Chapter 16
AT 12:30 P.M., THEIR GUESTS BEGAN to arrive. Christine had put out trays of cheese and crackers and crudité with dip. Erik played “Be Our Guest” on the piano as each new person entered, and the joke landed differently depending on the attendee. Garret chose not to smile and asked Christine to put on the NFL broadcast for the upcoming Eagles-Cowboys game. Meg and Marie were both charmed and chuckled at Erik’s enthusiasm as host for the day.
The best response, undoubtedly, came when Reza and his wife Sarah arrived with their 4-year-old daughter, Julia. The little girl immediately sat down and sang the song to Erik’s accompaniment, thus necessitating him to play the entire song. After it concluded, Julia demanded ‘Uncle Erik’ play “Let It Go” from Frozen and “You’re Welcome” from Moana , and Erik happily obliged.
“Secret Disney fan, are you?” Christine asked him when Julia lost interest in continuing the concert.
“Not so secret anymore. Garret and Reza are never going to let me live that down.”
“Oh, neither am I.” She was trying and failing to keep a straight face.
“Just for that, I’ll make you record a Disney duet with me. ”
“Erik, how do you use this f—” Garret pulled himself short when he noticed Julia looking at him with innocent eyes. “Flipping remote control?”
Erik and Christine shared an amused look as Erik moved to help his friend.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you’re Erik’s cousin,” Christine chastised Meg when she got her alone in the kitchen. She’d been tamping down a feeling of irritation toward her good friend to wait for the forthcoming explanation, but she was only human.
“Can you think of a reason or two I might have wanted to keep it private?” Meg asked, picking at some mixed nuts Christine had put out. Meg raised her thin eyebrows.
“I want to know your reasons,” Christine responded, unwilling to be cowed.
Meg sighed in annoyance. “Fine. Being affiliated with the Gardner name means people know I’m wealthy. That’s not something I feel is anyone’s business because it changes how people treat me. Suddenly, everyone wants me to pick up the check. My birthday presents to friends are judged harshly. No one respects my work as a dancer because they all think I had it easier than they did. Second, many women hear about my relationship with Erik and want me to set them up with him. That’s one reason Cynthia hates me so much. She found out I was related to Erik and was all about being my best friend until I told her I wouldn’t introduce them.”
Christine’s eyes widened. No wonder Cynthia wanted to drop off the audit paperwork—her sights were set on Erik. She shook her head, refocusing on the conversation. “You know neither of those would be the case with me.”
“Really? So you’re saying if you knew I was Erik’s cousin, you wouldn’t have tried to, say, slip me your résumé to give to him?” She tilted her head down and gave Christine a ‘who are you trying to kid?’ look.
Christine’s eyebrows came together, and she really thought about Meg’s predicament. If she’d known of their relationship, she would’ve at least tried to gauge whether Meg would be willing to help her.
“Christine, I know you’re nothing like Cynthia. But when I first met you, you told me about your dream of working for Gardner Industries. It was literally your life’s goal. I was nervous about how you’d treat me if you knew who I was. After being burned, I just wanted to be a friend, not a connection.”
Sighing, Christine really thought about Meg’s words. “That must have been difficult for you, and it sucks, people treated you that way.”
“It taught me who my real friends are, for sure.”
“So does it bother you that I’m dating your cousin?”
“Are you kidding me?” Meg held open her arms. “Give it here, girl!” She gave Christine a bear hug as much as was possible to get one from a 120-pound ballerina. “Do you see what you do for him? Look at where we are! My cousin is hosting a Thanksgiving dinner. He was playing Disney songs! For that, I’ll love you all my life, but what makes me truly happy is seeing how happy you are with him. Are you? Happy with him, I mean.”
Christine blushed, thrilled that she could confess the depth of her feelings to a friend. It made the truth feel real and more than a bit frightening. “I really am.”
“It’s such a funny story how you’ve been in each other’s orbit for years, only for you to come together now. ”
“For years?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. Erik always loved the famous Gus Derring.” They were momentarily distracted by Garret and Wendy’s yells as the Eagles took the lead. “Oh, let’s go watch. I bet Erik $10 that Garret would let an F-bomb slip in front of Julia by the fourth quarter.”
Christine pondered her friend’s words as they watched the rest of the game. An unbidden memory of the night in the elevator came to her.
In college, I used to go to the Blue Note on weekends. I saw him there a few times. He was outstanding.
Her mind went back to the night before, and there was something mysterious Erik had wanted to discuss with her but wasn’t ready to say. Centering herself, she resolved to get the answers she wanted before the night ended.
