Ellida

by J. F. Kaufmann

  Jack was strikingly handsome in his black tuxedo and trousers, single-breasted silvery gray vest and ivory white shirt, to match the shade of Astrid’s dress.

  THE SAME evening they were supposed to fly to Denver, and continue the next day to Palermo, in Sicily, for their two-week honeymoon in Livia’s villa.

  Astrid’s only concern was Rosie. She’d just turned five months and was still breastfeeding. She’d started eating solid food only a few weeks ago and finally agreed to sleep in her crib.

  Astrid wouldn’t mind postponing their honeymoon, but Jack wouldn’t hear of it.

  “She’ll be fine, Astrid. The freezer is packed with your milk and she likes her bottle. It’s not like we’re leaving her with strangers. She spends almost more time with Mom and Dad than with us. And Tristan and Livia are here, and you know how much she loves them.”

  “Actually, I’ve been thinking of going to Copper Ridge with Rosie so that Rowena and Ahmed could also spend some time with her,” Betty said. “James could come every evening to stay with us.”

  “Don’t worry, Astrid. By the time she notices you’re missing, you’ll be back,” James said. “Look at the ratio of loving relatives per child, not to mention a dozen doctors in her immediate family. Rosie’s gonna be fine and she’ll have a lot of fun.” He winked. “Besides, this is an opportunity for the Mortensens and your Mom and Ahmed to practice their parenting skills.”

  Astrid smiled, remembering the day that both her mother and Peyton had announced their pregnancies. Peyton and Ingmar would have a little a girl; her mother and Ahmed were expecting a boy.

  The maternity wards in both towns were going to be busy soon, Astrid thought, smiling, and her eyes moved over the clusters of people in the town square. There were several dozen expecting couples. Astrid had been sharing their happiness from the very beginning. She personally had confirmed many of these pregnancies. There was no better sign that balance and harmony had been restored in Red Cliffs and Copper Ridge.

  Jack’s arms encircled Astrid from behind, breaking the chain of her thoughts.

  “You should change clothes, baby,” he said and kissed her neck. “Andy’s ready to fly us to Denver.” He paused and then whispered in Astrid’s ear, “Actually, you know what? Leave that dress on. I’ve been dreaming of taking it off since I saw you in it this morning.”

  She turned around and closed her arms around Jack’s neck, offering him her warm, soft lips. “I need to finish packing. Give me half an hour.”

  “And don’t bother with sleepwear.”

  “Where’s Rosie?”

  “With Dad. She’ll be okay, Astrid. Go kiss her and off we go.”

  SEEING HER daughter surrounded by her loving family, Astrid convinced herself their absence wouldn’t traumatize Rosie for the rest of her life.

  Rosie didn’t agree. Sensing something unusual was going on, she closed her little arms around her father’s neck. When he tried to pass her to her Grandma Betty, she tightened her grip and pouted her lips. Eyes rapidly filling with big tears, she took a deep breath, held it for a while, and then opened her mouth and let out the loudest and most heartbreaking wail.

  Jack tried to comfort his daughter, whispering soothing words in her ears, rocking her gently and rubbing her small back. What always worked didn’t help this time. Rosie was impossible to console. Grandpa James tried to take her from Jack, but she clung to her father with all her might, buried her head into his shoulder and, kicking and screaming, absolutely refused to leave Jack’s arms.

  “Hey pumpkin, it’s okay, love. Daddy will come back soon,” he murmured in a low voice. “Look, Grandpa James is here. He’ll change into a wolf and play with you. Remember how much you like it? Dad, would you mind?”

  “Not at all, but I don’t think it’s going to do the trick this time. She’s a smart girl. She knows what the two you are up to.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, James, how could she know, she’s five months old?!” Betty said. “You’re all making her fussy. She’s tired and sleepy. You two just leave, Jack. Rosie will be okay. She’ll cry a bit and that’s it. Kids do that all the time, even when a parent goes grocery shopping. No harm in that.”

  “It’s called separation anxiety,” Eamon pitched in unexpectedly. “It’s a stage in which a child shows anxiety when separated from the primary caregiver. It’s regarded as a normal developmental phase, even though it looks quite dramatic from the child’s point of view. Rosie, for example, is probably thinking now you’ll never return. Makes you wonder if it’s really harmless or not.”

