Of course I’m not. Nothing has changed.
“Evie,” Mona says, her voice following me as I thunder up the stairs. “His first word was your name. You can’t say that doesn’t mean anything.”
I leave the rest of the message unlistened to on my phone for days, wary and painfully curious about it at the same time. Finally I can’t help myself and I listen to it, in private, lying on my bed with earbuds in. I start from the beginning, listening to his playing, seeing the scenes of the familiar book behind my closed eyelids brought to life by his composition. It’s wonderful. I know little about music but it seems to me he has as much natural talent for composing as he once had for singing.
Then Frederic’s voice envelops me, and thought it’s roughened, it’s deep and comforting as it ever was.
“I never gave you a chance, and I should have. But encouraging you to be little and innocent wasn’t a trick. With all my heart, I promise you that. It was because I thought it made you happy and that...that feeling when I held you in my arms was a sense of contentedness and completion like I’ve never known before.
“I shared things with you, told you things...” But he groans and there’s a sound like he’s scrubbing his hands over his face in frustration. “I can’t believe I’ve done this again.”
My ears prick up. Again?
“I kept things from Marion, too. I’ve read the manuscript you wrote. I know what she told you in your interview with her. She was quite tactful, and I didn’t deserve it. What she was saying between the lines was that I shut her out of a good portion of my life and it hurt her. It was easy for me to make excuses at the time. She wasn’t a performer. She wouldn’t understand. I never tried to help her understand, though, and I should have.
“You seemed to get it, though, without me needing to try. I suppose it’s because you write. I told you things, shared things...but I still kept secrets from you. It comes down to the fact that I’m not good at sharing my flaws. I’m talking about the real stuff. The deep stuff. Fear of being a failure. Of being just a voice and having nothing more to offer.
“That’s why I want to thank you for finishing the book. You put everything in there. All my triumphs and all my many, varied failures and soon they will be out there for people to read. Thank you for writing it. I don’t want to be afraid of any of it anymore.”
There’s ten seconds of silence and I listen to the sound of his breathing.
“Goodbye, Evie.”
The piano cuts in again and I stare at the ceiling and allow the music to wash over me. We’ve been honest with each other, truly honest, and now that I understand why he did the things he did I can forgive him. I never knew that honesty could cause so much pain, but I think it’s good pain. Healing pain. We’ve pushed each other past our limits, both of us kicking and screaming, defying change. But in the end it’s been the best thing for us. We can now put all the hurt and anger behind us and move on.
Except...as the days pass and Christmas bleeds into New Year, I can’t stop thinking about him. I read a book and I want to tell him about it. See a beautiful picture, hear a song, and I want to share it with him. Mum and Dad keep their distance as I haunt the house on my days off, though my sisters, when they’re home, watch me like disapproving hawks.
Or, at least I think my parents are avoiding talk of Frederic. Until Dad calls me into his study one day a week after New Year. He holds out his tablet and I see lines of text. “Frederic sent this to me.”
My stomach lurches at the sound of his name, and I look at the tablet without taking it. “You’re talking with Frederic? I thought you and he, well, he kept secrets from you, too.”
Dad’s smile is thin. “Frederic and I have been talking. I don’t like to hold professional grudges and he was very humble and apologetic when he reached out.”
I can’t help a stab of jealousy. So Frederic’s been talking to Dad. I glance at the tablet and say, “What is it?”
“He said it explains things better than he was able to on some recording or other, but if you prefer, he’ll take it out.”
“Take what out? Of what?”
Dad just looks hard at the tablet and then at me. “It won’t bite, I promise. I’ve read it myself.”
Unsure what this could be, I take the tablet and read at the top, acknowledgments. Oh. For his book. But it’s the writer who usually writes the acknowledgments, not the subject. Frowning in confusion, I read on.
I’m bucking a trend here, writing this myself. This is usually the part of the book where the writer lists all the people who have helped her during the writing process. Evangeline Bell is doubtlessly full of thanks for her editor and the people she interviewed. You’ll have to find your own way to thank them, chérie, because these pages are mine.
A biographer usually sits outside her subject’s life, looking in, but Evangeline Bell became a part of this story and to say merely thank you is, to paraphrase Rochester, blank and cool. She came into my life as my career was ending and she witnessed my swan song firsthand. Unlike a swan it was neither elegant nor beautiful. It was, in fact, a shameful fucking mess. A mess of my own making, and no one else’s.
Only three people knew about my voice disorder in those final months and Ms. Bell wasn’t one of them. I was certain that to speak of it would be to bring calamity down on my head, as a Shakespearean actor fears to utter the name of the Scottish play. We’re a superstitious lot, theater folk, and strange, too, preferring to wish actual bodily harm on each other rather than luck.
I feared pity most of all. I feared slowing down. I feared my life coming to an end. I am a singer and I am happiest when I am surrounded by music; not listening, but making. I’ve never been good at being idle.
Ms. Bell, a singularly accomplished, kind and wise person, never flattered me with platitudes. If I asked her opinion she gave it freely and honestly. If I had confided in her at the time then I’m certain that my career would not have gone down in flames as it very publicly did, me trying to do too much at once and in the end achieving nothing. It’s my keenest regret that I didn’t put my trust in her as she did in me.
And now? The tunnel has closed in around me, and the light is gone.
Or is it? A glimmer is visible in the darkness. A chink of possibility that would have been disregarded if not for someone very special who saw what was at my fingertips all along. It is a refrain on the evening air in Paris. It is keening notes strung out within the pages of an old book.
It is hope.