Everything You Are: A Novel

by Kerry Anne King

  His feet carry him closer.

  The cello is beautiful. Her wood is luminous. His hand reaches out to touch, but then he snatches it back. An instrument like this must be expensive, is certainly not for the likes of him.

  But when he glances up, the old man, still watching, nods permission. His expression is intent, almost hungry. Braden lays one hand tentatively on the cello’s burnished shoulder.

  Feels her shudder beneath his touch, sigh. “At last,” she sings to him. “All this time I have waited for you.”

  “Braden!” His mother’s voice is sharp, and he knows the words she’s not saying by heart. Are you five? Can’t you keep your hands to yourself?

  The heat of shame rises through his body.

  “No harm.” The luthier shuffles over to him. Up close, the old man’s eyes are almost black, glittering. “You like this instrument?”

  Braden lets his hand stroke up the cello’s neck, just skimming the strings. A whisper of music floats into the room. Mama shuffles her feet and clears her throat, impatient, but she seems far away. The cello is immediate, already becoming his own personal universe.

  “She likes you. She has invited you to play,” the luthier says.

  “We’re here to talk about violins.” Mama has her no-nonsense voice on.

  “Yes, yes. The violins. But first, five minutes to play the cello. She wants to be played, and we always must do what she wants. She is the boss of us, yes? Not the other way. Here. Sit.” The old man motions Braden toward a chair.

  Mama tsks disapprovingly but doesn’t interfere.

  If Braden looks at her, she’ll shake her head and pinch her lips to signal no. He sits.

  The old man lifts the cello with a little grunt. “She’s full size. Not a child’s instrument, but you are not a child. How tall are you, boy?”

  “Five six.”

  “And growing yet. Fourteen, are you?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Young, but the cello has spoken. Now, sit with your knees apart. Yes, like so.” He sets the cello down and rests it at an angle against Braden’s left knee. Braden’s hand settles on the curve of her shoulder, and it feels solid, familiar, right. A violin has always felt fragile, a thing to be shielded and protected. The cello whispers of strength.

  “Ophelia, bring the bow.”

  The girl slides down off the stool and pads over, soundless, and puts a bow in Braden’s waiting hand. Her eyes are wide with wonder, her hair the same warm gleaming red brown as the wood of the cello.

  “You will find the action different than a violin—”

  Braden sweeps the bow across the strings, not waiting for the old man to finish. Yes, he feels the difference. The curve of the bridge, the way the bow shapes his arm so that each note sings true. He moves his fingers over the fingerboard, experimenting with the pressure required to depress the strings.

  The cello is generous in her response, gifting him with rich, mellow tones that resonate even after his bow hand drops away. His entire body is trembling, as if he’s been too long out in the cold.

  The cello whispers, “I will always play for you. Don’t be afraid.”

  He wants to whisper back, to say that all he fears is loss, but he dare not break the spell with words.

  “You will be buying the cello, of course,” the luthier says, as if there truly is no question. “This boy is not a player of violins.”

  Mama bristles. “He excels. He went to state last year, with a cheap rented violin—”

  “And he will do more with the cello. With this cello.”

  “Nonsense,” Mama says. “We came for a violin. We will be buying a violin. Get up, Braden. Put that instrument away before you break it.”

  Braden’s hand closes around the neck of the cello, possessive. She is his, or he is hers, one way or the other or both.

  “I could play the cello,” he tells his mother. “This cello. It won’t take me long to learn.”

  “I will give you a good price,” the old man says. “No more than the violin. I am old. I have seen many matches made. This boy and this cello belong together.”

  “He is already very skillful on the violin. We are not starting over again.” Mama’s voice sharpens. “Put the cello away. Talk to me about this violin.” She points at an instrument that looks to Braden now like a child’s toy.

  “Trust an old music seller.” The old man’s hand rests on Braden’s shoulder, lightly. “I know these things.”

  “I don’t need you to know things.” Mama has reached the end of her patience. “Braden, come and try this one. See how pretty.” She lifts an instrument that glows warm in the light.

  Obedient, understanding it is pointless to beg, Braden gets up, feeling like the boy who walked into the store has vanished. His body feels big and clumsy, the violin too small. His hands won’t stop shaking, and the bow doesn’t glide true across the strings. It doesn’t love him, this violin. It will take time and effort to make it his.

  “Not this one.” He puts it back in its place and tries another. And another.

  “Enough!” Mama snaps. “Stop sulking over the cello. You are not giving any of these a chance.”

  “I’m not sulking. I just . . .” He has no words to explain. Mama reads something in his face that softens hers. She touches his cheek. “We will rent one from the school. How about that? We will buy you your own violin and rent a cello. If it turns out that you are a cellist after all, then we will try to find money to buy you one. All right?”

  Braden can’t answer her, his whole being submerged in unfathomable longing. Even when he doesn’t look at the cello, he can feel her, as if she’s a part of him now. What will be left of him if he is forced to walk out of this store without her?

  “Try another violin, now,” Mama urges. “Give it a chance.”

  “There is no point,” the luthier says. “I will not sell you a violin. Only the cello.”

