Work Text:
ghost story
His name is Erik, and he picks you up from your apartment in a red car with plush leather seats that are soft to the touch when you slide in. The chromium exterior gleams, a glossy coat of vermilion red. “I see I should’ve worn the red dress,” you say after the proper social niceties have been exchanged. “Would’ve matched the car.”
“I think you’d look stunning no matter what color dress you wear,” he says without taking his eyes off the road, but he had given you the expected once-over when you’d first stepped out onto the pavement. He hadn’t said anything then, but you like that he’s being complimentary now. He doesn’t know that you’d spent an hour standing in front of your closet considering the sweetheart light pink dress in the corner, the one that really showcases your collarbone and cleavage, but you’d thought red too much for a first date and so you’re wearing a navy blue romper instead. It’s October and the weather has started to cool, but it’s not so cool yet that you’ll need a jacket where you’ll be going - a classy Flatiron district restaurant that you’re secretly hoping he’ll cover because your budget doesn’t magically expand when you go on a date. Besides, your romper, a cute flowy thing you found in an overpriced thrift shop three blocks away from Washington Square, is long sleeved and has pockets .
You rearrange the edges of the romper about your legs, just so, and make sure said pockets aren’t inside out. “Thank you. I like the suit.” It’s black, sleek and well-tailored; the collar is artfully undone, and there is no tie.
He gives you a look, amused. “I feel like I should point out that you haven’t seen me in anything else.”
“Well, it works,” you insist, and the hand he puts on yours to offer a faint, appreciative squeeze sends a shiver trilling under your skin. You are excited, you realize as you tangle your fingers with his; anticipatory in a way that’s rare these days. You’re looking forward to good food and good conversation with an attractive, charming man, and if you’d taken a long hot shower beforehand, shaving everywhere except the V between your legs because you’d done it once when you were fourteen and it had itched like crazy for a week and if that happens tonight, then, well, he’s just going to have to take you as you come - well, what of it?
He is pulling up in front of the restaurant now, and you are talking about your living situation with your roommate Margaret, whose mother coaches for the American Ballet Theatre and runs her own studio, too - “It’s Meg’s apartment, actually. I’ve just crashed for long enough that we’re roommates at this point, we split all the bills” - when the conversation goes on hold because the valet is ready to park the car. You stand on the curb as he hands over the keys and comes over to you, putting his hand on the small of your back to escort you into the restaurant.
Behind you, the engine purrs; the valet drives off. “You’ve got a nice car, by the way,” you say.
"Thanks, it's not mine," he responds.
*
Some days, you want to tear yourself apart. You tense and untense and squeeze whatever you can grab, crossing your arms over your body and gripping the grabbable flesh of your sides and you hate it, you hate that you are a fist clenched around the ceaseless thought of who am I what am I what do I do where do I go?
But it’s been long enough that you have a routine now for when you find yourself thinking these thoughts. You take a long shower, scalding, and then you towel your hair as best you can and exfoliate your face and rubs shea butter into your skin and then you pad into the kitchen, leaving oily footprints on the floor that Meg is too nice to complain about even after nine months of living together. You boil water for tea, Söder tea with honey that you pour carefully into an old travel mug. And then you pad into the bedroom-converted-dance studio, and on the far side of the triple panel full-length mirror you put your shoes and towel and warm-ups and an excess of hair ties in your bag; you double back to the bedroom for your hair brush, thick with too many lost, curling strands, and you stash it next to the songbook you don’t open anymore but never leave behind.
Then you go outside and take the D train to Grand Street Station and if it’s nice out you sit in the park watching the teenagers in old graphic T’s play pickup and the laborers in stained tank tops smoke cigarettes on the sides and the little old ladies in clean patterned clothing patter along with small children, their grandchildren probably, their pride and joy. Sometimes there’ll be buskers, a singer and maybe a guitarist, or someone on the harmonica, and when they perform you sit there with your ears wide open but you keep your mouth shut. You sit there until you’re restless and then you pick up your bag and brush leaves and living things out of your hair and you walk the two minutes to the nondescript door sandwiched between the bank and the Chinese spa, and you take the three flights up narrow stairs up to Antoinette’s, where you can do your stretches and then dance for one, two, many hours without opening your mouth at all, without thinking beyond the precision of your movement and the arc of your body and the overwhelming control of it, every limb and every muscle and every breath, in and out, almost leaving your brain out altogether, and isn’t that lovely?
