In Harmony

by Helena Newbury

  There were no others left on his desk.

  ***

  I called Connor as soon as I got outside and he picked up almost immediately—which only confirmed my suspicions. I didn’t mention the essay, just telling him that we needed to meet, now, but I knew he’d be able to tell something was up from my tone.

  He told me to meet him at his gym, not far from his apartment, and I jumped straight in a cab. This was too important to wait.

  ***

  My father thought gyms were for posers, preferring trail running, so I’d never been a member of one. Clarissa had given me a guest pass to hers, though, and for one morning I’d walked amongst the toned, lean bodies in their Lycra and headphones, in an airy space filled with softly humming treadmills and beautiful, sculpture-like weight machines.

  This was not that sort of gym.

  The walls were breezeblocks, whitewashed so long ago that they were a crumbling gray, fading to sickly yellow near the ceiling where the cigarette smoke had collected until they finally banned smoking. The boxing ring had been fixed so many times the surface looked more tape than canvas, the ropes fraying and worn. There was a metal bucket beside it and I looked up at the ceiling for the leak. Then I saw someone spit in it.

  No one there was without a tattoo, and they weren’t the black, tribal bands or Chinese characters you see on men in their teens and twenties. These were faded, blue-green designs stretched over muscles hardened by brawling: names and knives and devils riding motorcycles.

  I was the only woman. I’d like to say that every head turned to watch me, that I could feel all the testosterone spike into lust, but this was me. I barely warranted a glance, even with the cello case on my back, before they turned back to their punch bags and medicine balls.

  Connor was near the back, stripped to the waist and throwing punches at a bag that was as big as me. His muscles shone with sweat, his hair damp with it. He looked wonderful, even through the haze of my anger.

  “What?” he asked, and it was like the snapping jaws of a wounded animal.

  “You didn’t even hand it in, did you?” I asked coldly. “You didn’t even bother.”

  His gloved fist thumped into the bag, the impact of it making me jump. “I did my best.”

  “How could you do your best when you didn’t even hand it in?!”

  He hammered the bag, two quick punches and then a final, harder one. The bag swayed, its chain creaking. Anger was darkening his face now. “I don’t have to answer to you. You knew what I was like when you got into this.” He punched the bag again for emphasis, grinding his fist into the yielding softness.

  “If you flunk, I flunk,” I told him, the words hissing between my teeth. “I could have helped you! If you were having problems with it you could have just asked!”

  He glanced at me, then focused on the bag, throwing a quick flurry of punches at it. One of them skated off the side, and as the bag swung back towards him he had to step back, missing his next shot. “It’s not that simple.”

  I pushed between him and the bag. “Then tell me. Tell me what’s so hard about writing an essay.”

  He glared at me. “Get away from the bag, Karen.”

  I’d disliked him, sometimes, but I’d never been scared of him before. I was then, just for a second. The moment stretched out, building and building until one of us had to give in.

  I shook my head at him in disappointment and walked away. Behind me, I heard him slamming punch after vicious punch into the bag, putting all his energy into hitting something he could never beat.

  ***

  I should have got a cab as soon as I left the gym. The streets in Connor’s area weren’t the worst in New York by any means, but they were a long way from the best. But I was lost in thought, trudging on as the slush soaked through my sneakers and left them as chilled and numb as my brain.

  I wanted him. Even angry as I’d been, the sight of his lean body with its strong, broad back had still been enough to send little ribbons of desire twirling right down to my core. But the more I wanted him, the less I understood him. I knew now that, behind the cocky exterior, he was just as insecure as the rest of us. I could sense that he was smart—much smarter than he let on. So why not at least try with the essay? I could have understood an F, but to not hand one in at all…why would he do that, except to spite me?

