Only a few lights at the back of Randall and Burns were lit when we arrived the next morning. The clerks were refolding sweaters. The manager, the round fellow who had come after me the last time I was in the store, walked toward us with a large ring of keys in his hand. Solomon, standing outside the door with me behind him, tapped on the glass door with authority, as if he had every right to do so. I adjusted the veil over my head and wished it would stop fluttering and shaking.
“Not open yet,” the manager said to Solomon, opening the door just enough to speak through the crack. Solomon pushed his way into the store, crossed his arms over his chest, cleared his throat and placed himself in front of the manager.
“Whisper will be purchasing some new clothes and some other much-needed items. Could you tell me, perchance, if a young man named Swanny is working this morning? I would like to have a few words with him.” Solomon was as solid as a tree stump, and his arms remained tightly crossed.
“She can wait until the store opens, along with our other customers.”
“No, she can’t,” said Solomon. “This child was taken to jail, was housed overnight in a cell where ruffians and villains are kept, and she lost twenty-four hours of her life to undeserved and unwarranted incarceration. You owe her not only time but reparation.”
The manager looked at me. He pulled at his bottom lip and then spoke to a nearby worker who was straightening a display.
“Get Swanny for me, would you?”
“Go on,” Solomon said to me.
I walked past the green coats and let my hand slide across the material. I picked a long brown skirt that reminded me of my mother, and I chose a black sweater with a high neck, long sleeves, wide pockets and no holes at the elbows. I saw a package of underwear and tucked it under my arm, as well as warm black leggings, plain khaki pants and short black boots that looked about my size. As I clutched these items, the prices rolled around in my head like gnats, confusing me. I knew I didn’t have enough money, but I didn’t know how to say this to Solomon. I didn’t know how much reparation he had planned for me. Beneath the veil, I felt my cheeks burning, the flush creeping down my face into my neck.
Solomon waved to me, and I stood next to him, holding the clothing in my sweaty hands. A clerk stood with one foot on top of the other, an unbalanced stork, and chewed on the fingernail of his first finger. When he saw me approaching, his eyes widened, and he held his hands out in front of his face as though warding off the devil.
“Is this the fellow?” Solomon asked.
According to the police report, I had attacked this man with my claws and nails, had used my powers when he was most vulnerable. I examined his cheek, but I detected no bruises or scrapes. He was at least six inches taller than me, and even though he was thin, I was sure he weighed more than I did.
“Stay away,” shrieked the man, in a voice so high it sounded like the cry of a crow.
“Come on, man.” Solomon’s hands twitched as though he wanted to wrap them around Swanny’s neck. “This girl wouldn’t attack you. Tell us the truth, now. What really happened?”
“She attacked me,” Swanny said while taking a step away from me. “She threw her arms at me. She was going to kill me, if not with her hands, then with her spells and her horrid, horrid face.”
“What did you do to her?” Solomon let out a long, huffing sigh.
“I touched her shoulder.”
I don’t know what came over me, how I became so brave, but rather than remain mute, I spoke. It was as though the words were pressed out of me by a squeezing hand.
“He sneaked up and grabbed my shoulder from behind.”
“You grabbed her, did you?” Solomon said to Swanny. “Well, you probably scared her half to death.”
Swanny had taken two more steps back, and his hands still fluttered around his mouth, but the manager stood behind him.
Swan. Beautiful bird—long-necked, elegant, stylish.
“I wasn’t sneaking. I wouldn’t have surprised her.”
“And where did she bruise you? Where did she attack your face and leave you partially maimed?”
Swanny’s right hand moved up past his mouth and touched his cheek with four unsteady fingers. Solomon took two large steps toward Swanny. He peered at Swanny’s face, took his chin in his left hand and twisted Swanny’s head back and forth, trying to locate the bruises, scratches, telltale marks.
“I don’t see a thing,” he said.
Swanny glanced at the manager, but the little man shook his head and rolled his eyes. His voice was as low as Swanny’s was high. “Swanny, she’s only a child.”
“She attacked me, I tell you. She flew at me with her sharp talons and tried to scratch out my eyes.”
While he said this, I shifted the clothing to my right arm and raised my left hand, examining my fingers. Talons. My nails were chipped and broken but clean. My hands were red and raw but unremarkable. I was a beggar. I had spent a night in jail. I looked like a witch. I almost believed Swanny myself. Without intending to, I lifted my hand and touched my mouth through the veil. This face, this horrid, horrid face. I might play the violin like an angel, but this face would always be how people judged me—what they saw first.
“Didn’t you say she was looking at the coat, Swanny?” the manager asked.
