As Annasophia watched, he opened his eyes, waking from his latest doze, and turned his head slowly toward her. “Elena,” he said in a weak, yet urgent, voice.
Elena, Matt's mother, had been Maestro's wife from 1963 to 1970, when they had divorced. They had briefly reunited in 1974, the year Matt had been born, but had separated again in 1978 and divorced for good in 1980. A weird relationship, to be sure. Elena had died ten years ago, and Annasophia had never met her or even seen a picture of her. There weren't even any pictures of Elena on the Internet Annasophia had been able to find. It was almost as though she and Maestro had never been married at all, except that Matt was proof. Of sorts. Matt hadn't been close to Elena, either. She'd asked him about his mom once, and he, ever-tight lipped, had replied, simply, that he and his mom had never gotten along. Strange that Maestro would be asking for Elena now.
With most of the odd things Maestro had been saying, Annasophia and Matt just played along. She didn't feel right playing along with this, though. Elena wouldn't be coming, even if Maestro wanted her to. Her heart seemed to crawl up into her throat. How sad for Maestro to yearn for Elena, after so many years of estrangement, then death. He must have loved her far more than Annasophia could have thought. A surprise, to say the least, given his apparent indifference the few times he had spoken about her.
“Maestro, I'm sorry, but Elena can't be here–”
He shook his head. “Don't let her know...” His voice trailed off into a mumble, but the urgency that had been in his tone remained on his face.
Poor Maestro. Perhaps he wasn't yearning for Elena at all. He might have traveled back in time, if only in his head. For him, Elena was still alive. Maybe he was remembering a difficult patch of their marriage, sometime during the period they had tried to live together again following Matt's birth. Annasophia looked over at Matt to see if any of this made sense to him, but he looked as perplexed as she felt.
“It's okay,” she told Maestro.
He looked at her again, and his gaze was more clear and sharply focused than she'd expected it would be. “No, it isn't. She knew what to do, and then...” His eyelids fluttered and his head fell back against the pillow. He'd probably be out another few minutes or so. Every time he lost consciousness, he lost it for a little bit longer time.
Annasophia's eyes welled with tears, and she put her hand on his. It wouldn't be long until he was gone. His hand jerked slightly under hers, as if he were still trying to communicate. She looked fixedly at her hand, which partially covered his large one. For all she knew, before he had slipped into unconsciousness again, he had gone back in his mind to when he'd been a little boy.
She glanced back up and started when she found that Maestro was staring at her, his eyes huge and haunted in his ashen face. “The door. You've got to guard the door. If you don't, you'll die.”
Annasophia shivered. Where was Maestro? With her, with Elena, with someone else? The sharpness of his gaze, though, didn't lie. He looked like he was with her here and now, not somewhere else in his mind. What he was saying, though, didn't make any sense. Was he afraid someone was going to come into his hospital room? It wasn't like Maestro to have worries like that, but who could tell what a person might come up with, filled with pain medicine and with body processes that were slowly shutting down.
“Don't worry,” she told him. “I'll guard the door.”
His mouth worked, but nothing came out, and to her surprise, tears welled up in his eyes and spilled onto his cheeks. His eyelids slowly slid shut and his head fell back onto the pillow. She hoped next time he came to, he wouldn't feel so anguished. Bad enough for him to be passing away without specters from the past haunting him, whoever or whatever they might be.
Annasophia sat back in her chair. Matt still sat on the other side of Maestro, but his face was almost as white as his father's had been. Staring fixedly at the floor as though he were afraid to look anywhere else, he looked as shocked and distraught as he had when Annasophia had told him about his father's diagnosis.
“Matt, are you hanging in–”
Someone started humming the melody line from the second movement, Adagio Sostenuto, of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. It wasn't Matt's voice. Though he adored music, he never sang or hummed. When Annasophia had asked him why, he'd told her he was too shy. She pressed a bit, and apparently, from what little she was able to get out of him, she figured out that his mother had behaved nastily to him when, as a little boy, he tried to sing. Annasophia scanned the doorway to see if anybody else had come in. Nope. The humming increased ever-so-slightly in volume, and Annasophia realized the sound was coming from right beside her.
