by Kristen Mae
“An eight minute mile is pretty fast,” I said. “I run around a ten on pavement or trail, closer to an eleven in the sand.”
“Now that sounds like a pace that perhaps wouldn’t make me drop dead,” said Claire.
“Great,” said Mike, “then go run with Hazel. Because yoga is not cardio.”
Claire rolled her eyes. “Yoga is cardio. If you’d watch me do it, you’d understand.”
“Oh, I’ll watch you do it sometime.”
She snorted. “Yeah, I bet you will, Doctor.”
Watching this ping-pong match of insult and innuendo did something funny to my insides. Oren and I never talked like this—I tried to imagine it, the teasing, easy banter, the inherent trust that there was no underlying malice behind the words they threw at each other. I couldn’t see it though—Oren was always too worried he would hurt me. I looked over at him and the expression on his face matched what my insides were doing.
Claire shoved my thigh. “Go get your clue,” she said. “It’s your turn to act out.”
Later that night, I made love to my husband. As I lay beneath him, watching his sweet, careful face, my mind turned again to Mike and Claire and the way they had poked fun of each other during our games. I wondered if that playfulness extended to their sex lives—did they talk like that during sex? Did they tease and provoke each other? Were they passionate? Did they mean it when they moaned in each other’s ears?
Oren eased in and out of me while I painted a picture of this alien couple in my mind: Claire atop Mike, head thrown back, curls flying, back arched in ecstasy. Every movement, every sigh a natural, involuntary response—no acting required. I wiped the image from my mind, ashamed that I would dare intrude on my friend’s relationship that way. But still, I couldn’t help but compare myself to her. She seemed so much more confident than me. More complete. I imagined Claire and me as a pair of pies like the ones in Trivial Pursuit—she, a whole pie with all her pieces still intact, and I with a gaping hole where someone had stolen a piece.
It was just sex, though, I kept telling myself. Who cared? Oren loved me in spite of my missing pie piece. We were enough.
As if to punctuate my thoughts, Oren shuddered and collapsed onto me, content and expended. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him close, pressing my face against the short blond curls at his neck. “I love you.”
“Hazel,” he whispered, and it was the same as if he’d said I love you.
He lay on top of me for a while, breathing lightly into my ear as his heart rate slowed. I turned my head from the moistness of his breath.
After he rolled over and fell asleep, I went to the bathroom to clean up, then returned to bed and snuggled up alongside his sleeping form, exhausted but not sleepy myself. We’d been moved in for nearly three weeks, but I was still getting used to the unfamiliar nighttime noises. The old windows were thin and warped, in need of replacement, and every sound from outside slithered in uninvited.
Somewhere, not too far off in the distance, a dog whined. Or the wind howled—it was hard to be sure. My ears went rigid with the strain of listening. A few minutes later I heard it again, this time accompanied by a short yip—a shrill sound, too pathetic and helpless to be an adult dog.
A puppy.
I waited for someone to bring the poor dog in, waited and waited, but every few minutes the whine pressed through the cracks of our old windows. The longer I waited, the more my chest constricted. My mouth dried out until my tongue felt like a lump of chalk. Goosebumps spread across my skin and the smell of decomposing plant life filled my nostrils, turning the world sideways and mashing me into wet earth. In my mind, I rattled myself like a ragdoll: You will not think of this. You will not start this again.
The puppy whined once more, and I saw myself screaming. I wanted to scream, right here, right now—fist the sheets, kick, flail, shriek, go crazy. But that would horrify Oren. I couldn’t do that to him. Wouldn’t do that to him. I stuffed down my screams, screwed a lid onto them as angry and fast as if I were trapping noxious gas in a jar. But they were loud in my mind, almost loud enough to block out the puppy’s whimpering.
With trembling hands, I scraped up a pillow and blanket and retreated to the living room sofa on the other side of the house. I was sure I wouldn’t hear the whimpering from there, and I could turn on the ventilation fan in the hall bath if I needed to block the noise.
