“Some of the soldiers took pleasure in torture, and how easy is it to torture a musician? To destroy her instrument in front of her eyes, to mutilate his hands. Musicians in the concentration camps were forced to play while others were marched into the gas chambers, or to provide weekly concerts for their captors.
“My grandfather said there was nothing he could do about the dead, but the instruments and the surviving musicians, that was different.
“After the war, before he and my grandmother immigrated here, he set up a repair shop in London. Many came to his shop asking him to help them. Most had lost everything—homes, money, family. There was no replacing an instrument that had been in the family for generations, one built by the masters. Some brought instruments to be repaired. Violins, violas, cellos, guitars—instruments that had survived concentration camps and bombings.
“He did much of this work for free. To restore what was lost, to help them heal.
“Some—some brought him fragments. ‘This is what is left of my Guarneri,’ they would say. ‘Can you help me?’ And he would build a thing that was both new and old, marked by the scars of the war but made beautiful again. He did this work at low cost, his repayment, he said, for Ireland’s staying out of the war.”
Phee pauses. Her face has a faraway look, as if remembering, and her voice fades.
“And my cello is one of these?” Braden asks.
“Yes . . . and no. The cello is made of fragments. Stradivarius, yes, and Amati and Guarneri. He said she had a soul. Here are the words he made me memorize:
“‘This cello carries the soul of a woman murdered in the gas chamber, the soul of a gypsy shot like a dog in the street. She has been beloved, she has been abused, she has suffered the touch of evil. I promised her, when I coaxed the pieces into one, that she would be ever loved, that if she would give of her music, she would not be passed from hand to hand but cherished by one musician and one only. And so I made the boy swear an oath to me when he bought her.’”
Braden stares at Phee. He wants to deny this, all of this. A cello cannot have a soul, and yet he has always felt that his does. He tries to shake off the mood Phee has created with questions and logic.
“Wait. You said the MacPhee luthiers have been creating these . . . contracts . . . between musicians and instruments for generations, long before the war. So this is just a bullshit story, meant to make me feel guilty.”
“I’m telling you what he told me,” she says. “Some of the MacPhee specials were built from scratch. Some were pieced together as was your cello. All of them, he said, carried a soul. Whenever he spoke of the cello, he became more . . . intense . . . than when he spoke of the others. You remember your oath?”
“I remember.”
He stands, one hand on the warm wood of the cello, feeling that she is already a part of him and he a part of her, and it is easy to lift the other hand and repeat after the strange old man, “I swear to love and cherish this cello as a part of my own soul. I swear to play her until the day of my death. If I should break my oath, the consequences be on me and my children.”
Braden, in the first heady rush of falling in love, had barely registered the solemnity of the oath. Of course he would love the cello and play her as long as they both should live.
His mother, practical and disapproving, had rolled her eyes, tolerating this foolishness as the eccentricity of a master maker, even as she must have dimly understood that she herself was under some kind of spell or she would never have consented to the shift from violin to cello in the first place.
“I know how it sounds,” Phee says. “When he first told me this tale, I asked so many questions, but he would tell me no more. He wouldn’t tell me by what craft or magic he believed he had put the cello together. He never told me what dark magic he believed he had invoked that any of the instruments should carry a soul. But he made me promise I would hold you to your oath. You, and the others on my list. So here I am, and here you are, and the only question is, What do we do now?”
“We do nothing,” Braden says. “Because there’s nothing to be done. Even if this wild fairy tale were true, which it can’t possibly be, my hands don’t work and I can’t play. Lilian and Trey are still dead. I don’t suppose the old man suggested a remedy for any of this?”
“He would say that you must play again.”
“Which I can’t.”
“Are you certain? There’s nothing that can be done?” She crosses the room, takes his right hand in both of hers.
Braden looks at her hands, strong for a woman. Calluses on the fingertips, the nails short. He can feel her touch on the back of his hand, on the part of his palm that adjoins his wrist, but on his upper palm, and where her fingers touch his, he feels only pressure.