*
Erik had shown up in Antoinette’s studio one cold blustery Thursday afternoon, weeks ago. You’d walked in for a scheduled class, for once, stopping at the sight of a stranger sitting behind the piano, long spindly hands dancing over the keys in a jaunty little warm-up as the ballerinas tied on their shoes. You’d blinked at him, briefly, at the sharp black suit over a white button-down, a white mask covering half his face, before you walked over to your usual spot, furthest from the door. The only pianist you’d ever seen at Antoinette’s had been a seventy-year-old retired piano instructor, a woman whose crotchetiness had deterred even looking in her direction for too long.
You ask Antoinette about the new pianist after the class is over and he is gone. “Oh, E’s new, yes. Victoria won’t be back for a while, she just got wrist surgery; it’s a very good thing E showed up when he did.” She eyes you through her glasses, gold-rimmed and sharp, then hmms and tilts her head; black bangs streaked with gray fall forward as she picks up where she left off, demonstrating a position for the French grad student standing nearby. Her upper body arches in a mimicry of an arabesque, fourth position en haut of the arms. “About time we had a man in the room, eh?”
The grad student gives you a look, and you feel your face grow red. “Yes,” you nod, and you don’t ask Antoinette about E again. But you do find yourself coming to classes more frequently, rather than just showing up whenever to dance in an empty studio; and one day you’re sitting in the park before class when he shows up in a slim single-breasted black overcoat you know he’ll end up draping charmingly over the piano. He asks you out on a date. You learn that his actual name is Erik, and that no, playing accompaniment for ballet classes is not all he does; that he’ll treat you, and that you should wear something nice. And in Antoinette’s studio that day he looks directly at you for the entirety of the adage and you stare steadfastly at yourself in the mirrors, tracing the elegant movement of your body, blushing like the teenager you never got to be the entire time.
*
Dinner talk does not tell you much about your date other than that he’s traveled extensively and has little to no family, at least none he’d like to talk about; that he’s evasive in a way that intrigues you, and inquisitive in a way that puts you at ease. “In the city, currently, but generally here and there,” he responds when you ask him where he lives. “Whatever I need to do to get by,” he says, for what he does for a living. You quirk a smile at him, because you’d sarcastically labeled him mysterious enough to be a hitman by the time the appetizers had arrived and he’s done nothing so far to disprove it, other than avoid talking about his work at all.
“I don’t play for the money, not at all,” he adds. “I love the ballet, but I’m no dancer, so I do what I can. You, though, you’re very good,” he smirks as you blush and sip on your painkiller cocktail. “But you mentioned singing before. Why not anymore? I know you carry vocal scores in your bag.”
“I know you’re a snoop, now,” you laugh, and hum. “I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to dance more, improve my technique, so here we are. But Meg is the professional dancer. It’s just a hobby for me, really.” And then you stuff your mouth full of coq au vin and turn the conversation to the last place he’s vacationed, and oh Meg’s told me about that place, Meg’s been everywhere, but I’m going to have to add it to my list, any other recommendations?
You eventually slip away to use the ladies room. Not as an excuse, as you are having a great time, but because it’s been close to two hours and the two painkillers you’ve had began knocking on your bladder a while ago. You check your reflection as you wash up; you smile, and it’s real, this is real, this is yours, and when you head back to the table the bill has been paid and Erik feeds you the miniature slide of opera cake that came with the check. Within five minutes you are leaving the restaurant arm in arm, nodding at the waitstaff as you go; it’s a gorgeous autumn night - the moon is full, a bright silver disc suspended from vast dark nothing, and you look up at the sky and breathe.
