Page 22 of Hunger

I stand in the middle of the shop and breathe in. It's a particular kind of smell. A craftsperson's smell. The smell of something built and maintained by people who care about it.

I cross to the counter. The case holds the rosin.

I don't know which kind she used. I know only that she used something good. I look at the labels. Pirastro, Hill, Bernardel, Andrea. The Hill catches my eye — a small dark brick of amber rosin in a wooden case lined with cloth. The Hill is the rosin a serious student would have used in the early eighties. The kind a teacher like Dr. Reeves would have insisted on.

I open the glass case. I take out the Hill rosin. I look at it in my hand. The case is small and the rosin inside is the color of dark honey.

I take out three of them. I don't know which she'd have used. The Light or the Dark or the violin-specific. I'll give her all three.

I leave the cash on the counter. More than enough. I weight it down with a metal practice mute from the display.

I close the case. I leave through the back the way I came. I lock the door behind me with a piece of wire and the kind of patience that comes from never being in a hurry.

* * *

The drive back to Millfield takes ninety minutes. The wind has picked up and the snow has started again, the same dry pellets that have been falling for three nights now. I park the van half a block from the apartment complex. I walk.

The Granada is buried under snow in its usual spot. I don't approach it. I cross the lot and stand at the base of the southeast corner of the building. The window on the second floor is dark. The latch is closed.

I climb.

The ledge is narrow. Maybe four inches. Wide enough for the wooden boxes if I place them carefully. I take the three rosin cases from the inside pocket of my coat and I arrange them on the ledge in a neat row, the labels facing inward toward the window so she can read them through the glass when she opens her curtain in the morning.

I look at the cases. They're small. They're nothing. They're the closest thing I have ever come to a confession.

The window is dark behind them. She's inside. She's sleeping.

I want to open the latch. I want to slip into the room and watch her sleep as I did before. I want to look at her hand on the pillow, the way her hair comes loose while she sleeps.

I don't open the latch.

I climb back down. I cross the lot. I walk back to the van.

I drive home with the first weak light of dawn graying the eastern horizon. The house is dark when I let myself in. I cross to the room with no windows and I sit on the floor and I go still.

Behind my closed eyes, Dr. Reeves is in her office, looking at the empty chair across the desk.

You can. You can. You can do this.

I stay with it until the day passes over me.

Chapter Six

Jenny

I wake at seven-fifteen. The room is gray with morning light. The wind has died sometime in the night and the apartment is quiet in the way it gets after a long stretch of weather, the sudden absence of pressure that makes the silence feel deliberate.

I lie in bed. The cold edge feeling from yesterday isn't in the room today. I don't know if that's because there's nothing to feel or because I've stopped trusting myself to feel it. The two are different but they amount to the same thing in the morning.

I get up. I cross to the window to look at the weather.

I open the curtain.

There are three wooden boxes on the outside ledge of my window.

I stop with my hand still on the curtain.

The boxes are dark. The wood is varnished. They're about the size of matchboxes but thicker, and they're lined up in a neat rowalong the ledge with their labels turned toward the glass so I can read them.