  “Well, thank you for enlightening us, but we really didn’t need your two cents in,” Jack snapped. “My wife’s a doctor, remember? And since when have you become interested in early childhood psychology?”

  “Ella and I talk about it sometimes.”

  “Why don’t you talk about music next time?” Jack said tersely.

  Astrid took a step toward her husband. “Give her to me, Jack. I’ll calm her down. Take our suitcases to the plane.”

  Shaking his head, Jack looked up at his wife. “How on earth are we going to relax if we leave her like that?”

  Astrid looked at Jack and shrugged helplessly.

  Rosie’s hold around Jack’s neck tightened even more as her howling became louder and more desperate.

  Soon everybody had to yell in order to hear each other.

  “Okay, that’s it!” Jack voice broke through the loud discord of Rosie’s blazing screams, James and Betty’s suggestions, Eamon’s explanations and Astrid’s concerns. “That’s enough! Rosalie Elizabeth Lucilla, stop crying this instant!”

  The infant was still sobbing heavily, but the fire-engine wailing finally stopped. “Livia, if you don’t mind, you and Tristan are going with us. Mom, please pack a suitcase for Rosie.”

  “I don’t know, Jack—” Astrid started.

  “I don’t want to give Rosie a lifelong trauma, Astrid.”

  “Then let’s postpone—”

  “Nor do I want to postpone my honeymoon,” Jack said. “It’s just a slight change of plans. She’s going with us, and Tristan and Livia will babysit her. It’s not Rosie’s fault that her parents got married after she was born instead of the other way around. Come on, muffin. This may be even a better solution.”

  Jack carried his suddenly quiet and quite happy daughter to the house, chattering about the plane ride and Tyrrhenian Sea and the villa in Palermo as if she could understand every word.

  “There’s a nice beach there, and Daddy will buy you lots of beach toys. You’ll be a good girl and let me and your Mom have some time just for the two of us. You’ll sleep in your bed, in Tristan and Livia’s room, got it? And stop drooling on my tuxedo, your mother will go berserk if she sees that.”

  Epilogue

  IN A sunny hotel suite in Palermo, Amelia Brecht opened her eyes and blinked several times, expecting the incredible feeling of well-being to go away with the last remnants of her dream.

  It didn’t.

  Amelia turned to the sleeping man beside her and smiled. She gently removed the arm he had wrapped around her abdomen. Sliding out of bed, she tiptoed to the living room, grabbed a stack of the local morning press and returned to the bedroom. She sat down on the bed and scooted her back against the pillows. She grabbed the first newspaper from the stash and opened the Art and Entertainment section.

  For the first time in many years her hand didn’t tremble. She knew precisely what she was going to find there.

  “MAGNIFICENT FAREWELL!” the title cheered excitedly. “In all her twenty-five year long career, Amelia Brecht has never given a more dazzling performance. Singing the Queen of the Night, the role she had previously refused to perform during her long singing career, Ms. Brecht bid us the most glorious adieu a performer could hope for, leaving every single person in the audience with lifetime memories of one of the most beautiful voices ever heard…”

  Amelia smiled and opened another newspaper with similar reviews t
hat praised her “lavishly beautiful singing… the most powerful coloratura soprano… in divine voice for one of Ms. Brecht’s most unexpected roles, the memorable and extremely demanding Queen of the Night…”

  Against all the odds, she’dleft the stage holding her head high. Her opera singer career had started here in Palermo and thanks to a strange twist of fate, it had ended there as well.

  The newspapers were right. She’d always refused to sing any role in Die Zauberflöte, especially the Queen of the Night. In spite of her extraordinary upper register and agile voice, she’d never felt enough confidence to sing it. The part of Queen of the Night, which reached a high F, rare in opera, was famous for its difficulty, and singers sometimes had to be doubled by instruments. She didn’t want that.

  During her professional years, the Queen of the Night had remained a challenge she was sure she’d never have enough courage to take. Especially not after a throat infection three years ago and a long recovery, which had ultimately led to her early retirement.

