. “Thank you, honey. I’m too tired to move today.”

  When I got to the top of the stairs, Daddy walked out of his office. “Hey, Sunshine!” he said. “Come see the new lighter I got today.”

  I followed him into his office, which was easily the most interesting room in our house. I wasn’t allowed to be in that room by myself, although I never understood why not. Daddy was a collector, but his collections were locked behind glass doors, so I didn’t see how I could hurt them. On one side of the room he had his cigarette lighter collection, and on the other side, his compasses, which weren’t nearly as interesting. Against the wall he had his violin collection—five violins in cases. They were the least interesting to me because I couldn’t see them. He never took them out of the cases. “They’re too valuable,” he said. I didn’t understand the point of collecting something you couldn’t even look at.

  Daddy had taught me to be a collector as well. I’d found a stray dog in the woods behind our house, but my mother was allergic to dogs, so we couldn’t keep it. I was inconsolably upset, so my father bought me a tiny statue of a dog and that was the start of my collection. I kept my little ceramic dogs in a case he built for me. It was much smaller than his cases and lacked a lock, but I loved it anyway.

  “Come see,” he said now, as he took his seat behind his desk. I stood at the side of his desk, my hands hooked together behind my back, while he opened a small cardboard box. Boxes arrived for him nearly every day. He pulled out some Bubble Wrap and I leaned forward to see what was beneath it. He lifted a little silver teapot from the box, and I smiled. The teapot was the perfect size for my dolls to use when we played “kitchen,” but I wasn’t allowed to play with any of the things my father collected, especially not the lighters.

  “It’s so cute!” I smiled as I touched the teapot’s black handle. “How does it work?”

  He pressed the small knob on the lid of the teapot and flame shot from the spout. I laughed. “It’s my favorite one!” I said.

  “I thought the fish lighter was your favorite? Or the dragon?”

  I looked toward the glass case that nearly covered one whole wall in the room. I did love that dragon lighter. “All three are my favorites,” I said.

  “Fair enough.” He smiled as he lowered the teapot back in the box.

  “Oh!” I’d almost forgotten why I’d come upstairs. “I have to get Mommy’s pills.”

  He lost his smile. “She asked you to do that?”

  “Uh huh.”

  He moved the box with the teapot in it to the other side of his desk. His lips were pressed together hard and I could tell he didn’t think I was old enough to get my mother’s pills. I thought that’s what he was going to say when he finally opened his mouth, but instead he said, “You know which ones she wants?”

  “The tall bottle.”

  “Okay,” he said, but I knew he still thought I was too young to be trusted with a task so big.

  ***

  My parents’ room always smelled of my father’s aftershave. It was a woodsy scent that I loved, and I breathed it in as I sat down on my mother’s side of the bed and opened her night table drawer. When I lifted the tall bottle of pills, I saw a photograph beneath it. I rested the bottle in my lap and pulled out the picture. It was small, no bigger than the palm of my hand. In it, my mother stood behind a little girl about my age. The girl held a violin at her side. Her hair was pale blond, like Danny’s, and she looked happy, although her smile wasn’t nearly as big as my mother’s. My mother seemed almost like a stranger in the picture, her smile was so wide. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her look that happy. She was bending over, her arm across the little girl’s chest, and they both looked into the camera. A million questions raced through my mind. Did Daddy take this picture? Who was this girl who could put such a smile on my mother’s face? My mother loved her, I was sure of it. Why didn’t Mom ever hold me that way? Why couldn’t I make her smile like that? Was it the violin? Did Mom love the girl because she could play it? I wondered if I could ask my mother who the girl was, but I looked at the pill bottle in my lap and thought I’d better not. There was something unsafe about asking my mother hard questions.

  I set the tall bottle of pills on the night table and then I turned the picture upside down on the very bottom of the drawer. I covered it over with everything else I could find in the drawer—the other pill bottle, a scarf, some handkerchiefs, some pens. I hoped Mom would forget the picture was there. Whoever that girl was, I didn’t like her. I felt as though she’d stolen my mother.

