Nightingale Songs

by Strantzas, Simon

  "She's just in the room down the hall. Are you sure I can't take your jacket? Oh well, keep it close then. Things have a tendency, you know..."

  Claire didn't.

  The hallway they travelled was longer than Claire thought possible, and the walls were decorated with more paintings. They were similar to those in the foyer, and on first glance they all looked to be by the same hand, but it did not take long before Claire realized her mistake. Before she could inspect the pieces further, however, she found herself following Doreen into a darkened sitting room. As they entered another lamp was lit, and a woman standing beneath a large familiar portrait on the opposite wall was revealed. She was bent, leaning heavily upon a wooden cane, her long fingers clenched around its head. She grimaced and squeezed her leg with her free hand, then her eyes narrowed and she scowled at Claire.

  "Who are you?"

  She spit the words on the floor. Doreen tittered.

  "Eloise, this is Claire. Claire, this is my sister, Eloise."

  There was a familial resemblance. She was the older of the two women, but even that age could not disguise that she was the subject of the painting behind her. It was clear she was no longer that girl, however. Her wrinkled face was free of any sort of laugh line.

  Eloise hobbled to a chair, massaging her bad leg with each step. Doreen looked as though she wanted to help, but the glare she received stopped her. Eloise reached her chair then eased herself down. She laid her cane across her knees. Doreen then sat as well. Claire noticed there were no other chairs in the room.

  "How did you get past the gate?" Eloise said. Doreen was grinning.

  "It was open," Claire said, hesitantly.

  "Was it?"

  The two women stared at her. Claire swallowed; she found the sensation of being sized up discomforting.

  "I was hoping to borrow your telephone. My cell -- my father wasn't answering and now it's lost its charge."

  "Really? Lost? Perhaps you've simply misplaced it?" A smile crept across Eloise's face, interrupting her grimace briefly. The room shrank around Claire, and its temperature rose. She adjusted her jacket but received no relief.

  "I'm sorry to trouble you. Maybe I'll go to another house and see if they can help."

  "Maybe you should."

  "Wait," Doreen said. "Where were you coming from?" Eloise's face twisted with barely contained fury, quieting her sister, and at once Claire's heart went out to the younger woman.

  "I was coming home from school. I'm going to see my father."

  Her face faltered with an impenetrable expression. She took to rubbing her knuckles into her legs once again.

  "He must be excited to see you," Eloise said. "How about your mother?" Her neutral tone could not disguise her brewing irritation. Claire did not know how she was expected to respond and was thankful when Doreen relieved her of the burden.

  "What happened to your car? Did it break down?"

  “Yes. Well, at first. But then there was ... an accident, I suppose.”

  The room chilled. Eloise turned to her sister accusatorily.

  "You didn't say anything about an accident."

  "I didn’t know," Doreen protested. "She didn't say."

  "Someone came out of the night and hit my car."

  "Are they all right?" Doreen asked.

  "I don't know. I --" Claire didn't know how to explain it. "I didn't see them. I'll be all right, though."

  Eloise attempted to speak, but no words emerged. She cleared her throat, and then called her sister to help her stand. When the woman found support on her cane, she asked between exerted breaths: "What did you say your name was?"

  "It's Claire."

  "Claire, I simply don't see what you expect us to do."

  "Do?" she stammered. "I--I just want to use your telephone. I need to call my father and let him know what happened. And where I am."

  "Then go ahead," she said. "It's right beside you."

  There, beside Claire, hung a black rotary dial telephone between two paintings. She wondered why she had not seen it earlier.

  "Please make it quick, though. It's late and my sister and I would like to turn in."

  Claire felt Eloise's cold eyes scrutinize her as she dialed her father's number. There was a click on the receiver, then a whirring noise before the line crackled with static. Behind the white noise, she thought she heard the faint trilling of a telephone, but she could not be sure. If it was, it never ceased, and when she finally hung up the receiver in defeat, she was certain she could still hear it.

