Chapter 31

I had not realized the heaviness I carried inside, not until months after I had taken up residence beneath the Opera House and truly appreciated the sanctuary I was allowed. Once I had a sense of peace, I started to understand how my former life was less than ideal.

Physically the bruises had long since healed and old wounds closed. Thin scars along my torso, arms and legs were ignored when I bathed in the lake, and sleep was no longer light and elusive. There were still nightmares, but not as frequently as I had grown accustomed to experiencing.

Yet the anxiety and restlessness never truly left me, and I realized as I stood staring at the ripples in the underground lake that the feeling was always there beneath the surface. It was a constant effort on my part to swallow down the nervousness before it consumed me, and there were many times I lost the battle.

I had stayed up well into the night, playing various musical selections that I considered playing on the streets of Paris. At the start of the evening, I had created sixteen neatly organized piles of music on my bed, however, by three in the morning, the piles had shifted due in part to a breeze coming from across the lake, but mostly the result of my poor skills in keeping my work space tidy.

At some point I fell asleep in the armchair with the bow still in my hand and thankfully my violin on the bed, used as an expensive and delicate paperweight. I woke to the sound of a tremendous crash and voices-many masculine voices.

In the initial haze of sleep, I thought I was in the midst of a nightmare from my days in the traveling fair. I sat up with a start, my back in knots as I straightened from a slumped over position.

"You there!" a man bellowed.

At once I was on my feet, papers scattering as I reached across the bed for my mask. I knocked over the side table in the process and frantically attempted to devise a plan of escape despite not knowing where the voices came from or where the men were headed.

"It won't budge!" another man called out.

"Eh, then leave it. There are other ways around."

I felt another rush of cool air and realized the voices had carried from across the lake. The crash I heard was most likely the delivery doors opening harder than usual because of the strong winds.

I shivered as the gust blew all of the papers onto the floor, some of which landed near the water. Barefoot and annoyed, I snatched them up one by one in the meager lamplight and grumbled to myself as I stuffed them beneath candlesticks on the table and the empty box that had originally served as a violin case.

The voices faded, the doors shut once more, and the gust of cold air returned to the comfortable breeze that usually streamed through the cavern. I waited for several minutes to turn up the lamps, my heart still pounding from the invasion across the lake.

Despite not being able to see the opposite shoreline from where I stood, I feared the glint of light from my apartments would call attention to my hiding place. I could not risk being discovered, not ever. I feared what fate awaited me if anyone knew where I had taken up refuge.

Given the rush of adrenaline, I stood wide awake with a crumpled stack of papers beneath two mismatched silver candlesticks. I doubted anyone had treated Handel and Bach's music with such disrespect before as I attempted to smooth the pages.

"Clumsy, ignorant, fool," I said under my breath.

I paused, the palm of my hand pressed firmly to the page as my father's cruel words passed over my lips. In the back of my mind, his voice continued to taunt me. You worthless, disgusting little bastard. Look at what you have done.

Out of all the wounds I had suffered, some were still quite open. I forced myself to turn away from the crumpled pages in hopes the words would fade away, but his voice filled my head.

Do you think anyone will ever want you? Do you think any woman would give herself to you freely?

I had no idea what my father implied. All I knew for certain was that not a single person in the world, not even my own parents, had wanted anything to do with me. I was a pariah, a lonely and wounded beast of an adolescent too hideous for the rest of the world.

Without thinking, I fumbled with the buttons of my pajama shirt, tugged at the drawstring of my trousers, and numbly walked into the water. The glassy surface rippled as I entered and waded into the depths, the shock of cool water against warm skin mostly ignored. I forced my gaze to remain at a distance point in the darkness, to pretend the scars on my flesh were not waiting to be counted.

I knew the location and recalled the circumstances behind most of the marks on my body. I knew the three cigar burns; one on the bottom of my left foot, the next on my right calf, and the last one on my right forearm near the crook of my elbow. My toes curled and hands clenched as I thought of how I had attempted to grasp onto something, anything to prevent my father from dragging me across the length of the cellar. With dirt embedded beneath my fingernails and dust caked along the tear tracks on my face, I could not stop him from wrestling me to the ground like a pig and snuffing out his cigar on the bottom of my foot. I had been seven at the time, and once he finally released me, I hid beneath a table and held my breath until he returned upstairs and it was safe to sob alone.

There was a dog bite-a regrettable accident-on my upper right arm, the snag left behind from an iron nail on my upper left arm, and many thin, silvery lines across my chest and stomach.

Once I found the bubbling warmth of the hot spring in the lake, I sank down into the water and fully submerged myself. I held my breath until I surfaced and gasped for air, then pulled myself under once more, spreading my legs and arms out as my lungs deflated and I sank like an anchor.

