Crickets, Part 3
Part 3 of 4
This is chapter three of an ongoing serial. If you’re looking for chapter one, click here.
Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner
Third Movement
I understand the words my mom is saying, but they don’t make any sense. The image that keeps playing in my head is of Hector nodding to me as I clock in for the day, or signing time sheets at the end of the week, or passing out twenty dollar gift cards to all the guys at Christmas. I hadn’t realized until this moment just how much he served as a pillar in my life.
Sturdy. Dependable. Boring, even. Right up until the pillar falls.
Hector’s funeral is on a Sunday, and we have to close down the store because pretty much everyone from work turns up. I feel guilty being there, but it would have been cowardly to stay home. I can’t shake the idea that Hector’s death is no coincidence.
Fours said there would be a price for breaking the rules, and that I wasn’t allowed to know what it was. Mom said the call came in on Friday evening, about twenty four hours after I met Fours for our usual lesson. I could probably get the exact time of the 911 call if I wanted it, but I don’t. I’m smart enough to allow myself at least a sliver of doubt.
Even so, I end up missing three days of school. Mom’s pretty understanding on the first day. She lets me sleep in and makes pancakes to cheer me up, which doesn’t work because I’m not actually depressed. What I am is afraid. Afraid that it could have happened to someone else, someone I care about more than a sixty year old coworker. Someone I can’t afford to lose.
Mom’s patience runs out on Wednesday morning, but I don’t care, and she’s too tired from work the night before to make sure I wake up in time for the bus. I make it up to her by cooking her favorite breakfast—cheese omelettes and coffee—but it doesn’t work on her any better than the pancakes worked on me.
“I’ll drive you to school,” she says as soon as the plates are clean. “Better late than sorry. Do you need a note?”
“I’ll go tomorrow,” I say. “Promise.”
“Jake.”
“I just need some time to think. I’ll do my homework today and get the house cleaned up. Just one more day. Please.”
She frowns, but I can tell she’s going to fold. Luck is on my side for two reasons. First, she has no idea how close Hector and I were, which means she doesn’t know how close we weren’t. Second, I’m actually being honest here. I really do just need some time to think.
“Tomorrow,” she agrees. “I’ll drive you.”
“I can take the bus.”
“I’ll drive you anyway.”
I make good on my promise to clean up, which gives me something to do until Mom leaves for work around noon. It also keeps my hands busy while my mind churns over the impossible question. Could Fours have had something to do with Hector’s death? I believe it, but even if it’s true, I can’t find an answer to the obvious next question.
How?
I know—have always known—that there’s something weird about Fours. He’s inhumanly good at the violin, and the first time I think that word, inhuman, I realize how well it fits him. I can’t point to a single detail that gives the game away. It’s all of it, together: his clothes, his truck, his campsite in the woods, the trail that always has just enough moonlight to see by. He lives like a character on a set, like one of those movies where everything happens in one room and the weather outside never changes.
The other detail that comes to mind is that I’ve never, ever told anyone about Fours. Not my mom, none of my friends at school. I could rationalize it, pretend that I just wanted to avoid questions, but this isn’t true. The real reason is that I’ve always quietly believed Fours existed just for me. That he would disappear if anyone else knew about him.
Sometime around six o’clock, my phone rings. I don’t recognize the number, but the display says it’s a New York area code, and most spam callers spoof your local area code if they can. In any case, I need a break from my own thoughts, even if it’s just to handle a wrong number. I answer the phone.
“Hello?”
“Is this Jake?” It’s a girl’s voice, but I don’t know who it belongs to.
“Yeah,” I say. “Who’s this?”
“Emily. From class?”
There’s a disorienting moment where I pull my phone away from my ear and just stare at it. The day is already holding too many impossible things. There isn’t any room for this one.
“Jake? Are you there?”
“I’m here,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
“Ms. Landy gave me your number. I guess we did okay on our audition, so she made us section leaders. Congrats, by the way. Are you… do you have a minute to talk?”
“Okay,” I say, drowning. “Yeah, I’m free.”
“Okay, good. Which, um, house is yours?”
The first thing I feel is a flash of bitter shame as I hear her substitute the word trailer for house, which is fine when my mom and I do it, but never sits right in anyone else’s mouth. But this is nothing compared to the sudden realization that follows. Because if she’s deciding between those two words, she must be looking at my trailer/house, which means she’s probably wandering around outside.
Stupidly, I wander over to the window to look for her, but the blinds are all the way up, and she spots me as soon as I mark out the unfamiliar car in the lot.
“Never mind,” she says on the phone. “I see you.”
Then she hangs up.
I’ll say this for panic, it clears your head of everything but itself. Guilt, apprehension, shame, my own middle name—gone, all gone. Instead of doing anything useful, I just stand there and stare at the door while the universe narrows to a single point twenty seconds in the future when Emily will, presumably, knock.
She knocks.
My phone is still in my hand, but my brain can only handle one thing at a time, so before I walk over to answer the door, I click the Add Contact button and type in Emily.
Last name? Violin. Why not?
I answer the door.
The nose stud is back today. It’s the first thing I notice. She’s also wearing a dark blue sweater, even though it isn’t cold yet. Maybe she’s one of those people who dresses for the calendar instead of the weather, or maybe she’s still thinking in New York time. Is it cold there in September? Probably cold enough.
“Come in,” I say, completely on auto-pilot now, too confused to say or do anything that makes any sense.
“Thanks.”
Emily walks in and I let the door hang open by an inch because this seems less creepy somehow. Instead of gesturing to the couch, I walk over to the kitchen and grab two glasses, which I fill with stale Coke from the fridge. Then we sit down.
