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Their first Christmas together, they part on the shortest day of the year. She kisses his cheek and for a long moment he holds her close until Nadir leans back over the turnstile and pinches his arm and politely reminds him that they still have a set of stairs and a bridge to get over and if he doesn’t hurry up they’ll never get a good seat.
Erik releases Christine, kisses her hair, scoops up his violin case, and pushes his way through to Nadir, all the time reminding himself that he’ll only be gone for a week and his mother is expecting him home and Uncle Al would never let him live it down if he forewent the family Christmas to stay with Christine.
They’d understand, though, if they stayed. They all like her (which is a tremendous relief) but he hasn’t the heart to disappoint his mother.
The thought occupies him until he settles on the train, Nadir letting him take the window seat, then immediately taking out his laptop so he can review case notes for the three-hour journey. Erik sighs, sets up his phone to the playlist he organised last night (and the Mumford & Sons, Lisa Hannigan, The Decemberists combination makes his heart ache for Christine already but it’s only a few days). He has stockpiled fic updates to read, but already he finds he’s not in the mood for them, so he leans his head against the window and lets his eyes slip closed as the train chugs out of the station.
He dreams of dying, dreams of falling into a limbo world awaiting death, dreams of Christine, a genderbent Orpheus, come to save his soul, blue eyes blazing, dreams of her taking his hand and pulling him through a hall of mirrors, pulling him through a veil, pulling him from the depths of the underworld out into the light before finally turning to face him.
He wakes sweating, one earphone slipped lose, the window cold under his cheek and ‘Red Right Ankle’ in his ear. Outside the world is dark, stars glittering though it is only evening and not yet night, and Nadir nudges a cup of tea over to him, and a bar of chocolate. “Trolley just came through,” he says, and Erik nods numbly, disconnected from his body as he takes a sip that is not as hot as it should be.
They pass through Carrick, still nearly an hour left, and the town is a riot of light, twinkly through the darkness, blue and gold and red and green, gaudy Santas and prancing reindeer and migraine-inducing house outlines and he has to look down to his phone, to the text from Christine telling him she misses him already, and three fic updates. He replies to Christine and feels less far away from her and reads the fic updates that warm his soul. And when, at last, he hears, “Next stop: Sligo MacDiarmuda”, Nadir packs away his laptop and Erik eases out his earphones and slides his phone back into his pocket.
“Damn I’m stiff,” he grumbles as he stretches out of his seat and Nadir’s lip quirks.
“In all the wrong places.” His voice stays even, but a laugh catches in Erik’s throat at the words and he fights it even as his ears burn. Nadir snorts at the sight of him before he turns away.
It is Nadir’s mother who collects them from the station. Anna May is a small woman, who insists that Nadir got his height from the father he doesn’t remember, and when she reaches up to hug her son Erik has to stifle a laugh at the way Nadir colours.
Then it is his turn to get a hug and Nadir doesn’t even have the decency to try not to laugh, just lets it out and Erik is sorely tempted to shove him.
He folds himself down into the back seat of Anna May’s car, and ten minutes later he is walking up the short lane to his mother’s house. The stars are still twinkling, moon glowing white and almost full (and will be full tomorrow night) and he knows it is fruitless to wish for snow but can’t help thinking that it would complete the scene. He picks out Orion’s belt, rising over the trees, and knows it is too early yet to see Sirius, but still the memory comes of childhood nights sitting out under the stars with Uncle Al, the two of them wrapped in blankets and sipping cocoa from a flask (and when he was old enough, the cocoa was laced with whiskey) and they’d talk of the stars and Erik’s father, their Christmas tradition, the same that Al had once had with his brother. “Some traditions are made to be adapted, not lost,” Al told him once, and the words recur to him now, just a step away from the door, and he thinks of how he would like to share the stars on Christmas night with Christine one day, if she will have him.
Then the door opens, and his mother enfolds him in her arms, smelling of baking and cinnamon, and his heart swells with the realisation he is home.
His second Christmas with Christine, he and Nadir again take the train home. Christine is still in Portugal, flying in in the morning, and Lilly will collect her from the airport in the morning and the two of them will drive down to spend Christmas in Sligo too.
It is, in part, at the insistence of Erik’s mother, and when Marina insists, she generally gets what she wants.
But as it is early evening when they reach MacDiarmuda, and the shops are still open, Al is the one to collect them, and he drops Nadir home before taking Erik to buy a ring.
It is not an engagement ring, not yet. It is instead a simple silver band with a purple stone set in the centre (an amethyst, he thinks). And Erik slips the box into the pocket of his shirt and keeps it close to his heart.
That night he does not sleep well. He is thinking of the ring, of what it means to give it to Christine. He is thinking of Christine herself, of spending four days in such close proximity to her and each of their families after not having seen her since August. She has met his family before, of course. Several times, in fact, but there’s something about spending Christmas with them and her that feels important, that makes his heart throb and butterflies flutter in his stomach. It is tantamount to a confession, tantamount to admitting that he plans to propose to her come summer when he can have her for a month and not just a scattering of ten days before she returns to Portugal and her research. It is like admitting that she has become the most important thing in his life, more important even than air, and he is mildly terrified over that, and wholly terrified of losing her.
He leaves the bed, turns on the lamp and takes his violin out of its case. There is an old piece by E.K. Daaé, dear old Konstin, that was the first dance at his parents wedding. He’s heard it every time he’s watched their wedding video, has several recordings of it on his laptop, memorised the sheet music long ago and the circumstances of its composition (as the first dance when Daaé’s mother married his stepfather). And though Erik means to compose the first dance he will (he hopes) share with Christine in their married life, his fingers find the strings now, guide the bow over them, and as the music fills the air it is as if every ounce of worry, every drop of fear, eases away. Christine is coming, and he will play this for her, and she will say yes to his proposition to someday propose to her.
