Caressa's Knees (17 page)

“Promise me,” he said again, dead serious.

A
former
user and drunk.
“Okay, I promise,” she sniffed, turning on her side. “I only have room for one obsession in my life anyway.”

He flipped her over and pinned her down, his mood suddenly turning from remote to angry. “Why so many questions?” he asked. “If you only have room for one obsession in your life, why are you over here plaguing me?”

“Do you think you qualify as an obsession? Don’t flatter yourself.”

“You called me at two in the morning, Caressa.
Seems pretty obsessive to me.
But then you’re not known for your reasonable behavior.”

She lay still beneath him, trembling to control her reaction to his nearness and the irritation in his eyes. He was rock hard. She could feel the rigid outline of his cock pressed against her belly. Against her will, her hips moved, seeking more contact. She chanced a look at him, pained to find a mocking expression directed at her.

“Now you go soft and submissive, when you want the cock.
Right?
No screaming at me now. No giving orders. I see how it is.” She searched his eyes for a teasing spark, but found only cool anger.

She pushed at him. “Get off me!”

“Oh, there are the orders. I suppose the screaming comes next.” He kissed her with punishing force, one hand squeezing her breast roughly. She realized the
flirting,
the fucking was all an act.
A ploy.
He hated her, just like everyone else. The thought devastated her. She pushed him again, with all the force she could muster, and he let her up, let her barrel away from the bed to grab her clothes.
Not you too, Kyle.

When he’d held her and pressed against her she’d wanted his warmth and forgiveness, not anger and hate. His hate destroyed her. She dressed on her way out to his door, not stopping when he called her from the bedroom. Fuck him.

She ran down the streets of Hudson Square until she hit Sixth Avenue and then kept going, not having the energy to flag down a cab. She needed air anyway. The few people on the streets walked around her, avoiding her, probably because of the look on her face.

She awakened late the next morning, still feeling wrung out and miserable.
Battered.
There was a reason her brain pinged out a warning every time he was near her, despite the reactions of her body and her heart.

If only he wasn’t so…irresistible. She went downstairs to find her cello, needing the refuge of music. She sat and played some older songs, simple, elementary tunes she hadn’t played since she was a student. It was so easy to play them well, to play them perfectly. Why must everything progress from simplicity to horrible, unmanageable complexity? She wondered what would happen if she changed her current concert repertoire to a recital of these childish melodies? She plucked at the strings, smiling to herself, and then she turned, hearing a deep, familiar voice chatting with Aunt Denise out in main room.

So he’d come. After his angry scorn last night, she’d expected him to quit or at least make himself scarce for a while. She strained to listen to their conversation through the cracked door at the same time she told herself she didn’t care. But they weren’t talking about him quitting. Denise was talking about
Caressa’s
interview with some New York arts magazine, and Kyle was talking about seating preferences on the upcoming flight to Montreal.

She started to play again, feeling detached and wooden. Of course he wouldn’t quit. He’d stick around so she could feel the maximum trauma necessary. She heard a sharp knock. She didn’t look up, but she knew it was him. She could feel his presence like a weight on her. He came and sat on her bed, watching her, but still she ignored him. She chose something louder, with long sustained notes she played with aggression.

“Do you want to talk?” he asked over the reverberating noise.

“No.”

“You seem upset.”

“Because I hate you.
I thought you were going to quit. I wish you would.”

He got up and left and still she kept playing, mechanically, even though her heart was aching and racing in a panicked rhythm. Her tempo faltered and her bow slipped. She grimaced and played the passage again, then forged into a difficult part of Saint-Saëns’ concerto, her showpiece. She wrestled with it, forcing her concentration, calling on all her skill.

But then he was back again, kneeling in front of her cello. She paused as soon as the marker touched her. She wanted to jerk away but he held her by the calf, drawing two eyes, a nose,
a
big cartoonish smiley face on one knee so it looked up at her.
More mockery.
He moved to the other side, drew an identical happy face. She would have laughed at the loopy artwork but the situation didn’t seem remotely funny. He wasn’t smiling at all. When he finished he drew away, capping the pen. He looked as if he might say something, but then he turned for the door. “I’ll let you practice. Stage call is at six-thirty.”

She knew it was. She put her bow to the strings, staring down at her knees. At the door he turned back and threw the pen next to her on the floor.

“You never smile, Caressa.
Never.
Anyway, I’ll be here at six. Whatever you want to wear, have it ready to go to the theater.”

She practiced for two more hours, but even music couldn’t exorcise the demons tormenting her like the smiling faces on her knees. She stopped halfway through and went to the bathroom, scrubbing at the carelessly drawn pen marks, trying to obliterate them completely. Still, a shadowy outline of them remained.

* * * * *

They got through New York, Montreal, Los Angeles, Toronto, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore,
Atlanta
. The Fourth of July came and went. He and Caressa interacted with professional distance, maintained more by her withdrawn focus than any self control on his part. He let her be, and found his sanity slightly improved for it, although his desire for her chafed. It was Nell all over again, and he wondered, as Jeremy had asked, what he ever did to deserve it.

But she was stable, at least. She didn’t scream at him or throw tantrums. She paced before shows but she got the job done onstage. Reviews were good, which seemed to sustain her in some equilibrium. He sent her dress ahead from venue to venue, hoping she might wear it one night, hoping she might ask to go shopping for more. But she was all black austerity again, with her hair tamed in a low, tight ponytail. She was stable…up until the Miami flight.

A series of inconveniences had them running late, and Atlanta traffic was gridlocked. Kyle looked at his watch, then at Denise.

“We’re not going to make it. We better look at other flights.”

