Virtuosity (23 page)

What was I thinking? The gown was the least of Diana’s worries.

Jeremy hadn’t been in his room, but it was easy to get in. I’d just had to convince one of the maids I’d locked myself out.

I shivered. The wind swirled around me, picking up black curls and whipping them against my cheek and bare back. The hair clips and bobby pins were long gone—they’d been the first things I’d removed after stepping inside the room. Then I’d kicked off my heels, peeled off my stockings, and pulled out my earrings. Nothing had worked. That had been an hour ago and the tightness was still everywhere, my chest, my head, my calves, my fingers.

So I’d taken my violin out of the case and onto the balcony.

It was hard pinpoint exactly when the idea had come—if I’d known when I’d broken into Jeremy’s room, or if I’d imagined it when I’d first walked out onto the balcony with my instrument in my hand. Maybe not even then, maybe not even as I lay flat, dangling the violin over the edge.

$1.2 million. The figure was hard to understand. Hard
to
feel
. I let the violin sway, just a little, and closed my eyes.
Murder.
The word came to my mind and I dismissed it. That was ridiculous. The violin wasn’t alive. It wasn’t a baby or an animal, not living.

But that would be easier to believe if I hadn’t felt it breathe and sing.

I opened my eyes. My knuckles, bony and white, were shaking. The pills were wearing off. The music was over.

I opened my hand, and at the very moment I felt the wood begin to slide I heard Jeremy roar, “No, Carmen!” I looked up to see him hurl his body into the railings just above my head, his arm shooting through the gap between the bars, his fingers wrapping around mine and around the scroll. It took a moment to feel the weight of his body, crushing me, and the pain in my crumpled fingers.

I couldn’t breathe. He rolled off me, pulling the violin and my arm back through the railings. With his other hand, he gripped the Strad, then finally released my crumpled fingers. I couldn’t sit up, I didn’t have the strength, so I stayed on my back staring at the black sky.

“Are you crazy?” he shouted, getting up on his knees and staring down at me.

Was I? My body ached, but my mind was empty. “Maybe,” I whispered.

He gasped, still catching his breath and leaned back
on his heels. “I walked in and saw you out here. I thought you were going to … you know … kill yourself.” He glanced over the balcony as if to confirm it was in fact high enough.

I shook my head slowly. “That hadn’t even occurred to me.”

“Was it your mom?”

I nodded. “You got the email.”

“Yeah. I was sitting at Lavazza, drinking my fourth espresso and considering a career in online poker when it popped up.”

“Do you hate me?”

He paused. Then he shook his head no.

“This cement is freezing.”

“You could sit up,” he said.

I didn’t have the energy.

“Jeez, Carmen. I can’t believe you were about to drop your Strad off the Drake.” He shook his head, then pushed his hair out of his face.

A siren approached and retreated far below us.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“I have no idea. We wait, I guess. I’m going home tomorrow.”

“But …” I didn’t know how to finish.

“But what happens to you?”

I sniffed, pulling back tears.

“I don’t know, Carmen.” He put his hand on my cheek, then in my hair. “You’re kind of screwed. You love music?”

I looked at my Strad nestled tightly in the crook of Jeremy’s arm.

“Aside from wanting to drop your million-dollar Strad off a balcony, do you love music?” he repeated.

“Yes. Always. But I don’t think I can come back from this.”

“You mean professionally?”

“No, but that’s true too. It’s more about not knowing if I want to.”

He nodded. He understood.

“You need to get out of here,” he said. “Away from this place. Away from her.”

“Why don’t you hate me? I’ve ruined everything for you.”

He waited a moment, then shook his head. “I just can’t. And it wasn’t you. You did the right thing, Carmen.”

“Where could I go?”

He didn’t answer. There was no answer.

Jeremy held me all night.

At first he pulled me onto his lap, and we sat huddled on the balcony, his arms wrapped around me and his chin resting on my head. But then the wind grew sharper and
not even his warm arms tight around my rib cage could hold in the shivering, so he picked me up and carried me inside. Despite everything, it felt right. He laid me on his bed, took a blanket from the closet and lay down behind me, pulling our bodies together under the blanket. Maybe it had been the most horrible day of my life, but the heat of his body, his breath on my neck, the pressure of his hand resting on my hip—that was close to perfect.

