Every Note Played(28)
“Excuse me!” he yells from the top step, unable to walk down fast enough to meet her, unable to wave his arms.
She notices him. Thank God. She removes an earbud and slows down.
“Can you help me get my key out of my pocket and open my front door for me?”
Her face closes off, scared. “Sorry,” she says quickly, and jogs away without looking back.
“Wait! Please!”
She practically sprints down the street. He can only imagine what he looks and sounds like—a sweaty, bashed forehead; his arms hanging; his torso bent over; his voice monotone and creepy. He’d run, too.
No one else is on his side of the street, and his voice is too weak to reach the dog walker he sees in the park. He looks down at his phone. It’s 12:20, over an hour until Melanie arrives. He won’t make it. Maybe they can send someone else, someone now. Yes!
He activates the voice control on his phone. A wave of pain and pressure rolls through him, doubling him over at the waist. He knows this is his last chance. He can barely speak.
“Call Caring Health.”
It rings three times.
“Hello?”
“This is Richard Evans. Can you send someone out right now? I can’t wait for Melanie. It’s an emergency.”
“Richard? This is Karina.”
What? How? His voice, his slurring, sloppy, barely audible monotone voice. Caring Health. Karina.
“Sorry, I . . . I—”
“I’m in the city. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“Please just leave me. Melanie will be here at one thirty.”
“Shut up.”
In the pause that follows, the last kicks and screams of their mutual dread settle into surrender. They’re in Richard’s bathroom. She could leave him here. But for some reason that she doesn’t yet understand, she’s not going to, and so it’s not worth discussing.
She unclips a device labeled BlueAnt from his coat collar, lifts his phone up and over his head, and places both on the vanity counter. She then unzips his winter coat, unsealing the stench that had been trapped beneath the insulating layers of down and weather-resistant outer shell. She covers her nose and mouth with her hand, an utterly ineffective shield against the noxious odor that is quickly saturating the air in the room.
She flashes to a summer afternoon when Grace was two. Armed with nothing but the innocent intention of retrieving a beach chair from the car, she popped the trunk and was assaulted by the putrid, violent stink of a forgotten diaper filled with poop, baked in eighty-degree weather for several days. The smell emanating from Richard right now is similar but far worse. She removes her useless hand from her face and gags.
About to take a deep breath as she would before attempting anything potentially painful or scary—striking the first key of Bach’s Goldberg Variations in a recital a million years ago; pushing in concert with the labor contractions that delivered Grace; picking up the phone today, knowing it was Richard calling—she thinks better of it. Taking a deep breath now would mean consuming more of this aerosolized cesspool. Instead, she lifts the top of her sweater and hangs it over her nose, creating a mask, and breathes short, timid breaths through the woven fibers.
She looks up and finds herself accidently eye to eye with Richard. His thin, clean-shaven cheeks are wet with untouched tears, and his eyes, ever formidable in her experience, submit to her gaze, humiliated, apologizing, holding an expression so stunningly uncharacteristic of him that she can’t look away. He closes his eyes and keeps them shut, likely unable to bear being seen like this, and she’s grateful for the curtain between them, that he’s not able to see the tears welling in her eyes.
While music, especially live music, can easily overcome her—the swell of the notes, an overwhelming awe of the artistry before her, the sorrow in the story of the song—she never cries for the crying. Raised under Russian oppression, she’d seen more than a lifetime’s worth of weeping before she could tie her own shoes. At a young age, she learned to pretend that nothing bothered her, to dam up any tears of pity or compassion with great, impenetrable walls. She watched dry-eyed as scrawny toddlers wailed in the bread line where she stood dutifully for over two hours every day after school; as Mr. Nowak, who lived across the street, was hauled off to prison in front of his hysterical wife and six crying children for stealing a pig’s head from a neighboring farm; as her mother wept while Karina packed her suitcase, leaving for a six-month job as a nanny in Switzerland, knowing that six months was a lie and that the nanny job was simply the plausible excuse necessary to obtain a passport, a way station on the way to school in America, and that she might never see her daughter again.
So it unnerves her that Richard’s tears have somehow found a wormhole. She clears her throat, attempting to shake it off, reorienting her focus toward the task at hand. She unbuttons and unzips his jeans, grabs the waistband of his pants and boxers at both hips, and, in one hard yank, pulls them down to his knees.
It took her longer than five minutes to get to Richard’s front stoop. She was only about a mile away when he called, but parking took several additional minutes. Some of the wet, runny shit that had dripped down his legs has already dried, his coarse black hairs poking through like weeds in droughty earth. A substantial heap is in his underwear, and the rest is stuck like cake frosting to his ass and balls. More than she bargained for.