Erik retrieves the car and drives you home. He comments on the fall weather as he walks you to the front doors of your apartment building, and when you get there you both stop and smile at each other.
“Do you want to come up?” you ask, and Erik moves closer. For a second, you think he might kiss you; you can feel the heat of his body, the lapels of his white button-down well within reach, but then -
“Actually,” he says. “I’m thinking, how do you feel,” and he takes your hands between his own, large and warm - “about an excursion?”
You blink. “Come again?”
“You and me, Coney Island, take the subway all the way down,” Erik says, and his smile changes a little; you can’t quite read it. “Have you been to Coney Island before?”
“I have, but - what about the car?”
“Eh, don’t worry about the car.”
You stare at him. “Look,” you say, mentally recalibrating as he squeezes your hands. You may be ruining your chances of getting him inside the building, but you’re fairly certain there’s a reasonable thing to do here, so - “Look, I’m all for spontaneity, but - it’s late. I’m sure you have work in the morning.”
“Well, you don’t have work in the morning. Am I right?”
“I don’t, but - okay, listen, that’s enough about me,” you say. “What about you?”
“What about me?” he repeats, gamely. You open your mouth, and nothing comes out. He grins. “Christine, I’m an open book. Ask me anything you’d like.”
You open your mouth again, and you close it again. A small part of you is whispering worrisome statistics in your ear, date rapes and disappearances and what would Meg think. She’d yell, you know, and berate you for being an idiot - “Chris, that’s like the first rule of dating, you do not go to remote locations with men you barely know” - except Meg’s out of town right now, gone another week for a ballet competition, and her voice is a little less urgent in your head.
But the greater part of you thinks you do know Erik, or trust him, and how different are those two things anyway; and the biggest part of you wants to get on the subway and see where the night goes because you have an empty apartment and nothing to fill it with and that terrible, terrible emptiness, you want it gone.
“I’ll ask you when I think of something,” you say much later, after you’ve walked three blocks with Erik and descended the stairs into the subway station, just as the train pulls in screeching, and he nods.
“You do that,” he says, and together you board the train; by the time the operator is announcing Stillwell Ave, you are the only two people left in the car, and it’s somehow like no time has passed at all. The train glides to a halt; the doors slide open, ker-thunk, ker-thunk .
“We’re here,” Erik says, standing, and takes your hand in his.
*
The first time you’d gone to Coney Island, you had been five years old. You were on vacation with your father, staying at Aunt Valerius’ place in Bay Ridge, just a quick bus ride away from the boardwalk. You don’t remember much from that trip except that you’d worn a little yellow sundress, and that you’d stared wide-eyed at the children screaming for joy going round and round on the Electro Spin. You do remember that your father had simply shook his head, guiding you away from the rides and finding a suitable spot to set his violin case; you remember him making the most gorgeous music, drawing eyes and ears up and down the boardwalk, and you remember him nudging you to sing.
You remember summers spent there, on that boardwalk, learning to sing as your father played along on his violin. You remember Aunt Val shedding the occasional tear, at the beauty of it, but scolding your father anyway when you sometimes went too long without a meal, or when the weather turned chilly and he took you out to busk. You came down with a cold, once.
It had been Aunt Val who’d eventually insisted you enroll in school like every other child; “for goodness’ sakes, Gustave, you can’t have her grow up busking on boardwalks and nothing else.”
It had been Aunt Val, too, who had sat with you at the hospital as you waited for your father to come out of the examination room he’d walked into with a look on his face you’d never seen before: a look like he knew what was on the other side of the wooden door, and didn’t want to face it, but had to anyway. Aunt Val had wrapped an arm around your shoulders when instead of your father, the doctor came out instead, saying things like “I’m sorry” and “no known cure” and “but he’s still got years left to live, I can promise you that” and you’d stayed still and stoic by Aunt Val’s side until you walked in and saw your father, sitting on that examination table. You remember rushing over to clamber into his lap, burying your face in his chest, clinging onto him for dear life as he said, “Oh, Lotte,” and buried his face in your hair, body shaking with great, silent sobs.