(He does it under the stars, on Christmas night. He is out with Al having spiked cocoa as per their tradition, and Al is reminiscing about the three years he and Erik’s father spent in London in the eighties, when he was a barman and Andrew played in bars every chance he could get, when Christine slips out of the house to join them. Erik takes her under his blanket, and Al tells another story, then lies about having to make a call and, eyes twinkling, goes into the house. Fighting down the nerves and twisting anxiety, Erik gives her the ring, then and there, slips it onto her finger and kisses her, and when, eventually, they make it back into the house, no one comments on their flushed cheeks or general state of disarray, but Bill makes them tea, and Marina takes out a tiramisu she made earlier, and Al and Lilly are sitting in the corner grinning.)
By their third Christmas, he has earned his doctorate, is working on getting his thesis published and learning to wear his new title. He is sitting in Costa waiting for Christine to meet him before they join Nadir for the trip to Sligo. Ever since Nadir got a car, he has taken every excuse to drive it, and it was his decision that they not take the train this year, so Erik went along with him.
Though he rather suspects he will miss the comfort of the train.
But he is in Costa, having a black forest hot chocolate, when Kate slides in beside him. She quirks a brow at him and smiles and looks no different than she did a year and a half ago when she took off for a research job in America and left John Henry behind to his own frustration.
“Christine told me I’d find you here,” she says by way of greeting, and it’s difficult to detect but Erik has always had a good ear for sound and America might have softened some of the edges of her Donegal accent.
“Christine is rarely wrong,” and he smiles, because his fiancée (since July) is truly a marvel. “Can I get you anything?”
Kate shakes her head. “I can’t stay long. I just wanted to give you this.” She reaches into her bag and withdraws an A4 envelope, then slips a sheet of paper out and lays it on top.
It takes him a moment to realise what he is looking at.
It is a group photograph, an old group photograph, or at least a copy of one. Down at the bottom it’s dated May 1882, and something about it puts Erik in mind of the westerns Al used to watch and John Henry still does.
Before he can ask what Kate is showing him this for when it is absolutely not his area, his eyes catch the two men in the centre of the picture, or at least the taller of the two men. The one who looks just like him.
Or would, if his cheek had fissures in it and not pitted craters.
It’s a dream. It has to be. The air has that unreal quality to it, thick around him as if it is not really air and he is not really breathing, just thinks that he is like the dream where Christine comes to save him from the afterlife, like any number of stories of tripping or falling or gauzy veils and finding himself in the netherworld.
Kate taps the back of his hand, as if she knows he has lost himself to strange and disturbing thoughts and by now she knows him long enough that she probably recognises when it happens even before he does. It is enough to bring him back to himself, and he inhales sharply, shakes his head to clear it.
How could someone from so long ago look so much like him?
“His name was Erik Delacarte,” her voice is soft. “He was a notorious outlaw back in the day, wanted for murder and robbery and fixing poker games and any number of things. But he straightened himself out after 1879.”
Erik looks back down at the picture before him, at the man who shares his face and so much of his name. “What has that got to do with me? Other than,” and he gestures at the picture as if to say, the obvious.
“Because obscure musicians are your area.”
His gaze snaps back up to her, away from his doppelganger, and Kate is grinning. “Obscure musicians?”
She hums appreciatively. “You see, in 1879, he met this man here.” Her finger taps the man beside Delacarte, shorter than him and darker and something vaguely like Nadir about his features. “Fahim Iravani. Delacarte settled down to a life of making music, and from what I can tell, he and Iravani were together for the next forty years.”
“They were lovers?”
She hesitates. “I need to dig further, but it certainly looks that way. I found this in an archive in Cheyenne about six weeks ago. The little bit of searching I’ve done suggests that all these,” and she passes a hand over all ten or so assembled people in the picture, men and women both, “were all intimately involved with each other. These two here,” and she indicates a sickly-looking man at Iravani’s shoulder and another taller, broader man beside him, “were certainly involved. And three of these four ladies,” and she points to a row of seats at the front of the group containing four women, one of whom is clearly pregnant, “may also have been involved. From what I can tell, everyone here had some involvement in music at some point, it’s just a matter of unearthing the links.” She sets down a black USB stick on top of the photo. “Everything I know about them is here.” And she grins at him. “Merry Christmas, Erik.”
The fourth Christmas he is with Christine comes with a stack of ancient sheet music courtesy of Kate that she found in an archive in Denver, all from the infamous Delacarte that she’s spent the last year digging up in the records along with his group of friends. She and Erik have made it a joint project between them, him taking care of the musical analysis while Kate does the historical research into what they’ve started calling “our favourite group of western gays.” There is, apparently, a reference to at least four requiems composed by Delacarte, but Kate has not been able to turn up anything more concrete than that and the thought is a torment.
Christine has made him swear off research for Christmas, but the urge to pick apart the sheet music is almost more than he can bear.
Or at least, it is, until Christine presents him with a record player on Christmas Day. Every present he opens from his mother and Bill and Al and Lilly and even Nadir and his mother Anna May is a bundle of vinyl’s. The Beatles and The Traveling Wilburys. Gordon Lightfoot. Don McLean. Tom Petty. The Pogues. Queen. David Bowie. Buddy Holly. Old stuff and new stuff pressed onto records. Konstin Daaé and Tchaikovsky and Chopin and Vivaldi. Lisa Hannigan. Mumford & Sons. My Chemical Romance. Even Taylor Swift. Piles and piles of music.
He almost faints at the sight of it all, the beauty of it. It’s the stuff of dreams, the sort of dreams he had when he was eleven and desperate to take in all the music he possibly could. Out of the side of his eye he sees Christine look at Al, who has gone a little pale, and who looks at Marina who nods. She disappears down the hall as Bill brews tea, and by the time Erik has stopped feeling quite so faint and untethered, she’s back carrying a box.
“Al and I were tidying his attic,” she says, a slight catch in her voice, “and we found some old tapes.” She swallows, something unreadable flickering in her eyes. “I mean, they’ve been there more than twenty-five years, Erik. We didn’t know what state they were in or if they’d even play. But we got someone to look at them, someone Bill knows in Belfast, and she did some work and got it all cleaned up and transferred to CDs and a stick, and it plays just fine.”