  I’d built him up in my mind, turned him into some sort of romantic hero. I had to remember he was still the Connor I’d always known. Loud. Arrogant. A dropout. And where women were concerned, only after one thing—well, from other women, not from me. I still had no idea why he’d even agreed to my plan in the first place, except that he must have pitied me. And the worst part was, however badly it went, I had no choice but to stick with him. He was still my only chance.

  I’d almost reached the men before I saw them. One was lounging back against the wall while the other stood at the edge of the sidewalk. There was enough room to get through between them, but it would be uncomfortably close unless one of them chose to move out of the way. A human toll bridge, waiting to extract their fee.

  “What’s in the case?” one of them said. Despite the chill wind, he was only wearing a thin sweatshirt.

  I was tempted to say, “A flute,” but even through my anger I knew that would be a bad idea. I put my head down and kept walking.

  “I’m talkin’ to you,” he told me, and suddenly stepped forward, stamping his foot down. It was a test and I failed it, flinching and stopping.

  “What’s in the case?” he said again, his lips parting to show stained teeth, and I felt my anger fizzle and die, icy fear rising in its place.

  “I—” I backed up a half step, and they took a full step towards me, closing the gap. “It’s—”

  A car pulled up beside us, and for a horrible second I thought it was their friends. I had a fleeting vision of being dragged inside and taken God knows where. Then I saw the blue stripe, the lights on the roof.

  “Everything okay here?” said the cop, leaning out of the window. He looked strangely familiar: short dark hair and a serious look.

  “Just fine, Officer Kowalski,” said one of the men, as if they were old friends. “How are you this fine morning?”

  “I wasn’t talking to you.” The cop didn’t even look at the man. He was staring straight at me. “Some place we can take you?”

  I glanced at the men who’d stopped me and then nodded. Without words, I opened the rear door of the cop car and slid my cello case in, then climbed in after it.

  As we pulled away, the driver—an older cop—gave Kowalski a look I didn’t quite understand, as if he was patiently mocking him. Then I realized where I’d seen them before. “You were in the alley,” I said. “When my friend was mugged.”

  The older man laughed. “Kowalski here recognized you. Thought you might be out of your depth, so far from home.”

  “Thank you!” I looked back through the rear window. The two men who’d hassled me had resumed their guard duty, waiting boredly for the next person.

  “You were lucky,” said Kowalski. “This is out of our way. We were following up on some stolen property—our normal beat’s over by Fenbrook.”

  I nodded. It hit me again how good looking he was: strong jaw, deep blue eyes…clean cut, in a way that fitted well with a police uniform. I could imagine him in the military too, all stern authority. He was almost the opposite of Connor’s jokey charm.

  It took me a while to notice the silence, as if they were waiting for me to say something. “Anywhere you could drop me is fine,” I offered.

  Kowalski smiled. “We’re heading back towards Fenbrook. We can drop you there.”

  The silence continued. Were they waiting for more thanks? For an explanation of what I was doing on the wrong side of town?

  At last, Kowalski spoke and it hit me that the silence had been him working up to it. “So, umm…I didn’t catch your name that night in the alley?”

  “Karen. Montfort.”

>   “Ryan. Kowalski. My friend here’s Pete Huxington—‘Hux’.”

  I nodded carefully. This was weird…it didn’t feel like he was about to ask me out—not that I had much experience to go on. But his friend Pete looked like he was trying not to laugh.

  Ryan drummed his fingers on the dash for a second. “So, um…your friend Jasmine…?”

  Oh!

  I smiled. “Single. If that’s what you’re asking.”

  Pete elbowed his partner, chuckling.

  Ryan beamed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Uh…yeah. Yeah, pretty much.”

  “I’m guessing you already have her phone number…what with her being a witness,” I said.

  Pete banged the steering wheel. “See? Did I tell ya, or did I tell ya?”

  Ryan shifted uncomfortably. “Didn’t feel right, using her number like that. And there was….”

  “The way you mistook her for a hooker?” I asked helpfully.

  “Yeah. That. Was she…annoyed about that?”

