You'll Miss Me When I'm Gone

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

“Is that seriously what you think?” This is why I can’t let the guilt fully take over. When she says things like this, it’s clear she doesn’t understand me at all. I worry about our mother too. Sometimes it’s too much to be in the same room with her for long.

  “It’s not what I think. It’s the truth.”

  I heave all my weight on the door, as though if I can just—close—it, then I can shut out everything she’s saying, too. But Adina sticks her foot inside.

  “What are you doing?” I say, voice climbing to a shriek as I bounce the door against her foot, trying to get her to move. “Get out of my room!”

  We’re ten-year-olds throwing tantrums.

  “I’m not done talking to you!” Her face is red and her eyes are slits. “You never let me finish a conversation with you.”

  “This is a conversation? Really? I thought it was you telling me everything I’m doing wrong.” I heave my back against the door, crushing her in the space between it and the frame.

  Footsteps pound up the stairs, and Ima marches down the hall toward us. “What the hell is going on in here?” she asks, following it up with a string of Hebrew curse words.

  I step back from the door, freeing Adina, who’s still pushing on it so hard that she stumbles.

  “It’s nothing,” she says quickly.

  “Do you have any idea how late it is? Do you? Or are you both so . . . so self-absorbed that you didn’t think some people in this house, on this block, are trying to sleep right now?” Her words are razor-sharp. She kicks my door. Hard. “This is unacceptable behavior from both of you.”

  I shrink deeper into my room, Ima’s words snipping several inches off my height. This is one of her mood swings. This isn’t her. Still, part of me thinks we deserved it. We’ve disturbed our mother with our venom for each other.

  “Ani miztaeret,” Adina apologizes, and I echo her.

  Ima crosses her arms over her chest. “Both of you . . . you . . . you need to figure this shit out. You can’t scream at each other like children.”

  As Ima turns to head back downstairs, Adina races to her room and shuts the door, leaving me with a poisonous mix of rage and guilt and shame. There’s nothing like hearing your mother swear at you. It makes me wonder what her classroom is like these days. What happens if she loses her temper in front of those kids?

  Her words echo in my head even as I close my own door and melt into bed, my cheek on the ice-cream-stained pillow.

  The last time Ima was this furious with me, I was nine. Adi had borrowed, then broken, a rock tumbler that I’d gotten for our birthday. I went to Ima’s room and through my tears I said, “I hate her. I hate Adi.”

  Ima yanked my wrist a little too hard.

  “Ouch!”

  “You don’t hate Adi,” she said. “Do you know what that word means? ‘Hate’?”

  “It means I don’t like her. I don’t want her to be my sister anymore.”

  Ima shook her head and sat me down on her bed. And then she told me all about what hate means to the Jews. About the Holocaust.

  I spent the next few years consumed by Holocaust literature. Consumed by trying to find a why somewhere in all that history, heartbroken when I couldn’t. You can spend lifetimes searching tragedies for reasons why.

  It was after that conversation with Ima that I realized two things, one about my religion and one about my sister. Being Jewish, being half Israeli—that would always make us—me—different. Not just in a please-say-Happy-Holidays-not-Merry-Christmas kind of way. It went deeper than that. It was a connection to something more. Centuries of suffering and hardship and being told we didn’t belong.

  Over the next couple years, I began my own Torah study, and everything took on new meaning: my bat mitzvah, keeping kosher, observing Shabbat.

  The second thing I realized was that I didn’t hate Adina. She might frustrate and infuriate me, embarrass and humiliate me, but I didn’t hate her. I never could.

  But tonight I came close.

  Nineteen

  Adina

  TONIGHT ONSTAGE, EVERYONE WILL BE watching me.

  “How are you feeling?” Arjun asks backstage at the symphony hall. He is wearing a dark-gray suit and a pale-yellow tie I cannot wait to unknot later.

  “Nervous.”

  “That’s normal. It’s good to be a little nervous.”

  I exhale, a tornado gust of wind. “How about a lot nervous?”

  “You’ll be fantastic, Adina. I have no doubts.” He drops his voice. “Slight change of plans after the show. I’ve been invited to a New Year’s Eve party at Boris Bialik’s house. The performers are welcome, too, and he asked me to extend the invitation to you.”

