Unforgiven Melody

Two hundred-dollar bills hit me in the face.

I didn't have to look up to know whose hand had thrown them. I looked up anyway.

She stood at the front of the little crowd, a woman in her fifties in a good coat, studying me the way you study a dented can on a clearance shelf. Working out whether the damage was worth the discount.

"Esme Hale." She said my whole name like it cost her something. "Four years. Four years you've been gone, and you're still out here making a spectacle of yourself, chasing this music thing."

She said the word music like it was a stain.

"You've made your point. Pick up the money and come home before you embarrass yourself any worse than this."

I bent down. I picked up the money. I said thank you, quiet and even, the way you'd thank an audience that came to watch you fail.

Then I turned to go.

Her hand clamped around my wrist. Her eyes had gone red at the rims.

"I raised you. I gave up everything for you, and this is how you pay me back?" Her voice climbed. "What do you even want from me?"

I worked my wrist free. I held the two bills flat between my fingers and looked at her. Really looked.

"Thank you for everything you gave up, Mom," I said.

"I just want back the life you took from me."

I went back to the band and helped pack up the gear.

The wind had teeth. The little crowd thinned and drifted off into the dark.

Only my mother stayed, red-eyed, fixed on my back like she could turn me around by it.

I shouldered the violin case and climbed into the van with the others.

She lunged at the window, both palms slamming the glass.

"Esme Hale, you get out of this van right now! I'm your mother. You do as I say!"

Cole's jaw tightened. He put the van in gear, and we were gone.

"Has she not done enough?" One of the guys twisted around to watch her shrink behind us. "She's got the nerve to stand there and talk about taking Esme home."

The others picked it up, low and angry, all of them looking at me like they wished there were something to fix.

I watched the city slide backward in the glass and let it wash past me like it was happening to someone else.

In the mirror she was already small. One more set of headlights that wouldn't stop following.

They had it wrong, though. All of them.

It didn't start with damage.

It started with love. That was the part nobody ever believed.

Chapter 1

My mother wasn't always like this. That's the part that still gets me.

She came out of a poor mountain town with nothing but a sharp mind, and that mind took her everywhere. Top of her class. Scholarships. A spot at a good university, then a better one, until she was the kind of young scholar a department fought to keep. The name people expected to see on a tenure-track door.

Then she had me.

She'd been told she might never carry a child. So I was a surprise, a good one, and I was also the thing that pressed pause on all of it. The pregnancy was hard on her. She left the work she loved. After I came, she poured herself into me instead. The best formula. The best little classes. A patience so soft I can still feel it.

I was small when I found the violin. Or it found me. A teacher heard something in the way I reached for the right note before I knew it was the right one.

I'd saw out some clumsy little tune, and my mother's eyes would go to crescents.

"Listen to my girl," she'd say. "You're going to be somebody. A real musician, one day."

She filmed every recital and posted all of it, proud, tagging me like a trophy.

I'd puff out my chest and clap my own small hands.

* * *

The van hit a pothole and my hand brushed the case beside me, that worn, familiar grain under my fingers. I looked down at it, and my face didn't do anything at all.

When did it change?

* * *

She lost six, seven years to me. By the time she went back, the world had moved without her.

She wasn't the brilliant one anymore, the one everyone wanted. She was behind. Behind on the methods, behind on the field, a scholar the field had quietly walked past. She knocked on doors that used to open for her, and they stayed shut.

And somewhere in there she found out my father, gone for work more years than not, had found someone new.

It all landed on her at once. And then she turned and looked at me.

Her daughter. Her genes. Surely raw material like that could be shaped into the thing she'd lost.

The violin lessons stopped first. I cried and asked her why.

The softness went out of her. She pressed a workbook and a pencil into my hands.

"Music? Music is nothing. You're going to study. You're going to get into a real school." Her voice didn't shake. "I've already walked this road for you. All you have to do is follow it."

So that's where my childhood went. The desk.

Other kids ran around outside. I drilled times tables until the numbers swam. Other kids watched cartoons. I copied out columns of words from test-prep books, words I didn't feel.

My grades stayed average anyway.

I'm not her. I never had what she had. I'd grind for hours and still come up ordinary, and there was nothing I could do about the way the symbols on the page simply closed to me.

