Her Steinway baby grand piano still sat in the corner of the living room. The light from the street lamp glinted off the polished mahogany finish. Em flexed her fingers. The smooth spruce keys whispered like a siren’s song beckoning to be played. She resisted the urge to run her fingers across the keyboard’s long expanse of black and white. She hadn’t turned on any lights, and the house remained shrouded in darkness. She needed it to be dark. The darkness muted the tangle of memories wrapped up in this house.
A high-pitched squeak came from the kitchen. Em furrowed her brow, took another sip of whiskey, and went to investigate. The sound stopped as she surveyed the space. The digital clock on the oven read 10:27. She stood there a beat and listened. There it was again. It was coming from the window. She ran her finger along the ledge, found the latch, and pressed it firmly in place, silencing the rickety hissing sound. The October breeze must have picked up and rattled the latch open. Her American Foursquare was solid brick and mortar, but the original windows from the 1930s, while charming, did little to combat the Kansas wind.
She opened the refrigerator, and the interior light illuminated the snug kitchen. A large bag of Halloween candy sat on the counter next to a wilted, generic-looking houseplant. The butcher block counters looked worn, and the dim light highlighted the scratches and nicks plaguing the old cabinets.
She took out a carton of milk, sniffed it, and grimaced at the sour smell. A hunk of cheddar with mold creeping across the edges sat on a plate next to a takeout box from The Park Tavern Grill. She shut the door and ripped open the bag of candy.
She was stalling.
Em popped a Kit Kat into her mouth and walked over to the stairs. She had to go up to her room. Eyeing the bottle of whiskey, she refilled her glass, then ascended the stairs. Her bedroom door was closed. She touched the doorknob cautiously as if she was trying to ascertain if there was fire on the other side.
It was ice cold.
She turned the knob. The hinges squeaked. She swung the door open, and a stale smell filled the room.
She took two tentative steps inside. The moonlight shined in through her window, and she gasped. “He never touched a thing.”
Broken plaques, bent trophies, and torn up photographs littered the floor. Her room was a time capsule. A shrine to the last day she had spent in this house.
* * *
“We can’t say definitively if you’ll regain the same level of function and dexterity.”
Dr. Neil Stein, Zoe’s father and Chief of Surgery at Midwest Medical and Psychiatric Center, sat on the edge of the bed, but Em wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“I didn’t perform the surgery, but I’ve looked at all the notes and pictures from Dr. Medina’s repair. It was a clean tear of the tendon, and she noted that the digital nerve and artery remained intact. That’s a good thing, Em.”
Em cradled her splinted finger. She hadn’t spoken a word since her outburst in the hospital. A week had passed since the surgery. Even with her mother’s arrival, she still hadn’t uttered a word.
“You’ll need to wear the splint for several weeks and do the hand exercises,” Dr. Stein said, modeling the exercise by gently moving his ring finger with the other hand. “Make sure your good hand is doing all the work. We don’t want you bending the repaired finger on its own. The tendon needs to heal, but moving it will help to lessen the chance of the tendon sticking to the nearby tissue.”
She watched Dr. Stein’s hands, but her mind was on the A string, the third string of the violin, and how her ring finger would dance and slide and pop nimbly along it.
Dr. Stein patted her leg. “Em, honey? Do you have any questions?”
She didn’t answer.
Her mother had braided her hair that morning. A lovely fishtail braid that snaked around the back of her head and came to rest several inches below her right shoulder. She shook her head and stared at the braid. She wanted Dr. Stein to leave. His words only solidified what she already knew. There would be no Juilliard. There would be no life playing the music she loved.
“All right, then. Take care, Em.”
As soon as Dr. Stein left, Em sprang to her feet, closed her door and locked it. She pressed her back against the hard wood and surveyed the room. Trophies lined every shelf and ribbons and certificates hung neatly, filling every inch of wall space. All these reminders of her past were taunting her.
You’ve lost everything, and it’s all your fault.
“Shut up,” she whispered. The words tasted like shards of glass.
A volcano of anger tore through her body. She ripped the blue ribbons from where they hung tacked to the wall. It felt good tearing down these symbols of her old life. She swept her hand across the top of her dresser. The satisfying clamor of metal striking metal rang out as trophies toppled to the floor. Endorphins raged through her body, and she pressed on like a marathon runner hitting mile-marker twenty-five.
There was no stopping now.
Her parents banged on the door. She ignored their pleas and focused on the violin case sitting on her desk. She opened the lid and lifted the violin from its velvety enclosure. Over the years, she’d had the privilege of playing some of the most exquisite stringed instruments ever created worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars.
Stradivarius, Vuillaume, Guarneri.
Em had held history in her hands as orchestras accompanied her all over the world. But that bit of wood and string that she held in her hand now, affectionately nicknamed Polly, brought her to her knees.
Made of Swiss chalet pine, her gaze swept over the instrument: a Paul Bailly full-sized violin crafted in 1880. It was a gift from her parents. It wasn’t in the same league as the Strads she had played on loan, but this violin came at a significant cost to her father. He’d joked that, while some little girls wanted a pony, his little girl wanted a violin made by a renowned luthier trained by the legends Jules Galliard and Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume.
