by Aubrey Rose
The tears ran and wet my collar as I pressed my handkerchief to my face and soon it soaked through, and still I cried and cried, the wet and dripping handkerchief clutched between my fingers in a paralysis of sorrow, nothing mattered. Not even my nose dripping so much, my tears wrinkling my face, so hot and wet and constant. My mom’s body was here, under me, and for the first time in a long time I let myself care. I let my emotions rise up inside me and take over, and in the roar of hurt and pain I found myself again.
I sat there for a long time, until I was steady enough to stop sobbing.
“I love you, mom.” I pressed a hand on the stone. It was cold and hard and dead, so unlike the tree in my grandmother’s yard. I thought that I would want to stay and talk, but now that I had seen where she lay buried, I didn’t want to. I didn’t know why. It struck me that I had been expecting more to come of my visit, for the world to stop, to change direction.
I stood up and touched my collar. It felt frosted, and that was when I realized that my hot tears had turned to ice in the air here. I pulled the coat collar out and brushed the frost away. There would be more tears later, but for now the world felt peaceful. Not numb, not suppressed. Just peaceful.
Walking out of the cemetery, my thoughts were a jumbled mess. I didn’t even notice when a car pulled up next to me, and I started when the car stopped at the curb in front of me and the driver got out. It was Eliot. He looked at me over the hood of the car, and I just looked back. I didn’t care how horribly puffy and red my eyes must be. He didn’t care for me anyway, so why should I care what he thought? Eliot walked around the front of the car to me.
“I’m glad I found you, Brynn! I talked with Mark already, but he said you had been gone since the morning. I thought you might be here.” Eliot stopped in front of me, just then noticing my bleary face.
“Brynn? Are you alright?” He dug in his pocket and brought out a fresh handkerchief. I took it gratefully and blew my nose. The sun had broken through the afternoon clouds and its rays warmed the top of my head.
“I’m fine. Just went to go visit my mother.” I said nothing about seeing his family’s plot, about his wife.
“Your mother? I—I had no idea. I thought you were visiting your ancestors... Of course. I’m so sorry. Brynn. Forgive me.”
Before I could stop him, he pulled me into his arms and hugged me tightly. My heart pounded against his, and we stood together for half a minute that seemed like a lifetime. His chest rose and fell and pushed mine to breathe with it, and for those moments we were breathing as one person. A surge of desire ran through my nerves as his hands touched my back, ran along my shoulders possessively. Then I remembered everything, remembered that he had pushed me away, and anger rose up to take its place. I needed to be alone, to think about my mom. I did not want to have Eliot edge his way back into my thoughts.
“Why are you here?” I asked, keeping my frustrations bottled. “Did you come here to...” I waved towards the cemetery, not wanting to say his wife’s name.
“No, no,” he said. “Nothing like that. I came to take you to the academy, if you’ll let me. Your, ah, friend Mark is on his way there already.”
“What’s the hurry?” The last thing on my mind right now was Mark or Eliot, and I resented having my day interrupted by two people I had diligently been trying to avoid.
“The problem.” He opened the passenger side door for me, and I reluctantly got in. “You two found a nice little opening into the answer. I checked it out earlier this morning.”
“Oh?” I crossed my arms. “Not last night?”
Eliot recoiled with the snide remark, as though I had slapped him across the face.
“I’m sorry I interrupted you last night. I was so intrigued, and this is such a new avenue to explore, I couldn’t help but come. But I am very sorry to have disturbed the two of you.”
I flushed. “You didn’t disturb anything. Really.”
“Really? He seems enamored of you.” Eliot’s smile was pained, but his emotions towards me were mere trivialities.
“What do you care?”
“Again, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry. It’s none of my business.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to become involved with any of the other students,” I said.
“I didn’t mean—”
“It would be a mistake.” I nearly spat out the word. “And I wouldn’t want any more of those.”
Eliot said nothing, just stared ahead through the windshield where slush spattered the glass.I fumed out of the window, and we rode the rest of the way in silence. When we arrived at the academy, I slammed the car door shut behind me.
“Brynn?”
I spun around to see Eliot standing, his hands open in innocence.
“I’m sorry for how you feel right now. If it’s my fault—”
“Of course it’s not! Of course it’s not your fault!” Adrenaline tensed my muscles, and another wash of grief tore its unyielding way through my body. I shuddered.
“What is it, then?”
“I thought it would change things,” I said, blurting out the thought that had been at the forefront of my mind since I left her graveside. “I thought it would change things to see her grave. But nothing changed.” I looked up at him, wetness burning in the corners of my eyes. “Nothing.”
Eliot paused in thought. A snowflake fell on my eyelash, and I blinked it away, a tear falling from my eye.
“Go again. Go again tomorrow.”
I looked up at him. The distance between us felt huge, empty.
“Why? What will have changed tomorrow?”
“You will have changed.”
I held my chin up. If he thought I was only a child, he was wrong. I would not be manipulated again, not by any of his high speeches. Not when he didn’t have the courage to put into action the advice he gave to others. When I spoke again, my words turned his face white.