  I scan the hall, make sure it’s empty. My family’s already seated. “I was looking forward to being alone with you.” That was the plan we made during winter break, when I divided my time between practicing in my room, sleeping with—no, having sex with—Arjun at his apartment, and selling guitar picks and bow rosin at Muse and Music. I cannot kiss him at midnight in a room full of people.

  “We’ll get a chance. I promise.” His eyes follow the lines of my body, from my emerald dress’s sweetheart neckline, to the dip at my waist, to the flare at my hips. The pumps I borrowed from Ima pinch my feet, but I imagine her looking glamorous in them, going somewhere people would notice her for all the right reasons, and that makes them hurt a little less. I’m wearing the evil-eye bracelet, my only jewelry. My hair is braided and twisted on top of my head so it looks like a crown, held in place by a thousand bobby pins and a gallon of hairspray. The finishing touch: Siren on my lips.

  “I hope so.” I bring my hands to the knot of his tie. To anyone walking by, it would look like I’m adjusting it. Instead, I give it a sharp tug.

  “Tonight,” he promises, his hand lingering on my lower back for only a second before he joins the audience.

  My set is the last one before intermission, so I remain backstage for the first hour of the showcase, listening to the strings and the applause. Representatives from top conservatories are in the audience. After my mistake during rehearsal, I have something to prove to all of them.

  I take my place behind the curtains until someone calls my name, and I lead Laurel the pianist onstage.

  Lights temporarily blind me, and I teeter in my heels, but once I blink the bright spots away, I take in the sheer grandness of the symphony hall. It is a sold-out show. I can barely see past the first few rows, but everyone is dressed up. Tonight I am on my own for the first time. Solo. Exactly where I am meant to be.

  I straighten my spine. My legs stop trembling, and suddenly I am stable. Then I take a deep breath and drag my bow across the strings.

  “Spectacular,” Boris Bialik says in the lobby after the show. He pumps my hand up and down. “What a marvelous performance, Adina.”

  “Thank you,” I manage to say. My heart is still racing. I knew I played great, but I had what felt like an out-of-body experience while I was up there. Nothing existed but the music and me.

  “Will I see you at the party this evening?” Boris asks. “I would love to chat more about your future in music.”

  A hand cups my shoulder. “She’ll be there. Thank you, Mr. Bialik.”

  “Mr. Bhakta, you were right. She is a delight. Such emotion, such raw talent. And, if you’ll excuse me, Adina, such beauty.”

  Heat rushes to my cheeks as Arjun’s hand ever so slightly presses tighter on my shoulder.

  “Thank you very much,” I say, but the comment, which in the past might have made me glow, irks me tonight. Does my beauty somehow make me more talented? More worthy of being onstage, because I am nice to look at?

  “If you’ll excuse us,” Arjun says, steering me away, “her parents are waiting.”

  “Absolutely.”

  I push out a deep breath when Boris is out of earshot. “This is a little overwhelming.”

  “Get used to it,” Arjun says. “You were the highlight of the show. Your parents
have been waiting to congratulate you.”

  When I become a soloist, I will always be the highlight of the show. I will be the entire show. So I square my shoulders and lift my head higher. One day I will grow accustomed to this attention, but tonight, combined with Arjun next to me, it’s almost too much.

  They’re in a corner of the lobby, Tovah in a loose-fitting gray sack of a dress, Ima in floral-patterned silk, Aba in a suit. Ima’s arm is linked through his.

  “So beautiful, Adina’le,” Ima says, patting my arm. She hugs me and says in Hebrew into my ear, “I’m so proud of you.”

  I stiffen at her touch. The way she yelled at Tovah and me a few nights ago is still fresh. “Todah, Ima,” I say before I pull away.

  Tovah looks up from her phone. Our parents have never let her skip a performance, the same way my presence was always required at her Science Olympiad competitions in middle school.

  “Nice job,” she says flatly, like it would kill her to be legitimately happy for me.

  “You looked very natural up there,” Aba says. I wonder if he still thinks my music is a waste of time or if my result has erased his wish for me to go to a state school.