Em held the violin out in front of her like someone skeptically appraising an item at a yard sale. She assessed the scroll and gazed down the neck past the delicate f-holes.
Smash it.
Rip out the pegs.
Tear off the strings.
This isn’t your life anymore.
The angry voices in her head beckoned her to destroy this tangible link to a life that would no longer be hers. She squeezed the neck of the violin as her breath came in short pants. It felt wrong to be holding the instrument in her right hand. Her right hand was for bowing, and her muscles tensed with the unfamiliarity of the position. She looked at her splinted left hand, hanging limp and useless at her side, and her chest tightened with emotion.
She needed to hold her Polly one last time. She balanced the neck of the violin on her splinted hand. Her chin connected with the chin rest as her body found perfect alignment, and her muscles relaxed into position. Like the final goodbye between lovers at the end of an affair, she inhaled the scent of wood and rosin. She closed her eyes and remembered the last piece she’d played, Paganini’s Nel cor più non mi sento.
Translated from Italian: In my heart, I feel no more.
From this moment on, she would feel no more. A dark voice rattled around her mind. Anger and rage would provide a sanctuary from the torment of her lost dreams. She eyed the instrument, and her vision blurred. She knew what she had to do.
* * *
Em entered her childhood bedroom and retrieved a broken picture from the floor. With only the moonlight, she could still make out the image. It was a picture from her first summer at Shelter Island, NY, where she had attended a prestigious camp for a few dozen of the world’s most gifted youth musicians.
She had assumed her father had thrown everything out, or at the very least, put these reminders of her past into a box, left to sit abandoned and forgotten in the corner of the basement like old high school yearbooks.
She finished the last of the whiskey and set the glass on her desk next to a closed violin case.
<
br /> The wounds of her past, once hidden under layers of anger and forced indifference, prickled as she touched the jagged scar on her left ring finger. She laid down on her bed, tucked into the corner of the room, and glanced out the window only to see the darkened bedroom window of the house next door. Michael’s childhood room. But before her thoughts could drift to Michael MacCarron, to his crooked smile and the way he always smelled of spearmint and lemongrass, something small and bumpy dug into her shoulder. She reached around and pulled a long string of beads. The necklace must have been lying on her bed. As she fingered the tiny orbs, the breath caught in her throat.
Her grandmother’s pearls.
A gift passed down to her from her Australian grandmother. It was the cherished heirloom she wore when she used to perform. Her fingers touched each bead reverently, methodically, as one would pray the rosary. But something was missing. The square-shaped vintage clasp. The clasp was long gone, lost to the night she couldn’t remember.
That damned night.
Even after more than a decade of trying to piece the events together, it remained an enigma. Cloudy and distorted like a chalkboard erased in haste, leaving only obscure fragments of images and words.
Em swallowed hard. She needed to stop the storm of grief and heartbreak that threatened to overtake her heart. She wrapped the broken necklace around her hand and slid it inside her panties. She pinched her eyes shut and rubbed the pearls against her sensitive bundle of nerves, feeling arousal take hold.
She was going to take those pearls and show them who was in charge now. Rage and lust coursed through her body. She pressed the pearls into her sweet spot and made small, rhythmic circles, sparking her sex to throb beneath her touch.
The house was still as she reached her peak, and she cried out in a tumble of fury and relief.
6
“I’m here to see Bill MacCaslin. I’m his daughter.”
Em stood at the security gate of the Langley Park Senior Living Campus and shielded her bloodshot eyes from the sun.
She had polished off the whiskey late last night and succumbed to a fitful sixteen hours of sleep. She dreamed of playing the violin. A dream she had every night; and, while anger insulated her from the pain of her loss during her waking hours, the pull of the music was no match for her subconscious mind.
“Bill MacCaslin’s daughter,” the security guard parroted back and narrowed his eyes.
“Yes, he moved into one of the assisted living cottages last week. I’m here to visit him.”
The security guard was an older gentleman who looked to be in his early sixties. Did she know him from somewhere? He didn’t look familiar.
“You know, you broke your father’s heart.”
Em hardened her gaze. “Do I know you, sir?”
“No, you don’t know me. But a long time ago, you meant something to this town, and everybody saw what happened to poor Bill after you threw away your future to get drunk and high. Your little accident didn’t make the papers, but people talk in Langley Park. I remember Bill used to come into the coffee shop on his way to teach at the university. I’d see him from time to time before I started my shift working security at the hospital. He’d be grinning ear to ear, telling the whole shop about you playing violin in this fancy place and that fancy city. He was never the same after your accident. It broke this town’s heart to watch that poor man live with that kind of sorrow.”
Her nostrils flared, and she clenched her hands into tight fists, but the twist in her gut told her he was right. His words also confirmed her worst fear: the whole town knew about what happened in Sadie’s Hollow, and they blamed her.
Em lifted her chin a fraction and swallowed back her guilt. “My father is expecting me. I think we’re done here.”
With one last sneer, the security guard handed her a map then buzzed her through the gate.
