Virtuosity (11 page)

Instead, I analyzed every look and every word that led up to it. As evidence. He was a liar. If I told myself that, it
was easy to see how everything that had happened could be woven into that story. That meant Jeremy was in his hotel bed right now, smiling, confident, relieved I was as gullible as he’d hoped, and plotting his next move. I hated him, more than I’d ever hated anyone or anything.

But what if Diana
was
wrong? Didn’t I deserve to have this one normal thing?

I slipped out of my bed and crossed the hall to my studio. My case was open, my chin rest still attached from my last practice session. I picked up my violin and walked over to the window. A light rain had begun, bathing the window in a film of water, and the sky had turned from black to the darkest navy. Morning was coming. How had Jeremy described performing? Flying. Easy for him to say. Maybe he flew; I slogged. Tomorrow, or tonight now, I’d be slogging through lukewarm water on that same stage.

Unless …

The idea made the back of my neck tingle and my stomach drop. What would happen if I didn’t take Inderal?

But you need it!
my mind screamed. I did need it. Tokyo. Inderal saved me from that. But I also needed to change something and I was running out of time. Maybe what I needed was to jump, to freefall.

I put my violin up and played the opening phrase of the sweetest melody I could think of. It was Ralph Vaughan Williams’
The Lark Ascending
. Smooth and clean,
the melody glided upward, lifting me with it. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the words to the poem that inspired the music. I couldn’t. Yuri had made me memorize them, but that was years ago. I did remember the story, though. It was about a bird who flew up and up and up toward heaven until she was too high to be seen.

Chapter 10

I
have no scars. Not a one. Heidi says the ugly red mark on my neck and the calluses on my fingertips don’t count because they’d go away after a few months if I were to stop playing. She’s right. It seems like a deficiency though, like evidence of living life in a bubble.

Clark has several, the biggest being an eight-inch purple rope down the center of his knee from ACL surgery. The ski injury has a story behind it that involved a poorly placed mogul, a tree, and a spooked deer. I’ve heard it several dozen times, but never the same way twice.

My favorite of Clark’s scars is the iridescent pink patch that wraps around the stub of his right pinky. He lost two
digits at age fourteen to his uncle’s table saw, but that wasn’t what he told me when I was little. Back then he said he’d accidentally bitten it off in a hot dog eating contest. That really freaked me out. To this day, I’m a slow eater with finger foods.

Diana has just the one, the mother-of-pearl dash over her voicebox. I think it’s kind of pretty, like a brushstroke. But she hates it. To her it’s a sinister, worm-like reminder of a scalpel digging around in her throat for polyps. As if her scratchy voice isn’t reminder enough.

Heidi has matching scars—glossy, pink patches over each elbow—from being chased by a dog on roller skates. She was the one on roller skates. Not the dog.

“I don’t know why you are so obsessed with them,” she said, as I examined the permanently damaged skin on her elbows, not for the first time.

It’s simple though. I like the scars because I like the stories. Bravery, stupidity, pain—none of them come free.

“Is it weird that I don’t have
any
scars?” I asked Diana once over a bowl of Raisin Bran.

“No, it’s not weird. You don’t have scars because you’re graceful and spatially aware.” She took a sip of coffee and added, “Not to mention young and lucky.”

“But not a single one?”

Clark looked up from his newspaper. “It’s because you’re a slow eater,” he said, lifting his four-and-a-halffingered
right hand and wiggling the stump. “Get over here and pinky swear to never enter a hot dog eating contest.”

I laughed. Diana rolled her eyes. Clark shrugged and grinned, mission accomplished.

Operation Inderal detox was worse than I thought it would be.

I threw up twice. The first time was in the bathroom of my dressing room. Luckily, my hair was already up and hairsprayed into place so it didn’t get splattered. Also luckily, Diana wasn’t there to see it. If she had been, she might have guessed why I was puking and made me take a pill. I’d intentionally left my pillbox at home in case I chickened out, but I knew she kept an emergency stash in her purse.

I hadn’t seen her all day. She’d left me to marinate in my shame, or whatever it was I was supposed to be feeling, while she ran errands. That was fine. I didn’t want to talk to her either.