And suddenly Erik knows whose music it is, whose voice he would hear on those tapes, before his mother hands the box to him. The prospect of hearing his father’s voice for the first time since he was four years old is enough to make his hands shake, and tears spring to his eyes, and as he looks at Andrew Delafontaine written on each CD case, as his fingers trace a red USB, his breath sticks in his throat and his mother’s arms come around him, as warm and steadying as they have always been.
And then Christine is at his other side, and Al’s tears are dripping into his hair, and Bill is making more tea as Lilly searches out the whiskey and his whole family is here around him, his father’s voice held in his hands.
By the next year he only has two chapters left to write for the book on Delacarte he and Kate are putting together. John Henry, in his highly skilled way of turning up information on consumptive southern gentlemen with medical degrees who went west for A Variety of Reasons, has found information on some of the other people in the photograph, namely one Henry Russell and his lover Warren Stapp. Christine is putting the finishing touches to her thesis, but she still drags herself away from Coimbra long enough to come home for Christmas.
They spend an evening walking through Maynooth arm in arm, looking at the lights and laughing at the dusting of snow. It is five and a half years since they got together, five and a half years of having this wonderful woman in his life and if everything goes well, this time next year it will only be a few months until they marry, a few months until they pledge their lives to each other.
It is a year and a half from now, but only a few months from next Christmas, and by the Christmas after that they will be married, will be sharing their lives, and when he looks at it that way it doesn’t seem so very long until the wedding.
As ever they travel to Sligo with Nadir and Lilly. The annual congregation of the family. And for all that Erik’s heart is overflowing with feelings, with sentiment and thought and desire, Nadir is moody. His father has sought him out, has decided it’s time to get to know his son, and Nadir doesn’t know what to think about it. All his life he’s heard about his parent’s tumultuous and short-lived marriage that broke up over the question of a job in Saudi Arabia and Anna May’s wanting to raise her son Catholic.
Erik wishes he knew what to say, but it’s impossible to know. After all, his father died, he didn’t leave by choice, so any frame of reference he has doesn’t fit. All his life he’s wanted to know his father. All year he’s listened to those old recordings that came from Al’s attic. He’s learned every nuance of his father’s voice, every modulation. Some songs, like ‘Everyday’, he could hear the smile in his father’s voice. When ‘Blackbird’ came on his heart almost stopped and the dimmest memory came to him, of being curled up beneath a blanket, a hand cupping the back of his head, and a voice softly singing in his ear. ‘Away in a Manger’ was on another disc, and it has always been his favourite Christmas carol and he never knew why, but when he heard that voice that was and was not familiar all at once it dawned on him that his father must have sung it to him once, too, and the memory of it has lived buried deep in his mind since, only to be reawakened now.
It’s like losing his father all over again, twenty-five years later. He was too young back then to truly understand it, too young for the magnitude of it all to hit him. But this year, ever since these old recordings came into his hands, it’s as if he’s only grieving him properly now, as if all of the years of missing him and wondering about him and longing for him have built up without his truly realising it, and all at once this year it’s come to him, what he’s truly missed out on all his life, what he should have had but was taken from him.
(There are many recordings on the discs, most of them covers of songs. But there are other pieces too, soft instrumentals, and the handwriting on the original tapes tell him that these are from after his parents married, after his own birth, that his father composed some of these pieces for him, and he must have played these for him, probably even played him to sleep with them. To think, every one of these notes came from his father’s hand. Sometimes it overwhelms him and he has to go out into the cold air to find himself.)
What he wouldn’t give, now, to have just one day with his dad. To just sit down and talk to him, just once. To ask him about music, and London, to ask him for stories, just to hear him talk. To just have that closeness to him. It’s what his heart has always craved.
He is already older now, than his father was when he died. He has already lived longer. He tries not to dwell on it, but it haunts him more and more.
If he were Nadir, he would want to get to know his father. Would want to have that time with him. But everything is different for Nadir, and for all of Erik’s years of longing there is nothing he can say that can help.
Christine gives him a soft smile and squeezes his hand as if she knows what he’s thinking.
He smiles back and shakes his head to clear the thoughts from his mind. It is Christmas. He will not let the sadness overwhelm the season. And there will be all the time in the world to help Nadir in the new year.
There is something not right. Something that has gone wrong deep inside of him. He can feel it, can sense it, the growing of something, or the erosion of something, it’s impossible to tell. But something is not as it should be. That much he knows, and it terrifies him.
He has not told Christine, not yet. It is Christmas, and he will not have the possibility of something spoil that fact for her. It has been a difficult enough year for the two of them, with her thesis and getting it finished. She passed her viva a month ago and earned her title and in March she will graduate from Coimbra, and he will fly out to be there at her side, as she was at his.
He has been busy with his and Kate’s book, getting it ready. The editing is all done, the cover selected, the names all known now of the people in that infamous photograph from 141 years ago (Erik Delacarte and Fahim Iravani; Doctor Henry Russell and Warren Stapp; Philippe and Raoul De Chagny, brothers; Etta Lynam or Harrington or Wallace or all three and more, expecting the baby; Christine and Carlotta and Sorelli, surnames unknown or questioned, and he never believed in reincarnation, put his own similarities to the other Erik down to just a fluke of genetics, until he discovered the existence of the Christine there too, and now he has to wonder; ten people immortalised in one photograph, and whose names he recites when he’s tired and can’t remember why he went to the trouble of writing such a book). It will be published in February, a landmark piece of work (they hope) and after it all he just has the wedding, now, to worry over.
The wedding to finish planning, with Christine at his side. Only five and a half months away.
He has a scan in the second week of January, and only after that he’ll tell her, about the Thing he tries not to think about, if he has to. There might not be anything to tell.
(Deep down, he knows that there is.)
