The first time Christine remembers seeing mistletoe, she was five, and it was hanging from her parents' bed.
"Look up, Christine," her mother said. Her voice was hoarse, but her hand was warm as it brushed the dark, unruly curls back from her forehead. "See what Papa brought me."
She was sleepy and swaddled in gray sheets. They were thin with tiny holes and see-through places all over. She liked to poke her fingers through them, pretending her hand had different colors on the bottom like a puppy's foot. She tried to pull it free quickly, but the threads caught on her knuckles, and she glanced at her mother. She knew she would scold her if she saw. She never laughed at her like Papa.
Her mother didn't see. She was looking at something above them on the headboard, her blue eyes shining.
Christine followed her gaze. There was a plant twined inside the heart-shaped cutout in the wood. It was hanging down, more a vine than a stem. She reached for the white dangling from the green. "Oh, pearls!"
Papa, standing at the foot of the bed, let loose a booming laugh. "They do look like pearls, don't they, Lotte?"
She nodded. "Did you get them from a clam?"
"Oh, yes, indeed. And what a magnificent clam it was! Huge, with a great, gleaming purple shell. Big enough to hold ten of you -"
Her mother cut him off with a weary sigh. "Gustave, enough. You cannot make a story out of everything. If you never tell her the truth, how will she ever learn what is real and what is not?" She stroked Christine's cheek. "Pearls come from oysters, darling. Not clams. And those are just berries. Papa found mistletoe."
"Just in time too, I think. Or else your mother would have strung me up by the strings of my violin."
Her mother did try to laugh a bit at that, but the slightest giggle set off a furious spasm of coughs.
"Papa..." Christine whined, frightened by the awful sounds. The coughs were lasting longer and longer. She was scared that there would come a time when she would start coughing and never be able to stop. She lifted her arms to him, hoping he would pick her up off the bed.
He swung her into his arms only to plop her right back down again. He placed her in the middle of the pillows, making a little room for himself, and squeezed in beside her. His arm stretched around Christine to rub her mother's back. "Everything alright, my love?"
When at last the coughing subsided, her mother smiled weakly. "Of course. We are together." Her eyes slid closed. "I am at peace."
Christine laid there, nestled between her parents, safe and warm and loved. She looked at the mistletoe, and then down at Papa's strong hand cradling her mother's withered fingers, and thought that the berries might not be pearls, but they must be something special.
Fifteen years later, she cannot look at it without her spirits sinking. It is an isolating feeling when everyone around her seems to be enjoying themselves so much. She can hear the ballerinas, squealing and snickering behind her as they drape ribbons over banisters as well as themselves. It makes her wish she was still counted among the dancers. Any other decoration would have allowed her more happiness than this bittersweet relic, but the only assignment she did not want was the very one she received.
The familiar sound of a cane striking the floor silences all the chatter. Christine's shoulders square in response, and she goes still.
"Come, girls! We are not neglecting rehearsal to play games. You will focus." Madame Giry seizes the end of a bow tied around one girl's neck and pulls it loose. She gives the ribbon a firm shake, snapping it straight. "The masked ball is tomorrow night, and I will not have my dancers be the reason the opera house is not ready in time. Am I understood?"
"Yes, madame," a chorus of chastened voices answers.
The girl takes back the ribbon, shrinking under Madame Giry's flat stare.
"Get back to work. Immediately."
The excited chatter of before is lost beneath the scrape of moving stools as her words spur them into action. The few words that are exchanged are distinctly raised in question. Where should we tie the white ones? Is this bow too big? Who will light the candles?
Christine returns her attention to the mistletoe. She has been trying to make a bouquet to hang in the doorway, but the pieces of twine and ribbon she was given are too short. No matter how many ways she rearranges the stems, they refuse to go all the way round them. In frustration, she removes one obtrusively large sprig and tosses it down on the table with the ballerinas' supplies. She knots the rest of the stems together in triumph, then follows the twine with the ribbon and manages a little bow.
It looks complete enough. She presses against the legs of the ladder already leaning against the door frame. When they do not budge, she grasps her bouquet in a tight grip and begins to climb. She must look up, keep looking up, never down. She feels more fragile the higher she goes, her legs turning to hollow glass beneath her.
The rooftop was never safe.
"Christine."
She jumps. The ladder wobbles, teetering first to one side and then the other. She looks down just in time to see a figure all in black rush in to steady it.
It is Madame Giry. "Heavens, child, don't break your neck!"
"Oh! Sorry." She scrambles the rest of the way to the top, blood pumping quick with fright. It is an easy reach to the tiny metal hook. She snags the loop in the string and hangs the mistletoe in its rightful place at last.
