It is one of those Murphy’s Law things that if you have a group project at school, the more important it is to your grade, the more likely you are to get stuck with partners whose safest contribution is to color the map. Even that makes you nervous. The project in question was a report on the economic system of a Pacific Rim country.
Partner number one, Jason Menyard, studied the list of choices. “Let’s do Honduras,” he said. “My parents went there on vacation.”
“Honolulu. They went to Honolulu, you idiot.” Partner number two, Nicole Hower. Nickname, Whore, because if you said her last name fast, this is what it sounded like for one, and for two, because her clothes gave the impression that she wanted to share her boobs with mankind, some goodwill mission like those people who go to third world countries to spread knowledge of how to keep their drinking water clean and improve their educational systems. Jason’s eyes were already so glued to her exposed chest you would have thought a good movie was playing there. Pass the popcorn.
“How do you know?” Jason said to Nicole’s boobs.
“Your parents brought mine back a present. Macadamia nuts. You don’t even know where your own parents went. God,” she said.
“Show some respect,” Jason said. “‘R-E-S-P-E-C-T,’” he sang. “That is what you mean to me. Ooh, just a little bit.’” Jason snapped his fingers.
“Hey, he actually does a good Urethra Franklin,” Nicole said to me.
Right about this time I was working on dual theories: that Nicole’s parents were first cousins, and that Jason’s brain and a jockstrap had much in common. Basically made of holes and not holding anything too important. I was also coming to the quick realization that I’d have to go to the library after school that day, since I’d basically be doing all the work here. This meant I’d miss the chance to see Ian before his lesson. I’d been holding on to that little open feeling, preparing myself to take a step in his direction whether Dino liked it or not, and I was going to do it that day. I, for one, would let Ian decide what was good for him. This glitch in the plan filled me with the low-level annoyance that is actually rageful, crazed fury held in a straitjacket.
At the library I grabbed everything I could on Honduras and bolted out of there. Finally, I headed home. I breathed a grateful sigh of relief when I saw Rocket on the front lawn entertaining a gloriously happy Dog William. Call me a pessimist, but I started having the creeping fear that now that I had finally gotten the courage to make a move, Ian would not be there that day, so I was glad to see that I was wrong. I dropped fifty pounds’ worth of Honduras books on the table and looked in the fridge for something to quench my weight-lifting thirst. I could hear the rumblings of Dino’s voice in his office, intense, making a point.
I closed the fridge door, stepped back into the hall to eavesdrop. I would have put my ear to the door, just like they do in the movies, had it been necessary, but it wasn’t. In fact, Dino’s voice got louder and louder over Ian’s playing.
“Bam, bam, bam. You need to hit it.” I could hear something being smacked against a table, a book maybe. Ian continued to play. “Again,” Dino barked.
Ian stopped, started again. I don’t know what he was playing, something frenzied and fast.
“Bam, bam, bam,” Dino said again. The book cracked against the table three more times. The sound made me flinch. “Don’t you hear me?”
“I’m sorry,” Ian said.
“Don’t stop. Pick it up and do it again. It is forceful. Fast. One-two-three. Not one. Two. Three. You have no command.”
“I’m sorry,” Ian said again.
“What is sorry? Sorry has nothing to do with anything. I don’t give a fuck about sorry. I give a fuck about you doing it right. What is the matter with you?”
“I don’t know,” Ian said.
Something crawled up along my backbone. Shame. I’m not sure why—shame at Dino’s behavior, shame for Ian. I felt sick.
“I thought you were supposed to be such a talent.”
“I’m sorry,” Ian said again.
“Do it again. Show me that what everyone says about you is true, because it is not what I see.”
I held my breath. Prayed that my feet would stay where they were and not burst in to interrupt this cruelty. The prayers were unnecessary, though, if I were telling the truth. I knew I couldn’t go in there. It was nowhere I belonged, and something I didn’t understand.
