Page 34 of Ruthless Sin
The music room is at the end of the corridor on the way back from group, the door half-open every Tuesday. The piano takes up most of the room. The violin on the stand against the far wall.
Today I stop.
Don’t.
I stop.
The room is empty, the piano lid down, a chair beside the violin’s stand and a second pushed against the far wall, the window above open and the late afternoon light coming through slow and syrup-thick.
The violin is old, Russian.
The scroll is cut pre-war Russian, the varnish amber underneath, the instrument played in cold rooms a long time.
My feet take me into the room.
I sit in the chair the way Papa taught me, spine straight and hands in my lap with my ankles crossed. His posture finds me even here.
I do not touch the violin or lift it from the stand. I look at the instrument the way you look at a thing you buried and find breathing.
My left hand starts to curl.
Stop.
It does not stop. The thumb finds the shape it used to make under the neck of a different violin. The same shape this one has. The fingers fall into the spread they fell into when I was a child. When I was a teenager standing in the third stand of the second violins at the Conservatory and the conductor had not yet looked up and seen me.
The fingertips do not have calluses anymore, have not had them in years. They remember anyway.
You don’t get to be her again.
My jaw remembers the weight of it on the left side of my chin, the pressure of the chin rest, the small place under the jaw where a different violin used to fit me. The bow arm comes next. The right shoulder drops loose without being asked.
Don’t.
My hand has come off my lap, in the air halfway to the neck of the instrument. I have not asked it to do this.
I put it back and sit with my hands in my lap and do not touch and do not look away.
The light through the window has moved across the floor. The room has no clock. The light is the clock.
I sit.
Cassia comes in without knocking.
She’s in the doorway before I look up, the folder against her hip, her step quiet. She does not speak.
She crosses the room and stops behind the chair beside the stand but does not sit. The folder is under one arm and a paperback is in her other hand.
She looks at the violin when she speaks.
“The wood is older than you are. Whoever owned her before you knew what they were doing.”
My face does not move.
My shoulders adjust before I can stop them. She does not turn her head or pause. She keeps her eyes on the scroll.
She moves to the second chair and sets the paperback down on the seat.
“This was on the third shelf for a long time,” she says, still to the violin. “There’s a new translation. The English is cleaner. I have my own copy.”
