Maestro

by Thomma Lyn Grindstaff

  Hastily, he sat down beside her on the bench. “You will see me in the future, Schätzchen. In the next moment, the next hour, and...” His voice grew husky again. “Tonight.”

  Oh, I wish, Annasophia thought. For a moment, she allowed herself to imagine what it would be like, she and Maestro in his bed, joined together not just from physical desire, but from love and mutual affinity: searing hot kisses, coming together, not just the heat of their bodies but the glow of their love and the harmony of their minds and hearts. Now, she would never know what that would have been like. Her tears spilled onto the backs of her hands.

  She was doing this for Matt.

  Closing her eyes and holding Matt's face firmly in her mind, she played the opening bars of the first movement of Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 2. She didn't have Maestro's top-notch technical skill, though hers was far from shabby, and because she was playing it by ear, it didn't match the perfection and precision of his performance, but she knew her playing was filled with her heart and that Maestro could hear it.

  “My God, Miss Anna,” she heard him say. “Are you playing by ear?” Admiration and awe filled his voice, which made her tears flow faster, harder.

  She couldn't reply. She could only keep playing, the image of Matt's face blotting out everything else in her mind, even – by strongest effort of her will – Maestro's voice, her mental image of his face, her hot desire, her aching love, and the burgeoning of agony in her chest as, with every note she played, she realized more and more the finality of this decision: saying goodbye to Maestro in this timeline and soon to say goodbye to him in her own. No more comings-together for her and Maestro, only the finality of farewell. She started to sob so hard that she had difficulty playing, but somehow, she made herself continue.

  The feel of the piano keys changed under her fingers, and she no longer felt the warmth of Maestro's body next to hers. Somehow, the concerto was becoming more difficult for her to play. It was as though she were losing her technical skill. She could still hear the concerto in her mind, but reproducing the music felt like a herculean task, and before she knew it, she was picking out a rough melody with her right hand while playing rudimentary chords with her left hand. It was the way she'd played when she'd been a small child, at least whenever she'd been lucky enough to encounter a piano.

  She hardly ever encountered pianos, though she enjoyed them whenever she did. Undoubtedly, if life had gone a little better, Annasophia might have been quite an excellent pianist. Her mom had never wanted to buy a piano, though, and Dad had left long ago. Annasophia had used to beg to be allowed to take piano lessons, and once, Mom had relented after a lady she knew heard Annasophia play by ear and insisted she was a child prodigy. On one of her rare, sober days, Mom had taken Annasophia to Southern Mountain State University in hopes of finding her a good teacher, but for some reason, Annasophia hadn't bonded with any of them, and Mom had given up, deciding it wouldn't have been worth the fuss or the expense, anyhow.

  Why was she sitting here at this piano? Where was she?

  Annasophia stopped playing and looked around. Two names urgently rang in her mind. Maestro. Matt. She didn't know anyone named Matt, and she'd never called anybody Maestro. She stood up from the piano bench, and dizziness seized her. She plopped back down. The piano was a spinet that stood in the lobby of what looked to be a large health care facility. People were walking around all over the place, coming off elevators, heading towards elevators, going to an eating establishment or the nearby gift shop. A hospital, no doubt. How had she gotten to a place like this? There was no hospital this size in Johnson City, Tennessee.

  The concerto, something deep inside Annasophia said. You got here from playing the concerto, and something has gone horribly wrong. You have to play the concerto again to make things right. Only then will you know what's wrong, because now, you can no longer remember, and you won't ever remember as long as you stay here.

  Had she gone insane?

  She had to know where she was. And what the hell day was it? Why wasn't she at work at the University where, Monday through Friday, she served as secretary for the Music Department? Damn, she wanted a drink. She tried not to drink during the day, saving her vodka for evening and sometimes nighttime, but under these circumstances, a case of vodka would be damn handy.

  So you're drinking now, too, the inner voice said. Play that concerto. Now. Before you get any more entrenched here, before you feel too much like you belong here. Because you don't. You have a better life, though you don't know it right now.

