Maestro had come to stand at her side. “Do you like this one?”
“I love it,” she said, picking up the dress and draping it over her arm.
“I can't wait to see you wearing it,” he said, and kissed the top of her head.
Someone – a woman – started humming, slightly off-key. The music sounded familiar. Annasophia looked around for the person humming. About ten feet away, near the dressy shoes, she spied a blonde head, moving closer. The humming grew louder. Elena? Despite the fact that she followed Maestro to his performances, Annasophia knew she didn't care for music. Strange for her to hum, except...
She'd been listening at the door last night, and she hadn't just heard Annasophia and Maestro's lovemaking. Elena had to have heard the Rachmaninoff concerto playing, then the following fracas when Annasophia had almost been pulled away, back to her time. Elena had also witnessed Maestro, in the hotel lobby, playing the piano to bring Annasophia back.
Elena knew that the concerto was the conduit. No doubt she'd heard Maestro play it enough to where she could do a decent job of humming it. The humming grew louder until Elena was standing on the other side of Maestro, looking straight at Annasophia as the melody of the concerto emanated from her lips.
As though from a billion miles away, the older Maestro spoke as she had heard him in the hospital.
Guard the door
.
Too late now.
Annasophia's surroundings grew transparent, and Maestro's eyes widened in alarm. He turned and saw Elena. His mouth opened, and he spoke to Elena, but Annasophia couldn't hear his words. As she stared at him, she hoped if she fixed her gaze on him firmly enough, she might not be pulled back. Silly, of course. Her gaze had nothing to do with it. All she could hear now was the humming. She closed her eyes. Maestro would make Elena stop. No more humming. No more anything. Just silence.
“Maestro?” Annasophia said, her eyes still closed. She felt for him. Nothing. How could that be? He had been standing right next to her.
She had also been holding the lovely black dress. Now, her arms were empty. And she wasn't standing up anymore. She was sitting on... what? A piano bench?
Annasophia opened her eyes. She had returned to her own time. Wait just a minute. Her own time? What kind of crazy thought was that? What other time would she be in, for Pete's sake? Maybe she'd got punchy from lack of sleep. Wildly, she looked around her apartment. She couldn't recall coming back here. She couldn't even recall just what it was she'd just been playing. Just what the hell was she doing in her apartment, playing the piano, when Maestro lay dying at the hospital, perhaps even taking his last breath?
Everything is all screwed up
, said a voice deep in her heart, or maybe her gut.
You've got to play the concerto again, so you can go back. This is wrong. Deeply wrong
.
A flicker of understanding flared in her mind at the words
go back
. Then it died. Back? Back where? The only place she had to go back to was the hospital, because Maestro was dying. And she had gone nearly all night without any sleep. She couldn't stay here in her apartment, listening to crazy voices from her heart, her gut, or her spleen, for that matter. Maestro needed her. There was nobody else to stay with him. Nobody but her, not really. It had always been that way. He had never had any children, and he was so private that he had only casual friends, with whom he had worked at the University. Nobody who would stay by his bedside as he passed away, nobody to give him comfort by holding his hand. It had to be her. She would have it no other way, after everything he'd done for her, all the support, friendship, and mentorship he had given her.
It was the least she could do.
Forget the voices
.
She jumped off the piano bench, grabbed her purse, then stopped short. Good grief, she was very sore between her legs. A hot and sexy sore, but sore, nonetheless. That made no sense. She hadn't been with anybody since after her gig a week ago, when she and a couple of her groupies had come back here and spent the night and the next day in her bed. And her living room and the bathroom. The kitchen floor, too.
Well, it had been pretty intense. They had really gone at each other. Maybe the soreness had lingered from a week ago, and she hadn't noticed until now.
Soreness notwithstanding, she ran out the door.