  And then, on the very sunset of her career, she’d been literally bullied into taking that role in exchange for a voice-teacher position in a music school in Vienna.

  She had been so sure then that it had been Reinhardt’s sweet revenge for leaving him a decade ago for another man. Leaving Reinhardt had been a terrible mistake that had cost her a lot of heartache, but all that was in the past now, her fears, her pain, it was over.

  She heard a sleepy groan. A smile tugged her lips.

  “Gutten morgen, meine Liebe.”

  “Gutten morgen, Reinhardt.”

  She and Reinhardt had come back to the hotel at the crack of dawn, after the long party organized in her honor. She’d felt lightheaded and giddy. Her smashing performance, too much wine, too many flattering words, Reinhardt’s dark eyes burning with desire. “You’re the only woman I’ve ever loved, Amelia,” he’d said, his voice thick with emotion. She’d felt like walking on the clouds.

  She stretched in bed, feeling better than she had in years, and the same wonderful sense of well-being she’d felt last night splashed over her body again, bringing back every moment of the best night of her life so clearly it was as if she watched herself on stage from the audience.

  AT THAT precise moment, at the opposite end of Palermo, in Villa Aurelia, a beautiful, old structure surrounded by an orange grove and situated on a private beach, Astrid stretched in bed and, keeping her eyes closed, reached for Jack.

  He was already awake, braced on his elbow and watching her.

  “And here I thought it’d be hard to match my wedding present.” She smiled, shaking her head. “I should have known better.”

  Jack lowered his head and kissed her lips, warm and pouty from sleep. “A 1958 Gibson Les Paul is a hell of a gift, Mrs. Canagan. And a very thoughtful one. You made me very happy.”

  “Jack, what you gave me was the most incredible wedding present,” Astrid said on the verge of tears. “Thank you.”

  “I promised I’d seize a theater for you, and I did.” He gestured toward a stack of local newspapers on the nightstand. “Do you want to see the reviews?”

  Astrid closed her arms around her husband’s neck, pulling him on top of her. “Not now, Jack. First things first,” she said in a hot, husky voice and reached for his lips. “Let me love you, Jack. Let me thank you for your present. Later you can tell me how on earth you pulled such a crazy stunt and how come I didn’t suspect a thing. And then I’ll tell you about my present for you.”

  Jack braced himself on his elbows, caressing her with his eyes. “You have something else for me? What is it?”

  “Later.”

  “NOW, YOU can tell me how you did it, and then we can go to see Rosie,” Astrid said later, as she stretched, boneless, over her husband.

  Rosie, Liv and Tristan were settled into a smaller house in the garden that long ago had served as servant quarters. The arrangement had provided Jack and Astrid with an opportunity to enjoy their honeymoon and, at the same time, spend some time with their daughter. Rosalie somehow had figured out Jack and Astrid stayed close by all the time and never complained when Liv and Tristan took her back to their house.

  “It must’ve been quite a conspiracy,” Astrid continued. “Still it’s beyond me how I didn’t see what was going on. Well, except, maybe that you kept finding excuses to avoid taking me out to explore Palermo. That was a bit strange, now that I think about it.”

  Jack ran his fingers along her spine. “Let me catch my breath first… And if you really want to hear the story, stop wiggling. You’re distracting me. So, the rest of the party started coming to Palermo in batches, soon after we arrived. If Rosie hadn’t thrown a fit on our wedding day, she would’ve been here a week after us, with Mom and Dad, although you wouldn’t have known. Dad and Eamon organized the entire trip. My job was to keep you in the villa as long as possible because Palermo was quickly filling with our family and friends. There was a good chance we’d accidentally bump into someone. It was a free holiday for everyone. They neutralized their scents, just in case, but we couldn’t expect them to stay in their rooms. ”

  Astrid laughed and kissed him. “Not that you had a hard time convincing me to stay in ours.”

  “I thought you’d suspect something when Professor Colonna called. That was the weakest part of the plan.”