  Shut up, she told the inner voice. She got up from the bench and went to a nearby information desk. There was no ordinary information desk, like the ones in the hospitals in the Tri-Cities region of East Tennessee. This information desk didn't even have any people. Instead, it had four digital kiosks. She'd heard of these things, but she had never used one before. All of them were being used but one. Annasophia ran her fingers through her hair – short? Hadn't she worn it long? What a silly thought. It had always been short. Hoping that weird inner voice wouldn't start in on her again, she approached the unused kiosk to examine it more closely.

  At the top of the kiosk was printed, Lucas Friend Memorial Cancer Center, with an address on 14th Street in Manhattan.

  New York City?

  The room started spinning, and Annasophia gripped the sides of the kiosk to keep from falling. This was wrong. She'd never been to New York City in her life. And she had sixty dollars in her pocket. How the hell was she going to get back to Johnson City? Or maybe was she imagining every bit of this craziness and was really back in the psychiatric hospital in Johnson City, where she had spent quite a bit of time in her late teens and early twenties for drug overdoses.

  Play the concerto now, the inner voice said. You don't want this life. It isn't your life.

  The fuck it wasn't. Yeah, it sucked pretty bad, but it was her life. Still, something about that inner voice pulled at her. Okay, maybe she was in the psych ward somewhere, stoned out of her mind. If that was the case, then what did she have to lose by giving in to a crazy whim? She'd go play the damn piano again, if only to shut up that voice. Being nuts was bad enough without having inner voices to listen to. At any rate, if she was truly stuck in New York City, with no idea of how she'd gotten here, she had surely managed to do something asinine and lose her job at Southern Mountain State University.

  Playing that piano sure couldn't hurt. Despite her ear gift, though, she'd never had any training, and over the years, with so little time to spend with music, what gift she possessed had grown rusty with disuse. Regardless, music still sparked a little something like magic in her, something that shone, however feebly, through tiny cracks in her plate mail cynicism.

  Annasophia went back to the piano and sat down on the bench. She lifted her hands to play – what had she been supposed to play? She couldn't remember now. Oh, yes. Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 2. Ha, what a joke! She could play the Big Note Easy Version by ear, but that was about it. Sighing, she started to play, then stopped when she heard a name float to her from someone who was speaking nearby.

  “Wilhelm Dahl...” a male voice said.

  Hadn't she heard that name before, somewhere, somehow? Oh, yes. She remembered. He was a famous concert pianist, like Vladimir Horowitz had been and like Sviatoslav Richter had been. She had watched some of his performances on YouTube, along with those of Horowitz and Richter. Well, she had listened to the latter two on YouTube. There was no video footage of Horowitz or Richter that she could find, though there was a bit for Dahl. He'd been performing for decades, though. He had devoted his whole life to the stage. He'd been married for a while but hadn't had any children, and from what she knew about him, he seemed to be more in love with music than he could be with any human.

  Sometimes she fantasized about having been able to take that route for herself in life. Though Annasophia wasn't very good at playing classical music, she loved listening to it.

  She glanced in the directio
n the voice had come, and heard more. “Going to die soon?” a middle-aged woman asked.

  “I don't know,” responded her companion, a middle-aged man. “But supposedly, he's here, and he's in really bad shape.”

  What was there about those words that pierced her heart like an arrow? She closed her eyes, and for the tiniest instant, she saw a face in her mind. She didn't recognize the face, but she wished that she did. The man was heart-stoppingly handsome and had the kindest eyes she had ever seen. He looked so sad. Almost as sad as she felt.

  She opened her own eyes with a jerk, and tears came to her eyes. Jerk was right. The only men she'd ever known – in all sense of the word – had been nothing but jerks. Using bastards, every single one of them. All she wanted was to be loved, but all they wanted was to screw her and then go on their way. Useless. Everything was useless. Even love.

  “...a great loss to the world of music,” said the middle-aged woman who had been speaking about Wilhelm Dahl.

