Chapter 59
I did not dare move. I stood stock still, breath held and eyes unblinking for a long moment as I attempted to comprehend my brother's response.
"Me?" I asked at last.
"Is that not what I said?" Phelan impatiently questioned.
"What do you mean you returned because of me?" I snapped.
"For you, not because of you."
His tone tried my patience. "When did you return there?" I asked through my teeth.
Phelan offered a casual shrug, belying the irritation in his tone. "I left here four months after the last letter from Alak Kimmer reached Valgarde. Long after you should have arrived at your cousin's doorstep."
He would not have found me. No one would have unless they had happened upon a traveling fair as it made its way through Europe. Most of the time I had only a vague idea of where the caravan stopped and the tents were erected. For the most part it did not matter; I was not allowed to wander and see any part of the city in which we stopped and I came to realize soon enough that hatred and cruelty was the same no matter where we ventured.
"Why?"
Phelan casually shrugged. "I wanted to retrace your steps, I suppose, and see if you had turned around and made your way back once the letters stopped arriving. It's been thirty years, Kire. I cannot recall my exact intention. I was sixteen, stubborn as a mule, and hell-bent on some preconceived, romanticized notion that I would bring you back with me."
"I apologize," I said quietly.
"For what?" he tersely asked.
I blinked at him. "For whatever distress I caused you."
Phelan snorted at my words. "How thoughtful."
I considered leaving the gallery right that moment, but truly I stood dumbfounded that he had searched for me all those years ago. A lifetime of rejection surfaced, the detachment I had felt from the rest of the world rising within me like the goose flesh on my arms.
There would be nothing for me in terms of a relationship with Phelan, not in the way I wanted. Blood evidently meant nothing to my brother, and as I stood halfway across the room from him, I regretted walking to the gallery.
I turned from him, my heart racing as I attempted to convince myself that I should return home, but foolishly, I still wanted more than I had been allowed. Of all my damnable faults, the desire to belong was the most prominent.
"You were my little brother," Phelan said. There was a hint of fondness in his voice that I did not expect. Rather than turn away, I stepped toward him, searching for more. "What business does a boy thirteen years of age have wandering about on foot with an unthrifty old man?"
"I was almost fourteen," I said quietly.
At last Phelan turned and fully faced me. "You most certainly were not. You do not know your date of birth, do you?"
"The eighteenth of June," I answered with far more conviction than I should have considering Madeline had decided upon a day in which she would celebrate my date of birth. She was the only one who had bothered to celebrate me in any way, and I had never considered any other date a possibility.
"The twenty-eighth of December," Phelan corrected. "Three years, six months, and five days after mine."
My lips pulled upwards in a smile. I was not yet forty-two years of age. "My wife will be quite pleased that she has married a younger man than she originally thought," I said, more to myself than to Phelan.
"I went off in search of you and the notorious Opera Ghost was safe and sound beneath the Opera House," Phelan muttered bitterly. "Not ever giving us a second thought once he found his musical paradise."
"I was not beneath the Opera House," I assured him.
Phelan looked up and met my eye with an expression like stone. He took another sip from his wine glass, then turned and walked back to the table where he splashed little more than a drop into his glass.
"Then where the hell were you?" he asked with his back to me, his tone accusatory.
"I do not know if Joshua told you, nor if you care, but I buried our uncle with my bare hands after he passed away," I said. "It took me all day to dig a grave that was not at all suitable, but it was the best I could do alone and in such a state of mourning. You two may have had your differences, but he was everything to me. Losing him, I truly wished to close my eyes, cease breathing, and die beside him."
My voice quivered, the grief I had felt that day and for months afterwards rattling through me. I was grateful Phelan did not turn to face me as I spoke as I knew I could not meet his eye.
"Gypsies found me sitting beside his body. They asked if I had killed him and I told them he was sick," I continued. "They allowed me to cover his corpse and place stones over the fresh earth so that scavengers would not disturb his grave."
Phelan turned suddenly and looked at me, his lips parted as he considered my words. Still, he said nothing.
