The Empress Chronicles (19 page)

The texts and voicemails confirm it. Someone’s parents are at the coast for the weekend. Party central. Best of all, it’s only a few blocks from Lincoln, up in the West Hills.

“Rich people and their liquor cabinets.” Cory grins, rubbing his hands together.

A deal is a deal, so I trot along beside him, feeling less like a girlfriend than a whiny little sister in a too-big coat, biding her time until she can have her big brother all to herself. “Don’t forget,” I remind him, “you have some translating to do.”

“It’ll only take a few minutes,” Cory says. “Your dad paid me pretty good for that cheese stand, so I’ll just flash the cash, get the goods, and we’ll be on our way.”

“And remember,” I continue, my voice annoying even me, but I can’t help it. “Not a word to anyone about this diary.”

Cory makes a zipper gesture across his lips.

The parade crowd seems to be following us through the rain, up the hill from Lincoln, the Mac Club, to the other side of Vista Bridge, where one of the kids from Lincoln had recently jumped to his death. Portland is full of sad stories, and this particular part of Portland, in the shadows much of the day, is sadder than most.

I think about Willow and her explanation of temperaments. It seems that like Cory, most teenagers ping-pong between sanguine and melancholic. Me, though, I never feel truly carefree. I wonder what it would be like to wake up without the weight of potential disaster and things out of order, the sense of doom and messiness invading your thoughts and deeds. I reach into the big pockets of the overcoat and feel the stolen diary and the sharp metal object that hangs from a chain. She was a sanguine girl, Sisi. Sunday’s child.

We arrive at the party house just as the rain lets up. I can tell the party’s been going on for a while. Drunk kids are spilling out the front porch and onto a manicured lawn in bunches. I recognize some of the upperclassmen. The athletes. The soccer players in particular, who seem better at holding their beer. A few of them have formed a hacky circle.

“Excellent,” Cory says and immediately joins in.

Naturally, he’s an expert hacky-sacker. He can pop it over his head with his ankle, spin a 360 and slap it with the very point of his toe. I stand on the outside of the circle, trying to be patient, but getting increasingly nervous. Dad will freak if we’re not home within the hour.

Minutes tick time away in my head. Everyone else seems too far away from the idea of time, laughing, drinking. I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn around. Standing there with a bottle of Henry’s in her hand and a big, big smile on her face as though she’s my BFF is Jewellee King, sans the Amy Winehouse eyes but with plenty of red, red lipstick.

“Liz! So great to see you!” she says and then, beer bottle and all, she wraps her arms around me. “I heard you moved in with your dad.” Her breath is all beery. “How are you?”

I couldn’t have felt more like a stupid little kid; that’s how I am. “G-g-good,” I say from inside my secret-agent-man coat.

Then, for an awkward beat, we stand there saying nothing. What is there to say? Jewellee scans the hacky-sackers. Immediately, and I mean immediately, she zeroes in on Cory. “You know who he is? That guy doing all the tricks?”

“He’s, uh, with me,” I say. “Sort of my stepbrother?”
God. What a creepy thought.

“No kidding. He live in Portland?”

“For now.”

“Well, silly,” Jewellee kids, knocking into me the way only best friends are permitted to do, “introduce me.”

Really?

I saunter over to Cory, suddenly feeling the weight of the tools clinking in my pocket. The hacky sack spits out of the circle and hits me in the nose.

“Dude!” choruses the collective of stoners.

Cory, with his ever-present grin, turns to me. “Okay, I get it, Liz. Jeez, just having a little …” His eyes beeline to Jewellee’s big red lips and they render him mute in the middle of his sentence.

“Cory, Jewellee. Jewellee, Cory,” I say into the damp night air.

After that, any hope I have of getting back to the farm in a reasonable time, sitting snuggled up next to Cory while he translates Sisi’s words, and having one night, just one night where everything goes right, blows up like fireworks at the Rose Festival.