My father's voice pierced the silence, and in the darkness, I screamed into the water bubbling up around me, emptied the air in my lungs out of protest in a manner I had never done before. I screamed for him to stop. Stop hurting me. Stop degrading me. Stop treating me like I am nothing to you. I regretted that he would never hear my words or understand what hell he put me through for no other reason than I was born with a scar to half my face.

Over and and over again I surfaced for a breath and returned beneath the water until I could no longer hold the air in my lungs. Exhausted and panting, I opened my eyes and found Madeline knee-deep in the water, a look of terror in her eyes as she attempted to hold onto her skirts and wade toward me.

I pushed off the bottom of the lake and deeper into the water, swimming desperately away from her as she was very much dressed and I was very much not.

"No," I shouted, my lips barely above the water's surface.

"Erik!" she yelled when she finally paused several meters away from me.

"I am not dressed," I said in warning.

Her skirts fanned out around her in the water, and she planted her hands on her hips. "You are not...dressed?"

"I am not."

"My God, I thought...I thought you were drowning," she admonished.

I realized that from a distance, my constant bobbing up for air and then sinking back into the water most likely resembled someone on the verge of drowning. Drowning seemed far less humiliating than admitting the truth.

"You scared me half to death," Madeline said before I could answer. Teeth gritted, she cupped her hand and splashed water toward me. "I left my shoes on the shore, and as I was taking them off all I could think of was what if you died because I did not want to ruin my best pair? Shame on you!"

She turned away and stomped out of the water, dripping wet and shaking her head as she passed my discarded clothing and paused beside her bag. "Ruined," she said as she pulled out what appeared to have been a muffin.

Mortified, I looked away from her and absently ran my thumb along the cigar burn on my forearm.

Once she exited the water, she sat and wrung out her skirts while I remained neck-deep in the water.

"Are you a decent swimmer?" she asked, briefly looking up to meet my eye. "Should I worry about you day and night in the water?"

I slowly shook my head. "I know how to swim well," I answered.

"Good." She climbed to her feet and rummaged through a chest of drawers until she found two towels, one which she used in an attempt to dry herself, the other which she left beside my scattered clothes.

"There are costumes for women if you wish to change into something dry," I offered, seeing as how she was still soaked to the bone.

Madeline sighed. She turned away from me, rummaged through one of the crates, then disappeared behind the stack while I faced away from the shore and tread water.

"Why don't you come out and dress yourself?" Madeline said once she returned in an emerald green skirt with lines of beads and garish embellishments. She draped her wet skirts over a makeshift drying rack I had devised for my own clothes when I washed and dried my laundry.

Madeline stepped out into the hall, and I scurried out, toweled myself dry, and hastily pulled on dry clothes. When I opened the door leading to the stairs, I was thankful to see her greet me with a smile.

"This skirt is deceptively heavy," she said. "And my heart is still racing."

I bowed my head. "I apologize."

"Why were you screaming if you were not drowning?" she questioned as she walked past me with her bag in hand and placed what was still intact of the muffin onto a plate.

Mortified, I froze several steps behind her and stared at the ground.

"Erik?" she questioned.

"I...I think there is something wrong with me," I blurted out, risking a glance in her direction.

Madeline whipped around, a look of concern on her face. She took a step forward and looked me over. "I'm not sure I understand."

I started to shake my head, far too ashamed to admit how I felt, but Madeline offered a gentle smile and motioned me to her side. Once I sat beside her, she pushed the muffin toward me and sat with her chin cupped in her hand.

"Why do you think there is something wrong with you?" she asked as she reached for the candlestick in the middle of the table and pursued the music I had selected.

With her eyes drawn away from me, I considered my answer carefully while I pressed my finger into the crumbs and slowly rolled them between my index finger and thumb.

"I am different," I said at last. "Not on the outside, but in my mind...I feel...I feel like there is something terrible." The words were painful to say aloud, and once they were out, I felt the emptiness left behind by my truth. I was an oddity, inside and out, the son of the devil down to the marrow of my bones.

I waited for Madeline to disagree with me or offer a complex and wise explanation of why being different was what made the world so wondrous, but instead she merely nodded.

"Do you feel like you want to hurt someone?"

"No," I said quickly. "No, of course not." My throat tightened, and I thought of Garouche. My feelings were still mixed when it came to his death, but I had no desire to hurt anyone else, not even my own father. "Never again," I vowed.

"Do you want to hurt yourself?"

It took me a moment to answer, but at last I shook my head. I was not certain if i was courageous or cowardly that I did not want to take my own life. The brief time spent with my uncle showed me that life could be pleasant while his death and the months that followed merely added to my cynicism.