  Ima tells Arjun, “We can tell working with you has made such a tremendous difference.”

  “Adina is gifted. It’s a real pleasure to work with her.”

  “Will we see you at home tonight?” Aba asks me.

  I shake my head. “There’s a party for the performers at the director’s place. I was hoping I could go?”

  Asking permission in front of Arjun makes me feel like a child, but fortunately Aba smiles and says, “Have fun. Home by twelve thirty, okay?”

  “Matt,” Ima says. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

  We all go quiet. Tovah’s gaze flicks to Arjun, as though trying to ascertain whether he knows what this means, and Arjun is looking at me as though waiting for permission to react. I’d like to melt into the floor, turn my skin into carpet.

  “It’s New Year’s Eve,” I say. “Not Thanksgiving.”

  Ima blinks. “Memory lapse. New Year’s Eve. Of course. No later than two, okay?”

  “Okay,” I grit out.

  As they turn to walk away, Ima stumbles, low-heeled shoe catching a knot in the carpet. Before Aba can catch her, she topples into a pyramid of empty wineglasses on a nearby table. They crash to the carpet, shattering.

  I rush over, Arjun following close behind.

  “I’m fine. I’m fine,” she says, swearing in Hebrew under her breath. Aba and Tovah pick glass shards out of her long skirt. Other concertgoers are crowding around, asking if she is okay. Ima’s face turns tomato.

  I grind my own heels deep into the carpet, making sure I am steady.

  “Can I get you anything?” Arjun asks my mother. “Water, a chair? Do you need to sit down?”

  “No, thank you. I’m just . . . clumsy.”

  Arjun signals one of the ushers to help clean up the glass. Still strangers are staring. Some shake their heads, embarrassed maybe.

  The horrible truth is that I’m embarrassed too.

  The penthouse party is like something I’ve only seen in old movies. Someone is playing a jazz tune on the piano, twinkling lights shine down on us, and a chocolate fountain bubbles in the kitchen. Everyone here is so much older than I am; even their laughs sound more sophisticated than the laughs I hear at school. I pinch a bacon-wrapped scallop off a tray and eat it in one bite. It is small but decadent. I take another.

  As soon as we arrived, some of Arjun’s musician friends swept him away, leaving me alone to mingle with the appetizers. I assume he’ll return to my side at some point, but he’s spoken to at least a dozen people so far, and while I haven’t let him out of my sight, he hasn’t once glanced my way or attempted to find me. I suppose these are his people, and he is obligated to make the rounds. Still, it’s hard not to feel envious when I see him clink his glass with a group of friends in cheers, or wildly shake a woman’s hand, or laugh when a man claps him on the shoulder and then reels him in for a hug.

  A couple professors, music writers, and Seattle Symphony members introduce themselves to me, eager to talk about their schools or the future of classical music. Once the last one ambles toward the chocolate fountain, someone squeezes my arm.

  “I loved playing for you,” Laurel says. “You got over that stage fright after all. You were a different person up there. So much energy!”

  “Thank you for the accompaniment,” I say, but my eyes are still on Arjun, who’s in the middle of telling an animated story to a group of symphony members. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but he waves his hands like he’s conducting an orchestra.

  She sips from her glass of wine, and I curse my childish sparkling cider. “I hear you’re applying to conservatory.”

  “Yes,” I say, and list the schools I applied to.

  “That’s fabulous. I went to Berklee, and I loved it.” As she talks about her college experience, I only half listen. On the other side of the room, Arjun is finally alone.

  A man taps a fork against a glass to get everyone to quiet down, and a pianist begins “Auld Lang Syne.” A few people start singing along.

  “Excuse me,” I say to Laurel. With everyone distracted, I manage to pull Arjun inside the bedroom people have used to stash their coats and bags and scarves.

  “What are you doing?” he asks when I lock the door behind us. The room has a king bed and a large window with a view of the Space Needle, where fireworks have already started to glitter the night sky.

  “You’ve barely glanced at me all night. You said we’d have a chance to be alone.”