“Maybe it’s not true,” Ian said. “Maybe I wasn’t born with some gift.”
“Nobody is born with that gift. It’s not about gift. It’s about need. A deep, ugly seed of need,” Dino said. “What is your need, Ian? In what need does greatness lie?”
“I don’t have a need. I play because I choose to.”
Dino laughed. Mocking. “What bullshit.”
“And when I choose not to, I’ll stop.”
“You know that’s a lie. Choice has nothing to do with it. There is no choice.”
“Maybe not for you.”
“Need. Ugly need. You’re no different.”
“How do you know?”
“You have no choice. You must save your mama, Ian. You must save her from despair. That is your need. You are the savior.” What the hell was he talking about?
“You don’t know anything about it,” Ian said. His voice was angry, full of tears.
“I know all about it. Play to save your mama, boy.”
“No.”
“Play! Bam, bam, bam. Play it.”
Silence.
“You think I’m hateful, don’t you? You think I’m a bastard. But you also think I’m right. I know you.”
“You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you. Play, God damn it. The need will speak.”
More silence.
“Stupid boy.”
And then, the beginning notes of the song. So tender, you pictured them floating in midair and then breaking in two. The music rose, gathered intensity. I recognized the part they had been practicing. It came, forceful. Building. Bam, bam, bam. I heard it; I knew nothing about this shit, but I heard it. One, two, three—driving into me, hard, so hard.
He stopped then, and the silence was abrupt. The kind of sudden, sharp silence that comes after a slap. And then Dino began to applaud. “Bravo!” he said. “Bravo, boy!”
I stood there, stunned. My heart hurt. My soul and insides felt wrung out, perched on the desire to sob. Oh, how I hated Dino right then. The office door opened and Ian ran from it. His coat was over his arm, and he shoved past me. He slammed out the front door, hard enough to rattle the windows.
Dino came out from the office. He looked at the shut door, shook his head.
“Bastard isn’t the half of it,” I said to him.
“You’re a child,” he said to me. “Silly child.”
Erik Satie, contemporary composer, wouldn’t wash with soap, and became so suspiciously obsessed with umbrellas (yep, I said umbrellas) that he had more than two hundred of them when he died. Tchaikovsky, of Nutcracker fame, killed himself with arsenic, and Schumann spent the last years of his life in an asylum. Beethoven was a Peeping Tom. When he was arrested, it is said that he yelled, “You can’t arrest me, for I am the immortal Beethoven!” Police later found that he had spread feces over a wall of his house. Crappy taste in decorating, if you ask me.
And since what happened next happened on Thanksgiving, let me tell you a few food-related wackygenius stories. Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an anorexic, due to her brother’s death and her father’s inability to let his children leave the nest (he disinherited any of them who dared to marry). Lord Byron was a bulimic, dieting and exercising down to the skeletal, and believed that if you ate a cow, you’d endanger the appetite of all cows. Charlotte Brontë basically threw up to death while she was pregnant because she was too whacked out to handle it. Vincent van Gogh ate his own paints. Yum.
Let’s also not forget that more people commit violent crimes on Thanksgiving than on any other day of the year. This is not just by people forced to eat Brussels sprouts, which would make the statistic understandable. Thanksgiving can be torture, and I don’t just mean the times when some well-intentioned person suggests, “Let’s all say something we’re thankful for,” and you want to drop through a hole in the floor. I mean that for some people life is already stressful enough without multiplying human relationships by five or ten or by however many napkin rings you happen to have.
Every year for the past three, my mother and Dino hosted a Thanksgiving party for certain members of the Seattle Symphony board of trustees, high-end givers, major players in the music arena, and Dino’s associates—his manager and agents and anyone from his recording companies and publishers who wanted to travel in for the occasion. I believe that he chose Thanksgiving in the hopes that most people would be with their own families—he’d be able to extend an invitation and get social credit for that, without having to have total follow-through. A good plan, really, but it never ended up that way. A gazillion people answered the formal invitations, mailing back tiny envelopes of RSVP.
