Page 9 of The Pawn
In the end, I was in this room for a total of ten days. On the eleventh day, my father came for us. I didn’t know the count then, only after. I didn’t know until after that that they took one finger for each night. The little hope she had they broke her of. She knew what was going to happen. Maybe it’s like Malek said. For a pianist, to lose your fingers is the worst of fates. She didn’t even try to fight it, not for herself. She only tried to save me.
My throat closes up
That’s probably why they’d taken me, too. If it was just her, she’d have laid down and died. With me, though, she had something to fight for. To stay alive for. To suffer for.
And Malek’s right about who was behind it all.
Cassian was right.
How did he guess it? Or maybe it’s how he thinks. How all men like him, like my father, like Malek, think. Look for weakness. Exploit it. Snuff out any light. Any hope. Crush it underfoot until it turns to ash.
My father ordered her kidnapping.
My father ordered her slow dismemberment.
Did he order her murder? No. He didn’t order it, but not because he didn’t want her dead. He was angry when she died, but it wasn’t because they killed her. It was because she didn’t suffer enough in his eyes. Malek isn’t lying aboutthat. He wanted more from her. He’d already taken her beloved teacher, the man he thought was her lover, but I don’t think he was. He’d already taken all her fingers. It wasn’t enough for him, though. It wasn’t enough for my butcher father. He wanted to steal her soul. Did he know he’d already killed her before she took her last breath?
I think by the end, he hated her.
But to hate, one must first love. I’m not sure my father was capable of love.
Malek was telling the truth.
And it was so easy. Just a whisper here, a whisper there.
Mom had her piano lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays before she came to get me from school. She’d been doing it for a while, and she was happier than I ever recall her being.
I was a pretty normal fifteen-year-old girl in that I was more interested in myself than anyone else, but mom and I were close. She was a lot younger than dad and almost more of a big sister than mother to me. There was something other-worldly about her. Always just out of reach of all of us. She loved us, Michael and I at least, but she was never ours. There was something about her or in her that we could never touch. I think that’s where the music came from. From those darkest parts of herself. She let herself be seen in her music. Sometimes I wonder what horrors my mother lived before she met Malek, before she met my father, to make the music she made.
My throat closes up at the thought of it.
My father felt it too, that she was different. That no matter what, she was as out of reach to him as she was to us. And it didn’t make him sad like it did me. It didn’t make him try harder to understand or accept her or take onlywhat was given without grasping for more. It just made him angry. And over the last year of her life, he was full of rage, a jealous, violent rage.
My mother didn’t know her parents. Her only memories were of the orphanage. She was entirely on her own. When her talent for piano was discovered, though, it paved the way for her future. She wouldn’t be allowed to fall by the wayside. It was a fairy tale in a way. A benefactor took her from the orphanage and placed her in a boarding school where she was trained by the best teachers. She was giving concerts by the time she was twelve. She only met the benefactor a handful of times. He was an old man, a kind man. A sad man, she’d said and what he wanted from her was music. Only music.
My father didn’t care so much for the music. He was only interested in possessing her. As far as love, I suppose he loved her like someone loves a beautiful object they can display behind glass, in a gilded cage.
I don’t know how she first met the Maestro. I met him a few times on those Tuesdays and Thursdays I didn’t have school or was too sick to go so Mom had to take me with her. It was either that or she’d have to miss the lesson. I never felt like I was unwanted those days. The opposite. I saw a side of my mother I’d never seen before. With him, she was like a child. She would laugh. Laugh like I’d never heard her laugh before. With him, she shone bright, so bright it almost blinded anyone who saw her.
I liked him, the Maestro. He was kind to us. And mom was special to him. They weren’t lovers. They loved each other, but it wasn’t a sexual love. It was more than that. Where my father wanted to possess her, the Maestro simply loved her.
But no one believed that. It’s why they brought us down here. What they wanted was her confession. She wouldn’t lie about it, though. It’s what my father wanted to hear, but she wouldn’t say it because it wasn’t true. Even when they took the last of her fingers. Only when they started on mine did she say what they wanted her to say. Only then did she lie to stop them from taking more. And by then, she was finished. Did they know that each time that butcher’s knife came down they cut away a piece of her soul, killing her slowly. One finger at a time, taking her beloved music as they mutilated her. Let her life seep out of her.
Sound from above calls me to the present. I turn to where it’s coming from and remember the small window in the back corner of the cellar. I don’t get up. I don’t bother. Being here now, it’s like those days five years ago. Not like the first day when I believed my father would come and save us. No. It’s like the last days when all hope was gone. When I held my mom because she was unable to hold me any longer.
I remember now that window. The glass was busted out back then, too, and we could hear them when they went outside to smoke. We could smell their cigarettes.
I remember when I smelled my father’s cigar.
And it was so easy. Just a whisper here, a whisper there.
Malek’s words are on repeat in my head.
The sound of tires on gravel comes from the window. A little bit of light. Headlights. I wipe the last of my tears and crawl toward where the window was, cutting my hands and knees on the old glass, the broken bottles, the filth of this place. I listen as car doors are opened then closed and I hear Rami.
“This way,” he says roughly.
A man whose voice I don’t recognize instructs someone to stay with the car. Says he’ll only be a few minutes.
