by Kristen Mae
She’d gone out of her way to make friends with me, to help me when I was falling apart and acting like a lunatic. She hadn’t shown the slightest bit of judgment—hadn’t dug for information or treated me like there was something wrong with me. But, I thought with a pang of anxiety, maybe she already knew. The classical music world was a small one. I removed my violin from its case with unsteady hands.
Katrina entered as I sat down and ordered my music on my stand. “Hi guys!” she said with a cheerful wave. “There was traffic. Go ahead and tune up and I’ll join when I’m ready.”
Claire’s eyes were on me again. I gave her a little half smile even as my stomach rolled over. “I’ve got an A,” said Raymond, pulling his bow across his instrument. I lifted my violin and followed suit, and as the pitches synchronized, my heart rate began to settle.
After Katrina had unpacked and tuned her violin too, she laid it on her lap and pulled a notebook and pen from her purse. “Okay guys, before we get started, what’s the scoop on Italy? Any spouses coming? I need to purchase plane tickets and set up room arrangements with Paolo.”
Raymond frowned. “Deborah can’t come. I guess I’ll have to eat enough pasta for the both of us.”
“Yeah, same here,” Claire said.
I chewed my lip, still too self-conscious to make eye contact with her.
Katrina turned to me. “How about your husband?”
I shook my head. “He can’t. He might be able to come the last week though.”
“So I’m the only one bringing a significant other?” said Katrina, scribbling in her notebook. “I’ll let Paolo know to give Frank and me the honeymoon suite then.”
Claire laughed. “Fine, but make sure they room me super far away from you two. I don’t want your wild romantic interludes keeping me up all night.”
Katrina snorted. “Please. We’ve been married twenty-one years and our kids are in college now. We’ve been done with all that desperate pawing for quite some time.”
Claire gasped in mock horror. “God, I hope I never get to the point where I’m ‘done with all that’ and can be as chill about it as you are!”
Katrina rolled her eyes. “You and Mike have been married what, like five years? Check back with me in fifteen, after you’ve pumped out a few kids.”
Claire looked as though she’d been slapped.
Katrina’s face went tomato-red, and her eyes looked glassy, like she might cry. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I wasn’t think—”
“No, it’s okay,” Claire said. “Please, Katrina, it’s fine.”
Raymond stiffened but kept quiet. I glanced from person to person, waiting to see if I would be let in on what had just happened.
Claire smiled brightly and sat up tall behind her cello. “Okay, let’s begin! How about starting with Ravel today?” Her voice rang with an artificial perkiness that begged us all to drop the subject.
Katrina nodded and opened up her music, but the redness remained in her cheeks.
After rehearsal, I packed up as slowly as I’d unpacked, hoping Katrina and Raymond would rush off and I’d have a chance to talk to Claire. I wanted to apologize for being such a basket case last time I’d seen her and for not texting her back. She surprised me by approaching me first. “Hey. I’m going to study Italian again tomorrow, if you’re interested. My place? Coffee for me, tea for you?”
I wilted with relief. Pretending nothing had happened was far preferable to my plan of offering an awkward apology. “Sure! That sounds fun. Or…I’m running in the morning. Would you like to come?”
“Ugh. You are seriously going to make me run with you, aren’t you?” She grinned. “You know I only run when I’ve got meth in my pocket and the police are chasing me, right?”
I froze in the middle of latching my violin case.
“Hazel. I never run because I never have meth in my pocket and the police are never chasing me. Hardy har? No?”
The wide-eyed, anticipatory expression on her face triggered something inside me to let go, and I laughed. And then laughed a little harder. And once I really got going, I couldn’t stop. I wasn’t even really laughing at Claire’s joke, though I thought it was funny once it finally registered in my brain. I was laughing at myself for being so slow and serious that I couldn’t even tell when someone was messing with me. I was laughing at myself for being the lamest, unfunniest person ever in the history of everything.
