Everything You Are(72)

She glances behind her at the door. She could run out, only she’s wearing the nightgown and where would she go? There’s nothing out there for her.

“You can do it,” Ethan encourages, and she shoves the whole handful into her mouth. Her throat fights her, closing against the chalky ovals. She swallows whiskey, but that chokes her too, and she gags on the whole mess, eyes watering. By the time she fights off the spasm of nausea and manages to swallow, Ethan has emptied both his glass and his entire dish of pills.

He leans back in his chair, watching her. Already there is a distance in his eyes, his face. He’s moving away from her.

Allie still has half of her pills to go. Her stomach is churning. Her throat burns with whiskey and a bitter chemical aftertaste. She can’t do this.

Panic hits.

Ethan is going to die and leave her behind. She’s going to sit here and watch him stop breathing, stop being Ethan. She’ll be left in this wretched place alone, alive, have to call her father and ask him to come and get her.

This is not an option.

Maybe she can take the pills with water. Maybe she can swallow them one at a time. Maybe she can still . . .

I don’t want to die.

The thought begins as a slow vibration at her core. It spreads up through her spinal column and into her skull, down through the bones of her legs, into her arms, her hands.

I don’t want to die.

It resonates outward, through her muscles and into her skin, every delicate nerve, every blood vessel and capillary. Into the room, which is spinning now, gently.

Allie hears music. Not the cello this time but a song with words, her father singing to her as he tucks her into bed. She feels safe, drifting off to sleep, knowing he will be watching out for her.

She doesn’t understand the words, something French, but she knows they mean he loves her. All of the music he shared with her is still with her.

A realization comes to her, now, when it’s too late.

Her father does love her, always loved her. The hours spent listening to him practice, the times he put the bow in her hand and guided it to make music. The cello lessons he insisted on, even after he was gone, that was love. And the breakfasts she’s despised, the oatmeal, that also was love.

Ethan is slumped in his chair. His pupils are dilated, his lids half closed. He looks younger without the tension in his jaw, almost childlike, and Allie wants to stop him from dying, only the room keeps spinning and her limbs are swaddled in cotton.

“Almos’ forgot.” He fumbles with something in his pocket and brings out a phone. It’s an old phone, worn. The screen is cracked. This means something, but before she can grasp it, the strains of the Bach suite in G drift into the room. Not just any version, not Casals’s or Yo-Yo Ma’s, but the Braden Healey version.

At first she thinks it’s the music she’s been hearing in her head, and then she understands. She wants to tell Ethan no, but her lips won’t work and the word sticks in her throat.

“’Cause you loved the cello,” Ethan says. “Downloaded the album just for you.”

Loved. Past tense.

Only it isn’t past, not at all. Loves. She loves the cello. More than anything else in the world. As the music washes over her, she understands her father’s words to Phee. He does love her, just as she loved her mother and Trey. It’s just that the cello is a part of him, a part of her. Cut that away, and what’s left is something undead, like a zombie. A tortured thing without a soul.

“Beautiful music to die to,” Ethan says.

Allie shakes her head, which is a mistake. The room spins faster, and she closes her eyes. It takes two attempts, but she finally coordinates her mouth and tongue to shape words.

“Have you ever seen anybody die?”

Ethan doesn’t answer. His eyes have drifted closed, his head nodding forward.

“Ethan. Have you?”

“What?”

“Have you seen anybody die?”

Still he doesn’t answer.

Allie watches Trey die all over again, as if her closed eyelids are a movie screen. His body twitching, convulsing. The desperate, ragged breaths. It wasn’t beautiful, at all. It was horrible and wrong.

Is this different?

She tries to force her eyes back open, but they are too heavy. Her limbs are weighted. She fights it.

The phone. There’s something about the phone.

A dim memory, her own phone hurtling into the ocean. Ethan’s lecture about phones and tracking devices.

“Whose phone?”

Ethan blinks slowly. He’s sliding out of his chair, leaning sideways. “Mine.”

No. You don’t have a phone. You said.

She’s waiting for the answer that never comes before she realizes she hasn’t spoken, that the words are only in her head. It’s so hard to think, the music making it even harder. She can’t give in, not now, something is wrong.

Allie wrestles with her body, trying to make it sit up straight, to make her arms and hands work. Little by little, she manages to fumble one of the pill bottles into her hand. This seems like the most important thing, a reason not to die. Her vision keeps going in and out, but she can just read the name on the prescription.

Ethan Bannister.

Not right. A doctor wouldn’t prescribe all these for him.

And then she sees the letters following the name. Sr.