by Skye Warren
She slides into the seat next to me. “I’ll keep you company.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see her wide silk skirt in deep emerald. Does she always dress like a queen? “I’m trying to figure out the longest I ever went without playing. Well, once I started. I suppose the longest time was when I was a baby.”
“I thought you were one of those genius freaks who could play before you opened your eyes. Isn’t that what Fransisco said? You were a child prodigy?”
“I could open my eyes. I could walk and talk.”
“So who sets the bar? Who says, this kid is good enough to be a prodigy?”
The music community could be fickle. It could also eat its own. “There’s usually disagreement. But then people disagree about the level of talent in adults, too.”
“Did anyone dare to say that Samantha Brooks wasn’t a prodigy?”
That makes me laugh. “My violin teacher. She hated me, I think. Or she hated the violin. She used to make me put my fingers in these positions that only made sense for bigger hands. Then the music would come out bad. If she just let me play, it would sound perfect.”
“Maybe she was jealous.”
“I used to sneak into the music room at lunchtime to play. Lucky for me the history teacher heard me playing. She played the piano, but not at a professional level. Still, she knew what she heard. She got the principal involved, and the music teacher had to give me more advanced music after that.”
“I bet that pissed her off.”
“So much. She started using a ruler on my knuckles if I didn’t do it her way. I spent a lot of that year with red lines imprinted on the backs of my hands.” It was a weird kind of conditioning. It never bothered me later when my hands would ache or bleed. I learned to play that way. “Then we moved away.”
“Ugh. I hope she sees your concert at the Palais Garnier and cries.”
“She was old back then. She might be dead now.”
“That’s inconsiderate of her, being dead before you can get your comeuppance.”
“People have a way of coming back from the dead around me,” I mutter, my thoughts turning dark as I stare at the shape of the violin. It’s always been a contrast of lines and curves, of soft wood and taut strings. It looks the same as it always did, and somehow foreign, too.
The door opens and closes again. Sunlight spills across the room at a diagonal. It had been a direct shot through the window when I started. The day is passing. No notes have been played.
Bethany sits beside me. “Why are you watching your violin?”
“Staring contest,” Isa says from the other side of the sofa.
“Who’s winning?”
Isa snorts. “Not Samantha.”
Probably accurate. The violin can wait all day. All year. All century. I’m the one who’s running out of time. “How long have you gone without dancing?” I ask Bethany.
“Oh, this one time I was on the silks. Someone had misplaced a beam. My ankle shattered. I wasn’t even supposed to walk for weeks, much less dance. I almost died.” She sounds very earnest, not like someone exaggerating to make a point. And I already know she isn’t prone to drama.
“Was it scary to start again?”
“No, I couldn’t actually stop. I kept dancing in my room. I’d tell myself I’d only use my left leg, that I’d be so careful, but I’d always end up re-injuring myself. Romeo actually tied me to the bed so I’d stop making it worse.”
“Kinky,” Isa says.
I stop glaring at the violin long enough to glance at Bethany. Liam’s constant movement, his continual re-injuring of himself, had seemed pointless. Irrational. I’m not so conceited to think everything he does is about me, but using his pain as a way to punish me had been the only explanation that made sense. “You did it even though you knew it would take longer to heal.”
She shakes her head, though not in disagreement. More like she’s dismayed at herself. “Maybe it’s like an addiction. Like crack. We’d beg, borrow, or steal to keep doing it.”
An addiction. That does explain the way I felt about my violin.
It also explains why I’ve been so afraid to start again. I never learned how to play in moderation. Rain or shine. Cold or hot. No matter what, I played and played. The world around me could have fallen apart. The world around me did fall apart. Which means that if I start playing again, I’ll lose myself. I feel like I’ve been holding my sanity with my bare hands. What happens when I pick up the violin instead?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A test chamber at Orfield Laboratories has 3.3-foot-thick fiberglass acoustic wedges, double walls of insulated steel, and foot-thick concrete. It is 99.99% sound absorbent. The founder challenges people to see how long they can stay in the room. The record is 45 minutes.
Liam
Friday morning there’s a knock at the sitting room. I open it, expecting to find Frans. We made plans to scout the Tuileries before I take Samantha there. It’s unlikely anyone will prepare to ambush us in such an open space, but I don’t want to take the chance.
Alexander Fox. That’s who stands at the door.
Technically, Samantha’s door. My eyes narrow. “Yes?”
A frown. He doesn’t like that I’m answering her door. That’s fine, since I don’t like that he’s knocking on it. “I came to speak to Samantha.”
“About what?”
“About the concert.”
“I’ll see if she’s available.” I close the door. The fact that I take pleasure in doing so is completely coincidental. No one has unfettered access to her. Except me.
She’s doing the staring thing with her violin again.
I push it aside to sit down in front of her. Her brown eyes focus on me. “Hi.”
“Hello. Alexander Fox came to see you.”
She looks around the room as if expecting to see him in a chair. I try not to let it bother me, the way she disconnects from the world. It’s part of the healing process. Or is it part of the staying-hurt process? It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes.
