by Kristen Mae
I wasn’t sure what else to say, what she was trying to figure out. It was hard for me to understand why anyone would want to know anything about me unless they were just digging for something ugly. People love looking at train wrecks.
I could see she expected me to go on, though she didn’t press. I closed the music box. “We should get going, don’t you think?”
She pulled out her phone to check the time. “Probably. We have to walk all the way back to the café.” Her tone was flat, neutral—I couldn’t tell if she’d noticed my discomfort or not.
“I’m going to buy this first, though.”
“Really? It’s chipped,” she said, pointing out a flaw in the finish.
I shrugged. “That’s okay. I like it.”
She smiled at me as if I’d finally told her everything there was to know about me.
I made my purchase, and we reversed direction down the sidewalk toward the café. Heat rippled off the street in waves. I wiped sweat from my upper lip with my index finger and flung it on the sidewalk like I did when I was running. Claire did not seem bothered by the heat—her skin was like chalk, dry and milk-white. I hoped my blood would thin out like hers apparently had.
As we passed the café, a movement near the base of one of the tables caught my attention.
Claire grinned and pointed. “Aw, a puppy!” She crouched with her hands on her knees.
I smiled too, but only for a second, and then felt the muscles in my face let go. The way the puppy’s leash fell from his collar and snaked along the sidewalk…
Not now. Please, not now, after all these years. Not here.
I saw Claire move to pet the thing, saw her stop, turn, gape: “Holy fuck, you are white as a sheet. Are you okay?” Her voice sounded funny, like it was coming from the other end of a culvert pipe.
A flock of birds let loose into the sky, synchronized and beautiful in their liftoff—a pandemonium of shadows on the ground. It wasn’t really happening, there were no birds, but I saw them anyway. They’d been a warning, should have been a warning, that day in the woods when he approached me. But I hadn’t been paying attention.
Not here, not here, not here.
I scrunched my eyes closed and tried to recover my sense of time but all I felt was crackling heat and hollowed out insides, like I was imploding, caving into myself. Somewhere outside of me, the crickets’ song ballooned over the street. A car melted by in slow motion. I heard a dull crunching sound.
Vaguely I registered the music box at my feet, halfway out of the bag and smashed on the sidewalk. A flash of schoolbooks slipping from my hands, the clumpety-clump-clump sound they made when they hit the dirt. Had I really just left my books in the woods? Did no one ever go retrieve them? I bent slowly, like melting wax, reaching for the music box, but Claire was already there and we almost collided.
She stood and held the bag out to me, but I couldn’t command my hand to take it from her. There was a roaring river rapids noise in my head. “Hazel,” she said, and her voice was muffled like she was speaking underwater. She grabbed me by the elbow. “Hazel.”
I willed myself to open my mouth and make human sounds come out. “I…I’m going to walk around the other way…parking lot.” My words had come out angular and disjointed. I sounded crazy.
“Are you afraid of dogs? I mean, it’s okay if you are, but…it’s just a puppy, you know. Wait!”
I fled in the opposite direction, turning to cut through the narrow alley that led to the parking lot behind the café.
“Wait!” Claire shouted after me again. “My cello barely fits through here!” Her shouts echoed off the brick walls of the alley as she lumbered along behind me.
Get to the car. Get away. I unlocked my door, threw my violin on the passenger seat and slid behind the wheel, closed my door, started the car. My stomach lurched and vomit climbed my esophagus. I choked it down. There was no getting away, I knew that, but still I fought with myself about whether to speed off in the car or abandon it, leave the door hanging open and sprint away on foot like a maniac.
There is no getting away. This time I meant moving, not the running or escaping kind of moving, but the moving-trucks-and-purchasing-a-home kind of moving. I’d done so much to put geographical distance between myself and my past, only to discover that the thing I ran from was in my own brain. Moving here was not the answer, not the thing that would loosen this noose around my neck. I’d made everything worse.