  "You see," Eloise said coldly. "There's no one there for you."

  "I'm sure, if we gave it enough time, the line would--'

  "I think we've been more than generous. The evening is at its end."

  "But what is she going to do, Eloise? We have to help her. Maybe she'd like to stay here tonight?"

  The idea sounded disastrous, but there appeared to be no other option.

  "I suppose, if you don't mind..."

  "Do we mind, Eloise?"

  The woman's tiny dead eyes glared as Claire held her breath. Then Eloise winced and began to forcefully rub her leg.

  "Give her the room at the top of the stairs," she hissed. "She can stay until the morning."

  Doreen beamed. She stood and grabbed Claire's wrist, then pulled her along.

  "Come on, let me show you where you'll sleep."

  "It's already quite late," Eloise said as they left. "You should go straight to bed."

  Claire followed Doreen back down the long corridor until they reached a set of stairs. At the foot, Claire looked back and saw Eloise hobbling in the other direction, the pain in her leg slowing her.

  "Is she going to be all right?" Claire asked.

  "Oh, she'll be fine. There's nothing to worry about. When we were kids she hated staying inside, but with her leg like that she doesn’t have a choice. It makes her restless; she doesn't mean to take it out on you."

  "I'll have to take your word for it."

  Doreen stopped on the stairs and turned.

  "It isn't like that," she said. "Eloise is just difficult to get to know. It's been just her and me for so long sometimes I think she forgets how to talk to other people."

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean anything."

  "Oh, I know you didn't." Doreen smiled and then continued up the stairwell.

  Claire inspected the paintings on the wall as they climbed. Unlike the others in the house their only subject was the bearded man.

  "These are pretty," Claire said. "You painted them?"

  "In this stairwell? Yes, they're mine. Our father was such a good sport about sitting still for them, though I can't say I ever did him justice. He passed away when Eloise and I were quite young. There was an accident and --" she stopped at the top of the stairs and looked back at Claire. "I'm sorry for talking so much. It's just that we don’t get many visitors."

  It was unfortunate to see the situation Doreen was in. Her sister heaped scorn upon her for no reason, and cabin fever was no excuse. Claire understood what it meant to lose a parent at a young age, but she no longer felt anger about it. She counted herself lucky she still had someone who loved her at all. Claire's father was overprotective, but too much love was better than none at all. Eloise seemed shut down, and Claire wondered how Doreen managed to live with it without going mad. Were Claire's father to die, she doubted she would make it.

  Doreen led Claire through the first door at the top of the stairwell, which opened into a small room with a tiny bed and walls claustrophobically close together. The staleness of air intensified the feeling of being strangled, and Claire opened the window so she might catch her breath.

  "It looks perfect," she said, swallowing her discomfort. It was either the room or the side of the road.

  "The washroom is down the hall. Like I said, it's just Eloise and me, so there won't be competition for it. I'll leave you to get settled. Eloise will be wondering where I am."

  "Oh, before you go," Claire said. "W
hich one of you was playing the piano earlier? I heard it outside and it was beautiful."

  "Earlier?" Doreen hesitated as though she were going to say something, and then instead turned back towards the door.

  "That was Eloise," she said, not facing Claire. "She's played all her life."

  Claire was surprised. She did not seem the type.

  "Please, tell her I think she's wonderful. Perhaps that will buy me some sympathy."

  Doreen turned back and smiled, though her lips were razor thin.

  "Let's hope."

  She closed the door behind her as she left. Claire listened as footsteps receded down the stairs.

  Despite Eloise's order, Claire was not yet ready for sleep. She slipped back to the window and peered into the darkness in hopes of piercing the dark from her second story vantage point. She looked beneath the flickering moon for some sign of her car, but it was gone, consumed by the same night that erased any trace of her passing from the street.

  Hollow notes of familiar music broke the stillness, the sound of Claire's drained cellular telephone making one last attempt to live. She answered it, and beneath the fuzzy noise was a faint clicking, followed by the distant cracking voice of her father calling her name.

