Crescendos usually lead somewhere—to some climactic event, a rousing finale, even a tremendous hush, a sweet piano. But occasionally, after a long, sustained crescendo, right after that uppermost point of tension, there is nothing.

Just a drop off into silence.

---

Friday night at Garrett’s I help him cook dinner. We grill steak, zucchini, and onions on kabobs, with goat cheese and raspberries on the side. I can’t stop with the raspberries—I eat all of mine and then start plucking from Garrett’s plate as well, and he sits and watches me with a look of charitable amusement. I get such a kick out of stealing from him, crossing into his territory so boldly. We both know I’ve got nothing to lose.

When we finish eating, I clear the table and do the dishes while he leans on the counter next to me, scrolling through his phone. We used to clean up together, but now he is content for me to do it on my own, and empowered by his mild reaction to the theft of his raspberries, I flick a bit of water at him. He cuts his eyes at me in warning, then resumes staring at his phone.

Fine. Something else, then. I rinse the glass I’m washing and place it in the drying rack. Pull my shirt off and toss it on the floor. Slide my pants down and kick them aside. I look over at him again, and after raking his eyes up and down my exposed skin, he goes back to his phone. Nothing.

Standing at the near-empty sink in my bra and underwear, I wash the remaining bowl and pan and set them in the drying rack.

Still nothing from Garrett. I pull a dishtowel from the drawer and dry all the dishes, put them away.

Not all.

There is one thing left on the counter: a knife, with a seductive, shining blade nearly the length of my forearm. I pick it up and hold it like a torch in my right hand, test how dangerous it can make me feel. See if it can tell me anything about who I am. That night with the boxing, the night Garrett choked me with his dick and grabbed my head and forced me to swallow his cum—that’s the night he told me who he was.

And I refused to listen.

“Watch,” I say, and I lay the knife’s edge across my wrist and press down, but not hard enough to draw blood. Am I as brave as my mother? I turn my eyes up to Garrett’s face.

His nostrils are flaring the same way they do when he watches me get myself off—he’s turned on by this. My eyes fill with hate but he holds my gaze, dares me to carry on with whatever game I think I’m playing, and after a while my hatred seeps away, replaced with resignation. I put the knife away in the drawer.

I’m supposed to be nervous about my audition tomorrow, but instead, here I am floating through the kitchen, floating over Garrett while he strips and fucks me, and that’s my tragic little shell down there with her face buried in a pillow, Superman whispering a reassuring mantra at her ear. Whispering You like it don’t you, you like being my fuck toy… Now more than ever his breath smells of wintergreen: cool and clean and refreshing.

---

I’m so chill about this audition I think I might actually be intimidating the other cellists who have yet to play. They’re all wide-eyed and fidgety; I am extraordinarily relaxed.

And I’m next. I’m about to play, about to have my final chance to prove that I’m good, or at least as good as a few believed I was. I guess I won’t get to know the end result, but nobody ever really does, do they? Because there is no end, ever, to anything. You’re either like this forever, in agony, or you’re fucking dead and it doesn’t matter anyway. And death is forever, too.

We might as well go in swinging and whatever happens, happens.

The door is opening, and someone is coming out of the room, one of the upperclassmen. He gives me a nod and a tight smile. He did great, actually—I heard him through the door—and I tell him so. His smile widens and he thanks me as I walk through the open door.

I don’t know what I expected—an audition panel, maybe, several judges in a lineup with pencils in hand, ready to jot notes about my playing. But it’s just one woman and a video camera on a tripod. She’s not taking notes at all. She might not even be a musician.

Whatever.

She greets me with a “Hello, how are you doing today?” and shakes my hand, and then I sit in the chair in the middle of the room. It’s the strangest thing, how light I feel, as if the Earth has lost some of its gravity. I’ve been waiting all day for anxiety to begin its squeeze on my heart because, whether my future in this body plays out or not, this was supposed to be my Big Moment to shine. But…nothing. I’m so relaxed I think I might actually float away.

I place my cello’s endpin into the rubber stopper on the floor and check the pitch of each string. The woman, who has told me her name but I’ve already forgotten it, reminds me to play my audition in the order posted on the flyer outside the room—Bach, Concerto, Orchestral Excerpts—and then asks me to state my name and school.

“Malory Shoemaker,” I say, looking into the camera’s round black eye. “Florida East Coast University.”

I open with the Bach, the prelude to the sixth suite, and immediately lose myself in the notes. The room has a wooden floor, a high ceiling, and only a few hard chairs as furniture, so every note echoes beautifully, as if I’m performing in a bathroom. I’m not using sheet music, but after I’ve played through what I know is two pages, the woman waves a hand at me to stop. “Next, please.” Her voice is free from inflection, neutral, probably so as not to give candidates any indication as to how well they’re doing.

I nod, and after a preparatory inhale—not from nerves but because it’s necessary with the Elgar—I begin. My thoughts go straight to my mother now, to her high, round cheekbones when she smiled, her pearl-white teeth, and then to the sadness that overcame her and carried her away. I wonder if she felt truly sad, a crying, desolate, hopeless kind of sad, or if she felt more the way I do: that ending it was simply inevitable, an obvious choice when compared with the alternative of living with herself.

It’s harder to sing her death now, because now I just don’t miss her the way I did before. I don’t know what will come after, but I have a sweet glimmer of hope that I might get to see her, to tell her that I am sorry for not seeing what was right in front of me. That I am sorry for being so happy when I thought she was getting better. That I am sorry I made my father so angry. I failed her, I failed Liza, and I confirmed what my father had been telling me all along: that I am a stupid, gullible fool—weak. Impotent. And since she died, everything I’ve done, every achievement, every A, every scholarship, has been a vain effort to prove him wrong. And I failed at that, too.

Today, I am not singing my mother’s death. I’m singing my own.

---

Okay, now I’m nervous. I just played the best audition of my life and I sort of want to know if I won the fellowship to Aspen, but…that isn’t the plan. I mean, it was the plan before, but not now.

Instead I think of that knife in Garrett’s kitchen drawer, how sharp and shiny it is, and I think of the image I’ve been quietly painting in my head all this time, the one where I follow the path my mother laid, down into the red water. It’s fitting, isn’t it, for me to go that way? We’ll have come full circle, she and I.

I’ll write a letter to Liza. Poor Liza. From the day I saw our mother in that bathtub full of blood, I thought of Liza as my one good reason not to succumb. But Liza doesn’t need me—she’s strong. She’s smart. She was the first to recognize what my father was, the first to distrust him. I can remember my mother playfully nudging her—Liza, don’t be disrespectful to your father, he’s just pretending—when Liza would yell at him because he was teasing the dog by dangling a piece of steak over his snout. And when she told me the things she heard him whispering to our mother in the dark, I didn’t believe her. Didn’t until he started whispering those things to me too, but me, weak as I was, I couldn’t save my mother from him, any more than I could save myself. You’re book smart, but you have no common sense, Malory. With a body like yours, you’re destined to be a whore. And the one time I came unfrozen: If you tell, you will regret it. It’s easier to see truth in retrospect, but Liza saw it from the beginning. None of this is her fault. So I’ll write her a nice letter to make sure she understands that she is blameless.

Still. I’m nervous now, way more than I was at the audition. It’s like, now that it’s over, the Earth got all its gravity back and then some. I’d like to know how it went, how I compared. I’d like to know if I got the fellowship. That would be nice, to know.