Crickets, Part 5
Part 5 of 4
This is the final chapter of an ongoing serial. If you’re looking for chapter one, click here.
Crickets
by J. Kyle Turner
Fifth Movement - Seven Years Later
I spot Emily as soon as she walks into the restaurant, so I wave to spare her the trouble of asking the hostess. She waves back with a smile and walks over to the table, where the server meets her with a drinks menu and talks her through the white wine section. She orders a pinot grigio to match mine and the server disappears into the kitchen to fetch it.
“So did you just come from work?” I ask.
“Last show of the season,” she says. “Sorry I’m a little late, had to make an appearance at the after party.”
“Anything I’ve heard of?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“I won’t laugh,” I promise.
She wrinkles her nose. “Albany Symphony presents Shrek Forever After.”
She’s right; I do laugh. But so does she. Anyone who makes a career of this kind of thing inevitably ends up playing a few crowd pleasers. One good franchise weekend might pay for a month of Mozart.
The server shows up with her drink and a basket of focaccia bread, and we toast before digging in. “To finally making it big,” I say, tilting my glass toward hers.
“And the sooner, the better,” she answers with a clink. “Speaking of, how are things with you? Still working at the Davidson Theatre?”
“For now,” I say. “But the program director’s nephew just finished at OSU, so I think my days are numbered.”
“Ouch.”
“It’s fine,” I say with a shrug. “Probably about time I moved on. That’s actually why I came up. There was a conference in Ithaca last week, and I thought it would be good to rub a few elbows, try to get my name out there.”
“Ithaca isn’t far,” she says. “From Albany, I mean.”
“Not too far,” I agree.
We talk all the way through dinner. I catch her up on life in Ohio, my mom’s new apartment, a few of our old haunts. She gives me the dirt on the Albany Symphony, and I dutifully take her side in every squabble. It’s remarkable how easily we fall back into it after years of one-off messages and birthday texts.
“I was kind of surprised when your name popped up on my phone,” she says.
“I figured it was a good chance to catch up. I’m glad you were free.”
“Oh, I’m free most nights,” she says. “I don’t really have anything serious going on, outside of work.”
“Same here,” I say. “Nothing serious, I mean.”
Dinner ends way too quickly, so we wander around for a bit to find somewhere else to sit and talk. Emily has a few favorite places in town, but they’re all closed by now, so we end up walking for half an hour in the spring weather.
“I thought New York never slept.”
“That’s New York City,” she explains. “Albany goes to sleep at ten.”
“Want to look something up? Try a new place?”
“Sure.”
We meet in the parking lot of a honky tonk bar just north of Washington Park. We grin at each other as we walk in, mostly to say sure, okay, nobody’s first choice, but we can pretend for a night. I hold the door for her and mime tipping my hat to the bartender as we walk in, and she hits me on the shoulder to tell me to stop.
There’s a bluegrass band up on stage at the back of the bar, so we grab a booth by the window where it’s a little quieter. We order a pair of beers and lean toward each other over the table to talk.
“Fiddle player’s pretty good,” I half-shout.
“Not bad,” she agrees.
The set ends with a decent cover of Tom Dooley, which is forty percent of what I know about bluegrass. The lead singer announces a fifteen minute break, and the bar returns to what I assume is the normal, steady hum of conversation. I can hear people at the nearest table if I strain to listen, but just barely. The tall booths and low lighting make it seem like we’re the only two people in our little corner of the bar.
“Can I ask you something weird?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Was any of it real?”
I know what she means, of course. I take a sip of my beer, not because I’m nervous about answering, but because I want to be as honest as I can, and old memories take a while to dredge up.
“I only went back to his campsite once,” I begin, a little unsteadily. “It was the first Thursday after graduation, just after dark. I wanted to apologize, I think. Or thank him. Or both. I don’t really know.”
“What did he say?”
“He wasn’t there. I’ve walked that path a hundred times, mostly in the dark. I could walk it blindfolded, point to the exact spot where his truck used to be, but it was gone. The whole campsite, everything. It wasn’t like he disappeared. It was like no one ever lived there in the first place.”
“Oh.”
“But to answer your question, yes. I think he was real, and I think it probably would’ve worked out the way you thought if we’d gone through with it.”