Mom had the event catered, thank God. She can get flustered when the phone rings and she’s making a grilled cheese sandwich. This year it seemed like there were more people than ever in our kitchen, more trays of food, more waiters carrying hors d’oeuvres and canapés. The house looked beautiful and different than our regular house with the cereal box left out on the counter. You wouldn’t believe how good it looked. We’re not talking decorations of turkeys with accordion-paper stomachs like we used to have when Mom and Dad were married and had Nannie and Aunt Nancy and Uncle Greg over. No, we’re talking cinnamon-smelling candles in hurricane glass on every surface, and evergreen boughs, and cranberry-colored vases of white roses. Linen napkins, and china with boughs of fruit around the edges. We’re talking a turkey the size of a brown bear, and the dining room draped with gauzy curtains and burgundy ribbons. There was enough food to feed a small town, all of it steaming and glossy and colorful. Mom wore velvet and I wore my beaded vintage dress, and Dino’s dark suit and restrained curls made him look like the man on the Paris Diaries cover, whose sex life was the talk of the town when he was younger.
I was glad my dad couldn’t see us now. This was the good news, the everything-is-working-out-beautifully that you want to hide from the other parent. Their worst nightmare of their former spouse having a better life after all, as they passed the yams back at home. We all smelled soapy and perfumed, and the doorbell kept ringing and ringing, and the house got so stuffed, people went outside to cool off. You wondered if all of these people didn’t have family to be with, or if the chance to be with a world-famous composer and violinist was enough to make them ditch their own grannies.
Andrew Wilkowski, Dino’s new agent, had apparently solved this conflict by bringing the whole gang along. He had brought his quiet wife, thin as a file folder, and his twin seven-year-old boys, who wore ties and ran around like crazed, midget businessmen, popping olives and caviar. I don’t know why they liked the stuff—fish eggs as a delicacy was always a hard one to understand—but I swear they ate half of the mountain of it, in spite of the fact that their mother told them repeatedly to stop. I caught her grasping each of their arms fiercely and hissing in their ears, showing her less passive side. Andrew Wilkowski also brought his aging parents, who looked at the thin wife and caviar-sucking children as if they were characters in a horror flick. Meanwhile, Andrew himself was glued to Dino, filling his plate and wineglass and doing the most shameless ass kissing I’d seen since Katie Simpson brought our sixth-grade teacher a dozen roses and a box of chocolates on her birthday.
I played good daughter at the party, and tried not to miss the old days of Dad’s overcooked turkey and Mom’s pies and watching the Macy’s parade on television. I talked to lots of old people with white hair who probably each had a gazillion dollars, ate way too many little chocolate tarts, and tried to figure out if there was something going on in the romance department between these two waiters. I saw that Dino had broken free from Andrew, and for a moment I was sincerely happy for him that he managed to cut loose from the weasely brownnoser.
But then I noticed that Dino was striding with a sense of purpose to the dining room windows. He peeled back the curtains, cupped his hand to the glass, and looked out. There was something about the way he walked—too much purpose, obsession, fury—that I recognized from that night I saw him on the lawn when he cut the cable. Oh, God. Not now. No.
I immediately scanned the room and looked for Mom. Instead of chatting amiably with the orchestra creative director or with one of the donors, I saw that Andrew Wilkowski had taken her elbow and was heading out of the room, as if to talk to her in private. Great. Terrific. Something was definitely wrong.
Dino apparently had not found what he was looking for. He moved toward the hallway and the front door. I thought I’d better follow him, though what the hell I’d do if he freaked out while I was with him I hadn’t quite figured out yet. Dino opened the door and I stepped out after him. I did not want to step out after him. I wanted to go someplace else, where I was completely alone and where no one could find me. I wanted to tuck my quilt around my head, disappear. I did not want right here and right now.
