Everything You Are

by Kerry Anne King

I, Ophelia Florence MacPhee, being of sound mind and purpose, do hereby swear a sacred oath to accept and discharge all obligations, tangible and intangible, related to the post of luthier.

“The only help I need, Ophelia MacPhee, is for you to sign these papers and promise that you will accept the responsibility for all of my obligations.”

She’s been known to fix things at one in the morning for an overwrought violinist whose instrument is suffering. Obsessive beings, musicians, the whole lot of them.

“When I was young,” she says, “we had freedom. Not at everybody’s beck and call every minute of every day.” “When you were young, unicorns still walked the earth.”

When Phee doesn’t answer, her mother sighs again, then asks in a world-weary tone, “Which one is it?” “The cello.” Phee scans the news article that triggered her app. A chill crawls up her spine, out of place in the heat of the kitchen.

“The girl who plays the cello—Allie—her mother and brother were both killed in a car crash.”

Oh, indeed she has a father, Phee thinks, or had one, anyway. Braden Healey, once a brilliant cellist, abandoned both his cello and his daughter and vanished off Phee’s radar almost eleven years ago. She dreams about him at night and runs internet searches for him by day. Always, at the back of her consciousness, a nagging little worry eats away at her.

Something bad is going to happen.

She was eighteen the night Granddad laid the obligation on her to guard a group of instruments. “The specials,” he called them. She keeps the book he gave her that night under lock and key, as she swore to do.

Braden Healey, first-chair cellist for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, announced his resignation this week following a tragedy that left his hands severely frostbitten and his brother-in-law dead.

Law enforcement reported that Mitchell Conroy, thirty-four, of Colville, Washington, died of a massive heart attack after falling through rotten lake ice at a remote hunting lodge near Colville. The damage to Healey’s hands occurred while attempting to rescue Conroy and administer CPR during subzero conditions. “We are deeply saddened both for Mr. Healey and for this blow to the music world,” said Yolanda Blaisey, spokesperson for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. “Braden was a stellar talent and is loved by all of us. We will miss him deeply.”

she presses play and moves to the bed, where she can lie down and stare at the ceiling while listening to the soul of a man who was unable to die at the same time as his music.

“Lilian has passed on to the other side. She’s singing with the angels now.”

One visit to the doctor. One trip to the pharmacy. Three days of Librium. Half a bottle of vitamin B. Another mathematical equation that should add up to Braden sober in time for a Sunday-afternoon funeral.

If she could die quietly, just close her story as if it’s a book she started reading and decided she didn’t like, she would welcome that. But she has to keep turning the pages; she’s not allowed to quit, because this is her fault and it’s the punishment she deserves.

“Just breathe, little bird. I’ve got you.”

She softens into him, letting him take her weight, and the moment of trust is a thread of light in all of the grief and darkness and guilt. Even when the music mercifully ends, Allie doesn’t pull away. He holds her while friends and acquaintances come by to offer condolences, letting Alexandra revel in the pressing hands, the hugs, the lugubrious sighs and sobs.

But Phee can’t quite believe this comforting theory. Can’t help thinking that if her grandfather was sane, and if the stories he told her were true, then these two lives cut short may be a direct result of the fact that she has not followed through on the oath she swore on the night the old man died. Her fault. Her responsibility to put things right before something else happens.

In the first memory, he’s alone at his parents’ cabin in the woods and he’s deeply, devastatingly sad, faced with a decision that is going to break him, no matter what choice he makes. The cello rests warm against his knee and he’s playing, not the C Minor that he’s meant to be practicing but something different, Allie’s song, a lullaby he created for her when she was just a baby. That’s one bookend.

In the next, he’s in the hospital. His cheek is stitched back together after being flayed open somehow. His hands are bandaged from serious frostbite. And his sister is telling him that Mitch, his brother-in-law, is dead. People keep asking what happened. How did Mitch come to fall through the late ice on the lake? He’s a big man, so how did Braden get him from the lake to the cabin?

Then, as now, he doesn’t know the answers. As always, when he tries to push his way into the blank space, panic hits him with hurricane force. He can’t breathe, his chest hurts, his vision narrows down into a tunnel, and, oh God, what is he doing here? Everything he has been running from is in this house. Who does he t...

“Get it over with, Ophelia MacPhee. Open your bag, show him what he signed, hold him to his oath. Your emotions have nothing to do with this.” But the truth is, her emotions have everything to do with it. The moment that Phee fell in love with Braden Healey is lodged in her memory with the same pristine clarity as her first glass of Scotch.

Both had a similar effect on her. The burn, the sense of melting away, the instant addiction. Both have been eradicated from her life, but she is now in the way of temptation. It’s almost eleven years since their last disastrous conversation, and yet every nerve in her body is tuned to his voice, to the movement of his hands.

Sober’ is such a bleak word. Makes me think of Quakers. Or nuns. Amazed and alive, that’s what I am, five years now.”

“Tell you what. You stay away from Allie. No giving her any of the bullshit you laid on me about how this cello has a soul—” Phee sighs. “It’s not Allie’s contract, Braden, it’s yours.” “—and I’ll come to your meetings.”

Phee showed up twice, once at the house, once at the hotel he’d moved into when he was still hoping the separation would be short and he’d soon be back home. On both of those occasions, she’d spouted insane nonsense about some contract between him and the cello, an idiot piece of paper he’d signed when he was still a child—rambling on about a curse that would befall him if he didn’t play.