He waddled over to the rack of coats, flipped through them to find a size that looked appropriate and glanced back at the now shuddering Swanny. The manager held out the coat for me.
My hand stretched out tentatively to the coat. It would be withdrawn at any moment—I understood that—so I wrapped my left arm around it and then dug through my pockets with my right hand, locating the coins Candela had thrown at me and holding them out to the manager. I knew it wasn’t enough—how could it possibly be?—but I wanted that coat as much as I wanted a home. The manager waved the money away and glanced quickly at Solomon, who still stood as though it would take an earthquake to move him. His eyebrows were low and his mustache quivered.
“Keep your money. Swanny gets a discount,” the manager said. “And he will withdraw the charges.”
Swanny sobbed but kept his hands over his face.
“Right, Swanny?” the manager said.
Swanny nodded.
I held the coat against my cheek, under my nose, all the way back to my room, my very own room with a bed that sat on a frame, a desk that contained two drawers, a closet that would soon hold my old clothing. I tried on the new coat and knew that whenever I wore it, I would think of mangoes, starlit nights, the company of friends and huts in the woods that had been my home.
The impromptu recital, organized to introduce me to Solomon’s students, was scheduled for 11:00 AM in the auditorium. A clock with glowing red numbers sat on my desk, announcing the time both day and night. At 10:45 I walked to the building where Solomon taught and looked for the auditorium. I thought the muted colors I had chosen would help me blend in, become part of my surroundings, as they would have in the forest, but here, in the ornate building decorated in white and gold, I stood out like a blemish.
Solomon sat on a stage in an enormous room where rows and rows of seats stretched forward like the cells of a wasp nest. In the rows facing him were about thirty students, scattered haphazardly in the seats. Lights hanging from the ceiling by long narrow cords illuminated the first ten rows of seats, and I slowed my pace, stopping where it was still dark. I tugged at the veil, wishing it would stretch and cover my entire body.
“Whisper,” Solomon said and motioned for me to come closer. I slipped one hand into the pocket of my green coat and held Jeremia’s violin with the other. My heart pounded in my chest, ready to burst from its cage.
Solomon leaped off the stage and took huge steps up the aisle to where I stood. He put his arm around my shoulders and guided me down the aisle, into the beams of light. All of the heads turned, and thirty pairs of eyes watched me. Some were curious, wondering, questioning, while others were narrow, suspicious, appraising.
“This is Whisper,” Solomon said. He guided me to a seat about three rows up and right on the aisle. The girl in the next seat pulled her arm off the shared armrest and turned her head away from me. “She is the recipient of the Watts Scholarship and will be under my tutelage next term.”
I concentrated on Solomon, willing everything else to fade away.
“Christmas vacation is in three weeks, and our recital is three weeks after that. When we return from the holidays, we have one week. Stay with the regimen! Now, I want Tomas, Ben, Sara and Rita on stage, front and center. Let’s show Whisper what we’re all about.”
Solomon climbed the far steps to the stage and tapped his foot while four musicians followed, carrying their instruments. They jostled each other, joked, smiled and stood in a rough circle. Solomon placed his feet shoulder-width apart and whispered a beat under his breath while waving his hand in a four-stroke pattern. The musicians readied their instruments, tapped toes to the beat and, when Solomon raised his hands, lifted their bows.
The music moved through me like water—first slow and alluring, gaining speed over the rapids, then sounding like the animals on the shore, the fish in the water, the birds in the air. The low strumming beat spoke of rocks, sand, planted trees. I felt so homesick that a shaky breath whistled from me and puffed the veil.
I wanted it to go on forever.
The musicians drew their bows across the strings one last time and I woke from my dream. If only I could wrap that music up, squeeze it inside me and carry it around, filling that hole of loneliness that wouldn’t go away. Why had I only heard the beauty of this music now, sixteen years into my life, when I could have been consuming it all along?
I clasped my hands around the violin case in my lap while Solomon brought all the other students up onstage and had them play. He was showing me something—I understood that—and I could sense that some of these musicians were better than others. When the music stopped, I watched the students whisper and ignore me. The girl beside me spoke only to the person on her other side, as though my veil was a solid barrier between us. The boy in front of me turned around with a big smile that felt false. He looked at the black plastic case that lay in my lap. “What make of violin do you have?” he asked.
Are violins made differently? Maybe I had the wrong version. I shrugged.
“I’ve got a Doreli,” he said, holding up his violin. It was beautiful, with cherry streaks through darker wood and a sheen that reflected the light from the stage.
