Maestro

by Thomma Lyn Grindstaff

  What was she up to?

  It no longer mattered. Annasophia heard Maestro ramming against the front door, trying to break in. As big and strong as he was, it was only a matter of time until he got in, though the front door itself was pretty strong. So it might take him a few minutes. It wouldn't be long now. Maestro would make it inside, and he would take her to the hospital. Surely, she needed medical care. She'd lost a lot of blood, and oh, she was so tired, and her head wasn't working right.

  She felt the urge to push again, though less intense than before. What? Oh, yes – she had to deliver the placenta. She moaned, and bore down, listening with anticipation to Maestro's thumps against the door. Any minute, he would bust the thing open and she and Matt would – oh, please – be okay.

  Annasophia heard the opening chords to Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. So this had been what Elena had intended all along. To take care of Annasophia until she was ready to give birth, then get Matt into her clutches and send Annasophia back to 2010.

  A record player. That's what Elena had set up out in the hallway.

  What a gullible fool Annasophia had been.

  “Maestro!” she screamed. She heard the crunch of wood as he broke the door in and rushed into the living room.

  “Anna!” he yelled back. She heard his footsteps coming closer, but the concerto overrode them. The music bore her away from this time just as surely as if it were a wave itself, like the waves of her contractions that had delivered Matt into this world. Now, the concerto was delivering her back to her time, and there was nothing she could do about it. She was racked with pain, too exhausted to move.

  She heard Elena come back into the bedroom, and she closed her eyes so she wouldn't have to see the woman's triumphant face. Instead of the bed underneath her, she felt – briefly – the piano bench in her apartment before she tumbled off it and hit the floor.

  Opening her eyes, she saw the walls of her apartment and her spinet piano looming above her. Blood dripped from the bench from where she'd sat on it oh-so-briefly. She put her hand between her legs. Blood coming from there, as well. And she was damned if she wasn't still delivering the placenta. She groaned and pushed it out, then she fell into not-so-blissful unconsciousness, her last thought before succumbing being that Maestro and Matt were surely lost to her forever.

  * * * ~~~ * * *

  Chapter Five

  Somebody was gently shaking her shoulder. “Annasophia?” came a soft voice. A man's. She opened her eyes and saw Matt. Oh, thank goodness. Whatever else had happened, he was here. Yes. This time, she recalled everything that had happened when she had traveled back to 1973 and 1974. She had preserved the timeline. It was all as she had remembered it.

  It made sense, in light of what she had just experienced. After Matt had been born and Elena had sent her, Annasophia, back to 2010 by playing the concerto on the record player, she must have told Maestro some kind of heinous lie. Perhaps she told Maestro that Annasophia had gone into labor quickly and had then died in childbirth, that her dead body had been pulled back here. That wasn't far from the truth; she felt nearly dead. At any rate, the only way Elena would have been able to convince Maestro to reconcile with her would have been by not letting him in on the totality of the horrors she had perpetrated on Annasophia and Matt.

  No wonder Maestro and Elena had gotten back together – Maestro must have been convinced that Matt needed some kind of mother, and Annasophia was sure Elena would have been able to lay on piles of bullshit, high and deep. After all, Elena had fooled her and Maestro, hadn't she? Maestro, in his grief, would desperately want to believe that Elena had meant well; otherwise, he would have to face up to the fact that he had left her, Annasophia, in the hands of a dangerous woman. Sure, he had the courage to face up to it, but Elena, in her cleverness, would skew things so that he could believe whatever she wanted him to believe. Since she had sent Annasophia back, there was nobody to argue with her.

  Well, except Matt. As an infant in 1974, all he could do was cry.

  So Elena, though her scheming, had gotten exactly what she'd wanted: both Maestro and Maestro's baby, whom she had tried to pass off as her own, at least publicly. No wonder Elena and Maestro had wound up divorced a short time afterward, because no matter how well Elena could pretend, her true colors would have come out at some point. And Annasophia knew down to her bones how she would have resented Matt. She now understood Matt's unhappy relationship with the woman he had assumed to be his mother.

