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“No, I know, I know.” He sighed and stood over me, rubbed my shoulder with one hand. “Christ, what a mess. Poor kid.”
I guessed he meant me, though he’d never called me that before.
“I’ll figure something out here,” Keith said, “but your seat on the Strings… I have to fill it, Char. You know that, right?”
I nodded and wiped my nose with the shreds of an old Kleenex I’d been clutching all morning. “I know,” I said, mildly surprised at how little that bothered me. It didn’t really register, actually. Keith’s words came to me from far away, like a distant transmission from space.
He one-arm hugged me, still standing. My cheek brushed against the rough side-pocket of his jeans. “You’re going to be okay, Char. Just go and be with your family. I wish I could be with you.”
I looked up, his words a faint flicker in the darkness. “You do?”
“It’s impossible, of course.”
I slumped. “Oh.”
“I can’t get away now, but you’re going to be fine, kid.” He jostled me affectionately, as if he were a coach and I were a Little Leaguer who dropped the easy out that would’ve won the game. “Yeah, you’ll see. Just fine.”
Bozeman, Montana. There wasn’t a more beautiful place on earth, as far as I was concerned. Until that trip home. I flew in at midday, but the Gallatin Valley seemed dark, as if it were hungover from the longest night.
The flight had been a blur; the ride from the airport with Uncle Stan was a nightmare. He was afraid to speak to me, as if I would shatter at the slightest sound. We rode in his shiny SUV to my home, and I felt like a prisoner walking on death row.Not my death. Chris. Chris is dead.
Chris was dead.
That thought, or variations of it, danced in my brain like the painted skeletons I had seen at aDia de los Muertosfestival one fall. But I couldn’t quite grasp the enormity of it. Not while in New York City, or on the airplane, or in Uncle Stan’s car. But as soon as I got home it would be there. I’d never been so petrified to see my parents in all my life.
A wake of sorts was going on and had been since “the incident.” I entered the maple wood paneled living room with the Native American tapestries on the wall and the smell of eight different casseroles wafting in from the kitchen.
I was besieged by old friends and extended family. I had to wade through a forest of tear-stained smiles and comforting words to reach my mom. Elaine Conroy, an elementary school teacher. She walked around with a tissue clutched in her hand and a panicked look in her eye, as if she had lost something and couldn’t think where to look for it. Shehadlost something, her son, and she would never get him back.
She found me and hugged me and squeezed me, again and again, as if to make sure I was real or that I wouldn’t slip out of her hands like smoke.
Gerald Conroy, my math professor father, was a silent statue, his brows seemingly permanently furrowed, as if he were trying to work out some great and terrible problem—a problem that had no solution. Because it didn’t.
The horse bucked. Chris was thrown. He landed in the worst possible way.
There was nothing else to work out except how those simple facts resulted in the yawning, black void that had opened in our lives.
Two days later, I stood in the First Morning Presbyterian Church, staring at my sleeping brother in a casket. He had to only be sleeping, didn’t he? He looked fine. His collar was high to conceal the tangled nest of broken bones in his neck, but otherwise… My big brother. My touchstone. My best friend.
First Juilliard, then the Phil!
No, Chris. First pain. And then more and more until my future was warped and drowned in tears, and I couldn’t see it anymore.
I sank to my knees, my forehead resting against the dark wood of the casket in the dim of the church and stayed there until the church somehow morphed into my bedroom at home.
I lay in bed for two days until my parents, fearful I wouldn’t graduate, hustled me back to school. They told me they were okay and not to worry, but of course, that was a lie. None of us would ever be fully okay again, and we knew it.
I flew back to New York City feeling as if I’d been submerged in ice water. I didn’t expect my seat on the Strings would still exist. I didn’t care. I could hardly find my way to my dorm, let alone play.
But Ihadexpected that the man I loved would be waiting for me, to comfort me through the worst of the grief. To be there for me when I needed him most. But Keith didn’t answer any of my calls, and the next time I saw him, he was walking through Lincoln Center with his arm around Molly Kirkpatrick, the bass player of Spring Strings. My seat had been given away, and life had gone on.
Then and Now.
Joy, exhilaration, love… They had taken me so high, higher than I ever thought possible. But then the wind changed, the currents dropped, and I plummeted in a free-fall, helpless to do anything but watch the ground rise up to meet me.
I went back to my student apartment at Juilliard, put my violin in its case, and shut it tight.
Time doesn’t fly; it ekes by and so did I. The vistas weren’t as vast, the colors not as vibrant here on the ground, and it was harder for me to see my future from my new low vantage. But it was safer down here. Much safer.