  Great loss. So very sad. Yes, music was the conduit. She would figure out how to get back to Johnson City, and she would then find out whether she'd lost her job. Hell, she might be in some psych ward. But for now, in honor of Wilhelm Dahl, she would sit here and play this piano. She would play for what she might have had in her life had she been braver, had she been able to let just a little more light into her daily realm of shadows. Music represented that to her. It always had, and perhaps – just perhaps – it still could.

  Just for now, she would allow herself just a little bit of hope.

  She glanced at the keyboard and got her hands in position to start picking out what she remembered of Concerto No. 2. It wasn't very much – mainly her favorite part from the second movement, which struck her as romantic, sexy, and cosmic, all at the same time. If only she could give it the proper skill it deserved. Closing her eyes, with her fingers in the right place, she started plunking it out. Not anywhere on the same planet as how Dahl, Richter, or Horowitz would make it sound. Still yet, making music of any kind soothed her, and as she played, she fancied she was developing more technical skill, though she knew that had to be her imagination. The keys seemed to change under her touch, and now, she was playing with confidence and skill, and of course she was playing well because she was a classically-trained pianist who had learned from a teacher who was nothing short of the very best. Someone else was playing with her. As she played, her hands bumped into somebody else's, somebody who was playing the concerto with her, or had been playing before she came.

  Maestro.

  Annasophia opened her eyes. She'd come back to him – the young one. A few people left at the bar and in the lobby were staring at her, and one of them rubbed his eyes.

  She jerked her hands off the keys as though they had delivered an electric shock, and Maestro, who had also been playing the piano, pulled her into his arms. “I brought you back, I brought you back,” he murmured. She felt tears on his cheeks. He hugged her tightly, rocking her back and forth, then he cupped her face in his big hands and covered it with kisses. He wrapped his fingers in her long hair – hadn't it been short, just now? – and pulled her to him again, murmuring, “Mein schätzchen... mein liebling. I shouldn't have doubted you. Can you forgive me?”

  Annasophia nodded against his chest. “There's nothing to forgive. I would have doubted me, too. My story sounded like utter craziness. But yes, it's true. I really do come from your future. And I really thought I was doing the right thing by leaving this time. Now, I have no idea what I should do or how I should try to do it.”

  Gently, he took her by the shoulders and held her from him, looking deeply into her eyes. “Please, Miss Anna. You don't have to try to do anything. I want you to stay here with me. As crazy as it might sound, I have fallen in love with you. I want you in my life. I don't care if you're from the future, from the moon, or from another galaxy. I want you in my life. Unless...” He paused. “Unless you have a life there you wish to return to. In that case, I wouldn't – I couldn't – hold you back.”

  She searched his gaze, not knowing how to respond. Where had she been? She couldn't remember any of it now except that wherever she had gone, she hadn't been by Maestro's side, and she was pretty sure that somehow, for some reason, Matt hadn't existed there at all. And her own life? No specifics, but trying to focus on her situation on that timeline, she experienced the same kind of feeling she would likely retain if she had stuck her hand into a bucket of rotten meat and maggots.

  She started, as though cold water had been thrown in her face. No wonder things had gone so horribly wrong. In the timeline she had just visited, Maestro hadn't been in her life. Why? For one thing, even if he had wanted to find her, he couldn't. She hadn't told him where she had studied with him – Southern Mountain State University. All she'd told him was that she was from Tennessee. She hadn't said where in Tennessee.

  “Well,” she began haltingly, “I do have a life there, and you're actually a big part of it, but it's different, of course, since you're so much older, and...” She couldn't tell him he was dying there. She just couldn't. And what should she say about Matt? Here Maestro was falling in love with her, but he was destined to have a child with another woman.

  She clutched her temples in her palms. What had happened with Matt in the timeline from which she'd just returned? Hadn't Maestro reconciled with Elena after she, Annasophia, had gone? She must have already messed things up, just by coming here in the first place. How on earth could she get back to her real timeline, the one that held her memories of two decades with Maestro as his student, so that she could ensure Matt's existence and be with elder Maestro as he passed away?

  Perhaps now it was her responsibility to bring that timeline into being, so that she could return to it. How she would do that, she had no clue.