Denise sent him a look he couldn’t interpret. “We’ll see.”

Kyle chuckled. “Uh, we’re still thirty minutes away, and the
flight’s
in an hour.”

“We can still make it. I don’t want to take a later flight,” said Caressa.

“There will be plenty of flights to Miami,” Kyle reassured her. “It’s just going to mean a longer wait.”

“I don’t want to take a later flight,” she repeated, a little more intensely. Denise soothed her, telling her they would wait and see. Kyle watched with jaded half-attention. A meltdown was coming.
Interesting.
Over something so insignificant.
They would probably only be delayed an hour and there was no concert tonight anyway.

But the meltdown started in earnest at the security checkpoint, in the form of violent, hysterical tears. She railed at the security workers to hurry up, and then screamed when they mishandled her cello in their haste. It was a miracle he got her through without an arrest, but her single-minded hysteria only mounted as she tore toward the gate.

He walked, wheeling her cello, since he couldn’t very well run with it. They wouldn’t make it anyway. The flight had been scheduled to depart ten minutes ago. Denise ran after Caressa, but Kyle headed for the ticket counter. He rescheduled their flight, and dawdled on the way back to the gate, hoping Denise had successfully soothed her niece.

But she wasn’t soothed. He wasn’t prepared for the shaking, disintegrating woman he was confronted with. He sat on the other side of her. “Don’t worry. I got our tickets changed, hon.” He ran his hand over her trembling back, the first time he’d touched her in a couple weeks. “It’s okay. We can leave in half an hour.”

“No!” He leaned back at the virulence of her denial, sitting up and looking around. Curious eyes were staring, wondering about the small woman beside the cello case screaming refusals and denials. Security headed their way. Denise looked at Kyle over
Caressa’s
head as Caressa sobbed into her hands.

“Even you couldn’t get her on that flight, Kyle.” She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

Twelve hours. Twelve hours to get to Miami by car. Later, when they were an hour or so south of Atlanta in their rental, and Caressa had long since cried
herself
to sleep in the back seat beside her cello, Kyle looked over at Denise.

“Okay. Explain it to me.”

She sighed. “Just drive, Kyle. Let’s just get there, please.”

“I’m not driving twelve fucking hours without some fucking explanation. Our flight would have already been there.”

Denise looked down at her hands, rubbing some imaginary spot on her palm. “It’s a long story.”

“I have—let’s see—about eleven hours.”

Denise looked at Caressa in the backseat, and Kyle glanced at her too in the rearview mirror. She’d fallen into a deep sleep, perhaps lulled by the highway road noise, or perhaps just exhausted from losing her shit so completely. Denise still turned up the radio a notch before she started to speak.

“When Caressa was very young, just six or seven, she started traveling to appearances. Not tours, per se, but word of her got around. They lived in New York, and her mother and father were at the heart of the arts community. Her father—my brother—was a pianist, and her mother was an artist and designer. Caressa often performed for their friends at events around the city. Not because she was an accomplished artist at six or seven years old, only because she was a novelty. No, novelty is not the word for it.”

She stopped and looked over at Kyle with
a sheen
of moisture in her eyes. “To have seen her play back then…I can’t really describe it. It was like the angels talking through her cello. She was just a tiny little thing, playing these grand concertos. So little, so innocent, and the music she could draw from those strings…” She paused, collecting herself. “It really was kind of like watching a miracle. It was just that affecting.”

“I believe it,” Kyle said.

“Anyway, by the time she was eight, they were making trips to Washington, The Hamptons, even out to the West Coast. People talked about movie appearances, books, concert tours with the masters, big time stuff even back then. The thing was
,
she was still a child.
An only child, and terribly spoiled.
Doted on.
She was the center of the universe for my brother and his wife. They let her get away with everything.”

Kyle chuckled, imagining it clearly. It fit her to a tee. But Denise wasn’t laughing.

“One weekend, they were scheduled to travel to a friend’s home upstate, up in Saranac Lakes. Some artists’ conference, and she was going to play there as a special guest. They were going to fly there. As you can imagine, she was a nightmare to drive with, even short distances, and she really loved airplanes. But she made them late, this day. Something about not wanting to wear the outfit her mother had
chosen,
or not wanting her hair brushed. Her hair has always been such a tangled mess…” Denise stopped, laughing almost wistfully. “As a child it was…”

“Forget about her hair. What happened?”

“Well, they missed the flight by minutes. She threw another tantrum about having to wait until the next morning to fly out, and her father just threw up his hands and hired a charter plane.
A little four-
seater
deal.
They had nearly arrived when the plane started to lose altitude. It crashed in the Adirondacks, in the middle of nowhere.”

Kyle felt something turn and slide in his stomach.
Horror.
Dread. “They died.”

“The pilot and her parents died. Caressa survived somehow with only superficial wounds. Perhaps the cello case in front of her kept her secured in her seat. Actually, her mother survived too.
The crash anyway, although her wounds were mortal.
She told… She said…” Kyle glanced over to see Denise choked up now in earnest. “She asked Caressa to play for her until help arrived. And she did…all through the night. It was a chilly autumn night, and she must have played for hours. At some point her mother died, but she kept playing on that banged-up cello. When they arrived, her fingers were mutilated from the metal strings in the cold. But it helped them find her…the sound of the music led them to her…” Denise stopped again,
then
continued on more softly. “If you look, you can still see the scars on her fingertips. So you see, whenever we miss a flight now…”

Kyle was silent, picturing
Caressa’s
world at that moment. Eight years old, a little girl who’d thrown a tantrum that led to a charter flight and the end of her parents’ life. Trapped alone on a mountain with her dying mother, who exhorted her to
play
…