by Kristen Mae
BEYOND
the
BREAK
KRISTEN MAE
TRITONE LITERARY PUBLISHERS
Copyright © 2016 by Tritone Literary Publishers
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.
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ISBN 978-0-9975418-0-9
Originally published in 2016 by Tritone Literary Publishers
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For those who have lost
something they never possessed to begin with
PROLOGUE
Six months after I nearly drowned in the ocean, Oren asked me, “Do you ever regret what happened with Claire?” It was a fair question on a day like that, the sort of day when I couldn’t let go of all the “what ifs” and “what would it be likes,” a day when I could smell her everywhere I turned: water lily body wash, sweat and woman. Really? On my pillow? She’s never even been in my bedroom. And in the refrigerator? I just want to make a sandwich! Go away, Claire! Get out of my head!
I paced the house like a caged tigress, head down, shoulders rolling, desperate to find a place where she wasn’t. And I was being terrible with my poor husband, sending him ugly thought-daggers: God, Oren, can’t you read my mind yet? I need you to hurt me, tear me apart, make me forget; don’t make me beg.
He leaned on his elbows over our granite kitchen peninsula and furrowed his blond eyebrows at me. I knew the question he’d really wanted to ask: Wouldn’t you be better off, more emotionally stable, if you’d never met her? And, boiling beneath the surface of his so-concerned exterior: I’m so goddamn jealous I could split in two.
I forgave him for this. Jealousy, that relentless wrenching of the guts, was a feeling I understood intimately. Oren had been far more gracious than I, more generous, more forgiving, more accepting. But the martyr thing gets old, and I was in a lashing-out sort of mood. So I asked him, “Do you ever regret that you encouraged the situation?” I said it with a voice turned to saccharine but gave him the bullish look that probably made him question how well he knew me, the look that needled him right in the soft parts. I might as well have said: You started it, darling.
He cocked his head to the side and huff-sighed through his pretty, straight nose. His glasses slid and he pushed them back into place. “You know what I mean, Hazel. You act like you’re miserable.”
I shrugged. “Well, I’m not miserable, and I don’t regret anything that happened with Claire.” The timbre of my voice bordered on flippant.
I did not feel flippant. I was a human knot, a mess of twisted, frayed nerves. But my words incensed Oren enough that he was able to do what I needed him to do, right there in the sunlit kitchen. He grabbed me and shoved me up onto the countertop, manhandled me (God! Finally!), pulled my hair, violated me while I breathed into his ear, “Show me. Do it.” I wasn’t even making any sense. But he understood; he had to unravel me, had to finish what she had started.
It’s not like I had any control over what happened with Claire. She was thrust upon me, injected into my psyche, one of those right-time-right-place coincidences. I could have fallen in love with a monkey or a robot if you’d inserted one of those things instead of Claire. Probably. The point is, I was positively itching to lose control.
ONE
There was a sharpness to the voice, a haughty audacity that was impossible to ignore. I paused by the half-open doorway, just short of being seen, and pressed my fingers against my violin strings so they wouldn’t vibrate and reveal me.
“—heard you. If you can’t even get through the Scherzo without tripping over your own fingers, you might as well give up.”
My heart rate had not yet fully recovered from the audition I’d performed only moments before, and now it picked up its pace again, thudding in my temples like a bass drum.
The voice laughed derisively. Another person cleared his throat, but it was a nervous sound—not the sound of someone preparing to speak.
I heard the plink and rustle of an instrument moving about, then an eruption of beautiful music, fast and virtuosic, played high on the E-string. Show off. More plinking sounds. “I’m honestly a little surprised they accepted your app. It’s not like they’re going to hire a new grad from some tiny little backwoods college in Georgia.”
A sigh. “Okay, man.” There was no fight in that voice at all, only exasperation and defeat. I saw a flash of my twelve-year-old self standing at the bus stop with a violin strapped to my back, encircled by a group of well-coifed popular girls whose daily habit was to appraise my secondhand clothes and stringy, un-styled hair. Those girls were the reason I used to cut through the woods.
There was quiet for a few moments, more rustling, and then: “Hey, you’d better hurry. You’re number three, right? They started twenty minutes ago.”
The door flew all the way open, startling me back a step, and a young man with a hawk nose and thick glasses emerged carrying a violin and bow in one hand and a short stack of music in the other. His pale face flushed bright red when he saw me, and he lowered his eyes as he hurried around me down the hallway toward the stage.
I continued on to my own warm-up room to pack up my instrument. Two other violinists were there preparing for their auditions, their music echoing off the bare walls. One, a plump, older woman, stopped playing and turned to me as I entered. “How’d it go?”
I shrugged. “I played my best.”
“Can’t ask for better, can we?” She flashed me a warm smile and turned back to her practicing. The other violinist gave me a polite nod but did not stop playing. This was how it was supposed to be. We were all competing, but it was friendly. There was a code among musicians, a may-the-best-one-win kind of solidarity. We weren’t supposed to cut each other down.
