The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(14)

“No, he had meningitis when he was a baby.”

“Oh.” Her head and shoulders disappeared from view as she pitched enough to put her hands on the floor. Just her foot in its pointe shoe left in the air. Her voice floated up. “It must have been hard on your parents.”

“Well, for my mother it was. My father left us and she had to go back to work.”

“What does she do?”

“She’s a nurse. And now she’s getting her Master’s in speech pathology.”

She resurfaced, ponytail askew, face flushed from being upside-down. “I see.”

“Anyway, my father leaving was the end of her giving music lessons, and we were so broke, she ended up selling the piano.”

“So how did you play, who gave you lessons then?”

“I went to the Y after school until sixth grade. A woman there worked with me, and I could play every day. Then I would just hang around the school music rooms and bang on the piano any chance I got. I kept up with it until maybe sophomore year, then I got more into guitar.”

Daisy put her foot onto the piano and extended her torso over her leg. “Your father left you?” she asked, forehead on her knee.

He nodded. “Went out one night and never came back.”

She looked up. “After a fight with your mother, you mean?”

“No. He just left.”

Slowly she took her leg down and put both hands on the piano lid. “How old were you?”

“Eight.”

“You haven’t seen your father since you were eight?”

He shook his head.

“No word. No contact. No nothing?”

“Nothing.”

Daisy’s eyes looked right and left before coming back to his. “Is he alive?”

Erik turned a page, then he looked over at her, looked into the blue-green eyes studying him so intently. He was surprised he had revealed this to someone he barely knew. Normally this was the card he kept closest to his chest. Yet something about Daisy looking at him, her expression calm and interested, sympathetic but not pitying, tactfully curious, seemed to be reaching into the tangle of emotions comprising the experience of being so cruelly deserted, and gently drawing out a thread.

“My mom still gets child support payments for my brother,” he said, sliding his fingers up and down the slick keys. “But they come through a lawyer’s office. I suppose if they’re still coming then he’s still alive. But I really have no idea.”

“He doesn’t send money for you?”

“Not anymore, I’m nineteen.”

Her delicate eyebrows wrinkled. “That is,” she said slowly, “such a violent thing. For a parent to disappear. Emotionally violent. It just stops a story dead in the middle. Like you turn the page and there are no more pages. What do you do with the story?”

He shrugged one shoulder. “It becomes a different story.”

She nodded, her delicate eyebrows raised. “Your story.”

He had stopped playing, and a hush fell over them. For a long moment, while she was leaning her chin on her hand atop the piano lid, and his hands rested lightly on the keys, they stared at each other. The stage, the wings, the maw of the theater and its rows of seats and ornamental moldings, all receded. The air about them shimmered, drew in, coalesced into a bubble. They looked at each other, breathing together, long past a socially acceptable interval. It was far beyond the border where Erik normally would have dropped his gaze, cracked a joke or at least a smile.

She’s peaceful, he thought, and her eyes widened slightly, as if she had heard him. He leaned a little further into her stillness, found he trusted it. And the trust coaxed from him yet another secret:

“My real name’s Byron,” he said. “It’s his name, too. My father’s. Byron Erik.”

“You probably didn’t want to be his junior anymore.”

“No.”

She smiled, and the blue of her gaze deepened. “My real name is Marguerite.”

“Is that why David calls you Marge?”

She nodded, then held up a warning finger.

He put his palms up, indicating he wouldn’t dare. “Where does Daisy come from?”

“Marguerite means daisy in French. It’s what they call the flowers.”

“Your family’s from France?”

“Both my parents. I was born here.”

“Brothers? Sisters?”

“Only me.”

“Only you,” he said. He wanted to kiss her.

She put a foot up on the piano. “Try the Prelude again,” she said. And she kept stretching her long limbs as he picked his way through it once more. Not perfectly. But a good boy doing fine.





The Fourth Wall


Later in the evening, during the run-through, Erik was in the balcony changing the lenses on the follow spotlights. The house lights were down, taking the concert one step closer to production. Things were starting to gel.

Kees came loping down the wide stairs and slid into a seat. “Nice to have all these vantage points, right?”

Erik finished his chore just as the Siciliano began. From the balcony’s front row, they watched together.

“Wat denk je, mijn vriend?” Such was Kees's customary opening remark, and the one thing Erik now understood in Dutch: “What do you think, my friend?”