Claire was at my window then, panting and white-faced. She pulled my door open and grabbed my arm. “Hazel! You know you’re having a panic attack, right? You can’t drive like this!” She reached across my body and pulled the key out of the ignition while I sat staring stupidly out the windshield. She walked around to the passenger side of my car and retrieved my violin, stand and music. A few moments later she was at my door again, empty-handed, holding her palms out to me. “Hazel.”
I was crying now, humiliation washing over me in waves. Why here? Why now? I’d worked so hard for so long to stay in control.
I gave Claire my hands and let her pull me to my feet. Mercifully avoiding eye contact, she locked my car door, helped me into the passenger seat of her Mercedes, and hurried back around to the driver’s side. I turned my face toward the passenger window and let tears fall in rivers down my cheeks. I already hated myself. A puppy? A fucking puppy did this?
Claire started the car and turned on the air. “You don’t have to explain anything to me, okay?” she said, finally looking at me.
I kept my gaze out the window but acknowledged her with a little nod.
She pulled out a packet of tissues from her center console and handed it to me. I took one and blotted my tears and snot. My chest swelled with air and stuttered on its way back down.
She let me take a few more shaky breaths. “Look, we can cancel rehearsal. I’ll tell them you got sick. No one needs to know.” Her voice was soft but matter-of-fact.
At her kindness, fresh tears welled up and spilled over my eyelids. I dabbed at my eyes again, still horrified at my total loss of dignity. “No. We can go. Really. I’ll be fine.” Another involuntary shudder rippled through me.
“Sure?”
I nodded resolutely and blotted more tears.
“All right then, if you’re sure.” She put the car in reverse and the tires crunched over the gravel as she backed out. “Would it lift your spirits if I talked about farting?”
I snorted an ugly sob-snot-choke of a laugh.
She shifted the car into drive. “Oh, Hazel. You really are too easy.”
SIX
At rehearsal, Claire kept me afloat by acting like everything was normal. She cracked her usual jokes when she wasn’t hyper-focused on the music and didn’t look my way any more or less than usual. Katrina and Raymond never suspected anything was wrong—or if they did, they didn’t show it.
Afterwards, Claire drove me back to my car. She didn’t press for details or explanations, but when she parked, she put her hand on mine and, with a piercing sort of look, said, “You don’t have to tell me. Just know I’m here.” Her blue eyes bored into my brown ones with such acuity that I felt like she was flaying me open. It made my chest tighten to have her look at me that way, like she knew me.
She texted me the day after my freak out, saying only “u ok?” to which I responded, “fine!”–with the exclamation point and everything, like an idiot. How could I possibly be “fine!” after what had happened? But what could I have told her? That the day after she saw me fall apart, I’d woken up with a knot in my chest and a frenzied trembling in my hands? That every day since, my whole body had prickled and buzzed like my power switch had gotten stuck in the “on” position? Sometimes I was sure I could hear myself buzzing.
Two things brought relief: running and playing violin. Every day I got up early and jogged on the beach until I couldn’t go anymore, pushed myself until I nearly threw up from the heat, until every drop of energy had shot out through my feet and into th
e earth and my toes were blistered and sore. It was the same with violin, though instead of through my feet, the excess energy pushed out of my fingertips and into my violin, and the music that surged out of me was riddled with a sharp, foreign intensity.
Claire sent me a few more texts in the following days, but I couldn’t stifle my embarrassment enough to respond. We didn’t see each other either, because the orchestra was off for the week, and the quartet didn’t have rehearsal until Monday.
I still hadn’t returned to normal by Saturday. If anything, I was worse—my hands now shook so much that it had become difficult to hold onto things. But I needed to stay busy, so while Oren was at the lab, I tried to tackle painting my music room. As I stood on the step ladder cutting-in around the edges of the room, I observed with remote interest how, when I touched the paintbrush to the wall, my hand would go still. Whenever I removed it, my hand would start shaking again.
