The Broken String (3 page)

I sat down at the table and she handed me a dish towel to dry with. Then she began washing the dishes, one by one. She’d rinse each piece in hot water, then hand it to me, making sure it was securely in my hands before she let go. I tenderly dried each plate or dish or cup and stacked them so carefully on the table that I couldn’t hear one piece touch another. She smiled at me as though she knew I understood how important the plates were. I would carry the memory of her smile around with me for days. It wasn’t the same as that joyful expression she wore in the picture of the little violin girl, but it said “I love you” just the same. At least I told myself it did.

She told me stories about the plates, how she remembered family dinners with a cousin who could read the tea leaves in the bottom of one of the cups, or an uncle whose toupee fell into the gravy boat. She was in her own world, a place where the memories were happy and pure. I tried hard to get in there with her, but although I came close that evening, I lacked the key to the final door. I didn’t even know where to begin looking for it.

***

When I got home from school the following day, I ran upstairs to change into my play clothes. Daddy was working on his computer in his office and Mom’s car was gone. I planned to ride my bike, but when I ran into the backyard in my shorts and t-shirt, I heard Danny call my name from the magnolia tree by the fence. The tree was so full of big leathery green leaves that I couldn’t see him. I walked across the yard until I was beneath the branches and I looked up to see him high above me.

“Can I come up?” I asked, then reminded him, “I’m six now.” The last time I’d asked if I could climb the tree, he’d said five was too young. The truth was, neither one of us was supposed to be up there.

“Okay,” he said. Excited, I reached for one of the low branches. “Not that one,” he said. “Before you grab a branch, you have to figure out where you’ll go from there. You have to think ahead.” He tapped his temple, then pointed to a different branch, one that was level with my waist. “Start with that one,” he said.

It took me a few tries to climb onto the branch, and Danny’s laughter didn’t make it any easier. I was out of breath by the time I had a foothold. Holding onto the trunk of the tree, I stood up straight, my head knocking into the big leaves surrounding me on all sides. I looked down to see how far I’d come. The soles of my sneakers were slippery against the bark.

“Okay, now see that branch there?” Danny pointed to my left. A half-eaten strawberry Twizzler dangled from his hand. “Get to that one next.”

I grabbed the branch, ignoring the rough feel of the bark against my hands. I wasn’t going to fail at this. I was determined to reach the branch he was sitting on to show him I could do it.

I kept climbing. I was nearly to his branch when I thought I might have to give up, but he pulled me up by my arm, which felt like it was going to pop right out of my shoulder. Finally, I made it. I sat next to him on a fat branch a mile above the ground, grinning and breathing hard. Looking down was scary—how would I ever get back to the ground?—so I looked around me instead. We were in a beautiful leafy room all our own.

Danny wasn’t admiring the scenery, though. He held his Game Boy on his thigh, madly pushing the buttons as he chewed the rest of his Twizzler. He had the Game Boy’s sound turned off, and I knew that was so our parents wouldn’t realize he was up here, but he was playing with his usual zeal, and I folded my hands in my lap, growing a little bored. “What are you playing?” I asked.

“Donkey Kong.” He pushed a few buttons and shook the Game Boy, as though that might somehow help him win.

“Can I play?” He never let me play with his Game Boy, but since he was being nice to me today, I thought it was worth asking.

“You don’t know how,” he said.

“You could teach me.”

He glanced over at me, and then he stared at my mouth. “That tooth is going to fall out any minute,” he said, poking at my front tooth.

“Don’t!” I covered my mouth with my hand. I’d already lost one front tooth, and it had been traumatic. Daddy’d tied one end of a long piece of thread around it and the other end to the knob on my bedroom door, and then he slammed the door shut and my tooth went flying through the air. He said it wouldn’t hurt because the tooth was ready to come out, but it
did
hurt. I still remembered the metallic taste of blood in my mouth.

“I could knock it out with one little poke of my finger,” Danny said.

I tightened my lips over my teeth, opening them only enough to say, “
No
.”

He laughed. “All right. Don’t freak out.” He started in on his Game Boy again and I leaned back to look above us. There were more branches, easily within reach.