She descends the ladder with great care and concentration. When she dismounts, Madame Giry lingers beside her.
"I wanted to inform you there is a piece missing." She nods at the discarded sprig. Its yellow flowers are upside down, its white berries splayed on the tabletop. "It is no matter, I suppose."
"Not at all. I was the one who placed it there. It wouldn't fit inside the string."
"Well, no need to frown about it. Perhaps you would like to use it to decorate your dressing room. I suspect the other girls are taking things for themselves." At this, Madame Giry turns to eye her daughter pointedly. "It might help to... brighten the occasion for you."
Hearing Madame Giry, so dark and severe, speak of brightening anything makes her smile impossible to suppress. A moment later, however, she realizes the rest of what was said. "My dressing room? Oh, no, I couldn't possibly have it there! It–it would bring too many bad memories."
Madame Giry lifts an eyebrow. "Indeed." She casts a knowing look into the shadows lurking behind the grand staircase.
Christine follows her gaze, subconsciously raising a hand to her neck. She runs her fingers along her throat as she wrestles with Madame Giry's assumption. Of course she would have no way of knowing it was her parents she was referring to. Of course she would misunderstand her. Weren't everyone's first thoughts these days of him? A whisper in the deepest part of her mind says perhaps she didn't misunderstand at all. Perhaps she understands better than Christine wants to understand herself. But it is only a whisper.
"Raoul is certain the Ghost has left us for good. Everyone is certain."
"Yes, whatever the managers may say to the press about the new chandelier, we all know what we are truly celebrating." She shifts closer, the monotonous tone of her voice dropping lower. "The viscount seems to be an admirable young man. When can I congratulate you on your engagement?"
"What?" Christine looks about, reduced to nothing but a ball of nerves. It doesn't appear anyone heard. "How did you know?"
"He does not try to keep it a secret even half so hard as you do. I think he is proud of you."
Christine's eyes stray toward the shadows again. She is proud of Raoul too, of course –more than proud. She would shout their plans to marry from the tops of mountains, if only his family did not look upon the match with such disapproval. And if only...
"Madame, do you believe he is gone?"
"It has been six months. There haven't been any notes."
Madame Giry walks away to scold another ballerina, this one forgetting the earlier admonishment enough to twist ribbons meant for the ball into her hair. "You will remove those this instant and practice your pirouette right here, where I can see you."
"Oh, but, Madame, can't I please do something else? I fell doing a pirouette during our last show, and I was so embarrassed. Please don't make me practice it where everyone can watch."
"You will practice it and nothing else. If the step has become a thing of dread to you, then I have just given you the opportunity to change its meaning. You must replace the bad memories it calls to mind with good ones. Now, hurry and fetch your shoes."
Christine picks up the sprig of mistletoe from the table, twirling the stem between her fingers. You must replace the bad memories it calls to mind with good ones. She thinks of her parents. She thinks of the Ghost –no, not the Ghost –her teacher. Her angel of music, revealed to be a wounded, lonely, and horrendously flawed man.
She tucks the decoration in her dress and slips quietly down the corridor, heading for her dressing room.
By the time she returns there, it is many hours later. Monsieur Reyer called all of the singers together to run through some simple holiday pieces, selecting a few to perform solos and duets while the guests were being ushered inside, before the dancing. Christine would not be performing. During the auditions, she did not even try. The masked ball is, after all, a celebration of freedom from the Ghost. She, and her voice especially, is tainted by the undeniable touch of his hand.
She sits at her vanity, removing pins from her hair. She moves with a fast efficiency that has become habit in the past six months. Rushing, always rushing, spending as little time in the dressing room as humanly possible. And all for fear of the full length mirror, the hidden portal to another realm.
It remains on the wall behind her. The black velvet drapes she covered it with, the ones she begged away from the stagehands just after the chandelier's fall, lie in a heap on the floor. She tore them down when she came in to hang the mistletoe.
Madame Giry may have been right about the decoration brightening the room. Despite her conflicted feelings toward it, the vibrant green leaves and yellow flowers do make even that treacherous mirror appear less ominous. She finishes shaking out her hair and stands, taking slow steps closer to the glass. Meeting the eyes of her own reflection sends a tremor down her spine. She looks up at the white berries, turned a soft cream by the candlelight, and forces a smile. The sprig winds prettily in the top of the gilt frame. She has made a gesture that she knows would make both her father and the mother she can scarcely recall proud.
