The Year of Shadows

by Claire Legrand

  Igor darted over and rubbed his head against the edge of the box.

  “Oh yeah, now you’re paying attention to me, because I actually found something interesting,” I said.

  Frederick’s music would most likely not be at the bottom of some plastic box beside the Maestro’s bed. But I opened the box anyway.

  And inside, I found letters.

  Bundles of letters, tied up with rubber bands. I recognized the writing on the front of the first letter: Otto Stellatella, 481 13th Street, Apartment 4E.

  Mom’s handwriting—loopy, dreamy, never the same twice.

  I dropped the letters like they were actually a bunch of spiders.

  Igor raised his kitty eyebrows. What’s the problem?

  “They’re letters,” I whispered. “Letters Mom wrote to the Maestro.”

  And some that he wrote to her.

  Igor butted against my shoe. Aren’t you going to look at them?

  “No.” But my hands were pulling them into my lap, and my fingers were undoing the string around the first bundle—the oldest one. The earliest postmarked date was almost twenty years ago.

  My brain screamed, No, I don’t want to read this! But my fingers opened the envelope anyway:

  Dear Otto,

  Thank you for your letter. I must admit, I was startled to hear from you. It was lovely to talk with you that night at the concert, but I never dreamed I’d hear from you again.

  I’m blushing as I write this. Isn’t that silly? But then, I blushed the entire time we spoke that night—on that terrace, in the breeze. I still have your jacket, by the way. Won’t you need it before your next concert? Maybe we’ll have to meet, if only so I can return it to you.

  I’m blushing again! If you were here, would you touch my cheek like you did that night? Would you tell me how lovely I am when I blush?

  I closed the letter and put it back into its envelope. My face was about to melt clean off. I couldn’t even think about all that blushing and touching cheeks and cool night breezes on terraces without wanting to crawl under the Maestro’s cot and hide. This letter was from when they first met. “I met your father on a starlit night,” Mom would tell me when I asked, and smile at the Maestro. Back when she actually smiled at him.

  I reached for the next letter, automatically, like a robot. It was from the Maestro.

  Dear Cara,

  If I were there, lovely girl, and you blushed for me again, I would take you in my arms and—

  Okay, no. None of that. I shoved the letter away.

  Igor’s tail twitched as he watched me. What’s wrong with you?

  “Nothing.”

  Igor blinked that slow cat blink designed to make you feel like a moron. What did you think love letters were like?

  “I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it.” But I remembered how they used to look at each other—Mom and the Maestro. Their eyes would be so soft. Even when the Maestro was busy working, if Mom said his name, he would look up and smile, and he would become this whole different person.

  “What went wrong, Igor?” I thumbed through the rest of the letters in my lap. I didn’t stop to read any of them, but I saw flashes of words like love and kiss, miss you, and toward the end, my name—Olivia. Had they kept writing letters to each other after I was born, just for fun? “What happened to them?”

  I didn’t blame Mom for leaving. But when had I love you turned into ignoring each other, into all that shouting? I didn’t understand that. Why had the Maestro gotten so busy? Why had he stopped eating dinner with us, paying attention to us, coming home even to sleep?

  The only answer I could think of was the one I’d always known—the orchestra.

  Looking around the Maestro’s room at all that music stacked everywhere, I felt the old hate bubble up inside me. He had chosen this over Mom—this dusty, moldy music. I didn’t understand that, either.

  At the bottom of the letters were some that looked different than the ones I’d been reading. These letters were addressed to Gram’s house. Mom’s mom. They all had yellow “return to sender” stickers on them. The envelopes were sealed; they had never been opened.

  “Does ‘return to sender’ mean Mom never got these letters?” I said, frowning.

  Igor watched me steadily. Mm-hmm.

  I examined the postmarked dates. December of last year to February of this year. “These are from after Mom left. There are tons of them.”

  Fifty-two, to be precise. Fifty-two letters over three months, all from the Maestro to Mom, all returned unopened and unread.

