The Year of Shadows (18 page)

“No.” Frederick paused. Then he said carefully, “In fact, the only people who can see shades are those who, like the shades, have experienced true loss.”

During every class the next day at school, I tried to focus on my latest sketch. It was the ocean of melting music from my dream, Mom being tossed around in its waves. I thought maybe if I drew the nightmare out of my mind, I’d stop thinking about it—stop feeling glad, stop feeling guilty.

But concentration was impossible. Frederick’s words stuck in my brain like thorns.
Only those who have experienced true loss can see shades.

What counted as true loss? I guess Mom leaving was my true loss. Putting those words to it made me feel ripped open. Loss. I had
lost
her.

No. She had left me. You can’t lose someone who knew exactly what she was doing when she left you behind.

I stabbed the paper with my charcoal, black dust flaking off the tip. This was my last piece of sketch paper. I tried not to think about that, coloring in the inky sea over and over, black as night, black as Death.

Another thought came to me as I worked, as Mrs. Farrity drew diagrammed sentences on the board and Joan shot disapproving looks at me for not paying attention:

Henry had also seen the shades.

He must have lost something too.

NOVEMBER

T
HAT FIRST WEEK
of November, we went crazy searching for Frederick’s music. Every evening after work at The Happy Place, I’d find Henry, wherever he’d camped out in the Hall working on his homework. The ghosts were usually hanging around him, so we’d set out an agenda for the evening, split up, and search.

We found nothing for a few days. I started to lose my patience. So did old Kepler. He kept whacking us with his broom and yelling at us for crawling around in the dirt like a couple of miscreants.

Finally, the only place left was the Maestro’s bedroom.

During one of the first November concerts, while the orchestra fumbled through Dvorák’s New World Symphony and the Brahms violin concerto, I snuck into the Maestro’s room. Igor slid through, right on my heels. I shut the door behind me and switched on the light.

Music clogged every inch of this room—recorded music, music lying silent within the upright piano crammed into
the corner, music in the old photographs of conductors plastering the walls.

“Well,” I said, nudging trash around with my foot.

Igor yawned.
Well, what?

“I guess we dig in.”

Igor plopped onto the ground, tail twitching lazily.
We? I don’t think so, friend.

I rolled my eyes and began to search. I rifled through each stack of music one at a time—scores of symphonies, concertos, weird experimental music that the orchestra didn’t play anymore. It was hard enough getting people to come hear the popular, classic stuff, much less weird experimental music. Weird experimental music didn’t fly since The Economy.

Piece after piece after piece, and nothing by Frederick van der Burg.

I shoved the fifth giant stack of music aside, ready to give up, when I noticed the old cardboard box beside the Maestro’s cot. It was full of used tissues, crusty plates, and moldy books—but at the bottom of the box, I found a hard plastic container.

Igor darted over and rubbed his head against the edge of the box.

“Oh yeah, now you’re paying attention to me, because I actually found something interesting,” I said.

Frederick’s music would most likely not be at the bottom of some plastic box beside the Maestro’s bed. But I opened the box anyway.

And inside, I found letters.

Bundles of letters, tied up with rubber bands. I recognized the writing on the front of the first letter:
Otto Stellatella, 481 13th Street, Apartment 4E.

Mom’s handwriting—loopy, dreamy, never the same twice.

I dropped the letters like they were actually a bunch of spiders.

Igor raised his kitty eyebrows.
What’s the problem?

“They’re letters,” I whispered. “Letters Mom wrote to the Maestro.”

And some that he wrote to her.

Igor butted against my shoe.
Aren’t you going to look at them?

“No.” But my hands were pulling them into my lap, and my fingers were undoing the string around the first bundle—the oldest one. The earliest postmarked date was almost twenty years ago.

My brain screamed,
No, I don’t want to read this!
But my fingers opened the envelope anyway:

Dear Otto,

Thank you for your letter. I must admit, I was startled to hear from you. It was lovely to talk with you that night at the concert, but I never dreamed I’d hear from you again.

I’m blushing as I write this. Isn’t that silly? But then, I blushed the entire time we spoke that night—on that terrace, in the breeze. I still have your jacket, by the way. Won’t you need it before your next concert? Maybe we’ll have to meet, if only so I can return it to you.

I’m blushing again! If you were here, would you touch my cheek like you did that night? Would you tell me how lovely I am when I blush?

I closed the letter and put it back into its envelope. My face was about to melt clean off. I couldn’t even think about all that blushing and touching cheeks and cool night breezes on terraces without wanting to crawl under the Maestro’s cot and hide. This letter was from when they first met. “I met your father on a starlit night,” Mom would tell me when I asked, and smile at the Maestro. Back when she actually smiled at him.