She turns, bending to put out the lights on the vanity. It is always the last thing she does before leaving, never wanting to linger here in the dark.
"Your performance today was dreadful."
Her eyes widen and jerk reflexively to the ceiling. The voice which has haunted her day and night, far more relentless than any ghost, seems to be floating somewhere above her. It would be so easy to mistake for a voice from heaven. She likes to tell herself that he could have fooled most anyone into believing him an angel, though she knows she is telling herself a lie.
"For months, I have abstained from your voice. For months! And I give in to temptation, only to find it wilted and left to shrivel in a corner. Does everything we accomplished mean so little to you?"
"I –I don't know what it means," Christine sputters. She turns up the oil lamp she was just about to extinguish and faces the mirror. She knows the trick now. "I wish you wouldn't throw your voice like that. It disorients me."
"You would prefer the truth, then?" His words come from behind the mirror, suddenly muted by the glass and, she assumes, the mask. "As you wish."
The mirror swings open, transformed into a door so quickly, she barely recovers from her surprise enough to stumble out of the way. He slinks from the darkness into the dressing room. He is not hidden beneath cloak and fedora, as she realizes she expected, but exposed in his evening suit. The light softens the white mask covering one side of his face in much the same way as it did the mistletoe berries. She could not comprehend, until this moment, how ill prepared she is to see him.
A hot stone lodges in her throat, and she claws at her neck as if she is choking. All she can see is the image of a man splotched in reddish purples and blues, eyes bulging from their sockets, tongue lagging from a lifeless mouth. She was not there when the body dropped to the stage, but the dancers who were have vivid memories. She was only near enough to hear the screams, cutting like a bed of knives beneath his terrible laughter.
She moans, dropping her face between her hands. Her hair falls like curtains over her shoulders.
"Yes, yes, look away! You see things you don't want to when you look at me now. No matter how tightly I wear the mask, you will never forget."
"It has nothing to do with your face. I can't bear to look at you because of Joseph Buquet." She raises her head, contradicting what she only just said, but needing to see how the name has impacted him.
It is him who looks away, staring at the lamp. The orange glow shimmers in his one dark eye. "I have no excuses to offer you. If you knew what I -" He breaks off, shakes his head, and starts again. "If you knew how I -" But this beginning makes it no farther either, and his gloved hands clench into fists only to be thrust down at his sides. "Let us say it is but a single raindrop in an ocean."
Her breaths come faster until they are nearly gasps. She cannot wrap her mind around such a comparison. Like the piece of twine, it refuses to draw the fragmented, nightmarish ideas together to form a solid thought. Hers is a mind which has always resisted unpleasant realities. Stretched any farther, it would snap.
"Why have you come back?" She brushes a curl from her face, twisting it behind her ear.
He watches her hand with a sharp concentration, as if a hard enough look will render it under his control. "Oh, believe me, I did not plan to. Not just yet." He takes a step toward her. "You have the most infuriating ability to annihilate with one action whatever good sense I possess."
"I don't know what you mean."
He laughs, a bitter, ragged sound. It has more in common with the desperate chokes of the dying than anything happy or amused.
She folds her arms across her chest and inches backward.
"I have always found it rather inappropriate that women flock to be kissed beneath mistletoe, of all things. In nature, it is a snake that coils itself around hapless trunks and branches and sucks their life away to sustain itself. Hardly romantic." His head tilts to the side in a questioning, patronizing manner. "Unless, of course, that is how a kiss feels. Is it?"
Her tongue is tied. So much blood has fled to her face, her cheeks feel inflamed. She wants to trade places with him, to escape through a hidden door and never be found. How pitiful to be tangled in a web of her own making. How foolish not to consider what mistletoe means to every other soul in Paris! She cannot disappear, so she is silent.
His shoulders, wiry and defiant, crumble in on themselves. "When I saw it over the mirror, I wondered –I could do nothing but wonder. I had to know." He speaks gently now, words slipping under his breath like a low hum, as soft and transparent as gauze over a fresh injury. "I have been working while I've been away. It has to be ready by tomorrow night, and it will remain unfinished so long as that blasted sprig is left dangling, unexplained, over one of my doorsteps."
She has to stop him. Her throat is so dry. "What -"
A raised hand is all it takes to quiet her. Her voice has been irrevocably changed by him, and there are times when it seems he is more its master than she is.
"Please, I must ask. I cannot stand not knowing. Do you - Is it – Is it my kiss you're after, Christine?"
Her eyes dart, unbidden, to the shady outline of his hideously swollen lower lip. The mask covers most everything else, but this it cannot quite disguise. It is the crack in what would otherwise appear to be a normally-shaped face, at least in profile.