Even in the half darkness, I can see the look of hurt that crosses her face. This is the real reason I dialed her number, why I drove all the way to Albany in the dark. She hides her expression by taking a sip of her own beer, then setting the bottle down a little too hard on the table. We sit quietly while she tilts the bottle back and forth with her thumb and index finger.
Finally, she asks. “So why didn’t we?”
It isn’t hard to answer her. Especially since I’ve already decided to be honest.
“Because I was scared,” I say. “In that moment, thinking about Fours dragging my fingers over the strings until they bled, it just terrified me. I was scared of doing something wrong, of finding my mom dead in the trailer if I broke some rule we didn’t know, of a million different things. But mostly,” I pause here, because this is the hard part, “because I was in love with you, and ashamed of myself, and Fours wasn’t going to solve either of those things for me, no matter how good he made me at the violin.”
She tears up at this, and it’s a wretched feeling to know that I’ve piled one hurt on top of another. But I have to hope that this is the kind of hurt that heals, the kind that draws the poison out.
“I’m sorry I pressured you into it,” she says.
“I’m sorry I chickened out.”
“Guess we were doomed from the start.”
I shrug. “I’ve been doomed before. I’ve survived it every time so far.”
We settle our tab and head for the door. It’s already late, but I know that if the night ends here, with us driving separate cars in opposite directions, it’ll be another seven years before we talk again, so I suggest a walk in the park to clear off my buzz. Emily nods in silent assent. Before we cross the street, I stop by my car and pull my violin case out of the trunk.
“Bring yours, too,” I say. “I want to show you something.”
She looks doubtful, but we stop by her car anyway and she digs her violin case out of the backseat.
On the way into the park, we pass a sign that says the park closed two hours ago, but we ignore it and head toward the bridge. Crickets sing to us from the far banks as we cross, and a cool breeze sets the trees rustling, swaying in the dark. I find a bench on the other side of the water and take a seat. Emily stands a few feet off as I pull out my violin and set the bow across the neck. I don’t know what I’m waiting for yet, but I know that I’ll recognize it when I hear it.
The breeze fades. A cloud passes in front of the moon. The whole city is blessedly, miraculously quiet. In the midst of that vast silence, I hear a lone cricket chirp the first half of a question. Three little quarter notes in the darkness, like the beginning of a waltz.
I answer with three notes of my own, counting the beats. The cricket chirps again before I finish, and I realize we’re playing a five-step waltz rather than the traditional three, so I adjust. This time, when the cricket chirps, I answer with four eighth notes: one, two, three, four-and-five-and, one, two, three, four-and-five-and…
The wind picks up again, and the rest of the night rushes in to join the song: a crescendo of rustling leaves, the rolling timpani of a distant train, the trills and flourishes of mockingbirds and whip-poor-wills. It’s only a shadow of that first night, when we played Verklärte Nacht in the woods and the moon sank lower in the sky just to hear us better—but it’s close.
After half a minute of playing, I lose the thread. My impromptu orchestra wanders in twenty different directions until I’m no longer playing with the night, but against it. I hold one final note, then let my violin fall to rest in my lap.
Emily’s standing there with her arms folded across her stomach when I finish. It’s too dark to see the look on her face, and I don’t think she wants me to.
“Sorry,” I say. “I just… figured I owed you a little magic.”
She takes a deep breath. It’s a long time before she says anything.
“How does it end?”
“What?” This isn’t the question I was expecting.
Emily sits down next to me on the bench and lifts the buckles on her violin case. I watch as she pulls out her violin and rests her chin against the chin rest. Her posture is still flawless, her arm perfectly motionless, perfectly relaxed. She could be a statue, if not for the tears running down her cheeks.
“How does the song end, Jake?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “However we want it to, I guess.”
She nods and closes her eyes, and I do the same. A few seconds later we hear it, a thin sound that rises like moonlight over the trees. I wait for her to take the lead. She does so a moment later with a long, slow pull that cuts through the empty night. It sounds like hope, and heartbreak, and seven years of hard waiting.
We play. We play until our fingers go numb, until the trees lean in and the clouds fall still in their circuits, and even the crickets stop to listen.
THE END
God, this is so achingly beautiful!