As long as I didn’t think about the carnage (my career, my family, my whole life) I would be all right, but I couldn’t keep my brain from poking at it. It was too fresh. Everything was over. And my mother … I didn’t know if she would ever talk to me again, or if I even wanted her to. I closed my eyes and tried to close my mind. I needed to force the thoughts out and just feel things instead. Like the smell of Jeremy’s skin, or the rise and fall of his chest. Those were warm and real and safe, but my mind wouldn’t obey. It kept coming back to that one thing.

“Jeremy …”

“Yeah?”

“The Guarneri.” The word tasted like bile in my mouth. “It should have been yours.”

His voice was deep and slow. “Maybe. Or maybe it should have been yours.”

I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter and pictured him on stage. “I’m sorry,” I whispered again.

He breathed in and out, labored and deliberate. “Me too.”

I was an idiot. Lost in my own pain storm, I’d forgotten about what he must be feeling. But even that, the fact that he was hurting too, was something the self-centered soloist in me couldn’t quite accept. His loss was temporary. He would win more competitions, maybe even the Guarneri in four years. I wouldn’t. I would never perform again.

Never? My heart started beating quicker, that familiar panic returning.
What have I done?
I suddenly gasped for air and clenched my fists, feeling tears flood my eyes.

“What’s the matter?” Jeremy asked. “You’re practically shaking.”

“I don’t know,” I whimpered, embarrassed, but not able to control it. “I just remembered everything all over again, and I can’t believe it really happened.” The tears spilled over, trailing sideways streaks across my face and onto the pillow. “What did I do? I burned every bridge in sight and now where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do now?”

“Shhh,” he said. “Tomorrow. Let’s worry about it tomorrow.”

“But—”

“Relax, Carmen.” He rubbed my arm with his open palm and kissed bare shoulder. “In the morning we’ll start fixing things.”

Relax.
He made it sound easy. I let go of the breath I was holding and tried releasing my tension, one muscle at a time. My calves, my back, my fists, my jaw, my fingers, everything ached as I slowly unclenched—ached, but sang with relief too. I could almost feel my body melting into his. By the end I was calm enough to feel his heart beating behind mine, anchoring me, and the last thing I remembered before falling asleep was the absolute rightness of Jeremy’s lips on my shoulder.

When I woke the first time it was still dark. But even before I was awake, before I thought about opening my eyes, I felt the weight of Jeremy’s arm still wrapped around me and his breath on my neck. I wasn’t ready for morning to come. Not yet. Once I was awake and he was awake and life started happening again, I couldn’t be sure there would ever be another moment like this, so I lay perfectly still, eyes closed, soaking up the sweetness of it. The earliest-rising songbirds had started to chirp, but my mind was stronger. I forced myself back to sleep.

It must have been hours later when I woke again. This time the brightness of the room left me no choice and I opened my eyes. Light gleamed through the windows on both sides of Jeremy’s corner suite.

“Jeremy,” I whispered, but I already knew he was gone. The bed felt empty around me.

There was a note on his pillow.

Carmen,

I went to your house. Don’t be mad. Your stepdad called my phone (I guess you left your phone at home) and told me to come by early while your mom is out. I’m bringing back some stuff for you—clothes and things, just to give you some time to decide what you want to do. I’ll be back soon.

Jeremy

Clark called Jeremy? He must have guessed where I was, or figured it out from my phone or maybe my email. But did Clark want Jeremy to get some of my stuff, or was that Jeremy’s idea? I reread the note. I couldn’t tell. If it was Clark’s idea, that meant Diana was mad enough to kill me and he was trying to keep us apart. Or maybe he thought I was mad enough to kill her. Maybe I was.

I stood and twisted the corseted bodice of my dress back into place. The boning had been digging into my ribs all night, and I had to assume I’d have permanent lines up and down my torso if I ever took the dress off. Was it only yesterday that I’d put it on? It felt like a full week had passed since then.