  "Dad, it's me! I got lost and the car was hit but I'm all right but --"

  "Slow down," he murmured. "What's happened? Where are you?"

  "I was coming home from school and the car broke down. I tried to call." A thought suddenly stuck her. "Where were you?"

  "Are you going to be okay? Do you need--" His voice was getting softer. Claire started to panic.

  "I'll be okay. I'll call you tomorrow. Dad? Dad!"

  Claire yelled into the telephone, but though she could hear him talking she couldn't hear what her father was saying. He had become too quiet, fading away like a spirit. She looked at the telephone's display and there was nothing there. No light of any kind, even after she reset it. Claire had finally drained the battery. She stood stunned, the lifeless piece of plastic in her hand. Its utter uselessness mocked her.

  But in the house's quiet, she heard muted weeping. At first she did not recognize the sound -- its volume faltered, and it appeared to originate from no fixed place, instead creeping along the walls past the many paintings in the hallway. Yet, when Claire opened the door of her borrowed room it was not crying she heard but music from a piano. The notes embraced her, raising the hairs on her skin, and slowly took shape to form the song she had earlier heard. Impossibly, it had become more beautiful. Claire imagined she could see the notes hanging in the air, and followed them like she would have a thin pebble path. Down the hallway a short distance she discovered a door, and from beneath it slipped a narrow beam of light. She placed her fingers lightly on the wood and felt tiny vibrations, as though the music were attempting to reshape the world around her.

  Claire was unsure whether she should knock or simply enter. Her father would have urged her to action, she knew, but she could not bring herself to interrupt Eloise so tactlessly. What if the woman did not react well to the disturbance? She might evict Claire, leaving her victim to the cold outside; there was no Doreen to protect her after all. Instead, Claire chose to quietly rap her knuckles on the door and whisper the older woman's name.

  "Eloise?"

  The air stilled, and Claire felt alone in the large house. Beside the door hung a painting of a younger Eloise and Doreen, sitting on their father's lap. Yet she sensed a vacuum; something was missing, but she couldn't bring herself to contemplate it any longer. Instead, she put her hand on the doorknob and carefully twisted. The door opened surprisingly easily, and when Claire's eyes adjusted to the light inside the room, the first thing that came into focus were the walls covered in more paintings, and beneath them shelves upon shelves of hardcover books. The only darkness came from the window on the opposite wall, its blind drawn up. And in the middle of the room stood a large piano, its stool pushed beneath and keys covered. But where, Claire worried, was Eloise?

  Yet something drew Claire into the room despite her alarm. Perhaps it was the faint sensation that a warm presence had recently departed, something that reminded her of home, of her father. Or perhaps it was the paintings that surrounded her, each with its crudely placed brushstrokes that nonetheless achieved a whole that bristled with energy and life. Or perhaps it was merely the arrangement of the room, the paintings and shelves designed to emphasize the importance of the piano and possibly she who played it. Those shelves spanned a range of topics from sciences to art, fiction and non-, all intermingled in a fashion that should have set Claire's teeth on edge but beneath that light only served to further lull her. Claire took a volume down and flipped through its pages. The smell of old paper immediately sent her mind receding to her childhood, sitting upon her father's knee, listening as he read to her while her mother sang in the kitchen beyond. She put the book down, still smiling, and noticed a pair of ill-defined eyes staring at her from behind a pair of glasses. On that thickly bearded face, those eyes danced through imperfect strokes of paint, as though the painting of the man seated between his two happy daughters were somehow alive. There was a strange quality to the artwork however, one that Claire did not recognize immediately -- Eloise's face was actually an inchoate smear of paint.

  Claire pulled the dusty bench out from beneath the piano and sat, hopeful she could make sense of the evening. Had she simply imagined the music, like some sort of echo in her memory? Why did the walls around the piano seem to lean inward as though being pulled by something unseen? The thoughts continued, amplified by her exhaustion, and with them followed an unplaceable rumbling. She stood from the bench and went to the window behind her. Something was out there in the dark.

