Violin by Anne Rice Page A

I’m alive. But I’m not so worm-eaten with guilt that youcan come in here and push me out of my wits. No, not by any means. I don’t think you fully understand guilt.”
    “No?” He was genuine.
    “The raging terror,” I said, “The ‘mea culpa, mea culpa’ is only the first stage. Then something harder comes, something that can live with mistakes and limitations. Regret’s nothing, absolutely nothing …”
    Now I was the one who let the words trail off because my most recent memories came back to sadden me, of seeing my mother walk away on that last day, Oh, Mother, let me take you in my arms. The graveyard on the day of her burial. St. Joseph’s Cemetery, all those small graves, graves of the poor Irish and the poor Germans, and the flowers heaped there, and I looked at the sky and thought it will never, never change; this agony will never go away; there will never be any light in this world again.
    I shook it off. I looked up at him!
    He was studying me, and he seemed himself almost in pain. It excited me.
    I went back to the point, seeking deeply for it, pushing everything else aside but what I had to realize and convey.
    “I think I understand this now,” I said. A spectacular relief soothed me. A feeling of love. “And you don’t, that’s the pity. You don’t.”
    I let my guard down utterly. I thought only of what I was trying to fathom here and not of pleasing or displeasing. I wanted only to be close to him in this. And this he would want to know; he might, he surely would understand, if only he would admit it.
    “Please do illuminate me,” he said mockingly.
    A terrible pain swept over me; it was too vast and total to be piercing. It took hold of me. I looked up imploringlyat him, and I parted my lips, about to speak, about to confide, about to try to discover out loud with him what it was, this pain, this sense of responsibility, this realization that one has indeed caused unnecessary pain and destruction in this world and one cannot undo it, no, it will never be undone, and these moments are forever lost, unrecorded, only remembered in ever more distorted and hurtful fashion, yet there is something so much finer, something so much more significant, something both overwhelming and intricate that we both knew, he and I—
    He vanished.
    He did most obviously and completely vanish, and he did it with a smile, leaving me with my outstretched emotions. He did it cunningly to let me stand alone with that moment of pain and worse, alone with the awful appalling need to share it!
    I gave a moment to the shadows. The soft sway of the trees outside. The occasional rain.
    He was gone.
    “I know your game,” I said softly. “I know it.”
    I went to the bed, reached under the pillow and picked up my Rosary. It was a crystal Rosary with a sterling silver cross. It was in the bed because Karl’s mother had always slept in the bed when she came, and my beloved godmother, Aunt Bridget, always slept in it, after the marriage with Karl, when she came, or the Rosary was actually in the bed because it was mine and I had absently put it there. Mine. From First Communion.
    I looked down at it. After my mother’s death Rosalind and I had had a terrible quarrel.
    It was over our Mother’s Rosary, and we had literally torn apart the links and the fake pearls—it was a cheap thing but I had made it for Mother and I claimed it, I, theone who made it, and then after we tore it apart, when Rosalind came after me, I had slammed the door so hard against her face that her glasses had cut deep into her forehead. All that rage. Blood on the floor again.
    Blood again, as if Mother had been living still, drunk, falling off the bed, striking her forehead as she had twice on the gas heater, bleeding, bleeding. Blood on the floor. Oh, Rosalind, my mourning, raging sister Rosalind! The broken Rosary on the floor.
    I looked at this Rosary now. I did the childlike unquestioning thing that came to my mind. I kissed the