January
She plays for an empty room.
Her fingers slide up and down the neck effortlessly, dance from string to string with the intimate familiarity that only comes with years and years of practice. From her cello she coaxes long, deep cries, and tremulous notes that hover in the air like a question posed to the universe, knowing it won’t be answered. A music stand is positioned in front of her, sheaves of music spread across it, some carelessly collapsed to the floor, but she plays with her eyes closed. She sways with her instrument, and the glossy red body of it glimmers in the sunlight filtering through the leaves outside her window.
Her room is small but bears all the markings of a haven. Her bed is rumpled from a fitful night, and still cradles a small teddy bear whose foot is sewn with her initials. There are scratches on the door jamb from where her parents measured her growth from toddlerhood to now. Warm lamplight pools on the floor, despite the sun streaming through her gauzy green curtains. The small desk situated in front of the window has chipped black paint and music notes carved into its surface, probably from some evening in adolescence when she daydreamed of being a famous composer instead of focusing on the algebra homework which always vexed her. A small, precarious stack of books balances on the edge, pushed there by piles of sheet music separated out across the rest of the space. The books, too, look well-loved. Their cracked spines and bowed covers and dogeared corners—the pages of which contain small sticky tabs--boast many rereads.
Photos line the walls, of January with her parents and a street violinist on the pier when she was six; January playing her first recital at ten, her cello then smaller, darker, older; January and her friends at camp when she was sixteen, arms slung around each other and bows dangling in their hands; her granny and grandad renewing their vows at eighty (two years before he passed, but five years after the dementia started to set in and creep its way through her granny’s brain) where January served as the officiant at nineteen; and more, chronicling the story of January’s life. Some are framed, some hang on a thin wire, held in place by a clothespin, and still others are chained to the wall by pushpins.
There is nothing in this room January loves more than the instrument in her hands.
Her door opens—she hears it open, but she doesn’t care—and nothing changes for the several moments that January continues to play, drawing her bow across the strings with precise, practiced grace. When the last note dissipates, she slowly opens her eyes, blinking against the light.
Her mom leans in the doorframe, watching January with a ghost of a smile and her head tilted to one side. “I think you were flat on the last bit.”
January inhales sharply, but a twitch of her mother’s lips unravels the ball of anxiety that surged to her throat. She rolls her eyes. “Thank you for your humorous contribution, Dawn, it is appreciated and not at all ill-timed.”
“It suits a daughter who still uses her mother’s first name to express displeasure.”
Dawn looks at January with raised eyebrows, and lets herself into the room entirely, drifting toward the bed where January’s battered old backpack sits open, clothes and toiletries spilling out of it haphazardly. Without another word, she begins refolding her daughter’s clothes.
January makes no move to help her mom, instead draping her arms over her cello and hugging it to her chest, the way a child would a precious toy. The way January once held the bear on the bed. Her eyes fix on the music in front of her, and she takes deep breaths, trying to settle the sudden flood of anxiety coursing through her. It isn’t the same anxiety her mom encouraged mere seconds ago, but a much deeper kind. This is an anxiety she has felt her entire life—a thrilling, terrifying kind.
Her heart beats out a hard, heavy rhythm in her ears. Her right leg bounces rapidly, rubbing against her cello.
“Was it good?” she asks, with nonchalance she doesn’t feel.
Her mom could scoff; January braces herself for the dismissal. But Dawn’s hands slow, tangled in a soft navy-blue sweater that is faded and thin and admittedly a little too shrunken to fit January as well as it once did. She sets the sweater down gently, and looks above January’s bed, at the large painting that dominates her wall.