One night I couldn't stand it. I crept into the storage room and dug the violin out from the high shelf where she'd hidden it, up out of reach.

I'd just gotten my fingers on it when the door slammed open.

She stood in the dark, holding her anger down with both hands.

"So that's it. That's why your grades won't move. This is where your head's been."

* * *

That night she smashed it.

It was an expensive instrument, a few thousand dollars of one, and she broke it into junk in front of me. The neck went with a crack like a green branch. A string let go and whipped the air. The whole room smelled of rosin and splinters.

It was the first time I ever saw her rage.

For a long time after, any small breaking sound, a glass, a plate, would drop me to the floor of my own chest.

* * *

Frankie's voice pulled me back.

"That car's been on us for like ten minutes." She twisted around in her seat. "Who even does that?"

I turned and looked through the back window.

It was my mother's car.

The old helplessness came up the back of my throat and just sat there. Following me was nothing to her. Easy as breathing. It was how she'd always kept me in sight.

In middle school I used to slip out on weekends, tell her it was a study group, and go stand outside the little music schools just to listen. Even that much was enough. Just the sound through the door.

It didn't last. Inside a month, every violin teacher in the city took one look at me coming and waved me off.

She didn't have to lock the doors herself. She just made sure every door in the city would do it for her.

Chapter 2

Once. Twice. I lost count of how many times I went back.

I'd stand in those doorways and ask, careful and small, and get the same cold look every time.

"Your mom already called. You come around again, she says she'll sue us." A hand, flapping me off. "Go on. Out. You're holding up the class."

I went home and we had it out.

She sat on the couch peeling an apple, calm as still water, and didn't even pretend she hadn't done it.

"Violin is a distraction. That's all it is." The peel came off in one long curl. "Put those hours into practice problems and you'd pull your score up five points. I keep telling you. The road I picked for you is the right one. I made it work. So will you."

I put my backpack on and sat back down at the desk.

When you're that small, your anger is a joke. Even to you.

I studied like it was a religion. My grades stayed exactly where they were. Not good, not bad. Stuck.

I'm not her. I don't have what she has. I clawed my way into a decent high school anyway, and then the work got harder and the floor tilted under me and my rank started to slide, and that was the thing that lit her up like nothing else.

There was a music club at school. It pulled at me like a dream I wasn't allowed to have. So I started sneaking in. Begging again, just to hold something, just to play one or two of the tunes still living in my hands.

One evening it was pouring, and she came through the doors of that hall soaked to the skin, eyes huge.

She slapped me before she said a word.

"Esme Hale. Do you see what rank you've dropped to? And you're in here playing?" The rain ran off her chin. "Why can't you put school first. Why does it always have to come back to this violin."

She was strong when she was that angry. She got me by the collar and hauled.

I went down. The collar bit into my throat and I couldn't get a breath, and my hands just beat at the air, useless.

She dragged me like that, like a dead dog, across the floor and out the doors, the whole room watching. Somebody's sheet music slid off a stand and onto the floor where my shoes scraped over it. Nobody moved. Nobody made a sound.

I didn't go back to the club after that. It only ever reminded me of the pride she'd taken off me in front of everyone.

So I went back to the desk. The cram classes. All of it.

My finals came up a little, and she glowed.

"And to think," she told me, "if I hadn't walked into that club and pulled you out myself, you'd never have scored like this."

I said nothing. There was nothing to say that she'd hear. She'd taken the one thing I loved, dragged me out by the collar in front of the whole school, and somewhere in her head it had come out the other side as proof of how much she'd done for me. That was the part that killed me. Not the cruelty. The way she got to feel generous about it.

Something in me went quiet that day and never fully came back on.

* * *

The van pulled up outside a barbecue joint we liked, smoke curling out under the string lights.

Cole threw up a hand. "Order whatever you want. Tonight's on me."

The others piled out cheering and crammed in around one table. I shook the old stuff loose and let myself fall into the warmth of it.

We were halfway through the food, laughing, when a man came over. Drunk, eyes crawling all over me.

"Hey, pretty. You're cute. Give me your number."

Frankie threw an arm across me. "Sorry. She's not interested."

He sneered. Then he put a hand on me, hard, where no stranger gets to, and said something about me acting too good for it, dressed like that, like I'd worn it for him.

Cole was already up.

