Everything You Are(62)

“Did you really play the C Minor?”

“Allie says I did.”

“Do you believe her?”

“I want to believe we were both dreaming.”

“But?”

“The cello was tuned to scordatura. So somebody tuned it for the C Minor. It could have been Allie—the music is out on the stand—but she swears she didn’t touch it.”

“What if you could play again?” she asks him, holding him with her eyes and her hands. “If you played last night, then maybe—”

“I was dreaming. Somehow—I don’t know—it’s like, people can do things under hypnosis that they couldn’t normally do, right? The subconscious taking over. So it must have been like that.”

“So maybe a hypnotherapist, then—”

Braden wrenches his hands away from her. “Let me show you. I have sensation here.” He runs fingers across the backs of both hands.

“And here, from the crease of the wrist to where the thumb joins my palm. The rest feels like—you know that thing where you sleep on your hand and when you wake up it feels like it’s not yours? Dead and heavy and useless. Sometimes—on a good day, I get pins and needles. I did months of occupational therapy to learn to do basic things like hold a mug, zip and unzip my fucking pants so I didn’t have to live in sweats. Every action requires that I watch what my hands are doing, navigate like I’m operating a remote control. And you think that somehow, magically, I’m going to be able to play!”

“You played the C Minor. With your eyes closed.”

“Oh my God. You are incorrigible!”

“So I’ve been told. What happened? The night of the . . . accident.” Her eyes search his, begging him to answer.

“I don’t remember.”

She can hear his breathing, rapid and shallow. The room is cool, but there’s a sheen of sweat on his forehead.

Phee goes to the kitchen and brings him a glass of water.

“Drink.”

He doesn’t answer, staring off into the corner.

“Braden.” She touches his face. He startles, recoiling from her touch, his eyes wild.

“Are you all right?”

He licks his lips. Swallows. “Flashback,” he croaks. “Just a small one. Night. Snow. Cold. That’s it. All I ever get.”

He takes the water and drains the glass. When he’s done, his face is a better color. His breathing has eased.

“Do you really think I haven’t tried, Phee? Music was everything! Without it, I’m nothing. Have nothing.”

A rhythmic thudding draws Phee’s gaze. Celestine sits at the edge of the room, his tail thumping on the floor. Allie stands beside him, looking heartbreakingly young in a pair of fuzzy pajamas.

Braden stretches a hand out toward her. “I didn’t mean that how it sounded, Allie. You know that. That’s why I—”

“Spare me,” Allie says.

Celestine starts to follow, but Allie stops him. “Stay here.” The dog whines but obeys, fixing Braden with a look of pure reproach.

He groans. “Take the cello, Phee. Take it back.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Even for Allie?”

“Because of Allie. Can’t you see how much she needs the music, too?” She should tell him about the note Allie left on her mother’s grave, but reading it herself was already such a huge breach of Allie’s privacy that she can’t bring herself to do it. Somehow she’ll just have to make him see.

The silence that falls between them is difficult and heavy. “I should go,” she says. She allows her hand to settle on Braden’s head and rest there. She doesn’t stroke his hair, as she wants to do. Doesn’t run her fingers through the loose curls.

“If I call an emergency meeting of the Angels, will you come?”

She’s not sure if the look he gives her is a promise or an acknowledgment of her words. “Somebody will pick you up,” she says, not taking chances. “I don’t suppose you’re going to want it to be me, so I’ll send one of the others.”

“Not somebody else. You.” He gives her a half smile. “We’re in this together, apparently. Whatever this is.”

“Tomorrow, then. Three thirty. Don’t make me hunt you down.”

“That,” he says, “is a terrifying thought. Good night, Phee.”





Chapter Twenty-Three

BRADEN

Braden, left alone with the cello, feels a pervasive sense of dread creeping up on him, as if he’s wandered into a horror movie and is about to be devoured alive by a seemingly inanimate object. Maybe the cello will strangle him, or bludgeon him to death. Allie will find him in the morning, bloody and lifeless, wrapped in strings and wood fragments.

Get a grip, he mutters to himself. Phee is a crazy woman. There’s no such thing as a curse.

The problem is, he’s known crazy people. He shared lodgings with a schizophrenic for a while, and is familiar with the lapses of attention, latencies of responses, the emotional flatness. Phee is not like that at all. Her clear and cogent presentation of what she believes will befall him and Allie has unsettled him deeply. He has his own experiences to consider, his sense that the cello didn’t want to be given away. The music that will not stop playing in his head.