Conclusion of "A Pianist" ---- +Lady_Blaze+

As we drove home, Mother reassured me that perhaps he was upset about his sister's death, and if we stepped quietly around him for a while, all would return back to what it was before. This hope I carried for about a week, until the piano's crashing sound began to fill my nights and prevented me from falling asleep. I don't know how many tears I cried on that pillow, wondering if I would ever please Father, wondering why it had to be this way. My dreams were tortured by Father's hand around his coffee mug, descending to the counter, and then the eerie, hollow steps echoing through the hallway to the parlor.

When I woke up, I never saw Father. I never saw him again, until two months later, when five men came and took him someplace I wasn't allowed to go. I felt like I was being restricted from the parlor; I was a burr in Mother's side, asking when I could go see him. She would, so patiently, explain.

"Maggie, your father's head doesn't work the same as yours and mine... He reacts to things differently, he feels and sees things but their meaning gets turned around sometimes in his brain. It's not anyone's fault that this happened, but if he'd stayed with us at home, he might have harmed us.. I know it hurts you to not have him around, but he needs time to calm down, a lot of time. I don't know how much..."

The piano sat in our parlor, unplayed, unwanted by me now that I knew in my heart Father was never coming back. Once I asked Mother if we could sell it, but she would have none of it. He'll play it when he comes back, she said. It cut me to see Mother so brave and optimistic, when the inevitable had fallen. Whether she was holding out for me, thinking it would be better if I thought he was coming back someday, I don't know. But I did not want the piano.

It was a while before Mother relented. More than five years had passed when I heard her talking on the phone to someone about moving it to a piano shop. The words good riddance tasted bitter in my mouth, but still they came. My resentment towards Father for what he had done was still there. But now I did not blame myself. I blamed him. And I vowed to myself that I would never touch another piano for as long as I lived.

I am twenty-seven, old by the standards I held when Father was alive, and I'm a little wiser, I might endeavor to say... He died peacefully, they told me, without any meddling medication to cloud whatever thoughts he had. In his will, specifically written, he left a large amount of money for the sole use of buying 'a piano for Maggie'. I did not stop to wonder where in the perverted reaches of his mind he had found that. It was that day the huge wall I'd used to protect myself from all that Father was began to crumble.

I remember walking to the cemetery to see his grave for the first time and seeing there, from some unknown person, an old weathered piano key resting on the plan surface of the headstone. I could not help but wonder how many people had passed that house to hear beautiful music pouring out of it; none of them were given a glimpse of Father, bent over keys glowing with an ivory life of their own. Only I, young as I was, and I could barely recall...

There was a stiff wind that day, and any tears I might have cried were whipped away from my cheeks to disappear in my hair. And I think that would have been how Father had wanted it, no tears shed for him to touch the ground.

I broke that vow I made so long ago. During college my love for music could not be stifled, and I eventually found myself drawn to sit at a piano, to finger out from the distant memory of thin, agile hands, the melody of Amazing Grace.

-- I hope you have enjoyed my short story.. :)

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