Mozart was crazy. .... But his music’s not crazy, It’s balanced, it’s nimble, It’s crystalline clear.
*
Jamie stared between the paintbrush in her hand and the bright canvas before her. She had a pallet in the other hand, touched delicately with small blobs of varying paints. But there was nothing on the brush, and nothing on the canvas. Her chest rose and fell heavily, as if she’d just finished running. In a way, she had. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw the filled canvases scattered about her room, all depicting horrors that she often found herself unable to express. They were the old works, the ones she’d done years ago, when wounds were still fresh. Most were from her first marriage. Others were through the divorce. A couple she’d done since entering her second marriage, when her first still felt too fresh to put aside completely.
She didn’t paint like this anymore, not really. It was mostly florals, or still life, or portraits of the ones she loved, their images brought to her by recollection alone, her visual memory strong and untouched, unlike the damage her auditory memory had faced. Jamie didn’t hear music like she used to, one of the reasons she had stepped away from the piano a long time ago. The other reason she had stopped playing was that Ross would not allow her to. Fingers broken by the slamming lid, being pinned to the strings - well, she’d hired a tutor after that to teach her children, instead of doing their lessons herself.
But painting, she’d continued. It was quiet; no one else had to listen, had to be disturbed. Jamie usually kept the paintings tucked away in a closet, but sometimes, when her husband was not home, she pulled them out and remembered.
She wanted to paint again, felt the urge to paint like that again. The recent death of her first husband had not been easy on anyone, and while Jamie would never claim to suffer more than someone who had actually loved him until the end, or someone who had been present at the end, or the one person who had the misfortune of both, she was devastated. And she didn’t want to be, because she hated to grief for the man who had spent so many years poisoning her against herself, each black and blue mark another infection, another reason to hate herself. Jamie didn’t want to let him have that kind of power anymore.
Damned if he had it anyway, though, because here she was, grieving, questioning everything. She had spoken civilly to his second wife in the days since the funeral, shared and compared experiences with Mrs. Karen Manger. And it was all so different. With Karen, he was kind. With Karen, he was gentle. With Karen, he was loving. With Karen, he was the man that Jamie had given herself to at seventeen, the first friendly face she had met after the move to America. Perhaps a bit controlling, as Karen conceded, but generally good and protective and God, he was special. Or maybe Karen was the one who was special. Jamie couldn’t help but wonder why she wasn’t special too.
She noted the ages of Karen’s children with Ross. Desiree, the year between her boys, a fact that boiled in Jamie’s blood. Ross was already crazy by then, his shift, at least toward his wife at the time, following the birth of their daughter years before. And when Arnold was born, Ross had been so accusatory, claiming out of nowhere that there was no way that was his son, that Jamie was a liar and a cheat and a whore, proclaiming that he would guarantee the next one was his and making good on his word. And after his rampages, evidently, he would find comfort in the arms of his mistress, who, if the math added up, was already pregnant. Jamie tried not to regret the marriage, because it brought her three marvelous and clever children, but she couldn’t help but regret how long she stayed. She should have left the moment Ross’s assaults bore fruit, the moment she knew she was pregnant with Jake.
Eden’s conceiving drew no rage from Jamie. Everything that mattered about the marriage was long dead by then, Jamie herself practically dead. But she looked at the years with suspicion, counted back months and days as she tore apart calendars. Karen was again with child the same time that Ross’s first marriage came to a close. Jamie remembered serving Ross with divorce papers and telling him firmly that he had to go, a dialogue she’d practiced a thousand times both to her reflection and to her sister Lilac. And Ross went, just like that. She had always been grateful for the lack of struggle, considering it the one good act he had done practically since they were married fifteen years earlier, and now it seemed he hadn’t even done it for her. He had done it for Eden.
Tears dripped into her paint, and when she noticed, she quickly moved her pallet out from beneath the waterfall. Jamie was tired. So tired. Tired of feeling less than. She was fortunate that Jeffrey treated her so well - he never made her feel anything like how Ross had - but even his love couldn’t undo what had been done. She should’ve known that would be true, and maybe somewhere deep within her, she always had, but the hope he could save her from her past was a solid portion of the reason she’d hopped into the relationship so quickly after her marriage finally collapsed. They met in December, at Lilac’s wedding to his former brother-in-law. She had only divorced in October.
His daughter had plagued her recovery to an extent, finding joy in the way Jamie jumped at loud noises, how she would flinch so easily, but other than that, it had been a fairly perfect marriage. Through ups and downs of her life - mostly Ross’s interference - Jeffrey was there, and not as a threat but as a comfort. It was a pleasant change of pace.