It’s a painting of January, but no one knows it exists except those closest to her. Only those closest to her know that her mother spent weeks in her studio, trying to perfect a portrait of her daughter that captured her in her most genuine form. Many canvases had been discarded in favor of this one. January, with her wine-red hair all swept over one shoulder, didn’t look at the artist. In fact, she didn’t look at anything. As it happened so many times when she played, her green eyes were closed, the slight purple of her eyelids painted in such detail that the blue veins crisscrossing the thin surface were visible, a bewitching detail that made something catch in January’s throat the first time she ever saw the painting unveiled. But it was a small detail, lost in the grandness of the rest of the image, which featured January arching her body against that of her cello, head tilted just enough that, while you could see the veins on her eyelids if you looked hard enough, the most accentuated part of her face was her jawline, and her slightly parted lips, the rest of it mostly obscured by the angle and her hair. Her head is thrown back to expose her neck and collarbones. The scroll of the cello nearly kisses her cheekbone.
Her fingers, long and pale and delicate, poised against the neck of the cello, are bone white as she presses the strings down. Her opposite hand pulls the bow so far out that her elbow is almost, but not quite, totally straight. The color is such that her cello is the brightest part of the picture. Her mother cast her in a forest green dress, which January has never owned, but it complements the red of her hair and her instrument. The background is black. It’s as if January was thrust into a spotlight.
“January,” her mother sighs. “It was perfect.” She turns to face her daughter but doesn’t approach. She sits on the edge of her bed and smiles. “It always is.”
Some of that burning fear fades away at her mother’s words, but another small, nagging part of January’s mind insists: She’s lying because she loves you.
“If it’s not,” her mom continues, as if reading her thoughts, “the judges will tell you and you can come home and I’ll admit they’re absolutely right, and I’m a fraud and a coward. I know nothing about music. I’ve coddled you all these years, and bribed every tutor, teacher, friend, and family member to sing your praises.”
The burning evaporates. Her leg stills, and her heart hums more quietly.
“Thanks, Mom,” January laughs. She lowers her cello to its side, using all the care she would to defuse a bomb. She sets about collecting the sheets of music scattered on her floor, organizing and returning them to their rightful places with the music that remains on her stand. Her mom watches her for a few seconds, like she wants to say something, before she returns wordlessly to her packing.
It’s always been like this between them. Neither of them is particularly inclined to verbally express themselves. January is a musician and a composer, her cello an extension of herself that speaks more eloquently than she could ever hope to. And Dawn is a painter, whose thoughts are more beautifully expressed through brushstrokes coming together over months than clumsily constructed sentences in the heat of the moment.
Sometimes they want to say something to the other, some grand expression of love. But words fail them.
That’s why January has the painting.
And it’s why January plays her cello in the living room every night, even when she doesn’t want to, and why her mom lingers every night, even when she’s exhausted.
They finish packing and fill the silence with small talk (“Dad said your car still isn’t done, so he’s sending James to come get you.” “Naturally.” “It’s not his fault you didn’t get your tires changed when he told you to.” “Yes, but it is his fault he forgot I am fundamentally incapable of caring about cars, and cannot be trusted to maintain the integrity of my vehicle.” “Ah, yes. We failed you as parents by not instilling you with any automotive interests.” “Precisely.”), and Dawn follows January down the stairs with the backpack while January lugs her cello in its case in one hand and carries her suit in a plastic bag in her other.
Granny waits for them in the living room, although January can tell, just from the slight indent of her brows, she doesn’t really know where she is or who she is waiting for.
“Mom, January is leaving in a couple minutes,” Dawn says. Her voice is light, but January didn’t miss the weary expression that flowed across her face the moment she, too, realized Granny isn’t here with them in this moment. “She’s going to her festival. They’re going to play her songs. You’re going to have to say goodbye for the weekend, wish her luck.”
Granny frowns. Dawn doesn’t look at January, but January glances at her in time to see the way her jaw clenches.
January drapes her plastic bag over the back of her father’s armchair, which is nearest the front door, and settles her cello case next to it. She brushes her mom’s arm with her fingertips when she passes her, crossing the room to crouch in front of Granny’s chair.
Her heart twinges when she takes her grandmother’s hands. It is strange, the things passed on through a family. People always think of eye color, hair color, intelligence, trauma, talent.
But January has her mother’s hands. And Granny’s.