“And what about you?” I said. My voice was cold, dead. “When will you go visit your wife?”
In legends, nobody dies peacefully. Villains die violently, heroes die unluckily, and if it isn’t arrows or spears it’s poison or drowning.
My mother died violently, and that’s all anyone ever told me. She went to Hungary to take care of my grandmother who had hurt her back, and one day when she was walking down the streets of Budapest someone killed her and threw her body into the river.
My father went to identify the body and see her buried, but he would not let me go. I was too young, he said, and I had school to think of. Later, after he had come back, I begged him to tell me what he had seen, but he never did. I had dreams where a hooded figure would stab me over and over again, tear my body to pieces, throw me into a dark river. My father didn’t know how to comfort me. Some nights I would wake up screaming. Some nights we both would.
They say time heals all wounds, but not always. Sometimes wounds pucker over and leave scars, and sometimes they heal silently and secretly, so that only one person knows the hurt was ever there. Sometimes they fester until another person comes along to cut out the rot, and then they bleed clean and fresh again. A second chance to heal.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Eliot didn’t respond to anything I said, and the meeting at the academy with Mark was brief and awkward. I sat on the other side of the table and listened as Eliot explained a number of different options we had to explore now that we had broken through the solution to the first, specific case. Occasionally he would glance up at Mark, but never at me.
Then he left, and Mark and I were alone in the university library. I began to gather up the papers to go, but Mark put his hand on my arm.
“Brynn?”
I turned to see him only inches away from me, his body so near mine that I could feel his breath on my skin.
“Mark—”
“I need to talk with you.” His face was so serious that I almost laughed out of sheer nervousness.
“About what?”
“Come on,
Brynn, you know about what.” He leaned in as if to kiss me, and I stepped back.
A lump rose in my throat and I coughed. I didn’t want to do this to Mark. He had been one of the best and closest friends I’d ever had. But I didn’t feel the same way towards him, and he deserved to know that.
“Mark,” I said carefully. “I don’t think we should go any further with this.”
His face dropped into a mask of apathy. He only looked like this when it hurt, I could tell. “Why?”
“I just— I don’t feel that way towards you.”
“You kissed me back. Last night.” His voice pleaded with me, and his careful mask began to crack.
“I’m sorry, Mark. I was excited about the problem. We both were.”
“But I thought...look, Brynn, I know we could be a good couple.”
“Mark, don’t.”
He forged ahead with the words that I’m sure he’d been practicing all last night. “I really think there’s something between us, Brynn. I’ve always felt it. You’re so special to me, and you always have been. Just give me a chance to be that person for you, too.”
“Mark—”
“Don’t do this,” he said, his voice cracking. “Please, Brynn, don’t throw this away without a shot.”
“I’m not throwing anything away. I just don’t think we should be together. Not like that.”
Mark paused, his brow furrowed deeply. He looked tortured, and I wished that there was something I could do to console him. But any kindness I had in me was safely tamped down. If there was one thing I didn’t want, it was to send mixed messages. No more hugs. No more shared smiles. No more anything for a while.
“I don’t understand it.” His voice turned hard, and he looked away from me. I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there, waiting.
“I don’t understand. Do you just not care about me?” His eyes flashed dark and accusing at me.
“I care about you a lot, Mark. Just not in that way.”
“So what?” He threw his hands up in the air angrily. “Are you going to pine forever for him?”
“Who?” My face turned hot as I realized what he was saying.
“You know who I’m talking about. You light up whenever Herceg comes into the room.”
“So?” Was it that obvious?
“He’s a professor, Brynn.”
“So?” I shuffled the papers again in my hands, trying not to admit what Mark already knew. That’s not the least of it, I thought. He’s also a prince and heir to a fortune. He lives in a castle, for god’s sake.
“So you think he would care about some dumb student?”
“No!” I threw the papers down onto the desk, and tears sprang to my eyes. “I know that! Of course he doesn’t care! That’s not the point, Mark!” Fury raged in me. He had no right to talk about Eliot in that way. I had never heard him speak so bluntly, so meanly.
“What’s the point?” he said.
“I don’t feel that way about you, and that’s all there is to it.” A frisson of energy crackled between us, and I could see that things wouldn’t go back to normal anytime soon. If ever.
“Okay.” Mark stacked my scattered papers together and pushed them back towards me on the table. “I’m sorry.”
I saw the rejection ripple through him and sag his limbs, but I couldn’t do anything. Sorrow ran through my, but I couldn’t fix this thing between us right now.
“Me, too,” I said.
The space between us had grown too dangerous to stay in. We couldn’t be friends, not like we had been before. I wanted to throw myself into the river outside and freeze until I couldn’t feel these emotions anymore. The pain of being rejected by Eliot was almost as bad as the pain of hurting Mark. I could deal with being hurt. I had always been the one who could handle pain. But dealing it out to someone else was too much. The two people in my life who I felt closest to here, and they had both been torn away from me. More alone than ever, I retreated back into the safety of mathematics, and the dam inside of me that I thought had been torn down now stood taller than ever, my protection from the messiness of he outside world.
