Whisper (27 page)

“Give it.”

“Look,” I said and pushed the violin against her cheek. She shook her head, swatting my hand, and finally she saw the small carving. She stopped then, letting go of my arm to hold the carving, her body so close to mine that I could feel her heat.

She turned the small violin over in her hands, looked at all sides and then smiled a warm, understanding smile.

“We are the same,” she said, “you and I. You grew up in the camp in the woods. You know Nathanael.”

I brought my hand out from behind my back and opened my fist. The cylindrical carving of leaves cascading down from a tree was Jeremia's, and Lizzy had been holding it for so long the wood was worn smooth as a polished stone, and some of the grooves in the wood had lost their depth. We looked at it together, this woman and I. She knew Nathanael. She had watched our camp in the woods—she had stolen a carving made by Jeremia. Was she Nathanael's lost love, the reason he had come searching in the city? She took her carving back, rolled it in her hand and sat on the bench, where she rocked back and forth and hummed lullabies. I watched her sitting there, a woman with a split face, no home and probably no family, and I wondered—would I end up like her someday?

Lizzy slept the rest of the day on the bench. I watched her, trying to piece together her story, which was somehow connected to Nathanael and Jeremia.

Aside from Rosa, Lizzy was the closest tie I had to my home.

The absence of my violin began to weigh on me, pulling me down into the depression that crept along the floors and leached into the skin through the bleakness of this place. The woman in the cell beside me picked her nose; the men in the cells on the other side bickered with each other, stared at me and then offered worn remarks to the police officer who brought us our lunch.

My violin sat on a desk in front of our cells. When I paced to the front of the cell, I could see it, I could sense it. I could feel the tingling in my arms, the need to play. I stood at the bars, not daring to touch their cold hardness, and looked at my case, at that present from my mother that might have cost her a year's worth of baking. I thought about the music I could play with it. Since I had received that violin, I had tried to play it every day—until today.

After our dinner of a stew that had the look and feel of the morning porridge but with bigger lumps, I lay down on the bench and waited for the forgetfulness of sleep. I held Jeremia's carved violin in my hand, felt its curves, the points and angles of its shape, and watched Lizzy do the same with the sculpture in her hand. I closed my eyes and willed my mind to go blank, my thoughts to disappear down my throat to settle in my stomach along with the dense stew, but the ache in my ear had become constant, a festering sliver, and I couldn't forget.

I heard footsteps on the stairs—more than one person— but I felt too cold and too tired to care. The police officer's stick rattled against the bars of the cell, and I slowly opened my eyelids, so heavy after not having slept the night before.

I rushed to the front of the cage. I held the bars in my hands, and when he saw me, he stopped fidgeting, and his warm, large hands eased through the bars and encompassed mine.

“Whisper,” he said.

This was what it had felt like when my mother showed up on my birthday.

“Whisper, dear,” he said, wiping his nose with a handkerchief he pulled from his coat pocket, “I have had such a time finding you. Are you well? Have you been hurt?”

The mint and coffee smell of him rose up and drifted into the cell, making me want to cry or shout. Rosa's words came back to me for a minute, but I pushed them down, away, under my haze of relief and hoped that he had come to let me out of the cell because he wanted to teach me music and not because he wanted me to work the night shift.

“She's the one, then.” The round officer, his neck almost nonexistent, jangled a cluster of keys in his hand and fit one of them into the lock. Lizzy lay folded into her clothing on the hard bench. She didn't move when the door opened to let me out, but she hummed her lullaby and rolled Jeremia's statue around in her hand. I stood beside her for a minute, watching the carving with the falling leaves and tangled vines, and then touched the top of Lizzy's hand with my own. We were not the same, Lizzy and me, and I would not end up like her. I would control the shape of my future somehow.

“Lizzy,” I said. “I'll come back sometime.”

She looked up at me, her eyes focused for just a second.

“No,” she said. “Don't come back. Be the morning star that becomes the evening sun. Be strong.”

Her hand flipped over, and our fingers touched. I could feel energy move into my hand, and I felt it surge within me. Yes. I would be strong. I would be more than this place wanted me to be.

After strapping the violin to my back and tucking the small sack of belongings under my arm, I followed Solomon and the police officer up the stairs while the men in their cells watched me with eyes that reflected the flat white of the stairway lights.

Upstairs, Solomon and the police officer chatted amiably, laughing and shaking hands while Solomon placed a heavy hand on my shoulder and guided me through the maze of desks. This time, no hand reached out to scratch me and no one asked to take my picture.

Solomon handed money to the woman behind the desk, signed a piece of paper and shook the stocky police officer's hand again.

“Her court date is March tenth. She'll need to show up or come back for her month of jail time.”

“She'll stand before the judge and prove she's done nothing wrong.” Solomon's heavy hand pushed me to the door.

That was it, then. I was free to go until March 10. Maybe that would be enough time to make amends in some way.

Solomon raised a farewell hand to the police officers and then gestured for me to proceed. I walked out of the police station. Solomon unlocked the door to a small black car that was sitting against the curb. He held the door open for me and then got in on the other side.