“I went to physical therapy for a while. Then occupational therapy. I even saw a shrink. Somebody, somewhere, thought that might be helpful.”
“Was it?”
“I learned how to make my hands work for basic tasks. It didn’t bring me back my music.”
“Nerves regenerate slowly. There have been cases—”
The hope in her voice hurts more than his familiar relationship with despair. He jerks his hand away. “It’s been eleven years, it’s not coming back. And I know what you’re going to say next. I could still play. I tried that. It sounded like a five-year-old child. And that’s what really set me to drinking, if you want to know. That horrible noise, where the music used to live. I can’t—I just can’t.”
He gets to his feet. “I have to get out of here. Please move. Let me go.”
“I’ll give you a ride.”
“No. Please.” He needs his feet on the sidewalk with the stink and blare of the busy city around him. Anywhere away from Phee’s mesmerizing eyes and the timbre of her voice and the creepy sensation that the old luthier is looking over his shoulder.
“I’ll find my own way. I’m sorry,” Braden says, to Phee or the dog or the ghost of the luthier, or maybe all of them. “I’m sorry.”
Chapter Seventeen
BRADEN
Braden takes a bus, gets off and transfers to another, letting the familiar reality of bodies and noise jolt him back to what is real. This. The hard, cramped seat. The dirty windows. His neighbor with the sharp elbow and the earbuds, exuding an aroma of pot into his environment like a skunky atomizer.
By the time he walks home from the last bus stop through darkness, a cold drizzle soaking through his clothing, he’s back to familiar, sharp-edged facts.
The cello is a thing of wood and strings with no emotions to be wounded. She does not carry the souls of musicians broken and murdered during the war.
His hands will not be magically healed. The disaster and tragedy in his life has not been caused by a curse. The disembodied music he keeps hearing must be stress-induced psychosis or some weird form of alcohol withdrawal.
Allie is his whole focus now. Maybe she’ll never love him, never forgive him, but that is not the point. He needs to see that her life doesn’t get sucked into the ruin that has claimed the rest of her family. Tomorrow he’ll get her set up for survivor benefits and counseling. He’ll tackle Trey’s room. He’ll call Lil’s attorney and go over the will.
If he can get inside the house. If he can find Allie.
Hoping against hope that maybe she’s made it home, he knocks. Rings the doorbell. Wonders if the neighbors are watching him, locked out of his own house. If they remember the last time he stood there, a supplicant at his own door, begging. The memory is vivid in his own mind.
His key won’t go into the lock. Because he’s drunk, maybe, so he tries again. And still it doesn’t fit. He sees the sawdust then, telltale on the porch, and knows what she’s done. Changed the locks. Not given him a key.
“Lili! Open up!”
He rings the doorbell. Knocks. Then rings again.
He fumbles with his cell phone, calling hers, and then the house phone, listening to it ring and hearing his own voice through
the door as he leaves a message.
“For the love of God, Lilian, let me in. We need to talk.”
The killing silence continues, retribution. Braden stumbles around the back of the house, tosses a pebble at the bedroom window, calls her name softly, not so drunk that he can’t be humiliated by the thought of the neighbors knowing what she’s done.
Still no answer.
And then the back door swings open, and Allie stands there, eyes wide with sleep and confusion.
“Daddy? Did you lose your key?”
“That’s exactly it, little bird.”
He hugs her, tight, and picks her up to carry her to bed.
And the next morning . . .
The next morning he’d left without saying goodbye to either of the kids. He couldn’t face them, couldn’t bear to tell them he was leaving.
This time there’s no Allie inside to rescue him and let him in. Maybe there’s a hidden key. He looks under the doormat, the flowerpot, and when he doesn’t find one, he is half grateful that Lil was smart enough not to stash a key in the obvious places. She would have left a spare key somewhere, though, in case one of the kids got locked out.