“God you’re so weird,” said Claire. She slung her cello onto her back and threaded her arm through mine as we walked to the door. “No wonder I like you.”
SEVEN
“Yeah yeah yeah. I know,” Claire shouted above the waves as she stumbled toward me over the dewy sand. “So shocking. I showed up.”
I had to grin at the look of resignation on her face. “You might end up liking it, you know.”
She rolled her eyes, then looked down at my feet. “Wait, you run barefoot?”
“Well, yeah. Your shoes will get waterlogged. Makes it hard to run.”
“Oh.” She looked around like she didn’t know what to do.
“Just stash them under the boardwalk.”
“No one will steal them?”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “You mean, like, the other two runners on the beach? Like that dude over there who probably wears a size twelve?”
“Smartass.” She slid her shoes and socks off and carried them back up the sand to hide them behind one of the wooden supports. I set my running app on my arm band and secured my hair in a high ponytail to get it up off my neck. The sun had just begun to peek over the horizon, but it was already eighty-five degrees.
“All right,” Claire said, trotting back in her bare feet. “Ready?”
“Let’s do it.” I felt good. I wasn’t even shaking. I jumped up and down to loosen my muscles and bent a few times to stretch my hamstrings, relishing the gentle burn.
Claire surprised me by keeping up with my eleven minute pace. Maybe Mike really was wrong about yoga being inferior cardio. I made a mental note to tell him.
“Your feet okay?” I asked her after a while.
“Yeah,” she breathed. Okay, she might be keeping up, but she was working at it. I slowed, trying not to be obvious, and we stayed close to the water’s edge where the sand was packed and we could cool our feet in the comings and goings of the waves.
At the twenty-minute mark, I motioned for us to reverse direction and made to turn around. Claire stopped altogether and put her hands on her knees, sucking air in great wheezing gasps.
“I’m…dying,” she said, still gasping. “This is really good exercise.”
I stifled a laugh. “You might hate me tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I might…just a little.”
“Take your time. I’m ready when you’re ready.” I stretched and bounced a little more while I waited. I wouldn’t be hitting any personal records today, but it was a nice change having a friend with me.
“Let’s go now,” she said. “I can do it.”
I matched my pace to hers and we covered the remaining distance without talking. Claire endured, with some effort—the few times I glanced over, her mouth was open, breathing hard, and her face was splotched pink and covered in sweat. But her eyes were cold and determined, focused on the sand in front of her. When we reached the end, she whooped and threw herself down on the sand, laughing and out of breath, splaying her limbs as if she were making a snow angel. “I’m dying! You murdered me!”
My chest tightened as I waited for Claire to realize she’d put her foot in her mouth talking about that, but then I remembered that she didn’t know she was supposed to be careful around me.
“You ran great,” I said, relieved that the moment of tension would never come. But then, in spite of my desire to keep my past a secret from everyone, I surprised myself by suddenly wishing she knew.
She sat up and pulled her tank top over her head and slid her shorts off. I thought I saw bathing suit bottoms underneath
, but I turned away, too embarrassed to look at her. “Let’s go in!” She splashed into the water before I could respond, tugging her hair free as she went and sending it flying out behind her.
The ocean was beautiful but dark, and the signs on the boardwalk warned of a fierce undercurrent. Not great swimming conditions. Besides, I was wearing regular underwear, and my white sports bra wouldn’t provide any coverage at all if it got wet.
Claire popped up out of the water and beckoned to me, her crazy curls lying plastered against her head. It literally took an ocean to tame her hair. A surprise wave pummeled her from behind, and for a moment I panicked, sure the undercurrent would sweep her tiny body out to sea. Then she resurfaced, still grinning and waving, now more emphatic than ever that I join her.
The sun had risen off the horizon and the temperature was easily ninety degrees. My skin dripped with sweat. I held my hands up against the glare, and their silhouette trembled against the backdrop of the sunlit waves.