  Why? Why had he written them, and why had Mom not answered? All that kissing and blushing and all those I love yous, and she didn’t answer one single letter? I mean, I certainly wouldn’t have. But Mom wasn’t me. Mom wasn’t supposed to not answer letters, to ignore us like we’d never existed.

  I opened the first “return to sender” letter. It read:

  Cara, dearest, dearest Cara,

  Where have you gone? I tried calling your mother, and she will not talk to me. I tried every number I had. I tried your office. No one will speak to me, Cara. What have you done? Where have you gone? You cannot do this to me. I can change. “No, you can’t,” you will say, but I can. And what about Olivia?

  I stopped reading. My eyes were thorny. I opened another one:

  My Cara, my lovely Cara,

  It has been two months, and still I have not heard from you. Where are you, Cara, where? The orchestra is—things are not going well. I need you, Cara. I need you, my dream.

  That one, I shoved back into its envelope so hard that it ripped.

  Igor’s whiskers twitched. Careful. You’ll get a paper cut, and those can sting.

  “Shut up.” I was not going to cry, and nothing I could find inside these envelopes would make me.

  I opened the last “return to sender” letter. It said only:

  Cara. Where are you?

  I stared at those words for a good five minutes straight, and then put all the letters back in the box where I’d found them, and then I sat in the middle of the floor with my arms around my knees.

  “Well, wasn’t that interesting?” My voice sounded so calm, so outside of my head, like I was listening to a recording of myself.

  Igor rolled over on his back. Isn’t my belly nice and fuzzy? Don’t you want to give it a pet?

  I snatched Igor up into my arms and buried my face in his neck.

  “Why wouldn’t she answer him?” I whispered. “Where did she go? Why didn’t she ever send me letters? She could have; I wouldn’t have shown them to him. I would’ve kept it a secret.”

  Igor wiggled loose. Maybe it was too hard for her to write you letters.

  “Too hard to keep in touch with her daughter? If I can sell my things and live on a cot and have to draw on napkins, then she could have sucked it up, you know? She could have written me something, anything.”

  From down the hall, the Maestro’s voice boomed, probably yelling at one of the musicians. I jumped to my feet, dumping Igor to the floor. I hadn’t even noticed that the music from the concert had stopped.

  But it was too late. I ran out of the room and straight into the Maestro’s stomach.

  IMMEDIATELY THE MAESTRO caught me by the shoulders. Igor ran away down the hall toward the kitchen.

  “What were you doing in my room?” The Maestro was in his full-blown post-concert state—skin flushed and sweating, hair wild, the permanent bags under his eyes even darker than normal. People didn’t like to mess with the Maestro after concerts, especially not these days. But I could think only about those unopened letters, one after another after another.

  “Cleaning,” I said, glaring at him.

  The Maestro looked past me at his bedroom. “And what a cleaning job. Perhaps you will tell me the truth now?”

  “I told you. Cleaning.”

  “You shouldn’t go in people’s rooms without their permission, Olivia.” The Maestro wiped his face with a stained handkerchief. “
I give you your privacy. You should give me mine.”

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Your privacy. To be alone with your music. Well, you’ve got it now, don’t you?”

  I couldn’t stop myself, even as I heard the words. Part of me screamed at myself to stop. The Maestro didn’t deserve my anger, my energy. I had more important things to do.

  But the other part felt sick after all those letters.

  Why didn’t you write me letters, Mom? Not even one?

  Because of him.

  “I don’t know what she ever saw in you.” The sight of him repulsed me. He was too sweaty and too skinny and too tired. “No wonder she left.”

  Something inside the Maestro snapped. I saw it in his eyes, like a light going out. He walked into his room and sank down onto his cot.

  “No wonder,” the Maestro repeated. He stared at his piano. “Did you know, Olivia, that it is possible to fall out of love with someone? That people can love one another very much, and then stop loving each other somehow?”

  I didn’t know what to say to this. The Maestro and I didn’t talk about love. That was always Mom’s thing.

  “I loved Cara—your mother—very much,” the Maestro continued. “But that’s what happened. She fell out of love with me, Olivia. She fell out of love with our life together. And then she left us.”