The Eagles managed to pull out a victory over the Cowboys—and covered the spread—much to the joy of everyone in attendance, but especially Garret and Wendy. In true Thanksgiving fashion, there was far too much food. Julia refused to eat anything except for the brioche Wendy had baked despite Reza and Sarah doing everything possible to cajole her into trying the stuffing, cranberry sauce, and turkey.
“Uncle Erik will sing you a song if you try the turkey, baby girl,” Sarah bribed, giving Erik a conspiratorial wink. Christine liked Sarah, who worked as a schoolteacher in Alpine, New Jersey where she and Reza lived. She shared Reza’s ballbusting sense of humor and kept her husband on his toes.
“Should we go around the room and say what we’re thankful for?” Christine asked when the group had gone for seconds and thirds and complained about their uncomfortably full stomachs.
“Really?” Erik rolled his eyes at Christine. “I thought people only did that in Hallmark movies.”
“I’ll go first.” Garret put his glass of beer down with a thud. “I’m thankful the Eagles are nine and three and have an easy back half of the season.”
“I’m thankful we live on the tenth floor of this building, so I don’t have to stuff you in a cab tonight.” Wendy laughed and affectionately patted her husband on the shoulder.
“I want to go next! I’m thankful for ice cream?” Julia looked at Christine with a questioning glance. Christine’s eyes met Sarah’s, who gave a little nod.
“Yes, we have ice cream for dessert.”
Julia gave a toothy grin. “Yes! Ice cream!”
“I’m thankful my school district hasn’t seen a single case of Flu this semester,” Sarah said, then immediately sneezed. “Oh no…” she fretted.
“And I’m thankful for the company health insurance plan,” Reza responded.
Christine noticed they were all keeping it light—trying to take the exercise with as little seriousness as possible. She looked at Erik, who was watching the exchanges, with a small smile.
“I’m thankful I needed to buy enough plates, napkins, cups, and whatnot for nine people,” he finally said, toying with the fork on his plate. Christine squeezed his thigh under the table, and he looked at her with a boyish grin. Everyone’s eyes were on her as they waited for her turn.
“I’m thankful for old elevators.”
The night ended, and the group dispersed. Reza carried a sleepy Julia on his shoulder. At the same time, Sarah extracted a promise Christine and Erik would come out for dinner sometime over the holidays. Garret stumbled along, discussing the possibility of an Eagles dynasty while Wendy cheerfully helped Christine and Erik box up leftovers. Marie gave her nephew a long hug that spoke of their affection.
“You take care of that girl, Erik. It’s so good to see you happy,” she whispered in his ear, out of Christine’s hearing.
“I will, Marie. Thank you for coming tonight.”
She patted his cheek affectionately. Meg gave him a high-five and a wink while she and her mother went downstairs to wait for their Uber.
It had been a fantastic night—the company, the food, but mostly the feeling that this was what Thanksgiving was supposed to be like. By the time he could remember Thanksgiving, his mother had alienated him from any distant relatives. The holiday was typically just the two of them eating at his mother’s club. There was no discussion of gratitude. They talked about music, or he listened to her complain about whatever petty concern aggravated her that day. He hadn’t connected with Marie until much later.
But tonight had been fun in a way he hadn’t experienced…ever. It made him additionally thankful for the people who had been there when he was miserable. He knew he owed a great deal to Christine for the joy she gave him, but he took some small satisfaction that his own efforts had also brought him here.
“Did you have fun tonight?” Christine asked, breaking him out of his reverie. She stood in the living room, waiting for him to clear the table.
“I did, thank you.” He put his arms around her and pulled her into a loose dance. He hummed an off-kilter rendition of “So This Is Love” from Cinderella , continuing the evening’s Disney theme.
Her fingers traced his jaw from the pristine side of his face across his chin to the scar tissue he hid from the world, as if conveying her love for him in that light touch. Her fingernails were soft and delicate, and he purred in contentment. She kissed him lightly on the lips and cupped his cheek.
“Erik.” She took a deep breath, and Erik sensed a nervous energy in how she said his name. “I know you’ve been keeping something from me. You might be scared to tell me, but I want to know. Please don’t keep me in the dark.”
“I’m prettier in the dark,” he said blithely before seeing the look of disappointment on her face.
Erik’s brow furrowed. He’d promised himself he would tell her tonight. He probably would’ve come up with some excuse, if he were honest. He took a step back, staring at the ceiling.
“You’re right,” he said solemnly. “I’ve been keeping something from you, and I’ve been scared to talk about it. By chance, what made you suspicious?”
“Meg said something tonight about you and my father. I don’t know what she meant, but last night you said you wanted to share something with me. I have a suspicion they might be the same thing.”