  At first, nothing appeared amiss. The view was nearly opaque save for what the moonlight edged, lending the world the appearance of being behind dark glass. The sound seemed to emanate from below the window, but when Claire looked down she was stricken with a vertiginous sensation; the ground crumbled away before her eyes, revealing the wreck of an old large automobile -- its driver’s side crushed, its hood crumpled like tissue paper. The creaking mass hissed with steam, and Claire experienced a wave of nausea that upended the flickering world and forced her eyelids closed before she fainted. When her breathing finally steadied she opened them and saw Eloise standing at the door, cane in one hand and an inscrutable look on her long face as she massaged her leg with the other. Claire looked out the window but the world had returned to normal.

  "I'm sorry," Claire stammered. "I was... I thought I heard you playing the piano." Even in her dissipating stupor Claire knew she sounded like a fool. Eloise, to her surprise, did not comment upon it.

  "How do you feel?"

  "A little faint," Claire admitted. "But this is a lovely room. Very inviting."

  Eloise's nod was curt.

  "This was our father's study," she said, hobbling slowly into the room. "We used to spend quite an amount of time here, Doreen and I. As you can see, he was quite well read -- an artist's heart -- and after our mother died he was all we had." She reached the bookshelf and picked up the volume Claire had held earlier. "He read every book in here at least twice -- it was something he prided himself on. He used to encourage us to do the same. I didn't have the patience. Always too busy playing, running around..." She looked down at her leg and seemed shocked to see her fingers gripping it. "I don't do that much any longer. Do you see these paintings? Doreen did them. She did all of them. She's apparently quite gifted in her way. Our father did his best to encourage it. I never understood what the fuss was about myself. They're nice, I suppose, but hardly anything to get excited about. They look wrong to me. Out of shape. This one here --" She pointed a crooked finger at a painting of her and her father; the two of them looked beautiful side by side. "This is me? It looks nothing like me. No, I can't say I'm much for painting. Music, though, the way he played the piano, it used to set my heart free. I used to sit beside him as he played, right there on t
he bench where you are now, and listen. I could have stayed there for hours." She joined Claire on the piano bench, letting out a small huff when she finally shifted her weight off her limping foot. That close, Claire could feel the old woman's body emanating frailty, as though a wrong move or misspoken word might damage her. She smelled of naphthalene. "Our father always told us it was important to appreciate the arts. He always -- well, let's agree fathers are always right." She carefully lifted the lid of the piano, uncovering the ivory keys, darkened from a lifetime's worth of dirty hands. "He would tell me that if I loved music so much, I ought to do what Doreen had done with her paints. He imagined us a family of artists, and wanted little more than to teach me what he knew." She smiled and put her thin finger on a key. She pressed down, and the piano emitted a flat note that carried through the room. "But I never managed to learn more than a few chords no matter how hard I tried." She dropped the cover over the keys and the small slam echoed in the quiet. Eloise struggled to get her cane beneath her as she stood.

  "Were you able to get hold of anybody?" she asked once she caught her breath. "Doreen says your car is ruined."

  "I tried," Claire croaked, her throat dry. She coughed to clear it. "My phone is dead, though. I suppose I'll need to use yours again tomorrow."

  Eloise sighed, and Claire realized her welcome had already been stretched to the limit. "I suggest you get some sleep then. Doreen has already arranged for a tow-truck to meet you in the morning."

  "That's very kind of her."

  Eloise may have laughed. Claire couldn't be sure.

  "It was, wasn't it?"

  She turned out the light and slowly limped out of the room, leaving Claire at the piano bench alone in the dark.

  The morning sun woke Claire the next day, gradually filling her bedroom with light she could not hide from. When she descended the stairs, she heard Doreen's titter before seeing her humming along the hallway.