  How strange, to look into the face of a thirty-seven year old man and know that she was his biological mother.

  It wasn't something she could tell him.

  She carefully watched Matt's face as he surveyed the scene. The blood on the bench. Her broken, naked body. The placenta lying on the floor. Would he know what a placenta was? He looked at all of it, and his expression, though it registered a kind of surprise, certainly didn't evince anywhere near the shock she would have expected. All he said was, “I think you need to get to a hospital.”

  Annasophia couldn't argue with that. “Please take me to the hospital where your dad is.”

  He nodded. “That's what I was going to do.”

  Sure, Matt was laid back, but she would have expected more reaction from him than this. To him, this pregnancy and birth would seem out-of-the-blue. Since the timeline had been restored, the last time he would have seen her would have been when she had left the hospital to come back here and play the piano. He'd agreed to take her to the hospital where his father was, which meant that Maestro was still hanging on in this timeline. She seemed to return instantaneously to the time she'd left. She supposed that was a good thing, because this time, instead of going back to 1974, she wanted to spend time with the elder Maestro. He seemed to know a lot about what was going on. He'd sent her back to 1973 when this timeline had been altered and she had forgotten all about time travel. So it followed that maybe he could help her now. And if he was still lucid, perhaps he could, finally, share with her everything he remembered about what had happened in 1973-1974.

  First, though, she needed medical care.

  ###

  The doctors patched her up; fortunately, Annasophia had been in better shape than she had thought. Oh, the nosy questions the doctors kept asking! She had just given birth, but there was no baby. Well, of course there was no baby. He'd been born in 1973, and he had remained there. As a baby. In 2010, the baby – now a grown man – was sitting with his dying father on another floor of the hospital.

  Annasophia couldn't tell the doctors the truth. If she did, she'd wind up in the psychiatric ward.

  When pressed by the doctors, she told them that the baby was with its father in another state and was being cared for there. Certainly, that was true, as far as it went. Any further questions, she refused to answer. She would bide her time as best she could, hoping she wouldn't get into any trouble before...

  What?

  She didn't know.

  Reluctantly, the doctors discharged her from the hospital, only she wasn't about to leave. She was now free to sit vigil beside Maestro. She made her way to the lower floor where his room was located. On the way down the hall, she passed a gurney on which lay a person who was entirely covered by a sheet.

  No, not a person anymore. A body.

  Somebody had died.

  Annasophia picked up her steps and burst into the room. Matt stood near Maestro's empty bed, tears on his cheeks. “He's gone, Anna. He passed away an hour or so ago. I was hoping he could hang on until you could see him, but he never regained consciousness, and then he just...”

  She burst into tears. Matt enfolded her in a hug. She lay her head against his chest and cried and cried. Even through her sadness, she found herself comforted by the strong beat of his heart. Though Matt couldn't know, wouldn't understand, he was her and Maestro's son. In him, their love lived on.

  How sorry she was that she hadn't been able to change how his life had unfolded! This was exactly the timeline she h
ad left, only now she knew the truth about Matt and the truth about Elena. The truth about her and Maestro. And now, Maestro was gone forever. He could never talk to her about what he knew, could never tell her the truth as he had experienced it. That would go with him to his grave.

  Matt still hadn't asked any questions about the strange circumstances he had found in her apartment. He'd only said that when she stayed gone, he had called her apartment, and nobody had answered. He'd figured that she would either be there at the apartment, back at the hospital, or in transit, so when she never showed back up at the hospital, he had decided to pay her a visit at the apartment to see if anything was wrong. When she hadn't answered, he'd gotten a bad feeling and had forced the door open, and there she had been, lying there naked, in a pool of blood. Why he hadn't asked questions, she had no idea.