“Hey, Granny,” she says, brightly. Granny watches her without recognition. January plows forward, rubbing her thumb over the back of Granny’s hands; it keeps her calm. If January doesn’t hold her hands, she has a tendency to tear at her nails until she bleeds. Her mother told her, once, that it was something Granny used to do when Dawn was a child. She would sit up late at night, and when Dawn would wake up and wander out of her room to find her mother, Granny was always sitting in her chair in the living room, staring at nothing, ripping at her own hands. “I leave for the festival today. Do you remember me telling you about it? It’s for student composers. There are really talented judges going this year. The group with the best arrangement can earn scholarships. And the composer is offered a chance to meet with some powerful people in the industry.”
She waits, and she tries to swallow her disappointment when Granny says nothing. She only peers at January with skeptical, confused blue-grey eyes, and shrinks back into her chair a little bit.
January’s smile emerges, wobbly, and she pats her grandmother’s hand—thin and fragile and veiny, but still every bit as delicate as January’s own. “It’s okay, Granny. I’ll see you when I come home. Be good for Mom and Dad, okay? I love you.”
She starts to rise, turning in the same movement. But Granny, with unexpected force, holds tightly onto January’s hand, and January freezes, half-crouched and half-turned away. When she looks back at her grandmother, her heart catches in her throat.
Granny stares at her with intense, startling clarity. “Be careful,” she whispers. “You be careful, Edith. Don’t get separated from the group. It’s not safe.”
For a moment, January hesitates, a half-dozen questions poised to escape her tongue. But in the split second before she can ask, her grandmother relaxes her vice-like grip and retreats into herself once more, and her mother’s hand falls on January’s shoulder. When January looks at her mother, she can feel her face contorted in a mask of confusion, but Dawn only gives the slightest shake of her head.
“Mom—” January starts.
“I don’t know,” Dawn says, voice low. “I don’t know.”
She can’t bring herself to look at her grandmother again; Granny won’t know who she is, like most days, but January can’t bear that heartbreak more than she has today. So, even though she would ordinarily turn back, coax her Granny into conversation, and try to feel out the landmines of her memory to discover what might trip her back into the present, January leaves her eyes fixed on her hands, crosses back to her instrument, and stares out the window while she waits for James. Dawn offers Granny hot green tea and honey sticks, and Granny mumbles something under her breath. Dawn sighs.
January has learned something about communication and love since Dawn fought her dad to bring Granny into their home, instead of leaving her in the community she and Granddad had lived in before he died. As it turns out, two people can communicate exclusively through body language and eye contact. Sometimes a sigh. Whispered words too low to be intended for someone’s ears. Silence is deliberate.
Their silence is different from the soft, sweet silence shared between January and Dawn.
It is a painful thing, to love someone who has forgotten they once loved you, too.
James pulls up in a truck, shiny and black with equally shiny black rims. His fist has barely tapped the horn—although his idling is sufficiently loud on its own--when January is scooping her backpack from the floor and slinging it over her shoulders. Her cello and suit are in hand the next second, and she kicks the screen door open.
“’Bye, Mom!” she calls over her shoulder.
If her mom wishes her luck, it’s lost beneath the slamming door behind her.
James drives like a lunatic, and not for the first time, January is relieved she sprang for a hard case for her cello. Even so, every time they hit a pothole she glances in the backseat with concern. James teases her; she doesn’t mind. James has been friends with her dad a long time, and he’s come to as many of her concerts as her parents. Sometimes he’s been there when they haven’t.
When he pulls to a too-hard stop in front of a small brick house with white shutters and a white plastic fence around a brown yard, an ugly maroon van camped in the driveway with all its doors flung open, he smiles without a trace of teasing. His smile is almost lost beneath his mustache.
“Go make us proud, Jan,” he says, and wraps her in a hug before he has to witness the tears pricking her eyes. Girls crying always made him uncomfortable.