But he tries not to let it dampen his spirits, and mostly he succeeds. He hugs Bill and dances with his mother and kisses Lilly’s cheek and listens to a recording of his father sing as he stands under the stars with Al. And Al is quiet, tonight, a faraway look in his eyes, as if he might suspect that there’s something Erik is not telling them. And he doesn’t pry, but before he goes into the house, he claps Erik on the shoulder and smiles (though the smile doesn’t fully reach his eyes) and says, “next year will be different.”
Erik hopes he just means the wedding and tries not to think of it as a sign of something.
It is different, celebrating Christmas in his own home. There is so much more to do, cleaning and tidying and decorating. They put the tree up on the eleventh of December, the same day he always did with his mother when he was small, because it was his parents wedding anniversary and it stayed a tradition even after she married Bill. It is ten months since had the surgery to fix the aneurysm on his aorta, but still Christine insists on doing the heavy work of erecting the tree and asks Nadir to climb the ladder and hang the outside lights from the eaves. “I don’t want you to get dizzy up there,” she says, and Erik tries not to be frustrated with her. She’s just worried about him and he knows that, he knows it, but it’s damn hard to accept when she still sometimes acts as if he might be an invalid.
The house was a wedding present from Al, though Al called it “early inheritance.” He sold his herd and most of his land (down to ten acres) and bought this house just so he could sign it over to Erik and Christine and gave them a lump sum of money. “I’m getting too old to keep battling these cows,” he said when he told Erik in the hospital only a week after the surgery, knowing Erik was in no condition to argue with him. And so, it seemed only right to celebrate Christmas here this year, in the house that is theirs and that they’ve decorated. Erik’s family is due in on the train, and Lilly will help Christine in the kitchen, and it is down to him just to organise some music, to feed the fire and keep the house warm and buy the alcohol though he won’t drink any of it.
There is no midnight Mass now, because too many people were turning up drunk. But they will go to the eight o’clock Mass, and Christine will look radiant on his arm, and his mother will lean into Bill, and Al will pretend he is not on the point of crying even as Lilly makes him laugh with some anecdote. And it will be like any Christmas in Sligo only it will be a Christmas in Maynooth, and sometimes it is impossible to believe that he’s here, now, that he has a family and he has Christine and he will be serving best man duties for Nadir in March, along with John Henry who will fly in from Georgia for the occasion.
(Nadir’s father will be there too. It hasn’t been easy, but the two of them have worked out an arrangement, and Erik is happy for his friend, that he is able to have this chance.)
It is inexplicable that he is nervous to spend Christmas in his own house. But nervous he is, and it twists in his gut, waiting for everyone to arrive. It’s not as if it is different from any other year. All that’s different is the location. It’s the same people, the same people he has spent Christmas with for so many years now. It is pointless to be nervous.
Christine kisses his cheek, and hugs him, and no matter how many butterflies tumble in his gut and make it hard to breathe, it is a comfort to have her at his side.
He has gotten himself enlisted into the annual carol service as a pianist, and in spite of himself, he is singing, ‘Silent Night’. He has always been very fond of it, and there is a recording of it in his father’s collection, but he has never performed it before. Has never performed anything, really, where the scrutiny would be on him. Not properly in any right, only the odd open mic in his student days when Nadir bribed him, or Christine softly asked. And of course, Enjolras in Les Mis when he was fifteen. But this is wholly different from any of it, is so many grades above it all, has so many expectations. His mother and Al and Bill have come in early to see it, and Christine will be in the audience with Lilly, and it will be fine, he tells himself, it will.
And he wishes he could believe that as easily as he can say it.
Ten minutes until he goes on, and there is a Masters student singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’. After her is the two third years doing ‘Little Drummer Boy’, and then it is Erik, and all day his students have been wishing him luck, because it is an open secret that he is involved, and he tries not to think about how many of them are in the audience, ready to judge him, watching for him to fuck up so they can laugh about it with their friends.
He draws a shuddering breath, slips in an earphone, and lets his father’s voice wash over him.
It is the first time since he got himself involved in this thing that he really feels as if he can do it.
He sighs, and nods to himself, and is as ready as he’ll ever be.
This year he is better able for the carol service. He has braced himself, is looking forward to it, in fact. And it goes off without a hitch. He plays Konstin Daaé, plays Delacarte, accompanies several students, provides his own accompaniment to ‘Silent Night’. Christine hugs him afterwards, and whispers that she recorded him. It will be another three days until his family arrives, and tonight he and Christine will go home arm in arm, though the drifting flakes of snow that melt as they reach the ground. If there were music, he would dance with her, here and now on the side of the street, slowly turn with her in his arms. But there is no music, and it is cold and damp, so instead they make their way home, and once inside revive the fire. He settles on a record, and she lights the candles and hangs their coats, and there they dance, wrapped in each other’s arms, in the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree. Her forehead is warm against his neck, arms safe around his waist, breaths soft at his throat. And he kisses her hair and holds her close and wishes, distantly, that he could hold her in this moment forever.
It was Christine’s idea to decorate the sitting room with fairy lights. Strings of them line the walls, twinkling soft gold against the violet paint. It is impossible for him to deny her anything now, when the time is coming so close, so he does not protest when she insists on rearranging the layout an hour before his family is due to arrive. There’s a certain aesthetic appeal to the whole thing, he will grant her that.
(Though he will not admit how funny it is that this is the one year she has allowed him to do the majority of the decorating – including putting up the tree. It is more than his life is worth to pass any remarks on it.)
Just a month until their baby is due. The whole of thirty-one days.
God but it’s terrifying.
Sometimes he thinks he has come to terms with the whole thing, then it hits him that in a month’s time he will be responsible for another tiny life, and God but how can he possibly make a good father? The moment something goes wrong he’ll panic! He’ll never be able to cope! The baby will hate him! Christine will hate him! And even if the baby, somehow, grows up all right and goes off to school, she’ll be bullied for having him as a father! Bullied for the sake of his face, his mask, his make-up! And then his baby will learn to hate him for ruining his life!
Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit
He excuses himself from the gathering in the sitting room under the fairy lights, pleading that he needs air. His mother bites her lip, and a look passes between Nadir and Christine, but he pretends not to notice as he grabs his coat and slips outside.
The night is cold, a heavy frost already down, coating the grass silver. The moon is full, burning too bright, and once upon a time when he was little, he would have worried about werewolves attacking Santa as he made his rounds. At another time, he might laugh at his younger self.
He’s going to have to play Santa one day.
That thought should not be as terrifying as it is.
The house door creaks behind him, and he draws his coat tighter around himself. Probably Nadir come to find him, to bring him back to the gathering. Or else Christine. It is a few minutes until midnight, until Christmas Day, and she will want to be going to bed soon. He closes his eyes and inhales through his nose, trying to calm the pounding of his heart.
“Tell me about it.” It is not Nadir’s voice, certainly not Christine’s, but Al’s. Of course it is. Al should have been the first person he thought of. His uncle has always known him too well.
“What makes you think there’s anything to tell?” He tries for nonchalant and hits on defensive.
“Besides the way you left us all back there?” He can tell by the tone alone that Al is going for dramatic unconcern. He has always been good at that one. “You have the same face you used to make when you were five and terrified every time Marina left the room.”
It is a concerted effort not to think that he was terrified every time his mother left the room because he was convinced that, like his father, she would not come back. And it was the same at four and five as it was at six and seven, that fear deep in his chest of losing what he had left. He still feels it too keenly for something that’s thirty years old.
“It’s the baby, isn’t it?” Al’s voice is softer now, and tears spring to Erik’s eyes as he nods. His uncle sighs beside him. “I don’t suppose it would help if I told you it’s normal to be afraid?”
In spite of himself, a watery laugh escapes. “No.”
Al huffs. “Didn’t think so.”
And then his uncle’s arm is around his shoulder, drawing him close, and though he has been taller than Al since he was fourteen, Erik goes.
“Well it is. Normal to worry, that is. You would be a fool not to. And the fact that you’re this terrified at all just means you’re going to be a marvellous father.”
Whatever he expected Al to say, it was not that, and Erik’s eyes snap open as he turns to meet his uncle’s gaze. There are tears shining in Al’s eyes too, and his lips are quirked in the faintest smile.
“You know Andrew was the same?” And Erik shakes his head because no, he did not know that his father had been terrified too. “It was Christmas when Marina told him about you, and he panicked. Spent half the night pacing and smoking and telling me that he couldn’t possibly be a father because the only thing he was good at was remembering all the lyrics and notes even when he was too drunk to walk.” Al’s fingertips are soft on his cheek, wiping his tears away. Erik hadn’t realised they’d started to roll. “Of course, they were only married two weeks at the time, so you can see how it would be a shock. He did his best to hide it from Marina, but she knew.” His lips twist, as if he wants to smile and can’t bring himself to. “But then, when you were born, all the terror just melted away. Andrew was still afraid, but he was always afraid of fucking up, no matter what he did. I don’t think the fear is ever supposed to go away. It’s probably a good sign that it’s there, but I think, myself that you’ll be the best father that child could ever wish for.” He nods resolutely and turns his gaze to the stars. “And if it’s any consolation, I think Andrew would be even more terrified than you are at the thought of becoming a grandfather.”
Erik snorts, and laughs, and then Al is laughing too, and suddenly the night feels lighter than it ever has.
Al’s hand is gentle squeezing his. “Happy Christmas, Erik.”
She might be only ten and a half months old (ten months and twenty-one days, to be precise), but Christmas is already completely different with Clíodhna. Erik can safely say he never imagined the sheer twinkling fascination of multicoloured lights until she stared at them for a solid ten minutes when they first switched on the tree. And when she did snap out of her reverie it was with great suddenness, and Erik had to rush to scoop her up as she speed-crawled in the direction of the tree.
The discontented noise she made made Christine laugh.
Of course, Clíodhna is too young yet for Santa. Next year she might start to have some grasp on it, and they’ll have to bring her to see the big man in Manor Mills, but for now they’ve hung a Santa sock with her name embroidered on it on the fireplace.
And Christine hung a string of fairy lights high over her cot.
They’ve each danced with her to recordings of Christmas songs, and ‘Away in a Manger’ and ‘Silent Night’ are her current favourite songs for Erik to sing her to sleep with, or to play with either violin or piano, she’s not fussy on that aspect. She also seems to be particularly fond of the collection of Christmas songs sung by her grandfather that Erik has assembled into a playlist. Maybe it is just because of the similarities between Andrew’s voice and Erik’s, but Erik likes to think that some part of her, some little thing in her blood, understands who the voice belongs to.
By far though, her favourite part of Christmas is the attention. She squeals with delight the first time Al tickles her, and burbles happily being bounced on Bill’s knee. Lilly dotes on her anyway, and Erik has no idea what it is his mother does, but Clíodhna keeps chatting at her in her baby way and laughing and (briefly) gets upset when Nadir takes her into his arms even though she loves Nadir. She’s getting very fond of Michelle too though she’s just a little shyer with her, and the glances that Michelle keeps sending Nadir’s way makes Erik think that they’re considering having a baby of their own.
Erik privately hopes that they are, so he can have someone else to spoil, another tiny person that is half of his best friend instead of him, because he suspects that having two of his own might be a handful.
All in all, it is a great Christmas. And at the end of the night, when Clíodhna has been put down to sleep and Christine is distributing tea, he stands out under the stars and thinks about how much everything has changed in the last year. He still carries the fear in his heart of something happening to his baby girl, but he has learned to live with it, and as Al adds the tiniest drop of whiskey to their cocoa, Erik knows that he wouldn’t give this up for the world.
The family photo session is Christine’s idea. “The last time there was a picture taken of us all together was five years ago, Erik. Five years. Now don’t you think it’d be something nice to look back on? Something Clíodhna would like to have one day?” He was already sold on the idea, but invoking Clíodhna was a low move, so he put up a token resistance just to let her think she’d gotten somewhere.