  “Let's sit down for just a little while,” Matt said.

  He was usually so quiet that she was surprised he wanted to talk. She figured he would go home, listen to music, and spend a great deal of time by himself as he worked through the death of his father. She had a gig coming up soon, and she would throw herself, with all her heart and all her might, into her music.

  She would love to play Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 2 to see what would happen, but she didn't quite dare. She had restored the timeline as it was; despite its problems, at least she hadn't mucked things up to where one of those worse, alternate timelines held sway, in which Matt didn't even exist or in which she had never met Maestro. She didn't want to take a chance that she might mess things up again. But she couldn't stop wondering what Elena had told Maestro about what happened. Had Maestro thought she had died in childbirth, and that was why she had never returned?

  No wonder he'd quit his career as a concert pianist and moved to Tennessee to become a professor at Southern Mountain State University, exactly the college she had told him was near where she would be born and grow up. It was all clear to her now, why he had given up his concert career, why he had moved to East Tennessee to teach. It had been because of her; perhaps because he wanted to make things up to her somehow, or perhaps just to be near her, albeit in a very different relationship.

  Love could take many, many forms.

  Tears flowed down her cheeks.

  “Matt, your father was a remarkable man.”

  He nodded. Then he looked at her. Not just looked at her; he seemed to look into her. Then, he asked haltingly, “Do you know who I am?”

  Oh, my. Could he possibly know the truth? Had Maestro told him? Her breath caught, and she returned his deep gaze. His eyes, so much like hers. Why hadn't she noticed that before? It had never occurred to her to notice such a thing. His eyes, his mouth, and even some of his expressions were so much like hers, though his build and coloring were all Maestro. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

  “I'm lost in time,” he said, in nearly a whisper.

  Lost in time. For a moment, the words made no sense. Weren't they all lost in time, she most of all? Then, she remembered. Lost in time. The email address from which she'd received the scanned picture of herself and Maestro.

  She leaned forward. “You sent me that picture?”

  He nodded. “I've always known that Elena wasn't my mom. I overheard some stuff when I was little, when they fought. And after she and Dad divorced, he admitted it to me. But when I asked him who my mom was, he would never tell me. But then, I found this picture of him with a young, brunette woman. It was cut out from a magazine. He had kept it with him for years, I guess, and I only found it when I was thirteen. I guess I was snooping through his stuff, trying to find clues about, oh, I don't know. Anything. He just never talked much about his past. I knew he'd been a big time concert pianist, but there we were, living here in East Tennessee, and he always seemed more comfortable not talking about anything to do with those earlier years.”

  She had seldom heard Matt speak so many words at one time. “And...?”

  “I showed him the picture. I asked him if the woman in the picture was my mother. At first, he wouldn't tell me anything, but I picked up on how much I looked like the woman in the picture, and he finally admitted that yes, the woman was my mother. But he still wouldn't tell me anything about you.”

  “Go on,” she pressed.

  “I remember when he took you on as a student. You were the only student he took on, other than his university students. I remember thinking how crazy it was that he wanted to teach a little kid. Him, who had been such a big deal as a performer, and who had a lot of respect as a professor. But when I met you, I realized how talented you were. He talked all the time about you being a prodigy. As you grew older, I couldn't help but notice how much you looked like...” He broke off and looked at his shoes.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That must have been weird, to say the least.”

  He let out a long breath. “Once you had grown up, I knew for sure who you were. But that only opened up more questions. Big questions. See, I assumed the woman in the picture was someone he had a fling with or something. Watching you grow up, I realized it had been much more. But I never confronted Dad with what I'd figured out about you. I always had a feeling it would have made him uncomfortable. And what stumped me the most was just how it had happened in the first place. Time travel was the only possible answer, but I couldn't figure out how you'd done it. You certainly seemed like you were in the dark about it, too. So I realized that you hadn't gone yet – that for you, traveling back in time was a future event.” He shook his head. “Just talking about it blows my mind.”