Outside, the night was amazingly quiet, with the noise of the party behind us, inside the house. It was November cold, and the air was dewy and full of rain not yet fallen. Thick, wet clouds filled the sky. A couple of people were standing and talking by the long line of parked cars. I heard a trunk slam, and a man and a woman with instrument cases walked back up the street to our house. Dino looked up and down the street, and headed toward the box hedge at the perimeter of the yard.
“Dino?” I said.
“William,” he called. “Wil-yum.”
A bit of hope. “Did we lose the dog?” I asked.
“No, not the dog. William Tiero, the leach. I know you’re here.”
Shit, I thought. Oh, shit! I wanted to call for Mom, to find her, but I didn’t think I should leave him. I didn’t know what to do. I just had no idea.
Dino crouched over, looked under the hedge. I was glad that the people with the instrument cases had gone inside. I decided to be calm. If I used a really calm voice, then he’d be calm, and I could go and find Mom.
“You’re getting your pants all wet,” I said. “Let’s go in.”
“I knew he couldn’t stay away.”
“William Tiero is not here, Dino,” I said. My voice sounded high, like it might break. I was fighting a weird sense of unreality. I didn’t even feel like me, talking calmly to this man I lived with, who was looking in the hedge for someone who wasn’t there. I felt like I had gone into someplace past fear. Someplace way farther than that, where you cut off from what’s happening in order to function. I was watching this poor girl with this crouched-over man who was losing it. I looked down and saw my own hands, and they seemed familiar but not.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. That prick will never let me out of his life.”
“No one’s in the hedge, Dino,” I said.
Dino came out of the hedge, hair messed, bits of leaves on the arms of his jacket. I don’t know how to describe his eyes except to say that they were not unfocused or bleary like someone who’s been drinking. In fact, they were the opposite—hyper focused. He stood still, listening. It was as if his senses were broken open—his hearing more acute, his gaze taking in things no one else could see.
“Why don’t we go inside now,” I said.
“He’s not in the hedge. I’ll check the back. You check the cars,” he said.
“Please, Dino.” I wasn’t doing well with calm. My voice was pleading and anxious. I was climbing the slope of panic right alongside of him. Where was my mother? Where was someone who knew what to do?
“Check the cars before he drives off. He called and hung up just now. He can’t stand it, that this is happening without him.”
“William Tiero isn’t here, Dino.” Okay, the calm was gone completely. I don’t want to do this! I can’t! I felt like crying.
“Of course he’s here. I know he’s here.” He pulled his cell phone from his jacket pocket, showed me the display. It was true that someone had called. The ID read UNIDENTIFIED CALLER. The letters glowed in the gathering darkness. The two people who were talking by the car were carrying large instruments into the house now, also. A bass and a cello, by the looks of it.
“Is everything all right?” one man asked.
I wanted to cry out. Help me, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. “Fine,” I said. “The dog is missing.”
“Pets,” the man said. He hauled his instrument through the door, a loud gust of party sounds escaping as he went through.
“Dino,” I said. “Unidentified caller. That could be anyone. William Tiero is not out here in the bushes. Or anywhere.” Please, I begged him with my voice. But you can’t reason with insanity, or plead with it. It’s the frightening tyrant, the boss, the kidnapper.
“He did this last year. I smelled his cologne. I saw him looking in the window. I’m going to catch the dirty little bastard. I’m going to check the back.”
I changed my tactics. “Let me check the back. I’ll make sure I find the dirty little bastard,” I said. “You go inside.”
“He couldn’t let me free. Obsessed.”
“Come on.”
“He’d rather have me dead than free of him.”
I took Dino’s arm. His unreason made him seem capable of anything, and I didn’t even want to touch him. But I did—I pointed him toward the house. I tried to keep from letting the tears come, from letting out my own desperation. I looked around for Mom. Inside, people were gathering in the living room. The quartet of musicians had set up an impromptu concert, began to tune for the crowd. I wondered if they were expecting Dino to join them. Some woman was ushering everyone out of the dining room for the concert—they were squeezing out of the doorway and packing into the living room. Dino stalked into the dining room, empty of people now. He looked back out through the drapes again.