You remember many years after that, happy years spent living life, growing up and going to school and joining choirs and even winning competitions and going to Coney Island every summer without fail, singing folk and country and pop on the boardwalk as your father accompanied on the violin, harmonizing in the sunlight as the salty breeze tangled with your hair. You remember the conversations with fellow New Yorkers and with people from all over the world, glowing with praise for the pair of you; you remember your father, in his element, able to connect with just about anyone. You remember just how wide you smiled, to see it; you remember, you remember, you remember.
You remember not realizing that the end was near until it had come and gone, and it was too late to do anything about it, much less face it with grace. You remember the shock of standing at a freshly dug grave, Aunt Val at your side, knowing this had been coming all along, yet blindsided; something deep inside you tearing apart, freezing over, buried.
*
This Coney Island is very, very different. You meet a few people bundled in warm jackets heading away from the shore, into Brighton Beach and the rest of Brooklyn; you pass them with little acknowledgement, and after them the dark structures of the amusement parks ominously shadowed against the moonlit sky, and the vast empty boardwalk with its bending, creaking planks; beyond that, beyond the pale stretch of beach bathed in blue glow, the ocean under the moon is an enormous shimmering sheet of black. You follow Erik onto the beach and take off your heels before they can sink all the way in; the sand is cold and a little damp beneath your toes, the arches of your bare feet. You feel a thousand miles away from New York, though this is New York, of course, this is American history and tourist attraction and childhood memory and maybe the strangest date you have ever been on, as far as you can remember, though you suppose that’s not necessarily a bad thing; though, granted, you haven’t been on very many dates.
Up ahead, Erik has stopped walking. He’s taken his shoes and socks off, his suit jacket too, and is shuffling indistinguishable shapes into the sand with his left foot. You hang back because it’s cold and because you’re not positive your sense of reality is all here anymore, between the subway ride that lasted no time at all before spitting you out onto the platform a few minutes’ walk behind you and, laid out in front of you, the moon glittering on the endless sea. What are you supposed to do?
But then Erik turns and offers you a hand, beckoning you without moving at all, and oh, that’s easy, then; you go to him.
“I’d meant to ask earlier if you prefer a nickname,” he says when you reach him, though he drops his own hand back to his side and turns once again to face the wind blowing in from the sea.
“My father used to call me Lo - well, it doesn’t matter anymore,” you say, shivering a bit. “My roommate and a few other friends call me Chris. I don’t have any real preference.”
He hums. “Okay, then. Christine,” and now he’s turning toward you, and taking your face in his hands, and kissing you, and his hands have lost some of their warmth to the chill in the air all around you; you close your eyes and kiss him back, the edge of his mask faintly pressing into your skin, because how many times have you imagined touching this man’s mouth, tracing over his cupid’s bow with your tongue, threading your fingers into the soft blackness of his hair as his thumbs caress your cheeks, holding you close?
You both end the kiss, and from nowhere he pulls out a deck of cards.
“What,” you say as lights flicker on in the distance, startling you - a faraway part of the park has lit up, gleaming yellow pinpricks outlining what looks like a rollercoaster, a carousel, behind a tall black fence.
“Come on,” and Erik sounds playful, young; he laughs out loud, retreating in the direction of the boardwalk.
“Where are we going?” you call.
His voice floats back on the breeze, or perhaps it’s carried away. “Let’s play a game of poker!”
You eventually find your way to a bench you inspect for splinters before sitting on, right on the edge of the boardwalk. Erik starts dealing cards like a pro.
“I don’t know how to play actual poker, American poker. I never learned how. My fa - I grew up playing Swedish card games,” you find yourself saying. “Besides, don’t we need more than two people to play poker?”
Fwip fwip fwip go the cards. He huffs a laugh at you, and his eyes are smiling, and his mask glints pale-blue-white in the light of the moon over the ocean, lips stretched wide beneath its clean sharp bottom edge. You had just kissed that mouth. You shiver; you want to do it again.