It was his own insistence that Nadir and Michelle join them. No photograph could ever be complete without his honorary brother.
So it is that on the shortest day of the year, after his mother and Bill and Al have gotten to town, they traipse off to the photography studio. Of all the photographs taken that day, Erik’s personal favourite is the one of the whole group of them, Christine sitting with Clíodhna in her lap, him behind them, Nadir on his left behind Michelle, Bill on his right behind his mother, and Al standing tall beside him with Lilly in front of him. It is only afterwards, when they are back home, that Nadir pulls him into his arms and hugs him and says, “And the baby is there too but he doesn’t know it yet.”
It takes Erik a moment to realise exactly what Nadir means, but when it dawns on him, he pulls back and gapes.
“You mean—”
Nadir nods, tears sparkling in his eyes. “You’re going to be a godfather.”
It is the best news Erik could get, and in a fit of giddiness he kisses Nadir full on the lips which makes them both choke laughing, and that is how Christine finds them when she comes outside to tell them the tea is ready. She cocks a brow at their tear-streaked grinning faces, and Erik grabs her and kisses her, whispers, “Nadir’s going to be a dad” in her ear, then rushes inside to hug Michelle. She grins at him and says “so he told you” and Clíodhna is reaching out to him from his mother’s lap, her hands grabbing at air, and Erik scoops his little girl into his arms, looking like a tiny angel with her dark curls and red dress and big blue eyes, and dances around with her on his hip, her giggle in his ear like music, and it might not be quite Christmas yet, but he doesn’t see how it can get better than this.
They were supposed to take Clíodhna to see Santa, and he can’t help feeling remarkably guilty about it. It’s not his fault that he got pneumonia and then that his lung collapsed for the first time since he was seventeen (same damn lung too) and he earned himself a week in hospital from it all. (A week in hospital in which Christine pretended not to be scared and he missed Clíodhna’s little stories desperately). The whole thing is nobody’s fault, but he’s ruined all the plans they’d made. Now they’ll have to wait until next year to take her to see Santa and it’s not fair.
His mother pats his hand and makes him tea when he lays it all out for her. It is late on Christmas Eve, the presents are all wrapped and under the tree, and he’s supposed to be resting but he can’t sleep because he’s already rested so much, which is what led him to wander out to the kitchen.
He just didn’t expect to find his mother out here reading, as if she might be expecting him.
And when he tells her how terrible and guilty he feels, that he couldn’t help Christine with the shopping or the cleaning and cooking, and couldn’t take Clíodhna to see Santa, she sighs.
“Erik, Clíodhna isn’t even three yet.” And he nods, because it is, in fact, almost six weeks until Clíodhna turns three. “In all fairness, she would probably be terrified of being sat on the knee of a strange man in a big red suit. There’s no need to feel guilty over sparing her that trauma. And as for the rest,” she takes a delicate sip of her own tea, “do you really think Christine is upset that she had to do all of the work herself? Erik, her only concern now is for you to get well. She would have done a thousand things more if it meant you’d get better. Just because she has Clíodhna, it doesn’t mean she needs you any less. She needs you more than ever.” Her eyes shine damp and then she blinks, and he knows the ghost of his father is between them again, knows that they are both thinking of him, knows that his mother probably more than anyone else in the world knows how Christine feels. “You are more like him than you realise,” she whispers, fingers toying with her wedding ring.
He bows his head, not knowing what to say, an odd blend of pride and discomfort twisting heavy in his chest. The older he gets, the heavier it weighs, being compared to the man who died at barely twenty-nine. The thought of being ripped away like that, from Christine, from Clíodhna—it seems to come on him more and more at this time of year, something he can never escape. His father died when he was twenty-nine, and he is already nine years older than that. He has grey hairs for Christ’s sake! Not many, but a few. How can he be like a man who never got a chance to turn grey?
His throat tightens, and his mother must see it in his face because she reaches across the table and grasps both of his hands, squeezing them tight.
“Erik,” she whispers, “it doesn’t matter. None of it matters, do you see? That’s the secret. It doesn’t matter how like him or not like him you are. You’re you, and that’s enough, and it’s perfect. It doesn’t matter that Clíodhna didn’t visit Santa when she’s two years old and would never remember it even if she had. It doesn’t matter that this one year Christine had to do all of the Christmas shopping, not when you were too sick to help. She would do all of the shopping all of the time every year if she thought it would keep you well. All that matter is that you’re here. All they’ll remember is that you were home for Christmas, and all the rest is just detail. Nothing but detail.”
There are tears tickling down her cheeks, and he knows they must be mirrored on his own face. She stands, still clasping his hands, and slips around the side of the table, coming to him. And then her arms are around him, pulling him close to her, her lips brushing his forehead, and she rocks him, just rocks him until the tears ease and he can breathe again and feels, at last, like he might be able to sleep.
“Now,” she murmurs, “off to join your wife. Or if you stay up too late Santa won’t come.”
Clíodhna is delighted after visiting Santa. Her tiny hand is wrapped around Erik’s as they walk, a small teddy clutched to her chest as she chatters. “And then I told him I want…” He nods along, not quite listening even though he knows he should be, because Christine’s eyes are suspiciously damp even as she smiles, and he knows she’s thinking of when he was hospitalised last year.
They stop walking when they reach the lights, ready to cross the road. Clíodhna has fallen silent, marvelling at the Christmas lights strung across the street, and Christine uses the moment of distraction to draw her to her side. But Erik isn’t ready to leave them just yet, and he pulls Christine close, brushes her hair with a kiss. “All right?” he whispers in her ear, and she nods against him.
“Fine. It’s nothing.” She pulls back and curls her hand around the nape of his neck, draws him down so she can kiss his good cheek. “Don’t delay too long with John Henry.”