  A couple of hours later, we sat in the dining room eating the chicken and potatoes that had been cooking in the Crock-Pot all day. Daddy cut the skin off my chicken and moved the revolting chunks of mushroom to the side of my plate as he asked Danny and me about our day at school. My mother seemed a thousand miles away from our conversation. Suddenly, though, she came to life.

  “Oh, my!” She pointed toward the china cabinet on the other side of the room from where she sat. “Look how the sunlight is filling the china cabinet, showing all the dust on the glass shelves!” she said. “Now how does dust get into a closed china cabinet?”

  “Dust gets everywhere,” Daddy said. “It even gets in my locked cabinets upstairs.”

  “I’m going to have to take everything out of there and clean those shelves,” Mom said. “And I’m sure the dust is all over the Franciscan Ware, too.” She’d stopped eating, setting down her fork, mesmerized by the cabinet.

  Daddy followed her gaze. “I don’t understand why we don’t use those plates for everyday if you love them so much,” he said.

  My mother smiled. “This from the man who has three enormous padlocked cabinets full of collectibles,” she said, and Daddy laughed.

  “Touché,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” Danny asked.

  “It means she’s right.” My father looked happy, and I thought it had something to do with my mother’s all-too-rare smile.

  “I don’t know what’s so special about them plates,” Danny said.

  “ ‘Those plates,’ ” Daddy corrected him.

  Mom stood up from the table and walked to the china cabinet. The door creaked as she pulled it open, and she reached inside toward the Franciscan Ware. I hoped she would pick up one of my favorites, and sure enough, she pulled out a crescent-shaped salad bowl and brought it back to the table. The plate was a creamy white color with bold red apples, green leaves, and brown stems painted around the rim. I loved those plates. Even at six years old, I felt something like nostalgia for them. They were as familiar to me as my parents and brother, something that had always been in our house, in that creaky old china cabinet, and I knew they were special.

  My mother held the crescent-shaped dish cupped in her hands above the table. “They were a wedding gift for my parents,” she said. “A hundred pieces. Can you imagine that? My mother never broke one in all her years of marriage, and I’ve never broken one either.”

  “That’s because they’re always locked up in the cabinet,” Daddy teased.

  “Every one of them is hand painted,” my mother said to Danny and me as though she hadn’t
heard my father’s comment. “Can you imagine the work that went into them? No one has the patience for that sort of work these days.” She ran her fingers over the rim of the dish. “I have a lot of lovely memories attached to them from when I was a child.” She set the dish down carefully next to her water glass and looked across the table at my father. “But Daddy’s right,” she said. “We should use them every day and enjoy them. We just need to be very careful with them. After dinner, I’ll take them into the kitchen and wash off the dust and they’ll become our everyday dishes, like they were when I was a little girl.” She looked dreamy.

  “I’ll help you!” I said. “I can dry!” I liked drying dishes because it usually meant we were together in the kitchen, just the two of us, and sometimes a whole different side of my mother emerged. She’d bend over to kiss my forehead or we’d sing a song together. I didn’t see it often, that happy, peaceful, loving side of her, but even at six, I tried to set the stage for it as often as I could. I craved her smile and her voice lifted in song. I craved that kiss on my forehead.

  “Okay,” she said, “you can dry, but you have to do it sitting at the table so you don’t drop any of the plates.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, excited. One hundred pieces. I would have her all to myself for a very long time.

  Daddy helped carry all the dishes into the kitchen, where he and Mom stacked them on the counter. He got a box and put our everyday dishes into it to make room for the Franciscan Ware. “We’ll still keep the serving dishes in the china cabinet,” Mom said as she filled the sink with hot soapy water. “We don’t have enough room for all of them in here.” She spread dish towels on the kitchen table. “When you finish drying each piece, you stack it carefully on the dish towels, all right?” she said to me.

