She cackled, couldn’t help herself, opening her eyes to look right at him.
“Cartoons,” she said.
He winced. “I’m sorry?”
“Cartoons. ‘You want to learn how to feel, Nadya, watch cartoons. Why do you think you like them so much? When cartoons are happy, they are real, real happy. Right?’” She wiped her eyes, her nose. “‘No ambiguity. No double bind. And when they’re angry—’”
The words came out like rote; she was quoting a therapist she’d seen the first year after leaving home. Her voice caught at the end.
“And when they’re angry,” he said gently, “they what? Tell me.”
She responded with a forced and clumsy little laugh, then put her hand to her face. Eyes clenched shut, she shook and gasped for air.
“This is going to sound terrible,” he said softly, putting his hands on her shoulders, “but I would really like you to stop, okay? As a young man, I learned some of my hardest lessons from women who got prettier when they cried.”
That made her laugh. Waving her hand, she said, “I’m fine, really,” but she wasn’t, and instantly she plunged right back into it.
“If you’re up to talking about it, I’m up to listening.”
She wiped her face. “No. No, it’s—”
“Seems to me, we already danced to this tune. Don’t make me bully you, all right? You got something to get off your chest. You keep it inside, it just finds some other way to sneak out. You think you’re getting a handle on it, but it’s smarter than you. So tell it.”
It went like that for the next half hour, giving in to him, letting him hold her, wanting him to, rocking back and forth. Toby’d never mentioned this side of his father, perhaps had never seen it. She felt privileged. And guilty. Gradually, he got her to tell him why the tears.
Jeremy Vanderheiden, MFA, Ph.D. Plump, blond, dapper, eccentric: he’d been her mentor, hired to prepare her for the Tchaikovsky Competition. And though he lectured her about discipline and possessed the required obsession with all things
élevé,
he was also at times a devilishly silly man, a kind man. A perceptive man. It became clear to him early on that though she might very well possess the talent to compete, she lacked the monomania, the fire. She was gifted, yes. But not great.
He saw something else, though, too. She needed her lessons for reasons far removed from music. She ran there to get away from the sadistic little psychodrama at home: feckless dad, icy mom, vindictive sister. Only her grandmother provided anything like warmth, and even that came tinged with need and bitterness—then, when Nadya turned eleven, the old woman got shipped off to a home. Six months later, she suffered the massive stroke that transformed an aging Ukrainian émigré into a bedridden ghost.
And so Jeremy Vanderheiden, piano guru to Berkeley prodigies, became the one human being in her life Nadya could not wait to see. He indulged her, serving petit fours and maple creams, tittering as he gossiped about divas, letting her begin each lesson with the music she loved, lifted from cartoons—as long as she played
con fuoco.
With fire.
Then, five years after she’d begun her course of study with him, he shriveled up before her eyes. Scalded with sores, badgered by delusion. One day she came to the door and a man she didn’t recognize answered. He asked her name and then retrieved an envelope from a small stack lying on the entryway desk. He handed it to her, then closed the door.
She ran to a nearby park, tore the envelope open, and read:
My dearest Nadya:
I am writing this note long before it will be necessary for you to read it, because I fear, if I wait much longer, I will not have enough of a mind left to say what I must say to you.
How I wish we did not have to say good-bye. You charmed me, Nadya, with your passion, your silliness, your shyness. How brave you are. I wish I could live forever to enjoy you, to protect you. I will miss the sound of your laugh. I like to think, sometimes, that there will be something like it where I am going.
Now I must be honest—your family, “music,” “your future”—these are lies. They are a prison. Continue to be brave, Nadya. Be happy. From where I sit now, I believe to be brave and to be happy might well be one and the same thing.
I will be your loyal friend forever, wherever
Jeremy
Toby’s father sat there with her, handing her tissues, gently rubbing her back as she finished the story. Finally, he said, “Now I understand why you’re always saying you’re sorry. I think I know what it is you feel so sorry about.” He tapped his fingertip gently against the bridge of her nose. “You’re alive.”
Behind her, the door to the hospital room opened. The sound of a man’s voice filtered in.