Which leaves the neighbors. Damn it. He knows which one of them it will be. Steeling himself for the encounter, he knocks on Mrs. Jorgenson’s door.
She jerks it open midknock, covered from neck to ankles in a bathrobe, fuzzy slippers on her feet.
“Well, well. Come to borrow a cup of sugar, then?” Her gaze rakes over him, top to bottom.
He knows full well how he looks. Damp, disheveled, and drunken. It makes no difference that he’s actually sober.
“Mrs. J., I’ve lost my house key. Any chance you could help me out?”
She stares at him, reprovingly, through her half glasses, lips pressed in a tight line.
“Are you drunk?”
“Not yet.”
She sighs, as if he’s asked her to drive him to Canada or help him bury a body. “How is that poor child doing?”
“She’s managing.”
“I told them they could leave her here, after the accident. Until her aunt could show up. I told the social worker straight up, I said, ‘Are you going to let bureaucracy win over the needs of that poor child?’ They said she was staying with a friend, but surely—”
“Do you have a key?” Braden asks, trying to cut this conversation short.
Mrs. Jorgenson makes a tsking sound with her teeth. “Poor thing. Life is a vale of tears, for certain. One thing after another.” She turns away and leaves him shivering on the porch, but since she doesn’t slam the door in his face, he’s hopeful that she’s gone to get a key.
A moment later she’s back.
“Those kids missed you,” she says. “I never agreed with Lilian kicking you out like that. How are the hands? Did they heal?”
A lump gathers in his throat at this completely unexpected kindness. He shakes his head, not trusting his voice, and accepts the key she drops into his palm.
“You need anything else? Because I’m heading off to bed.”
“This is great. Thank you.” He means for more than the key but doesn’t know how to tell her, hoping she’ll hear it in his voice.
The door closes between them with a small and final click, and he returns to a dark and empty house.
Nothing has changed. The bottle still sits on the counter where he left it. Music plays in his head. He’s wet and shivering and miserable.
Phee is a brightness in his mind—an oasis—and that is yet another loss. He can’t see her again, not after this. Can’t go back to the Angels. He’ll need to find a real AA group tomorrow. His list of things to do feels weighty and overwhelming.
Now, tonight, he needs to get rid of the bottle on the counter, pour it down the sink. Before Allie comes home. Before he succumbs to the comfort it offers. But when he picks it up, he hesitates. It won’t hurt to smell it. A small allowance for everything he’s been through today.
His hands are only too ready to open the bottle. He lifts it to his nose and breathes in, deep, the rich, seductive smell of it flooding his senses.
Maybe just one swallow before he sends it down the drain.
Such a shame to waste it.
It’s been a hard day, he needs something to settle his nerves.
Basically medicinal.
The first swallow warms his throat, his belly. The second eases the knot of fear in his chest. By the third, he’s no longer shivering, but the music is louder, more tormenting.
Bottle in hand, he walks into the music room and opens the case that imprisons the cello. Light gleams on burnished wood. With his eyes, he caresses the curves of her, the beautifully carved scrollwork, the silvery line of the strings.
“You.”
The music in his head goes quiet, but he feels the presence, as if the cello is breathing.
“It’s not my fault,” he says, lifting the bottle to his lips and sucking in a long draught. “You know that, right?”
Silence.
His face is wet before he realizes he is weeping. “Damn you,” he says. “Let me go.”
The cello says nothing. What did he expect? He laughs, wildly, and leaves her there, settling down at the table with his bottle.
When his phone rings, he fumbles the answer button with an upsurge of relief, not checking the caller ID.
“Allie?”
“What is going on, Braden?” Alexandra’s voice, not Allie’s.
“I don’t—”
“I just had a call from an officer. A police officer, Braden.”
His heart stops. He feels like he’s falling, can’t find any words to ask the question that looms in his mind.