  I thought back to our time waiting for the doctor at the hospital. “Seriously?!” Jasmine had raged. “A hooker? How dare he? Really, how dare he?! Typical fucking cop!”

  Then I thought back to the party at Natasha’s house, and Jasmine setting me up with Fifty Shades of Gray Hair.

  “She was fine with it,” I told him. “And, in your defense, it was a very short dress.”

  “Well, yeah,” Ryan said hopefully. “Yeah, exactly. So, uh….”

  “Would you like her number?” I asked sweetly.

  Chapter 12

  I didn’t hear from Connor for three days. I picked up the phone to call him at least five times, but always stopped at the last second. If I hassled him, he could walk away from the whole thing. I needed him a lot more than he needed me.

  In the meantime, I wrote the second of my three sections. It came slowly at first, but the more of it that spilled out onto the strings, the more there seemed to be to follow. It took me by surprise, because it wasn’t like anything I’d written before. It had more force and confidence and there was an underlying pattern of hard, barely controlled anger. Playing it left me feeling shaky, and oddly sad inside.

  On the fourth day, he called. I snatched up the phone on the first ring.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I felt a shard of hope the size of a grain of sand, and grabbed it tight. “I shouldn’t have blown up at you,” I told him. “Can we meet?”

  The walk to Fenbrook was eerily quiet, the forecasts of heavy snow keeping most people indoors. I looked up at the clouds overhead, hoping they’d hold off until I got home.

  An hour later, we were in a practice room. Flaunting the rules, Connor had brought in a couple of glazed donuts and a coffee each from Dunkin’ Donuts. Dunkin’ Donuts was my second favorite takeout coffee after Starbucks. It had always made me think of cops sitting in patrol cars, and I made a mental note to ask Ryan, if I ever saw him again, if that myth was actually true.

  Connor played the second of his sections, and I could tell immediately that he’d spent most of the last few days preparing it. It was very different to my own piece, much softer and more timid but with a slow rhythm that built and built until it demanded attention. I wasn’t sure how the two would sound next to one another, but I was looking forward to finding out.

  Watching Connor as he played, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing something. He’d obviously spent hours composing the music and then practicing it, probably up on the roof of his apartment block. He’d been big enough to apologize and come and meet me yet, when I tentatively asked if we could talk about his essay work, he just shook his head. It was beyond frustrating. We had more essays due before the recital, and if he didn’t hand something in for those, either, I was certain he’d flunk. And then all our work would be for nothing.

  An hour in, coffees finished and the donuts reduced to sticky crumbs, we took a bathroom break and—against all laws of men and women—I returned first. Only to knock over his guitar case as I came in, sending it crashing to the floor.

  I propped it up again, but something was sticking out of the lining at the top—a folded piece of paper dislodged by the fall. I went to tuck it back inside, but something about the writing on it made me stop.

  The handwriting was normal enough, but the letters made no sense. You kissed me mad me cofy and said yor nam was Ruth.

  I slowly drew out the paper and unfolded it. I recognized the lyrics from when I’d heard Connor sing them, but this version had been distorted, the words and even the sentences twisted almost beyond sense. Reading it, I could feel him trying to push what he wanted to say through a mind that wouldn’t quite comply, his frustration evident in his spiky pen strokes. I suddenly knew why he’d never handed in an essay.

  Too late, I felt his presence in the room. When my head jerked up, he was standing there fuming in the doorway. He looked just as disappointed in me as I’d been in him at the gym—before I understood.

  Without a word, he grabbed his guitar, case and jacket and stalked from the room. Seconds later I heard his feet pounding down the stairs. I looked at my cello, still propped up beside my chair. By the time I packed it away and got the case on my back, he’d be out on the street.

  I left it, and ran after him.