  I sat down at the table and she handed me a dish towel to dry with. Then she began washing the dishes, one by one. She’d rinse each piece in hot water, then hand it to me, making sure it was securely in my hands before she let go. I tenderly dried each plate or dish or cup and stacked them so carefully on the table that I couldn’t hear one piece touch another. She smiled at me as though she knew I understood how important the plates were. I would carry the memory of her smile around with me for days. It wasn’t the same as that joyful expression she wore in the picture of the little violin girl, but it said “I love you” just the same. At least I told myself it did.

  She told me stories about the plates, how she remembered family dinners with a cousin who could read the tea leaves in the bottom of one of the cups, or an uncle whose toupee fell into the gravy boat. She was in her own world, a place where the memories were happy and pure. I tried hard to get in there with her, but although I came close that evening, I lacked the key to the final door. I didn’t even know where to begin looking for it.

  ***

  When I got home from school the following day, I ran upstairs to change into my play clothes. Daddy was working on his computer in his office and Mom’s car was gone. I planned to ride my bike, but when I ran into the backyard in my shorts and t-shirt, I heard Danny call my name from the magnolia tree by the fence. The tree was so full of big leathery green leaves that I couldn’t see him. I walked across the yard until I was beneath the branches and I looked up to see him high above me.

  “Can I come up?” I asked, then reminded him, “I’m six now.” The last time I’d asked if I could climb the tree, he’d said five was too young. The truth was, neither one of us was supposed to be up there.

  “Okay,” he said. Excited, I reached for one of the low branches. “Not that one,” he said. “Before you grab a branch, you have to figure out where you’ll go from there. You have to think ahead.” He tapped his temple, then pointed to a different branch, one that was level with my waist. “Start with that one,” he said.

  It took me a few tries to climb onto the branch, and Danny’s laughter didn’t make it any easier. I was out of breath by the time I had a foothold. Holding onto the trunk of the tree, I stood up straight, my head knocking into the big leaves surrounding me on all sides. I looked down to see how far I’d come. The soles of my sneakers were slippery against the bark.

  “Okay, now see that branch there?” Danny pointed to my left. A half-eaten strawberry Twizzler dangled from his hand. “Get to that one next.”

  I grabbed the branch, ignoring the rough feel of the bark against my hands. I wasn’t going to fail at this. I was determined to reach the branch he was sitting on to show him I could do it.

  I kept climbing. I was nearly to his branch when I thought I might have to give up, but he pulled me up by my arm, which felt like it was going to pop right out of my shoulder. Finally, I made it. I sat next to him on a fat branch a mile above the ground, grinning and breathing hard. Looking down was scary—how would I ever get back to the ground?—so I looked around me instead. We were in a beautiful leafy room all our own.

  Danny wasn’t admiring the scenery, though. He held his Game Boy on his thigh, madly pushing the buttons as he chewed the rest of his Twizzler. He had the Game Boy’s sound turned off, and I knew that was so our parents wouldn’t realize he was up here, but he was playing with his usual zeal, and I folded my hands in my lap, growing a little bored. “What are you playing?” I asked.

  “Donkey Kong.” He pushed a few buttons and shook the Game Boy, as though that might somehow help him win.

  “Can I play?” He never let me play with his Game Boy, but since he was being nice to me today, I thought it was worth asking.

  “You don’t know how,” he said.

  “You could teach me.”

  He glanced over at me, and then he stared at my mouth. “That tooth is going to fall out any minute,” he said, poking at my front tooth.

  “Don’t!” I covered my mouth with my hand. I’d already lost one front tooth, and it had been traumatic. Daddy’d tied one end of a long piece of thread around it and the other end to the knob on my bedroom door, and then he slammed the door shut and my tooth went flying through the air. He said it wouldn’t hurt because the tooth was ready to come out, but it did hurt. I still remembered the metallic taste of blood in my mouth.

  “I could knock it out with one little poke of my finger,” Danny said.

  I tightened my lips over my teeth, opening them only enough to say, “No.”

