AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I had their corpses rounded up. I’d send them back to him for a proper burial—albeit not without a warning sign carved into their chests.
I leave Oleg in the foyer and head up to the blue room. My mother would be horrified to see me sit at her piano in my current state, but she isn’t here to admonish me for it anymore.
There’s blood and grime caked underneath my fingernails. When I stroke a key, it leaves behind a smear of crimson on the ivory. That’s poignant, for reasons I can’t quite explain.
I start to play. Note by note, I feel the stress of the fight slide off my shoulders.
I know it’s a temporary distraction. The moment I stop playing, the weight will be back. The decisions I’m putting off won’t disappear. But for now, I have the keys under my fingers and the conviction of knowing I control the music. I decide where it starts and where it ends. I manipulate every lift and every fall.
Some days, this is the only certainty I have.
15
JUNE
I haven’t been able to get the piano out of my head.
I hadn’t fully registered the shock of seeing it sitting there in the room the first time I’d stormed in and seen it. I was a little preoccupied with the power struggle playing out on the sofa. But when I finally fell asleep that night, I didn’t dream of the yellow-toothed man who touched my skin like he wanted a piece of it for himself, or the splintered blue of Kolya’s eyes, or any of the other nightmare fragments that have been floating around my head for the last three months.
I dreamed of the piano.
So when I leave my room for the first time today, I have only one goal in mind: find the blue room with the grand piano.
I’m not totally clear on what I’ll do when I find it. I don’t have any real use for the thing. Adrian tried to teach me a few chords once, but my fingers were as clumsy as my feet were nimble. Our lesson had ended in a screaming match, a slap, and two days of stone-cold silence.
When we’d finally given up the fight, we’d compensated for our childishness by making love in front of the piano and never speaking of it again. It felt like a good resolution at the time. But looking back on it now, it feels like a prelude to everything that was coming.
We were never very good at communicating the important things. Adrian had an agenda for that. I was just naïve.
I retrace my path back to the room, but when I approach the patterned door, I realize that there’s music coming from inside.
Someone’s playing.
It makes my heart skip a beat. I’m unfamiliar with the music, but I can appreciate the quality of the playing. Smooth and supple andpure, somehow, if music can be pure. I approach the room and gingerly push open the door. The shock that registers feels like an ice bath when you least expect it.
It’s Kolya.
I stand at the threshold and watch. Despite how big and bulky his hands are, they move fast and confidently from one side of the keyboard to the other.
Adrian’s hands looked exactly the same. Tattooed and scarred, but so lithe and confident. He had the same posture, too—tall and proud, eyes closed, as if the rest of the world had faded away and the only thing left was himself and the music.
I used to know that feeling, though it’s been years since I really felt it fully. That’s how I felt when I danced. Like nothing else existed. Like I’d entered a world of my own creation, and in it, I was anything I wanted to be.
I want that back. God, I want that back so much, because the world I’ve been given is nothing like the one that was promised to me when I closed my eyes and danced. Adrian and The Accident took my heart and my knee, respectively, and when they did that, they took away my key to the world I used to dream of.
Without even thinking about it, I reach above my head. One arm stretched high and graceful. I point my toe, long and lean. My bad knee trembles but doesn’t give way. Not yet.
I shift my weight, let my eyes flutter closed, and rise up onto one foot as I pirouette. The spin feels good, so I do another.
The music gets louder. Keys crashing together, one chord ramming into the next and splintering apart on impact. I let loose a sigh I’ve been holding since the day Adrian died and I spin, I spin, I spin, then I—
Fall.
I go too fast. Twist too hard. Bend all wrong. My ruined knee screams in protest and I collapse to the floor, cracking my head against the marble tiling. The tears and the pain are both instant and involuntary.
I roll over with a groan and look up, directly into the lights overhead. Everything is so blue that I feel like I’m underwater. I’m falling deeper and deeper, blackness swimming in from the edges…
Then a silhouette breaks up the light.