“No lie, I heard it from one of the nurses. Guy howled in here with his girlfriend, maybe two o’clock. They’d had sex, he rolls off, she says, ‘I can’t feel anything in my legs.’ He thinks she’s complaining. Then boom, lights out. Aneurism. Died in here this morning.” A snort, a murmur of disbelief. “Understand? The guy fucked his girlfriend
to death
. Twenty-three years old. Try getting a hard-on after that.”
She turned away from the mirror toward the sound and came face-to-face with a tall, mournful man with rust-colored hair, dressed in a wrinkled suit. Behind him, a beefy black-haired man with a squinched face was ending his exchange with a police officer sitting just outside the door.
“Nadya,” the first man said, “my name is Detective Murchison.” He seemed surprised to see her up and out of bed. Gesturing to the black-haired man, he added, “This is Detective Stluka. We’d like to speak with you a moment.”
She looked up into his eyes and felt a knifing sadness. The opening bars of “Flee as a Bird to the Mountain” filtered through her mind. A spiritual, Toby had taught it to her, then showed her how Jelly Roll Morton had turned it into “Dead Man Blues.”
“Would you please tell them to stop giving me whatever it is they’ve got me on.” She lifted her hand toward her head. “I feel like I’m going a little crazy.”
Murchison offered his hand. “You need help getting back into bed?”
Nadya lurched beside him while the other one glanced around the room. Stluka, she thought, a Slavic name, maybe Polish. Her grandmother always hated the Poles, a Ruthenian Catholic versus Roman Catholic contempt Nadya had never comprehended. Religion seemed the last of this detective’s concerns; he looked a merry thug. She worked herself back into the bed and covered herself.
Murchison pulled up the room’s only chair and sat. At close range, his eyes were a large, warm, watery brown. Stluka rested his back against the wall, cracking his neck.
“We’re working on the incident involving Mr. Carlisle.” Murchison folded his hands. They were freckled, with graying red hair. “I understand you were there, when the first officers arrived.”
It’s not a question, she realized, and yet it felt like one.
The incident
. His words evoked an image, she believed it to be true, but it all seemed tagged with “could be.” If it happened, she thought, it happened to someone else. My sickly twin.
“You were sitting on the porch.” He nodded toward her bandaged arm. “Clawing at your skin.”
The panic came like a thunderclap, lancing through her body, more like a seizure than any kind of fear she recognized. A shudder knifed up her back. Her throat clapped shut. The air in her nostrils smelled thick, warm and coppery like blood, then greasy and sweet.
Murchison shot up from his chair. “You all right?”
Behind him, Stluka opened the door, telling the officer outside, “A nurse. Like now.”
Nadya lurched upright, her lungs clenching as she tried to draw breath. Murchison hovered near her face, his eyes chasing hers. Her throat opened up to expel a racking sob. She clutched at his jacket, the wool smelling of rain and sweat and musty cologne a thousand years old. He put his hands on her arms.
“Deep breaths.”
A nurse appeared—middle-aged, African American, her hair bobbed, gray at the temples and parted on the side. She wore an open white hospital smock with a navy turtleneck underneath. A pair of reading glasses, hanging from a chain around her neck, bobbed on her plump chest. She moved Murchison aside, rested her haunch on the bed, and pulled Nadya toward her.
“About time.” She stroked Nadya’s hair. “What you’ve been through, what you did, about time.”
Nadya clung to her, embarrassed at the need, the two detectives watching. It seemed an eternity.
What I did,
she thought, confused. Her throat went raw, sandpaper again. The nurse reached for a Kleenex dispenser and pushed tissues into Nadya’s hand, one after the other, as she wiped her face and blew her nose and said, “I’m sorry,” over and over, to which the nurse murmured, “No sorries required, dear, none whatsoever.”
In time the nurse looked over her shoulder at Murchison and Stluka. “She’s crying.” Said to a pair of dopes. “You call in a nurse, like she’s popped an artery. She’s crying.” She shook her head and turned back to Nadya. “Ain’t that the way.”
“She couldn’t breathe,” Murchison said, a little testily. “She said the meds are driving her nuts.”
Stluka said nothing.
“Breathing all right now, aren’t you, dear?” The nurse’s voice was warm, like the sound from a sleeping cat. Holding Nadya at arm’s length, she inspected her eyes, felt for the pulse in her carotid artery, then her wrist. She ran her hand along Nadya’s bandaged arm, checking to see that the adhesive was secure. “I do believe, little one, that you are going to live.” She took Nadya’s hands. “These two rough-tough crime-fighting-type fellas need to ask some questions. Could get sloppy. You up for that, or you still need a little time?”