“Do you ever climb higher in this tree?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, without looking up. I looked at his Game Boy to see what was so interesting. There was a monkey on the screen, running and jumping around so fast he made me dizzy.

“I’m going to climb higher,” I said.

“Whatever,” he said, pushing the buttons on the Game Boy. “Don’t go too high.”

Without him to tell me which branch to step on, I felt nervous as I carefully stood up. There were a few branches in front of me, laid out almost like a set of stairs. I climbed up one and then another, and when I looked down I was staring right at the top of Danny’s white-blond head. “Look where I am!” I said.

He leaned back to look up at me. I let go of the branch I’d been clutching to hold my arms out at my sides, like a circus performer, a proud grin on my face.

“You’re too high,” he said. “You better come—”

The sole of my sneaker suddenly slipped from the branch. It happened so quickly, I had no time to grab onto anything to stop my fall. Bark scraped my forearms as I fell, and my mouth bashed into a branch. I screamed. I knew how high I was. I knew I was going to land in a crumpled heap on the ground. I could already picture it.

But Danny caught me. His arms clasped me so tightly that the breath blew out of me. I was sobbing, more from fright than from the pain of my scraped arms and the tooth that, while wobbling around in my mouth, was still somehow attached to my gums. My feet hung freely in the air as they scrabbled to find a branch, but at least I was no longer falling.

“Don’t cry,” Danny said into my ear. “You’re safe now.” He was behind me, holding me suspended in the air. I smelled the Twizzler on his breath and felt the pressure of his arms wrapped around my rib cage like a vise. “You’re safe,” he said again. “Look at that branch. It’s right behind you. Just step back a little. That’s it.” My feet found the branch. I held onto him tightly while I tried to get my footing, only then aware that it was not only my body that was shaking. I felt the tremor running through him and knew I’d scared him as much as I’d scared myself.

He moved my hands to the trunk of the tree. “Hold on here,” he said, letting go of me only when he knew my shivering hands were wrapped around the trunk. On the ground far below us, I saw his Game Boy and I wondered how many branches it had crashed into as it fell.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, looking at my arms. “We need to go down.”

Now that the worst of the fear had subsided, I felt the pain in my arms and my lips as we made our careful way out of the tree. I was crying again by the time we reached the ground. Danny picked up his Game Boy and tried to turn it on, but the screen stayed dark.

“It’s hosed,” he said, tossing it back on the ground like he didn’t care all that much, and he took my hand and walked with me into the house. “We have to sneak upstairs to the bathroom where that spray stuff is for your arms.” I tiptoed up the stairs behind him. We could hear my father tapping on his keyboard in his office, but we ducked into the bathroom without him saying a word to us. “He probably has his earphones on,” Danny said. Daddy liked to listen to music while he worked on the computer.

In the bathroom, Danny told me to sit on the edge of the tub. I’d finally stopped crying and now I was in awe of my ten-year-old brother, who suddenly seemed very grown up. He told me to hold my arms out in front of me, and I did. They looked skinny and pale and the skin was puckered up over the scrapes.

“We need to rinse your arms off, but I think this is the only bad cut.” He pointed to my right arm, where two little lines of blood had cropped up. He had me hold my arms under the faucet while he ran cool water over them. He dried my hands, then suddenly said, “Look at me.” He dabbed my sore lip with a washcloth. “Open your mouth,” he said, and when I did, he pulled my tooth out so fast I didn’t even realize what he was doing. I yelped, then giggled at how sneaky he’d been. He smiled and set the tooth on the back of the sink. “They’re going to see this,” he said, pointing to my arm. “It’s too hot for you to wear long sleeves every day. Plus your mouth is all … dinged up. We have to think of a way you might have done this to yourself,” he said. “We can’t say you were in the tree.”

“On my bike?” I suggested.

“You’d have to be pretty stupid to fall off a bike with training wheels,” he said. “How about the steps that go up to the porch? You caught your toe on one of them and fell. Scraped yourself all up.”

“Okay,” I said. I thought of his Game Boy, lying dead in the dusty earth beneath the tree. “I’m sorry about your Game Boy,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s just a thing,” he said.