I settled into the couch and hugged the blanket to my chest, focusing on the whomp-whomping of my heart as if it were a lullaby. Don’t think of it. Don’t start this again. Don’t, don’t, don’t.
I fell asleep quickly, but it was a fitful, uneasy kind of sleep, besieged by vivid dreams of old-timey keys jammed into keyholes oozing thick trails of bright red blood.
FIVE
When I awoke the next morning, my head hurt. I sat up on the couch and gazed around my new living room in a groggy stupor. The room still bore that gray “in between” quality of light—no longer night, but still not quite morning. All was silent save the low hum of the refrigerator in the kitchen.
I knew I’d had a flashback the night before; I remembered the feeling of being pressed into the earth. I remembered my chest constricting, my hands trembling as I’d picked up my blanket, the way my screams had tried to rip themselves free. I remembered everything flawlessly, but from a distance, as if I’d watched the events happening to someone else.
I tried to remember the sound of the puppy whining and how it had made me feel. Nothing. My mind remained tranquil and unperturbed, bland as an unsalted cracker. I closed my eyes and tried harder, tried to conjure the shrill sound as vividly as I could in an attempt to elicit even a fraction of the reaction I’d had the night before, yet my heart stubbornly maintained its even tempo as if it was indifferent to what my brain was doing. I’d overreacted, that was all. I’d let the night and the wine get to me.
That’s how I convinced myself the incident would be an isolated one; a single, freak disturbance of grisly memories now safely stowed away.
Later in the week, I ran on the beach just after sunrise. I hadn’t heard the puppy since the night after the concert, nor had I succumbed to any more bloody dreams, so I felt rested and strong. But the heat was different that June day, a new kind of heat, more intense than anything I’d felt since we’d come to Florida—blistering, sticky, and heavy. Moving through it was like swimming in a cauldron of boiling Elmer’s glue.
Even with the cool ocean waves fanning salty-fresh air against the shore, and even though I drank two bottles of water after my run, I still ended up feeling like a beat-up leather satchel of shriveled human organs. No wonder Claire hadn’t shown up to run with me despite her “definite maybe” text from the night before. She knew better.
By mid-afternoon, when I parked my car behind the downtown café where Claire, Katrina, and I had agreed to study Italian before our rehearsal, the heat sat on my chest like a sweaty elephant. I paused by the open door of my car and pulled my freshly washed hair into a damp ponytail before I grabbed my bag and violin case from the backseat and trudged to the front of the café.
A bell tinkled overhead as I pushed open the door. A glorious air-conditioned current swam up my shorts and into the sleeves of my shirt. I spotted Claire sitting in the back of the dim room on an old plush couch adorned with coffee-stained corduroy cushions and beat-up hippie pillows. A textbook lay across her lap, and her wild hair had been scraped back into something close to a bun, with a halo of curls springing free from the headphones she wore. Her forehead was smooth and relaxed like she was daydreaming rather than studying.
I crossed the room and stood in front of her for a few seconds, but she didn’t acknowledge me. I touched her shoulder. “Hey. Claire.”
“Oh!” She startled and looked up at me, sliding her headphones down around her neck. “Ciao. Piacere di conocerla!”
“Huh?”
She laughed. “It means ‘Hello. Pleasure to meet you.’ It’s Italian.”
“Yeah, I…sorta figured that might be Italian.”
“Hazel, I’m beginning to think you’re secretly a smartass.”
“Only trying to keep up with you,” I said. “I missed you this morning. It was unbelievably hot, though. I’m whooped.”
“Oh…yeah, I was going to meet you. Sorry about that. I ended up going to the hospital.”
“To see Mike, you mean?”
“To play cello. I play for the patients a couple times per week.” She tapped the fiberglass case that rested on its side under her calves. I assumed that, like me, she’d brought her instrument inside to keep it out of the heat.
I sat down beside her. “Is that a regular thing?”
“Sort of. Mike had the social workers set something up where I could go in and play and lift people’s spirits or whatever.”
I pulled out my new textbook and a pen. “Wow. That’s really cool of you to do that.”
