Christine
The keys in her hand jangled violently as she unlocked the front door of her apartment with quivering fingers. It was a battered, sticky deadbolt on a door not properly aligned. Entering the apartment always required a bit of force, but now it just felt like an overly arduous task. This apartment was all they could afford, and she despaired that her father may spend his final days in such a dismal place.
The blot slid open with a loud click, and she exhaled a sigh of relief as the door opened.
Her father was sitting on his air mattress, a pen in one hand, with the violin in his lap and a notebook at his side. Over the past few weeks, he had begun to furiously compose a piece which he refused to let Christine hear or sightread. His eyes lit with an obsessive gleam which cut through the glaze of exhaustion he had carried since the illness had taken deep root in his body. Cancer had ravaged him, carving away the strong, vibrant man who was her most cherished person in the world. His previously trim frame had whittled down until there was nothing left to spare. The disease had left a physical stranger behind, but it had not yet snuffed out his beautiful spirit.
They had sold their little house with all their worldly possessions and gutted their combined life savings to afford his treatments. Perhaps they could have afforded a better apartment, but the Covid pandemic had reared its ugly head and the restaurant Christine had worked closed its doors forever. To save money, they had moved into the dingy little studio apartment in the cheapest neighborhood in the city.
Christine had blamed herself for their dire circumstances, while her father did the same. She felt if she had taken classes and pursued a stable career instead of chasing the dream of living life solely for music, then perhaps the mortgage could have been paid as her father battled his disease. Alternately, her father lamented over his lifelong career as a musician with gigs that had been hit or miss for years.
Her father was her best friend and last living relative. Their sacrifices to pay for the treatments would be worth it if he survived.
Hope was all she had left.
"Min ängel," he warmly greeted in his charming accent which Christine lacked "How was our friend, Raoul, today?"
She offered him a tremulous smile in return to hide her tumultuous state of distress.
"He is doing just fine, just as he always is. You know Raoul never sees a bad day," she replied with a false cheer that lacked buoyancy.
"That boy loves you," he said somewhat absently as he used his pen to mark a notation in the notebook at his side.
She gave a quiet sigh as she locked the door and walked the six short paces to the laughably small kitchenette, a short counterspace with a sink, a microwave and a tiny fridge. The countertop had been painted over with several layers of housepaint making it unfit as a working space for preparing food. Everything is the apartment was covered in housepaint, the bathtub included, as if paint would cover the filth from each previous tenant.
Her palms stung as she washed them in the meager sink, but her mind was too preoccupied with the sorting of the evenings events to give the pain more than a fleeting acknowledgement.
That man.
He was not the same man who had pushed her down as her bag was yanked from her back. He wore a reusable black cloth mask, the sort which had become so commonplace during the Covid pandemic that it hardly deserved notice, and a shabby suit, which hung limply from the angles of his awkward body. Upon his head sat a rebellious mane of dark hair that had been fought into compliance by weeks without a wash.
She couldn't seem to shake the queer sensations he had evoked. In the dim streetlight she could have sworn his eyes had a light of their own, like glowing embers in the darkness of a firepit long after the flames had died. He was thinner than her sickly father, yet terrifying in stature and he moved with a silent grace reserved for wild nocturnal creatures. Had she not seen him she would have never heard his approach.
While her instincts had told her to flee, she still accepted his hand when he offered to assist her up.
Then…something happened.
The moment she took his hand, those oddly luminescent eyes seemed to widen to the size of dinner plates, he dropped her hand, left her where she lay sprawled upon the ground and mumbled a pained apology before disappearing off into the night like a startled bat. Christine was with a messy state of confusion and the tingling of some bizarre sense connection.
She glanced over at her father while she dried her hands. He was lost in some thoughtful realm, with weary eyes fixated on his notebook and his hand rubbing idly at his scruffy jaw, gone too long without the caress of a razor.
"I wish you would let me in on your little musical secret," she sadly teased.
"A good artist never shows a work in progress. It's bad luck, you know that," he closed the notebook with a heavy sigh and tucked it beneath his pillow "It's a mess," he breathed miserably, "The notes don't come together. I can feel them just beyond but I cannot tether them together." Another heavy breath came with a rumble and then an explosive cough that sounded as though it would expel his lungs from his body.
Christine would never grow accustomed to that sickly, wet sound.
"Did you remember to take your medication today?"