He sprayed the antiseptic on my cut arm, then looked in the direction of Daddy’s office like he could see through all the walls that separated us from him. I pictured our father surrounded by his lighters and compasses and violins.

“They care more about things than people,” Danny said as he set the spray bottle on the sink and reached for a bandage. “I’m never going to be like that.”

It says something about my parents that they never noticed the scrapes or bandage on my arm. They only noticed my swollen lip because I had to tell them about my tooth so I could put it in the special “Tooth Fairy Pocket” when I placed it under my pillow. The tooth fairy must have been very busy, though. It took her three nights to show up with my dollar.

***

A week later, our school held its spring concert. The gymnasium was transformed into an auditorium filled with gray metal chairs that clanked against each other every time we fidgeted in our seats, and there was plenty of fidgeting going on, given the age of the children in the audience. A platform was set up at one end of the gym for the chorus to stand on so we would be able to see the singers better. The kindergarteners had the seats closest to the “stage,” so I could see my brother clearly when he sang with the fourth- and fifth-grade chorus. He looked serious, dressed in his white shirt and black pants, and he was very sincere about his singing. I could hear his voice rising above all the others as they sang “Wind Beneath My Wings,” and I sat quietly, my hands folded in my lap. I loved listening to the music and watching my brother sing louder than anyone else. I thought that his strength and confidence was a good thing. I had no idea it was the beginning of a defiance that would later rule him.

After the chorus finished their four songs, our school’s small orchestra took the stage. Like the singers, they all wore white shirts and black pants. They stood in a row at the front of the stage and bowed to us before noisily taking their seats. I was instantly mesmerized by the three girls carrying violins. One of them had blondish hair, but she was not the girl in my mother’s photograph. Still, I stared at her and the other two violinists as they sat down. Once they started performing, those three girls were all I could see. It wasn’t the music that interested me. To be honest, it sounded screechy and hurt my ears. But I was fascinated by the way the girls held their instruments tucked beneath their chins. I loved the delicate way they held their bows and the way the bows stuck up in the air when the girls turned the pages of their music. But as I watched them, the photograph of my mother and the little girl clouded my vision. That big smile on my mother’s face. The way she hugged the girl, with her cheek pressed against the girl’s blond hair. Would my mother love me more if I played a violin? She and Daddy made me take a couple of piano lessons, but I’d hated it and they let me stop. I wondered if they’d let me try the violin instead? Maybe I could put a smile on my mother’s face and make her want to cuddle me the way she cuddled that little girl in the picture.

When the first piece ended, the girl closest to me rested her violin on her knee and turned a peg at the end of the violin’s neck. I was fascinated. Why did she do that? Was it an on-off switch? Or maybe it controlled the violin’s volume? The girl had long glossy black hair, and she looked so self-confident as she turned the little peg and plucked one of the strings, her head close to the violin. She turned it again and I could almost feel that small black peg beneath my own fingertips.

That afternoon, Danny and I walked home from school together, as we usually did. He hated walking with me because older kids made fun of him for hanging out with a kindergartener, and especially for holding my hand. So when we saw those kids, he’d let go of my hand and act like he hardly knew me, but as soon as they were gone, he’d take my hand again, especially when we had to cross the street.

“How old do I have to be before I can play music at school?” I asked when we were about halfway home.

“You have to be in the fourth grade to be in the chorus.”

The fourth grade was so far in the future, I couldn’t even imagine it.

“What about the other thing?” I asked. “The band thing?”

“Orchestra,” he corrected me. “Band is different. You have to be in the fourth grade for the orchestra, too, but in the third grade you’ll learn how to play the recorder, which is the world’s most totally lame instrument.”

I remembered how much he hated his recorder. Our mother was always after him to practice.

“When
I
get to be in the band,” I said, “I mean, in the
orchestra,
I’m going to play the violin.”

He let go of my hand and stopped walking altogether, looking at me like he had no idea who I was. “The violin is the lamest instrument of all.” He sounded angry and I felt embarrassed that I’d even mentioned it. He started walking faster than we had been. “Play the flute or something,” he said, ignoring my hand when I reached for his. “Anything but the stupid violin!”