  Mama is speechless, but only for an instant.

  “I don’t understand. You sell violins—”

  “To people who wish to play them, yes. This boy is a cellist.”

  “That is ridiculous.”

  He shrugs a bony shoulder. “Many people come in to look at instruments. Some are not music people at all, and I send them away. The boy and the cello are a matched set. They belong together.”

  The old man’s eyes look deep into Braden’s, right into the depths of his soul.

  “A forever home, you understand. A marriage. This cello is not a thing to be acquired and cast aside. And when you die and the bond is broken, your next of kin will bring the cello back to me. Here.”

  Phee’s voice pulls him back. “Do you remember?”

  Braden nods, a long way from words. “You were there,” he manages, lips stiff. “I’d forgotten that part.”

  The memory of that first meeting is so vivid he can still feel the warmth of the cello between his knees, the easy sweep of his bow arm, the tiny adjustments made so automatically by his hands. It’s as if he’s lost her all over again. His grief over Lilian and Trey, compounded by this fresh loss of the cello, threatens to break something loose at the core of him.

  “Come upstairs.” Phee walks away from him, the dog at her heels.

  He hesitates, every nerve in his body signaling warning. The hair on the back of his neck prickles, his belly feels full of wet cement. All the same, this moment is predestined, like he’s dreamed it, maybe even lived it before.

  He follows Phee back into the workroom, and from there up a flight of narrow stairs.

  “Music is a curse,” he hears as he sets his right foot on the first step.

  Lilian said that, not long after they met.

  The words were said so lightly, with an upward sweep of her black lashes and the slightest tilt of her rounded chin, that he’d missed the conviction that marked them. He’d kissed away the tang of bitterness the words left on her lips, kissed her eyelids, her cheek, her hands.

  “Music is magic,”
he hears as he sets his left foot on the second step. He’d said that, had believed it. “Music is a gift from the gods.” And when he played for her, just for her, coaxing songs out of the cello that were new in the world, born of his love and the wonder he felt that Lilian allowed the liberty of his kisses, he’d felt like a god himself. Anything was possible.

  Braden stands still on the stairs. Phee and Celestine have both vanished out of sight. He can go up, or down. He chooses up, finds himself in a light-filled, high-ceilinged space with floor-to-ceiling windows and skylights above. Outside, the city is moving into evening. Fog creates ghostly haloes around the streetlights, half obscuring the bumper-to-bumper traffic down below.

  “Sit,” Phee says.

  Braden sinks into a comfortably worn armchair. Celestine flops down at his feet.

  “Why did it have to be you?” Phee asks.

  Braden, not understanding the question, doesn’t try to answer.

  She bends over an antique cedar chest, inserting a heavy, old-fashioned key into the lock. A fragrance of old linen and lavender wafts upward when she lifts the lid.

  “My grandfather left the shop to me, along with all of the instruments he built, and all of his clients. There are certain strings attached. When I came to talk to you, after your accident, I told you that you have to play. I didn’t tell you why.”

  Braden’s throat is dry. A sense of something heavy compresses the air.

  Phee kneels in front of his chair, a book in her hands. It is clearly old, the binding a faded green. Drawn by curiosity and dread, Braden watches her turn the pages, catching glimpses of handwritten transactions.

  Thomas McCullough, violin, Derry, Ireland, 1 June 1822.

  Daniel Marcus, violin, London, 1 November 1884.

  Julia Weisel, viola, Berlin, 15 August 1901.

  Some of the names he recognizes, well-known violinists and cellists. Others he has never heard of. As the pages turn, the handwriting changes, once, twice. Phee stops on the last page. He sees his own name, the last written, blank spaces below it.

  Braden Healey, cello, Seattle, 5 January 1990.

  Only a transaction record. Nothing unusual or terrifying about that, and yet he feels the jaws of a trap closing around him.

  “This book was my grandfather’s. It was his father’s before him, and his father’s before that. A long, unbroken line of luthiers passing lore down from father to son. My father has no interest in music or instruments, and so it fell to me.”

  “Did you want to be a luthier?”

  “I wanted to build and repair instruments.”

  “Isn’t that what a luthier does?”

  “Ordinary luthiers, yes. My family line has other . . . responsibilities. This book was used to keep records only of certain—special—instruments. Not all were entered here.”

  Braden registers this. “My cello. The maker’s mark, the color of the varnish, all indicate Stradivarius. You’re telling me it’s not?”

  “It is, and it isn’t.”

  Another cryptic comment that answers nothing. Phee wraps the book in a towel and locks it back in the trunk. She rifles through folders in a desk drawer, draws out a single sheet of paper, and holds it out to him. Braden stares at it, his hands locked together in his lap.

  “No point in resisting. Fate has caught us up.” She tries to laugh, but he reads only regret and sadness in her eyes.

  Braden takes the paper.

  The first thing he sees is his own name scrawled at the bottom. It barely looks like his signature, his twelve-year-old self still laborious at a task that has since become as automatic as breathing. Even with his numb fingers, his signature always comes out the same.