“I see movement,” he said. “Turn off the lights so that I can see.”
“Dino, no. He’s not there.” I felt the tears working away at my throat. Where the hell was Mom?
“Turn out the lights!”
His voice was loud, and I flinched. I knew that my job right then was to hide the mess, make sure none of these people noticed anything. To keep the secret. So I went to the switch and turned off the lights to keep him quiet. Thankfully, everyone was either jammed in the other room or overflowing out into the hall, happy to be in an important house of an important man, spilling drinks and talking and eating tiny, fancy desserts on glass plates.
Only the candles flickered in the room. I could see their flames reflected in the glass that Dino was peering through. “Shh,” he said, even though I wasn’t saying anything. “Come here.”
I went. I hated standing beside him. His breath was fogging up the glass. His coat was hanging dangerously over the candles on the table under the window.
“Be careful, Dino,” I said. I watched his sleeve dangle by the flame. “Jesus.”
“Holy shit, look!” Dino said.
I looked outside, where he was pointing. “Oh, God,” I breathed.
He was right, there was a figure outside, a dark figure in a big coat.
I jumped my ship of sanity, got into Dino’s boat, because he was right. And if Dino was right about this, maybe William Tiero really did have evil plans for us. Maybe Dino really was in danger. The quartet began playing in the other room. All four instruments, a sudden, thunderous sound of frantic motion.
“Get the gun,” Dino hissed.
“Don’t be crazy,” I said, which is a rather stupid thing to say to a crazy person, but my own thoughts were out of control. My heart was thumping like mad, my hands shaking. A man in the bushes … “We don’t have a gun.”
“I said, get the gun!”
Right then, the figure came close to the glass, toward us. I let out a little scream at the same moment that I realized it was my mother standing before us, Andrew Wilkowski’s navy wool coat draped over her shoulders. It was also at that same moment that Dino’s elbow knocked over the glass hurricane candle and the flame began to lick up the fabric of the curtain.
Here is what I saw in my mind. The flame, gathering speed up the curtain, bursting into a ball of fire. Catching onto the other draperies, moving with the fury of some mythological god to the adjoining room full of people. I heard screams in my mind, the panic of sequined and silked guests, someone tripping on a velvety hem. Smoke suddenly everywhere, one doorway, glass breaking. Flames spinning up the stairwell, surprising a couple who were upstairs, looking for their coats. Fire trucks with twirling, dizzying lights on the dark street, and charred remnants of furniture and bodies, people crying on the front lawn, the house consumed and then disappearing under gusts of water from the hoses.
I watched as already the flame was beginning to lick its way up the curtain. I could see my mother through the glass, her mouth frozen in an O.
I grabbed the curtain with my hands. My bare hands, I just grabbed it and crumpled it up. It was the only thing I could think to do. No, let me say that again. I did not think at all, I just acted. I gathered up the fabric in a ball and extinguished the flame. The quartet kept playing in the other room.
Before I knew it, my mother was beside me. She was holding my hands in hers. There was ice in a towel. I didn’t know what happened to Dino, but I guess Andrew Wilkowski had brought him to his room and calmed him down, telling guests he wasn’t feeling well, implying he had had too much to drink, which was a sin forgiven with an amused smile. I couldn’t stop shaking. My body just shook and trembled until I threw up. There was a call to a doctor, but my hands were okay. I was okay finally, and I stopped shaking after I was wrapped tightly in my blanket. The only thing that remained of the night was a small scar, which I still have. It sits in the curve between my thumb and forefinger, the place that looks like a small boat if you hold your hand up in the air.
I will never forget that night. The mark reminds me what fear can do to you, how fear can distort what is real to the point that the damage is permanent.
It was the same shape, come to think of it, as the scar on Dino’s neck.