He didn't wind up. He didn't say a word first. He came up out of his seat and put the man down with one clean shot, and the sound of it cut the whole patio quiet.

The others were on their feet before the man finished staggering. Somebody kicked a chair out of the way to get to him.

"Out." Cole stood over him, and his voice came low, the kind of low that scares a man worse than any shout. "You touch one of mine again, you'd better hope I'm not the one who finds you."

"Move, before I call the cops," somebody snapped. "Crawl back to whatever hole you came out of."

The man went, fast, into the dark, one hand cupped over his face.

The band settled back around me, still bristling, checking I was okay, and that was the thing that almost took me apart. Not him. Them.

A table full of people who'd been strangers a year ago, ready to swing for me.

And my own mother, who never once stood between me and anything at all.

Chapter 3

They crowded around me, all talking at once. Frankie took my hand and held my eyes.

"Esme. What you wear is nobody's business but yours. He's the one in the wrong."

Something in me went tight and sore, and I thanked her.

Mom. Did you ever once understand that?

* * *

After she'd changed my college applications behind my back, I ended up exactly where she wanted. A local school, the major she'd picked. She added every one of my professors and classmates online, so she could watch me without leaving the house.

Sophomore year, she handed me a man's number. Nine years older than me.

"Esme, this is Chase. My friend's boy. He's doing his PhD overseas." She covered her mouth and laughed, pleased with herself, pleased with him. "You two should get to know each other. Think about it. The genes alone. Children from a match like that would turn out brilliant."

She made me go.

He waited until the theater went dark. Then his hands were on me where they had no business being, and when I shot up out of the seat, he caught me and held on. His breath was hot and sour against my face.

"You said yes to the date. That's saying yes to this. Don't play shy now." His grip tightened. "Your mother all but handed you to me. Begged me to seal the deal."

The midnight show was empty. There was no one to hear me. I fought until I was loose and I ran.

I ran straight out the doors into my mother, lit up and eager, grabbing my arms to ask how it had gone.

I told her, crying, what he'd done.

Her face closed like a door. She slapped me.

"Chase is a good boy. Brilliant. Top of his field. He would never." Her voice didn't rise. It sharpened. "You're doing this because you're unhappy with me. Making things up to drag him down." A breath. "And even if he did try something. Well. Dressed like that, acting like that. What did you expect. You brought it on yourself."

The street tilted. My stomach clenched and turned over, and I crouched at the curb and was sick until there was nothing left.

Her eyes stayed cold on me. Cold as a blade going in.

Maybe, to her, grades were the whole truth of a person. And a girl with bad grades was a liar. Not worth believing. Not allowed to fight back.

* * *

Cole slid a skewer of lamb in front of me, still smoking.

I took it, smiling, and had a sip of my beer.

Quick footsteps. The next second a whole drink came down over me, cold, soaking me to the skin.

Her voice went into my ear like a needle.

"Esme Hale. You drink now too? What did I tell you. That's what the bad kids do. The ones who can't keep their grades up."

Everything I'd packed down for years caught at once, like a spark in dry grass.

Before anyone could move, I was on my feet, my eyes locked on hers, and I was shouting.

"Yes! I'm the bad kid! Bad grades, I lie, I embarrass you! I was never built for any of it!" My voice tore. "You pushed me. You. The whole time, it was you!"

"Why do you never once look at yourself? Why is it always, always my fault?"

The slap cracked across my face.

She was breathing hard.

My head snapped to the side.

Then she lunged, ripped the hearing aid out of my ear, and threw it down on the ground.

She stood over me, jabbing her finger, her mouth opening and closing.

And I couldn't hear a single word of it.

Chapter 4

After the thing with Chase, I stopped wanting to be near people at all.

So she found me something else. An engineering co-op. Hands-on, real equipment, the kind of thing that would set me up to go abroad for grad school later. She pulled strings, called a supervisor, got me put on the night shift watching the machines.

Nobody saw it coming. A worker missed a step that night, and the line blew.

I was running on nothing, and I was a half-second too slow getting clear. The burns took my arm and my leg. The blast itself, that whole wall of sound, took my hearing.

The treatment ran six months. I lived through every hour of it, and most of those hours I spent learning how to be a thing that just lay there.