I opened my case and looked at my violin. In comparison to his, it looked battered and worn. The girl beside me glanced into my case and then laughed. The boy looked as well, then gave me a big grin.
“Not a Stradivarius, then, is it? Someone make that for you?”
The two girls to my right laughed outright, then put their hands to their mouths. I closed the case and looked away. I wished I could ignore them—not care about their whispers, their stares, their appraising glances—but every mutter felt like it was about me and every laugh was at my expense.
My night in the jail came back to me, the night when I had vowed that I would never end up like Lizzy, that I would be proud even when others made me feel like the dirt pushed through an earthworm, but that moment of strength was hard to recapture in this place. I didn’t fit in here—I would never belong.
Every day I spent two hours with Solomon and three hours in the tutoring center. The tutor was kind, gentle and patient. When I didn’t understand how to take the tests or write an essay, she showed me how. I would be placed in remedial classes soon, she said, to prepare me for university-level instruction. Remedial, remedy, in need of a cure, like I was the disease.
In my private music lessons, Solomon repositioned my fingers on the violin. He showed me sheets with music on them, sheets that I was supposed to read but didn’t understand.
“You will learn how to read the music. Don’t get so frustrated,” he’d say when I threw the sheets of music on the floor and put my face in my hands.
“I’m too far behind. I’ll never catch up. I feel so stupid.”
“You are not behind, and I will not listen to nonsense. With your talent and natural skill, you sound like a seasoned musician who has played for half a century. Now, let’s try again.”
He’d pick up the book and I’d look at the notes, trying to make them fit with the sound. Solomon gave me a small round machine, a CD player, that I slid plastic circles into. The music that emerged from the machine was clear and perfect compared to what had come out of the radio back at the camp, and even though I was still lonely, with no one to talk to besides Solomon, the music from the machine filled the empty space. After listening to the songs on my CD player, I would play them on the violin. Aside from my tutoring, I spent most of my days in practice room 303, and there I recreated the sounds as best I could.
The cafeteria hummed with noise and movement, the students like a pack of coyotes, cackling, jostling, gorging themselves and shrieking across the room to their friends. The very first day I went to the cafeteria, I stood at the back of a line that extended out the door of the squat stone building. I waited in the cold, my hands deep in my pockets and my veil draped over my face. Rita and Max, two students from the music program, stood a few people in front of me. They whispered to the other students in their group, and all faces turned to look at me. No one waved or invited me to join the group and no one said hello, even though they were obviously staring. It felt like being chained to a doghouse in a lonely village. After that first day in the line, I waited until the cafeteria was almost closed and then I darted in, sneaking and scavenging, grabbing whatever leftovers were available, and ran out again.
I curled up on my bed, out of the wind and cold, listening to the music of heaven. Gradually, my hands lost their coating of red, rough skin. I hadn’t had an earache since my first night at the university, when I’d bought oil at the store on campus. Even though I was physically comfortable and could spend all of my time listening to and playing music, it wasn’t enough. I cried more than I’d ever cried before. And a fear that never went away lived in my chest.
I had not paid Celso. Another month had passed, and I was sure he’d come for his payment. He would take it out on me, find me and force me to the brothel, or he would punish my family. I didn’t want to think of Jeremia, but sometimes I lay in bed at night, pulled my coat around me and remembered the way his hands made my skin tingle.
On Christmas morning I walked the five blocks from the dormitory to Solomon’s house. He lived in a neighborhood with trees—gigantic trees with wide, empty arms and thick, sturdy trunks. I wanted to see them in the summer, fresh with green leaves and arching branches that would shade the street and offer an umbrella of color. Now it was so cold outside, my breath froze in misty clouds when it puffed from my nose. As I walked along the sidewalk here, where the houses were three stories tall with huge windows and supporting columns, I saw a family emerge from a car and rush to a house, where the door was thrown open wide and the people inside the house hugged and kissed the visitors. A yellow warmth glowed from the house. The windows of Solomon’s house were the same, bright and yellow like framed campfire lights. When I knocked on the door to his house, a tall thin woman with wide round glasses opened the door. She wore a white apron speckled with little blue flowers.
“You must be Whisper,” she said and stepped aside. “I’m Katherine, Solomon’s housekeeper. Shall I take your sack?”
I shook my head, hugging the brown paper bag to my chest. This was my gift, and I wouldn’t relinquish my hold until it was given. My violin thumped against my back. Shoes were lined up by the door, and I added my new boots to the row. I hung my green forest coat in the hall closet. The veil covered my face, a constant disguise.
