Playing With Fire (8 page)

“She did it on purpose. She placed that toy car on the second step, where I’d be sure to slip on it. Then she made noises in the kitchen, to wake me up and draw me downstairs. She
wanted
this to happen.”

My husband is trying his best to maintain a neutral expression. He sits by our bed, where I lie propped up on pillows and groggy from Vicodin. I’ve broken no bones but my back is knotted in pain and I can barely move without sending my muscles into fresh spasms. He doesn’t look at me, but stays focused on the duvet, as if he can’t bring himself to meet my gaze. I know how absurd I sound, claiming that a three-year-old plotted to kill me, but the pain pills have loosened all the connections in my brain, and a whole host of possibilities floats around me, like poisonous gnats.

Lily is downstairs with my aunt Val, and I hear her call out: “Mommy? Mommy, come play with us!” My darling daughter. I shudder at the sound of her voice.

Rob lets out a troubled sigh. “I’m going to make an appointment for you, Julia. This doctor comes highly recommended. I think she can help you.”

“I don’t want to see a psychiatrist.”

“You need to see
someone.
”

“Our daughter is trying to
kill
me. I’m not the one who needs therapy.”

“She’s not trying to kill you. She’s only three years old.”

“You weren’t here, Rob. You didn’t see her studying that toy car, as if trying to understand why it didn’t work. Why it didn’t kill me.”

“Can’t you hear her calling for you right now? That’s our baby, and she wants you. She loves you.”

“There’s something wrong with her. She’s changed. She’s not the same baby anymore.”

He moves onto the bed and takes my hand. “Julia, remember the day she was born? Remember how you cried because you were so happy? You kept saying how perfect she was, and you wouldn’t let the nurse take her away because you couldn’t stand not being with her.”

I bow my head to hide the tears sliding down my cheeks. Yes, I remember weeping with joy. I remember thinking that I would willingly throw myself off a cliff to keep my baby safe.

He strokes my hair. “She’s still our little girl, Julia, and you love her. I know you do.”

“She’s not the same girl. She’s turned into someone else.
Something
else.”

“It’s the pain pills talking. Why don’t you go to sleep now? When you wake up, you’ll wonder why you said all these crazy things.”

“She’s not my baby. She’s been different ever since…” I lift my head as the memory takes shape through my Vicodin haze. A warm and muggy afternoon. Lily sitting on the patio. My bow gliding across the violin strings.

That’s when everything changed. That’s when the nightmare began, when I first played
Incendio.

My friend Gerda lives at the end of a quiet lane in the suburb of Milton, just outside Boston. As I pull into her driveway, I spot her straw hat bobbing among the flowery jungle of delphiniums and when she sees me, she rises easily to her feet. At sixty-five, silver-haired Gerda’s still as nimble as a teenager.
Maybe I should take up yoga, too,
I think as I watch her stride toward me, peeling off her garden gloves. I’m half her age, but my stiff back makes me feel like an old woman today.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say. “I had to stop at the post office, and the line went out the door.”

“Well, you’re here now, and that’s what matters. Come in, I’ve made fresh lemonade.”

We step into her cluttered kitchen, where bundles of fragrant herbs hang from the ceiling beam. Perched on her refrigerator is an old bird’s nest she found abandoned somewhere, and on the windowsill is her dusty collection of seashells and river stones. Rob would call this place a housekeeping emergency, but I find all these messy, eccentric touches strangely comforting.

Gerda takes the pitcher of lemonade out of the refrigerator. “Did you bring that letter from the shopkeeper?”

I reach into my shoulder bag and pull out the envelope. “It was mailed ten days ago, from Rome. His granddaughter wrote it.”

As I sip lemonade, Gerda slips on her eyeglasses and reads the letter aloud.

Dear Mrs. Ansdell,

I am writing on behalf of my grandfather Stefano Padrone, who cannot speak English. I showed him the photocopies you sent, and he remembers selling you the music. He says he acquired the book of Gypsy tunes quite a few years ago, along with other items, from the estate of a man named Giovanni Capobianco, who lived in the town of Casperia. He does not have any information about “Incendio” but he will ask the Capobianco family if they know the composer or where it came from.