“What did he want?”
“To talk to you about the concert.”
She sighs. “He wants to know what I’m going to play.”
“Tell him to wait.”
“These things are usually decided way in advance. That way the orchestra can prepare. As it is Romeo and Bethany have had to make arrangements without me.”
“Tell him to wait.”
Another glance around the room. “Well, I can try. Assuming he comes back.”
“I think he’s at the door.”
A wide-eyed look. “Right now?”
“Probably.”
“Why didn’t you say that?”
“This way he has practice waiting.”
An exasperated sigh. She mutters something about men, which is probably generous. I can only imagine if she knew what thoughts went through my head. He conspired to take her away from me. He offered to hide her from me. The fact that he thought he protected her is the only thing that keeps me from throwing a punch.
Samantha
I expect the Tuileries Gardens to have more flowers. Or bushes. Trees?
There’s a lot of stone walkways. And grass. Large expanses of grass. The whole gardens are bigger than I would have expected, too. Enough that it’s not immediately clear how we would meet someone.
Naturally, Liam didn’t want me to come.
Except he couldn’t count on anyone showing up if they didn’t see me in the park. And I wasn’t going to miss the chance to meet the mother who left me. I’m not thinking there’ll be a sweet reunion. When your mother leaves you to fate and a barren Russian orphanage, there aren’t a lot of nice feelings left. She asked for this meeting, arranged it, and I want to find out what she has to say. It could be the information we’re in Paris to uncover.
We walk for fifteen minutes. Or an hour. It’s hard to tell because I’m breathing hard, my muscles taut. I’m braced for an altercation. A fight or flight. Lia
m pulls me down to sit at a bench while he murmurs into his watch. “East side entrance,” comes the response.
I turn to the east in time to see an older woman turn down the path toward us. Liam starts to rise, to place his body between mine and hers. I put my hand on his arm. “Let me.”
“Samantha.”
“You can’t protect me forever. Let me go.”
I didn’t mean it to be so poignant, but he looks at me as if I’m asking for him to say goodbye. Those green eyes, so familiar and yet always a surprise. So vibrant for someone who never shows emotion. Except for now, when he looks half-broken.
“Go,” he says, his voice hoarse.
I didn’t mean it like that. The words hover on my tongue. I’m not sure they’re true, though. Eventually he’ll have to let me go. It might as well be now, when I’m in a foreign land, with family I can’t even recognize on sight, unable to play the instrument that’s been like a limb to me. A complete loss. A hard separation from the Samantha from before and after.
The woman stops when she sees me walking towards her.
Wrinkles frame her eyes and mouth. Laugh lines. Frown lines. A lifetime lived without me in it. The brown eyes, though. Those are familiar. They look back at me in the mirror. “Hello,” I say, which feels inane to say to a long-lost mother.
It also feels like more than she deserves.
“You look beautiful,” she says, with those mine/not-mine eyes.
“Why did you find me?” Of course I wouldn’t have asked this question if she had shown up at the orphanage. Or even years later, on Liam’s doorstep. I think even if she’d found me on the US leg of the tour, I would have embraced her. Hopeful and hopeless.
“Take a walk with me.”
An order from a parent who does not have the right to give it.
I look back at the man who does have my respect—not quite a parent. Not quite a lover. He waits with his hands behind his back in a strict military bearing. I suppose that’s who’s in the gardens with me today. The soldier.
With a nod I fall into step beside her. She has an uneven gait, her left leg strained from some old injury. It’s cruel, I think, that I have the urge to ask her about it. That I have the urge to offer my arm to ease her way. Cruel, when she couldn’t spare a minute for me.
She sighs. “Maybe it was too much to hope you’d be happy.”
Maybe it was too much to hope you’d be a mother. There’s more bitterness in the thought than I expected. I don’t sit with this grief every day. There’s a mother-shaped hole inside me, grown over with moss and ivy. It doesn’t have to be seen, but when I pull away the vegetation of everyday life, there it is. “Yes.”
“Do you remember me?”
There are impressions of soft skin and hard curls, the smell of jasmine and hairspray. I remember the colorful batik fabric she wore, though she’s in more modern, plain clothing now. “Not very much. Do you remember me?”
A small laugh. “More than I would like, sometimes.”
I’m determined not to feel bad for her, but a little sympathy seeps in. The curse of being human, to feel empathy for someone else, even if they don’t feel any for you. “The man back there, he’s the only parent I’ve really known.”
She nods her head, as if absorbing a blow, accepting it. “He’s more than a parent.”
“How do you know?”
“I went to your shows in the US. Almost all of them.”
There’s a crack in my heart, but it’s not going to let her in. It’s only going to fracture. Any orphan wants to have parents. Any orphan dreams of it. I wasn’t different that way, except that I thought she was dead. “Why did Daddy say you died?”
“Maybe he thought it would be easier for you to handle that way.”
“It wasn’t.”
“More likely he did it to protect me. If I were dead, then no one could come after me to use against him. No one could threaten me to get what they wanted from him.”