  “You did say there's a reason you had to go back, yet you wound up back here,” Maestro said as he gently rubbed her back, then pulled a lock of her hair to his lips and kissed it. “Just say yes or no, sweet Schätzchen. Do you still have that reason to go back?”

  “Yes.” Two reasons, she thought. Matt, and saying goodbye to you, my Maestro, when you're sick and old.

  “Can you tell me what the reason is?”

  “No.” She couldn't possibly tell him he had to fall in love with another woman for his child to exist. That would be exactly the way to ensure that Matt would never exist at all.

  “Is it another man?” he asked.

  How to answer that? In a way, the answer was yes, since Matt was, technically, another man. Matt wasn't, however another man in the sense Maestro meant. “No,” she said.

  “Yet the reason was important enough to take you from me just now?”

  “Yes,” she said reluctantly.

  Tears filled his eyes. “Am I going to lose you again, this time for good?”

  She had to tell him the truth. “I don't know.”

  He paused, kissed her forehead. “Will I have you with me for a little while at least?”

  Unable to speak, she nodded.

  Though it would still have to be goodbye here and goodbye in the other timeline, at least this timeline's goodbye wasn't looming nearly as close as she'd thought it was. She had made a mistake by trying to go back too soon, and she had to take some time to figure out when to try again. Questions crowded her mind, but for now, she would beat back her anxiety and enjoy Maestro's company.

  Perhaps she should try, while she was here, to shift their feelings away from the red hot romantic end of the spectrum and a little closer to the just friends end. It would be hard. She knew how she felt; she knew how he felt. He knew how he felt. But she had an advantage: he couldn't be sure how she felt. After all, she'd just tried to leave, and he knew that at some point, she'd have to do so again. No matter what he claimed to understand, that would have to stir up some kind of doubt. As much as she would hate doing it, she might have to play that card to lessen his interest in her so that his feelings could, ultimately, flow back toward Elena.


  There had to be some unfinished business between the two of them, after all. Otherwise, Matt – who would be born next year – couldn't possibly have existed.

  She gently disengaged from his embrace and wiped non-existent dust off the piano keys.

  He took her hands in his. “I'd like to make the most of what time we have, Miss Anna.”

  “Me, too,” she whispered, her mind whirling in a cyclone filled with stardust.

  ###

  What to do, what to do? Annasophia thought. If they went back up to Maestro's suite, they'd make love. She knew it. And she didn't want to mess things up for Matt. Just because Elena had said she would come to Maestro's hotel didn't mean that tonight would be the night Matt was conceived. But Annasophia thought she and Maestro should stay in the lobby as long as they could, to make sure. If Elena showed up, Annasophia would make a discreet exit. Of some sort. She wouldn't play the piano again, lest she wind up in that other weird – and wrong – timeline. She had to find a chance, despite whatever Elena and Maestro might get into, to talk to Maestro, to give him more information to let events, as she knew them, properly unfold.

  Then she would take her leave back to 2010.

  For now, there was nothing to do but wait.

  And – she supposed – play the piano. Music had always been her preferred means of communication, anyhow.

  Though she didn't want to make things harder on either her or Maestro, she supposed there wouldn't be anything wrong with sharing a couple of her original songs. She wanted him to see – to hear – how much he had helped her native talent to blossom, how much he had inspired her, and how, as a result of his mentorship, she had grown in a positive direction. Unlike in that nightmare timeline she had just left. The details mostly eluded her, but she recalled this much: it had been sadly bereft of music, as she experienced it now.

  Annasophia played the opening notes to “Ancient One,” a song she had written for Maestro. He had laughed when she told him its title, saying it certainly fit, since he was an old guy. When she had played and sung it for him, though, she had glanced his way and seen that his eyes had welled up with tears. She had been surprised by how much the song had moved him, though now, as she started singing, “I see you in my dreams; I hear you call to me,” she heard him let out a long breath. Perhaps when she'd played the song for him when he'd been her mentor, her teacher, he had been remembering now, this very moment when he heard her play it for the first time.