He nodded. She was so intelligent, so good, his Christine. Erik stepped back from her embrace and motioned for her to sit as he went to a large bookcase. Leafing through volumes, he picked up a thin book and handed it to Christine. She flipped through the grainy images of musicians at their trade—on stage performing with lazy camaraderie. There, on the second page, was a picture of Gus Derring sitting at the piano next to Erik.
“You knew my father?”
“Christine…” Erik’s soft voice echoed from a distance. In her gut, panic churned, accumulating size and weight. Her heart began to pound, and her body began to tremble. Unconsciously, she reached for Erik’s hand on her shoulder, holding on to the reality of his presence.
“I don’t understand. How— Why haven’t you told me this?” She looked at him, moisture gathering in her eyes. His voice was somber as he began his story.
“I told you about my trips to the jazz clubs. When we first went, it was because the bouncers there looked the other way at our phony IDs if we slipped them a twenty. But I fell in love with the music.” He paused and looked at her as if afraid to continue.
“Go on,” she whispered.
“There was one night when my buddy had too much to drink. He got into an argument with the next table. Before I knew it, I was flat on my back with someone punching me. The bouncers were all over us before anyone got seriously hurt. They were about to eject us, but your father stopped them from throwing me out. He’d noticed me at the club several times before, kind of copying his playing on the tabletop. Also, I was told I tip well when I’m drunk.”
He gave a wry smirk. “Gus took me under his wing. I stayed at the club till closing, and we talked. I told him about my experience with the piano, how his music had inspired me to want to play again, but I didn’t know where to start. He suggested he teach me, which was how I hired your father as my tutor. ”
“Every Saturday night, I would go to the city before the club opened, and he would teach me jazz, classical, pop, and even theater. He loved Disney soundtracks.” Erik chanced a look at her.
“Pixar especially—he liked Randy Newman and Michael Giacchino,” she said absently, as memories of her early childhood resurfaced. “He used to play them for me…” She looked down at the photo in the album, tracing the picture with a finger.
It was incredible seeing Erik amongst the wrinkle-worn faces of the professional players. He smiled broadly, a flop of dark hair curling over his forehead as he focused on whatever he was playing. He was so young, his body slender and youthful, white shirt soaked with sweat and sticking to his chest. He looked more at ease than she’d ever seen him. The joy on his handsome face was captured forever in the photograph.
“This was during my sophomore year of college. I’d been studying with your father for three years, and he invited me up on stage with him that night. I was terrified and said I’d fall flat on my face. And he said he’d catch me if I did.”
Christine gave Erik an alert glance, misery growing within her.
“After that, I snuck into the city whenever I could. Your dad was the closest thing I had to a father… After the accident, your father came to visit me every week, first in the hospital and later at my home in Princeton. One time, when I was feeling particularly low, he brought me Veselka’s and said that was what he always got you when you were sick.”
“So it wasn’t just a lucky guess…”
“No, but I swear I wasn’t trying to mislead you. It felt like I was coming full circle, like I could bring your father to you when you were at a low point, just like he’d done for me. Ultimately, his insistence I live my life began to win out, and I took lessons from him again. He was the one who insisted I practice an hour a day so I would have something I had to do—something to get me out of my head. It was his idea I compose. I was so resistant to sharing my feelings with anyone. Playing and composing became my coping mechanism.”
“He was in the car when he had the heart attack. Was he on his way to see you?”
“He was. When he didn’t show I asked Garret to check up on him. Garret saw you crying on your doorstep with the cops. I’d never felt so guilty in my life. He’d been coming to see me, and you didn’t have a father anymore. I took him away from you. I’m so sorry.” Erik’s eyes were red-rimmed.
“You…” She swallowed convulsively. “You didn’t kill my father. It’s not your fault he died any more than it’s mine. His heart gave out, but it would’ve done so anywhere. He could just as easily have died bringing me a forgotten lunch box.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “You paid for the funeral?”
Erik nodded. “It was the one kindness I could do, such a small token of respect. I also wanted to support you, but I was barely holding it together. I was alone in a mansion with a piano, reminding me of two people who were gone from my life, one I loved and one I disdained. It was many years later, when I got my head out of my ass, that I questioned how Gus’s daughter was surviving in the world. That’s when I started helping you whenever I could.”
“What did you do?” The feeling in her gut grew as her understanding of her reality continued to change.
“The Gardner Industries scholarship was created so you wouldn’t have to pay for college.”
She nodded. Of course it was. “What else?”
“I ensured Marie hired you when you applied to the opera. I never intended to meet you. Then, when we met, I behaved atrociously. I would’ve felt guilty for talking to anyone like that, but you were someone I was supposed to be looking out for! How could I treat Gus’s daughter so terribly? I had Reza contact you because I thought I could make it right. I wanted to give you space to forget me and make your dreams come true. Then we became friends, and I didn’t tell you because I figured our relationship would be brief. Then I was in love with you and scared you’d hate me if you knew the truth.” He looked at her. “Do you? Hate me, I mean.”
