Find Me in the Dark (2 page)

I shut my eyes and sing.

My voice is as deep and rich as a cello. My mother loved my voice, especially the huskiness no amount of training can hide. I hated that huskiness. I knew a girl with such a rough, low voice would ever get the part of a leading lady in an opera. When I told this to my mother, she’d only smile. I can see her clearly when I sing—leaning back in her chair, her sightless eyes gazing in my general direction.

Most of my friends growing up were scared of her eyes. They said it was like looking into emptiness, or getting lost in thick fog. This scared me when I was little; I worried she was lost in a fog, especially when she’d wander around the kitchen. I was always careful to leave everything in the same place so she could find it again, but doing stuff like that got to me. The sameness of everything, the lack of decorations or pictures, and the sterilized white walls made me feel like I was stuck outside of time. Sometimes, I felt like she wasn’t even really present in the world—that she was just existing by routine. I hated myself for feeling that way.

But when I sang, and she looked in the distance past me, it was like she was seeing something more beautiful than anything that existed in this world. Like she could see the real me, or something better than the real me. She seemed to hear things in my voice that I would never be able to hear. And I realized how stupid I was, how stupid everyone was, for looking into those eyes and thinking they were hollow and never saw anything, for in them was a world few would ever find, no matter how hard they looked.

My throat tightens and my voice wavers. There’s something beautiful about it, like an accidental stroke in a painting that should be out of place but somehow makes it even more lovely. There’s a rawness to it, as if someone is opening up my chest to take a look at my heart. Like my mother is watching me again.

I pick up my bow and lose myself. I don’t think of the hours I spent perfecting my posture, the angle of my wrist, the position of my cello between my thighs. Memory and history keep me going, and allow me to lose myself in the song.

The sounds of footsteps fade. The honking sounds distant, as if it is taking place on a different plane of existence. I think of the water behind me though I can no longer hear it, always cool regardless of the weather, rustling quietly while no one listens, a pool of calm in a sea of noise.

I think of these things as someone right stops next to my cello case.

My body prickles with awareness. Sweat rolls down the nape of my neck. My throat is tight again, this time because it’s so full. My cello feels like a lover between my legs. I’ve always thought of it my most important, intimate companion—the thing that sees and knows all of me even though it can’t talk back.

Suddenly, the object feels hot and distant at the same time. My thighs ache as they spread apart, further. What is happening?

The man sits beside me. I don’t know how I know he’s a man. Perhaps there is a heaviness in his step, but no, it sounds as light as the water behind me.

My eyelids flutter.

“Don’t open your eyes.” His deep voice is rough and soft. English isn’t his first language. He sounds like he comes from Eastern Europe, maybe Russia.

I breathe quickly. My hands tremble but keep playing. I’m used to pressure. I can play like this, always, no matter what happens around me, even if my untrained voice breaks apart.

Even if my obsession appears before me.

His clothes catch on the fountain as he leans back, increasing my awareness of the roughness of the cement between my shoulders and just below my neck.

“Laura.”

It’s him
.

I’d always imagined his voice to be as sweet as his letters—the voice of a friend, someone you could say anything to. But his is as wild as Siberia and as ruthless as a glacial landscape. This voice strips me bare, like a cold wind scraping away my skin until all that’s left is bone. It’s a voice I’m afraid to say anything to, the kind that suggests violence even when it’s calm.

My fingers caress the neck of my cello. I remember how much they’d bled when I first learned to play—how many hours I spent alone in my room with my eyes closed, breathing evenly, pouring my soul into the music so that at moments like this, when I felt as if the world is falling around me and my mind wanders to places I’d rather it not go, I’d be able to find my center and continue to play.

My body feels colder. The sweater I wear scratches me through my thin shirt. My fingers are cold too. Stiff. I can barely hear the water over my pounding heart. If I open my eyes, I’ll see him. If I open my eyes…

His request for me to keep my eyes closed echoes in my ears. Even if he hadn’t said it, I doubt I would have had the strength to open them. My body is humming. Every part of me disintegrating into the vibrations of the music. I barely even hear the melody anymore. I’m dissolving into water until nothing exists but liquid passion.