  At the beginning of the second week of their honeymoon, Eamon’s Musicology professor Alessandro Colonna had called Astrid and asked if they could meet. He’d been delighted when he’d heard her recording, he’d said, so he’d wanted to invite her to Teatro Massimo to record the arias on the stage, because of the proper acoustics. No audience, of course. Would Astrid do him the honor?

  “Well, in retrospect, that also sounded fishy,” Astrid said.

  “We were walking on very thin ice there, I know. But I did manage to keep you distracted with my gorgeous body, didn’t I?”

  “Well, your distraction worked even better than you expected.”

  Jack threw her a look. “What do you mean?”

  “I’ll tell you in a bit,” Astrid said. “I’m still stunned I didn’t have a clue about anything until I stepped into the banquet room!”

  IN THE early afternoon on the day when the recording had to take place, Jack and Astrid had gone to Palermo. Signor Colonna, a middle-aged man of stocky build, met them in front of the Opera house. He walked them to the banquet room, chatting about how thrilled he’d been to hear her voice.

  When he opened the door, Astrid took a step inside the room only to come to an abrupt halt.

  Her lips had tugged into a wide smile as she took in the big room filled with people: Astrid and Jack’s parents and grandparents, Eamon, Maggie, Darius, Peyton, Ingmar and Lanni, holding Rosie who gnawed on Lanni’s amber necklace with great dedication. There was Mr. Fontaine, her patient from Rosenthal, and a young green-eyed man, whom Astrid recognized from the photographs as Mrs. Fontaine’s grandson, David Convel, Azem Nimanni from Winston, Lily Falconer, the Nakamuras, little Henry... It seemed that half of Red Cliffs and Copper Ridge, together with quite a few guests from here and there, had flown to Sicily.

  Every pair of eyes turned to her as she stepped in.

  “What are you all doing here?” she’d asked no one in particular, smiling and shaking her head in disbelief.

  “They came to listen to your singing, baby,” Jack said and kissed her lips. “Because tonight you’re going to be the Queen of the Night, on a real stage and for a real audience.”

  “Do not tell me, Jack Canagan, that you actually took the theatre by force,” Astrid said, shaking her head. “You’re crazy!”

  “That I am. Crazy about you!” Jack said and kissed her again.

  “But how? What about that recording? Signor Colonna? What’s your role in this?”

  The chubby Italian professor laughed wholeheartedly, looking gradually younger and slimmer. “Well, Signora Canagan, my role is a small one, but crucial,” Alessandro Colonna said i
n his melodious Italian accent. “Your husband approached me with this unusual request a while ago. I’m still going to use those recordings, se non vi dispiace.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” Astrid said. “You’re welcome to use it. So you are a real music professor, then?”

  “I am indeed un insegnante di musica. As you probably know by now, I’m also a werewolf. I agreed to help Jack and your family to pull this off. It wasn’t without complications, though.”

  “The most difficult part was to find a singer who would officially ‘sing’ tonight,” Eamon added. “After some research, Professor and I found out that Amelia Brecht’s always refused this role, unsure her voice could make it.”

  “You’re using Amelia Brecht for this?” Astrid said.

  “But she’s perfect,” Professor Colonna said. “And she was right, you know. She used to have a beautiful voice. She’s always dreamt of this role, and passionately practiced it for years and years, but even at the peak of her career, the Queen of the Night was too much for her.”

  “So we got her agent to blackmail her, sort of,” James carried on. “I’m not very proud of it, but it was the only way. He’s one of us, he understands. She’ll get a teaching job and secure retirement, and most importantly, conclude her singing career with dignity, so I really don’t feel bad, after all.”

  “And it might help her to reconcile with him. Reinhardt Hoffman is the greatest love of her life,” Betty said.

  “At least, that’s what Reinhardt is hoping for,” Rowena said, smiling. “Come on, my love, you should get ready.”

  “Wait, wait, Mother. What about the orchestra? The conductor? People will notice I’m not Amelia Brecht. I’m at least six inches taller and not so, well, traditionally built,” Astrid said, still dazzled.

  Ahmed walked to her and hugged her. “Leave that to us, honey. Nobody will notice a thing, trust me. The local press will be here because this is the season premiere, but we made sure there wouldn’t be any sort of video-recording.”