This was a fun one to write. :) I hope you enjoy the interaction between Erik and Phelan.
Chapter 65
"You left the gallery," I obtusely observed.
"Did you think I lived there?" Phelan snidely remarked.
"Clearly." I looked from Phelan to Bessie, who had decided to smear herself through a wet spot on the cobblestones. I gave her leash a tug and moved several steps from whatever filth had attracted her attention. She was not making a very good case for herself on the superiority of dogs versus birds.
Phelan grunted and uncrossed his arms. One of his shirt sleeves was nearly ripped off at the shoulder and his knuckles appeared red and swollen. I narrowed my eyes and took a step closer, somewhat surprised to see him not only without his coat and gloves, but roughened up.
"Are you injured?" I asked.
He tugged at his shirt sleeve and ignored me for a long moment, so long in fact that I didn't think he would reply at all. "No," he answered at last as he wandered nearer to where Bessie and I had stopped. He rotated his wrist and flexed his right hand. "A scratch or two and nothing more."
"From your bird?"
He looked at me, clearly offended by my insinuation. "Absolutely not."
"Moreau?"
My inquiry earned little more than a glare. I sighed, unsure of why I bothered to ask Phelan a damned thing when he did not wish to divulge an answer. He was relentlessly exhausting in that manner.
"I thought you would still be at the gallery at this hour, given the sizable crowd waiting to see you," I said. The sun had almost completely set behind my brother, a fleeting, golden aura around him as the light slipped down past the trees. I estimated Julia and I had left the gallery a little over an hour ago.
Phelan shrugged. "The crowd bored me, as the unreasonably wealthy tend to do. A well padded bank account does not make people more interesting, Kire."
My jaw clenched. I would have bid him a good night and returned home to aid Julia, but the way in which Phelan addressed me grated on my nerves. It was not the first time he had referred to me as Kire and the way in which he said my surname highly irritated me.
"Why do you say my name as an insult?" I asked through my teeth.
Phelan paused from flexing his hand and met my eye. "I beg your pardon?" he asked as though he had no idea what I meant.
"You refer to our uncle, our father, and our cousin by their given names, but you have only addressed me by surname."
"Kire is not your surname, is it?" he snapped.
My hands clenched at my sides, nostrils flared in frustration. "It is the one I gave myself."
"How clever."
I shook my head and turned away, but my intention of storming off was unfortunately curbed by Bessie refusing to move at the same pace. I took two steps forward while Bessie leisurely stretched out one back leg, then the other as though she had all night to wander the city.
"You learned to read music before you grasped the alphabet," Phelan casually mentioned. His words stopped me in my tracks. "Music came naturally to you. At the time I wasn't impressed, but Alak knew you were very talented. He praised you constantly over supper and while out fishing. Remarkable, he would say, a true genius of song."
At once I turned to face him again, drawn to his revelation of our shared past. The way in which he doled out information was like being starved for years and given one crumb at a time. Hunger planted my feet firmly on the street, and I savored each word he spoke.
"A month or two before you disappeared, you wanted to string notes together and compose your own music rather than play Mozart. At night when you were supposed to be asleep, you would incessantly ask questions in the dark. How do you spell moon? Spell wind, Lan. And I would lay there looking out the window, praying for you to fall asleep as I purposely misspelled words for you." He offered a devious smile as he spoke. "N-o-o-m, Erik. Moon. W-n-i-d, wind, little brother. And then I would spell out entire sentences and you would eagerly sit up in bed and ask me what I said, and I would look at you, wide-eyed and insatiable across from me, practically hanging on my every word, and tell you, 'That means go to sleep, damn it.' But you would not stop talking. Half the time you crawled out of your bed and into mine so that you could poke me in the chest or literally pry my eyes open to keep me awake."
"It sounds as though I was quite terrible."
"Oh you were." Phelan offered a genuine smile, a rarity even in the brief time I had known him. "Absolutely intolerable."
Despite my incessant chatter as a small child, years of silence had followed, day after day of being too afraid to utter a word as I feared my father's temper. How I longed for these memories of brothers whispering in the dark to be mine. I ached for a bit of the recollection he described, of a time when I was able to speak freely and be a child rather than an outlet for my father's frustration.