  He reads:

  I, Braden Healey, being of sound mind and purpose, do solemnly swear to enter into a forever bond with this Cello. I understand that the consequences of breaking my oath are unpredictable, and possibly dire. I will keep her, care for her, and play her, until such time as death parts us.

  Braden Healey

  “Your grandfather was a great luthier,” Braden says, “but a crazy one.”

  “That’s the easy answer.” Phee walks away to look out a window.

  “Surely you don’t believe this shit?” When she doesn’t answer, he presses on, stumbling over his own words. “Things happen. Musicians sell their instruments, acquire new ones.”

  “Not this musician, not this instrument. Not any of the musicians on that list or their instruments, all the way back to 1822 and probably before that.”

  The weight of what she’s saying crushes the air out of his lungs, raises a cold sweat on the back of his neck. “If there’s any truth to what you’re saying, then Lilian and Trey are dead, not because I was absent and drinking but because I wasn’t playing the cello.”

  He waits for her to deny this, to admit that the whole idea is out of the question. Instead, she makes a strangled sound, half sob, and says nothing. She’s a strong woman, not given to dramatics, and her emotion shakes him more than anything she’s said so far.

  “Oh, come on, Phee. There’s no logic to any of this! I blame myself for their deaths because I should have been there. Not because some magical curse befell them. You don’t really believe that. You can’t.”

  Allie, he thinks. If a curse exists, then Allie is in danger.

  Phee turns to face him, her back pressed against the window, a creature at bay. Tears track down her cheeks, and she lets them flow with no attempt to wipe them away.

  “You stopped playing. I tried to warn you.”

  Braden laughs, a wild, twisted sound. He holds up his hands. “The curse came before the not playing. What do you want from me? My fingers feel like there’s cotton between them and anything they touch. I can’t play.”

  “Even so,” she whispers. “Even so.”

  He tries to steady his heartbeat, his breathing.

  “This is crazy! All that shit about Paganini selling his soul to the devil? The idea that Stradivari soaked his woods in blood or in a waterfall before crafting his instruments, all of it is bullshit! Science says the mystical Stradivari secret was probably all about the varnish made by a local chemist. There’s no curse, Phee.”

  Her back stiffens, she moves away from the window. “We’re not talking about Paganini or Stradivari. We are talking about the MacPhee luthiers and you and the contract you signed for your cello.”

  “And that your grandfather laid some sort of curse on me.”

  “He never laid a curse on you. You broke the contract.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it?” She flings the words at him, a challenge.

  He throws up both hands to deflect them.

  Celestine rumbles a protest and goes to Phee’s side, protective now, the fur along his spine raised.

  Grief and rage heat Braden’s skin. “Music was everything to me, do you hear? Everything I had, everything I was! I’m nothing without it. Nothing! And you have the nerve to stand there and tell me that I’m cursed because I don’t play?”

  The room is too small. Braden stumbles toward the door, but Celestine intercepts him, a growl rumbling in his chest.

  “Celestine,” Phee commands. “Come here.”

  Celestine doesn’t come. He bares his teeth, still growling. Braden steps back, cautious. When the dog doesn’t move, he retreats another step, and then another.

  Phee is weeping, and Braden feels like a brute. He can’t take back anything he’s said. There’s nothing he can do to fix any of this. “Listen. I know you’re just relaying some message from your grandfather—”

  She shakes her head, denying, takes a steadying breath.

  “I used to be like you. I loved the old man, but I thought it was all superstitious insanity. What difference did it make to an instrument who played it? As long as it was well cared for, how could it possibly matter?”

  She stops. Takes a breath.

  “And?”

  “I was wrong. There was this other guy on
my list who sold his violin—”

  “People sell their instruments, Phee. Every day, for God’s sake. No great tragedy befalls them.”

  “Out of all of the instruments he made and sold, my grandfather left me six to take care of. Your cello, and five violins. And the guy who sold his violin—”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “You asked why I started drinking. I’m trying to tell you.”

  Braden presses his hands to his temples. His head is going to explode. Memories creep and crawl in and out of the dark space inside him like flies, like maggots. The more Phee talks, the more likely it is they’ll get out. He can’t have that.

  “Don’t!” he shouts. “Don’t tell me some coincidental horror story and try to connect it to mine.”

  Her tears, he sees, are not weakness but strength. She feels what she feels, and does what she needs to do, anyway. “I need to tell you a story about your cello, about why she needs to be protected.”

  “Oh my God. She is protected. She’s safe and warm and cared for. Allie’s been playing her. I know everything I need to know—”

  “You don’t, actually. He said, if you should ever put aside the cello, I should tell you this. I’m not going to leave you alone until you hear it, so you might as well sit.”

  Braden hesitates, but the dog decides for him. He’s not going anywhere without permission.

  “My grandfather fought in World War Two,” Phee begins. “He called it the Great Evil. He was a musician. A craftsman. How must that violence and destruction have marked him? He wouldn’t talk about the war itself, only of the aftermath.

  “He told me about bones and gas chambers and tattoos and mass graves. And he told me about Hitler’s instrument collection. He targeted fine violins—Stradivari, Amati, Guarneri . . . the Nazis stole and collected them, the same way they collected art.