Secret

by James R. Edgerton

  "In elementary school, we--Mom and I--got along mostly. The usual fights about homework and such. She would be there for the plays and the recitals. I played the piano. I started playing because she played. I would watch in rapt attention whenever she would play and swore I wanted to play like that.

  "I took lessons starting around second grade. Or maybe it was the end of first grade. Doesn't really matter. I didn't do all that well in school, so she was usually a bit upset about my grades. I didn't get in trouble. I just ... forgot to do my homework. And when I did it, I would forget to turn it in.

  "Ah, but the piano. I don't want to brag. I wasn't another Mozart. However, I was pretty good and I loved it. I won a few awards. And Mom... She was always so proud of me. I put more hours and more hours into the piano.

  "Then, when I was not quite thirteen she went to visit the doctor."

  Ellen stopped. She could remember the day.

  "It was the first time my mother had missed one of my recitals. She said she didn't feel well. She went to the hospital while I was playing. They did some tests and sent her home.

  "We didn't know then. Not for months. She got sicker and then for awhile she felt better. She wasn't. Six months after that doctor visit she was dead."

  Ellen's voice was flat. However, she remembered her own tears. The pain and confusion. The fear. So much fear. By then ...

  "She was my whole world and she had died. Some bit of me died that day as well." She paused for a moment considering. "I have played the piano since, but it was never the same." She had never really thought about it before. That really was the last time. The last time that the piano had felt like ... like an extension of herself.

  Ellen felt Kris's warm hand holding hers. She dared a quick glance down and saw tears on his cheeks. She squeezed his hand and looked back out over the ocean.

  She could feel the pain still. In some ways it was every bit as intense, but it was more distant. Like something seen through a pane of glass. You knew what it was, but you couldn't quite touch it. All you could touch was a cold, hard surface.

  Not even glass could hold it all back. She felt a single tear gather in the corner of her eye and flow down her left cheek.

  Warm lips touched hers and warm arms pulled her close. Somewhere deep inside something rigid relaxed--or maybe it broke. The flood it held back escaped in a deluge of tears. Ellen pulled Kris close with the desperation of someone drowning.

  * * *

  "Your mother sounds like a wonderful woman."

  For a moment, Ellen did not respond to Kris's comment. If she spoke she would likely burst into tears.

  After a moment, and a few stray tears that found their way past her defenses, she nodded and said, "She was. She came to virtually every recital I ever performed. From the early ones where I barely managed 'Twinkle, Twinkle' to the later ones where I actually did play some of Mozart's works." So had her father. Well, when he was in town. For a moment she remembered those earlier years. She had actually loved him then, hadn't she? She had loved being with him. Holding his hand as they walked.

  She knew it had happened. There were pictures. Lots of them. Pictures of the time before the betrayal. She remembered it, but as something that happened to someone else.

  No longer. Not now.

  Her voice was a bit colder when she continued, "She used to play as well. When I was little especially. Less and less as I grew older. I suppose she must have been getting busier at work. And I suppose she was spending more time taking care of me. It took a lot of time.

  "I loved listening to her. I would beg and beg her to play more.

  "It was our special time together. My brother Fred never cared much for the piano even when Mom was playing, so when Mom would play, it would be just her and I. Dad didn't come around either. I don't know if he was giving us time together or if he didn't care or what."

  It was odd, she mused to herself. The piano had always been something that only she and her mother shared. Well, her father had shared it a bit with her, but not with her mother. Why was that?

  "Mom was really good. I didn't realize at the time just how good. I wonder why she gave it up?"

  Kris's hand rubbed warmly over her own. It felt good. She squeezed back.

  "Gave it up?"

  "Yeah. I don't know the whole story. However, she had done something with it professionally. Neither of my folks would talk about it. I think she played a jingle for a radio ad or some such. Maybe more than one. I don't know."

  "Wow."

  "Yeah. It is funny. I remember asking about it. I never really thought about the fact that they never really answered my questions."

  Ellen fell silent again.

  "It hurt so much when she died. Like one of my legs had been cut out from under me. Like a hand had been cut off. Actually, I would gladly have given one of my hands if it would have kept her from ... going. From dying."

  A warm hand wiped away the warm tears on her cheek.

  "That means a lot from a girl whose great love was the piano."

  Ellen looked down sharply. He was right. She had never really considered the implications of her offer.

  "Yeah. I remember telling someone that I would have given my hands to save her. I don't think they understood. Actually I don't think I understood when I said it."

  After a long moment of silence, she continued, "And maybe--just maybe--I did give up my hands when she died."

  * * *

  "You stopped playing when she died?"

  Kris's question was so obvious and yet so unexpected. Ellen considered the question. She hadn't stopped playing when her mother died. What had happened? Something had happened.

