Page 50 of Hunger

I sit on the rug beside it and I tune it carefully, and I rosin the bow, and I begin to play.

I play scales first. I'm better than I was a week ago. The fingers aren't stiff anymore. The shifting is smoother. I work through scales in three keys, then arpeggios, then double-stops. The motion is settling back into my hands. The training hasn't left me. It's been waiting.

I work through pieces. Bach first — the short preludes from the Sonatas, the ones I learned at thirteen. The Wieniawski I played at sixteen. The fingering comes back in fragments. Things I haven't thought of in years rise out of my fingers and into the room as if they were never gone.

I don't look at the clock.

I'm hours into it when I start the Meditation from Thaïs.

I don't decide to start it. The piece begins under my fingers on its own. The opening D, the slow rising line, the bow drawing across the string in the long sustained way Massenet wrote — it begins, and I keep going, and I haven't played this piece in three years but I don't need to remember it. It's in me. It's part of how I'm made.

I play the whole of it.

I miss notes. My fingers are still rusty. The shifting in the high passages is uncertain and I stumble on the cadenza. But I play it. I play it for the first time since I stood on the stage in the dark dress and my father stood up in the audience when I was done.

When I finish the room is full of the silence the piece leaves in its wake. The same silence the auditorium had. The same long-held quiet before anything else.

There's a sound outside the window.

I lower the violin.

I cross to the window. The curtain is drawn but I push it aside, and the late afternoon light comes in across me. The sky outside is the color of old gold. The sun is low. It must be an hour from setting.

He's on the ledge.

He's crouched on the four-inch ledge outside my window with his back against the brick and his face turned away from the sky. The daylight catches him fully. His gray skin is paler than it was last night. The shadow under his eyes is darker. He looks worn. He looks reduced. He looks like a creature of the dark caught in a place he wasn't built to be.

He has come to me in the day.

He's chosen to be in the place where he's weakest, on the ledge outside my window in the late afternoon, because the night before I told him to stay and he couldn't wait to see me again.

I unlatch the window.

I push it up.

"Come in."

He moves slowly — slower than he moved last night — and he steps through the window into the room and closes it behind him. He turns to face me.

I see him.

I see him in daylight for the first time.

The gray of his skin isn't uniform. There are paler patches where the skin stretches over bone, darker places where shadow has settled into the hollows. His face is long and lean. The cheekbones cut high. The mouth is wide. The eyes are the same solid black they were last night, but in this light I can see the shape of them more clearly — the long slant of them, the way the lashes are pale instead of dark.

His hair is dark brown going gray. It's thin and uneven, untended for a long time. His brow is heavy. There's a thin scar at the corner of his jaw — old, a thin pale line — and another at his temple.

He's taller than I remember. He has to bend his head slightly to clear the ceiling near the window.

I'm not afraid of him.

I'm not even surprised by him. I've already seen him in the dim light of moonlight, and what I see now in the sun is the same creature in better detail. Nothing has changed. Only my ability to see has changed.

I step toward him.

He stays where he is.

I close the distance between us. I lift my hand and I lay it against the gray of his cheek. The skin is cold. Smoother than I expected. There's a faint texture to it under my palm, like fine paper. He's gone still under my hand. He's letting me touch him. He's waiting for me to do whatever I'm going to do.