Jamie had made her peace with it all before this, before Ross had, God only knows why, decided to bring harm upon her child. Their child, dammit, because the time period when Sally was conceived and born was one of the happiest of Jamie’s life. They were so, so young. Jake’s age when they married, Arnold’s when Sally was born. But they were blissful, and she thought she understood him. He seemed to understand her in ways no one ever had before. He liked her music, and he liked her art, and he told her she was beautiful even when her stomach swelled with his child. But something changed almost the moment they brought their baby girl home. Perhaps he’d wanted a boy. Maybe that was what Jamie did wrong. Maybe that was why he went out and found someone else who would give him one, how Asher Hill came into the world. Even if Ross hadn’t met his son, the fact of the matter was that he had created him in an act of infidelity. Maybe Jamie wasn’t beautiful anymore after having the baby. A little weight here, a stretch mark there. Maybe she wasn’t enough.
Her bright blue eyes, feeling greyer everyday, stared between the paintbrush and the canvas. She wanted to paint again, felt the urge to paint like that again.
But she couldn’t. She couldn’t even get the bristles into paint. How was she supposed to express something like this? Her fingers felt numb, just like her brain, as she lost herself in the vast whiteness of the blank canvas. Who was she? With Ross dead and gone, it felt like her story was over, like history ought to be erased, because one ought not to speak ill of the dead. Jamie had hardly even spoken of the past, sometimes physically unable without her stomach bursting, but shouldn’t it just… go away? So why did she hurt now more than ever, and why couldn’t she paint it out? Why did this damn burning parasite of loss and regret and self-depreciation sting her insides like this?
The quiet of the house shattered melodically in that instant. She heard music downstairs and couldn’t help but follow the sound, almost in a trance. Jamie descended the stairs and found her youngest son seated before the piano, his short but dextrous fingers sliding easily between black and white keys. Jake sounded far better than the last she’d heard of him; she hadn’t known he’d kept up with his music while at Sonora, and this was certainly the first he’d played since summer. He’d been a prodigy once, a remarkable talent for his age. But Jamie often found she couldn’t listen.
“Jake?”
He jarred hard at the sound of his name, his fingers crashing into the wrong keys, creating a scrunching, dissonant chord that in turn made Jamie cringe too. “Oh, hi, Mom,” he said. His tone was flat, his blue eyes dulling, just like hers. It seemed, at last, that Ross had broken him too. All that was left of Jamie shattered.
“Where’s Peyton?” she asked, hoping to force something pleasant.
“I dropped her off at Aunt Lilac’s for her playdate with Vlad,” he answered, turning back to face the piano. His fingers sat on specific keys, and it looked as if his arms pressed down, but something stopped at the wrists because his hands did not move, and no sound came.
“You sounded lovely,” said Jamie weakly. “Sorry for interrupting.”
“It didn’t feel lovely.” His hands slid slowly down, tumbling from the piano and into his lap. His head fell, like it was too heavy to hold up properly. “It felt pretty lousy. Most things do anymore.”
Even partially turned from her, she could see the hurt in his face. Suddenly all of her own hurt was on hold, and she went to him. She sat on the edge of the piano stool, draping her arm around him even as he scooted away, not to escape her but to offer her more room. Jamie looked at the keys in front of her, and her fingers felt instinctively clumsy and swollen. But with her son beside her, the black and white seemed less like teeth, and the grooves and wrinkles of her fingers felt less like battle scars. She dared to check the sheet music on the tray. “Do you mind a duet?”
He looked at her in subdued bewilderment. “It’s been a long time,” she conceded sadly. “But I can read music just fine, and I miss it. I miss you, too. I love you.”
Jake leaned close and hugged his mother. “I love you,” he whimpered back, pressed into her collar bones. “I hope that I come back someday. I miss me, too.” He sat up after a long moment wrapped in his mother’s arms, and he carefully and gently positioned her hands to place her in the right octave. Then he placed his own on the keys before him. Then the speaking was done, and the strings spoke for them. I love you, I love you, they echoed high and low.
* *
And you know that it’s just A sonata away... And you play... And you play... And everything else goes away. Everything else goes away. Everything else goes away....
OOC: This post is bookended by lyrics from the song "Everything Else" from the musical Next to Normal. It is a show I recommend looking up with caution, as it deals with a broken family, death, and mental illness, themes not entirely different from the Mangers' plot, however they are utilized quite differently. Likewise, this song serves a very different function in the musical than it does in this post, which I felt was important to note.