  I caught him in the first floor hallway, but when I grabbed his arm he just shook me off and was out of the main door before I could stop him. I wrenched it open to follow…and then staggered back in shock. While we’d been practicing, the clouds had finally let go and a full-on blizzard was in progress, the flakes flying horizontally and smacking into my face so hard they hurt. As I stumbled down the steps, freezing air filling my lungs, I realized my coat was still on the back of my chair upstairs.

  I blundered after him, hair streaming behind me in the wind. Snow splattered the front of my sweatshirt, the color disappearing in seconds under a coat of white. “Connor!”

  He didn’t even slow down. Shoulders hunched, guitar slung across his back, he marched on, away from me, away from Fenbrook. I had a horrible feeling that, if I didn’t stop him, he’d never come back.

  I forced my legs to go faster, sneakers sliding on the fresh snow. “Connor, wait!” A blast of wind shot straight down my throat, making me gasp and turn to try to catch my breath, and he slipped further away.

  I gritted my teeth and stepped into the street, where the traffic had mashed the snow down. Pounding alongside the sidewalk, trying to watch for headlights coming at me through the blizzard, I managed to get alongside him and grab his arm. “STOP!”

  He turned and hauled me bodily out of the street, dumping me back on the sidewalk. “You’ve got your answer: I’m too fucking stupid to write an essay, that’s why I never handed one in. That’s why I won’t be graduating! So you can take your cello and shove it up your pretty little arse, ‘cos I won’t even be here for your recital!”

  I stood there gaping at him. “Stupid?!” I asked, dumbfounded.

  He just stood there glaring at me and I realized he didn’t know.

  “Oh my God,” I said, half-aloud. “Oh my God, you thought…Connor, you’re dyslexic!”

  He cocked his head to one side, as if suspecting a trick.

  “You’re not stupid! You just have a problem with words! That’s why you’re fine with playing and composing and writing scores.” I gaped at him. “Has no one ever said this to you before?”

  There was the tiniest flicker in his expression, as if he could see a distant light and didn’t trust it to be real. He looked away and then back to me. “I thought that was just an excuse. What people say when they’re bone idle.”

  I felt something twist inside me. His assumptions were no worse than mine; I’d taken him for lazy without bothering to find out the real reason. “No,” I told him. “No, it’s not. It’s been holding you back—it’s like trying to play without being able to hear properly.” I stepped closer. “I can help you!”

  He looked at me doubtfu
lly. “You think you can fix it? In the time we have left?”

  “We can figure something out. I can help you get through the essays.” I was very close to him now. “If you’ll let me.”

  He gave me a long look, and then his hard expression finally melted. “Jesus, put something on before you freeze,” he told me, whipping off his jacket and pulling it around my shoulders. His hands were warm, even through the leather.

  ***

  We were back in the practice room minutes later. Save for me shivering, it was as if the whole thing had never happened, and yet I knew nothing would ever be the same again.

  “I can’t believe they never helped you with it when you were young,” I told him quietly. “You should have had a helper in the classroom, assistance during exams….”

  He wasn’t looking at me, his focus turned inward and to the past. “Not in this school. If you got out with some maths and English, you were doing well. The teachers didn’t care as long as you weren’t trying to burn the place down. And my parents…well. They didn’t have any expectations to shatter.”

  I studied him as he sat there, hunched over in his chair, his body closed even as he opened up to me. He’d gone so long without talking about the problems he was having, had worn his reputation as a bad boy like a suit of armor to disguise what was really going on. I could see it on his face—humiliation, at finally admitting to someone that there was a problem. And hope—the faintest possibility that maybe it wasn’t his fault. That maybe he finally had some control over his future.

  I started to worry that I’d promised something I couldn’t deliver. Sure, if he’d had help from the start, back in high school, he could have achieved much more. But we had less than two months until the recital and graduation. Could I really turn him around?

  “Let’s play for a bit,” I told him, to try to break the tension, and he nodded eagerly. I played my second part again, so alien to me with its confidence and force, that theme of suppressed rage running underneath.