I reached for the next letter, automatically, like a robot. It was from the Maestro.

Dear Cara,

If I were there, lovely girl, and you blushed for me again, I would take you in my arms and—

Okay, no. None of that. I shoved the letter away.

Igor’s tail twitched as he watched me.
What’s wrong with you?

“Nothing.”

Igor blinked that slow cat blink designed to make you feel like a moron.
What did you
think
love letters were like?

“I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it.” But I remembered how they used to look at each other—Mom and the Maestro. Their eyes would be so soft. Even when the Maestro
was busy working, if Mom said his name, he would look up and smile, and he would become this whole different person.

“What went wrong, Igor?” I thumbed through the rest of the letters in my lap. I didn’t stop to read any of them, but I saw flashes of words like
love
and
kiss
,
miss you
, and toward the end, my name—
Olivia
. Had they kept writing letters to each other after I was born, just for fun? “What happened to them?”

I didn’t blame Mom for leaving. But when had
I love you
turned into ignoring each other, into all that shouting? I didn’t understand that. Why had the Maestro gotten so busy? Why had he stopped eating dinner with us, paying attention to us, coming home even to sleep?

The only answer I could think of was the one I’d always known—the orchestra.

Looking around the Maestro’s room at all that music stacked everywhere, I felt the old hate bubble up inside me. He had chosen this over Mom—this dusty, moldy music. I didn’t understand that, either.

At the bottom of the letters were some that looked different than the ones I’d been reading. These letters were addressed to Gram’s house. Mom’s mom. They all had yellow “return to sender” stickers on them. The envelopes were sealed; they had never been opened.

“Does ‘return to sender’ mean Mom never got these letters?” I said, frowning.

Igor watched me steadily.
Mm-hmm.

I examined the postmarked dates. December of last year to February of this year. “These are from after Mom left. There are tons of them.”

Fifty-two, to be precise. Fifty-two letters over three months, all from the Maestro to Mom, all returned unopened and unread.

Why? Why had he written them, and why had Mom not answered? All that kissing and blushing and all those
I love you
s, and she didn’t answer one single letter? I mean, I certainly wouldn’t have. But Mom wasn’t me. Mom wasn’t supposed to not answer letters, to ignore us like we’d never existed.

I opened the first “return to sender” letter. It read:

Cara, dearest, dearest Cara,

Where have you gone? I tried calling your mother, and she will not talk to me. I tried every number I had. I tried your office. No one will speak to me, Cara. What have you done? Where have you gone? You cannot do this to me. I can change. “No, you can’t,” you will say, but I can. And what about Olivia?

I stopped reading. My eyes were thorny. I opened another one:

My Cara, my lovely Cara,

It has been two months, and still I have not heard from you. Where are you, Cara, where? The orchestra is—things are not going well. I need you, Cara. I need you, my dream.

That one, I shoved back into its envelope so hard that it ripped.

Igor’s whiskers twitched.
Careful. You’ll get a paper cut, and those can sting.

“Shut up.” I was not going to cry, and nothing I could find inside these envelopes would make me.

I opened the last “return to sender” letter. It said only:

Cara. Where are you?

I stared at those words for a good five minutes straight, and then put all the letters back in the box where I’d found them, and then I sat in the middle of the floor with my arms around my knees.

“Well, wasn’t that interesting?” My voice sounded so calm, so outside of my head, like I was listening to a recording of myself.

Igor rolled over on his back.
Isn’t my belly nice and fuzzy? Don’t you want to give it a pet?

I snatched Igor up into my arms and buried my face in his neck.

“Why wouldn’t she answer him?” I whispered. “Where did she go? Why didn’t she ever send
me
letters? She could have; I wouldn’t have shown them to him. I would’ve kept it a secret.”

Igor wiggled loose.
Maybe it was too hard for her to write you letters.

“Too hard to keep in touch with her
daughter
? If I can sell
my things and live on a cot and have to draw on napkins, then she could have sucked it up, you know? She could have written me something, anything.”

From down the hall, the Maestro’s voice boomed, probably yelling at one of the musicians. I jumped to my feet, dumping Igor to the floor. I hadn’t even noticed that the music from the concert had stopped.

But it was too late. I ran out of the room and straight into the Maestro’s stomach.

I
MMEDIATELY THE MAESTRO
caught me by the shoulders. Igor ran away down the hall toward the kitchen.

“What were you doing in my room?” The Maestro was in his full-blown post-concert state—skin flushed and sweating, hair wild, the permanent bags under his eyes even darker than normal. People didn’t like to mess with the Maestro after concerts, especially not these days. But I could think only about those unopened letters, one after another after another.