###
Annasophia got to the hospital as quickly as she could. Walking down the hall to Maestro's room, she became more and more apprehensive with every step that she must be too late, that he had passed on. Perhaps hospital personnel were in his room right now, preparing his body for the morgue. Tears trickled down her cheek and she broke into a jog. Why had she left him all alone? She couldn't imagine what had possessed her to go home and play the piano. She couldn't even remember having made that decision. It was as though the decision had never been made.
Except it had. She'd just come from home. Perhaps she was far more tired than she wanted to acknowledge, making decisions half-asleep. Even driving half-asleep, for Pete's sake. She wanted to slap herself. So dangerous. She could have killed herself or other people in a car accident. Rest assured, she wouldn't do it again.
She fairly burst into Maestro's room. There he lay in bed, unconscious. He must be very close to passing on. She looked up at the monitors that were hooked to him. He could code any minute. His heart rhythms were erratic, his blood pressure extremely low. She must stay here beside him. She hoped she wasn't too late for him to know that she was here.
Sitting in the recliner next to his bed, she glanced at the empty chair on the other side. Oh, how she wished Maestro had family in addition to having her as his friend. As good and kind a man as he had been, he deserved a whole group of loved ones, taking turns at his side. But he had never married after divorcing... what was her name? Oh, Elena. They'd never had children. And in all the time Annasophia had known Maestro, two decades now, he'd always kept very much to himself. Not even close friends. If he'd ever had close friends, he'd lost touch with them long ago.
So sad.
She took his hand in hers. He didn't give a response. Not so much as a twitch. His skin felt odd, almost as if he were already dead. Very little elasticity in its feel. A tear rolled down her cheek, and she glanced again at the monitor above his bed. With all her heart, she wished for him to wake up just one more time. Just once more, so she could tell him goodbye and how sorry she was for not having been here all along, like she should have been.
Maybe he could hear her, despite being so close to death. Annasophia had read about how hearing was the last sense to go. She would try to talk to him. She had to try. Maybe he would hear, even if he was beyond any ability to reply.
She stood, leaned over him, and spoke softly, close to his ear. “Maestro, I'm back. I'm sorry I left. I don't know what I was thinking. But I'm here now. I...” Abruptly, she broke off. She hadn't realized tears were that close. She muffled her mouth with her hand; she must be strong. Give him a loving goodbye and not burden him with the sound of her grief. She closed her eyes, took several deep breaths. Then she said, “I want to thank you for always been such a good friend to me. More than a friend. A teacher. A mentor. Someone I could look up to. In many ways, you saved my life. If it hadn't been for you, I would almost certainly have wound up...”
“
Schätzchen
,” Maestro said. The word surprised her. She had no idea what it meant, but there was something about it that rang a bell deep in the shadowy recesses of her mind. If he had called her
Mäuschen
... well, that would have made more sense. That had been his pet name for her when she had been a very little girl. He'd stopped using it years and years ago, probably when she had been about ten, but if he used it now, it would make sense. Perhaps it would mean he was back, in his mind, to when he had been younger and she had been a child. What did
Schätzchen
mean? And there was the way he said it: with incredible warmth and tenderness, discernible even in his quiet, wasting-away voice. Not as if he were speaking to a child, but as if he were speaking to...
She stared at him. A lover?
Another bell rang deep inside her mind, but she pushed the sound aside. It didn't mean anything. It couldn't. He wasn't even thinking about her. Perhaps, in his mind, he was back with Elena, though he had told her that he and Elena had married when they were very young, too young to know any better. It had been about infatuation, he had said, not love. They'd had little else in common. Why, at the touch of Annasophia's hand, would he be thinking about a woman he hadn't loved?
Perhaps there had been someone else in his life, someone from long ago, a special woman he had never told Annasophia about. It made sense. Good grief, Maestro was too extraordinary a man not to have been deeply loved at least once in his life. But why the secrecy? Why the...
“Miss Anna,” he said. She could barely hear him. His lips were so dry. The nurses had left lip balm on his tray, and Annasophia picked it up and rubbed it on his lips. She wanted him to be as comfortable as possible. “Yes,” he murmured at her touch.
