Page 63 of Angel's Fall

It had been the longest train journey of her life. Even though she had nursed her father for two years, she had always thought he would get better, or at leaststay. Papa couldn’t die and leave her with so many dreams to fulfill without him.

“Do not worry, my Christine. I will send the angel of music to watch you and guide you. He will keep you safe and even keep up your lessons,” her father had told her that night, the same old story from her childhood. She had believed it because the alternative was unthinkable. There was no world without Papa.

The toll of the bells in the church shook Christine from her thoughts and she forced herself to rise, despite her exhaustion. It was afternoon, and soon the sun would be gone again. She’d tried to sleep once she arrived, so late in the night it was morning, but the dreams had come again. Dreams mixed with memories of her father’s cold hand in hers and his disappointed eyes watching from far across the sea.I warned you, Christine. I tried to protect you, but you had to go looking for more.

Christine had been out earlier, wrapped in Erik’s dark cloak out of habit, his scent bringing her comfort even as it mixed with the wind off the sea. She had wandered Perros-Guirec for an hour before she had found the courage to knock on Doctor Mainville’s door. He had looked so old compared to her memory, but he had smiled to see her and offered her tea. He too recalled the date and had been expecting her. It was the third year she had come back to Perros to honor her father’s passing. She had nearly forgotten, and the shame burned in her like acid on her insides.

This year, at least, Christine had been brave enough to look at the precious relic the good doctor had sheltered. He had insisted Christine keep it. Now, it sat silent on her lap: the violin her father had lived by and played until the day he died. Would it still play, she wondered? She was afraid to try. Erik could tune it easily, of course. Her Angel of Music was a master of mending the broken and discarded so they could sound again, just as he had done with her.

The Angel of Music asks only for devotion and fidelity, and in turn, he will fill you with song. That’s all you will need.

She understood now, why her father had wanted her to wait for an angel – because men were fickle and cruel and lied and died. Then what was left of you after?

Raoul’s words had followed her too.Look what he’s done to you.He was right. Christine didn’t recognize herself anymore. Somewhere along the way, all the roles and costumes and music and dreams and lies had made her into a woman she didn’t know. All she had known was that she was Erik’s. That was all that made sense, because all she had been before him was Stellan Daaé’s daughter. What was she without them?

I knew your father, Christine, and this is not the life he would want for you.But what had he wanted? Hadn’t he wanted her safe from the world, safe from real love and loss, devoted only to music and the memory of him and nothing else? Her father wanted Christine to truly be that insipid girl who cared only for art – who she had convinced Raoul she was. Christine had hated that part.

It was anger that made Christine rise and cast the violin aside, anger that pushed her out of her room and down the cobblestone street to the church, through the drizzling rain. There were no people visible in the church in the middle of the afternoon on a cold, gray day, and fewer still in the cemetery to the side. Along the low stone walls, green shoots of crocuses had begun to pierce through the cold soil. Christine remembered how, three years ago to the day, she’d watched her father take his last breath and felt like spring would never come again.

The grave was humble, nothing but a headstone tucked towards the back of the churchyard, but still more dignified than the unfortunate souls relegated to rot in the charnel house, their bones piled neatly by the side of the church like so much gothic artwork, their names forgotten. Christine’s father’s name was carved in cold stone above where he rested in the ground, somewhere below her feet.

She stared at the simple inscription.Stellan Daaé: beloved father and husband, now with the angels.

Christine had fought with Doctor Mainville about the burial. Her father would want his final resting place to be in Sweden, his native soil, next to where his wife and son were buried in Upsala. But there had been no money for that – everything they had was to go to the conservatoire and Christine’s survival. It was better this way, the doctor had rightly argued, to bury him near their new home in the land where he wanted Christine to thrive. At least here she could visit, stare at the place where his body lay, and wish he could hear her.

She wished so many things.

“Why did you send an angel that I couldn’t keep?” Christine asked aloud, her voice so weak and thin no one would guess she could fill the glittering Paris Opera auditorium with sound. “Why did you fill my head with dreams and promises? You made me think that if I was good enough or achieved everything you wanted for me, that it would mean something. But I’ve done it all and more, and you’re still gone. It stillhurts.”

That was the crux of it, wasn’t it? Christine thought as a tear trickled down her cheek, mixing with the rain. She had spent so long dreaming and striving because she had been told she had no choice. Her grand career – the dream Erik had moved heaven and earth to make real for her – had been built on the lie that if she reached that pinnacle, there would be some reward or change.

“It was beautiful when I sang for him and you, like you both wanted me to. I was so happy and so proud. But none of the applause mattered, because the music was over and I had to go back to the world without you. Why didn’t you tell me it was all so empty? Maybe you didn’t know.”

Christine laughed softly to herself, bitter and cold as the graves around her. “You never had a whole theater applauding you. The best you could hope for was a crowd at a country fair stopping for a few minutes to smile and throw us some coins. That was enough for you. You should have told me even that was just... temporary.”

Christine held back a sob. It was all temporary. All fleeting and impermanent, and no one could change that. There was no immortality at the end of a performance, no life of love with no end after a lover’s vow. Her father had made her believe that music was forever, unlike love that would leave her.

“You were wrong.” It was a shock to say that aloud, speaking to the ghost that listened from her dreams as rain began to fall. “You taught me all my life that it was music and art that would endure, but they’re just dreams too. You lost your love, so you never wanted me to feel that pain. Yet you didn’t let me have a world beyond you, so when you left, I had nothing.” Christine swallowed, a pit opening inside her. “Iwas nothing.”

She recalled the shell she had been for so many years – faithless, hopeless. Nothing more than a trained bird singing the same songs in hopes an angel would finally hear.

“Then you sent me him.”

It had been a miracle the night her Angel of Music had appeared. She knew – in her soul sheknew– it was because of her father that Erik had found her. By some intervention of the divine or the world beyond, Erik had been there at the perfect moment and heard her prayers.

“And then I was his and I was happy – until I lost him. Until I learned he was just a man, not divine. Now, I love that man, and I fear losing him again, just like you. Why would you send me an angel that made it hurt so much more?” She balled her hands into fists.

“You broke me, Papa. You taught me to be afraid, then left me all alone with nothing but foolish dreams you knew would never replace you!” Her voice was rising even as the rain fell harder. “You were so hurt and so afraid. Why couldn’t you have taught me to be brave so I didn’t have to suffer like you?”

Christine fell to her knees before the gravestone. She wanted to shake it and smash it and scream until some sort of answer came. “You left me alone! And now he’s going to do the same! He’s going to die, just like you, and what do I do then?” she sobbed, pressing her palm against the unyielding stone. “What do I do now? When he’s already just half there?”

No answer came from the marker, this inanimate thing standing in for a father long gone.

“He’s just like you – I see it. He’s so afraid to lose me that he won’t live. And it’s killing me. I don’t know what’s worse: knowing he’s going to leave me just like you, or that he’s never really even been there. But it hurts so much to love a ghost.”

“Would you accept an idiot man instead?”

Christine stumbled as she stood, afraid to turn around. Surely it was some illusion, or she had finally succumbed to madness. It could not be Erik’s voice she heard because that was impossible.

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