I stepped into the cool water, timid and careful, my feet sinking into the sand below. Something brushed against my ankles. I froze and balled my hands into fists as Claire splashed over and grabbed my wrist. “Don’t be such a ninny,” she said, grinning. Before I could offer any resistance, she pulled me deeper into the water.
Invisible beneath the surface, the sand dropped off like a cliff. My feet lost contact with the earth and a huge wave sent me spinning. My mouth, nose, and eyes filled with salt water. I scrambled for a hold, but just as my feet made purchase with the ground, another wave sent me tumbling again. I couldn’t tell up from down, couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe.
After floundering in the waves for a few more seconds, I felt Claire’s firm grip on my wrist tugging me up. I emerged from the water coughing and gagging, trying to wipe my eyes without pushing out a contact lens. I was pretty sure there was a gob of snot on my upper lip.
“Can you not swim?” Claire yelled over the waves, still clutching my wrist. She was shockingly strong. Her face swam in my blurred vision, but I could see well enough to know her eyes were wide with fright. My throat burned from swallowing gulps of sea water, and though I tried to answer her, I could only cough. I trudged toward shallower water and bent to rinse the snot off my face. Claire came up behind me and put a hand on my back. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said hoarsely. “And I can swim…okay.” I bent again to cup some water in my hands to smooth back my hair. “I’ve…never been in the ocean. We come here a lot, I just—” I succumbed to another bout of violent coughing before I could continue—”I haven’t had the…courage to go in the water.”
She looked stricken. “I’m really sorry!”
“It’s okay,” I said. We were yelling over the waves, and I thought how strange it was to shout consolations. I was suddenly overcome with exhaustion. Still coughing, I walked up onto the beach, plopped on the sand, and wrapped my arms around my knees.
Claire followed me with her head bowed and sat down next to me. “I think I just almost drowned you.” I’d never heard anyone sound so repentant.
I had to laugh at her excessive guilt. “You’re fine. It’s just that the water surprised me. You made it look so easy, jumping in and flitting about.”
She laughed too, but the nervousness was still there. “It is easy, once you get your bearings. You’ll see. I’m so sorry, though. Jesus, I cannot believe I just did that. Shit.”
I lay on my back, not minding that I was coating my clothes and hair with sand. My shirt clung wet and heavy to my chest. I sighed. “No, Claire, you’re fine, really. My sinuses needed a thorough rinse anyway.”
She lay down next to me and we stayed like that, silent and still, until the tide rose and the waves began to swallow our feet.
“Isn’t it weird how language textbooks teach you how to ask ‘Where’s the bathroom?’ long before they teach you how to understand the answer? I mean, how is that helpful if you don’t know words like ‘left’ or ‘right’ or ‘down the hallway’?”
Claire tilted her head at me, considering. “You know, you’re right. That is weird.”
It had only been a few hours since I’d gone for a tumble in the ocean, and now Claire and I were spread out with our books and papers on the rug in her music room. She’d offered to cancel the study session so I could “recover,” but I’d insisted I was fine and could handle it.
She shoved a few pieces of popcorn into her mouth. “In that case, we’d better learn directional words so we can figure out what people are trying to say to us.” She washed the popcorn down with a swig of coffee.
“You know you eat like a frat boy, right?” I said.
She burped. “People tell me that all the time. They say I’m gross.” She flipped through the pages of her textbook, unperturbed.
“Imagine that,” I said sarcastically.
She quizzed me through several pages of directional words until I gave up on focusing altogether and let my gaze wander around the cozy space. Claire’s music room was quite a bit messier than the rest of the house, with stacks of music, books, and papers covering almost every surface. Three floor-to-ceiling bookcases stretched the length of one wall, none of them with room to spare. Books were stacked sideways on top of other books, wedged in at awkward angles, and piled in untidy heaps on the floor where the bookshelves had obviously failed to accommodate.
