Lay Me To Sleep

Chapter Twelve - Violin

It had been a week since Lestat had began to teach me how to play piano. I was getting better at it each day. Lestat was correct in saying how wonderful a teacher he was.

Before the plague, I took violin lessons. I was always a beautiful player but it was extremely hard to learn. It took me a total of three years and many hours of practice to fully learn and appreciate the art of violin. My teacher was my mother.

That's how my parents met. Mother was a street player and a seamstress. She would go to work and then play after dark near crowds of people- young and old. Catherine wasn't born yet, but I was. So, she had herself and a young child of four to feed. She played in the streets of her homeland and father was taken with her, or what she had to offer him.

My Father, my real father I had never known, he had left my mother when she fell pregnant with me. My mother was strong and showed extreme courage in raising me alone for those four years. The next man she met, she married. That was Richard, he was really my step- father but he had instructed me to call him by "father".

Richard was never the fatherly type to me. Before the abuse started, I do believe he actually cared for my mother. But he never did connect or care for me. I believe if he could've, he would've convinced my mother to forsake me, and leave me on the doorstep of an orphanage. He then would've taken her to see the world. Or so he told me- often. But because she loved me, she would always choose me- never him. This he knew, so as I grew up, I was the reminder of his failure. He grew to hate me more each day.

Then the abuse started. At first it was little comments or he would call me profane things.

It soon escalated to violent fits of rage. He would yell at me, and he developed a taste for alcohol. His addictions consumed anything good that he previously had going for him. Mother could no longer play as much as she wished. The sound of her playing enraged him. He destroyed her instrument and began to be verbal with her. Soon she found out about his beating me and the repeated rapes, she pleaded with him to stop and attacked him when he pursued me. She tried her best but was never physically capable of fending him off. Any love they had shared had been no longer. She hated him but had no where else to go, she could no longer support the both of us on just her career as a seamstress. She needed her violin as well. Richard knew this. He after all was a bastard, but a smart one.

One night he went off crazier than usual, he damn near beat my beautiful mother to death. He then raped her in front of me. I was twelve then. She told me to go in the other room but I couldn't leave her with him. I wouldn't, and he told me that if I tried to run for help, he would put a bullet in my mother's head. All I could do was close my eyes and be there for her when all was over and done.

That summer, mother was pregnant once more- a baby girl- Catherine. He never loved me but he did love Catherine. He loved her until he died in that bar fight. The only regret I have, is that it wasn't me that got the opportunity to kill him. There were many a night when I fantasized about pulling the trigger of a gun aimed at his head.

You'd think that I would've had something against my young sister, I never did. I loved just as much as I loved my mother. We were finally a family and we were happy. Richard was dead and mother was here. I was able to get a job and saved up enough to buy mother another violin. She taught me how to play once she remembered how to herself. It was something we both enjoyed. Catherine never got the chance to learn, she died long before she ever could. That's when the Black Death took my family from me. When we were most happy, that is when tragedy would always strike. I could never seem to outrun the darkness. It chases me, even now, it is like a moth drawn to flame.

This is my secret. They are my secret place. I find happiness when I think of them.

As I played the piano in the parlor I began to weep softly. Footsteps called after me. I quickly wiped away my tears as Louie entered the room, wine in hand.

"Why do you weep, Nina?" He asked, concerned.

"It is nothing. Just the ghosts of past days."I reply earnestly. I continue to play.

"Do you wish to talk about them? " he paused, "I too, once had a family- a wife. She died in childbirth. Her name was Veronica, the child, Ana, she died as well. I miss them, even now."he told me.

I then told him my story and he told me his. It was just the two of us in the quiet of the parlor. After we talked about our lives before, we went into the library. Louie, I had come to find, was an avid reader, like myself. He had a whole room dedicated to the books he had collected over the years. I ran my hands across the old spines of novels. Some looked to be older than he was.

" Such an amazing collection you have, Louie. Truly." I said as I picked up a book. The book was snatched from my grasp quickly. I looked to Louie for an explanation and he granted me one.

" My private journals." He said apologetically as he bowed his head. I laughed and told him I could never read such a thing. He looked to me, relieved. "Please. Go on, take your pick of anything." I picked up a book and sat in the chair across from him. We sat in silence as we read on. The quiet- our company.