After the first half hour of Cory and Jewellee chatting it up, faces painted with matching smiles, stepping ever closer to each other, his lips whispering in her ear, the ear with three dangling earrings—after that, off they go to be a beer pong team with me trailing behind them, whiny little sister in a trench coat.

It’s Jewellee and Becket all over again. Them and me. Always a “them.” Always a “me.” My cell phone rings in my pocket. Dad, no doubt. I don’t bother to check.

My head feels huge and wet, jagged-haired and hatless. My hands are itchy. That diary I want so badly to read is a stone in my pocket as everyone gets drunker around me, messy, out of control. They’re barfing in the hedges now. Fighting in the driveway. I have to leave.

Last thing I see at that party is Cory, through the living room window, bouncing little white balls into sixteen-ounce cups at the far end of a Ping-Pong table to the animated jumps and claps of my long-term nemesis. An image that’s already searing into my brain.

So I flee. Flee is the only right word for what I do. No understanding of where I’m headed, just knowing that I can’t be here. From the West Hills, everything is lower, and so I follow the law of physics. Past the bridge where people kill themselves. Down, down, down, down, down, down.

Parade goers are back in their homes, so only the after-party types are milling about downtown—the bums, winos and crazy people—the after-parade filth, wrappers and cups and bottles and cans. And this city is supposedly a leader in sustainability and recycling? Ha! Even my beautiful Pearl is now filled with overflowing garbage cans. Cruising cars with revving engines puncture the buzzy air. Maximum entropy. Total lack of order. Where can I go to escape?

I follow my body. Let my legs decide. Turn off the chorus of voices in my head. I am
engaging
. This is what it feels like.
Keep moving, keep moving, keep moving
, I let my mouth say. I pull out my iPod, its cage of white wires encircling it. Pachelbel. The piano piercing the sweet litany of violins. That’s all I need. To hell with Cory and the rest of them. But right now, Pachelbel is letting me down. The music sounds too hopeful, and I don’t want hopeful. I want proof that the world is unforgiving, filthy.

I reach into a coat pocket to keep my fingers from clawing my skin and close my hand around the sharp, jagged chunk Cory had tweezed out of the diary binding. My fist goes small and tight until the edges of the metal push into my palm. I pulse my hand like a heart, each beat going deeper. I roll the links of the metal chain between my thumb and index finger.
When you feel the urge, Lizbeth, engage!

The rain starts up again and wets down my hair. It falls harder and harder until I feel drenched and dripping. I begin to shiver and draw my bleeding hand out of the pocket and wipe my cheeks with red fingers. When I pull my fingers off my face, they’re a combination of mascara and blood.
What’s black and red and gross all over? Liz’s face!
Voices start up again, despite the Canon, despite any of the masters, the long-dead masters. They were all crazy anyway, the good ones.

Ahead of me is the familiar Conrad awning. And under it stands the doorman/lobby-security-guy, Gus.

I try to rush past him, mad at myself for not crossing the street, but there’s a light-rail train in my way.

“Hey,
Maestro
, that you?” I hear behind me. “Hey, Liz, stop!”

My legs stop, completely disobeying my brain.

“Liz?”

I turn, head down. I inch back to the awning, and as soon as I do, there’s Gus’s hand on my chin, raising my face for inspection. “Hey, Liz, what happened?” He grabs my bloody hand. “Let’s get you inside,” his steady voice says.

I read Hemingway. He was a freshman English syllabus favorite. When he wrote about a clean, well-lighted place, he was talking about the lobby of the Conrad Lofts. It may not be in his story, but Hemingway must have sat in the sturdy chair behind the lucky bamboo plants, surrounded by gleaming granite. Each perfect light on the track above beaming its ray like a choreographed dance.

I am clean, dry and salved sitting next to Gus, and he lets me just sit, without asking questions. There are very few people in the world like that. My cell phone keeps ringing and ringing, and he doesn’t ask me why I’m not answering it. Residents walk in and are greeted. Many of them remember me; nobody raises an eyebrow. Finally, I say, “I miss this place like you wouldn’t believe.”

