Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

It really did hang, too, from its halter strap — crisp and shiny and gaping way too big. A little Russian woman flitted around her with pins. Maybe not Russian, she reminded herself. Maybe Lithuanian. Maybe Ukrainian. Maybe Minnesotan. Piet sat on a pink-cushioned bench and watched. “Looks great,” he said. “Look even better with a ring on.”

She stared in the mirror, not at the dress but at her horrible face. Her skin was dry and her eyes were puffy, her hair a dark mess. She wanted a necklace with a big red stone, to match that brilliant red on the albatross’s neck. What she hadn’t been able to describe to anyone about that day in Tumby Bay was the sublimity, the blinding beauty of that bird as it flew, and as it lay where it fell. She could bring back in an instant that moment of white light rising beyond the leaves, her hand shaking against the gun. The echo of the shot seeming to come first because her ears went dead, then the load roar as they woke again. The flapping and cracking as something fell through the trees, branch by snapping branch. She wanted black arms on her gown, to match the dead bird’s wings. She wanted to take it all back, to return to that moment at the lake’s edge and take back that one moment of horrible misprision. And if she’d seen that bird wrong, and seen Eden Su wrong, who was to say she hadn’t seen Malcolm wrong, too? She’d been walking around blind ever since that day.

“You look miserable,” Piet said. “I’m calling him right now.” He pulled out his phone.

“No! Please don’t.”

“I already dialed.” He held the phone out of her reach, like he’d done with stuffed animals when they were kids. She couldn’t move away from the Russian woman’s pins.

“Malcolm, listen. It’s Piet. Yeah, my sister’s been an idiot, she’s sorry, and she’s standing here in her wedding dress looking gorgeous. You’d be a fool not to take her back. What do you say?” He listened for a minute, and she could hear the rumble of Malcolm’s voice, but not his words. “Sure, sure. Good man.” He clicked his phone shut. “He says call him tonight and you can talk.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“No, you’re not.”

They walked out into the street, her dress left behind in a bag like something hung up to bleed. “See, things are looking brighter,” Piet said. “As soon as I show up.”

“All that’s happened is you’ve meddled.”

There was a park up ahead, so they sat on a bench. Geese flew above, real ones, with brown bodies and black faces and white chinstraps.

“So really you’ve got four options. You go back to Malcolm and back to work; you forget about Malcolm and focus on the job, or vice versa; or you leave it all behind and go live someplace you’ve always wanted to go. I mean, your problem is it’s undecided. And you’ve never been a girl to leave things to chance, just sit there and let things happen to you. So, you take action and you select an option. One, two, three, or four.”

Piet had that way of talking that you’d agree to anything he said. And if she no longer believed she could see clearly enough to find her way, at least she was starting to believe in luck. She reached into her pocket. She said, “Go ahead, pick a card.”

The next morning, Eden Su was walking down the big sidewalk that cut diagonally across the campus green, hunched under a carapace of red backpack. She wore a silky blue sweater over black leggings. Alex raced behind the music building so she could meet her face-to-face, rather than sneak up from behind. She had just dropped off her statement for the Grievance Committee, and it was a good one. Whatever Eden had to say, stellar writer that she was, it wouldn’t hold up against Alex reasoning with the committee on an adult level.

When she was about ten feet away, Eden spotted her, and there was a slight trip to her step. She put her head down again, as if she planned to walk past and say nothing — which made Alex angry, rather than just desperate to end things. This girl had taken it upon herself to ruin an adult’s professional reputation and tenure prospects, but now she was acting as if they were eighth-grade enemies with crushes on the same boy. And Alex wouldn’t accept that. It gave her the courage to approach Eden as an adult talking to a child, rather than as a desperate woman begging a twenty-year-old for mercy.

She stopped walking right in front of her and said, “Eden.” And smiled patiently.

Eden tried to look surprised. “Oh. Hi.” She glanced around — not, Alex realized, out of embarrassment, but to see if any friends were around to witness the strange professor accosting her like this. “Professor Moore. I’m glad you’re feeling better.” Instead of pulling her hair across her face, she tucked it behind her ear.

Alex had planned on asking her to explain, from her point of view, the problem. This would lead to a rational discussion in which Alex would not apologize — doing so might give Eden more ammunition for her Grievance Committee statement — but they would eventually see eye-to-eye, and Eden would admit what a silly misunderstanding it had been. But now the girl was staring her down, and Alex didn’t want to lose the little edge she had left. So she said, “Have you resolved the issue of those missed credits? You can’t be picking up a new course now. Will you need to overload in the spring?”

“Yeah, I — it’s okay.” Eden was starting to look uncomfortable. “Actually, what I’m doing is switching to an independent study with Professor Leonard. It’s the same reading, just one-on-one.” Her voice was still quiet, but determined, and even — something Alex would never have guessed — a little supercilious. “He offered.”

“Right. Well, I hope you’re thanking him for his time. That’s a lot to ask of someone already teaching two courses and acting as department head.”

Eden adjusted her backpack. “Okay, sure. So I’ll see you later.”

“Hold on.” She could absolutely not let Eden be the one to end the conversation. She put a thin layer of concern in her voice. “You know, Eden, part of me wonders if the real reason you dropped this class is because you weren’t getting a strong grade.”

Eden just stared ahead blankly, the way she always used to.

“Maybe you haven’t really been challenged like that before, and it seems I was wrong about where you’re from, but talking in class is still a part of a liberal arts education. And I can see from your recent actions that you have no problem speaking up for yourself.”

Eden looked around again for those invisible, incredulous friends.

“Look at it this way, Eden. How much do you know about me? Do you know my first name? Do you know where I did my graduate work? Do you know my genetic background?”

Eden was gawking at her like she was insane and drooling. Alex found it infuriating, even with the Vicodin still in her system.

“I’m going to take your silence for a no. You’ve probably made assumptions about me, and I’m sure most of them aren’t true. For instance, I’m not American.” It was a lie, from lord knows where. “I was born in Australia. I lived there till I was eighteen. If you referred to me, say, in an article for the Telegraph , as an American, you’d be wrong. And one thing I could say, if I were being unreasonable, is that you were intentionally denying my Australian identity. My point is, Eden, that we can’t see anyone , really.”

The girl shifted her backpack and smiled. She didn’t look uncomfortable at all anymore, just quietly, enragingly smug.

“For instance,” Alex said, “I thought you were an intelligent student. And I appear to have been mistaken.” She turned away before Eden could say anything, then looked back over her shoulder. “Have a super term with Leonard! I’m sure he’ll enjoy your stony silence!” She managed a ridiculous grin and walked away, pleased to note in her peripheral vision that Eden stayed planted several seconds before pulling out her phone and continuing down the walk.