“Are you not watching her at all? My God. Arrested at a house party. My heart about stopped when they called me—”
“She’s at a party?”
Braden starts laughing. It’s totally the wrong response, but he has absolutely no control over the sounds coming out of his body. A heady relief floods him, from his toes to the top of his head. Not dead. Not murdered. Not in a ditch somewhere, just a teenage girl caught out at a party.
Such a normal, wonderful thing.
“This is not funny, Braden Healey! Are you drunk?”
She’s right. It’s not funny at all, but still he can’t stop laughing.
“I am. Gloriously drunk. Yes.”
“I see that nothing has changed. Put that poor girl on a plane and send her to me before she has a chance to ruin herself completely.”
“Where is she?”
“That’s the sort of thing you’re supposed to know.”
“But I don’t. And they called you. So if you would kindly relay the information, since you are thousands of miles away and not available to rescue her, I will take care of it.”
“You are not going to drive—”
“Hell no. Not driving. I’ll call an Uber.”
“Can you even write down the address?”
“Just a minute. Yes.” He gets to his feet. The room tilts a little but then rights itself. Good. Not too drunk to manage.
He makes his way to the kitchen and opens what in any other house would be a junk drawer. In Lilian’s kitchen, it’s efficient organization, stamps, pens, a letter opener, notepaper, and other list management materials all neatly separated into compartments. There’s even a to-do list, written in Lilian’s precise hand.
Call yard care
Pick up dry cleaning
Schedule Trey’s sports physical
He closes his eyes. Not enough alcohol on board to protect him from the blow.
“Braden?”
“Yeah. Here.” He scribbles down the address while Alexandra continues with a tirade of bitter I-told-you-sos and then hangs up on her in midsentence. He checks for Allie’s car, still missing from the garage. Just as well, he’s got no business driving.
He books an Uber, makes himself coffee, and swallows it black and scalding.
By the time a car pulls i
nto his driveway, he’s able to walk in a straight line. He’s had plenty of practice functioning under the influence and hopes for a quiet ride in the back seat, but his driver is nosy and eager. She leans across and opens the front passenger door. “You can ride up front! It’s so much easier to have a conversation that way, don’t you think?”
Braden considers closing the door and climbing into the back, but he can’t bring himself to this level of rudeness. He hasn’t been in the car for more than thirty seconds before he regrets his choice.
“I’m Val, and I just love doing this Ubering thing, you know? I get to meet such interesting people and go such interesting places! You, for example. I’d think you’d have your own car.”
“I do,” Braden lies, to hush her.
“Good for you, being responsible about drinking and driving. Going to a party, then? That’s a beautiful neighborhood. I’ve been there.”
Braden maintains his silence, but she doesn’t seem to have heard that it takes two to have a conversation. A glance in his direction and she shakes her head.
“You’re not dressed for a party.”
Which reminds him that he’s rain soaked and muddy, covered in dog hair, and probably encrusted in drool. Nope. Not dressed for a party. He checks through the emotional bandwidth available to him and discovers that he really doesn’t care. He’s exhausted. The warm haze of alcohol has turned into an irritant now that he’s required to think and feel and act. Val’s chatter is a discordant screeching.
“I’m a writer,” she volunteers. “It’s why I drive for Uber. I don’t really need the money, you know. But I meet people and I see all of these different parts of the city, and I hear such fascinating stories!”
She waits expectantly, but Braden remains steadfastly silent.
Val is not a woman to take a hint.
“You, now, for instance.” She glances over at him. “You don’t look like somebody who would go to this neighborhood. You’re a mystery. You could be an investigator, or a red herring, or even the bad guy . . .” She sobers at her own words and glances at him again. “You’re not, though, right? The bad guy?”
“I just need a ride, is all,” Braden says.
The woman’s jaw hardens, her body language shifting to what might be wariness or just a fit of the sulks because he won’t play her game.
Everything You Are: A Novel Page 14