“Uh, well, it’s good practice for performing. So I have an audio program here. You can use one of my earpieces. Have you ever learned a language before?”
“Yes,” I said, not missing how adroitly she’d shifted the focus from herself.
“Oh, really?” Her eyebrows rose. “Which one?”
“English?”
She laughed. “I meant a second language.”
I grinned, proud of my little joke. “No. I slept through Spanish in high school. My teacher didn’t give a crap.” I glanced around. “Where’s Katrina, anyway?”
She shrugged. “Can’t come. Something about needing to run errands to buy Elizabeth stuff for her dorm room.”
“Elizabeth?”
“Her daughter.”
“Oh.” I held my hand out. “Well, let me see that earpiece then.”
“Wait. Hold on a second.” She clutched the headphones to her breast and her blue eyes turned stern. “Do you at least remember how to conjugate a verb?”
I burst out laughing but then went serious when I realized she wasn’t joking. “Uh, you mean with the six different persons in each tense?” I was surprised that I could recall anything at all from high school Spanish.
“Okay, thank goodness you are not totally clueless. Most people do not even know what ‘conjugate’ means.” She shook her head as if this was unforgivable. “Anyway, in Italian, many of the most common verbs are irregular. Right here, see?” She pointed in her book, and I scrambled to pull out my own copy and flip to the page she was on. “‘To be,’ which will be the verb you will probably use more than any other, is ‘essere.’ But to say ‘I am,’ you have to say ‘sono,’ and to say ‘you are’ you have to say ‘sei.’ See? They are all irregular.”
I blinked at my book, trying to keep up with her. I’d been thinking this studying thing was going to be fun and laid back. Claire appeared to have planned precisely the opposite. “You are not using contractions in your speech the way regular people do,” I said in a robotic monotone.
“Huh?”
I leaned back on the ugly cushions, laughing. “It’s a thing you do.”
“I…what? Really? I never use contractions?” She looked up and to her right like she might find the answer written on the ceiling.
I grinned. “No, you do. But when you get really serious and academic, you start talking as if you’re dictating a scientific paper or something, like where contractions would be frowned upon. It’s funny.” But my neck and ears were beginning to prickle as if I’d wandered too close to a fire. I wasn’t used to blurting out the first thing that popped into my brain. Maybe Claire was already rubbing off on me.
She wrinkled her nose. “I have never noticed that before. Oh shit,” she said, laughing. “Did I just do it again?”
Now I felt sorry for having pointed it out. “I didn’t mean to make you feel self-conscious. It was just something I noticed and thought was sort of…uh, interesting. It’s endearing, really. I’m sorry.” Heat crept up my neck and face.
“You don’t need to be sorry. And I’m not self-conscious.” She bowed her head over her book again, tucking a flying curl behind her ear. “So anyway. Back to the verb ‘essere.’”
Two hours, three cups of coffee for Claire, and two cups of tea for me later, we called it quits on studying. Or, more accurately, I called it quits and Claire acted like a frisky squirrel who’d just been ordered not to move. She really enjoyed studying.
We had an hour before we needed to leave for quartet rehearsal, so we decided to meander the tree-shaded streets of the old-fashioned downtown and browse the few antique stores with aisles wide enough to accommodate Claire’s cello case.
In the first shop we came to, I found myself lingering over a beautiful, timeworn buffet inlaid with blue and yellow Spanish tiles. It looked like an old washstand that had been converted. “This would look pretty in our foyer,” I said, running my fingertips along the smooth wood grain.
“It is pretty,” agreed Claire. Her fingers traced the same spot mine just had. “You should get it.”
“Well, yeah…but how much is it?” I squeezed my body around the back of the piece, trying not to slam my violin case into some expensive thing while I searched for a price tag.
Claire bent and looked underneath. “Oh, shit. It’s fifteen hundred dollars! Doesn’t that seem exorbitant?”
I did think it was exorbitant, though I imagined Claire and Mike could easily afford the piece. “For me it is.”