“Sorry for the other day,” Emily says. “It was kind of a rough week for me, and I just wanted to be done with it.”
“It’s fine,” I say. Then, realizing this isn’t good enough, “I’m sorry, too. I probably should’ve been nicer to the new kid on her first day.”
She smiles at this, and we defuse the tension by sipping our drinks.
“So why’d you come over?” I ask. Out of the hundred and fifty questions I’ve come up with in the last thirty seconds, this one seems like the most important.
“To check on you, I guess.”
“But we aren’t friends.”
This makes her grin again, but she can’t disagree. “No, we aren’t friends. But I had a friend a long time ago, before I moved, and I said some pretty fucked up things to her that I never really got a chance to apologize for. So now I drive around town and check up on boys from school that I don’t even like.”
“You have a car?” I ask, even though I’ve already seen it.
“Yeah.”
“Nice.”
We take another sip of Coke.
“Listen,” I start, “it’s cool that you came by-”
“Ms. Landy said your mom called and told her someone had died. A friend of the family, or something like that.”
“Hector Rosales,” I say. “He owned the hardware store where I worked.”
“Were you close?”
“Not really, but I feel like it was my fault.”
I realize this sounds insane as soon as I say it, but it doesn’t take long to come up with an explanation. “He had a stroke while he was closing up the store. I usually close on Friday nights, but I asked for the day off so I could focus on the audition, so I wasn’t there when he fell. Mom said it was a couple hours before anyone found him and called 911.”
This isn’t the exact truth, because I haven’t worked Fridays since school started back up, but the guilt rings true enough.
“Bargaining,” Emily says. “It happens to people sometimes when they lose somebody. You obsess over the things you didn’t do, the rules you didn’t follow. Your brain is trying to protect you by telling you that you have more control than you do. You accept responsibility for this death if it means you can prevent the next one.”
“I guess so,” I say, unconvinced—and more than a little unnerved. I get that she’s trying to make me feel better, but her talk of bargains and rules hits too close to the truth for my liking. “How do you know so much about this stuff?”
“Like I said, I had a friend.”
“Oh.”
After a line like that, there’s nowhere for the conversation to go but up, so we talk about class for a bit. Emily says that Ms. Landy’s already chosen a piece for the winter concert, so we listen to the first few minutes together on her phone. It’s Johan Halvorsen’s Symphony no. 2, and it reminds me of old European movies where villagers chase each other through the woods.
This leads to a long conversation about a movie that neither of us can remember, though we can both hum the same two minutes of the score. I knock over my glass while pretending to conduct, and she soaks the cuff of her sweater helping me clean up the mess. We talk about school, and summer jobs, and her hometown in New York, and a hundred other things.
She gets up to leave around eight o’clock and I walk her to the door. “Before you go,” I say, pulling my phone out of my pocket. “What’s your last name?’
I hand over my phone so she can type it in and she laughs when she sees that I already have her as Emily Violin. Her eyebrows scrunch together while she types in her name and I suddenly realize that I’ve been alone with a girl in my house for the last two hours, and she’s holding something of mine, and the clicking sound as her thumbs hit the keys feel like static on the back of my neck.
***
The storm breaks on Saturday when word gets around that a girl came over while my mom was at work. The lecture starts somewhere around seven in the morning and doesn’t stop until dinner is on the table. We both go hoarse from arguing all day, so we order pizza and rot in front of the TV for the rest of the night.
The next day, Emily calls to ask if she can come over. Mom looks like she’s about to either yell or cry, but since she may as well meet the girl who’s having my kid or giving me STDs or both, she relents. Emily charms her, of course, and Sunday becomes a regular thing.
“Are you two dating?” Mom asks me one night.
I can’t help but laugh. “Two weeks ago you called her a slut.”
“Don’t use that word,” Mom snaps. “Besides, that was different. I didn’t know she was nice.”
Truth be told, this isn’t an unwelcome fantasy, but I can’t imagine it ever happening. Emily’s already made dozens of friends at school, so she’s never alone, and I can’t ask her out in front of my mom. I don’t have a car, I can’t afford to spend what little I make at work, and she already knows that I live in a trailer. You can only put so many nails in a coffin.
“No, we’re not dating,” I say, and Mom leaves it at that.
Between school, orchestra practice, part-time shifts at work, and Emily, I manage to go a whole month without thinking about Fours. Even weirder, it’s Emily who brings it up, completely by accident.
“Have you ever heard of the Fossegrim?”
“What?”
Mom is out on the front porch trying to figure out where to hang a basket of mums she picked up this morning. Emily and I are done practicing for the day, so the windows are open to let in the cool October air.
“It’s some kind of Norwegian monster,” she says. “Or fairy. Hard to tell. Johan Halvorsen composed a song about one.”
“What does it do?”
“It’s supposed to be really good at the violin. Like, scary good.” She holds up a phone, is quoting directly from Wikipedia now: “Fossegrim is said to be willing to teach away his skills in exchange for a food offering made on a Thursday evening and in secrecy. A white he-goat thrown with head turned away into a waterfall that flows northwards, or smoked mutton. If the offering is satisfactory, he will take the pupil’s right hand and draw the fingers along the strings until they all bleed, after which he will be able to play so well that the trees shall dance and torrents in their fall stand still.”
My hands go cold. I get up to shut the window, then sit back down. It’s a long time before I can manage more than a whisper.
“I’ve never heard of it,” I say. “But I think one lives in the woods behind my house.”
Okay, this whole charming, coming-of-age tale has suddenly taken a totally unexpected, creepy turn!