The words raise alarm along my spine. If someone could threaten her to get to him, they could threaten me. Is that what happened? No, he turned the gun on me in Carnegie Hall.
That’s something a daughter doesn’t forget.
“Your father did bad things. I think at the beginning he did it for the right reasons.”
“There are no right reasons for treason.”
That earns me a sharp glance.
Is that how I look when I’m displeased with Liam? God, how strange to see my face on someone else. Even stranger because it’s so ordinary. It’s something everyone with a family would know. Not rare. Not heartbreaking.
“He thought he was doing something important. Or maybe he only wanted to believe that. Then it became about the money. Then… it was too late to leave, even if he wanted to. Well, he probably didn’t want to. He liked the money too much.”
“Is that why you left him?”
“I left him because I was afraid. I was afraid of the men he was in business with, the people, the entire countries who felt they owned him because of what they paid.”
“The songs he taught me—”
“He called it his insurance policy.”
Greed and ambition. The most common human motivations. I glance back at Liam, who has never been moved by either one of those things. We stop at a small gathering of flowers, a rare spot of color in a landscape of white concrete and green grass. A red ladybug rests on a wide green leaf. It means good luck, Bethany said. This particular ladybug must not have gotten the message.
“Insurance how?”
“It was a back door. A code that could get into the system. Even having it would prove that corruption had happened. That he could also influence the results meant he was a force to be reckoned with.”
“I don’t understand. What system?”
“Oh. You didn’t know? The electronic voting system.”
Dear God. There is no excuse for treason, but this is somehow more than I expected. I thought there would be secrets handed over. Maybe information about weaponry. The kind that wouldn’t actually get used because we weren’t at war.
This has very real, very scary consequences.
“I’ve already written down the musical score in detail.” A broken laugh escapes me. “I played most of it for hundreds of people before the shots rang out. It’s recorded. Why are they still after me if this back door is already out there?”
“Because you are the only link to your father and them. You are the link that will be used to assassinate them privately or declare war publicly. You are the most dangerous person in the world to some of the most dangerous people.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Emperor Napoleon III launched an architectural design competition for the design of the new opera house. Charles Garnier’s project was one of about 170 submitted.
Samantha
People either love or hate the Palais Garnier.
It has its own style, which is really a nice way of saying it borrows from many other styles, taking only the most loud and ostentatious parts. Seventy-three sculptors created the outside cornices and embellishments alone.
A less sympathetic observer might call it garish.
As a child it had been overwhelming.
Now that I stand before the grand staircase that splits to either side of the theater, I can’t help but feel awe. How could I not? It’s a monument to art. Recognition of music’s place in society’s consciousness. The elaborate showmanship of the shows in the US aren’t necessary here. The setting provides the grandeur.
We only need to add music.
Easier said than done. Liam appears behind the central stairs. He’s been liaising with the house security for days now. His footsteps echo off marble, bronze, and canvas paintings on the ceiling. His expression looks as severe as a statue. “Are you ready?”
“Are you afraid I’m going to stand up there and not play a note?”
He’s distracted by the logistics of safety. The entrances, the exits. The armed gua
rds. It’s reflected in the lightness of his green eyes. Slowly he focuses on me. He doesn’t look worried about what I said though. “Of course not.”
“There’s no of course not. I haven’t played in months.”
“Some things you don’t forget how to do, no matter how long it’s been.”
We’re clearly talking about the violin. Or maybe about physical agility, the way that Bethany described. We’re definitely not talking about sex, but my cheeks heat as if he’s said something dirty. It feels even more taboo that we’re talking about it here, at the premiere theater in the world, in a place meant to be packed with people.
My face feels warm. “It won’t be good to be rusty, either.”
He looks amused. He must know what I’m thinking about. “You won’t be rusty. But even if you were, you’d still play better than anyone else.”
“You sound like a proud—”
His gaze sharpens. “I sound like a proud father?”
It comes out as a whisper. “Yes.”
“I’ll never be able to separate that part of me. The man who made you breakfast before school and signed your permission slips. The man who knew you would conquer the world. I’ll never be able to stop wanting to protect you, Samantha.”
And I would never stop being the grateful orphan taken in by him.
Where does that leave us?
He takes my hand and leads me up the stairs to the Grand Foyer. Paintings cover the sixty-foot ceilings, each framed with elaborate gilt. It’s not hard to see the dismay through the eyes of the common citizen. What is the usefulness of luxury to a person who can’t buy bread? The French underwent a particularly bloody revolution in response to this sort of excess. Is it irresponsible? Or full of hope? What a strange dichotomy to walk.
We come to the theater. A gasp escapes me.
Elaborate carvings line the balcony. Red velvet covers the seats. The chandelier rises high and proud, uncaring about whether a poor man needs to eat. It’s beautiful and troubling, a mixture I find more common the older I get. Everything felt so black and white when I was young. Playing the violin well was a good thing. Having parents who were alive was a good thing. Now I have both, but the only thing I want stands beside me.