Clark dropped me off at Symphony Center two hours early, and drove off with his signature double-honk for good luck. He’d be in the audience later. Probably checking the score of the White Sox game on his phone every five minutes, but he’d be there.

And so would the Glenns. Apparently my grandparents had called last night and announced that they
were in Chicago and would be attending the concert.

I made my way to the dressing room, the same one Jeremy had used, and tried to ignore the trembling in my hand as I reached for the knob. My fingers slid off twice before I managed to grip and twist. This was usually the peaceful part, arriving before the other musicians, feeling the quiet of the auditorium before a million melodic fragments clouded the air. My heart was already pumping too fast, aching behind my rib cage.

I just had to remind myself of what Dr. Wright had said: Inderal was not
physically
addictive. But if that was true, then this feeling that my body was about to explode or collapse or both was all in my head. If it was true, this pain in my gut was just neurosis.

Dr. Wright was full of crap.

Diana was supposed to meet me backstage with my dress an hour before call time.

My resolve was weakening. By the time she arrived, I was afraid I’d be begging her for Inderal.

Picking up my dress from Mei-Ling’s, Diana’s seam-stress in Chinatown, was somewhere on her to-do list between buying pantyhose and going to Northwestern to drop off my music for the judges. (Ten days to go—original scores for all the Guarneri semifinalists were due.)

I’d performed in the dress only once before, but that
was over a year ago. It had needed letting out in the bust, a discovery we’d made thanks to Diana’s fixation with seeing me in performing dresses three weeks early, just in case lipstick stains had to be removed or hems re-stitched. Both she and Heidi had insisted it was too tight, which Heidi reinforced by referring to me as Dolly Parton for several days. So we’d all gone to Mei-Ling’s for a fitting. Heidi had come along so we could work on physics in the car, but spent most of the time writing haikus on the edges of my notebook about hating General Electric (home of her most recently botched job interview), while Diana talked on the phone with her travel agent about the price of flights to Sydney in August. That was the last time I’d seen the dress. I’d brought a spare just in case, but I liked the other one better. It was white, and white seemed like the right color for a fresh start.

My warm-up inched by. I practiced, I did my hair, I practiced, I started to feel shaky, I started to feel nauseous, I did my makeup, I tried to think about happy things like the beach and chocolate ice cream, I ended up wondering if Jeremy would be in the audience, I threw up, I practiced, I paced, I did this windmill thing with my arms to try to force the blood to my fingertips, and then I practiced a little more. Not having Diana there at least gave me something concrete to stress about. Getting nervous about getting nervous was just too abstract to get a grip on, but I
could freak out about not having my dress arrive and that felt much better.

What am I doing?
The thought seized my brain every few minutes, and I’d try to smother the panic with some relaxation exercises Dr. Wright had suggested at my follow-up appointment: deep breaths, calm thoughts, deep breaths, calm thoughts, deep breaths, calm thoughts. Dr. Wright really was full of crap.

At fifteen minutes to go, I started pacing faster, this time in a wide loop around the dressing room: between the coffee table and the sofa, over the ottoman, around the piano, down the mirrored wall, repeat. My legs shook under me, but the repetition was oddly numbing. An image of the polar bears in the Lincoln Park Zoo came to my mind, lumbering pitifully around their cages in the same circuit over and over. Maybe they had anxiety issues too.

Where was she? Diana was never late, so being late to a
performance
was completely unthinkable. My stomach still hurt from the puking. Would she be able to tell? I looked in the mirror. Scary. My skin was an eerie greenish-white, my stage makeup even more garish than usual. Glossy red lipstick, green eye shadow over bloodshot eyes—I looked like a circus clown with the stomach flu. I’d taken off my shirt before hair and makeup, and was wearing just jeans and a bra, adding another layer of
weird to the image in the mirror. How could Jeremy kiss that face?

I opened the closet and took out the dress bag holding my backup, a navy blue organza dress with a sweetheart neckline. I was deciding whether I should put it on or go back to the bathroom to throw up again, when the door swung open.