She continued up the sidewalk that ran parallel to the main drive. The campus was only a ten-minute walk from her house on Foxglove Lane. She could have driven the 1980 candy apple red Mercedes-Benz coupe her father kept locked in the carriage house garage, but she needed the walk to clear her head.
She clutched the map and forced fresh air into her lungs. She couldn’t arrive at her father’s cottage all worked up.
Em scanned the lawn. This place looked like an infomercial for active seniors. There was a group doing Tai Chi on the lawn while several stately gentlemen played bocce ball nearby.
The entirety of the Senior Living Campus was nestled into the southwest corner of Langley Park across the street from the Langley Park Botanic Gardens and less than a five minute’s drive to the Midwest Medical and Psychiatric Center. The gated complex consisted of townhouses for seniors who still lived independently and individual assisted living cottage homes for those requiring in-home care. A memory care center for individuals with Alzheimer’s and dementia was housed inside the main building.
Em looked at the map. In addition to the main building housing the memory care unit, it also contained a dining area, a coffee bar, crafting rooms, a wellness center with an Olympic-sized pool, a movie theater, and even a ballroom.
This place couldn’t come cheap.
She passed the main building and headed toward the neighborhood community consisting of a grid of four streets dotted with townhomes and cottages. It reminded her of a small village she had visited in the English countryside after she performed with the London Philharmonic.
She was just about to turn down her father’s street when a man riding a bicycle with a covered bench attached came barreling through the turn.
“Sorry, dude,” the rider called out unfazed as two gray-haired ladies sat giggling and clutching each other like school girls in the backseat. “Teddy-cab, coming through!”
Em jumped out of the way. “Take it easy, dude!”
She shook her head, but the man continued down the street unfazed. She checked the map, found her father’s cottage, and knocked on the door. A sign was posted in the front window: No Smoking. Oxygen In Use.
“Hey, kiddo, I was wondering when you’d get here.”
Em tried to mask her surprise. Her father was wearing a small backpack with a portable oxygen canister. The clear tubes from the cannula delivering oxygen into his nose traced back across his cheeks and curved around his ears. His blue eyes had dimmed since she’d last seen him.
“Don’t look at me like that, Em. The ladies in the eighties knitting group tell me I’m still quite a catch.”
Until last year, Dr. Bill MacCaslin had been a professor in the education department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. That’s where her parents had met thirty-five years ago when her mother, fifteen years Bill’s junior, had come from Australia to finish her doctoral work on the learning styles of children in the deaf and hard of hearing community.
“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m a little off with the travel, and then some surfer guy nearly ran me down with a rickshaw.”
“That’s just Ted from the bike shop in the town center. He comes over a couple of times a week to give us old folks a ride around the campus in his pedicab.”
Em nodded, and they lapsed into a pocket of silence as the gentle hum of the portable oxygen reminded her that the breathing disease her father was battling was all her fault.
“Well, come in, come in,” Bill gestured.
Em entered the cottage. The smell of fresh paint lingered in the air. One lone picture sat on an end table. A black and white photograph of her holding up a trophy twice her size—her first violin competition. Her father was so proud of her that day. If she had turned the camera and taken a photograph of her father, she would have captured him grinning ear to ear, the dark auburn of his beard highlighting the rosy glow of his cheeks.
“The cottage is really nice, Dad,” she said, pulling her gaze from the photo and taking a seat at a small kitchen table. “How are you feeling?”
Bill adjusted the oxygen tube. “I’d give my right arm for a cigarette. Probably
not the answer you wanted to hear, but I think we’re past half-truths and walking on eggshells with each other.”
Em rubbed at her scar beneath the table.
Her father took two deep breaths. “You’ve been to the house.”
It was more of a statement than a question.
“Yes, I got in late last night. My room—it’s exactly how I left it.”
“Your mom and I agreed a long time ago that it wasn’t our place to clean it up or decide what happened to any of its contents.”
“Why can’t you guys just hate each other like every other normal divorced couple?”
Bill laughed, breaking the tension, but the laugh morphed into a cough.
“Your mother and I will always care for each other. Her research took her back to Australia and mine kept me here. We were always the kind of people who were married to our work. The gift we both got was you.”
Over the past two decades, Em’s mother had been an instrumental player in creating a formal educational curriculum for deaf children in Australia. Her work had taken her to the Royal Institute of Deaf and Blind Children, Renwick Centre in Sydney. After the accident, Em spent time with her mother at her office. She was fluent in sign language thanks to spending time with her deaf Australian grandmother, Grandma Mary. At first, Em could only use her right hand to sign, but as she healed and continued helping her mother with her research, she volunteered in the classrooms and was eventually hired on as a teacher’s aide.
“How are things going at the Centre, kiddo?”
Without thinking, Em signed, “It’s good.”
Her work at the Renwick Center had been the only thing that had gotten her through the first few years after the accident. The children and the silence insulated her from the musical world while also giving her something other than her anger at Zoe and Michael to focus her energy. Renwick during the day, and drowning her sorrows with Jack Daniels at night, had become her routine.
The Sound of Home Page 4