I’d scanned her collection earlier and found titles as diverse as The Communist Manifesto, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Joys and Sorrows by the famous cellist Pablo Casals—the last of which I possessed my own cherished and dog-eared copy. There were various scientific journals and medical books too, so many that I’d need several lifetimes to read them, let alone understand them. At first I’d wondered if some of them might be Mike’s, but given the way Claire had thrown herself into learning Italian—she was already speaking in full sentences in what appeared to be a very good accent—I wouldn’t have put it past her to have read every one of those books.
I glanced at the clock on the wall, a massive, cello-shaped sculpture with the hour and minute hands drilled into its center, and tried not to yawn.
“I guess it has been over two hours, huh?”
“Yeah.” I closed my book with a sigh of relief, grateful she’d finally noticed I wasn’t paying attention anymore.
Claire closed her book too, then narrowed her eyes at me.
“What?”
“Are you…like…okay?”
God, how did she do that? It was that look again, the piercing one that made me feel like she could see right into me. I forced my voice to come out calm. “Of course. Why?”
“I don’t mean to be nosy, and you can tell me to fuck off if you want to, but…” She pointed at my hands.
I’d been sitting on them to squelch the shaking. Obviously it wasn’t working. I’d been fine during our run that morning, but the prick of ugly memories had returned, a now constant tickle at the back of my head, dribbling down the veins of my neck and arms and into my hands until it pressed eagerly at my fingertips, searching for release. Was it the memories themselves that made me anxious, or the fear that I’d somehow gotten myself back into a place where I could lose control? I held my hands up and let her see. “It’s weird, right?”
She pursed her lips, thinking. “The day we were downtown, in the shops, you picked up all sorts of delicate things. Your hands were fine. But then we saw that little dog, and you freaked.”
I dropped my hands in my lap.
“Something really bad happened to you, huh?”
“Pretty bad.” My lungs felt too big for my diaphragm. “No, not just bad, but crazy. Like so crazy you might be scared of me crazy.”
She blinked and shook her head. “Hazel, I can’t imagine that anything you could possibly tell me would make me scared of you.”
A lump rose in the back of my throat. I knew I was going to tell her, and just the knowledge that I was about to let it out made my heart pound so wildly that it was like
the ocean was still roaring in my ears.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. “It started with a family friend, a guy…well, a boy, really. He took care of me over the summer while my mom worked.” The words “took care of” made my jaw lock, and I had to stop. Those were not the right words.
Claire scooted closer to me and clasped one of my hands between her own.
“I’m sorry, I haven’t talked about this in…forever. Years.”
“Please don’t be sorry. Are you okay? Do you not want to go on?”
My insides shook. Every part of me went painfully rigid—just from talking, and I hadn’t really said anything yet. It was as though my secret was a slab of granite, buried under thick layers of earth, and the shakiness I’d been experiencing was that incomprehensible weight finally trying to quake free. Suddenly I wanted to finish. I wanted to release it. Needed to release it.
“He was the son of my mom’s best friend, fifteen or so. I was seven.” My voice sounded terrible, all stiff and croaky and raw. “We lived in the same apartment complex. He was supposed to take care—to watch me. While our moms worked. But he kind of…experimented on me. You know? I think he wanted to…practice. He kept asking me…uh, how it felt. Kept checking with me.” I shuddered. All his disgusting words poured over me like a bucket of frozen marbles—Do you like it? Does it feel good? You’re so pretty—and I really began to shake. Tears gathered in my eyes but wouldn’t fall.
Claire’s chest rose and fell as she took my other hand. I wasn’t sure I could keep going, but somehow the words came. “He didn’t…make me, uh, do it with him. You know? He just seemed really curious. All the time, very curious. He would take me swimming. And I was so dumb. You know how I tried to escape him, as bad a swimmer as I am? By holding my breath on the bottom of the pool. Isn’t that stupid? His lungs were bigger than mine.”
Claire shook her head slowly. She was trembling too now, all over.