“We are playing whatever kind of poker you want. And if you win,” he says in a tone that makes you think this is how ghost stories must begin, blankets and smores by a crackling dying bonfire, stories in the dark; except you’re on a beach sitting by the vast expanse of the murmuring sea and he’s just a man, a mischievous man with a spooky idea for a first date and you have no idea where this is going to go but you want it to go somewhere, you think, you feel.
“If I win?” you prompt.
“If you win, I’ll take you home, yours or mine, and we can do whatever you want. Which could be nothing at all.” The final card is laid, now; his hands, long-fingered and thin, pianist’s hands, are bare.
You lean in, you can’t help it. “And if you win?” you say, and you wonder how you got here, playing cards by the sea in the light of a full moon with a man - a person you are slowly realizing you know next to nothing about.
He grins, and his teeth flash. “If I win - ” and now he tips his head in the direction of the rides, dark towering structures rising into the sky, the eeriness of Tilly’s dilapidated grin over the entrance to Luna Park - “if I win, we’ll take a tour of the premises. Just the two of us - a private tour. I’ll make it worth your while,” and he touches your hand, feather-light and quite cold now. “I promise.”
You think about it, and you find you don’t care how you got here. “Deal,” you say.
*
You lose the game, and Erik gestures in the direction of the darkened amusement park.
“Shall we?” he says.
*
As you walk toward the moonlit mass of rides you realize, in a slow murky muddling sort of way, like the way raw sticky honey tips out of the jar and into your daily mug of Söder tea, that you’ve never really thought about Erik’s face. He’s never taken off the mask, and you’ve never once questioned it; you’ve seen half his face, have admired it, thought it handsome, certainly, kissed it, and yet you’ve never thought to wonder what the mask conceals. Is it a scar? A disfigurement? Or something else entirely? It would be rude to ask now, you know, and you feel a good deal of surprise, all in all, that it’s taken you this many weeks and most of a date to think about it in this way.
But you don’t feel the concern you think you should feel at this revelation; against your better judgment you open your mouth and tell him so, staring at his mask as if sheer power of will might let you see what lies beneath.
“Mm,” he says, smiling a little. You keep staring; you can’t tell at all.
*
“Why don’t you sing anymore?” he asks again as you pass through the entrance to Luna Park, Tilly’s leering, paint-faded face looming overhead. The gate had been closed, but Erik had pushed it open, just like that, and you don’t want to ask.
“I don’t really know,” you say, and you give him the answer you’ve been giving everyone, including Meg, including yourself. “I just don’t feel like it anymore, I guess. But I spent so long singing anyway, it was time I moved on to something else. Antoinette’s has been quite good for me so far.”
“I see,” Erik says. “Who taught you to sing?”
You almost say your father, or perhaps the teacher giving the group lessons in school that one time. Do, a deer. It’d been more frustrating than anything, having to learn your Do re mi’s with the rest of the fourth grade when you’d been singing ballads with perfect pitch for as long as you could remember; Gustave Daae had made sure of it.
But your father is dead, and you can’t bring yourself to name him.
“Myself,” you finally say.
Around you, everything is faded and gray. The smell of rust and fog hang heavy in the air, lingering in your nostrils. You look up and around, at the bright white moon first and then lower, and you see to the west an enormous metal tower with spokes like the branches of a tree; it looks decrepit, ominous, sharp. Erik tells you that it’s the parachute jump tower, but you cannot for the life of you imagine people on that thing.
“Well, we won’t be going there, then,” he says good-naturedly. He gestures toward a row of buildings, two stories tall, dark inside with exteriors worn by either time or design. Either is possible, you suppose, in a place like this. “Want to try the hall of mirrors?”
You’ve never liked halls of mirrors, or haunted houses either for that matter. “Sure,” you say.
It’s warm inside the entrance of the hall. You jump at a sharp creaking noise from behind you - but it’s only Erik cranking a lever, and a network of dim red lights lining the edges of the floor, leading into the first corridor of mirrors, flickers on.
“Lead the way,” Erik says from behind you, breath warm on your ear, and you lean back into it briefly before you move.