“Hmmm I won’t.” Frankly he has no idea what it even could be that John Henry wants, only that he received a text as soon as the man landed back in the country telling him that he’d found something that, quote, you need to see as soon as possible, making sure to type it out fully so Erik could gauge his level of seriousness as High. Hence the need for the meeting in the university library café. Erik could personally think of any number of other better places, but John Henry was insistent, and sometimes a strategic agreement is better than trying to push a point.
He lets go of Christine and kneels down so he is face to face with Clíodhna. His little girl is still smiling, blue eyes shining with excitement, and he kisses her cheek and gives her a quick hug there on the footpath.
“Be good for Mammy, okay?” He uses his best Daddy Voice, the semi-stern one that always has her agreeing and now is no exception.
She nods so fast her head might bob off. “Yes, Daddy.”
“Good.” He smiles at her and gives her another hug before he straightens up. “I’ll be home soon.”
He turns around and without looking back at them, lest he be tempted to go straight home now instead, he walks towards the library.
The path is quiet this time of the evening on a Friday, most students already gone home. Wrapped deep in his heavy coat he feels oddly like a first year again, as if time has slipped and tossed him back twenty years. How many times has he made this walk since? Thousands, thousands and thousands. But something in the cool evening air, the blue that lingers in the darkening sky and orange glow of lamplight makes him feel nineteen again.
It is the flickering of memories that betrays the illusion.
He passes the castle, closed for the season, and enters the campus through the main gate. Before him stand the evergreens, the ancient elm that he kissed Christine under for the first time. Beyond is Stoyte Hall, with the eighteenth-century map of Maynooth he and John Henry recreated in one of their 3D modelling classes. He skirts the edge of the green and trees, up past New House which always seems to have people in it and yet in twenty years he has no better idea what they do in there. Probably questionable theological voodoo. Up by the stage entrance to the Aula Maxima, where he stood on top of the steps under the lights at twenty-one and had his first and last cigarette after playing the background music for the drama festival in the hope Niamh Higgins might notice him, but she went off with that wanker Bob Fogarty (who still has terrible opinions and it’s agonising to see his articles in journals) on closing night, and Nadir stayed with him as he drowned his sorrows. So many other times since he’s passed through those backstage doors, with Christine and without, yet something about that ancient betrayal still rankles.
He pushes the thought away. Who’s to say, but if Niamh Higgins had gone with him instead it might have changed everything and he would not have Christine now, so it’s all for the best really.
He turns right for the bridge, and over it sees the library, his favourite in all the world, scene of liaisons and plotting and flustered essay writing and extended research sessions and procrastinating with pizza when he was twenty and having feelings about Les Mis.
Light shines out through the glass panels, and he sighs as he reaches the revolving door, already wrapped in the familiar space where he spent more time than any other in his student days. Christine won’t be home yet, but he reflexively checks his phone anyway. The library has never had more than a passing excuse for phone service, in all of the changing years, but of course there is no text, not yet, and he did not truly expect there to be.
Inside, the library is decorated for Christmas. The tree in the foyer garlanded in lights, the fake fireplace (actually a giant tv screen) flickering against the brick backdrop (which still looks like something seven year old kids would make), strands of tinsel strung. In another week there’ll be the annual charity reading of A Christmas Carol. Maybe this year he should finally do a passage from it. At the very least he should bring Clíodhna to the reading. She’d love it.
He smiles to himself. Domesticated, Nadir called him, in his first months with Christine. And here we have an Erik, formerly wild and could be found haunting obscure rooms in the music department, now domesticated but he still knows all the best places to lurk. Nadir is as domesticated as he is, now, with Michelle and little Aisha, but Aisha is still too young for A Christmas Carol or visiting Santa.
Starbucks is quieter than he hoped it would be, and he orders a toffee nut latté, craving the sweetness of it and the edge on the back of his tongue. He takes it around the back, to the polished collection of wooden tables and chairs, and there John Henry is, sipping his own coffee, looking wrecked with jetlag and a slim folder on the table in front of him.
It takes Erik a minute to arrange his own limbs, and the coffee is as soothing as he hoped it would be.
“So what do you have for me?”
And the grin that lights up John Henry’s face banishes the tiredness, makes his eyes dance. “Something very special.” The grin is edged with slyness, with pride, and even as he opens the folder and lays a sheet down in front of him, Erik knows it must be something exceptional. “What do you make of that?”
Erik raises an eyebrow at his old friend as he slips his reading glasses from his pocket and puts them on. A cursory glance of the paper tells him it is a printed copy of sheet music, originally handwritten, so likely a photocopy. The lack of a title leads him to suspect an extract (and that John Henry is hiding something, evidenced again by his smile). Time signature suggests a requiem, as does the fact that it is clearly written for violin. The formation of the notes seems oddly familiar, but he discounts that as proof of anything. He’s studied so much old music that there must be hundreds of composers with familiar writing. Still, if this extract is anything to go by, he should master the whole piece in under a week, certainly two depending on how long it is, and possibly even a few days. He plays through the notes in his head, imagines how they might sound together, taps the tempo with his fingers on the edge of the table, and nods. “Deceptively simple, but deeply melancholy. A requiem I suspect, not for the composer himself but for someone close to him.” He raises his head and looks John Henry dead in the eye. “Whose is it?” And please God don’t say it was composed for me.
John Henry sips his coffee and settles back in his chair, still grinning. “It was composed,” and goddamn, Erik thinks, don’t let him be dramatic about this, “in Arizona, in the summer of 1881, though it was not actually performed until a May morning in Wyoming in 1887. Thirteenth of May, to be precise.” And now he can’t hide the twinkle in his eye, clearly loving the suspense he’s inflicting on Erik. “It was requested by, composed for, and played at the funeral of one Doctor Henry Russell, a consumptive from Virginia who was immensely queer and—”
Erik’s heart is pounding and all he can think is, oh my God oh. my God. “And who you’ve low-key wanted to shag, should time travel become possible, since we were twenty-eight and you first discovered his existence.”
John Henry shrugs. “Not quite what I was going to say, but okay.”