I stopped going to school. I lay in that bed and leaked tears all day, no sound to them, the way a cracked pipe leaks. Some hours my mind went white and empty and I'd stare at the ceiling tiles, counting them, losing count, starting over. Some hours I'd sink into a cold, heavy sleep and surface worse than I went under. The puppet feeling got into my chest and stayed there. There were mornings the day was just a long gray hallway I couldn't think of one reason to walk down.

And the worst part, the part I never said out loud, was this. My own mother had put me on that night shift. And some small, ruined corner of me was still waiting for her to be sorry in a way that counted.

My mother cried like her insides were tearing. She said sorry, over and over.

That was when I learned the shape her mouth made for sorry. I got so I could catch it across a room, no sound needed.

She took me to a specialist, and a hearing aid handed the world back to me, more or less.

And after that, she changed. So much.

She stopped pushing the studying. Instead she spent real money on a violin for me, a gorgeous one, a sound on it like nothing I'd ever held. She found me a teacher.

She sat by my bed and stroked my hair, gentle.

"Do whatever you want from here on, sweetheart. I mean it. I'm behind you."

"I was wrong before. I forced so much on you. I won't be like that anymore."

Something in me that had been dry for years took a soft, warm rain. I looked at the light in her eyes, and I worked up the nerve, and I put my arms around her.

I got happy after that. I healed fast.

When I held the violin, I had my whole life back in my two hands.

It didn't last.

The teacher started canceling. A scheduling thing, he said, again and again. No lessons.

And then one day I caught her on the phone, tucked into another room, her voice low.

"Thank you for this, Mr. Castellano. Yes. I'll still pay for the hours. You just keep telling Esme you're too busy. That's all I need."

"She's much better now. I'll get her set up to study abroad. Back on the academic track, where she belongs."

The sky she'd patched for me cracked open again, all the way down, deeper than before.

Chapter 5

That was years ago. The phone call. The sky cracking open a second time. I was still down in it when the hands came into the dark around me and hauled me back to the present, to the curb outside the barbecue joint, to my mother standing over me with her finger in my face.

Cole was up and between us, a wall. Frankie ducked low and came up with my hearing aid off the ground, not broken, just thrown, and fit it back over my ear, careful, like it was made of glass.

Sound rushed back in. My mother was mid-curse, the words coming out of her ugly and fast.

Someone had already called it in. The police came quick and took all of us down to the station.

* * *

My mother held court there too.

"She's my daughter. I gave birth to her. She does as I say her whole life, and that is not up for discussion."

The officers traded looks. Family messes like this one, nobody wants to touch.

I stood up. I reached for my collar and drew it down, slow, until they could all see it.

The scar. The long raised seam of it down my chest.

The room changed color.

I walked over to where my mother stood, and I told her the truth, level and quiet.

"Mom. The life you gave me. I already gave it back."

* * *

Four years ago, we were out on the street, going at each other the way we always did, and we'd drifted up against a lot fenced off for construction, scaffolding two stories up the side of it.

She was past reason by then, grabbing at me, shoving back into the rig when I wouldn't come. The whole frame of it shuddered. Then it let go.

I didn't think. I shoved her out from under it.

I didn't get myself out in time.

I woke in the ICU thirteen days later with that seam down my chest and my mother at the side of the bed, her eyes swollen shut from crying. The first thing I said to her was that we were square now. A life for a life.

When the wound closed over, I took my ID and some cash in the dead of night, and I left.

Four years ago, to the day.

* * *

Back in the station, my mother's face went red, then white, then red again.

And then she did the thing she always did when she was losing.

She broke. Right there in the middle of the station, loud and sudden and total, wailing that she had nothing left, that there was no point to any of it, that she'd be better off gone than stand here and take this.

The room lurched. An officer started toward her, hands up, talking low and fast.

"Don't." My voice came out flat. It cut straight through hers, and the officer stopped where he stood. "Nobody move. Let her finish."

The whole room went still. Every head turned to me, the daughter watching her mother fall apart on the floor and not moving an inch to catch her.

I looked at her and let a small, tired smile pull at the corner of my mouth.

"Come on, Mom. The dying act. We've run this one before, haven't we. You and me. Why don't you tell the room how it ends."

Something moved behind her eyes. Like a door swinging open on a room she'd kept shut for years.

The fight went out of her in a breath.

"How," she said. "How do you know that."

I let the quiet stretch. Then I told them. All of it