Miss Anna
, he'd said in the same tone of voice he'd said
Schätzchen.
Her hands shook as she applied the lip balm. What could it mean? Maybe he'd had a lover named Anna. Wasn't that just a bit over the top, though, for coincidence? Then again, Anna was a fairly common name. “Maestro,” she said, trying to keep her voice steadier than her hands. The bells in her head were ringing like crazy now. Try as she might, though, she couldn't find anything in her mind to explain this. So why the ringing bells, as though this all made perfect sense and she only needed to figure it out?
His eyes suddenly opened so wide that they bulged, and despite herself, she jumped and dropped the lip balm. “You've got to go back,” he said. “Please.”
“Go back where?” Had he done this before, asked her to go home, and she didn't remember? She was exhausted. It was possible Maestro had asked her not to be by his side as he died, that he preferred her to remember him as a living man rather than have her last memory of him be a corpse. Maybe that was why she'd been home, playing the piano, instead of here, at his side.
Yet that just didn't feel right.
“My time. You're...” His eyes closed again, and he took a long, raspy breath. Then he said, “Pregnant.”
Her knees gave way and she stumbled back into the chair beside his bed. “I don't understand,” she managed to whisper. Didn't she, though? The soreness between her legs begged for an explanation. The lovely, languorous feeling she still had when she squeezed her thighs together, as though she'd had the best sexual experience of her life, which would be saying a hell of a lot, since as Jimi Hendrix might say, she was plenty experienced. But pregnant? No way. She always used condoms. Well, not her personally. She made her groupies wear them. That was their ticket inside.
At that thought, she flushed. Maestro was still looking at her. Thank goodness he had never known about that. How ashamed he would be! “Go back,” he said. “Don't worry about me. You've got to...” His voice was trailing off so soft she could barely hear him. “You have to go back before I...”
“But Maestro,” she said, feeling as though she'd swallowed a rock. “I honestly don't know what you're talking about. I'm not pregnant. And I don't know what you mean by
back
.”
Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head. “Just go back to your apartment. Play Rachmaninoff's Concerto Number Two. You will see. And...” He paused, then added, “I will see, too.” He cast a glance at the empty chair on the other side of his bed.
“You'll see what?” She took his hand again. This time, his hand shifted in hers, and ever-so-gently, he squeezed her hand.
“Just go. Do it, please. For me.”
Maybe this was what she had done before, and she couldn't remember. Oh, she felt so unhinged, more and more with every minute! Still, this was a dying man's last wish. More than just any dying man. It was Maestro's last wish. She couldn't say no.
She nodded, then realized he couldn't see her because he'd closed his eyes again.
“I'm going,” she said, her voice filled with tears. Damn it, she couldn't help crying. “I love you, Maestro. Please hang on until I can get back.”
To her amazement, he smiled. “I guarantee you, I am hanging on.”
She looked into his illness-ravaged face and saw, for the briefest of instants, a double image: a younger Maestro who shone with health and vitality.
Though it didn't make a lick of rational sense, she found herself smiling back at him, and something in her chest expanded in inexplicable joy.
* * * ~~~ * * *
Chapter Eight
By the time she got home, though, Annasophia had grown frustrated with herself again. Why, exactly, was she doing this? Maestro was dying. He might be half-out of his mind. Or even mostly out of his mind. She'd heard that sometimes when people drew near to death, they sometimes displayed an oddly convincing lucidity. Well, he'd sure convinced her, and for all she knew, he could be dying at this very moment. She would never see him alive again, and here she'd be, playing a concerto by ear to fulfill his last wish. For what? It wasn't as if he could hear her or see her play. Maybe it had been his favorite piece to perform as a concert pianist, and he liked the idea of passing away while she played it.
Who knew.
She would play it, as much of it as she could recall, and then she would rush back to the hospital. Hopefully, he would still be hanging on, and she could tell him that she had done as he had asked. At least that might give him some satisfaction, even though she might never know exactly why.