I hear him move. Feel his breath on my neck. Feel his hand brush against my hair. My body screams at me to lean back and melt into whatever he offers. To lose myself completely. To let him play me.

His hand stops just before it touches my nape. “I hope you’ll come to me tomorrow tonight, Laura.”

It isn’t a question. It isn’t a request either, though on the surface it sounds like one. There are so many things I want to ask him, but I can’t bring myself to utter a single word.

His toe bumps into my cello case as he stands. He drops something in it.

“Tomorrow,” he says once more.

The word vibrates within me.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow
. More of a drum beat than a word. My body responds with something primal I don’t understand. I wonder where he wants me to go, and what will happen if I do. In his letters he is always asking, but now he’s here, commanding.

His footsteps disappear into the sea of footsteps before me.

The honking returns and I realize that, at some point, I’d started holding my bow wrong. My notes sound as screechy as they had when I first started to play.

I glance up. He’s already gone. I knew he would be. Well, it’s not like I’d recognize him if he stayed but I can only see people walking up and down the street, not paying any attention to me.

No use lingering now. It’s getting dark.

I almost drop my cello as I set it in the case. So careless. I’m never that careless, especially with my cello, but at that moment it doesn’t matter if my carelessness is strange because it’s unforgivable, because I’m so careless that I smash the gift he left me: a single white rose.

I grip my sheets and sit up in bed, panting. Hair sticks to my face and neck. My heart beats so fast it feels like it’s about to break free of my ribcage.

It takes a second for my eyes to adjust to the dark, and another second for me to realize I’m my shoe box dorm room, not a narrow, dark alley that smells like fast food and exhaust.

I shut my eyes and exhale slowly, trying to slow my heart. I hadn’t had the dream in so long. Why was it starting up again now?

I can still see my mother. I see her unseeing eyes looking back at me, cloudy as a winter sky. My mother’s eyes were expressive and elegant, like moonstone or some other gem found deep inside the earth, forged by fire and pressure and found only when one dug deep into rock. Other people’s eyes lied to me, but my mother’s never did. I often asked her what she saw when she looked at the world, and she’d just smile and rub the top of my head. She couldn’t describe what she saw because she had nothing to compare it to, but she tried. She said it sounded like a Romantic sky, so I imagined her world as the backdrop of a shipwreck, surrounded by dangerous clouds that a part of you couldn’t help but want to be swallowed by because they were so beautiful.

But that’s not what the dream was about. It was always about the boy with the gun.

I hated that so often when I remembered her, he was there. I should have seen him earlier, but it my first time in New York City—in any big city, actually—and I was too giddy to notice much of anything. I was being offered a scholarship. A scholarship! It was crazy. I told my mother it wasn’t necessary to come, but she’d insisted. She wanted to see her girl succeed.

We were lost, and both of us instinctively knew we shouldn’t be on that street. My mother gripped my arm as I searched the map. We’d gotten off on the wrong subway stop. It should have been the yellow one instead of the orange one, or the orange one instead of the red one, or something like that. I was telling her it was going to be alright, that we were almost there.

Then I looked up and saw him.

His eyes were blue. It was cruel, almost, how beautiful they were. That was what I was thinking about when he shot her.

The noise startled us both. He took a trembling step back, knocking over a trash can, his eyes never leaving mine. I saw the regret in them before I realized what he’d done. Then my mother’s grip on me went lax and she started to fall.

I tried to grab her waist to hold her up but my grip slipped. Something slick seeped through her coat. I noticed my wrists were red.

I screamed, going down with her.

I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t move her, but I needed to stop the blood. I pressed my wrists to her stomach, hoping the pressure would be enough, but it just made her bleed out faster.

Then her red hand wrapped around mine. Her lips parted.

“Don’t say anything,” I commanded.

