She should have asked Gail for a minute, a second, to get her head and heart straightened out. Instead, when the woman appeared, chattering into her headset, Etta found herself following her, walking out into the flood of soft blue light on the stage. The applause rolled over her in a dull wave.
Don’t drop it, don’t drop it, don’t drop it.…
Etta found her mark and took a moment just to study the violin, turning it over in her hands, fingers lightly skimming its curves. She wanted to still everything that was hurtling through her as she stood under the stage lights; to freeze the fizz of disbelief and excitement, remember the weight and shape of it in her hands.
The Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium in the Metropolitan Museum of Art wasn’t the grandest venue Etta had ever performed in. It wasn’t even in the top ten. But it was manageable, and more importantly, hers to command for a few minutes. Seven hundred faces, all masked by shadows and the glare of the lights high overhead as they shifted into a final, rippling blue that reminded her of the ocean, with wind moving over the surface.
You have this.
The applause petered out. Someone coughed. A text alert chimed. Instead of sinking into that calm, the deep concentration, Etta felt herself hovering on the surface of it.
Just play.
She dove into the Largo, pausing only for a steadying breath. Seven hundred audience members stared back at her. Two bars, three bars…
It crept up on her slowly, bleeding through her awareness like light warming a screen. Her concentration held out, but only for another few seconds; the sound that began as a murmur, a growl of static underscoring the music, suddenly exploded into shrieking feedback. Screams.
Etta stumbled through the next few notes, eyes frantically searching the technician’s booth for a sign about whether she should stop or keep going. The audience was still, gazing up at her, almost like they couldn’t hear it—
It wasn’t a sound a human could produce; not one anyone could get without ravaging an instrument.
Do I stop? Do I start over?
She crossed strings and flubbed the next three notes, and her anxiety spiked. Why wasn’t anyone doing anything about that sound—about the screaming feedback? It crashed through her eardrums, flooding her concentration. Her whole body seemed to spasm with it, the nausea making sweat bead on her upper lip. It felt like…like someone was driving a knife into the back of her skull.
The air vibrated around her.
Stop, she thought, desperate, make it stop—
I’m messing up—
Alice was right—
Etta didn’t realize she’d stopped playing altogether until Gail appeared, white-faced and wide-eyed at the edge of the stage. Pressing her face into her hand, Etta tried to catch a breath, fighting through the sensation that her lungs were being crushed. She couldn’t look at the audience. She couldn’t look for Alice or her mother, surely watching this play out in horror.
A nauseating wave of humiliation washed over her chest, up her neck, up her face, and for the first time in Etta’s nearly fifteen years of playing, she turned and ran off the stage. Chased by the sound that had driven her off in the first place.
“What’s the matter?” Gail asked. “Etta? Are you okay?”
“Feedback,” she mumbled, almost unable to hear herself. “Feedback—”
Michelle, the curator, deftly plucked the Antonius out of her hands before she could drop it.
“There’s no feedback,” Gail said. “Let me get you a glass of water—we’ll find a place for you to sit—”
That’s not right. Etta swung her gaze around, searching the faces of the other violinists. They would have heard it—
Only, they clearly hadn’t. The sound of the feedback and her own drumming heart filled the violinists’ silence as they stared back with blank faces.
I’m not crazy, I’m not crazy—
Etta took a step back, feeling trapped between their pity and the wall of sound that was slamming into her back in waves. Panic made the bile rise in her throat, burning.
“Go!” Gail said frantically to one of the older men. “Get out there!”
“I’ve got her.”
The dark-haired girl, Sophia, stepped out of the green room, reaching out to take Etta’s arm. She hadn’t realized how unsteady she was until the arm Gail had thrown around her lifted, and she was forced to lean on a stranger a whole head shorter than her.
“I’m…I’m fine.…” Etta muttered, swaying.
“No, you’re not,” Sophia said. “I hear it, too. Come on!”
The easiest explanation was that she’d snapped, that the stress had gotten to her, but…someone else had heard it, too. It was as alive and real for her as it was for Etta, and it flooded reassurance through her system to know she hadn’t lost it, that she hadn’t just crashed and burned because her stage fright and anxiety from childhood were colliding with the way Alice had doubted her.
Etta thought, just for a moment, she might cry in relief. The sound moved like burning knives beneath her skin as Sophia expertly wove them through the dark backstage area and out a side entrance that dumped them directly into the dark, silent museum, just at the entrance of the Egyptian wing.