Your footsteps fall soft inside the maze of twisting corridors and shoddy red lighting, mirrors cracked at the edges and blackened in spots. You can’t tell whether the carpeting is actually red, or reddened by the lights. When you look up again, your red-fluorescent face is the only one in the mirror, and Erik is gone.
“Erik?” You swing around, but it’s just you in that mirror, too. “Erik? Where’d you go?”
There’s no response, and you - push the stirrings of unease and fear down, keep it down - you decide to find your own way to the end of the maze, to the moonlit outside where you can wait for Erik or, if he’s already there having a laugh, give him a good shove.
It takes a little while to grope your way to a room that may be the center room; it’s larger and octagonal, every side a perfect red-lit slice of mirror, and something resonates inside you. You spin in a slow, slow circle, watching eight or nine or ten you’s flickering past in the glossy shimmering panes of glass. Every one of you looks different. You find yourself wondering if you were ever one person, one dream, one desire, and you think you might have been once, a long, long time ago. That was another you, another lifetime. Dead. Divorced, beheaded, died. But maybe it was never dead and can’t ever be dead and there’s only ever been one you, one Christine, one desire thrumming through your veins, raging in your lungs, sluicing out of every open wound burning, the beat beat beat of your young-old heart.
You find the entrance to the next corridor, hands feeling the way, and there is a familiar face in the mirror opposite you that is not yours. A terrible shriek pierces the air, shattering the glass - breaking, tinkling showers all around, shards bouncing off your feet - and suddenly you’re being gathered into Erik’s arms and held tight, and you realize that you are still screaming.
“Hey it’s okay, I’m here, shhhh,” you hear, but everywhere you look you see him, even when you have squeezed your eyes shut with everything you have. You see your father, young and bright-eyed; you see your father, old and sad and withering away, and you want to smile and cry and scream yet again but you’re tired, too tired already, you feel wearied and restless and so, so old -
*
The last time you had seen Aunt Valerius, the funeral had been just over a month ago; you had just turned down the single conservatory offer you’d received in favor of studying communications at a local college, and she had looked at you with so much disappointment in her eyes that you’d wished you hadn’t applied to anything at all.
“I just want you to be happy,” she pleads softly. “Your father would have wanted you to go to conservatory, I’m sure of it. You were born to sing, Christine. You used to be so happy whenever you sang, don’t you remember?”
“Father is dead, Aunt Val, and I know what makes me happy,” you’d shot back, seething; grieving. “And it’s sure as hell not singing. If you can’t accept that, if you can’t understand why I can’t stand to so much as - sing, anymore, then - then you don’t know me at all.”
That had been nine months ago. Aunt Val hadn’t accepted it, and you’d ended up moving out. You’d moved in with Meg in New York, and you hadn’t gone to either conservatory or college. Either would have been a betrayal. You don’t sing again, either.
*
You kiss Erik a second time atop the Wonder Wheel in Deno’s that is somehow working, here in the middle of the night with no operator, with soft yellow lights around a red-framed structure and music you cannot place playing from nowhere, and when you open your eyes again after the kiss the park has, oh, the park has come alive - lights and music and spinning rides, invisible laughter and the smell of fresh popcorn, churros, and inexplicably, lemon zest and patchouli and pine and a dozen other things you remember from Aunt Valerius’ house; and in between all the lights you notice shadows flitting in the corners of your eyes, shades of things you think you might recognize but avoid looking at directly for fear they will overwhelm you, drive you insane. So you look up, and to the east the white wooden Cyclone rises tall and proud, lit up like a blazing beacon despite the fact that you cannot see any lights on the structure itself, and you can hear the happy screaming of children and adults alike going up and down, up and down on the hundred-year-old tracks.
And meanwhile inside you everything is leaking from the cracks, spilling out of the woodwork, squirming out of deep dark hidden places you didn’t and don’t like thinking about because nine months nine months you are nine months old and yet you feel ancient with the grief in you, and you know that if you start talking now your throat is going to close and all that’s going to come out are these little hitching sounds and you don’t want Erik to hear those, you don’t want to hear them yourself.
