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I closed my eyes for a moment, hoping to conjure up a memory to share with them. “Have I told you about the time Fiona and I started piano lessons?”
They shook their heads as they instinctively moved closer together. My eyes grew scratchy as I took in their small, newly bald heads. They were like two little bald birds in a nest.
“Once upon a time, when Fiona was five years old, she asked her mother and father if she could take piano lessons. At the Barnes estate, which was vast and very beautiful with dark floors and big windows and plush furniture, there was a baby grand piano, like the one in our apartment here. Only this one was never played. Fiona’s first mother, who died when Fiona was only a baby, had played. For five whole years, it sat all alone, unplayed. A teacher came to the house and Fiona began her lessons. She was quick to understand and to get better. One day, while I was coming up from the kitchen where my grandmother worked, I heard her playing. The sound was so nice that something inside me changed.” I paused, thinking of how to best describe the feeling music gave me, especially when it came from Fiona.
“It was as if I’d heard the sound a home would make. Like nothing else had ever come before, and it was only the music that I needed to make sense of everything. I’d come from nothing, like you two. I lived with my grandmother and my sister Fai in a shack. If we’d not been asked to come live at Lord Barnes’s home, I don’t know what would have happened to us. We might have died that winter.”
“Like us?” Bleu asked. “In the cold winter?”
I blinked, surprised he’d understood that part. “Correct. Since we’d come to the big house and been given beds and warm meals every single day, I’d grown strong and curious. When you have enough to eat and a place to rest your body during the night, it allows you to think about more than the hunger in your stomach. I was able to go to school and I learned English there, just like you’re learning now.”
They nodded and smiled, obviously pleased with themselves.
“By the time I heard Fiona practicing, I knew English. I was getting good marks on my lessons. At night, I slept in the room with my sister and grandmother. I was happy there. The twins were my friends.”
“Fiona’s brothers?” Bleu asked.
That’s right. I’d told them about Flynn and Theo in some of my other stories.
“But there was something missing. Music was missing.” I held up my fingers. “Playing with my own hands. So I asked Lord Barnes if I could take lessons too.”
I took a pause to breathe and Beaumont asked, “Did he say yes?”
“He did. I was allowed to take a lesson just after Fiona, and then we learned to play violin. I was especially good at it, so that became my favorite way to make music. When Fiona and I were older and had learned a lot more, we began to play together. Then, when I was grown, Lord Barnes arranged for me to go study music at a university in a big city called Chicago.”
“Did Fiona go with you?” Bleu asked.
“No, she was too young to go with me. She was still a child.”
“Did you miss her?” Beaumont asked.
“You understand what I’m saying?” I asked.
“Our English is better,” Bleu said.
“It’s very much better.” They were like little sponges, these two. “Yes, I missed her. But I thought of her as a kid back then. She was still growing up. When I came home from Chicago, though, she was all grown up.”
I smiled, remembering the first time I’d seen her after I returned home. She’d been in the garden and wore a large-brimmed hat and held a basket of vegetables in her arms. She’d dropped them at the sight of me standing there by the rosebushes and rushed to hug me. I’d been taken aback at the woman standing before me.
When I’d left, she’d still looked like a girl, but at fifteen she was no longer a child. Still, she’d been too young for me to think of her that way. It wasn’t until later that I knew what it was to fall in love with her. Now she was as much a part of me as music. “She was pretty. Just like she is now.” In fact, she hadn’t changed much since then. If anything, she’d grown lovelier, leaving all hints of a girl behind. “When we were back together again, we started to play music all over town. At church and at dances.”
“Then you married and lived happily ever after like the princess and the pea?” Bleu asked in French before yawning.
“Those are only fairy tales,” I said. “Not like real life.”
“But why?” Beaumont asked. “Can’t they be true for someone?”
“We’ll see,” I said, noncommittally. “For now, you two must get your rest. We’ve had a big day.”
I placed a hand on each of their foreheads before turning off the lamp. “Sweet dreams, little princes,” I whispered.
“Bonne nuit,” one of them said.