"I—I... I want... to make peace with you."
"Peace," he echoes, his tone jumping dangerously.
She hurries around him as though possessed by the need to see into the passage behind the mirror. Anything to give her an excuse to move, to place her beyond the reach of his gaze. She begins to throw out an explanation, her words flying as fast as her feet. "In Sweden, when I was a little girl, my father-"
"For God's sake, haven't you learned not to put your trust in that man's ridiculous stories?"
Heat flares through her chest. She whips around to glare at his back. "They're not ridiculous. I should think you would be grateful. If it wasn't for them, I would never have even spoken to you!"
His shoulder blades tense visibly beneath his jacket. He makes no sound, save for a whooshing exhalation that makes her feel like she has just used a bullet to puncture his lung.
"Forgive me." She glides forward on impulse, reaching for his arm. "That was very cold. I'm sorry I said it."
He turns a moment before her fingers can touch him, his mismatched eyes wider than she has ever seen them. He sees her outstretched arm just before she lets it fall. He follows what had been its intended path with his eyes and stares at his sleeve. His hands clench and unclench at his sides. "It is the truth. And rightly deserved."
She shakes her head. "This is why I hung the mistletoe. I don't want anymore pain for either of us." Or anyone else.
His fingers unfurl from his palms, and he is still.
"It wasn't a story. It was a tradition that everyone believed in. When couples-" Her voice catches. She hurries to rectify her mistake, "When people in our village quarreled, and they wanted to make up, they would stand together under the mistletoe to start anew. My mother couldn't stand, so my father used to hang it over their bed whenever she was cross with him."
"I could see the value in such a custom." The response is stilted, as uncomfortable as a line in a new libretto read aloud for the first time, but it is spoken with care.
She smiles.
He runs a hand over his dark hair, thick and immaculately groomed. So much so that it almost doesn't appear to be natural. His weight shifts, an indecisive tug of war between one side and the other, resulting in a gradual sway. The dance ends when he bridges the gap between them in a single stride.
"I will agree to honor the traditions of your homeland, if you will extend the same courtesy to mine."
She stumbles back, thrown off balance by his sudden proximity. She is not sure how to feel about having her sincere wish placed on a condition, but curiosity overtakes her thoughts so completely, there is really no room to ponder anything else. The traditions of his homeland? She thinks of the exotic trinkets decorating his world in the cellars. The music box holding an animated monkey, his oriental-looking robe with that strange little hat..."Where are you from?"
"You mean to tell me it isn't obvious?"
"Oh, well, I didn't mean -"
He chuckles. "I have known for many years that I will never appear to belong with people of any nationality. It is no news to me. I was born here in France."
"You were born here?"
"Not in this city exactly, but the broader location is the same. It was an unfortunate happening for everyone involved, but, well..." He raises a hand to her face, halting its progress before he can reach her skin. His fingers tremble as he brushes the air a hair's breadth from her cheek. Is it fear or music that inspires them? "I am sure you are familiar with the local customs. Women standing beneath the mistletoe to bestow as many kisses as there are berries over their heads. The part that has always been of particular interest to me, though, is that once there, they are not allowed to refuse a kiss to any man who approaches them."
Her breathing slows, growing deeper. When she extends her head back to find the mistletoe directly above her, it is not dread she feels, but relief. If she is not allowed to refuse, then there are no choices to be made. The necklace concealed beneath the collar of her dress, an engagement ring on its chain, is not quite so heavy. The hypnotic draw that his voice has always held for her seems to descend without a single note of song. She purses her lips and shuts her eyes, leaning into his palm in surrender.
His hand rips away as if she has scalded him. He collapses to his knees. "No, no!"
He is so loud, she looks at the door, afraid it will burst open. It is a small blessing that she has been in here so long. Everyone else has most likely long since departed for home. She stares at him in shock, catapulted from a lovely stupor by a racing heart.
"I do not expect you to kiss me. I would never ask that of you. Never! I—I only wish... you would allow me to kiss you. Just once, and only if you agree to it."
This is not the same as having the decision taken from her. She knows it's not, and yet his eyes plead with her. His back is slumped in resignation, reminding her of an abused alley cat she rescued from a group of cruel children. They were taking turns kicking the poor thing, and she screamed until they left it alone. When she tried to pet it, it flinched from her too, only expecting to be kicked again.
But she does want his kiss. She does not want to dwell on why, or get lost wondering what it says about her that she desires such a thing. She will not, cannot, do that now.
At the moment, she can only nod.