My emotions felt ready to trickle out my nose, to overflow from the slit in my face and pour out of me. This wasn't happiness—it was something else, something like the touch of ice-cold water against your feet on a hot summer day. My legs eased into the car and I found myself seated in the vehicle. It didn't smell like urine, vomit and deceit like the rear seat of the police car had—it smelled of coffee, cigar smoke and peppermint, just like Solomon's jacket. I held my violin in my lap as we headed to I knew not where, pretending to be someone I wasn't.

And that's when I knew how this would all end. I would go to the university, play my unpolished pieces beside those who played like heavenly beings, and they would see that my musical abilities were nothing, a farce, and they'd take back my opportunity to study music. My shoulders sank into the seat of the car, and I stopped feeling the pressure of expectations, the weight of undeserved grace. I would fail, and that knowledge put me at ease.

We crossed the river and drove past Purgatory Palace. I searched for Rosa, Candela, Oscar, even Ofelia, but I saw only the women with the painted faces, the men with their devouring looks.

“I'd never been in there before—didn't even know it existed,” Solomon said when we had passed Purgatory Palace. “So many people with hard lives. I never knew.”

“We make our own family,” I said. “We fit together because we don't fit anywhere else.”

“But that is not the right place for you.”

“What is?”

“The university. That is where you should be.”

“I won't fit there either.”

“Heavens, child. Of course you will.”

We drove the route that Candela and I had walked every day. We cruised up the big hill, approached the gray stone buildings filled with turrets, domes and rows of glass windows, and turned onto a street where these buildings lined both sides.

This was the National University. I had passed by this street every day and had never known that the huge buildings with the skulking creatures along the roof were part of the university. But it made sense—our coffee shop was just around the corner, which explained why Solomon was always there.

Solomon drove confidently, one hand on the wheel and the other hand waving at people walking on the sidewalk. He turned right and stopped beside one of the beautiful buildings. It must be a church, I thought, although I had never been in a church. It was tall and made of square-cut stones, with brightly lit windows and balconies around the upper level. Solomon turned off the car and smiled at me. I began to shake. New places were never good—that had been the rule of my life so far. I had been a prisoner in Belen's house, a beggar at Purgatory Palace, a criminal at the jail—what would I be here? A freak? An object to be displayed and stared at?

He opened the car door and grunted as he extricated his large frame from the car. I considered staying in the car, refusing to move, but I pulled the handle on the door and followed his example. The door popped open and I stepped out.

For a moment, the world spun around me. Lights lined the streets and walkways like organized stars, and students moved beneath them, coming and going from the buildings. A woman—a professor, perhaps—climbed the stairs to the building, carrying a small leather case in her hand, and amidst all of this I saw myself—small, disfigured, a reject. I grasped the veil around my neck, untied it and slipped it over my head. In the city, near Purgatory Palace, rejects occupied every street corner, like featherless birds, but here I saw no blemishes.

Solomon climbed the front steps to this grand building and I followed, still holding my belongings, my violin strapped to my back.

I tried to take in everything at once, but it was impossible. We walked through a doorway as tall as Purgatory Palace and twice as wide. Inside, the hallways were cavernous and the floors were made from a hard substance that was cold as ice, hard as rock, but beautiful as gold leaves. Our footsteps rang through the hallway, and I shuffled along as quietly as I could, but this was not the forest floor and my steps echoed across the hall, announcing my presence. Students, all older than myself and dressed in expensive clothing, milled about in the doorways to other rooms, laughing with each other. When they saw me under the veil, they grew quiet and watched. I knew they couldn't see my eyes or meet my gaze, but I wanted to look away anyway, down at the floor.

Solomon's office was on the second floor, just past the curving staircase with a stone railing that was as beautiful and polished as Jeremia's statues. We entered a large room with maroon decorations where a tiny man who had been seated behind a desk stood and introduced himself to me. He was the office manager for the music department, he said as he shook my hand vigorously. He came up to my shoulder, and he twittered and fluttered like a cricket, buzzing around the office in such a frenzy I was reminded of Eva jumping with the grasshoppers. “Dorm room number one eleven, Clarence Hall,” he said. “A room all to yourself, honey. Here is your meal card. Call me Quincy.” He handed me a hard piece of plastic with a blank for my signature.

“We'll need a photo sometime,” he said, but when Solomon furrowed his eyebrows and shook his head, he added, “Or not.”

His bespectacled eyes looked me up and down, noting the tattered sweater, the threadbare canvas pants and the flatsoled brown shoes that I had been wearing far too long.

“Is the contract ready?” Solomon asked.

Quincy picked up a rolled piece of paper tied with a red string. He handed it to me.

“Well, untie it,” Solomon said, his hands twitching as though he would have liked to untie the string himself.

I untied the string and began to read the contract to myself.

“Oh, no. You must read it aloud,” Solomon said, seating himself on the front of Quincy's desk.

“
I, Solomon Woodson, in agreement with the Music
Department at The National University, hereby offer The Watts
Scholarship to Whisper_______________for the duration of
her studies at the university. She will be given room and board at
said school during her education and will also receive a stipend
of $
100.00 a month.