“You wouldn’t believe traffic,” Diana gasped, twirling around to hang the dress bag on the hook behind the door and tossing a Sak’s Fifth Avenue bag on the sofa in one breathless movement. “I almost forgot the pantyhose,” she added and pulled a package of sheer control-tops out of her purse.

I grabbed the garment bag and unzipped it, in too much of a hurry to hide my shaking hands. It was like I remembered, simple but dramatic, the color of milk, strapless, with a wide blood-red sash tied around the waist. It was the kind of dress that drew eyes in and held them. I took off my jeans, put on the pantyhose, and pulled on the dress. It fit perfectly.

I looked in the mirror again. The image was less scary. The dress was stunning. My lips and the sash looked like they’d been dipped in the same dye, and the sickly shade of my skin was definitely less noticeable.

Over my shoulder, Diana’s reflection frowned at me. I turned away.

My fingers. I had to stop the shaking. I picked up my violin to do one last round of shifting drills. They were ugly and whiny (according to Clark, the drills sound exactly like the noise a cat makes when you swing it around by the tail), but they helped get the blood pumping to my fingers.

Diana changed into her own outfit, a long tight mauve dress, while pretending not to watch me. I kept up the cat wrangling and pretended not to notice her pretending not to watch me.

A knock at the door startled us both. “Five minutes,” a muffled male voice called from the hallway.

My stomach lurched, and my knees buckled. I would have fallen but my elbow caught the edge of the piano and I leaned into the instrument to steady myself.

“Carmen!” Diana cried. Was her voice always so shrill? “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“Did you forget to eat?”

“Um …” That was a pretty good excuse, actually. “Yeah.”

She commenced rifling through her purse, and nattering about the physical effects of low blood sugar and the importance of planning ahead. By the time her rant had come full circle, she’d unearthed a Luna bar, three Certs, and a package of black licorice. She made me eat it all.

“It’s time,” she said.

I choked down the last piece of licorice and washed my hands in the sink, letting the scalding water pour over my skin. Maybe that would heat them up. But by the time I’d twisted the faucet off and dried my hands, my fingers were cold again.

Why was I doing this? Why hadn’t I just taken the Inderal like I was supposed to? But it didn’t matter now. It was too late.

Diana followed me down the corridor that led to the stage right curtain. A handful of people stood waiting—the conductor, Maestro Chang, giving directions to the stage manager; a new technician I didn’t recognize; a stage hand with two metal music stands tucked under each arm. I stood a little apart from the cluster, took a shaky breath, and closed my eyes.

I tried to focus, but the music in my head had never been quite so dizzying. Rolling waves of melodic passages overlapped, Tchaikovsky’s beautiful themes all mashing together unnaturally. I felt like I was standing on a rocking boat and staring into a warped mirror at the same time. It was a discordant nightmare.

Suddenly, my mouth felt wet and I knew. I shoved my violin into Diana’s hands and gave my surroundings a panicky search for something to throw up into. There was nothing. I was about to lose it when I saw the trash
can and rushed over, reaching it just in time.
Why couldn’t I be doing this alone?
I thought as I retched into the can. Even in the middle of those slow-motion spasms, I was aware of at least five pairs of eyes on me, of Diana’s hand resting on my back, of the dissonant jumble of notes still swirling in my head, of the fact that I still had to perform. One Luna bar, three Certs, a package of black licorice. Of course, she
had
to make me eat them all. I was done. My jaw ached.

“Feel better?” Diana asked. Her voice was small and hard like a pebble.

“No.” I didn’t. I felt weak.

“I wonder why.”

She knew.

I forced myself to look at her, still gripping the trash can, bracing for her fury. But she didn’t look mad. Her mouth was slightly open, her eyes watery, her brows arched like she was in pain. She looked wounded, like I’d kicked her in the stomach.

“Why?” Her voice quivered as she spoke. “Why would you do this
now
?”

She was about to cry. I stared at her, but I didn’t feel anything. At first. Then the anger came, falling on me like a flood of fire.
She thinks I’m punishing her
.

“It’s not about you,” I hissed, and pulled my violin out of her hands. The venom made my voice sound like some-one
else’s. I’d never talked to her like that before. “Why does it always have to be about you?”