Katherine led me down a hallway, past a dining room with a long wide table set with plates, glasses, silverware and candles, a carefully placed arrangement that would soon be cluttered with family—Solomon’s son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren were coming for the holidays. Solomon had invited me to Christmas dinner three times, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sit at a table full of beautiful strangers and try to eat. How would I keep the veil on my face while slipping food into my mouth, how would I keep the children from staring, how would I feel comfortable, as though it were truly Christmas?
We went to the kitchen, where Solomon was sitting on a stool at the counter, drinking a cup of coffee and reading a newspaper. He looked relaxed here, the large, chunky chairs sturdy enough to support his large frame.
“My virtuoso,” Solomon said. “I’m honored.”
He pushed a chair back from the counter with one of his feet, but I didn’t sit. I placed my bag on the countertop. Katherine was quiet, tense in the neck, stirring the contents of a big pot.
“What do you have in the bag?” he asked.
I edged it toward him. Solomon stood, peered into my bag and then looked at me, his eyebrows up. Katherine touched the spoon from the pot to her lips.
“Could I…” I whispered and glanced at Katherine, “use your oven? I would like to bake some bread…”
“I think we can figure out the timing. Katherine is a culinary genius.”
She opened the oven door and slid the turkey to the side, proving that there would be room for my bread pans.
I felt like a toad in Solomon’s kitchen, short and stumpy in earth-toned clothes that didn’t match the peach and purple tiles of the countertops and walls. I was here for only one reason—to make the bread and give it as my gift to those I fit with best. I remembered my mother’s recipe word for word, even the lines about the yogurt culture needing to cook for a day, but when I had purchased the recipe items at the store, I had come across something my mother had not known about—yeast, a miracle ingredient that could be added to the bread immediately, making it rise perfectly.
While the dough rose, I played chess with Solomon. I was reminded of Jeremia, who had never been a good chess player. He would furtively make his move and then bite his first knuckle. While playing the game with Solomon, my nose began to drip, my eyes filled up with tears, and my head ached. Would I ever see them again, hold Ranita, play hide-and-seek with Eva, soothe Jeremia’s energy or watch the stars with Nathanael? Their absence hurt more every day, a spreading infection like gangrene. Would Celso punish them for my absence?
“Christmas,” Solomon said. “I always miss Anna most at Christmas.”
I looked up, surprised, although I shouldn’t have been. He had children, grandchildren, a housekeeper, but no wife. Maybe that was why he’d invited me to dinner—Solomon knew the loneliness of holidays.
“How long has she been gone?” I asked.
“Six years and three months,” he said and looked down at the chess board. After contemplating for a minute, he took my knight with his bishop.
“Do you miss her less or more after six years?”
He looked at me, his eyebrows furrowed. “I don’t miss her more or less or the same. I miss her differently each year. This year I miss that I can’t talk to her about you. She would know better than I do how to support your inclusion.”
I looked down at the chessboard and moved my rook out of his knight’s reach. Maybe I didn’t want to be included.
“My uncle may come for me,” I said. “I didn’t pay him in December.”
“What will he do?” Solomon asked.
“Hurt me. Hurt my friends.”
“We’ll pay him now. How much does he want from you?”
I shook my head and looked at my feet. “It’s too late.”
“We’ll alert campus security. They’ll keep an eye out for him.”
I nodded, but that wouldn’t help. How could campus security hold back the wind?
The dough rose perfectly. Between chess games I punched it down, shaped it into loaves and let it rise once more. Katherine seemed to understand that I didn’t talk much, so she said very little, showing me where to find the materials I needed for the bread but not demanding that I explain who I was and why I knew how to do this. She was comfortable to be around, quiet and careful like me, not wanting to intrude but also not leaving me alone.
The four loaves were soft and golden when I took them from the oven. Solomon stood at the counter, picked up a loaf of bread, closed his eyes and breathed in deeply.
“Why is the smell of bread so pleasurable?” he asked.
I picked up another loaf of bread and smelled until my lungs were full of the rich, nutty aroma. “It means warmth, comfort and home.”
He nodded without opening his eyes and smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Home.”
I left one loaf with Solomon and wrapped the others in towels as gifts, but as I was preparing to leave, again refusing Solomon’s request that I stay for dinner, a chime rang through the house. Solomon glanced at Katherine, moved down the hallway and then returned, almost tiptoeing, with a woman behind him.
She was short and plump, with a soft, lined face. When she saw me, she beamed and stood with her chubby hands wrapped around the handle of her handbag, rocking back and forth on her feet. Even her hair was plump, framing her face in soft white curls. The woman looked like she had been shaped out of a lump of dough and then left to rise.
