by Brianna Hale
“Didn’t want to disturb your tour. Got one of them internet alerts set up for your name. Saw you was with him again.”
“Again? How did you know I wasn’t?”
But he closes his eyes and takes a few breaths, as if these sentences have taken a lot out of him. I pull the chair up and sit down, wondering how long he’s had an internet alert set up for my name.
“Did you finish the tour? In China or whatever.”
“Southeast Asia. Almost. We had one more night, but there are lots of cellists.” Maybe Laszlo found another to fill in for me or maybe they went on with only seven. It hurts so much to think about Laszlo right now. I want only to think about Dad, but then I remember something. “He was always urging me to come and see you. On my birthday. Near Christmas. I always said no.” I examine Dad’s face carefully, looking for condemnation, but his expression of blurry concentration doesn’t change. “I think I was afraid. I didn’t understand why you were the way you were. Later Laszlo explained.”
There’s a few seconds’ lag, and then Dad’s eyes narrow and he asks, “What did he tell you?”
“That you took heroin because it was the only thing that took your pain away.”
His expression eases. “Good of him to tell you, once you were old enough to understand.”
“But I didn’t understand.” The anger rises up again. Thirteen whole years in which we were absent from each other’s lives. What would it have looked like if he’d reached out to me? If I hadn’t been such a coward? “I still don’t.”
“You were a kid. Don’t matter. Better this way.”
It doesn’t feel better. My mind is filled with what-ifs. “I haven’t been a child for years,” I whisper. “What’s my excuse now?”
He fumbles for my hand and I give it, looking at the IV needles taped to the back of his. “You don’t need one, love. You’re here.”
But I’m here at the end. There’s nothing to be done at the end.
He closes his eyes but keeps talking in short, mumbled sentences. “I’m right proud of you, Issy. So much like your mum. Do you still play her cello? I never saw a sight so beautiful as your mum. Sitting at that instrument playing that song. Filling the air. I could even see the bird. Do you remember, Issy? ’member how she sounded…”
He lapses into silence and I see it too, the white swan on the water, almost painfully bright in the sunshine, swimming, swimming.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Isabeau
Now
The funeral is held at a church in South London, not far from where Dad lived most of his life. There aren’t many people there to pay their respects and I recognize none of them. He was an only child and my mother’s side cut ties with him a long time ago. Hayley wanted to come with me but I made her stay at home. I don’t know how to bring people into this part of my life.
The salary I was paid to tour with the RLSO was very generous and I see to it that there are lots of beautiful flowers inside the church and on the coffin. I feel like it’s what my mother would want. She loved him, once.
I stand dry-eyed outside the church shaking hands with the dozen or so mourners who enter for the service. They look like people from Dad’s neighborhood. I try not to judge when I see track marks on some of their arms. I don’t know their stories. Maybe they were in pain like Dad was.
I’ve been in freefall ever since I left Bangkok. I can’t seem to stop falling and I don’t think I want to. Because it’s not the fall that kills you. It’s the landing.
I’m about to go inside when I see a car draw up, and Laszlo gets out. He’s wearing a somber black suit and tie and his hair is neatly combed back. I haven’t spoken to him since I left Bangkok. I know he arrived back in London not long after my father passed away, and he’s called me dozens of times but I didn’t have the strength to pick up. Finally I texted him to let him know what had happened, but of course he knew already. He was Dad’s emergency contact, not me.
As he walks up the path of the church toward me, his hazel eyes on my face, I finally stop falling. He catches me in his arms as I hit the ground at terminal velocity and I sob, my face buried against his chest. “I forgot that he called me Issy.”
Laszlo holds me tightly and strokes my hair. “It’s all right, sweetheart. I’ve got you.”
But it’s not all right. I shake my head and pull away from him. “I’ve done a bad thing, and I think I might regret it for the rest of my life. I could have fixed it so easily and now it’s too late.”
Laszlo looks at me, his hands on my shoulders, not understanding what I mean. It’s all I’ve been able to think about since Dad died. What if I’d tried harder to know my father? What if I’d reached out to him? What if we’d sat down and talked about my mother, even once? What if he’d tried, too?
I can see Laszlo desperately wants to take this pain away but he can’t. He glances to the front of the church and I think the service is about to start. “I know you want to play but you don’t have to. I’ll tell the priest you’re not feeling up to it.”
He moves to go inside but I stop him. “No. I want to.” I push my hands through my hair and wipe my face. I can do this one thing.
We go in and sit down on a pew, and I take gulping breaths, trying to compose myself. I can get through the next hour and later I can fall apart. Hayley’s promised to be at home waiting for me. I’ve been staying with her and she’s helped with everything. The best thing she’s done is not ask too many questions. When I’m strong enough I’ll tell her what happened between Laszlo and I. Again. She’s too good a friend to say I told you so.
“Are you ready, sweetheart?”
I look up at Laszlo and realize it’s time. I stand up on shaky legs and walk to the front. My cello is already set up there, to one side, along with a chair. I take my seat and arrange my instrument between my knees. Then I take a long, slow look around the church, at the mourners who don’t know me and don’t know what I’m doing. Laszlo taught me this. That a soloist should take her time. That the audience waits on her.