  I didn’t think mothers could fall out of love with their children. That’s what I wanted to say to him. But I couldn’t speak. I felt hopeless.

  Then the Maestro’s face crumpled, and he started crying.

  I told myself not to look directly at him. I started backing toward the door. Then, when he buried his face in his hands and let out this awful gasping sound, I ran.

  If I’d stayed there any longer, I would have ripped open that box and shoved the letters in his face and demanded an explanation. Either that or started crying right along with him, and that was unthinkable. The Maestro didn’t get to see me cry.

  I ended up in the basement, not stopping to notice how weird it was for the door to be left open. Kepler never left the door open.

  I found a switch and paced in the dim light until I caught my breath. Old instruments surrounded me. Boxes of worn curtains. Seat cushions chewed through by rats.

  Nothing made sense anymore. Letters and kisses, dreams and sobbing Maestros and missing moms—it all whirled about in my head like a sketch left out in the rain. It whirled so hard that I didn’t see the hole in the floor until I’d already fallen through it, and I landed hard on my butt in the dirt.

  “Ow.”

  I squinted up at the hole in the floor. I wasn’t too far down, just a couple of feet. But it was still weird, for there to be this giant hole in the basement floor. The floor had been torn to shreds. I looked around and realized I was in a shallow tunnel that led back behind me into darkness.

  The walls of the tunnel were grooved, like they had been dug away by someone’s fingers.

  I started exploring, running my fingers along the grooves in the wall. They were icy cold, and they left behind black grit on my fingers. I brushed my hand on my jeans to wipe off the grit, but it didn’t budge.

  I looked closer. That wasn’t black grit. It was tiny speckled burns, freckling my fingertips. Wherever I had touched the wall, my fingers came away burnt.

  Automatically, I clutched the burn on my arm, hidden beneath my jacket. I knew then that shades had been here. Maybe shades had even dug this tunnel.

  I should have turned around and climbed out, but I didn’t.

  A fat weight landed on my shoulder. Igor started hissing in my ear. Must I constantly keep an eye on you?

  Something crunched beneath my left shoe, and I ran face-first into a cold, hard wall of dirt.

  Igor tumbled off my shoulder.

  “What is all this?” I knelt down to examine the wall, which was packed full of brick, old wiring, and garbage. The corner of a piece of paper caught my eye. I couldn’t see anything on it but three letters:

  “Urg.”

  Igor, irritably cleaning himself, meowed. I do beg your pardon?

  “It says ‘urg’. Look.” I started digging into the wall. Mud caked beneath my fingernails. “It’s almost like whoever was digging here stopped all of a sudden.”

  Igor wound himself between my legs, meowing louder.

  “It’s the concerto.” I pulled out the paper as delicately as I could. Twenty pages total, crumpled and filthy, but I could still read them. Frederick had written it in E major. How strange, to see his handwriting; it felt so personal. His real, nonghost hands had touched this. “Igor, look at it. Right here: It says Frederick van der Burg. We found it!”

  When I whirled around, grinning like an idiot, I saw four long, black arms spring out of the tunnel floor. Their fingers, five times the normal length, curled around Igor and started dragging him toward an opening in the tunnel wall. Past the opening was swirling blackness and crooked, shifting shapes.

  Limbo.

  I CRAWLED TOWARD Igor, screaming.

  “Let go of him!” Too angry to be afraid, I pounded on the shades’ arms. Each thud burned my fists and sizzled like meat on a grill. But I didn’t care. They would not take Igor from me.

  Cold wrapped around me as shadow-fingers brushed against my clothes. Caressed me. Pet me.

  Then they let go, like they’d been burned. They dropped Igor and darted away from me, back into the opening in the tunnel wall. I’d never heard anything like the sounds they made—these awful wails that made my teeth hurt. Even as they slunk back into Limbo, they reached for me.

  I staggered back, and they were gone. I was alone, clutching a freezing Igor to me. His coat was matted with frost.

  “You’re okay, you weird, stupid cat,” I whispered.