Sincerely, Anna Maria Padrone

“I haven’t heard anything new since I received that letter,” I tell Gerda. “I’ve called the antiques store three times and left messages. No one answers the phone.”

“Maybe he’s on vacation. Maybe he hasn’t had a chance to talk to the family.” She rises to her feet. “Come on, let’s take another look at that waltz.”

We go into her cluttered practice room, where a baby grand piano leaves barely enough space for a bookcase, two chairs, and a coffee table. Stacks of sheet music are piled high on the floor like stalagmites in a cave. On her music stand is the copy of
Incendio
that I scanned and emailed to her three weeks ago, when she recorded the piece for Lily’s neurological test. It’s merely two sheets of paper dotted with notes, but I feel its power. As if, at any instant, it could glow red or levitate.

“This is a gorgeous waltz, but it’s definitely challenging,” says Gerda, settling down in front of the music stand. “It took me a few hours of practice to get the arpeggios under my fingers and to hit these high notes just right.”

“I never did manage it,” I admit, feeling as if I’ve just confirmed every bad joke ever told about second violin players.
Question: How many second violinists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: They can’t go that high.

Gerda takes her violin out of the case. “The trick to this passage here is to make the shift to fifth position a measure earlier.” She demonstrates, and her notes scamper up the E string at a blistering speed.

“You don’t need to play it now,” I cut in.

“It really does make this next section easier to manage. Listen.”

“Please
stop.
” Even I am shocked by how shrill my voice sounds. I take a deep breath and say quietly: “Just tell me what you’ve found out about the waltz.”

Frowning, Gerda sets down her violin. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m sorry. It gives me a headache listening to it. Can we just talk about the music?”

“All right. But first, can I look at the original?”

I open my shoulder bag, take out the book of printed Gypsy music, and flip it open to where I’ve tucked in the loose sheet with
Incendio.
I’m reluctant to even touch the sheet, so I simply hand Gerda the whole book.

She pulls out the waltz and examines the yellowed page, both front and back. “Written in pencil. Standard manuscript paper, looks pretty brittle. I don’t see any watermark, and there’s nothing to identify its origin except the title and the composer’s name, L. Todesco.” She glances up at me. “I looked up that name online and I can’t find any published music by this composer.” She squints more closely at the page. “Okay, this is interesting. On the other side, there are a number of partly erased notes, which were then written over. It looks like these four measures were revised.”

“So he wasn’t just copying the music straight from another source.”

“No, these changes are too extensive to be a simple transcription error. This must be the actual page he composed it on. And then he made these changes.” She glances at me over her glasses. “You know, this could be the only copy of the piece in existence. Since it’s never been recorded.”

“How do you know there’s no recording?”

“Because I sent a copy over to Paul Frohlich at the conservatory. He ran it through all his music recognition programs, comparing it to every known recorded piece. There are no matches anywhere. As far as he can tell, this waltz was never recorded, and he can’t find any published music under the name L. Todesco. So we’re completely in the dark about where the waltz comes from.”

“What about the book of Gypsy tunes? I found
Incendio
tucked inside it, so maybe they came from the same owner. Maybe the book belonged to this L. Todesco.”

She opens the fragile collection of melodies. The cover is crisscrossed with brittle Scotch tape, which seems to be the only thing holding it together. Gently she turns to the copyright page. “It’s an Italian publisher. Printed in 1921.”

“There’s something written on the back cover.”

Gerda flips over the book and sees the faded words, handwritten in blue ink:
11 Calle del Forno, Venezia.
“That’s an address in Venice.”

“Maybe the composer’s address?”

“That would certainly be a starting point for our search. We should compile a list of everyone who’s lived at that address since 1921.” She turns her attention back to the two pages of music on her stand. “
Incendio.
Fire. I wonder what kind of fire the title refers to.” She picks up her instrument, and before I can stop her, she starts to play. As the first notes ring from her violin, I feel a rising sense of panic. My hands begin to tingle, an electrical current that builds with each note, until it seems my nerves are screaming. I’m about to snatch the bow away from her when she abruptly stops playing and stares at the music.

