Paula Guran - The Mammoth Book of Cthulhu

And it was the long sweet weekend when Luke took her virginity in his clumsy, quick way. When he told her he loved her. She’d never thought those words could sound like they did, like a chord, something to build a concerto around.

But it wasn’t the cabin or the burned house where he said it, it was after that, after they got back on the road home and saw an old severeroofed church in the distance. Something about its shape, or the way the forest stood guard behind it, made Luke turn down the snaking driveway. The door was not locked. Ada would have followed him into the deepest cave that day. Inside was an air of God abandoning His flock, but the place was clean and still used, no dust on the pews, which were well polished with hymnals in little cubbies along the back of each.

He needed a few minutes in one of those pews before he took her hands. I love you, Ada . She can’t even remember the name of that church. It was just the old place, when they were new people. But the thrill she has now, what makes her more Ada Blount than she’s been in months, is from his choice to mention not the I love you but what came after, when she opened up and told him what her life had been.

About how Gram had taken her in when she was three, orphaned in a car accident that had killed her parents instantly without even scratching Ada. How Gram raised a friendless and timid mouse, never let Ada out of sight. Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings to their tiny church, the grocery store on the fifteenth and the thirtieth, and the rest of it was the house, hiding from a white world in an unlocked cage. They slept side by side in the bedroom off the kitchen. The bathtub was her one privacy, the one place she would sing, always in her softest voice because Gram wouldn’t allow song. There was sin in Ada’s voice, somehow.

But the viola, Gram almost worshiped that thing, though she knew little of it. Practice after breakfast, before dinner and bed. Even the Bible lessons weren’t as strict — Ada’s mama, she was supposed to be in a famous symphony some day, but the Lord had told Gram that Ada would do even greater things. For all Ada knew, her mama had only left behind her proud instrument. Ada pretended she could smell her in the wood.

Didn’t you go to school? Luke asked, and looked away for a second, just the one second, when she told him no, she’d even learned to tell time with only a sundial. She’d learned to read by the scriptures, made her friends out of her father’s records, full of music written by long-buried men. The mountains locked the sky in with her. Gram, always right there, broad and tired and feeling stomachachy, the lines sinking into her face like a sped-up geology. That was her whole world, days strung together into a forever that could have ended sooner than it did. Ada’s curiosity was growing right along with her body. But one afternoon, she was seventeen and humming nonsense under her breath in the tub, she heard a soft thunder from the kitchen and there lay Gram on the floor, the oven door open in surprise.

Ada became less a granddaughter than a nurse. The cancer ate Gram’s bowels first before spreading its fingers into all her nooks and crannies. She refused chemo, refused hospice, had all she needed with her little Ada.

Gram lasted nearly three years. They called for a hard, dark love but Ada gave it. She sat between their twin beds and played, and Gram talked to Ada’s Grampa, who’d passed long before Ada was a dream of a thought. She wailed at that drunken Irish fool who’d killed her daughter and only spent a year in prison. She reached her hands up, her palms white as the pages of her Bible, and clutched at Ada, still trying to protect her.

Ada felt her kinship with the viola deepen in those years. She grew to understand the depth of its androgyny, in its delicate bridging of violin and cello. The notes it wrought were like pheromones.

And the pounds melted from Gram like winter. She died just five months before the day Ada told Luke about her, and it felt like minutes and a lifetime since the brash, vibrant world opened up to a girl of twenty who had only the faintest idea of what to do with it. She’d never been educated. Never known anyone her age. She stood in a doorway with no threshold.

What she didn’t tell Luke, though it pounded in her: She couldn’t even remember Gram’s funeral, or all the strange lonely quiet after. It hadn’t gone on long enough, only until she ran out of food and built up her nerve to go to the store. And there had been the answer, smiling, hazel-eyed by the tomatoes.

I love you . The second time he said it was sweeter than the first, more first than the first, somehow. And she loved him back more than he could ever know, because she had never known.

—We’ve looked for you.

Something stirs in the attic, boxes shifting, and her daze breaks apart. When does Luke need her to come? The voice in the film said now. It’s late already but the old place can’t be more than half an hour south, right inside the cusp of the Blue Ridge.

She picks up her viola. “Is he in trouble?” she asks the ceiling. The shuffling above her stops, waiting, is it breathing at her? Then one long nail of something drags across the inside of the closet door.

“Yes, why don’t you go rescue him?” a voice says from the closet, and laughs.

Ada recognizes the voice — her neighbor? “Ms. Hursh?” she says, stepping back until the bed presses into her legs.

“I’m only wearing her, dear. I’ve watched you. We’ve come far. And Luke saved you,” Ms. Hursh says, only it’s started to sound nothing like her. “He gave you a world outside of your grandmother.” It’s almost Regan’s voice now. “Like a birth,” now it’s Gram, it’s someone much, much older, “like a father.”

These are Ada’s own thoughts, thrown back at her. A challenge, a rite of passage. She takes the wadded sheet from the floor and holds it like a shield.

“I’ll show you how we look underneath,” that old voice says. There’s a wet stretching, a breaking-bone sort of sound from the closet, something growing, and the doorknob begins to turn. She snatches up the viola and runs outside, where the moths are boiling, parting for her like a sea of ash.

It’s remarkable, how she’s thinking about the end of her marriage from a distance now. Because she’s on her way to him, she supposes, but it seems more as though she’s just beginning to see Luke clearly, through a truer lens, one that’s her own. She can think of arguments they had, how they ran hotter than she told herself when she rewrote them the next day. And she’s playing music again, reaching deeper and deeper into her instrument. Her hands feel strong around the steering wheel. Headlights pick out the reds and yellows from the night, the trees leaning over the road, the mountains settling into the changing quilt.

Luke had been under a black cloud for days before the Breakup, and she’d had to beg him to get out of the house and just be with her. They sat in a booth in Locke’s Pub and Ada tore her napkin into strips. When there was nothing else to do with her hands, she mentioned the books Luke read in his studio, the time he spent on his computer, light bleeding onto his face at two, three most mornings. What was he doing when he hadn’t shown her any new work in months? Where did he go when he didn’t come home at night?

He got this look to him when she said something bad, it wasn’t quite often, but there it was now. “Nothing,” he muttered, the naked hanging bulb turning them both into suspects. A glass of something amber and oak-smelling sweated on the table in front of him. “Stay out of that stuff. It’s just research on this . . . group I hunted down.”