  Igor grumbled cattishly to himself. I almost get killed, and you call me stupid?

  Someone shouted my name: “Olivia!”

  Henry jumped down into the tunnel and pulled me into a hug. The ghosts hovered right behind him near the tunnel’s entrance.

  “You’re shaking so bad,” Henry said. “What happened? Are you okay? Should I call 9-1-1?”

  I let him hold on to me for a few seconds before pushing him off. “I’m fine. Just a little burned.”

  Henry whistled when he saw my fists, where I’d pounded on the shades. The sides of my hands were burned in twin black C shapes. “How will you hide those?”

  “I don’t know. Gloves?”

  “Yeah, because that won’t look weird.”

  “What were you doing down here, Olivia?” Frederick asked sternly. He, Tillie, Jax, and Mr. Worthington were almost completely transparent. The tunnel walls shimmered through their rippling bodies.

  “Are you guys gonna be okay?” I said, reaching for them.

  “Please don’t touch, Olivia. We’re quite fragile at the moment.”

  “That was Limbo, wasn’t it? That opening in the wall?”

  They looked at where Limbo had been. Frederick sighed longingly. Tillie folded her arms around herself, like she was holding herself back from something. Jax turned away.

  Mr. Worthington kept shaking. It sent chills through the air.

  “Yes,” Frederick said. “That was Limbo. They were calling us to it.”

  “Those rotten, stinking—” Tillie muttered.

  “Dirty, lying—” Jax mumbled.

  “Thankfully, they didn’t stick around with you and Henry close by, and we were able to . . . how shall I say it? Resist the temptation.”

  Henry whispered, “We can almost see right through you, Frederick.”

  “It takes a lot of effort to resist Limbo. One gets tired of fighting it, you see?” Frederick’s face wavered. “Now, what were you doing down here?”

  “Oh, your concerto!” I grabbed the papers and held them up like a flag of victory. “I found it. Frederick, we have your anchor.”

  Frederick’s eyes widened as he reached for the music. I held my breath, and Henry grabbed my arm. This was
it: When Frederick touched his anchor, he would fade. He would move on, and it was happening too fast. I hadn’t prepared my good-bye, I didn’t know what to say.

  Even Igor seemed to be holding his breath.

  When Frederick’s fingers closed around the music, he straightened to his full height.

  “But how are you touching it?” Henry whispered.

  “Because it is my anchor.” Frederick smiled and stroked one smoky finger down the first page. “I think I am meant to touch it.”

  I waited as long as I could stand it. “Why isn’t anything happening? You’re still here. Is it not working?”

  “Henry, fetch me a violin, would you, please?” said Frederick calmly. “And then let’s all reconvene onstage.”

  “Oh.” I watched Henry climb out the tunnel and felt suddenly tinier than Nonnie, tinier than anything. “You have to play it, don’t you?”

  Frederick put his free hand through my shoulder. “Every anchor has a purpose, something it must do to be whole. What is music if no one ever hears it played?”

  “Just some ink on a page,” I said dully.

  Tillie floated in midair on her side, squinting at me. “You okay, Olivia?”

  At the same time, Jax said, “What’s wrong, Olivia?”

  “I’m fine.” Even though I wasn’t. First the Maestro crying, now Frederick leaving. Everything was happening so fast. I felt hollow inside, and tired. “Oh, and you spoke at the same time again.”

  Tillie spun around in a little circle; Jax smiled. They always liked when I told them that.

  I tucked Nonnie into bed while Henry and the ghosts made sure the Hall was clear. As usual, music bled out the Maestro’s closed bedroom door, rattling the walls. My mind automatically registered what it was: Mahler 2, again. At least he wouldn’t be able to hear us.

  When Henry met us onstage with one of the old basement violins, Frederick’s fingers closed around it, just like a living person’s fingers would have. His wispy gray fingers became more solid. He brought the violin up to his shoulder and rested it there, under his chin. This hum started, like when a television’s on mute in another room, and the quiet electric buzz sizzles high up in your ears.