From Maestro, though from all appearances, he appeared unconscious.
If he had been well, she would have recognized his voice. Over the years she had studied with him at the University, he had, once in a while, hummed bars of the pieces she was learning, and sometimes he had sung them to her without words while she played. Since he was so sick, though, his voice sounded far away, as though he were lost to her already.
But he wasn't. Oh, he wasn't. There he lay, and he was humming one of Annasophia's favorite pieces, though for the first time, she wondered why she'd never worked with Maestro on that particular piece. When, at seventeen, she suggested they choose Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 2 for her to work up for a concerto competition, he had insisted she work up Concerto No. 1 instead, since it would wow the judges more with her technical finesse. She had agreed but had intended to learn Concerto No. 2 on her own.
She had never gotten around to it.
How well, though, she knew the music. It was one of her favorite pieces to listen to. And now, listening to it being hummed in Maestro's voice, a voice she knew well and associated strongly with many happy and challenging years of studying piano with him, she began to cry. The imminence of his loss hit her as though somebody had squarely socked her in her chest, and she clapped her hand over her mouth. No, she reminded herself. She would be strong for Maestro. No crying. Not when she was sitting here with him. He might be lost in some netherworld between living and dying, but there was a slight chance he could hear her if she broke down, so she must not break down.
She felt his hand move under hers. Slowly, he turned his hand over and squeezed her fingers. When she glanced at him, his eyes were wide, almost frenzied, but though he was looking right at her, he seemed to be looking through her. “Use the door,” he said in a voice that sounded nearly equal to his strong, deep voice when he'd been well. “Use the door, but guard it well.”
As though he had lost most of his energy by speaking so forcefully, he drew in a long breath and his head fell back against the pillow again. Along with his exhale, though, came light humming: yes, still Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 2.
The door. What door could he possibly want her to use? In her mind surfaced a mental image of the picture from the email, of young Maestro, who held in the circle of his arms a woman who looked exactly like her.
Realization just about knocked the breath out of Annasophia. The music. His words. His desperate urgency and effort. He wasn't talking about a literal door. “Matt, I have to run back to my apartment for just a few minutes.”
Gravely, he looked at her and nodded. Poor Matt. She needed to be here for both Maestro and Matt, but there was something she had to try. Something Maestro had just suggested. If it didn't work, then she'd know in a hurry. If it did work, then... well, she had no idea, but it would mean that in a very real sense, she would have more time to spend with Maestro before he died. The more her rational mind insisted on the craziness of the idea, the greater became her need to give it a go.
Maybe she'd gone out of her mind. Heck, she probably had. Some of her greatest songs, though, had come to her when she felt like this. Untethered and completely open to possibilities. Unfortunately, she didn't own the music for Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 2.
But she had always excelled at playing by ear.
* * * ~~~ * * *
<
br /> Chapter Three
Annasophia hoped she wasn't making a big mistake. Maestro's time was growing shorter and shorter. She had to try this, though. If she was right...
Her breath caught. Oh, if she was right!
She rushed into her living room and sat on the bench of her spinet piano. She could play the digital piano she used for performing, but her gut told her that what she was about to try would work better on an acoustic instrument. After all, digital pianos of the sort she owned weren't remotely in evidence back in 1973. If time travel was possible, then her instrument should be an appropriate conduit: as common then as now.
She summoned the rich, sensual strains of Adagio Sostenuto to her mind. Then, closing her eyes, she placed her hands on the piano keys. The music played in her mind, and her fingers began to move. She wasn't playing it note-perfect, but she was playing it, and the music she made on her piano melded with the beauty she heard in her head, and on top of it all came Maestro's voice as she had heard him humming it while lying in the hospital bed.
