That Gregory had then kissed her — that she’d kissed him back and let his dense, abandoned stubble scrape her chin — seemed almost inevitable, just a by-product of all that youth and music and summer. They’d been rehearsing Bartók together that week, and it seemed to follow naturally that the interweaving of melodies should lead so directly to the interweaving of limbs. As it so often had, in the history of Marlboro. In the history of music, for that matter.
He had wedged his thigh between her legs, and she felt her feet leave the earth, felt the damp of the building soak through her dress. Gravity rearranged itself so that leaning back against the theater’s slippery verticality was enough to keep from floating off into the night.
The next morning, she could still trace the red patches on her skin where Gregory’s mouth and chin had scraped and bitten: down her neck, along her collarbones, down her sternum. And it was only then, the next morning, standing in her towel in front of the narrow closet mirror in the Marlboro dorm room, that she could process what had been so unusual, what left her so shaken and oxygen deprived. Every man who had kissed her good night in the past year of formal and tepid dating had done so with a tactical purpose: obtaining a second date, getting invited upstairs, letting her down easy. But Gregory and his fervid mouth had only demonstrated the simplest and most emphatic things: clavicle, they said, and shoulder, and teeth and thirst.
And then he had lowered her, slow and weightless, to the ground — where his hand against her cheek and then his heading to the theater, staring back over his shoulder, had not seemed in the least like a breaking off. Nor did it particularly seem like a story that was to be continued.
At lunch the next day there was no awkward avoidance, only a sly grin, which made it all right to rehearse peacefully with Mike and Mike that afternoon, to glide through the rest of the summer’s rehearsals and meals and concerts with neither longing nor regret, just shaky wonder.
Outside, she heard a car drive up and stop. Gregory and the Mikes weren’t due until the next morning, and she had a moment of dread imagining that Gregory might have decided to show up a day early. But the car wasn’t in the driveway. It was out on the road near the oak tree, and when the doors opened two women worked their way out. A few leaves had already fallen from the trees, affording her a clearer view of the cross than she’d had before, and as the women began circling it, she could see their bodies and their pale hair. One was extremely thin, almost ill-looking, so that the other, though not obese, was nearly twice her weight. They wore jeans and unzipped fleeces, and the larger one seemed younger — mother and daughter, perhaps, and perhaps the mother and sister of the dead girl. Celine had pictured something very different before. She’d imagined the dead girl as petite, with dark skin and long, straight black hair. Exactly like her teenage self, she realized now, and wondered why she’d formed such a narcissistic picture. But no one like that could feasibly be related to these two women who were now walking partway up the driveway to peer at Celine’s car, to stare suspiciously at the house. Celine ducked out of the window frame and only looked again a few minutes later when she heard music blasting from the little blue car. They had turned on the radio and opened all the doors, so that now they had a soundtrack of anemic rock for the redecorations they were attempting around the cross.
They didn’t seem to be taking anything away, just adding. Celine grabbed her father’s old birding binoculars out of her desk and watched the women jab individual plastic flowers into the ground around the cross’s base. She inferred from the cardboard box still full of blue and white and pink that they intended to plant an entire plastic garden.
Over the next hour, as Celine went back and forth between unpacking and cleaning and staring out the window, the women, too, alternated their plastic horticulture with sitting on the hood of the blue car, smoking, laughing loud enough for Celine to hear.
At several points she considered pulling on her coat and walking out there, bringing the women mugs of hot cider, asking if there was anything she could do to help. But she never knew what to say in these situations, and she worried that her distaste for the new lawn decorations would show on her face. The way they kept looking at her car, kept pointing at her house and talking, she felt strangely judged. They already guessed her to feel superior, and they were right.
When the Mikes showed up the next morning — Mike Langley, the gay blond one, and Mike Cho, the young straight one who, in a fit of bravery, had slapped his arm around Celine that summer and called her his “half-breed half-Asian half sister”—she was in a frenzy of breakfast preparations. She had covered the kitchen table with pitchers of orange juice and milk and plates of fruit and toast, and over at the stove she was working on “eggs with stuff,” which she was sure had a fancier name somewhere in the world. It occurred to her, as she hugged them both and showed them their rooms and ran back down to stir the browning vegetables and sausage, that filling the air with the smell of onions and peppers and mushrooms and meat might have been, in some way, an attempt at compensation for the hollow welcome of an empty and under-decorated house.
The Mikes sat at the table fidgeting and ate huge plates of eggs. Mike Langley was in his twenties, and this had been his third summer at Marlboro, but Mike Cho was only eighteen. She had suddenly wondered, in the midst of all the arrangements for this week, if she should perhaps be calling his parents. Langley had picked him up from Juilliard this morning and driven him west in his little Honda. Despite their enormous talent, both had been noticeably intimidated that summer by both Celine and Gregory, and she hoped this week would put them at ease.
She was displeased with how frequently she found herself checking the clock, how busy her hands wanted to be. “There’s a used bookstore in town,” she said, “and a coffee shop, if you want to drive in. I thought we could all go out to dinner tonight, or we can order pizza. And tomorrow’s the day Julie comes, from Deutsche Grammophon.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Langley said. “Don’t tell me.”
“You can pretend she’s my sister, and she’s visiting from Canada. My blond sister, ha! But she’s going to love you.”
Julie was thrilled by the prospect of the quartet, especially since it involved Gregory, who was already on the label. But Celine hoped, from a sort of motherly perspective, that Julie would fall so in love with Mike and Mike that she’d develop independent relationships with them.
Gregory had, apparently, just let himself right in the front door, because there he stood, duffel bag in one hand, violin case in the other, his thinning hair still bleached from the summer, his face unshaven. He put his things on the floor and hugged everyone. Celine held her wooden spoon out awkwardly behind her back so she wouldn’t get grease on his coat.
“Quite a display you have out front there.”
“We were wondering!” Mike Cho said. But then he straightened his face, clearly worried he’d made a mistake. “Was it your dog?”
“A girl on a motorcycle.” Celine went back to the stove and started cracking eggs into the new batch of vegetables and sausage. Too many eggs, probably, but she couldn’t stop herself from cracking one more, and then one more. She told them the story, as she knew it, and about the recent additions. “I haven’t been out yet this morning. How bad is it?”