Wayfarer

There were nights Etta dreamt of drowning, of sinking further and further into the black heart of the sea. No one came to rescue her.

She’d had to rescue herself.

It was only that…now and then, she caught a fragment of a memory long enough to examine it, each a lesson in heartbreak. Nicholas’s secret smile in the rain. Henry’s eyes, watching her play for the tsar. Her mother’s pale hand reaching for her, just as the timeline reset.

The sudden roll of applause startled Etta out of her thoughts. She straightened, shifting her violin out from under her arm, feeling something like a warm buzz move against her skin. The orchestra cleared out through the other stage wing, allowing the senior orchestra members to flood out to claim their seats.

Gabby flashed Etta a huge smile as she stepped out with the others to renewed applause, taking over Etta’s post as the concertmaster. The rest of the students whispered words of good luck and encouragement to Etta as they passed by.

“All right, here we go,” Mr. Davis said, coming up behind her. “I’m so grateful this worked out—I can’t thank you enough for stepping up like this.”

Sasha Chung, a celebrated violin virtuoso new to this version of the timeline, had been slated to perform Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor for the concert; the idea being, Etta supposed, that Sasha would be an additional audience draw and help further raise the profile of the program. On the way to the airport in Paris, however, she’d been in a car accident that had sent her to the hospital, leaving them without a soloist.

“Thank you for the opportunity,” Etta said sincerely.

She liked Mr. Davis; it was easy to return the smile he gave her, to chuckle as he nudged her and whispered conspiratorially, “I think you play it better anyway.”

The orchestra fell silent, leaving only a few stray coughs from the audience to fill the darkness.

“That’s our cue,” Mr. Davis said, motioning her to step out first. Etta ducked around the curtain, half-blinded by the lights at the stage’s edge as she approached her spot near to the conductor’s stand. Because she knew it would make her laugh, Etta reached out and gravely shook Gabby’s hand, the way she would greet any concertmaster, and her friend turned pink with the effort to hold her giggles in. Mr. Davis situated himself at the front of the orchestra, and glanced her way.

She looked out into the audience one last time, at the way the lights under each tier of seating looked like necklaces strung with stars.

In most concertos, there was some small slice of time before the solo violinist entered the piece. But Mendelssohn broke with convention, and the solo violinist was present from the beginning, playing the tune in E minor that he once told a friend gave him “no peace” until he finally situated it in a concerto. Etta had always loved that story. There was something beautifully human in trying to capture a feeling, a fragment of notes, and translating it all into the universal language of music before it fled.

Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor fluidly shifted between three movements: allegro molto appassionato in E minor, andante in C major, and, finally, allegretto non troppo—allegro molto vivace in E major.

All right, Etta thought, lifting the violin to her shoulder, I hope you’re listening, Alice. Because she was going to play the hell out of this piece. She was going to bleed every last ounce of emotion out of it that she could.

Mr. Davis raised his hands.

Etta took a deep breath into her belly.

Felt the ripple of excitement race along her bare arms.

They began.

It was hard to describe exactly what she felt when she played. The best she had ever come up with was a feeling of being whole, though she hadn’t been aware something was lacking to begin with. She became a drop in a larger stream, driving steadily forward without hesitation. It was a voice of beauty when her own faltered.

Etta knew this concerto so well that she barely needed to think through the bravura of ascending notes, which led to the orchestra restating the opening theme back to her. By the time she reached the cadenza, moved through its rhythmic shifts from quavers to quaver triplets and semiquavers, her muscles were warm from the ricochet bowing, her blood thrumming. Etta moved with the music, twisting, dipping, eyes closed. Relief flooded her—that she could still feel Alice nearby when she played, that it was still possible to know the joy of it when Alice wasn’t there to experience it with her. And she wondered again what had ever been the point of holding back when it felt so good to fly.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mr. Davis relax and lose himself in the piece. When she hit her first brief rest, Etta risked a glance out to the audience. Something pale caught and drew her gaze to the right end of the front row.

Rose.

The word swung wildly through her mind. But she was impossible in every way, by every definition: impossible to tame, impossible to capture, impossible to stop.

Her mother wore a navy dress, the bandage around her throat half-hidden by a scarf, gazing up at Etta with a faint smile on her face. Etta sucked in her next breath as a quiet gasp, the sight of Rose working through her like a lightning bolt, stunning her so greatly she nearly missed her next entrance back into the piece. But once she’d seen her, Etta found she couldn’t stop looking at her, at her mother’s expression of pride. When Rose turned to look to the other end of the row, Etta nearly dropped her violin.

Henry sat on the edge of his seat, his elbows braced against his knees, his hands covering his mouth, as if trying to hold something—some word, some feeling—in by force. Etta’s heart began to pound, and she felt as if she were rising off the stage as she coaxed the music from her violin. She wanted to shut it off, that swell of emotion in her chest, but the moment she saw the light catch the tears in his eyes, Etta had to look away to keep from crying herself.