As she continued to play, swept away by the sound and the feel, she started to hear another piano playing the music, more skillfully than she was now playing it, but she kept on, because they seemed to be playing not just together but for each other, echoing back and forth, back and forth. One moment, she heard her own playing more clearly, the next moment she heard the other's playing more clearly. Dimly, she was aware of her cell phone's ring tone from inside her purse, which she had thrown on the floor nearby. No. Shut up. She squeezed her eyes tightly closed, but the damn thing just kept on ringing, and the more she focused on the ringing, the less she could hear the other pianist, and the more she fumbled up her own playing.
Shit on a stick.
She had to answer the phone. It might be the hospital. If Maestro was worsening, she had to get back there, door or no door. Matt was by his side, true, but she wanted to be with Maestro when he passed away. He deserved nothing less than the gift of her love at this time, or any other time.
Any other time. Again, in her mind, she heard the other piano seeming to play along with her, and also along with more sounds which she couldn't quite place.
The phone's ring tone came again. Relentless thing. She pulled it out of her purse. “Hello.”
Silence.
“Hello?”
An automated voice said, “Please hold for an important message.”
Good grief. She had messed up whatever was going on for a wrong number... or a telemarketer? She should have checked caller ID. Hell, she shouldn't have answered the phone in the first place.
What she wanted to try would take only a few minutes, she reminded herself. What was the harm in turning off her phone for that brief length of time? It was pretty clear that hearing its ring tone had jerked her away from wherever she had been. She had to try to go back.
She turned off the phone and put it in her purse. Now, back to Rachmaninoff. She closed her eyes again – for years, she had been skilled at playing by touch – and resumed Adagio Sostenuto. For some moments, all she heard was her own playing. Anxiety tied a knot in her stomach. No. Surely she wouldn't get only one chance. If this was a conduit – a door, Maestro had said – then it had to work. Besides, there was that picture. That picture couldn't exist unless she had, indeed, gone back in time.
The picture was of her and Maestro, years before she had been born. She knew it. Yes, skilled graphic artists could do incredible jobs with faking photos. But nobody or nothing could create that expression on her face except for real life, some real life in which she had fallen deeply in love with someone.
It would work. It must work. She played and played, but nothing happened. I'm trying to force it, she told herself. Just let go. Believe. And soon, in her mind, she heard – ever so faintly – the sound of the other piano. It built in power and volume until she was playing along not only with the other piano but with a full orchestra. Wow. She hadn't experienced anything like this in years. The temperature of the room seemed to go up a little, then she couldn't hear her own music anymore, just the other piano and the orchestra. It seemed to fill not only her mind but also her entire body, swelling all her nerve endings nearly to bursting.
She was no longer playing the piano in her apartment. The touch and feel had changed. This piano had a more solid feel, and she had to use more muscle to play fortissimo. She didn't dare stop playing. If the Rachmaninoff concerto had caused this change, then she probably ought to play through to the end, or as near as she could come. How rapturous to play with an orchestra again. She hadn't done this since she was eighteen and Maestro's student at Southern Mountain State University. She had won a concerto competition playing Rachmaninoff's Concerto #1, then she had played it with the Johnson City Symphony Orchestra.
She could hear her own playing again, but the other piano had to be amplified, because she could hear it much more clearly than her own. Oh, those orchestral strains! She had never heard anything to equal them. The members of the orchestra accompanying the pianist played as skillfully as the pianist, and it all came together to create a symphony of bliss. And she was playing along, a part of it all. She could stay here and play forever, until her arms fell off from fatigue, or whichever came first. And if it turned out that all she was doing was deluding herself, sitting in her apartment losing her mind, at least nobody would see her, and when she'd finished the concerto, she'd go back to the hospital with nobody the wiser.