  He laughed. “All right. Don’t freak out.” He started in on his Game Boy again and I leaned back to look above us. There were more branches, easily within reach.

  “Do you ever climb higher in this tree?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, without looking up. I looked at his Game Boy to see what was so interesting. There was a monkey on the screen, running and jumping around so fast he made me dizzy.

  “I’m going to climb higher,” I said.

  “Whatever,” he said, pushing the buttons on the Game Boy. “Don’t go too high.”

  Without him to tell me which branch to step on, I felt nervous as I carefully stood up. There were a few branches in front of me, laid out almost like a set of stairs. I climbed up one and then another, and when I looked down I was staring right at the top of Danny’s white-blond head. “Look where I am!” I said.

  He leaned back to look up at me. I let go of the branch I’d been clutching to hold my arms out at my sides, like a circus performer, a proud grin on my face.

  “You’re too high,” he said. “You better come—”

  The sole of my sneaker suddenly slipped from the branch. It happened so quickly, I had no time to grab onto anything to stop my fall. Bark scraped my forearms as I fell, and my mouth bashed into a branch. I screamed. I knew how high I was. I knew I was going to land in a crumpled heap on the ground. I could already picture it.

  But Danny caught me. His arms clasped me so tightly that the breath blew out of me. I was sobbing, more from fright than from the pain of my scraped arms and the tooth that, while wobbling around in my mouth, was still somehow attached to my gums. My feet hung freely in the air as they scrabbled to find a b
ranch, but at least I was no longer falling.

  “Don’t cry,” Danny said into my ear. “You’re safe now.” He was behind me, holding me suspended in the air. I smelled the Twizzler on his breath and felt the pressure of his arms wrapped around my rib cage like a vise. “You’re safe,” he said again. “Look at that branch. It’s right behind you. Just step back a little. That’s it.” My feet found the branch. I held onto him tightly while I tried to get my footing, only then aware that it was not only my body that was shaking. I felt the tremor running through him and knew I’d scared him as much as I’d scared myself.

  He moved my hands to the trunk of the tree. “Hold on here,” he said, letting go of me only when he knew my shivering hands were wrapped around the trunk. On the ground far below us, I saw his Game Boy and I wondered how many branches it had crashed into as it fell.

  “You’re bleeding,” he said, looking at my arms. “We need to go down.”

  Now that the worst of the fear had subsided, I felt the pain in my arms and my lips as we made our careful way out of the tree. I was crying again by the time we reached the ground. Danny picked up his Game Boy and tried to turn it on, but the screen stayed dark.

  “It’s hosed,” he said, tossing it back on the ground like he didn’t care all that much, and he took my hand and walked with me into the house. “We have to sneak upstairs to the bathroom where that spray stuff is for your arms.” I tiptoed up the stairs behind him. We could hear my father tapping on his keyboard in his office, but we ducked into the bathroom without him saying a word to us. “He probably has his earphones on,” Danny said. Daddy liked to listen to music while he worked on the computer.

  In the bathroom, Danny told me to sit on the edge of the tub. I’d finally stopped crying and now I was in awe of my ten-year-old brother, who suddenly seemed very grown up. He told me to hold my arms out in front of me, and I did. They looked skinny and pale and the skin was puckered up over the scrapes.

  “We need to rinse your arms off, but I think this is the only bad cut.” He pointed to my right arm, where two little lines of blood had cropped up. He had me hold my arms under the faucet while he ran cool water over them. He dried my hands, then suddenly said, “Look at me.” He dabbed my sore lip with a washcloth. “Open your mouth,” he said, and when I did, he pulled my tooth out so fast I didn’t even realize what he was doing. I yelped, then giggled at how sneaky he’d been. He smiled and set the tooth on the back of the sink. “They’re going to see this,” he said, pointing to my arm. “It’s too hot for you to wear long sleeves every day. Plus your mouth is all … dinged up. We have to think of a way you might have done this to yourself,” he said. “We can’t say you were in the tree.”