An unfinished score by Elise Blackwell

Author:Elise Blackwell [Elise Blackwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Roman
ISBN: 9781936071661
Published: 2010-09-15T07:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Suzanne does not remember the dream, yet waking feels like escaping someone else’s brain, as though she’s been imprisoned in another head and is running down a foreign tongue, panicked to breathe fresh air before she is closed in forever.

After showering she dresses in jeans and tee-shirt, sandals and silver hoops. Fuck Olivia. She will go as herself, wear her regular uniform into battle; she doesn’t have to pretend to be a better self, a put-together self, a composed woman. Alex loved me.

Downstairs she carries a paper cup of coffee across the lobby and down the hall to the business center, which is cramped in comparison to the otherwise extravagantly spacious hotel. In the breezeless room, she returns a short message from Adele: “I miss you, too!”

There is also an email from Daniel. “I’m in love, really in love. Don’t worry, it’s not with you this time, or even Petra. I know I just met her, but I’m going to marry her. You’re a romantic still, right? So tell me you’re happy for me.”

“You know me,” Suzanne writes back. “Sucker for a happy ending. Send me an invitation. p.s. Who the hell is she?” As she hits send she remembers seeing Daniel walking toward Linda at the party as she played with her daughter and Adele. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Maybe Daniel’s proposing to her, to the only widow Suzanne knows, other than Olivia.

The next new email is from Petra. Suzanne scrapes her teeth over her bottom lip. Olivia asked what she’d told Ben, but the person Suzanne lied to about this trip was Petra. Her story was fabrication: she needed to lay filler to finish up some old studio tracks in order to be paid for work she’d done before the founding of the Princeton Quartet. So she not only lied to Petra but asked Petra to lie by not telling Anthony, who might not approve of her taking outside work at this point in their performance cycle. Her story was plausible enough, and certainly it wouldn’t cost Petra much to withhold a small secret from Anthony. Petra agreed to do so if the lie was one of omission. “I hate saying things that aren’t true,” she said. Still Suzanne’s stomach pinches at the idea, and she knows she will have to figure out a way to seem to have more money than she did, to cut some hidden corner and offer the savings to Petra for Adele’s surgery. She lowers her head, realizing the worst of what she’s done: she has used Adele, telling Petra they needed the time alone because Adele was becoming more attached to Suzanne than to Petra. She stares at her hands on the keyboard, hands that belong to someone who would manipulate the affections of other people. Perhaps this is how it happens: You slip along and have your reasons, and one day you wake up as a bad person.

She opens Petra’s email, which holds news: Anthony has run the numbers. Princeton is against the war, or at least against war.

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