I know hardly anything about my parents, but The Swan meant something to both of them. At least I have this.
I take a deep breath and put the bow to the strings and close my eyes. I’ve played this piece at the most significant moments of my life. My first professional solo piece. My graduation piece. It’s only right I play it at my father’s funeral. He never got to hear me play it but I know he remembers how it sounded when my mother played Saint-Saëns.
The long, keening notes pour through me, beautiful and sad, a dirge in the gray chill of the church. There’s only silence after.
I go quickly back to my seat, my head down. Laszlo reaches for my hand but I pull away.
After the service people come up to me and tell me how beautiful my playing was, how they didn’t know that Piers had a daughter, that he must have been so proud of me. I can’t find any words so I just nod, my eyes fixed somewhere over their shoulders.
The church empties out, and we leave. It’s a gusty day and Laszlo and I walk quietly side by side through a nearby park. Finally he stops and turns to me.
His tone is even but his face is uncertain. “I’ve got some news for you, Isabeau. I’ve been offered an opportunity for my career. A very good one.”
It’s easy to smile a little because I’m glad for him. Laszlo works hard and he deserves to keep moving onwards and upwards.
“But it means going a long, long way away, and soon. So I’m going to turn it down.”
I shake my head. “No, you can’t. I know you’re restless at the Mayhew. It’s the new concert hall in Bangkok, isn’t it? They’ve asked you to be the musical director.”
He doesn’t say yes but I know I’m right. And I’m glad for him.
I keep walking but he stops me with a touch on my arm. His eyes are pleading. “Come home with me, sweetheart. Please? Let me take care of you. You old room is there, just as you left it.”
Just as I left it. I cringe away from the memory. Laszlo
’s home belongs to another Isabeau, and she fled years ago.
“Hayley’s waiting for me,” I manage, and I pull away. Hayley’s flat is uncomplicated by regret, or love, or pain, and I’m feeling too much of all three right now. I love Laszlo even through all the guilt and pain, but he doesn’t love me back. We were given one chance to try and make this work and it didn’t. We’ll never find our way back to each other now.
But I have to ask him one more thing before I go.
“Did we do the right thing? The day you offered me the whole world and I took it without looking back.”
Laszlo steps toward me and his voice is low and urgent. “If there was any fault that day it was all mine, not yours. I will never, ever let you regret what you did. Not for one hour. Not for one second. I take it all upon my shoulders.”
I can’t look at him. I’m already feel myself pulling away because I can never see him again after this. It will hurt too much.
“No one and nothing can judge me except for you. Only you, Isabeau. If you think I did wrong I will spend the rest of my life trying to put it right.” His voice becomes choked and his fingers touch my chin, as if he wants me to look up at him but he doesn’t want to force me. “Please let me put it right, Isabeau.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Isabeau
Now
When I left my father’s home at eight years old it was the work of a moment to fill my schoolbag with a few personal things. I look around at nearly two decades of my father’s cluttered belongings and feel overwhelmed by the job ahead.
All right, I think. I’ll approach it like a piece of music. You don’t just launch into playing a new symphony from the opening bar. First you study the piece, getting a feel for it as a whole and where the trickiest parts are. I walk from room to room, identifying personal possessions and valuable items—very few of either—that could be donated to a charity store, and what needs to be thrown out. I’ll need to hire a truck or a skip or something.
There are a load of shoeboxes under the couch by the mattress my dad slept on and I hook them out and start going through them. They’re full of letters, dozens of them, the paper crinkled as if they’ve been taken out of their envelopes and read many times.
They’re are all addressed to my father in a slanted, spiky script I’ve seen on hundreds of scores over the years. Shock pierces the fuzziness in my head.
Laszlo’s handwriting.
Letters with postmarks from five years ago, eight years ago, thirteen years ago. Right back to the time I came to live with him. I didn’t know that he wrote to my father.
I choose a letter at random dated two and a half years after I came to live with him, when I was ten.
Laurent,
Isabeau had her Grade One cello exams today. The examiner gave me a copy of her performance and I pass it on to you.
Valmary
There’s a CD with the letter and I play it, and that day comes back to me so vividly that I can see it. The hot room, the examiner scratching out notes. My father listened to this recording, and I wonder what he thought. Was he pleased to know I was still playing the cello? Did it make him proud? Why didn’t Laszlo tell me he was writing to my father?
I turn to the next letter, another short missive, this time with the addition of my school picture, a skinny redhead with the biggest grin on her face.
Laurent,
Isabeau’s teachers tell me she’s a bright, kind and conscientious student. They don’t tell me anything I don’t already know, but it’s good to have one’s high opinion confirmed by others.
Valmary
I find myself smiling at Laszlo’s words, and reach for another letter. This one is longer.