She didn’t. Instead she looked up at the sky, as clouded over as her eyes were, and gripped my hand as if she wanted to take me to whatever place she saw above.

It felt like an eternity passed before the sirens came. I don’t know who called them. We were alone in that alley, and I was too disoriented to do anything but push my hands into my mother’s wound. Maybe the boy did. In the end it didn’t matter. She died twenty minutes away from the hospital.

I pull my knees to my chest and bury my face in them. I don’t want to think of this. I don’t want to remember. Whenever I do, I become a different person. Someone I don’t recognize. Someone who is capable of hate.

I hate his clear blue eyes. I hate that I was looking at them instead of her, that I admired them so much I didn’t even see the gun.

I hate that I failed to protect her.

I hate him so much.

My hands shake as I grip the sheets and pull them tighter around my legs. After a while I glance at my clock. 5am. I won’t be able to get back to sleep. Then again, I don’t want to at this point. I want to forget, and to forget I need to force down everything I don’t want to think about. I can’t do that when I’m sleeping; I have no discipline in my dreams.

I stand up and pace. It only takes three steps to go from one end of my room to the other, so I tire of this quickly. I want to play, but it’s too early. Still, I open my cello case and run my fingers over the strings.

For a long time I blamed my cello for killing my mother. If I hadn’t gotten that scholarship, we never would have come to the big city. I think it hurt so much because the entire reason I started playing was because of her.

When I was little, I couldn’t make cards or lumpy coil pots for my mother. Well I
could
, but since she couldn’t see what I made I saw little point in arts and crafts. But my mother loved music.

She always looked so happy when she sat and listened to a record in our little kitchen, and I wanted her to look at me that way. The only instrument we owned was her grandfather’s cello. After begging her for lessons, she found a professor at the local university who offered subsidized lessons for low-income children.

My mother loved to sit and listen to me play, so I practiced every day. The professor thought I was a child prodigy, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I was a slow learner, but there was nothing in the world I wanted more than to give my mother a gift she could appreciate, so I practiced obsessively. The cello became my life.

I stop rubbing the strings, shut my eyes and breathe deeply.

I didn’t play for six months after her death. I didn’t want to love the cello anymore. I felt like loving it was disrespectful to her. One day, I decided to play one last time. As I sank into the song, I remembered how she sat and listened to me—how nothing made her happier—and it felt like I’d found a part of her that still existed, somehow, in my song.

I vowed to never stop playing again. The cello was the instrument of my grief and my salvation.

I press my fingers into the cello’s neck. I want to play so much right now that my hand aches, but I can’t. My friends are sleeping next door.

I pace again. My three steps to the edge of my bed are short and fast. And then I remember that I hid his rose in my bedside table.

The loose handle wobbles as I pull the drawer open. In the dark, the white rose looks blue. Most of the petals are smashed or have fallen.

I touch the soft petals. My heart races.
Tomorrow
. What had he meant by that?

I close the drawer and resume pacing. I’ll find out soon.

There’s no letter waiting for me that morning. I try to tell myself it’s nothing, but it’s hard to convince myself. There’s always been a letter. Still, it’s early. He might be late today, but what does that mean? All I have to go on is his cryptic ‘tomorrow.’ Maybe he’d meant that I wouldn’t see him again after tomorrow and…

Get a grip
, I chastise. I know I’m being a neurotic mess. I know this entire situation is pure insanity. But I can’t help it. He spoke to me yesterday, and then cut off communication.

Or maybe he just decided to sleep in.

Ugh, I have to stop this! I step back inside and lean against the front door with a sigh just in time to see Cassie racing down the second half of the staircase.

She almost falls down the last two steps as she glances inside her open canvas bag to make sure everything is in place. She seems satisfied, because she bursts forward with a short nod, almost knocking me over.

“Aaaah!” Cassie yells, swerving to the right as I do the same. I grimace as her head hits my collarbone.

“Oh my god, Laura. I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you there.”