"And once it was finished, they lassoed me from a distance and pulled me forward. I did not fight or struggle or say a word of protest, and yet they still clubbed me until I fell to my knees. They placed irons on my ankles and wrists and another like a collar around my neck. The weight of it...I could barely lift my legs, but they told me to walk behind their wagons lest I wished to be dragged. They allowed me to take one pack with me and everything else was left behind. Everything I had was from my uncle, which was not much, but it was still part of him."
I waited a moment for my brother to respond. There was nothing he could have said that would have halted the flow of apathy I felt inside. If he wished to know where I had been, if he thought I had simply found solace and lived in peace following my uncle's death, I would make certain he knew what hell I had survived.
"Garouche, the man in charge of the fair, decided I would fetch a decent amount as part of their showcase of abnormalities. His daughter was a fortune teller, and said she saw darkness within me and an endless void, which her father thought was quite profitable. He purposely tore my only clothing in decent repair and made certain I was caged with the rest of the animals. Six times a day, six days a week, he put me on display and that is where I remained for ten months, as an oddity in a traveling fair, scorned and ridiculed by strangers who paid an admission fee and often offered up a small amount in order to throw rocks and rotting food at me. Ten months of being scrutinized and mocked, starved so that I remained a skeleton, and chained or caged to prevent me from harming women and children. Ten hellishly long months of being humiliated repeatedly and welts and bruises received before a paying crowd."
Phelan looked away from me and studied his wine. He worked his jaw in silence and waited for me to continue.
"I was not the Opera Ghost then, but perhaps you had heard of me? I had several monikers in those ten months." I shifted my weight and felt the agitation always present within me begging for release. "The Living Corpse? Have you heard of that one? Or the Beast-Child? Their favorite banner said The Devil's Son and had a picture of an infant with horns and a spade tail. Come witness the true embodiment of evil, he would say, before he clubbed me to the ground and pulled off my hood for the crowds to witness something truly despicable. Early on a man grabbed my arm and slammed me into the bars. I learned to place myself in the center of the cage so that it would not happen again."
Again I waited for my brother to offer his own remarks, but he did not look in my direction or say a word. I wondered if he felt a sense of remorse or pity. I did not want either.
"I was not human to them or their audience, not until a ballet dancer, of all people, helped me instead of joining in the laughter. Madeline Edwards, a British girl in a French theater, took me away. She hid me beneath the Opera House within the cellar, fed me from the kitchen, clothed me with suits from her brother, gave me a birthday, and befriended me. The last part still comes as a surprise. I had been so utterly alone for so many years that I did not think I was capable of friendship."
Phelan bowed his head, but his nostrils flared as he continued to listen in silence.
"If you went in search of me, then I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. I did not think anyone would bother attempting to find me. In truth I suppose I did not want to be found. I have never felt as though I truly deserved to be discovered."
Bessie leaned up against my leg and nudged the tips of my fingers with her cold, damp nose. She offered a wag of her tail as reassurance, and I bent to acknowledge her with a pat to the head. Whenever my mood darkened considerably, she would speak to me in her wordless, canine language and make certain I was aware of her unwavering loyalty.
"An inconvenience," Phelan said more to himself than to me. "You were born an inconvenience."
His words had sharpness to them I fully expected but did not care to hear. I looked away from my brother and focused my attention on Bessie, who continued to lean against my leg and lift her head in search of a scratch behind the ear.
"You were born later than expected despite Gyda's best attempt to expel you early from the womb. I was far too young to recall such matters, but Alak spoke of it from time to time, usually when he drank far too much."
As much as I wanted to defend my uncle's good name, I stood and listened intently, the need to know my past outweighing the desire to interject my own commentary.
"Alak would say you must have been aware of what cruelty the world had in store for you and that is why you did not wish to be born, but the process was difficult. I remember it took nearly a day for you to arrive, and when the midwife finally brought you out of the room, she stood in grave silence before Bjorn and whispered to him.
"I would have thought you were stillborn given their melancholy exchange, but you howled in a way that made my ears hurt. I watched as the midwife and Bjorn spoke over your cries until at last he took you, held you out as far from his body as possible, and placed you at the foot of the stairs behind the house. Then he shut the door and returned inside and asked the midwife how the injuries had occurred."