“You have to play.” “I can’t.” “You don’t understand. Granddad said there’s a curse if you don’t.” His laughter in response to those words had hurt more than the tears he’d been unable to shed. “I’m already cursed. How much

worse could it get?” Plenty worse, as it turns out. Not that the cello or any mysterious curse is to blame. Braden is his own curse. Everything that has happened is his fault. All of it.

Five faces turn toward him: two women and three men. The youngest must still be in her teens, the oldest close to eighty. The only thing they have in common is that their expressions are engaged and interested and alive. Braden feels like a zombie in comparison, dull and slow. “Hey, Braden, I’m Len,” the oldest man says. “We don’t bite.

Adventure Angels Manifesto I hereby commit to falling in love with life in all of its manifestations of trouble and triumph, joy and grief, boredom and excitement. I will treat each day as an adventure, full of possibility, and I will seek to be present for every moment, whether pleasant or unpleasant. I will resist the lure of alcohol, always vigilant against its many deceptions. I commit to the pursuit of honesty regarding my relationship with alcohol. If I should be overcome by temptation, I promise to share my struggle with the

Adventure Angels group and allow them to support me back into life. I commit to becoming an ambassador for adventure, bringing new experiences into the lives of others while engaging in them myself. And I solemnly promise to hold sacred the confidences and stories shared in this group, along with the identities of individuals who attend. If I should fail, I commit to picking myself up and trying again. On this day, I do so solemnly swear.

“There was an accident. Lilian was taking Trey to a doctor’s appointment, is what I understand. Police are still investigating, but she might have fallen asleep at the wheel.”

Always, she has made sense of her world through music. When she was a little girl, it was the notes her father played that sorted her emotions. When she was five, she could see colors in the music, could watch it carry away the black and the harsh red, bring out her favorite hues—the vibrant blues and purples and greens—sometimes a pure, bright yellow, the color of happiness.

that “fine” stands for “fucked up, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.”

A phrase of music vibrates through his entire body, not high and bright like a violin but deep and sonorous. His mother doesn’t notice, but the old man does, and so does the girl. Braden sees their focus shift, away from his mother and the violins, away from Braden, to the far side of the store. And then he sees the cello, and understands that even though nobody is playing and the strings are not moving, the cello is the source of the music.

“A forever home, you understand. A marriage. This cello is not a thing to be acquired and cast aside. And when you die and the bond is broken, your next of kin will bring the cello back to me. Here.”

“Did you want to be a luthier?” “I wanted to build and repair instruments.” “Isn’t that what a luthier does?” “Ordinary luthiers, yes. My family line has other . . . responsibilities. This book was used to keep records only of certain—special—instruments. Not all were entered here.” Braden registers this. “My cello. The maker’s mark, the color of the varnish, all indicate Stradivarius. You’re telling me it’s not?” “It is, and it isn’t.” Another cryptic comment that answers nothing. Phee wraps the book in a towel and locks it back in the trunk. She rifles

through folders in a desk drawer, draws out a single sheet of paper, and holds it out to him. Braden stares at it, his hands locked together in his lap. “No point in resisting. Fate has caught us up.” She tries to laugh, but he reads only regret and sadness in her eyes. Braden takes the paper. The first thing he sees is his own name scrawled at the bottom. It barely looks like his signature, his twelve-year-old self still laborious at a task that has since become as automatic as breathing. Even with his numb fingers, his signature always comes out the same. He reads:

I, Braden Healey, being of sound mind and purpose, do solemnly swear to enter into a forever bond with this Cello. I understand that the consequences of breaking my oath are unpredictable, and possibly dire. I will keep her, care for her...

This cello carries the soul of a woman murdered in the gas chamber, the soul of a gypsy shot like a dog in the street. She has been beloved, she has been abused, she has suffered the touch of evil. I promised her, when I coaxed the pieces into one, that she would be ever loved, that if she would give of her music, she would not be passed from hand to hand but cherished by one musician and one only. And so I made the boy swear an oath to me when he bought her.’”

“Sure. Music makes us vulnerable. You’re not ready for that in a group setting right now.”

“Oh, Allie. I can’t imagine how hard this is for you. But music . . .” His face is so full of sympathy and kindness, it’s going to make her cry in a minute, and that would suck. “It will make you feel, yes, but it also heals.”

“Grief is a strange place, Allie. Everything is upside down. Don’t make any permanent decisions now.”

The problem is, he’s known crazy people. He shared lodgings with a schizophrenic for a while, and is familiar with the lapses of attention, latencies of responses, the emotional flatness. Phee is not like that at all. Her clear and cogent presentation of what

she believes will befall him and Allie has unsettled him deeply. He has his own experiences to consider, his sense that the cello didn’t want to be given away. The music that will not stop playing in his head.

“What I think you’re asking isn’t necessarily connected to PTSD, although there is usually trauma involved. There is a fascinating condition we call conversion disorder. A person is faced with a set of circumstances so impossible to reconcile with their belief system, or a trauma so intense, that an elaborate defense mechanism emerges.

“There is a condition called conversion disorder, a psychological block that affects the body. It’s caused by trauma and protects the sufferer from having to face a decision or action that is too horrific or terrifying for their consciousness to handle.”

You did exactly right, Allie. It happened because your mother didn’t see all that you are, and tried to make you somebody else.”

“I love you, little bird,” he says, and then the miracle happens and she lifts her arms to him, like she used to do when she was a little girl.

Allie’s new reality is as fragile as a spiderweb. All of the things she knew about life used to make a solid tapestry; now she feels as if somebody has unraveled the whole thing, handed her the threads, and suggested she weave them back together without a pattern. A gift, she realizes with surprise. Her life, to be shaped and re-created however she chooses. The emotional place she was in when she swallowed the pills belongs to another girl in another life.