The little vibrations didn’t feel bad, but my heart rate climbed perceptibly each time I noticed it. Should I see someone? How long should I wait? I pictured myself sitting on a sofa in a tranquil room with a kind-looking therapist, someone I would pay to help me figure out what was wrong with me. I laughed out loud at the thought, at the image of me spilling my guts to yet another stranger so he could pick me apart and tell me why I was the way I was, as if I didn’t already know. I would rather vibrate myself completely to pieces, let all my cells detach from one another and scatter like dandelion seeds on the wind.
I was still mulling these things over when the garage door opened, announcing Oren’s arrival. I checked the time on my phone and realized I’d been gazing at the wall with a paintbrush in my hand for the last twenty minutes and hadn’t accomplished a damn thing. I hurriedly dabbed at a few thin spots before going to meet Oren in the kitchen.
“Hey, hon.” He set his wallet and keys down and pecked me on the cheek. “Painting? You got a drip on your shirt.” He tapped my chest. I looked down to find the spot and he swooped up his hand and poked me in the nose. A shy laugh bubbled out of me in spite of my anxious mood. He always got me with that joke.
“You are too easy,” he said.
My laughter dried up. Claire had said exactly those words just days before. For a second I thought he was making fun of me, that the two of them had formed a secret alliance behind my back. To keep an eye on me? To make sure I didn’t go crazy? But he was smiling and shaking his head at me as he turned to shuffle through the stack of mail he’d brought in from the mailbox.
I straightened my arms and leaned my weight into my palms on the cool countertop, inhaling myself a fat lungful of air. Paranoid freak.
I hadn’t told Oren about my panic attack, and I didn’t intend to. I wanted to act normal. Wanted to be normal. “How was work?” I said. “I thought you were going to be home much later.”
“Going okay.” He sliced open an envelope with a letter opener. “We’re doing some experiments that have to sit there before we can compile the data. We’re looking at these two proteins that reside on the surface of many human cells—laminin receptor and galectin-3 proteins, they’re called—and we’re analyzing how they react to certain pathogens that…” I was staring at him like he’d sprouted a third eyebrow. He laughed, realizing he’d crossed my threshold for molecular biology comprehension. “Anyway, I’m incredibly smart. Really, astonishingly smart,” he paused to let me roll my eyes at him, “and I’ve got a grad student, basically a personal servant who worships my profoundly ginormous brain, who will work on collecting the data so that I can be here with you instead.” He smiled at me smiling at him. “So what did you do today?”
I relaxed against the counter and bent my neck from side to side, stretching. “Slept in a little, ran on the beach. I’ve been painting, too. Almost done.”
“Sweet. Did you go to the store?”
Shit. I’d told Oren the night before that I would go pick up steaks and beer for the weekend, and we were completely out of milk. “I’m so sorry. I forgot. I can run out now.”
“Don’t worry about it, babe. We can go together.” He nudged me. “A little off your game this week, aren’t you, honey?”
“I…I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Liar. My heart rate quickened.
“Hazel, I’m teasing. We’ll go together in a little. No big deal.”
He made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and ate it while telling me all about the competitive grad students at his lab. I only half-listened. The granite counter was cool and solid beneath my hands and, just as with the wall, the inertness of it was enough to still my trembling. Up, down, up, down. Tremble, calm, tremble, calm. Weird.
Oren went on with his story and didn’t notice.
“So I was thinking we should get together with Claire and Mike again next weekend. You haven’t said much about her in a while, but you guys seemed to be hitting it off.” Oren wiped his mouth on his towel and set his toothbrush back in the holder.
I spit into my sink and kept my eyes from his. “Yeah…I haven’t really heard from her, but I’ll see her Monday at rehearsal.” My stomach flipped over at the thought.
“I got along well with Mike. I have a lot more in common with him than the musicians you used to try to get me to hang out with.”
“When did I ever try to get you to hang out with people?” And why was he so intent on getting me to be buddies with Mike and Claire? I wiped my hands on a towel and walked to the bedroom.