Eliot sat at his desk, reluctantly petting the gray ball of fur that sat purring on his lap. As the phone rang again, he prayed for Marta to stop calling him. After the tenth ring, he gave up pretending to be in the shower.
“Eliot? Finally!” Marta said, her voice bright and enthusiastic. “I’ve called about that damned cat you wanted to get rid of.”
“Oh!” Eliot breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad.”
“Did you think I was going to ask about that girl of yours? I convinced the Lustigs to take her cat in a couple of days. How is she?”
“The cat?”
“The girl.”
“Marta, the subject is over.”
“I was just asking how she was.”
“She’s doing well. She’s done some good work on the project with another student.” His voice caught on the last syllable, and he coughed to cover it up, but Marta didn’t miss anything.
“Another student? A boy? Eliot, are you jealous?”
“It’s not my place to be jealous.”
“You don’t have any competition.” Marta seemed unworried. “She’ll come back around.”
“Thanks, Marta, but I’m really not looking for any kind of relationship right now.”
“You’ve been saying that for ten years, Eliot.”
The pause between them stretched and curled across the phone connection. Eliot shifted uncomfortably back in his chair, leaning his head on the hard leather. A burning desire flickered up in his consciousness and he stamped it down.
“I can’t.” I won’t.
“Why not?”
“She’s a student—”
“So what? Eliot, don’t think her heart isn’t in the same place as yours.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’ve seen my share of lovestruck maidens.” He could hear the wine being sipped at the end of her sentence.
“You’re being absurd.” As insightful as Marta was sometimes, she couldn’t help but insert herself into drama. Or create it if none existed. And he was sure that none existed here.
Marta sighed, a heavy sigh meant to chastise.
“If you think she doesn’t love you, you’re either so stupid you can’t see the nose in front of your face or so scared that you’re pulling back into your shell. And I know you’re not stupid, Eliot.”
“I don’t believe she does love me. If she ever did, I’m not convinced she does anymore.”
“I am.”
“Marta, even if we both wanted something, I can’t.” Eliot stood up from his desk and began to pace from shelf to shelf, the phone pressed to his ear.
“Whenever you say you can’t, it usually means you’ve just gotten in your own way, Eliot. You always trip over good intentions. Don’t let them get in the way of love.”
“I can’t—”
“Can’t what?”
“Love!” Eliot rested his head against the wall. “I can’t love anymore. Not again.”
“You won’t let yourself. Eliot, when was the last time you went to church?”
Eliot smiled wanly. Otto wasn’t exactly the religious type, but Marta strove to get him to church every Sunday. Whether for the publicity or for the moral salvation, Otto usually obliged.
“It’s been a while.” Ten years is a while, isn’t it?
“Try it, maybe. You might learn a little something about forgiveness.”
“I don’t deserve it. The accident was my fault.”
“And it’s in the past. The long past. You deserve a future.”
“Thank you for your concern, Marta. Give my love to Otto.”
“I will. Forgive yourself, Eliot.”
Eliot looked at the phone, then hung up.
I don’t deserve a future, he thought. And even if I did, she deserves a brighter one than I could give her.
Weeks passed. Eliot kept his
distance from Brynn, and she kept hers. Her work, already impressive, had become near-professional in its diligence, and she made sure to document not only her successes, but the avenues of inquiry that led to failure. She stayed late at the academy every night, or so his assistants told him. He wasn’t quite sure what happened between her and the Joseph boy. Either she hid the relationship from him so well he couldn’t figure it, or nothing had happened after that first night he caught them together. Regardless, on the rare occasions he came to visit the academy and saw them working together, he felt a tug of jealousy.
Why should he be jealous? It had been his decision to stay out of her life, and the choice had been made for her own good. Every time he saw her, though, he came closer and closer to ruing the decision he had made. In her time at Budapest, he saw her grow and mature, not only as a mathematician, but also as a woman. Each visit made him more aware of her budding grace, her beauty that was no longer childlike. He began to make excuses to come to the academy more often, every time knowing that he was playing with fire.
The semester went on and on, and his work made progress in leaps and bounds now that he was actively sharing ideas with the interns and assistants. Each day brought him closer to the answer to his problem, and at the same time closer to the day when Brynn would leave and go back to America to graduate, find a job, marry someone else. Eliot tortured himself with imagining her future husband, her future family, her future life without him. He was no idiot. She was young and had the rest of her future in front of her, and he was sure her brief experiences with him had disillusioned her about the possibility of staying with him. No, that chance had come and gone, if it ever existed.
He lectured at the front of the classroom, but his lectures were directed solely towards her, and although she never raised her hand to ask a question, he tried to read her expression to know what parts he needed to explain more thoroughly. And although she stayed quiet, the last words she had directed his way echoed incessantly through his mind:
When will you go to visit your wife?
