Everything You Are(15)

This is the first time it has called him by name.

Braden.

Feeling like he’s dreaming, he steps over the stain, walks down the hallway, opens the door to his old music room.

Nothing has changed. The old desk where he once sat composing music still sits in the corner. His favorite chair is in place by the window, sheet music on the stand in front of it. The cello case, scuffed and scarred, stands beside it.

He glances at the music, and the room around him spins. Bach’s Suite in C Minor. The same music he’d been practicing before music was torn out of his life. His own handwritten notations to himself are still there.

It makes no sense that the music would be sitting on the stand, less sense than the fact that the cello is still here.

He undoes the latches on the case, swings the cover open.

The cello steals his breath. Same burnished red gold. The perfect curves, the tiny chip on the scrollwork where he once caught it against a door. A new scratch on the body that he traces with an insensate finger, imagining that he can actually feel the smoothness of the wood beneath his touch.

He plucks a string, surprised that it is perfectly tuned.

“Hello, beautiful,” he whispers.

The cello hums an invitation.

“I can’t,” he murmurs. “You know I can’t. Hush now.”

He lays his hand across the strings. The connection is immediate and fierce, the lock of a powerful magnet to a shard of iron. It was like this when he was twelve years old and met her for the very first time. It was like this every time he touched her.

The shock of loss hits him all over again, as fresh and overwhelming as it was that very first morning when he woke up in a hospital bed with bandaged hands. Every day for the last eleven years, he has wakened to the same shock and disbelief, the dark wonder that life can go on, day after day after endless day, when he is barred from the music that gave it all meaning.

Now, though, a faint joy threads through his grief. The cello has been cared for, played. The bow has recently been re-haired.

Allie. It would have to be Allie, just as he had always hoped. He set up music lessons for her when she was twelve, the same age he’d been when the cello came to him, but he communicated the plan through an attorney and never inquired about her progress. All he knew was that money transferred from his account into the cello teacher’s every month.

He allows himself the small pleasure of lifting the cello out of the case and setting her on the stand, a fierce hope rising within him. Maybe he and Allie still have a chance. Maybe they can connect over the music. If he could teach her, it would be almost like playing himself.

His left hand circles the cello’s neck, his fingers settling onto the strings. Such a familiar gesture, and yet so different and so wrong. If he focuses, he can vividly recall the sensation of finger pads on strings. It’s the very last memory fragment he retains from the far side of a black chasm of nothing.

He inhabits that memory as fully as he can, hoping and fearing it will carry him on into the next one.

In the first memory, he’s alone at his parents’ cabin in the woods and he’s deeply, devastatingly sad, faced with a decision that is going to break him, no matter what choice he makes. The cello rests warm against his knee and he’s playing, not the C Minor that he’s meant to be practicing but something different, Allie’s song, a lullaby he created for her when she was just a baby.

That’s one bookend.

In the next, he’s in the hospital. His cheek is stitched back together after being flayed open somehow. His hands are bandaged from serious frostbite. And his sister is telling him that Mitch, his brother-in-law, is dead. People keep asking what happened. How did Mitch come to fall through the late ice on the lake? He’s a big man, so how did Braden get him from the lake to the cabin?

Then, as now, he doesn’t know the answers.

As always, when he tries to push his way into the blank space, panic hits him with hurricane force. He can’t breathe, his chest hurts, his vision narrows down into a tunnel, and, oh God, what is he doing here? Everything he has been running from is in this house. Who does he think he is that he can face it all, especially sober?

For Allie, he reminds himself.

He staggers to his feet, away from the cello, slamming the door behind him. But this house is a minefield, trip wires of memory hidden everywhere he walks. He wants, needs, requires a drink.

Water. Librium.

He makes it to the kitchen, manages to fill a glass with water, although his hands are shaking so violently he spills half of it when he tries to drink. There’s the bottle of Librium in his suitcase, meant for withdrawals, but he knows from experience that it’s also good for anxiety. He’d packed in five minutes, stuffing clothes and toiletries into the bag without folding or sorting, and the whole thing is a twisted mess he can barely navigate.

By the time he locates the bottle, jeans and socks and underwear are strewn everywhere. The childproof cap nearly defeats him. Between his shaking and his numb fingers, it takes him three tries, and then as the cap opens, the whole damn thing slips from his grasp and lands on the floor, the contents spilling everywhere.

Which is when the doorbell rings.

He ignores it, chasing down one of the capsules and trying to pick it up. He hears himself laughing like a maniac.

The doorbell buzzes again, and then again, and relief floods through him.

Alexandra, surely, come back to press her point. Perfect timing. She was right, he was wrong. He’s not up to this, can’t do it, in fact it’s going to kill him. He’ll let her care for Allie and he will hit the closest store, buy a bottle, and drain it.