But she didn't.
This time, Matt moved a little bit. She was starting to stretch around his head, and now she understood why women in labor called this the “ring of fire.” Panting, she glanced over her shoulder at Elena, in whose expression malevolence burned even hotter than the ring of fire between Annasophia's legs. The urge to push slammed into her again, but this time, she could no longer stay on her knees, so she got down on all fours and pushed as hard as she could manage. This time, it wasn't nearly as hard, but exhaustion was getting the better of her again.
She had bled quite a bit on the bed. Elena hadn't let her have another drink. Dizziness made her head swim, and she sank back down on the bed, panting. She mustn't lose consciousness again. If she did, she might not come back.
Annasophia lay, her head on her pillow, her legs spread wide. She reached down and touched Matt's head again. He wasn't fully crowned yet, but he was close. One more push, and he'd be there. One push after that, he would be even closer to birth. She mustn't give up. She couldn't. Her mind and heart were one thing, though. Her exhausted body was quite another.
“God, Elena,” she grunted. “How can you be so cruel?”
“I'm only doing what I have to do,” she said.
Okay, maybe not cruel.
Crazy
probably fit better. Oh, God, Oh, God – the urge to push was building again, and Annasophia, sobbing and moaning, gave herself over to it. Despite what she had already been through, nothing could compare to the agony as she pushed as hard as she could, locking her arms around her knees to make it easier to bear down, and Matt's head crowned, bringing the ring of fire to its sizzling climax. Oh, she couldn't stop screaming. It hurt so bad. Somebody had to get this baby out of her. She couldn't stand it any more.
“God, Elena, pull him out, pull him out, please...” Annasophia was babbling, but she couldn't stop.
Elena just sat there.
An abrupt knock sounded on the door.
Maestro?
Annasophia let out a long breath as the urge to push hit her yet again. Perhaps she and Matt were saved.
###
“Annasophia! Elena!” came Maestro's strong voice. “What's going on in there?” He kept knocking on the door, but Elena didn't move from her chair. Annasophia glanced at her, and for the first time, she saw anxiety creeping into her expression.
Whatever Elena had planned, she wouldn't get away with it. Not now that Maestro was here. He had come. Thank goodness, he had come.
“Keep pushing, bitch,” Elena snarled.
Regardless of what she said, Annasophia had to do what her body wanted. She bore down again and felt unutterable relief as Matt's head left her. He was nearly born now. All that she had to do was push him the rest of the way out, then he'd be in her arms, Maestro would be here, and they'd have Elena arrested and out of their lives for good.
She would survive this. Their family would be okay.
The haze of unconsciousness pulled at her, but she beat it back. She had to push again. Bearing down, she felt Matt slide out of her body and onto the bed. Elena jumped out of the chair. At that point, everything became a blur of sound and activity. Elena snatched the baby into her arms and rushed him into the bathroom. Then she headed for the bedroom door, on her way out.
Surely, she'd had sense enough to wrap Matt in a towel to keep him warm.
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 had 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.