Erik is too stunned to laugh, aware that he is staring at his friend, aware that the world is continuing around him, aware that if he speaks at all this might be revealed as a dream. “It’s Delacarte’s, isn’t it?” His voice is barely more than a whisper.
John Henry nods. “The first of Erik Delacarte’s lost requiems.”
“Where—how did you find it?”
“A conference about attitudes towards and about medicine in history. I only went for the discussion about the contrast between dentistry and medicine regarding germ theory in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But at the talk on what might be reflected by the approach to tuberculosis I got talking to this lovely young anthropologist. She was there because her great-great-great granduncle,” he counts them out on his fingers, “died of TB. And it turned out he was Henry Russell, dear friend of Erik Delacarte and Fahim Iravani. One thing led to another, there was quite a bit of drink involved, and she revealed that a collection of Delacarte’s music was in her ancestral home in Arizona.” He smiles. “And it was the requiems. All ten of them.”
Ten. He thought maybe four, but ten.
Erik sucks in a breath, and sips his coffee, not trusting himself to speak. The lost requiems, that he hungered after, that Kate searched every archive in America for, and they were sitting in someone’s house in Arizona. Well, maybe the dry heat will have helped preserve them. “What state are they in?”
“Kate is having a friend of hers discreetly preserve them. Nicola De Chagny, the anthropologist, has agreed that when they’ve been digitised, you will be the first to examine them.”
The world whites out, just for a second, and when it fades back in John Henry is squeezing both of his hands, still grinning. “Merry Christmas, Erik.”
As he buttons his shirt over the new scars on his chest, it’s apparent more than ever how much weight he’s lost since his illness during the summer. Not that he had much to spare in the first place, but it makes him look more like a ghost than ever! At this point, his options are either gain weight (Christine, his mother, and Lilly have been working hard at that one to little avail), get almost all of his clothes taken in, or go out and buy new ones. Right now, that last one sounds like the easiest option.
He sighs, and tucks his shirt into his trousers, then arcs his hips to buckle his belt (the hole being a new one that he put in when it was obvious that all the old holes were too loose). The waistcoat brings out his eyes, matches the tiger’s eye cufflinks Christine brought him from Portugal once upon a time for his birthday. Then he fixes his tie, settles on his mask, smooths a hand over his hair, and pulls on his jacket. He checks his pockets for wallet, phone, and glasses, and stands back to survey his reflection.
A particularly sturdy ghost, indeed.
Christine would be cross with him if she heard him say such a thing. She does not appreciate reminders of how close it was this time.
He squares himself and tilts his head. His good jawline has always been his best angle, after all.
If he’s being honest with himself, he can’t blame Christine for being sensitive about the whole Event. He’d be the same if it were the other way around.
(He is immensely grateful that it was not the other way around.)
She has also forbidden him from being Introspective tonight, and so he nods at his reflection and gets his coat off the back of the door, swinging it on. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve (which makes today Christmas Eve Eve, as Clíodhna pointed out with all her almost-five year old wisdom), and he will have his period of introspection tomorrow night at Mass, while Clíodhna is enraptured with the decorations and music and Christine is Communing with the memories of her parents as she likes to on Christmas Eve and won’t notice his reflecting that when he collapsed three weeks before his birthday it was remarkable that he lived to see forty, never mind get well again and make it to another Christmas.
(And make it, so help him, to March, when Clíodhna will become a big sister and wasn’t that a shock to discover when he regained himself enough to ask Christine what she was hiding from him. This time he was in no condition to even consider running away.)
(Clíodhna wants a sister, and Erik tells himself he will be happy so long as the baby is healthy, but a tiny part of him is hoping for a boy.)
Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, yesterday they were at Clíodhna’s Nativity play (and it’s not just because he’s her father that he can say she was a wonderful Mary, several of the other parents complimented her, and especially her ‘Silent Night’ solo verse at the end), and tonight he is taking Christine out to dinner. Lilly is babysitting Clíodhna, his family is arriving in the morning, and it is snowing.
Actually snowing.
It really is Christmas. Clíodhna will be delighted.
Christine is waiting for him on the couch, the folds of her dress hiding her baby bump. His heart flutters at the sight of her, mouth dry as she stands and comes to him, smiling softly, blonde curls twisted and making her look like an angel or the Virgin Mother herself in her blue dress.
God but she’s beautiful.
Her arms come around his waist and she stretches up, presses a kiss to his lips. Already he can see how their evening will unfold. The short walk, arm-in-arm, to the restaurant. The way she’ll smile at him over the dinner table, her eyes sparkling, the soft lighting making her curls glow. The walk home again when, if it’s still snowing, he’ll take her in his arms and dance with her on the side of the street, under the lights. Coming home, only the two of them in the whole house, putting on soft music (the waltz that Konstin Daaé composed for Antoine De Chagny on the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary, and which he only ever publicly performed once), and holding her close as they sway to it.
And suddenly he is twenty-five and falling hard for a pair of blue eyes across a coffee table. Twenty-seven and giving her a ring under the stars, a proposal to propose. Thirty and tumbling breathless with her down a hill beside a castle. Thirty-one and declaring his intention to love her and honour her forever in a church full of the dearest people in the world to them. Thirty-four and coming off stage to find her waiting for him. Thirty-five and cradling their tiny new-born daughter in his arms. And he is forty and holding Christine in his arms as he kisses her, and he is all of the ages he has ever been with her at his side, and all the many more ages to come that he will ever be with her pressed close to him.
He loves her. He loves her more than breath, more than life, more than music which is almost the same thing. So long as he has her, he can do anything, be anyone. When he is eighty and crochety and stiff with old scars and half-blind and barely able to play a note, he wants to still have her in his arms, her lips pressed to the shell of his ear.
He presses his lips to hers now, firmly, with all of her heart, slips his tongue into her mouth to taste the sweetness of her, still as sweet as on that cold day in March beneath the ancient elm. His Christine.
He pulls back and smiles, and there are tears in her eyes as she smiles back up at him, her fingers light stroking back his hair.
And it is Christmas. And it is perfect.