That poor kid. I zipped my violin into its case, tucked my music back into my bag, and gave my competition a wave as I left the room. Three doors down, a man with dark hair exited the same room the hawk-nosed violinist had just left. I only saw his back as he disappeared down the hall and into the men’s restroom. Even his stride was arrogant—too long, too much sway in the shoulders.
I crept to the now-empty room and poked my head in. Two cases sat open on chairs, one with a violin in it, and one without. The one without would belong to the guy with the hawk nose, as he was currently auditioning. The other, the one with the violin in it, would belong to the bullying prick.
What came next happened so fast it was as if someone else were in control of my body, moving my extremities with exacting efficiency and shoving aside any concern of what might happen if I were caught. I slipped inside the room and pushed the door closed behind me, then laid my violin case down, unzipped it, and pulled out an S-shaped piece of metal barely longer than my hand. The tool was designed to set sound posts, the tiny column of wood responsible for carrying the vibrations of the violin from the belly to the back and out the f-holes to the audience. That thin piece of wood also supported the front of the instrument so that the immense pressure exerted by the tightened strings would not send the bridge crashing through the delicate belly of the violin. The same tool used for setting that vital
piece of wood could also be used to remove it.
How cocky will he be when he realizes his violin is totally unplayable? I slid the metal tool down into the f-hole of the man’s violin and gently tapped the sounding post until I heard it give way with a hollow-sounding thwack.
I shoved the tool back in its compartment and re-zipped my violin case with unnerving, detached coolness. I checked the hallway. Still empty. I hurried from the room and walked outside, where I was greeted by blistering heat and brilliant sunlight, and only then was I hit by a powerful wave of vertigo.
It wasn’t only that I’d just sabotaged a man’s audition. This rushing wooziness that overtook me nearly every time I walked out of a building had been happening for some time now, ever since Oren and I first moved to Florida back in December. I had explained it to him as similar to the feeling you get when you wake up in a strange hotel room and have no idea where the hell you are or what day of the week it is. ‘Geographical vertigo,’ I’d called it, and he’d gazed at me with a bemused expression and told me I ought to take up writing—the way I was always coming up with funny names for things.
At first it was the too-warm winter, the rustling palm trees, and the weirdly fat blades of grass that threw me. But now we were into May, and the weather, which up to then had been perfectly sunny with just a kiss of humidity, was a jarring cacophony of furious, blinding sun, booming afternoon thunderstorms, and heat so liquid that walking and jogging became wading and swimming. I just couldn’t seem to get my bearings.
Not that I was complaining. My heart was a skipping schoolgirl with a noisy metal lunchbox. Because every time I forgot where I was, I also got to remember: Nobody knows who I am. No one in our new town had heard about me, the reluctant and just a little bit scary super heroine known as Did What She Had to Do Girl. Here in Conch Garden, I was just Hazel Duval: ordinary, anonymous, and perhaps a little quieter than most. Nobody meeting me for the first time would suspect the ugliness that lurked in my past. Not even Claire.
She was there in the parking lot that day when I walked out of the auditorium’s back entrance after my audition, the bang of the door slamming shut behind me startling me out of my weird, woozy vertigo. My legs almost buckled at the sound—I was sure someone was rushing out at me, snarling and angry and ready to grab me by the straps of my violin case to drag me back inside.
I plodded on wobbly legs across the scorched blacktop of the parking lot, focusing my attention on objects in my environment in an effort to ground myself, as my old therapist used to advise me to do when I felt a panic attack coming on. Hard ground beneath my feet, smooth leather handle of my violin case, hot breeze on my cheeks. No one was after me. No one had seen. That guy had it coming. My legs solidified beneath me, and my heart relaxed a little.
That’s when I first saw Claire. She was standing behind an old beige Mercedes, flailing her arms at me and bouncing like a kid who badly needed a trip to the potty. She had enough hair for three heads, white-blond and cartoon curly, and skin so pale I wanted to get my umbrella from my car and hold it over her until the sun went away.
“Do you have a wire coat hanger on you?” She jabbed her index finger at me as if in accusation, and my heart leaped up and snagged in my throat—a coat hanger could certainly be used to hook a sound post and pull it over. But she couldn’t possibly know, could she? I’d only just left the room.
“Locked my keys in the car, and now my cello’s roasting in the trunk,” she said with a grin.
I sagged with relief. She wasn’t talking about the sound post. And I did have a coat hanger on me—that’s the weird thing—since I’d picked up Oren’s dry cleaning the day before. His first dry cleaning ever. This sort of coincidence is why I’ve often accused the universe of fucking with me.
My temples were still thumping with paranoia, but I managed an answer. “I do, actually. Just a sec.”
I crossed the aisle to unlock my car and bent over the back seat of my Camry to untangle a coat hanger from one of Oren’s freshly laundered shirts. She took it from me and jimmied open the door to the old car, her hands as fluid and sure in her movements as mine had been just moments ago at a similar yet decidedly more nefarious task.