“Erik, I don’t hate you. I…I want to pretend this doesn’t matter…but, Erik, you have to see that it does!” Now that he’d shared his truth, that something churning inside her stomach morphed into a proper panic. She held the heels of her palms against her eyes before pulling down on her face to look at him.
“I do. I do see it matters.” Erik’s voice was low and wretched. He held his head in his hands, and against her will, she pitied him.
“I feel like I’m in one of those fun houses, just waiting for another trap door to open and swallow me up.” She looked at him with naked fear. “Everything I worked so hard to accomplish, and it feels like none of it was on my own merits.”
“That’s not true—you must know that’s not true. You got yourself into UPenn—into Binghamton. What did I give you that I didn’t take from you? Money—it was only money.”
“It’s easy for you to say ‘it was only money,’ you who never have to worry about money. And it wasn’t just money. It was the job at the opera too!” She ran a hand through her hair and stood so that she was looking down at him.
Erik raised his hands as if her anger was a physical blow he was staving off. “A job you would’ve gotten anyway. Marie’s told me multiple times that you’re the best hiring choice she’s ever made. Jessie Skies? You made that happen. Getting into Columbia? That was all you. ”
Christine considered his points silently. Even now, as she fumed at his confession, she felt annoyed at herself for how his praise warmed her.
“I’ve never been in a relationship like this, Erik. I’ve never been in love before. The stakes feel so much greater, and then to find out you’ve been keeping this from me?”
“Christine, I love you. I loved your father too. Everything I did for you before we met was because of what I owed to him, to you. But it doesn’t take away from what you’ve accomplished,” he pleaded up at her. “You’re so much more than anything I’ve ever done for you, or anything I could ever do for you.”
Exhausted and drained, Christine let out a slow exhale. “I know you did this out of love, and that’s what’s keeping me here instead of storming out in a huff. But you gotta admit…this whole backstory has a mild stalker vibe.” She fell back on the sofa, her body limp with emotional exhaustion.“Do you know why I didn’t sign the contract when Reza approached me?”
He shook his head.
“I’ve asked myself that more than a few times. God knows I was tempted. But I knew I couldn’t take the money from you. Part of it, a decent sized part, was that I wanted to succeed on my own merits.” She looked at Erik. “My father would’ve told me to take it, but he had a daughter to support. The thing is, I’d been admiring you from a distance for so long. You were my guardian angel and my hero in one. Then I got to meet you, and, at first, you were more amazing than I could’ve imagined. When I saw your face, your reaction scared me, but the feeling that lingered was pity. How could I take indiscriminately from someone who had already given me so much? How could I repay that generosity by suggesting he was worth less because of his face? So I said no, at least partly, because I already cared for you.”
She sighed. “And now I feel like I need to parse out those feelings of love from wondering how much of that was manipulated into existence—and I don’t want to have to do that! I want to forgive you. I want to forget this conversation because I love you so much, but I also know how fucked up it is for me to feel that way.”
“I regret so much about how I handled it. My only excuse was fear of your reaction.”
Christine looked at him. The good side of his face was taut as he watched her—his face, scarred and handsome in equal parts, which had become so dear to her. Yes, he withheld, but Christine believed him when he said he hadn’t intended to mislead her. She still loved him, and heaven help her, she wanted to give them this chance to be happy. Erik looked plainly petrified as he waited for her to speak.
“I understand why you’d feel that way, not because I intend to leave you but because you have such limited experience in trust. I want to…move past this, but I’m struggling with how when I don’t know if I can trust you.”
“I wish I could return to that elevator and confess to you. Tell you who I am and what your father meant to me.”
“You wouldn’t go back further?”
“It’s hard to wish for that. If I went back too far, you would be twelve, and I would be twenty-two, and it’d be extremely unlikely we’d be here together.”
“Yeah—that would be pretty creepy.” She gave a halfhearted laugh. “I told you…” She paused, then started again. “I told you I would enter this relationship on your terms, but that was overly optimistic of me, wasn’t it? You can’t keep secrets from me, Erik. At least, nothing to do with my life.”
“I promise—no more secrets.” His voice broke with apparent relief at her desire to move forward. “May—may I hold you? ”
She nodded, and Erik’s arms came around her, warm and familiar. Slowly, very slowly, the panic in her gut leached out until her breathing and heartbeat returned to nearly normal. She buried her head into his chest while she fought off this scary new insecurity his confession had left behind, like an itch that couldn’t quite be scratched.
“I love you, Christine.”
“I love you, too.” And she prayed it would be enough.