“Love,” she murmurs.

“What?”

“Don’t you hear it? The passion, the anguish in this music. In these first sixteen bars, where the melody’s introduced, such sadness and longing. Then at measure seventeen, it grows agitated. The pitch climbs and the notes speed up. I can almost imagine two frantic lovers growing desperate.” Gerda looks at me. “
Incendio.
I think it’s the fire of love.”

“Or hell,” I say softly, and rub my temples. “Please don’t play it anymore. I don’t think I can stand hearing it.”

She sets down the violin. “This isn’t just about the music, is it? What’s really going on, Julia?”

“It
is
about the music.”

“Lately you’ve been so distracted. You’ve missed two quartet rehearsals in a row.” She pauses. “Is there something wrong between you and Rob?”

I don’t know what to tell her, so for a moment I don’t say a thing. It’s so quiet here in Gerda’s home. She lives alone, with no husband, no children; she has to answer only to herself, while I’m forced to share a house with a man who questions my sanity and a daughter who scares me.

“It has to do with Lily,” I finally admit. “She’s been having problems.”

“What problems?”

“Remember when I told you I cut my leg and needed stitches?”

“You said it was an accident.”

“It wasn’t an accident.” I look at her. “Lily did it.”

“What do you mean?”

“She pulled a piece of broken glass out of the trash can. And she stabbed me with it.”

Gerda stares. “
Lily
did that?”

I wipe away tears. “And that day I fell, that wasn’t an accident, either. She left a toy on the stairs, right where I’d step on it. No one believes me, but I know she did it on purpose.” I take a few breaths and at last manage to regain control. When I speak again, my voice is flat. Defeated. “I don’t know who she is anymore. She’s turned into someone else. I look at her and I see a stranger, someone who wants to hurt me. And it all started when I played the waltz.”

Anyone else would tell me that I’m delusional, but Gerda says nothing. She just listens, her silence calming and nonjudgmental.

“We took her in for medical tests, and she had a sort of EEG, to look at her brain waves. When they played the waltz for her, her brain responded as if it were a long-term memory. As if she already
knew
this music. Yet you say the waltz has never been recorded.”

“An old memory,” Gerda murmurs and stares at
Incendio,
as if seeing something in that music that she had missed before. “Julia, I know this is going to sound bizarre,” she says softly. “But when I was a child, I had memories that I couldn’t possibly explain. My parents put it down to an active imagination, but I remembered a stone hut with a dirt floor. Fields of wheat, waving in the sunlight. And I had a vivid memory of seeing my own bare feet, but with one toe missing. None of it made any sense, until my grandmother told me they were leftover memories of who I once was. In a previous lifetime.” She looks at me. “Do you think that’s crazy?”

I shake my head. “Nothing seems crazy to me anymore.”

“My grandmother said most people don’t remember their past lives. Or they refuse to accept those memories as anything but fantasies. But with very young children, their minds are still open. They still have access to prior memories, even if they don’t have the language to talk to us about them. Maybe that’s why Lily reacts to this waltz. Because she’s heard it before, in another lifetime.”

I can imagine what Rob would say if he heard this conversation. Already he suspects I’m unbalanced; if I start talking about past lives, he’ll have no doubt of it.

“I wish I could offer you some sort of solution to your problem,” she says.

“I don’t think there is a solution.”

“Now I’m
really
curious about this music. If your antiques dealer in Rome can’t help us, maybe we can track down the composer ourselves. I’m scheduled to perform at that festival in Trieste, and that’s really close to Venice. I could make a quick side trip to the address on Calle del Forno. Find out if L. Todesco ever lived there.”

“You’d go to all that trouble for me?”

“It’s definitely worth my time, and it wouldn’t be just for you. This waltz is gorgeous, and I don’t think it’s ever been published. What if our quartet could be the first to ever record it? We need to make sure the rights to this waltz are free and clear. So you see, I have my own selfish reason to track down L. Todesco.”

“He’s probably long dead.”

“Probably.” Gerda casts a covetous look at the music. “But what if he isn’t?”