“Oh, I’m Claire,” she said, swinging the car door wide. She grabbed my hand before I had a chance to prepare myself for a reasonably confident shake, then let go before I could stop my hand from being floppy. How embarrassing. I felt a peculiar spark of jealousy toward her. She was all smiles and freckles and crystal blue eyes and a gap between her front teeth that she obviously wasn’t insecure about. And was capable of calmly breaking into her own car. She struck me as the kind of person whose heart didn’t race over anything, ever.
Now she stood staring at me with an almost-smile, looking as if she was on the edge of a giggle.
“Oh—I’m Hazel.” God, I’d spent so long avoiding people that I’d forgotten how to socialize. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“Two older brothers.” She leaned against the Mercedes. “Crazy smart, but they only use their powers for evil. They taught me all sorts of mischief so they had someone to take the fall.” She held up the coat hanger as evidence.
“You mean they got you in trouble on purpose?” I wiped sweat from my brow with the back of my hand and glanced behind me at the auditorium doors. Surely that guy had discovered what I’d done to his violin by now. He probably wouldn’t suspect it was sabotage; sound posts get jostled and fall all the time. But still…
“Oh, no one ever believed them.” She snorted. “I mean, look at me.”
I tried to, but she’d disappeared into the old Mercedes, and there wasn’t anything to see but the hem of her bohemian-style skirt draped over the leg she’d kicked out for balance.
She reemerged with her keys and purse and came around the back of the car to pop open the trunk, then wrestled out a large, beat-up cello case. The way it squeezed out of the tiny trunk made me think of a bloody childbirth video I’d once watched. I crinkled my nose. “So…you’re in the orchestra?”
“Yep. You here for the auditions?” She wrapped a sinewy arm around her cello case and leaned on it.
I nodded.
“How’d you do?”
“I think I did…okay.” It had been my best audition ever. That didn’t mean anything, though. I might not have been the best player who auditioned.
She cocked a you’re-not-fooling-me eyebrow at me and jostled the strap to her cello case over her shoulder with a bounce. “Well, you’ve just demonstrated that you are always prepared. I wouldn’t be surprised if you got the gig.”
“Eh. We’ll see.” A bead of sweat snaked into the waistband of my pants. Claire’s bare arms and shoulders gleamed like sculpted marble in the sun. How was she not sweating? I almost reached out to touch her to see if she felt as cool as she looked.
“The orchestra is great. You’ll love it. Maestro is great too; he doesn’t fuck around.”
That made me smile. “He doesn’t fuck around” was high praise for a musician. Maybe for anybody.
She waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t, she said, “You aren’t much of a talker, are you?”
I blushed furiously and hoped my olive skin and the glare of the sun were enough to hide it.
“Why don’t you come to my quartet rehearsal while you wait for the results? It’d be fun, and it’ll make the time pass quicker.” Her words sounded softer now, like she’d seen my blush and felt bad for teasing me. She pulled her phone halfway out of her purse and glanced at it. “Shit, I’m already ten minutes late. You coming? Or were you on your way to somewhere important?”
“I was just going for coffee.” No, I wasn’t. I didn’t even drink coffee. Why was I lying to her?
“Come on, it’ll be good networking. Do you live in the area?”
“Yes, since December.”
“Have you played any gigs?”
“Not yet.”
“Well then you definitely need to meet other musi
cians. Come on, seriously, I’m late and it’s hot as balls out here. Let’s go inside.”
And before I could come up with a good excuse to say no, she linked her arm in mine and dragged me back the way I’d come.
Years later, I would wonder, with a deep, bittersweet ache in my chest, how different my life would have turned out if I hadn’t had a coat hanger with me that day.
TWO
Claire pulled me back into the same building, down the same hallway, and by the same room where I’d just sabotaged a man’s audition. He came barreling out of the room as we passed by, his face a mask of panic. “Excuse me, do either of you happen to have a tool for setting sound posts? Mine fell.”
“I’m so sorry, I don’t,” Claire said, slowing her pace.
So he had assumed it was just an accident. I held back a sigh of relief. Over his shoulder beyond the doorway, I saw the hawk-nosed violinist standing with his arms crossed, his instrument now packed up and strapped to his back. A hint of a smile pulled at the edges of his mouth. He looked like he was really working to keep it from exploding into a full-fledged grin.
I turned my attention back to the now-desperate violinist and shrugged with an appropriate amount of empathy. “Sorry, neither do I.” He was definitely screwed.
Satisfied with my vigilante handiwork, I followed Claire further into the bowels of the building until we came to a brightly lit rehearsal room.
“Jeez, Claire, you’re fifteen minutes late! I was about to call you!” A lanky brunette in her forties wearing too much makeup and a severe ponytail occupied one of four chairs set up in a semicircle at the center of the space. A violin case sat open in her lap, and she appeared to be packing up her instrument, as if the rehearsal were over rather than just beginning. A broad-shouldered black man with a viola leaned back in one of the other chairs, looking bored.
