Page 98 of Our Strange Duet

When I finally arrived at my father’s tomb—a black granite slab which his musician friends had pooled their money for—I sank in front of it, a great sob welling in the hollow of my throat. It felt too large to free, too unwieldy to let burst. I wondered if it was possible to choke on your own sadness, to expire from unabated misery.

I traced my hand over the carved letters—his friends had only been able to afford his surname—and though I felt my lip quiver, the needed tears refused to fall.

“Oh, Father,” I said, and my breath stirred the thick mist to movement. “I wish you were somehow here again. I don’t know what to do. I…I need you here.”

My words were low, with a worrying rasp, and in the back of my mind, I could hear Erik’s concern. He’d never want me out in such weather, would never want me to do anything to put my voice in peril.

“I wish you’d never told me the story of the Angel of Music,” I said in a rush. “I wish I’d never been so foolish as to think him real, to think that he’d come to me. If I hadn’t been so quick to believe, none of this would have happened. It’s all such a mess, and I don’t…” A single tear fell. “I don’t know what to do. Father…please…tell me what to do.”

I waited, knowing there would be no response, while also cursing the small part of my heart stupid enough to hope there would be.

“I so wish that…” I stopped and swirled my finger along the engraved D. What did I wish for? Truly?

“I wish I could go back to the way things were. At the beginning. When it was just the Angel and me, those moments were so beautiful. I wish I could stay in them, stay in that music—our music—forever. I wish you could have been there to hear it. I wish you were alive. Alive and healthy and whole and here. I wish we were back in Deauville…”

Memories of that summer seemed brighter than all the rest, more sharply limned, their colors more vivid. Father playing on the boardwalk as I sang, twirling round in a new dress…Father laughing as we shared a length of taffy, our fingers as sticky and sweet as our smiles…Raoul, soaked and shivering and holding out my rescued scarf, the look in his eyes so proud, so hopeful.

So unlike how he’d behaved in the managers’ office that morning. I still keenly felt the pinch of his betrayal as he’d asked me to sing. He knew my fears. He knew my reasons for not wanting to. Yet still he’d asked.

“Why must everything be so complicated?” I asked my father’s grave. “I understand everything when it’s just the music. But I don’t understand this. I wish…I wish you could tell me what to do. I wish I could hear your voice again. I know I never will, but—”

All at once, the birdsong stopped, leaving the cemetery empty with potent stillness. The air felt heavier, marked with a trace of the uncanny, and, even as I knew it impossible, knew it was only the desperate wishing of my desperate heart, I dared to hope.

“Father?”

When the music came, a lilting violin solo, bittersweet and sorrowful, my breath caught. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t blink. I didn’t want to do anything which would stir the air and stop whatever magic was happening all around me.

It was him! It really was. No one played as he had. No one put so much of their soul into their music, letting it saturate every refrain, letting it fill each note with its timbre and vibrato.

Laughter bubbled within me. My joy bordered on euphoria.

I closed my eyes and let his music sink in. I felt my heart speed up to meet and match its tempo. My blood quickened. My soul took flight.

Though I had no answers, though I couldn’t see a way forward, I felt lighter, convinced everything would somehow work itself out. What was this music if not proof that miracles were possible? My father had returned to me, exactly when I’d needed him most.

I took deep breaths, savoring, basking in the strange convergence that had returned the dead to the world of the living.

Church bells rang in the distance, silencing my father’s violin mid-melody, and tears began to fall. They wet my cheeks with bitterness as he was taken away from me again, too soon, without warning, without giving me a chance to say goodbye.

“Father?” I shouted into the fog, shouted across the expanse of years wasted between us. “Don’t leave me! Don’t go!”

A thicker patch of fog swirled in and completely blocked my view of his tombstone.

In the silence came the sound of footsteps upon gravel, just as I’d heard before. I whirled round, certain that my father was approaching. He’d come up out of the mist, looking as he had before the sickness had claimed him. Hope leapt so high inside me it hurt.

“Father?” I cried out again. The fog was impossible to see through. What if he couldn’t find me?

The footsteps passed by.

“Father, please!” I tried again, panic growing within me. Things like this couldn’t happen twice. There was only so much magic in this world. There were only so many miracles God would grant one person. I couldn’t bear to miss mine because of this damnable fog.

On the other side of me came the footsteps once more, going in a different direction. I whipped toward them. How had he gotten around me so quickly?

Or was I the one who’d become mixed up?

I spun back to where I thought the tombstone was but could only see a wall of white. I held out my hands, feeling for the granite slab, but it was nowhere to be found. Nowhere near me.

“Wandering child, so lost, so helpless…”