The coughs came one after the other, but he merely waved her off when she approached him with the helpless composure of one who wishes to assist but knows it is fruitless.
"Yes, yes," he managed to croak once the violence in his chest started to fade. "Stop hovering over me, dear and sit down. Tell me about your visit with Mr. DeChangy."
She crossed over to her own mattress and sat down.
The apartment lacked any other furnishings, the walls were plain, save for the single photograph hung upon the wall. Christine's mother looked out over the apartment with bright eyes frozen in time by the lens of a vintage camera. Christine felt the memories of her mother losing their crystal clarity. Each precious moment grew a thin layer of haze with the passing of each year.
Pulling her eyes away from her mother's portrait, she noticed her father's downturned expression.
"What happened to your knees, Christine?" he asked.
She looked down at her scuffed knees, still raw and bleeding from her fall on the concrete.
"I fell on the sidewalk," she prevaricated, "It's not that bad. I'll take a shower in a few minutes and clean them up."
He seemed to accept that answer, merely leaning over to pat her knee with a soft admonishment.
"You need to be careful, dear."
Eager to change the subject, Christine unzipped the backpack to retrieve Raoul's envelope. Despite her protestations, they needed Raoul's merciful charity to get through another month.
"Raoul gave us this. I didn't want to take it, but he was very persistent," Christine handed her father the envelope of cash.
"I told you that boy loves you," he airily replied in a playful sing-song voice, the one which had always delighted her as a young child.
She shook her head.
"We're friends, papa. He doesn't see me that way."
"Bah!" he waved dismissively, then, as a small wave of coughs took over, he held up his had to indicate he had more to say. When they subsided, he continued, "That boy has been moon eyed over you for years, Christine. I'm not blind. I can see the way you both look at each other."
Christine wasn't going to argue with her father over something so sensitive. Nor was she going to point out that Raoul's former girlfriend had been a well-publicized model and the one before that a successful ballerina. Both women had been graceful, classy, and sharp, while Christine was none of those things—too short, too plain, too odd.
Regardless of her close relationship with Raoul, of her own secret tender feelings towards him, or her father's fanciful dreams of obtaining him as a son-in-law, Christine was not Raoul's preference in a woman. She couldn't take a good picture to save her life, while Raoul's social media was littered with selfies that may as well have been magazine spreads. He had come from a family with old, intergenerational wealth and graduated from Stanford, while Christine struggled so much with math she dropped from community college and her bank account collected moths. They were so different in every way that they were practically in separate worlds.
She didn't even know what he got out of their friendship, but she wouldn't argue with it because he was always there for her. Raoul was nothing, if not a phenomenal listener.
"Christine," her father whispered in a hushed sort of awe.
Her eyes left the scuffed patch of hardwood flooring she was staring absently at during her musings and moved up towards the object of his attention.
He had opened the envelope.
"What is it?" she asked with a sickly dread forming like a living thing in her gut as she accepted the envelope from his unsteady hand.
When she revealed the number of crisp bills, fresh from the mint, making their value seem more obscene, she physically cringed.
"We can't take this," her sigh was so heavy with shame she could imagine it hitting the floor as it left her in a woeful exhale. She couldn't take this enormous sum of money, but she knew she couldn't face Raoul to force its return either.
What was worse, her wounded pride for accepting or the knowledge that Raoul knew their circumstances were so dire he felt this offering necessary? A childish part of her almost wished her backpack had been taken, along with the uncomfortable amount of cash, so she would not be burdened with this complicated heap of emotions.
No matter which way it had went she would have felt terribly guilty.
She did the only thing she usually did when deeply troubled by feelings she couldn't comprehend; she asked her father to strike up some music from his home country and she sang.
Together, she and her father disappeared into a world where there was no cancer, no failure, no mediocrity, bruised knees or wounded pride. The drab apartment around them was transformed into a palace of sound.
Music was her favorite method for escape.
Perhaps she allowed herself to slip away too deeply, taking it into her dreams. Because later that night, when the light had been extinguished in the apartment and she and her father had long been tucked into their beds, she thought she heard her father mutter in sleepy awe: "Christine, do you hear it? It's the Angel of Music."
And in her drowsy state, with one foot within the realm of dreaming, she could swear that she heard the lilting, ethereal sound of a heavenly violin drifting through their half-open window.
But that was just ridiculous, so she slipped back beneath the waves of slumber.