"Moon Wind," Phelan said, clearly amused by his thoughts. " I think that was the name of your first composition, which of course you wanted to sign. Middle of the night, and my genius baby brother needed my expertise in order to give his music a proper name and make certain everyone knew he had composed the notes. But of course you had no idea how to spell your own name."
My breath hitched, and I dropped Bessie's leash as I anticipated what he would say.
"You were so proud of yourself. I watched as you jumped out of bed, took up a pencil and sat on the floor with your tongue poking out from the corner of your mouth. You carefully wrote Noom wnid, and then asked me how to spell your name, and I told you-"
"Kire," I finished on his behalf, my voice barely above a whisper. My hammering heart seemed to miss a beat and my eyes threatened to lose focus. "You called me Kire."
Phelan nodded once. "I did. For the remainder of the time I knew you, that was your nickname. You were a musical genius who could not spell," he mused. "You had a fault at last."
"Music was the only area in which I excelled," I corrected quietly. It was the only part of me that was not deeply, terribly faulted. The only part of me, in fact, that I wanted to share with others. "It was all I had."
Phelan chose to ignore my self deprecation. "You were unhappy once you realized I had been purposely misspelling words for you, but then you seemed to enjoy my teasing, which of course made it less entertaining for me. And much to Alak's chagrin, you took to spelling your name backwards in the dirt and carved letters into the wood beneath the dining room table. We were both in a great deal of trouble for that one." He eyed me briefly, his lips turned up in a smirk. "So yes, I suppose it is a childish insult and nothing more, Kire."
"One you thought I would remember?"
Phelan met my eye, and for a fleeting moment there was hurt in his gaze, the remorse of a man who had held onto hope of finding his younger brother only to discover that I had not done the same. "One I thought you would not forget."
I expected he would turn on his heel and dismiss me again as he stormed off into the night, but instead he sighed and turned away. With his back to me he began violently ripping at the fabric of his sleeve until he managed to pull it off completely. Teeth gritted, he turned, balled up the fabric and tossed it into the grass where it partially unraveled.
"I don't think I noticed the sound of frogs and crickets until you went missing, nor the sound of dogs and coyotes until there was nothing else to hear," Phelan said as he examined the scratches on his upper arm. His voice had become tighter, each word bitten off. His features twisted, hardened like the sound of his voice. "I could never hear them over your voice. For weeks I wondered who was forced to answer your questions. How tall of a ladder do you think we would have to build to stand on the clouds? How many snails do you think I could fit in my boot? Do you think a squirrel would explode if lightning hit a tree? So many damn questions of the most peculiar nature day and night."
"You were fortunate to be rid of such an annoyance, it seems."
"Yes," Phelan agreed.
Despite leading my brother into the answer, I still looked away from him, feeling the intensity of rejection in a single word. Perhaps I deserved it for forgetting he had ever existed. I chose not to hold it against him.
"Fortunate to have a room to myself, cramped as it was," Phelan continued. "For the better part of a year I stared out the window at the changing moon, listened to the wind in the trees, and laid awake until dawn waiting for you to magically appear again and ask me a question I could not begin to answer. Night after night, I left the window open even when it was unbearably cold in case you decided to crawl through and land on your bed. I left you part of my supper. Desserts, sometimes too." His gaze flickered to mine, and I knew my love of sweets had started at a very young age. "Over and over I would spell the words for you even though you were not in the room with me. M-o-o-n, Erik. W-i-n-d, little brother. But your name? That I did not change."
My heart ached in a way that made my chest feel tight and my stomach knot. While I fought the urge to cry myself to sleep in a cellar, someone had laid awake waiting for me to return. Day after day of being convinced no one would ever want me, I had been missed. I had been wanted.
"How long did you wait?" I asked.
"Thirty-eight years. And now look at you." He touched the scratches on his right harm with the scarred flesh of his left hand, his mouth twisting as he picked at the raised, reddened marks and pulled off bits of skin that had been rutted out in long, thin tracks.
"I apologize for not being adequately prepared to be a nuisance to you again."