  “There were a lot of people here I had to talk to.” He glances at his watch. “It’s almost midnight. Everyone’s going to be up on the roof.”

  “Exactly.” I pull his face down and slant my mouth against his. His stubble tickles. I run my lips back and forth across it a few times. My skin might be red in the morning, but I won’t care; at least it will remind me of him. He is a man and not a boy, not like the children tearing through the halls at school.

  I need to show him he’s mine. Even surrounded by so many people who want to talk to me about my “future in music,” I am his, too. I hold my palm against the front of his suit pants, feeling his erection. He groans deep in his throat. I love that sound. Lowering myself onto my knees, I unbuckle his thin black belt and unzip his pants.

  “Adi,” he growls as I take him into my mouth. We have had sex, and he has put his mouth on every part of me, but we have not yet done this. It’s always felt so intimate to me. His fingers grab at my coiled hair, the slight pain telling me he wants this so desperately that he cannot control himself.

  He is mine. I am his. None of those people out there can change that.

  Outside they are counting down. Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .

  But I can barely hear them. I focus on Arjun’s breathing. I’m using my hands now too, my hands and my mouth, my knees pressed hard into the carpet.

  Finally, he lets himself go, his hands flying up to brace himself against the wall. I swallow and get to my feet, continuing to watch him. It takes a few more moments for his breathing to return to normal, and once it does, he zips his pants and hugs me close.

  “Happy New Year,” I whisper.

  “Happy New Year, Adina. That was . . . a surprise.”

  “A good one?”

  He gives me a strange look. “Yes. Of course.”

  We stand there in silence for a while as the party sounds get louder. Through my pantyhose, my knees are wrinkled by the carpet. Peering at myself in a gilded wall mirror, I repin my hair as best I can. Arjun’s reflection looks uncomfortable, like he doesn’t know quite what to do with himself.

  He scratches at his elbow. “Do you want to go up to the roof?” he asks. “We’d probably have a better view of the fireworks up there.”

  I don’t want to share him, and I can’t understand why he wants to rejoin the rest of the party after what we’
ve done. But the rest of the night, he’ll be thinking about this, so I agree. I sift through the coats and bags on the bed to find my silver clutch and, unclasping it, I check my phone.

  Six missed calls and two voice mails, all from Tovah. Shit. Shit.

  My hands are shaking so badly, it takes a few tries for me to find the right keys.

  “What is it?” Arjun asks, but I can’t answer.

  “Adina, it’s Ima,” Tovah’s recorded voice says. “She was in the bathroom and . . . and she fell again. We’re taking her to the ER right now. Call me. Please. Or just come to the hospital.” She gives the cross streets and then hangs up. The next voice mail is her saying they’re at the hospital and “pick up, pick up, why the hell are you not answering your phone?”

  I drop the phone from my ear.

  “Adi, what’s wrong?”

  Ignoring him, I push a trembling index finger to Tovah’s name. Five rings. She doesn’t answer.

  “Adina?”

  “It’s my mom. She fell, and she’s in the hospital.”

  Arjun’s face completely changes. “I’ll drive you,” he says, fishing my coat from the pile. I want to be able to appreciate that he knows which one is mine, but I can’t dwell on the insignificance of that now.

  Everyone else is so distracted by New Year’s festivities that we’re able to slip out of the party unnoticed. Arjun pulls a ticket from his inside jacket pocket and hands it to the valet, and soon we’re on the freeway, pushing eighty miles per hour. We don’t talk. When he pulls up to the hospital, I lean over to hug him. Cling to him, really.

  “She’ll be okay,” he says. He traces the braids in my hair. Some of my bobby pins have fallen out, possibly making a Hansel-and-Gretel trail from the symphony hall to the party to the hospital. Then he pulls back, pats my shoulder. “Let me know if you need anything?”

  “Okay.” What I need is for him to come inside with me, hold my hand in the hospital elevator.

  Instead, I get out of the car and into the cold, and he drives away, leaving me aching for more things than I can count.

  She smacked her head on the side of the bathtub. They needed to use staples to close her up. I can’t even imagine the gruesomeness of it all, can’t let myself wonder if there is red staining the rug in my parents’ bathroom.