Oren followed, sliding on his glasses. “I guess you didn’t, really, now that I think about it.” He pulled back the covers and got into bed. “I think it was just the group we fell in with after graduating. I’m surprised we stuck around there as long as we did.”
I climbed in with him and scooted close, so my back was pressed up against his front.
The warm air from his mouth blew against the nape of my neck. “I think a fresh start is good sometimes.” He pulled a strand of hair away from my face, making me shiver. “Don’t you?”
“Mm hmm.” But my chest had grown tight—I wasn’t so sure anymore that we’d done the right thing by uprooting our lives. I considered telling Oren about the puppy and how I’d reacted. I wanted to. Felt I ought to. I even took a breath and got ready to speak, but stopped before anything came out. Why can’t I make myself talk to him?
His breath stilled. “Were you going to say something?”
“No,” I said. “Just breathing.”
He squeezed me tighter. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I forced my shoulder muscles to loosen. “A little tired, maybe. I did seven miles this morning.”
“Damn, babe. That’s awesome! Don’t you normally do four or five?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re amazing. I should start running with you again. You want me to?”
“Sure. That’d be fun.” I tried to muster some enthusiasm around my words, but they fell dreadfully flat.
He went quiet for a moment then said, “Are you really okay?”
He was trying to lead up to sex, I could feel it. The atmosphere had tensed somehow, as if he could electrify the air with an elevated heart rate, a slight contraction of the muscles. My own body tightened, but for different reasons. I didn’t have the emotional energy to fake it tonight.
With his hand on top of the sheet, he rubbed his palm down my arm and over my hip, following the slope of my thigh, then retraced his path in the other direction. His touch should have felt nice, relaxing, even, but it was nothing to me; it was surface friction, with no sensation in the underlying nerves. I lay unmoving—a tacit denial—though normally I would have turned and let him have me. I almost never refused him. But for the first time in a very long while, I couldn’t make myself put him first.
After a few minutes of stroking his palm back and forth over the curve of my hip, he gave up and went still. I felt the rejection radiating off him in waves, flattening what had been desire only moments before. But he would not press me, would
not ask for more than I willingly offered. It was not his way.
Oren was an expert at sacrificing his own wants and desires—always had been. It was why I had to be so careful to play the game with him, to make him believe I was a willing, even eager, participant. He was determined not to become the controlling, emotionally abusive husband his father had been toward his mother, and so he martyred himself at every opportunity, as if one could tally generosity, hoard goodness, make amends across generations. As if the sins and good deeds of fathers and sons were weighted against one another on a balance scale.
We almost never argued, because Oren refused to put up a fight. We’d moved from Ohio at my suggestion. I’d controlled the logistics of the move, chosen to rent, picked out the rental house. We had agreed on the house we bought, but if he hadn’t liked it he would have still let me have my way. It was frightening to think I could destroy Oren the same way his father had destroyed his mother. He would bend and snap under my will without so much as a squeak of complaint.
Soon, he was snoring lightly in my ear. I felt guilty for denying him. It would have been so easy to comfort him and let him believe everything was okay, to suck up my own discomfort and give him what he craved. I snuggled deeper into his chest and hugged his forearm against me, kissed his hand.
I was almost asleep when I heard the faint whimpering of the neighbor’s dog again. This time I didn’t bother to wait for the owners to bring him inside. Careful not to disturb Oren, I slid out from under his arm, scooped up a pillow and spare blanket, and escaped to the living room.
When I arrived at Monday’s quartet rehearsal I unpacked my violin a little slower than usual. Raymond and Claire were already seated, but Katrina hadn’t arrived yet. I shuffled through my music, sure I could feel Claire’s curious eyes on my back, sure she must be wondering why I hadn’t called or texted her back in those days after I’d panicked downtown. My guilt over ignoring her made me feel like I’d eaten something rotten.