Jeremy’s suitcase lay unzipped at the foot of the bed. I flipped open the top and started rifling through the tidy little piles for something to wear. But then I realized what those piles meant, what I’d known but somehow forgotten. Jeremy was packed. Jeremy was flying home today. I closed the suitcase, the room suddenly spinning. Last night he’d said we would start fixing things in the morning. I’d felt safe, or at least not alone. I shouldn’t have. He was leaving.

The dizziness worsened and I stepped back from the suitcase. My stomach groaned. Food. I hadn’t eaten in … I couldn’t remember.

I was looking frantically for the minibar key when Jeremy walked in. His face was whiter than chalk, and his eyes shone. He looked crazy. Or was that glee? It seemed like I should be able to tell the difference, but the intensity in his eyes could have gone either way. One of his hands gripped the handle of a familiar leather suitcase, one of Clark’s, and the other clutched his phone and a booklet.

I swallowed and waited. I just couldn’t ask. But Jeremy didn’t say anything, just stood in the middle of the room, staring at me with fire in his eyes.

“So you went to my house?”

He tossed the small navy book in his hand onto the bed. It was a passport. My passport. “I thought I could convince you to come to England with me,” he said in a shaky voice.
“I thought we could spend the summer at Gigi’s together. But then on my way back here I got a call.”

He looked down at his hand. It was still clutching the phone in a white-knuckled grip. Then he looked back up at me. A tight grin had split his face. “It was the president of the Guarneri Foundation offering me an apology. He said he was contacting all the semifinalists. They canceled the finals last night, Carmen.”

I waited for more. Of course they canceled it. I knew they would when I wrote the email, and he had to have assumed the same thing when he read it. So why was he freaking out now?

“I guess having two crooked judges and only two finalists left them no choice. They’re going to start over.”

“What?”

I saw it now. He wasn’t angry, he was ecstatic. He shook his head and started to laugh, releasing his death-grip on his cell and tossing it onto the bed beside my passport. Still laughing, he pushed his hair up and out of his eyes, leaving his hand on top of his head.

I reached out and steadied myself on the armoire. Of all the outcomes I’d imagined, I’d never even dreamed of redemption. Actually putting the whole competition together again—it was perfect. But impossible, wasn’t it? There were no do-overs in music. If things weren’t fair, people sucked it up.

“The whole competition,” he continued, dropping the suitcase and pacing the length of the room, “starting with the
same
semifinal list, is being repeated again next week, but with new judges.” The smile had taken over his face, stretched his features past their limits. It looked like it hurt. He bounded over the coffee table between us and grabbed me, pulling my body into his.
“Carmen, we get another shot,”
he whispered into my ear.

I closed my eyes. I wanted to feel it. I wanted a piece of his elation, for my heart to be launching itself into orbit alongside his. But it wasn’t. I should have been flying, sobbing, throwing my arms around him, feeling
something
. But I was frozen.

Jeremy’s grip on me loosened. “What?”

“We don’t get another shot,” I whispered. “
You
get another shot.”

“No, you don’t understand, Carmen. They aren’t punishing you. They know you didn’t do it and they’re letting
all
of us play again. I asked that specifically. You’re getting another chance too.”

I let his words clear the air and enough silence follow for him to hear my every word. “But I don’t want it.”

Jeremy stopped grinning. “Yes, you do. You’re just in shock.”

“No.” My voice was calm. The dizziness was fading slowly, leaving my mind clear. Everything around me
finally stood solid and still. “I really don’t.” It was true. I knew it now.

“I don’t understand,” he said, shaking his head. “You aren’t thinking this through.”

“I am. It’s tainted. For me, I mean.”

He blinked, still wanting to absorb my sadness into his happiness. “So it doesn’t fix anything for you, then,” he said.

“No, it does. I’m relieved. I’m choosing this for me.”

He put his hand on my cheek, ran his fingers down my jaw and over the violin scar that wasn’t a scar at all. “But Carmen, this is the Guarneri. Are you sure?”

Was I? I nodded. I needed time. I needed distance from Diana. I needed to decide why I was playing the violin anyway. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I blinked them back, hoping he didn’t see.

“You’re sure, but you’re not okay,” he said.

“No. But I will be.”