She flashes a grin at him when he releases her, and says, “You’re already proud of me, James. You’ll just have to settle for me not fucking up badly enough to change that. Deal?” She leaps from his truck as his booming laugh fills the cabin and retrieves her things from his back seat. She can see him still smiling when he pulls away, and the way he mouths Deal and winks in the rearview mirror.
“January!”
January turns in time to absorb the weight of Lourdes’ small body with her front, instead of getting tackled. A laugh spills past her lips and she wraps the arm that doesn’t carry her cello around the girl’s shoulders awkwardly. Lourdes’ thick, curly hair tickles January’s nose and she pulls herself free of her embrace, and carefully sets her things down.
“You’re not excited at all, are you?” she teases. Lourdes practically vibrates where she stands, bouncing on the balls of her feet. January glances around and frowns. “But you’re the only one. Where is everyone else?”
The smile on Lourdes’ face vanishes in an instant. “You haven’t checked your phone, have you?”
An image unfolds in January’s mind, of herself that morning, frantically shoving clothes into her backpack at three a.m. because she couldn’t sleep. Settling into her chair to practice her fingering when she couldn’t shake her nerves enough to sleep again. Her alarm going off at five a.m., disrupting her concentration.
Yanking the phone from its cord, dismissing the alarm, and tossing it back to the bed. . . only for it to fall, and skitter face down under the bed.
January’s heart sinks.
“No, I forgot it,” she says. “What happened?”
“Don’t freak out,” Lourdes warns, so naturally, a flurry of volcanic worries swarms through January. But she smooths her face and listens.
Deja and Justus called to wake up Destiny that morning, warning her they would be picking her up at six. Destiny’s mom was the one to answer, alerting them to the fact that Destiny partied too hard the night before and was recovering in the hospital from alcohol poisoning. Deja immediately called Soleil, but Soleil didn’t have any fellow musician friends who could fill Destiny’s spot in their ensemble. Not on such short notice. Deja and Justus went to pick her up anyway, without a replacement, when lo—a boy in her dorm emerged with his violin and played for them January’s song. “I heard you practicing the last month,” he said. “I like to study in the practice room next to yours.”
They are bringing him and will be here in fifteen minutes.
January inhales short, rapid breaths through her nose and exhales, long and steady, through her mouth.
“Right,” she says. “Good thing I printed off extra sheet music.”
Lourdes smiles sympathetically. “He’s not as good as Destiny, I guess, but Deja said he’ll do.”
January groans. “Thanks for that.”
“Better than nothing?”
“That remains to be seen. And I didn’t have nothing, you and Soleil play violin, too. Beautifully. It’s why I chose you.”
Lourdes shrugs, but January sees the pleasure flash in her honey-colored eyes. She grows distracted by Taylor emerging from the small house behind them, backpacks in hand. January lifts a hand in half-hearted greeting while Lourdes bounds over to her to help pile things into the van.
Fifteen minutes. That’s enough time.
Lightning quick, January flips her cello case onto its back and pops it open. In a flash, she has extended her endpin and decided she doesn’t need its anchor—this driveway is damaged already, and there’s no risk of her cello slipping against it. She grabs her bow and settles herself on the edge of the driver’s side running board, cello between her legs.
She hesitates, fingers hovering over the fingerboard, bow barely brushing the bridge.
She closes her eyes.
Her body knows her music better than her mind does. Her heart knows. So when she plays, she does so without thought. This was how she learned—simply by feeling. She’s watched others in her class play, by sight, by memory, by ear, by rigid and repeated practice. And she does that, too. But for the pieces she composed herself? She doesn’t know how to explain it. Her fingers and hands know how to move before she consciously decides.
Granny used to tell her she was born for this. The music is in her blood.
Granny doesn’t remember that, but January does.
The fine horsetail hairs of her bow meet the metal of her cello strings, and January is lost.
As she always does, she drowns in the music. It takes her over, and she succumbs to it with an overwhelming swell of relief. Sometimes she thinks the world could end while she plays, and she would never notice if she didn’t have to stop.
