“That’s nice,” he says, offering up his best patronizing smile. “I’ll let you know if I lose my fucking mind.”
The door swings open. For a moment, his father’s face freezes. Then it folds away as he steps back outside, hiding a pain Sebastian did not know he could cause.
Shostakovich in E flat, frustration taking the form of a major key, impossible fingerings, sharp and grotesque. This is music for straightening your mind out, anger finding safe staccato expression. With her bow, Viola is screaming feeling without consequence.
Out of her window, Viola can see her brother stripping leaves off thetrees bordering the marshes behind the yard.Go, just go, have fun, she had said to her father.I’ll take care of him.
She holsters her bow and steps into the hallway to begin the painstaking process of untaping her brother’s “art.” Her mother, Orson Grey. Her low-cut top, her enormous hair. The disturbing swell of her breasts. The look of her: out of control. The look of him: afraid.
It’s stupid, she tells herself.It’s from some trashy magazine. He isn’t like that. Whatever her mother may have been, Orson is no sleaze.
What she feels for Orson Grey isn’t love. You can’t be in love with someone you don’t know. She admires him, that’s all. She has read the article about how close he was with his grandmother. She has seen the photos of him with the baby bunny. In her bedside table, her mother’s nudes remain hidden in a red folder, deceptively labeled SCIENCE.He didn’t take those photos, she tells herself.He’s just not that person.
She folds up the giant, decorated paparazzi image, slips the textured stack of it under her bed. Comparatively, it’s an easier mess to clean up.
The darkness that comes earlier every day is already ribboning up the hickory trees that reach toward the last pink dashes of sky. Viola steps outside. “You okay?”
“I’m great,” her brother says, peeling off a skein of bark, crumpling it in his hand. “Do you think we could give that woman a light food poisoning? Just bad enough so that she never comes back?”
“We have to give her a chance, Seb. She seems nice.”
“God, Lola. A lobotomy seems nice.”
What do you want from her?Does he expect all women to be like their mother? Unknowable, brimming with secrets? Is the problem that she’s real?
“It’s been ten years.”
“Oh, you think Dad needs to ‘get on with his life.’?”
“It wouldn’t be the worst thing. For any of us.”
He pulls at the bark and a large piece comes away in his hand. He picks it apart, crumbling away the fine layers.
“So, what do you think?”
“Of your little exhibition? I think you’re nuts.”
“The picture is real though.”
“Bullshit, Seb. All those magazines are fake.”
“You never believe me, Lola. Fuck it. I’m going to Toby’s.”
“Seb, don’t be like that.”
“Then come.”
Toby Caruso’s party. It’s not her sort of thing. Nalgenes full of warm white wine, girls she can’t stand, boys who frighten her. Normally, she would avoid it like a sinkhole. But her brother has been too alone for too long. Someone needs to take responsibility for him.
In the marshes, a bird is singing. These woods used to seem so thick, but it feels like the sea is creeping closer every day, erasing the known world. If she stands here long enough, can she keep the ground from falling away?
She squishes her face forward into a thin fish mouth. “Fine. But I’m not drinking, okay?”
“Fine.”
“And don’t abandon me,” she says.
“I won’t.”