Gus is one of those guys who favors toothpicks. He’s a chain-picker, always jabbing his gum line when residents aren’t watching. His eyes are mostly on the security cameras above us, because that’s what he’s paid to do. That and keep the sidewalk out front free of degenerates. Mom surmised that he had a past. AA type, she ventured. Clean, sober, with the program.

Gus may or may not be a recovering drunk or addict, but he is street smart, and I know that he knows something isn’t right. At long last he says, “So, you run away?”

I nod. “Just for tonight.”

“You wanna talk about it?”

I shake my head. Cory’s overcoat is drying on a hook behind us. The diary and whatever that chunk of metal is. Somehow, it isn’t as important without Cory. I hate that I feel this way. The drive I had to steal the book, to read the book, to pore over the mystery of Sisi and her Count Sebastian, it all evaporated in the air between Cory and Jewellee. In the deep, gnawing slap of the reality that I am invisible.

The world will write what it wants upon you!

Then let it.

But Gus won’t allow it to end with that. “You know the Vickenstein loft is still vacant,” he says. “After you and your mom left, he hired me to water the plants.”

It’s only been a few weeks, but it feels like years since I lived there.

“Liz, would you like to go up and play the piano?”

I couldn’t believe it. Gus simply handed over the keys to my former home like he did biscuits to snorty little pugs, casual as could be. Now I sit on the recently dusted bench of the beloved Steinway grand. I even bypassed the hygienic bathroom, going straight for the behemoth piano that faces a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the West Hills. The palm of my hand stings under its bandage as I stretch to span an octave. I can still do it perfectly, B to C, thumb to pinkie, poised to scale the twelve notes. Muscle memory ripples through my fingers. The sound of the Steinway obeying my command as I wander up the scales competes against the warm, unsettled feeling that pulses through my hand. I need more. More sound, more noise, more evidence that I am here in this very place and not back at Providence, those first days, wandering around in a stupor. I move my hand all the way left. Can I still crawl up the piano perfectly? My piano teacher called this
the chromatic battle
, and the goal was the whole succession of scales, without missing a note, in less than ten seconds.

Engage, Lizbeth!

But, just as I’m about to start, Jewellee’s red lips and the sound of her cloying, fake voice punctures my concentration. She and Cory are no doubt making out right this minute. I slam my hand down on the keys, and then my other hand. Frankenstein music reverberates off the cold, concrete walls. What’s the use? This piano is part of my old life.

I look around the boxlike space. The smooth granite countertops, the impeccable décor. Every painting hung level. Coasters are placed carefully on the coffee table, even though there’s nobody here to set down a glass. No cobwebs. No mouse droppings. No cat licking feces from its fur.

The piano tuned perfectly.

Mom worried that I was too obsessed with getting the notes just right, sometimes sitting on the bench for three hours straight until the tips of my fingers went numb.

Thinking about Mom, how angry I am with her, I pound out “Für Elise.” How could she just leave me like this? She wept that last morning, telling me that when it came to raising me, she had to admit defeat. She’d failed, she sobbed, botched it—this motherhood thing. Motherhood
thing
? What was she, a goat? And am I a pain-in-the-ass kid who needs to be removed in order to keep things going with production?

I slam my fingers through “Reuben and Rachel.” “Ta-ra-ra Boom-der-e.” “Pomp and Circumstance.” My entire recital in one fell swoop. And after that, I keep going, like an insane Tchaikovsky, sweat dripping from my forehead, my crazy, patchy hair bouncing off of my head in the reflection in the darkened window glass. Music will always be mine. Even if I suck at producing it, it won’t leave—can’t leave.

I can control this. If I miss a note, I start again. Every time I play a sharp instead of a flat, when my finger hits a crack, causing two keys instead of one to sound out, I make myself play the piece three more times with perfection, or another three will be added. On and on and on I play until eventually, I feel the keys beneath my cheek.