The Last Orphan
Chapter 20

Echo stood beside the tall, narrow pane of her elongated tilt-and-turn bathroom window, bare feet on the wide ledge, gazing down eleven stories at Broadway below. The wind cut straight through her jeans and sweatshirt as if she were wearing nothing at all. She had a good grip on the inside of the window frame, so all in all it was a pretty safe scouting exercise, one she’d undertaken a number of times, venturing to the sheer edge of what her nerve would allow.

She’d forgotten about the phone in her pocket, its ringing nearly startling her off her semisecure perch. She’d debated not answering. If she was going to take the plunge, what would an unanswered phone call matter? And yet not picking up a call that had arrived serendipitously seemed like putting her thumb in the eye of fate. And who could afford to do that on the way out?

At first she’d thought it might be her mother, which would have sent her over the edge with haste. Mom derived her pleasure not from luxuries but from the superiority she felt projecting the strictures of her own contorted morality, a perennial litmus test everyone else failed. Not that Echo had stopped trying to pass.

Not all the way through Dartmouth, principal cellist in the orchestra, crew team captain, magna cum laude, four years volunteering in the music-therapy program at the Children’s Hospital. She’d been the first in her class to open a business, midway through senior year. It was a music-therapy online start-up—or, in Mom’s words, a rent-seeking scheme for Echo to get her snout into the medical-industrial trough.

But the universe had spared her from Mom calling with a few sanctimonious last words and given her a stranger instead.

The man on the other end of the line seemed shockingly calm given what she’d just said.

“Do you have a plan?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “One more step.”

“Oh,” he said. “It’s like that.”

“I come out here from time to time and consider my options.” She thought of her Christian Pedersen cello resting unused on its stand inside. When she couldn’t play, she felt voiceless. “I can’t figure out if I’m serious or if this is just a cry for help. But I don’t know who I’m crying to, really.”

A gust of wind filled the receiver. A taxi disappeared beneath the awning below, and over on Madison someone honked and held the horn, an aggressive blast. To her side a pigeon set down on the ledge, cocked its head, and regarded her with curiosity, its dumb pigeon eyes frozen wide in that expression of perennial pigeon shock.

“You want to talk about Luke Devine?” she asked.

“Not at the moment,” he said. “But I would like to know what you can tell me about him, yes.”

What could she say about Luke Devine?

That he walked the razor edge between brilliance and insanity? That at times it seemed he could make anyone do anything? It wasn’t his money that was intoxicating, it was the fearlessness that had led to his having money. No, not just fearlessness. That adventurer’s streak so rare among today’s entitled and contented. That’s what he exuded, an old-fashioned spark of genius and recklessness. That’s also what pulled so many luminaries along in his wake, what made so many unmakeable deals snap together at the last minute, what drew everyone to him like a drug they couldn’t believe they’d lived without. His conviction that every instant contained the whole universe if you were willing to pay close enough attention to it.

In the brief but intense time they’d dated, he had shown her how to see inside herself in a way she never had, all those buttons coded into her genetics and coaxed into prominence by her lived experience. How to let the ebbs and flows of guilt and anxiety roll through her instead of locking them inside where they could drown her.

Luke made her stronger, but he used to say in his playful scherzando voice that she made him better. That she tethered him to the world, brought him into balance. He was an incredibly sensitive instrument that she knew how to tune. Without her he was all thundering fortissimo, but she helped remind him to also live in the tender dolce that made the powerful notes so much more powerful.

She’d always thought of the cello as a split personality, swinging from warm and low to bright and high, the yellowy heat of bourbon balanced against the cyan coolness of vodka. Its voice spanned three clefs, transforming itself to hold other instruments together, to ground the whine of the violins or lift the growl of the basses. It took a rare soul to allow the instrument to speak with its full vocabulary, and the fact that she belonged to that small community was her biggest secret joy. She liked to think she did that for Luke as well, modulated him to embody his full musicality.

Until she couldn’t.

Those last few months, Luke’s work and the considerations surrounding it had grown greater and greater. When he spoke, the words crowded together, like there were too many thoughts in his head competing to get out and his mouth was a mile behind them, struggling to keep pace. Everything—she included—seemed to bore him. He’d told her that he increasingly felt the same everywhere, like he was in a scene he’d played through enough times that he could have written the dialogue for every role. That he needed new challenges and new frontiers. The energy coming off him in those weeks was brilliant like a diamond and just as hard. He’d even held himself differently, head jutting ahead of his body, his prefrontal cortex out in front leading his chest, heart, guts, overpowering and effective, able to convince itself of anything.

She’d been afraid he was speeding up.

When he was himself, he was the best.

But when he was fast, he was very, very bad.

“I don’t know how to describe Luke to you,” she told the pigeon and the man on the phone. “Or to anyone else. I just know that since our relationship I feel … diminished. It’s so humiliating that I was weak enough to let him do this to me.”

“It’d be more humiliating if you killed yourself over it.”

For the first time in a long time, she felt genuinely amused. “I know,” she said. “That’s the problem.” She kicked at the pigeon, who scuttled back, undeterred, and then shat in the wind with pigeonly entitlement. “Know what’s worse?”

“No,” he said. “But I’d prefer if you told me once you were inside.”

She was surprised to hear herself laugh. “Hang on.”

She squirmed back through the window, the heat of the condo enveloping her. Her feet had gone partially numb. She walked through the bathroom and into the studio, burrowing into the plush velvet blanket on the couch. “Okay,” she said.

“Tell me what’s worse.”

“Luke could see everything that was wrong with me.” She rubbed an edge of the royal-purple blanket against her cheek, stared at her cello collecting dust next to the side table by the front door. “He saw it in me, in everyone but himself. It wasn’t the whole truth. But it was truth. That’s how Luke is. And … God.”

“What?”

“Even talking about him now feels like a betrayal. Of him! How insane-making is that? How do you stay angry when parts of him are so …”

“So what?”

“So right.” Heat in her face, pressure behind her eyes. There was a pause so long that she wondered if the caller had hung up. “Still there?”

“I am.” A briefer pause. “Will you tell me more about him?”

“Huh. I suppose so. It’s just …”

“What?”

“I can’t hear an instrument in your voice,” she said. “Is that by design?”

“Do most people have an instrument in their voice?”

“Everyone,” she said. “Who are you? What’s your name?”

“If I flew out to see you, would you promise not to kill yourself until I get there?”

The wind howled against the window, and the building creaked in response. Wrapped in the blanket and the glow of her own body heat, she felt safer than she had in months.

“Why the hell not,” she said.