With her delicate bone structure and striking features, she missed her true calling. She did some print modeling back when Dad was alive, but she wasn’t tall enough to be on the catwalk. Once he got sick, she needed “job security” to help pay bills. Housekeeping filled that niche, but I know a part of her has always regretted switching professions. And now she’s determined to see that I don’t lose my shot at something better, something she thinks I was born to do.
Gray light and purple shadows take turns gliding along her high cheekbones as we pass through the trees. People say we could pass for sisters. We share her ivory complexion, the tiny freckles spattered across the bridge of her nose, the wide green eyes inside a framework of thick lashes, and her hair—black as a raven’s wings. The only difference is, I inherited my curls from a father whose laughter I still hear when I dance in rain puddles. Whose face I still see in the water’s reflections, as if he’s beside me.
Without being at home, close to our garden, my only remaining connections to him are the music he loved and his family, each inseparably intertwined with the other. Since Mom’s parents passed away before I was even born, she had no one to lean on once Dad got sick. So, Grandma Liliana came from France to live with us in Harmony. She was a lot of help in the beginning, but a few months after Dad died, she left our lives in a blaze of horror, literally. The last time I saw her she showed up at my second-grade Valentine’s Day party and purposely started a fire that almost wiped out an entire class of eight-year-olds.
She was carted back to France and has been locked away in the city of Versailles ever since, at a prison for the criminally insane. Ironic, considering that was her second attempt at killing me. Although I often wonder if I imagined the first . . . if the details got mixed up in my seven-year-old brain because I was fighting so hard for my life. According to what Grandma told Mom, it had all been an accident.
I shiver and rub the scar on my left knee that peeks through the rip in my jeans, a reminder imprinted on my skin. A reminder of the splintering wood I kicked my way through . . . a reminder that, accident or not, I didn’t imagine it.
“You have a gift.” Mom’s statement rakes across the intrusive memory, ripping through the cobwebs and dangling dead hopes in my heart that have settled where a loving and sane grandmother should’ve been. “This place will help you realize your potential. Be grateful for the opportunity.”
Mom doesn’t get that I want to be grateful. I miss how singing once made me feel: free, unique, complete.
But what if Grandma was right about me . . . about everything?
The aria I heard earlier in the elevator bumps against my ribs once more, making my breath shallow. From the time they started dating, Dad taught Mom French. He’d done the same for me since birth, and she continued his tutelage after we lost him. Because of that, I know enough to be comfortable here. But the opera piping through the speakers had sounded Russian. I have no idea what the name of it is or what it’s about. I don’t have to know. Now that the notes are woven within me, the words are imprinted alongside them. Whether or not I can translate what I’m singing, I’ll still remember how to form each syllable on my tongue when the time comes to release the song.
It’s like I have an auditory photographic memory, although it’s not something I can quietly absorb then let sit on the back of my eyelids like an image, hidden from everyone else’s view. There’s nothing private about my ability.
Dread tightens my throat. I need to ease the tension, to rid myself of the music. But I don’t want to lose it in the back of a limo. It’s too confined; and then there’s the driver . . .
Everyone has experienced the feeling, stepping into a room and the other people stop talking. This happens to me each time I sing. Wall-to-wall silence. If a sweat drop were to fall, you could hear it splatter to the floor. Not an awkward silence. More like an awed hush.
I have no right to be proud because it’s nothing I’ve earned. Up until recently, I’d never had a voice lesson in my life. Yet, ever since I was small, opera has been a living, breathing part of me.
The problem is that as I’ve grown, it’s become more demanding . . . an entity that controls me. Once a song speaks to my subconscious, the notes become a toxin I have to release through my diaphragm, my vocal cords, my tongue.
The only way I can breathe again is through a binge and purge of music. The worst part is what follows—how finishing a performance makes me feel. Stripped naked, cold and exposed. Physically sick. Only hours later, after the symptoms of withdrawal have run their course, can I become myself once more. At least until the next melody possesses me, like the one snaking through me now.
My legs start to jitter, and I clamp my hands on my knees. I cough to suppress the tune that’s climbing my throat like bile.