So instead you focus on the lights, colorful, dazzling, glorious, until it’s too much, and you shut your eyes and ask Erik to kiss you and he does until you’re breathless and wanting, but then he’s bending to whisper directly into your ear, hot breath on your skin, burning you -
“Christine. Christine, open your eyes,” he says in a voice that is not the Erik you know, if you ever knew Erik at all. But you open your eyes, and the world is too bright and too noisy and so alive, and a hot rush of some emotion - fear? gratitude? relief? - is the last thing you feel before his jaw unhinges and you look into his red mouth as it gapes open and the world around you turns like a kaleidoscope - amusement park rides and steel beams and ocean salt and damp gritty sand between your toes and putrid food stand grease and the smell of pine and Söder tea and encompassing it all, confining it all - a warm-cold body, warm blood, cold hands, the contours of muscle under skin and of eyeballs and teeth and a thousand voices born of a thousand others and the thing-that-is-Erik-but-what-is-Erik - the thing opens its mouth and swallows you whole and down you go, down, down, down, down, down.
*
You’re walking on the boardwalk in the broad light and heat of a summer day, and Erik is walking next to you.
“Hey,” he says, and you turn to stare at him, at his face you can’t really see. “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?”
Not too far away a boardwalk artist is sitting under an umbrella, painting a young family of two. You step closer to see - it’s all broad strokes and bright colors, a sloppy-quick job for vacationers in the summer heat, but even so you can make out the grin on the young father’s face, in his pale gray button-down; the little girl with a mass of long curls sitting on his lap, in a light yellow sundress emblazoned with little white stars.
You glance up at the actual father and daughter, and they’re not sitting anymore; they’re standing, the father fitting a violin to his chin, the daughter opening her mouth to sing - though you hear nothing, only the sounds of the beach, the chatter of beachgoers and seagulls and the rushing roar of the sea. To the side stands a woman, the aunt, and you know without following her eyes that it’s love you see there, love for the violinist father and the daughter with the enormous heart and angel’s voice.
You can’t look anymore; you lower your eyes. Erik puts a hand on your shoulder.
“You have a lovely family, Christine,” he says.
You turn away to face the ocean. The wind hits you in the face, salty and smelly and delightfully cool. “Who are you,” you ask.
“Ah-ah-ah, don’t you get it?” he says as he steps onto the sand. The beach is crowded, lively; Erik looks like any one of them, in his simple black T-shirt and khaki shorts. The sight is utterly incongruous.
You follow, and the sand feels like heaven under your bare feet. “Tell me,” you say. “Tell me.”
Erik spreads his arms out wide, as if to say, it’s me! “I’m the reason you can’t sing, Christine. I’m the anger you feel and the guilt you have for feeling it. I’m the ghost of everything you’ve buried with your father, including yourself,” and he laughs, then, throwing his arms up in the air at the candy-blue skies and seagulls squawking around them. “How’s this for a haunting?”
You suddenly feel very tired. “I… Erik, I -”
“Give your Aunt Val a call, will you?” and when you blink he’s in front of you and his hands cover your eyes, and you tumble into a deep sleep full of dreams you won’t remember.
*
In the morning you wake up in your apartment and you’re alone, sunlight and street noise streaming in through open windows. Grittiness in your mouth, the tangy taste of cinnamon and oranges. You get up and close the windows to prevent any more cold air from coming in; you walk into the studio, and stop, because leaning against the triple-panel mirror is an enormous painting of you, naked, sitting on a bench on an empty pale-sand beach, windswept hair in your face so you can’t quite see your own eyes, and you are holding your bloody carved-out heart in your hands but your chest is pearly smooth and intact and it’s your throat that is gaping wide open, torn bloody edges like something was ripped right out, rivulets of blood dripping down your pale-white sternum and between your breasts, sliding violently down your torso; and it’s not a heart after all but a heart-shaped mess of a music box, because under the red paint you can see all the tiny golden pins and gears.
There is whistling coming from the kitchen; it is empty, but you find water for tea boiling on the stove.