The world doesn’t end today. Instead, a car pulls up. She wants to keep playing—her fingers ache to keep moving, but they stumble. The undertone of the rumbling engine and its tires arguing against gravel disrupt her rhythm and swarm between her body’s connection with her instrument.
She’s already glaring when she opens her eyes, hands still, and her eyes fall on Deja, first, clambering out of the backseat of a battered blue car, backpack in hand. Her twin, Justus, kills the engine a second later and when he unfolds his long limbs from the front seat, she can see half of his body over the top of the vehicle. He shoots her a charming smile. January continues to scowl.
Soleil rounds on her from the driver’s side back seat and clicks her tongue. “Uh-oh, Justus, you’ve made Mother mad.”
“Don’t,” January snaps.
Soleil, by far the most comfortable of the bunch when it comes to challenging January, seems to understand that to continue to press January’s patience today, of all days, is a mistake. She smiles to herself but doesn’t attempt to antagonize January further.
Still, January contemplates spitting a barbed retort at her, maybe something about her timing always being off, but the words die before they even find full form, dispelled by another interruption. A tall, thin, too-elegant man slips out of the passenger seat almost as soon as the door is open. Perhaps, like Justus, he finds himself too long for small spaces, or maybe he’s just eager. It seems likely to be the latter; his eyes flash in the morning sunlight, unmistakable glee shining from them. They dart, first from the house to the van, then to Lourdes and Taylor, and finally settle on January.
His eyes are hazel. Sparking like fire. A bewitching color, like autumn clinging to summer.
He smiles at her. She scowls, and moves with stiff limbs to put her cello away.
“You must be January,” he says, his long legs carrying him to her side before she’s even finished putting the endpin away. He crouches and reaches to reopen her cello case, but January stops and glares at him with such heat that his hand halts before he even dares to brush the glossy surface.
“You must be a detective,” she replies. “Your deductive abilities are astounding.”
Irritatingly, he smiles—it’s small, just the corners of his mouth curving upward, barely a twitch. But it maddens her. “Well, detective work is my side gig,” he says. “Just in case the piano thing doesn’t pan out.”
A pianist. Not a violinist, then, not in the same way as Lourdes and Soleil. He can play the instrument, January is certain. But his heart belongs to the keys. His lips twitch again and his eyes dance when they meet hers, and he flicks his eyebrows up in challenge. Well? he seems to be asking. What now?
A smile cracks across her lips, and she sighs, popping the lid of her cello case.
January allows him to aid her in getting her cello into the trunk of the van, alongside Deja’s double bass. The backpacks, violins, and Justus’ viola find their place in the back, too, and Deja complains about the suits probably getting wrinkled when they lay them atop the mountain of bags. January worries, too, but not for long.
They leave the city’s limits within twenty minutes, despite Taylor’s grandmother-like driving. January stares out the windshield, watching the world pass by, and tries not to let the burning fear of failure expand to an untamable flame in her chest. The twins squabble, Soleil offering quips to Deja whenever Justus seems on the verge of winning their verbal sparring match. Lourdes has headphones on and falls soundly asleep.
Loch chooses silence for a long time before he finally asks if anyone has sheet music he can study. January turns to look at Soleil, sitting beside Loch in the back row, grimacing as she does. “I do.”
Soleil groans. “In your case. Shit.”
“I can get it,” Loch offers, but Soleil undoes her seatbelt before the sentence is even out of his mouth.
“It’s fine, I’ve got it. You can’t reach it from your angle,” she says. January watches her twist her body over the back row and rummage through the trunk, battling her cello case. Taylor catches her eye and smiles, shakes her head. January bites back a grin and settles in her seat.
Taylor slides smoothly into the far-left lane, passing a black sedan as they slow for the truck in front of them merging on.
Soleil gasps, “No,” at the same time Taylor says, “Oh, God.”
January’s eyes flit to the sideview mirror and catch a flash of grey—a car moving into their lane.
And then the world ends.