Madeline nodded. I picked at the muffin, taking slow bites of soft blueberries in an attempt to distract myself, but nothing cleared my mind. Frustrated by my inability to express how I felt, I pushed the plate halfway across the table and twisted in my seat, facing toward the water.

"What happened to these pages?" Madeline gently asked.

"They blew off the table," I explained, keeping my back to her. "I did not want them ruined in the water, but I suppose they have still been destroyed."

"Hmmm."

From the corner of my eye, I watched as Madeline ran her hand over the sheets of paper, but the crinkles could not be smoothed out. I twisted my spine and watched as she looked over the music sheet by sheet.

The silence stretched on and I leaned forward, lacing my fingers together. "When the pages blew off the table, I thought of what my father would have said to me. He would have called me clumsy, ignorant…" My throat tightened, and as much as tried to clear my voice, speaking became difficult. I could not bring myself to repeat the rest of his words.

"That is what you meant by there is something terrible inside of you? His insults?"

I nodded, keeping my gaze trained on my clasped hands. Words should not have had the ability to hurt worse than a fist, and yet the insults were embedded within me.

"There are times when we are in rehearsals and I miss a step, and all I can think of is the old ballet mistress stalking behind us, muttering under her breath that I would never be anything but a dancer blending into the background. Every time she would tell us to stop and start over again, I feared making the same mistake twice because then she would make me go through the steps alone with the rest of the dancers watching. She would try to prove her point that I would never be good enough to be principal. It has been three years now since she retired, and I still picture her standing behind me."

I dreaded my father's words still woven through my thoughts more than a year since I had last seen him. I could not bear years of his hatred following me.

""It is not as often these days," Madeline told me. "And there are times when I miss a step, ram into another Anne, and create a moment of pure havoc that disrupts the entire theater," she said with a laugh.

"The entire theater indeed," I said under my breath.

Madeline playfully bumped my shoulder with hers. "Right down to the cleaning staff dusting the chairs," she said with a grin. "Believe me, I have made mistakes that will be talked about for ages."

"You are without fault," I said.

Madeline blew air past her lips and discarded my comment with a roll of her eyes. "What fun would that be?" She looked at me from over her shoulder, her eyes meeting mine. "Turn around and eat your food," she said firmly. "It will make you feel better to have something in your stomach."

Her tone commanded obedience, and I swung my legs back over the bench and reached for my plate, feeling a pang of hunger. Before I could take a bite, Madeline pulled off a morsel and popped it into her mouth with a devilish grin.

I appreciated her willingness to share a meal with me and how she effortlessly transition from her stern, motherly tone to playfully stealing a bite. The warmth of her arm against mine and the musical sound of her kind words drowned out my father's cruel taunts.

"Is this what you selected to play tonight?" she asked.

I shrugged. "I have not made a final decision."

"Saint-Georges," Madeline said. "This concerto is lovely, even with the wrinkles."

I grunted. She was making an attempt to ease my self-deprecation, but I was not easily swayed.

"That concerto is my favorite."

"It was raining before I came down here," Madeline commented. "Hopefully it clears by nightfall so that you are able to play as you wished."

"I would still play in the rain."

"Ah, there is your flare for the dramatic. Willing to stand in the rain for your art."

Her words made me unexpectedly chuckle. "I would do anything for music."

Music-and the Opera House in particular-was my solace. I looked over the music from Saint-George, a man who was not only a composer and avid fencer, but the son of a slave. I admired him for the way he he found acceptance within society-at least to a certain degree. While I was able to mask the ruined half of my face, he could not hide the color of his skin, and for all of his contributions to music, he was still denied much in his lifetime.

His accomplishments as a musician and composer, however, inspired me, and I stood abruptly to reach across the table for blank sheets of paper.

"I will compose my own music," I said quite suddenly. "And I will play it tonight in the rain if I must and then for Senora di Carlo as a parting gift tomorrow."

"You intend to compose something now?" Madeline asked.

I caught the skepticism in her tone, but my mind was set. "Saint-Georges followed by an original piece," I said. "Two pieces of music."

And once I finished playing, all of Paris would clamor for more of my music. The thought was quite exhilarating.

"Do you have time?"

"If Mozart could write the overture to Don Giovanni in a morning, I could most certainly write a concerto in twelve hours."

I failed to mention that I had previously attempted to write a symphony, but found there was not a single melody willing to entertain me. For once I vowed to set my past failure aside and focus on my potential.

"If you don't mind the company, I will stay until my skirts have dried," Madeline said.

"I would like that very much," I answered.