“Meet Dr. Ruiz, Whisper,” Solomon said. He placed a hand on my shoulder, directed me to the high counter and eased me into a chair.
Dr. Ruiz sat in the chair beside me and placed her handbag in her lap. She looked at my veil, and that, at least, I liked, because she didn’t glance about the room, looking everywhere but at my face. She met me eye to eye, but she sat too close, the powdery sheen on her face like a dusting of snow. Solomon slipped out of the room as though I wouldn’t notice.
“Very nice to meet you, Whisper. I am Dr. Ruiz.” She spoke with a slight lisp, a sibilant hushing sound that reminded me of snakes sticking out their tongues. “Solomon has told me about your musical skills and a bit about your unconventional life, but really I am here to see your face, to see if perhaps surgery could be of help to you. May I see your face?”
Surgery. What did I need surgery for?
She pointed to her upper lip. A white line, thin as the vein on a leaf, ran from below her nose to her lip. “I was born with a cleft palate, or an opening at the roof of my mouth, just like you.”
I almost laughed. As if her face had ever looked like mine. Her lips were solid, well defined, unsplit, while mine were gaping and unsmooth.
“Do you know what a cleft palate is?”
“No,” I said.
She opened her mouth and pointed to the roof with her first finger.
“A cleft palate is when the two shelves at the top of your mouth don’t grow together before birth but stay open. It can cause all sorts of problems, like earaches, food and drink up the nose, rattling breath. I would have had all those problems too, but my family had money, and I had three surgeries before I was one year old. And now I’ve performed operations on many patients with cleft palates, all of which have been successful.”
I watched her talk. Her mouth was perfect. Was it possible that she had looked like me at one time? That seemed absurd, dishonest.
“In your case, if you do have a cleft palate, there is a drawback. You are no longer a baby. Most of the surgeries I have performed were done on children under the age of two. In your circumstance, the surgery might be a bit trickier. But until I can really take a look at your face, I won’t know for sure.” Dr. Ruiz smiled and all the puffiness in her face pushed up. Her cheeks became big and round, her eyes were almost lost in her cheeks, and even her ears moved back.
“I’ve had this all my life,” I said. “I’ve learned to adapt.”
“Of course you have,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider how your life could improve were the surgery to be done.”
How my life would improve. Could the surgery bring my family to me? Could it make my mother live again? Would it change the fact that I’d been ostracized most of my life? Would I be accepted?
“I don’t have any money.” I slid off the stool and held my paper bag with the wrapped loaves of bread in it against my chest.
Dr. Ruiz hopped down from her stool and stood in front of me.
“My health clinic would pay for the surgery,” she said. “There would be no cost to you.”
“No.”
Dr. Ruiz’s smile narrowed and then she suddenly grinned, as though I’d told a joke she hadn’t understood at first. “Why don’t I give you my card, dear, and you can think about it?”
I made no move to take the card she placed on the countertop. The silence between us became huge, big as the wind through the trees.
“Goodbye, Whisper. I can see that I have made you uncomfortable. That was not my intent.” As she brushed past me, I smelled a red flowering camellia.
I waited where I was, rigid in front of my chair until I heard whispering in the hallway and then the front door opening and closing. My shoulders were tight, my teeth clamped together, but almost of its own accord, my hand reached out, snatched Dr. Ruiz’s card off the counter and slipped it into my sweater pocket. When I looked back at the granite, at the deep purple counter where the card had been, it was surprisingly bare. When Solomon came into the kitchen and placed his hand on my shoulder, I dipped, and his hand slipped off.
“Won’t you at least listen to her?” Solomon said.
“I would listen if I thought it were true.”
“It is true,” Solomon said. “A cleft palate can be fixed.”
“Not for people like me.”
Katherine and Solomon watched as I walked down the hallway, pulled on my coat, put on my shoes and opened the door. I didn’t wave as I left the house. They stood in the doorway, their mouths tense and their eyebrows lowered. I wanted to walk away, but I turned and made myself speak.
“Thank you for the use of your oven,” I said. “I will think about Dr. Ruiz.”
My feet moved me through space, my coat wrapped around me, warm and comforting. Surgery. Corrective surgery for my face. I could look like everyone else. Had Nathanael known? Had Belen known? Had my mother known? The card in my pocket crinkled and rubbed. According to Dr. Ruiz’s story, if my parents had given me surgery when I was a baby, I could have had a barely discernible scar like the doctor’s. All of us could have been normal. All of us—Ranita, Lizzy and Whisper.