The concerto reached its end, and she finished up her own playing a few bars after the other piano. Uh oh. What would the other pianist think? How silly. He or she – he? – probably hadn't been able to hear her. Thunderous applause erupted, and Annasophia leaped to her feet. She opened her eyes without meaning to. Her mouth dropped open, and she fell back on the piano bench.
She'd been playing not her brown, spinet piano, but a sleek, black studio piano. A Baldwin, no less. Her apartment piano was a Wurlitzer. No wonder the touch had been different. She seemed to be backstage, but backstage where? For what? Listening to whom? It wasn't like any backstage she had ever seen. This place sparkled as though every square inch had been cleaned by a toothbrush. Her eyes wide, she stared at the double doors that separated her from what was, presumably, the stage. Another set of double doors marked the opposite side from where she sat. The applause continued, and she heard footsteps. Coming closer. A man came through the double doors, from the stage. He was so tall and wide-shouldered that he seemed to fill the doorway. Not that she could focus on anything but him: his slightly wavy, short dark hair, his rugged features as if his cheeks had been chiseled out of granite, and his intense brown eyes. He wore black tie and tails – concert attire.
Annasophia stood, and her hand went to her throat.
Maestro.
The applause continued, and he cast her a brief glance that was filled with curiosity but utterly devoid of recognition. He went back onstage, and the applause increased in volume. Annasophia looked around. She was alone back here. For now.
As she thought about what went on after her shows backstage, she felt her face grow hot with a fierce blush, and she felt ashamed of herself. Maestro would never behave like that. She knew it. Yeah, he probably wouldn't figure it of her, either, but who knew? Maestro was well aware of how, so often, she had never felt worthy of love, and he knew she'd never been in a stable, lasting relationship. The few relationships she had been in had never lasted longer than six months.
There had been Tim Calloway from college, who had followed her around like a puppy and smothered her half to death. Next had come Fred Duff, a fellow musician. He had turned out to be an alcoholic who liked nothing better than to lie around in his cluttered apartment and marinate his vital organs in whiskey. Then Annasophia had become involved with Al Mars, one of her groupies. She'd initially been attracted to his energy and enthusiasm both in and out of the bedroom, but he had turned out to be a paranoid conspiracy theorist who had driven her out of her mind with his continual ranting and
raving about everything from the Masons to corporate logos. Yeah, she could really pick them. Always men who were damaged in some way. Like her.
A man like the younger Maestro was way out of her league. As an older man, her mentor, he had seen that she had promise. As a young man, he would be a lot more likely to see – or to intuit – her damage. Her screw-ups. Literally and figuratively. She'd always felt transparent to the Maestro she knew, though he was wise and kind and had never judged her. But here was a Maestro – no, not her Maestro, but Wilhelm Dahl at the height of his acclaim as a concert pianist – who didn't know she was alive.
He was about to find out. She had better think of a better way to introduce herself to him than, “Hi, I just arrived from thirty-seven years in your future.” That would either send him running away from her as far as he could go, or it would make him want to call the men with butterfly nets to come and slap her butt into the nearest loony bin.
###
Maestro had three curtain calls. Each time he briefly returned backstage, he cast a curious glance at Annasophia, each more probing than the last, and – she fancied – a little warmer. Yeah, he found her attractive – how well she knew that look from men – but was there nothing about her that he recognized?
Well, there was no reason why she would appear to be anything more than the stranger that she was to him right now, in this time. She felt more than just a little discombobulated. Here was a man she had known nearly all her life, and not only was she a stranger to him, he was, in a real sense, a stranger to her, too. When he passed through the double doors, she peeked at the stage and spied the glossy black corner of a concert grand piano, around which sat music stands and chairs for the orchestra that had accompanied him. She caught a glimpse of numerous seats, floor and balcony, and ivory-colored walls highlighted by sculptured designs that featured gold inlays. Astonishingly beautiful. Before becoming a singer-songwriter, Annasophia had dreamed of playing in places like this.
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