Laurent,
Last night Isabeau had her solo debut with my orchestra at the Mayhew. She played The Swan on her mother’s cello, her first performance with this instrument. Sometimes I look at her and I realize what I’ve taken away from you. I want you to know how proud I am of her. There’s so much pride in me that it feels like I’m being proud for both of us.
I burnt a DVD of her performance that an acquaintance recorded on their phone.
Valmary
I go to the television in the corner and put the DVD in the player. I see myself in the pink dress and hear my playing, the gentle sound of the strings behind me. It always made my father upset to hear me playing the cello after my mother died. I look at the box of letters, positioned so close to his bed where he could reach them, and wonder if it still hurt after I’d gone, or whether he found it comforting.
I read the letters in chronological order and as I progress I feel Laszlo’s prickliness toward my father thawing with each one, and I wonder why. Perhaps my father is writing back. Maybe there are more letters.
One dated around my fifteenth birthday provides some answers.
Laurent,
I’m sorry about your relapse, for your own sake but especially for Isabeau’s. I’ve done as you asked and I haven’t told her that you’re trying to get clean. I suppose you’re right. This cycle of hope and failure would be hard on her and I want to protect her from life’s disappointments as much as you do. But I won’t stop asking her if she wants to see you. I would never keep her from you and if she ever asks I will bring her to you immediately.
I found another clinic online that has had great success treating patients such as yourself over an intensive three-month program. It’s more expensive than the last one but I’m willing to cover the costs again. Please consider it.
Isabeau has learned to play…
I stop reading and look up. Dad tried to get clean. Dad tried to get clean several times, and Laszlo paid for the treatment. My heart is pounding so loud in my ears I feel like I’m inside a drum. Did Dad not trust he would get better? Was he afraid to hurt me with shattered hopes?
I feel my face crease with tears. All this time I thought he never tried, but he did. He tried for me.
I sit on Dad’s bed long into the night, reading every word that Laszlo wrote him. Listening to every recording. Watching every performance. I’m stunned by the number, and there’s not only these, but also descriptions of what I’m doing, how I laugh, what’s interesting me. Laszlo wrote pages and pages about me, giving my father everything he was missing out on. I thought he hated my father but I feel that I’m reading kindness, even friendship, in the handwritten lines.
There’s a letter around my sixteenth birthday that has angry, spiky lettering and I sense that Laszlo was in a temper when he wrote it.
Laurent,
I don’t care that you failed again and that the money was “wasted”. The money doesn’t matter. Tell Isabeau soon, please. She can at least take comfort from the fact that you have tried to get better, that you want to get better, for her, even if you can’t. Because right now she has nothing and I can’t help but think that this is worse. Shouldn’t she at least know that I have kept you appraised of her life all these years? That you read my letters again and again? That you listen to her playing when the pain is at its worst to help you fall asleep? It feels wrong to lie to her through omission, day after day. I hate keeping this secret from her.
If you could only see her face when I ask her if she wants to see you. She won’t admit it but she’s hurt that you have never reached out to her and I feel like the smallest olive branch from you would make all the difference. Every time she says she doesn’t want to see you I’m sure she feels guilty. There’s no need to protect her from false hopes anymore. She’s sixteen, not a child.
But yes, all right. I know what you’ll say. She’s your daughter, not mine, and I respect your decision to keep this from her. Even if I think it’s the wrong decision.
The letter lays in my lap and I stare at the dark window. Night has fallen while I’ve been reading. I remember Laszlo’s face in Bangkok when I screamed at him to tell me what was wrong, what I’d done, what he was keeping from me.
I can’t, baby. I can’t. It’s not your fault, but I can
’t.
I look down at the dozens of letters spread all around me. This is what he was keeping from me, at my father’s request. My father tried to get better, for me, but was ashamed that he couldn’t. Even on his deathbed Dad was too proud to tell me the truth.
I pick up the next letter. And the next. I read and read. There’s a letter around the time I’m seventeen with a three-page description of me sitting at my cello while we play together. The paper is smudged with fingerprints and the folds are wearing thin, as if this letter has been read many, many times. Between the lines I can read all the longing that Laszlo had for me, and hid from me.
Tears fill my eyes. We want each other so much, but we still can’t make it work.
Sometime around three in the morning I find Laszlo’s last letter, written, I’m shocked to see, a few days after I fled his house. I read it, and I feel my heart break.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Laszlo
Now
I thought losing Isabeau when she was eighteen years old would be the worst thing I’d ever experience in my life. Losing her a second time is far, far more painful. She’s in terrible grief and I can do nothing to help her. She won’t let me help her. I’ve stopped calling but I message her every single day. I’m here if you need me. I’m always here for you sweetheart, no matter what. Please talk to me. My messages go unanswered but I will keep sending them until she comes back to me. Or until she tells me to stop.
She loves me. Or, she did. I don’t know how she feels about me now. Maybe she hates me. The confession took me by surprise and like last time it was guilt that made me silent. How could I tell her I love her, too, when she doesn’t know about the letters? It wouldn’t have been fair. Do I tell her now, against her father’s wishes? Did he already tell her on his deathbed and she’s too angry with me for hiding things from her to speak to me?