Despite knowing I had not been wanted, I still felt a great sense of devastation at being placed outside like rubbish. From my very first moments I had been turned away.
"While they were arguing, I walked out back, gathered up the blankets and my screaming newborn brother, and saw the wounds they spoke of on your face and skull. I thought perhaps once you stopped crying they would not look as horrible, but that was not the case."
"Why did you bring me back inside?" I asked.
Phelan looked me over, his scrutinizing gaze studying my mask. "Because I wanted a brother," he said as though the reason should have been obvious. "And once you were born and I saw the scars, I still wanted a brother. I was not so callous as to leave a newborn baby, even one bearing wretched scars, to die in the cold. I was not a monster." He looked me in the eye briefly. "And neither were you."
I exhaled harder than I intended and stared back at him, half-expecting his words to be followed by a condescending remark that would erase the feelings suddenly conjured within me.
"You were a terrible inconvenience, and not at all what I expected," he continued. "You cried every few hours, I could scarcely put you down without waking you up, and you fussed day and night. More than likely you would have perished if not for Alak taking the two of us, but even so, I considered you my responsibility."
"You should not have-"
"Why not?"
There was no reason I wished to voice aloud.
"Why not?" he asked again, his tone harder than before.
When I remained silent, Phelan fished his keys out of his pocket, tossed them up, and snatched them out of the air. He turned away from me and briskly disappeared into the back of the gallery while I awkwardly remained frozen in place, unsure of whether he wanted me to follow him. Before I could make up my mind, the interior lights went dark and I heard Phelan's footsteps quickly drawing nearer. I looked around the gallery one more time despite the lack of light while my brother walked past me and waited at the door. He did not directly face me, but rather stood at an angle and studied me from the corner of his eye.
"When I returned home, I asked Bjorn when he had last seen you and he would not answer me. He was far too intoxicated to make sense and in a surly mood. I had absolutely no patience for that drunken bastard looking for a fight."
For a long moment Phelan stood silently at the door. He adjusted his left arm and folded it across his body as though it were cradled in an invisible sling.
"He attempted to shove me to the ground, much as he did when I was a child, but he failed to realize my size and strength, not to mention my clarity was far greater than his" Phelan said. "He grabbed a leather strap, stumbled to the ground, and I took it from him. I struck him with it until he was bloody and whimpering for mercy, and then I asked him again when he had last seen you and he swore you never returned. I left him behind the house, at the bottom of the stairs writhing and begging worse than I ever did, the pathetic coward. He probably thought I spared his life, but in truth he was not worth my time."
His words made me shiver as I knew precisely what leather strap Phelan referred to as well as where it hung on a nail in the house at the top of the cellar stairs. I could still see the head of the nail warped from a hammer, bent and rusted. By the time I was finally taken away by my uncle, I stood eye-level with the top of the strap my father would grab on his way down to the cellar.
"I spent three weeks searching for you before I exhausted what meager funds I possessed, and then I returned to Valgarde empty-handed and frustrated. For six months I used the last of my wages to place ads in the newspapers once a week, hoping to find you, but there was never a reply. 'I am searching for my brother Erik Kimmer, age thirteen. Traveling with Alak Kimmer, our uncle. Reward for information if whereabouts known'."
Phelan studied his injured left hand. "For twenty years I wondered what became of my little brother, imaging some violent, sickening end had befallen you somewhere between our childhood home and Paris for no other reason than you had been born with scars to your face."
It had been violent and sickening, but it had not ended. There had been several times over the years I wished for death, but I survived. Sometimes I wondered what my purpose was in the world, and often I answered my own rhetorical question with cynicism.
"How long has it been now? Nine years? Days after the Opera House fire, in the bottom corner there was an obituary that I still do not know why it caught my eye as I was scanning other more notable articles of people recovering from the fire and sensationalized accounts of what occurred. Valgarde and I felt quite fortunate to leave the disaster virtually unscathed. But that one obituary? I read those three words several times to be certain that I had seen it correctly. Do you know what it said?"