Phelan looked up at me and cocked a brow. "Oh, you are definitely adequate." He snorted out a laugh. "My expectations have been exceeded, Kire. You are as easily riled now as you were at the age of three."
"Hardly." I grunted and found myself staring at the scratches once again. "What happened to your arm?" I asked.
"Nothing," he insisted.
"You intend to walk the streets with one sleeve?"
"Yes."
"You would draw quite a bit of attention to yourself," I pointed out.
"As much as a man in a mask?" Phelan asked.
I offered little more than a shrug in response, and almost immediately his expression sobered and he shook his head. "My apologies, brother, my words were not intended as an insult," he mumbled. "You did not wear a mask then and my taunting was never directed at you in that way."
My skin prickled. His words came as somewhat of a surprise as I fully expected him to have been relentless in his mocking. I wondered if he still recalled what I looked like beneath the mask...and if he would have berated my appearance as we grew up together. I had grown accustomed to such treatment.
Phelan shrugged into his overcoat, the shoulder of which was partially torn. I swore he donned his overcoat for no other reason than to contradict my observation about him drawing many eyes.
"My wife sews," I offered. "If you would like her to mend the shirt sleeveā¦"
"I believe my shirt is well beyond repair and this coat is simple enough for my tailor to fix." He rubbed his face and sighed, then reached into his overcoat pocket and pulled out an envelope. "Ah, yes. You left this behind."
"I forgot to give it to you in the gallery."
"Your son is ten years of age? He is a decent artist."
"Eight." And he excels at everything, I wanted to add.
Phelan made a face as though Alex's age made no difference. "He is no prodigy, but he shows promise."
"Alex and Lisette were quite insistent I deliver their artwork to you this evening. They will be pleased to know their drawingers were received."
"There was only one drawing," Phelan said.
"There should have been two."
He pulled out two sheets of paper from the envelope and I craned my neck to see what Alex had drawn. "Your daughter sent a letter. No great literary feat, but I assume what she lacks in the penning of a great work she makes up for in honesty."
My breath caught. I realized then that I should have opened the envelope despite promising I would not peek inside. Quite clearly only God, Lisette, and my brother knew what was inside.
"I was not aware," I said carefully.
"No?" Phelan looked from the two sheets of paper to me. The corners of his lips were turned up ever so slightly in a smug grin.
"Two o'clock Sunday?" Phelan asked. The grin remained when he spoke. He looked me over and rolled his eyes, then thrust the papers at my chest. "Oh for God's sake, Kire, take it."
I snatched the papers from him and quickly glanced at Alex's artwork of what appeared to be goats in my bedroom eating my music. I would have examined it closer if not for Lisette's letter taking priority in that moment.
Dear Monsieur Artist,
My father would like to be your friend. Would you be kind enough to visit with him this Sunday? You may arrive at two in the afternoon. My mother will make cookies. Also, she will make sandwiches. We have a deck of cards and a game of chess for entertainment, so I do hope you are able to play for a while. My father would be very happy.
Please arrive on time.
Love,
Lisette Kire
I read the letter a second time merely to avoid Phelan's eyes and what I imagined was a satisfactory smile given how desperate the note made me sound. "She took this upon herself," I said. "I had no idea..."
"I realize as much," Phelan replied as I handed him the sheets of paper. He appeared quite amused by the invitation, which he carefully folded and returned to the envelope. "I must say, you are fortunate your daughter has so much charm, of which you are completely lacking."
"Indeed," I muttered.
Phelan shifted his weight and lifted his chin. "Tell me, Kire, what happens if I do not arrive on time?"
"I imagine there would be hell to pay."
"I shall do my best to arrive in a timely manner. Finish your walk, Kire. Your dog looks bored to death."
I glanced at Bessie with her hooded eyes and droopy expression. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She was quite joyful. "That is her usual expression."
"Pity." Phelan flashed a smile, and with that, he turned and started to briskly walk away.
I looked from him to Bessie, who peered up at me as though she was equally surprised that Phelan had accepted Lisette's invitation.
"You are still better than a damned bird," I reassured her.
"She is not," Phelan said over his shoulder.