“These meds—”
“You’re on Xanax and Valium, dear, nothing more. You just got it intravenously, so it feels a bit more personal. We can slide back a little now, if you want. Nothing else in your system, really, except some antibiotics, for your arm. Pretty tore up, it was. Took a bit of needlework.”
Nadya stared at the bandage, feeling another wave of dread, but gentler now, with the nurse there. “I don’t remember.”
“No surprise there, dear. You’re gonna find your memory shooting around on skates for a while.”
Murchison made a face. The nurse ignored him and got up, moving with a droll sashay toward the door. “If she needs anything else—a coif, pedicure, some chilled white wine—you gents just holler. Holler good. We’ll come a-runnin’, oh my yes, God a’mighty.” She opened the door and said to the officer stationed outside, “You gonna move sometime today, or shall I get the girls from Housekeeping to drop by and water you?”
Once the door closed, Murchison returned to his chair. He nodded toward Nadya’s arm. “That seems to bother you.”
She followed his gaze. It was as though they were both standing a little off, regarding her arm. It made her feel ashamed.
“I don’t remember anything about it.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Not yet.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you do remember.”
Nadya looked up from her arm and saw Stluka against the wall, his eyes fixed on her.
“It’s all in pieces.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I have these emotions—they’re, they’re very raw, very intense—but there’s no picture. Or, if I do see something, it just flickers by. Never connects to anything.”
“What’s the last thing that doesn’t feel like that? That feels whole.”
She gave it thought. “I was at the piano.”
“The one in the living room?”
“Yes.” She closed her eyes, trying for a mental picture—stomach tight, heart thumping, but she tried—unsure if she was remembering or imagining. Music echoed faintly in her mind, one of the Hungarian dances again, but not the fifth this time, the eleventh. No cartoon associations with the eleventh: elegiac, in A minor. Poco andante.
“I was playing, waiting for Mr. Carlisle to come home. I got this sense that he was outside. I don’t know, just a feeling. Then I heard the gate. I got up to see—”
“See what?” It was Stluka.
Her head felt light and she found words failing her. Again, an eternity passing. “I heard the gate.”
“You told us that.”
“I mean a second time.” She looked at Stluka, then Murchison. “I heard the gate a second time. That’s when the shots—” Her pores opened up and sweat beaded on her skin, but she was cold. She felt so cold.
“You want us to call the nurse back?” Murchison said.
“I was confused, I just sat there.” Drawing breath, it felt like sucking air through a long, thin tube. “I’ve never heard a gun go off before. And for a moment, I didn’t know, or couldn’t believe, what it was. The shots, they were so close, just outside. So loud. I remember thinking that I should get down, on the floor. One bullet, I think, hit the house. But I couldn’t move.”
“That’s not so strange.”
“But you did get up finally.” It was the other one, Stluka. “Go to the window.”
Her head began pounding again. “I should have gotten up right away, I know. Done something.”
She shut her eyes and it felt good, the blankness, but then Murchison, the kind one, was struggling with her, holding her by the wrist. “Stop. Stop it.”
Nadya blinked open her eyes. Her face was damp, her whole body was wet. She glanced at the wrist Murchison was gripping. The hand was balled into a fist and throbbing.
“Don’t hurt yourself.” Murchison loosened his hold. “There’s no need to hurt yourself. It’s not your fault.”
Nadya unclenched her fingers. They felt like wax.
“Tell us what you saw, Nadya. Please. All right?”
Stluka said, “Where was he lying?”
She glanced up. “Excuse me?”
“In the yard, Mr. Carlisle, where was he?”
Like a fish dying at the bottom of a boat, she thought. Eyes bulging, mouth gaping, formed around a silent
No.
But a human face, an arm reaching out for her.
“Just inside the gate.” She had to swallow, breathe. “Beneath the sycamore.”
“Anyone else there with him?” Murchison asked.
She tried to picture herself back at the window, looking out, but when her imagined gaze tracked up his body the yard telescoped, the fence receding fast, growing small, the gate vanishing into the distance. It made her dizzy.