"Erik is dead," I said automatically.
Phelan did not seem surprised that I knew what he referenced. Broken in every sense for weeks after the final night of the opera, I had asked Madeline to write me the briefest of obituaries for the death I anticipated. She had obeyed my orders, but while I waited for my last breath, she orchestrated a new life I had no desire to live.
"Erik is dead," Phelan echoed. He turned and looked at me briefly. "Valgarde disagreed at first when I swore it was you, but I knew for certain. Years of searching, years of wondering, and there it was before my eyes. My responsibility. My inconvenience. My little brother. Dead."
We stood no more than ten paces from one another, the space between us magnified by his words. At some point my overture had stopped playing on the damnable phonograph, leaving us in silence.
Bessie, whose leash had slipped from my grasp, wandered from my side. I thought she would slip out the open door and sit outside beneath the bench, licking the cobblestones, but instead she stopped in front of Phelan, gave a heavy sigh, and put her right paw as high up on his shin as her stout leg could reach.
At first Phelan ignored her, but after another attempted at garnering his attention, my brother conceded to the dog's silent request. He knelt, gathered up long, soft ears and massaged Bessie's jowls into a generously wrinkled mass that made her eyes disappear beneath the folds of skin on her face. Alex crumpled up her face constantly, and though she didn't enjoy the way in which he doled out attention, she tolerated his antics. I could tell by the way her wagging tail slowed that she humored Phelan in a similar fashion.
My brother's features softened as he lavished Bessie with his full attention. She hopped up and rested her front feet on his thighs while enthusiastically wagging her back end once he scratched the sides of her face and beneath her ears.
"You are quite insistent, aren't you?" he asked her. There was no telling how long he would have remained squatted down if Bessie had not attempted to nibble on his beard. At last he stood, cleared his throat and brushed off his trousers.
"Your wife will be quite concerned if you do not return home soon, Kire," Phelan brusquely said.
"Are you married?" I asked before we parted ways. I realized I had no idea whether or not he had a wife or children at home. I knew virtually nothing of him at all aside from he was a painter and did not live in Paris.
He grunted at my question. "I am not."
I awkwardly looked away when he offered nothing further in terms of conversation. We were linked by blood and the trauma of our past, but nothing more. Frustration pulsed through my veins as I attempted to sort through the barrage of emotions I felt for what I had been denied in terms of a family growing up.
"My wife," I said quite suddenly. "You told her the other night that you had once cared for me."
"Your wife clearly misheard what I said," Phelan remarked as he strolled through the gallery door. He held it open, and Bessie trotted behind him with her tail wagging, delighted in her new friend and oblivious to me trudging behind the two of them.
His statement caught me off-guard, and I briskly exited the gallery. Heat rose up the back of my neck, and I felt both of my fists and my jaw clench as I looked away from him.
"My exact words to your wife were that I had loved you once, a long time ago," Phelan said as he locked the door and placed the keys into his pocket. "And now, as you said yourself, I mean nothing to you. I am little more than a name."
"You misheard what I said," I snapped.
Phelan narrowed his eyes and lifted his chin. "Then by all means, correct me."
"I said I meant nothing to you, not the other way around."
Phelan grunted. "My apologies then." He looked at me suddenly as though he would elaborate but thought better of it and turned away.
"My wife believes we are...similar."
Phelan cocked a brow and looked at me from the corner of his eye. "That is preposterous," he grumbled.
I considered agreeing with him that Julia's observation was indeed preposterous, but I was not an agreeable man.
"Similar," Phelan groused. "You and I?"
"Indeed," I mumbled.
"We could not be more different."
In the back of my mind, I could hear Julia groan at his words. Quite clearly we were more alike than either of us desired to admit.
"Precisely," I said as Bessie eagerly took several steps toward the street. I was certain she wished to distance herself from the perfumery.
To my surprise, Phelan crossed the street with us. He stared straight ahead and sniffed. "For one, my art has been well-received by critics while your music…" Phelan had the audacity to make a face as though the very thought of my music pained him greatly. "What was the phrase? Cattle would willingly run into the slaughterhouse to avoid suffering through Kire's latest work?"