  It blew Annasophia's mind, too.

  “Anyway, I kept the magazine picture,” Matt said. “I really didn't know what to do with it. When Dad got sick, I realized that however you had gone back in time, you needed to get moving because he would soon die. I actually knew about Dad being sick before you told me about it. He hadn't told me in so many words, but I knew. I had a gut feeling that something was terribly wrong. So I emailed you a scanned copy of the picture.”

  She nodded. “I showed the picture to your dad the day after he was admitted to the hospital. At first, he didn't want to talk about it, but then... well, he showed me the way to get back to him. He did it while he was semi-conscious. I still don't know if he knew what he was doing or not. But I did get back there.”

  Matt smiled a little. “Well, you must have. I'm here, aren't I?”

  Man, this was awkward. Here she was, a twenty-six year old singer-songwriter, talking with her thirty-seven year old sound man, one of her best friends, whom she had discovered was also her son. It was too damn weird, and the whole thing made her sad. Biologically, Matt was her son, but he couldn't be her son in any other way that could mean anything emotionally to either of their hearts. It was just another tragedy, piled on top of all the other tragedies that had already happened.

  They could maintain their friendship and their working relationship. They would always be aware of the other dynamic, though, the overarching dynamic, with which they would always feel uncomfortable and ill-at-ease. Annasophia had thought about becoming a mother someday, but she certainly wouldn't have thought it would be anything like this – motherhood without feeling like a mother. She could never feel like a mother to a man who was eleven years her senior, a man with whom she had been buddies and co-workers for many years.

  No longer to be Maestro's wife or Matt's mother. Elena had taken them from her. To make things worse, Elena had then thrown both Maestro and Matt away.

  Oh, how Annasophia wished she could figure out how to change the timeline for the better! She didn't think of the future as something set in stone. She saw it as endless possibility. The future was what came as the result of what she did now. But how to create a new future? She had seen so many possibilities, all of them far worse than this one. After Elena had sent her back in such a terrible way, Annasophia had lost hope. But what could she have, if not hope? Without hope, she would die. Maybe not physically, but emotionally. Perhaps if she had a li
ttle faith in herself – if she believed in the power of the love Maestro and she shared, if she truly believed in what was possible for them and for Matt – then perhaps she could create something wonderful for all of them.

  It was about possibilities. By giving up, by letting Elena have her way, she would shut herself off to possibilities.

  She couldn't believe that Maestro would never play Rachmaninoff's Concerto No. 2 again after Elena had sent her back. Even if he thought she was dead.

  Annasophia stared at Matt. “I have an idea.”

  He glanced at her. Sadness hung over him like a dark cloud. He probably wouldn't go home and play music. He'd probably crawl into bed. Poor Matt. As good a sound man as he was, he had been dogged all his life by depression. No wonder, growing up with Elena's toxic resentment and his confusion about who the heck he really was and where he had come from.

  “I want to try to go back to your dad in 1974.”

  His eyes widened in alarm. “What?”

  “It might work. I don't know why it wouldn't.” Annasophia racked her brain. If she played the concerto again, she should wind up with Maestro at whatever point he'd be playing it in his timeline, whether on tour or at home.

  She had to let him know she wasn't dead. And she had to be there for him and Matt, even if Elena sent her back a hundred times. A thousand times. This time, Annasophia wouldn't give up. She would never, ever give up. She couldn't just stay here in this timeline, with Matt so downtrodden and miserable, with so many possibilities unexplored.

  “But it almost killed you.”

  “Don't worry. I'll have that covered. Or the best I can manage.” She would do her best to guard against Elena, and after the difficult experience she'd had of pregnancy and the horrendous birth, she wasn't planning on getting pregnant again anytime soon. “And I'll do my best to stay there.”

  “So.” He looked down at his shoes. “Now I lose not just a good friend, but...”