“I think it’s crazy to spend that much money on something you’ll probably never actually do anything with. I mean, there are starving children in the world for Christ’s sake.”
“Hey, you’re preaching to the choir,” I said. I thought back to Claire and Mike’s house and remembered that although the structure itself was large and well-crafted, the décor seemed modest and sparse. I wondered what they did with all of Mike’s cardiologist money and immediately felt awful for being petty and nosy.
Claire rolled her cello case backward out of the store and we strolled the sidewalk side by side in the sticky afternoon heat, slowing whenever we passed under a patch of shade provided by the evenly spaced oaks along the street. Claire’s cello case clunked each time it rolled over a crack.
“So what’s your deal?” she asked suddenly. “You said you came from Ohio? Did you study there? Were you at Cleveland?”
“Cincinnati.”
“I studied at Cleveland for a long time, so not too far away. That’s why I was wondering if you went there. What a coincidence that would’ve been, huh?”
I nodded and wiped sweat from my brow. Even in the shade, the heat was nearly unendurable.
“Later I studied at Manhattan, though. I started when I was really little, like four. I literally cannot remember a time when I wasn’t a cellist.”
“You were a prodigy, right?” I asked. I bent to pick up a plastic bottle from the sidewalk and tossed it into a nearby trash can.
“Hmm. Prodigy. I’m not in love with that word.” She frowned at the sidewalk. “People assume that being a prodigy means my parents discovered my talent and then forced me to practice all day long, and it wasn’t like that at all. Cello was just…my favorite toy. Some little girls played Barbies. I played the cello.”
“Couldn’t you have been a soloist?” I bit my lip. “I mean, I don’t know why I’m asking that—of course you could have. But why didn’t you?”
She sighed and pulled open a door to a shop with a pottery display filling the front window. The thick, spicy aroma of incense overwhelmed us and we both cringed backward.
“Ugh!”
Claire laughed as I fanned my hand in front of my face. “It’s a bit much, right?” She let the door swing closed and we continued walking. “I did tour for about a year. I even had an agent. I hated it. I mean, really hated it. The playing itself I enjoyed, obviously, but I am not a person who can live out of a suitcase. It made me horribly anxious to always be flitting from one city to the next.” She sighed as if relieved to be free from the stress of traveling. “But I met
Mike on tour, so it wasn’t a total bust. He got the job here at the hospital and we figured I’d be able to weasel my way into the orchestra fairly easily.”
“Ha. I’m sure they were tripping over themselves at the prospect of you leading the cello section.”
“Oh, please. It wasn’t that bad.” We arrived at a little antique store with a window display jammed full of centuries-old furniture, rugs, and trinkets. Claire opened the door. No incense this time. “So, back to you. You haven’t really told me a thing about yourself. I mean, you talk, barely, but you never actually reveal anything.”
“What? What do you mean?” Did I give off an aura of secretiveness? The back of my neck heated.
“Sorry,” she said, rolling her cello over the threshold. “That was completely rude. I just mean I don’t know anything about you besides that you’re from Ohio and studied at Cincinnati. Like, how old were you when you started playing? Don’t answer if you don’t want to. I’m being an ass.”
I followed her into the store and let the door swing shut behind me. The aisles were tightly packed with innumerable treasures—painted ceramics, silver serving trays, stunning glass vases in greens and golds and blues. “I was seven.” My skin broke out in goosebumps that had nothing to do with the air conditioning. Seven. When I’d gone quiet quiet quiet after what the neighbor did to me. When my mother, crazy with worry at my sudden change in temperament, had been desperate to give me a voice in any form.
Claire set her cello down at the end of an aisle so we could look at the trinkets on display without worrying about her knocking into things. “And?” She cocked her head at me.
I picked up a delicate ceramic music box adorned with the figure of a sleeping, rosy-cheeked woman. I opened it. Nothing happened. “My mom started me on violin because I needed something to occupy myself with. I wasn’t as talented as some, but I practiced more than anyone. I played in a lot of competitions. I won a few.” I wound the key on the underside of the music box and the player tinkled the waltz from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty.