"Luc Testan is a tone-deaf, ignorant fool," I snapped.
"Perhaps. I've never met him, although I will admit I have thoroughly enjoyed his commentary on your music over the years. I simply wish you had given a rebuttal."
"He is quite mad and never deserved a reply."
In truth I had written dozens of angry responses littered with choice words that left Madeline equally horrified and impressed by my insults. None of the letters were ever published as Madeline made sure they all somehow disappeared.
"You sound like a disgruntled composer."
"I am not disgruntled in the least."
"Clearly." Phelan looked at me from the corner of his eye. "I suppose we can both agree I am taller than you."
I nearly missed stepping up onto the curb. "You most certainly are not."
"Not by much, but I am taller. And I possess broader shoulders, am far more pleasant, and my suits are better tailored," he added, counting each insult on his fingers. "Quite frankly, I do not see the similarities at all."
Phelan truly knew how to agitate me over the most inconsequential details. I found myself so aggravated I could scarcely sputter out a reply, which seemed to be his intention given his smile of satisfaction.
"You are as easily irritated now as you were thirty-eight years ago," Phelan said as we both approached the corner. The fondness returned to his voice, which surprised me.
"You remember my irritation from almost forty years ago? Impossible."
Now it was his turn to be offended and sputtering for a reply. "My memory is flawless, I assure you."
"Of this I have no doubt," I answered rather dryly. "Quite remarkable for a man of your advanced age."
"Advanced indeed," Phelan muttered.
For the first time since we had met, Phelan smiled and chuckled to himself. "You may think I am jesting, but I distinctly recall you would become enraged when I knocked down whatever small hut you built with rocks and sticks. Red-faced, tears in your eyes, teeth clenched... you would pound your fists on the dirt with such fury that I was amazed such a small child could be so upset.
"There was one time where you hit your face on the ground and gave yourself a bloody nose and I thought you would bleed to death. I dragged you into the woods behind Alak's home so that he would not find out as he would have been furious with me. Thankfully Val brought out a damp rag and helped me clean you up, but you squealed like a stuck pig." He shook his head. "Your temper…"
"My son was the same way when he was younger," I commented. "He hit his head on the corner of my desk and on the wall when he was around a year old."
"You named him after our uncle?" Phelan questioned as we continued briskly toward my home. I wondered where he was headed, but given that we were in the midst of conversation I found somewhat enjoyable, I decided against asking.
"I did. It was the only name that seemed suitable. I would like to think our uncle would approve."
"Is he musical?"
I shook my head. "He doesn't take much interest in playing. Yet."
I still had hope that at some point he would wish to take up the violin or perhaps inquire about composing, but at eight years of age he found my hours of toiling at my desk to be quite boring.
"His mother, she is-"
"My wife is his mother," I said sharply before Phelan finished speaking. I doubted he knew Christine was my son's birth mother, but I had no desire to speak of it. "Julia has been in Alexandre's life since he was quite young. Not in the capacity she is now, but she is the only mother he has ever known and quite frankly I could not have imagined a more wonderful and loving woman in my son's life or mine."
"You are fortunate then."
I turned to glance at him and realized we stood across the street from my home. The moment I looked at my brother, I saw Julia peer through the parlor window.
"Still no critique after a private showing at the gallery for you and your dog?" Phelan dryly asked. He followed my gaze toward the window as Julia disappeared and the curtain swayed shut.
"Your paintings are well done and clearly appreciated by many considering the show at the gallery is sold out, but it is not to my taste," I said.
Phelan's lips twitched into a brief smile. "Fair enough. Will you and your wife be attending this evening?"
"If you would have us."
"The broker and gallery owner would be quite disappointed if you did not attend."
"Of course," I dryly replied.
Phelan grunted, tipped his hat, and gave Bessie one final pat on the head. He turned on his heel and started down the street in the direction we had previously traveled.
"Good night, Kire," he said over his shoulder.
"Good night," I replied. "Brother," I quietly added once he was out of earshot.