  "No. I didn't stop. Not exactly. I was committed to piano lessons that had been played for, so I played some the year after that. Just practice. No performances. But even practice was never the same. My heart... my heart was not in it. I guess I actually played for a few years, into high school."

  "Do you play now?"

  "Not often. I still love playing, but I am so busy."

  Ellen stared out toward the horizon. There was something important here. It was right there where she could *almost* touch it, and yet it remained just out of reach.

  "I am not really that busy," she muttered.

  "What?" Kris asked.

  His question was quite reasonable, however, it irritated her. She tried to keep the irritation out of her voice as she repeated more loudly, "I am not really all that busy. So, why don't I play?"

  Absent-mindedly she ran her fingers through Kris's hair.

  Something had changed the day her mother died. She had some after that. Though, it had been a bit like missing a hand.

  "No. Not a hand," she muttered unaware that she had spoken aloud until Kris responded, "A heart?"

  "Yes!" she whispered.

  She had kept playing the piano because of ... inertia. However she had lost her heart that day. She could no longer put something of herself into each song because there was no self to give. Eventually the friction of life had used up her emotional momentum and her playing had stopped. In some ways her life had stopped.

  "That's it," Ellen said a few moments later. She could feel little puzzle pieces dropping into place.

  Far out at sea, a sailboat was moving along its lonely path in from the north. It seemed to be the only boat at sea.

  All these years, countless hours of meditating on her problem, and she had never figured out what had caused her to give up the piano. Perhaps the time had come for ...

  No. Some things could never come to light.

  Ups and Downs

  Ellen looked at the calendar. In just a few days, they would have been known each other for four months and had been dating more or less the last three. She had had other boyfriends. She had been happy with them. And yet, she knew that Kris was
different. They had not slept together.

  She was not actually sure how she felt about that. They had talked about it, and to her surprise, he was actually saving himself for marriage. While there might be "holier than thou" people out there, Kris was not one of them. She had, and did, feel a bit of guilt when she realized that, if they ever got that far, he would be a virgin and she would not. She had not gotten up the courage to ask him whether he would marry a someone who was not a virgin.

  For one thing, she felt very uneasy about marriage. Until her parents marriage had dissolved around her, she had never had a doubt about the white dress in a church. Since then, however, the idea had not gone completely away, but there was a sour taste about the whole thing that she could not quite get away from.

  For another, she was afraid to find out his answer. What if she was disqualified before she even got to the gate? It seemed unfair. She had made those choices, but she had not really understood what she was choosing, and never expected the consequences to come back to haunt her. Though now that she thought about it, those consequences had haunted her quite a bit. She had had at least four pregnancy scares. And the one STD she had gotten had been easily treated. That had scared her pretty badly though. She had dumped that boyfriend and been celibate for months after that.

  In school, they taught "all about" sex and STD's and safe sex and alternate lifestyles in the general science class in eighth grade. They had even mentioned abstinence. Actually, no. A student had mentioned it. The teachers and the materials they used clearly thought such behavior was unlikely at best and possibly indicated a chemical imbalance.

  Ironically, the only class that taught about marriage was an economics class. They taught about budgets and the cost of children. They taught the dangers of credit cards and children.

  No one had ever mentioned love as something separate from sex. She had seen something of that before her parents had broken up. The divorce sort of made using them a bad example. Kris, on the other hand, clearly distinguished the two. Not that he was sexless. She could not imagine marriage to Kris being celibate.

  Beyond sex and love, he distinguished two thoughts she had never really separated: "love" and "in love". She knew the distinction between infatuation and "being in love". Kris did not minimize those, but he more or less lumped them together. He distinguished them from "love". He had said that being "in love" would not last more than a couple of years. "Love" was what happened after that.

  That messed with all of her preconceptions.

  Based on Kris's view, you could "love" anyone. And it could last forever. "Like parents," he had said. That example was hard for her. She loved her mother, though dead many years, even now. Her father, however, she hated. However, she understood something of what he meant.

  Under that view, marriage was not an irresistible side effect of "being in love," but rather a choice. A commitment to stick with someone even after "being in love" had faded into the past and been replaced with love. Deeper than the ocean. Higher than the sky. The words had pulled at her. And yet, what about finding "the one?" What about soul mates?

  Your soul mate was the one you chose and poured your heart into, he had said. You didn't do it because your hormones gave you no rest. Rather, "You didn't do it only because of that," he had laughed. You did it because your true love was more precious to you than your own life.

  The words tugged at her heart. She felt a tear at the corner of her eyes each time she thought about it.

  And yet…

  And yet, her parents had not loved until death parted them. Which was ironic, for the divorce had been costly and ugly and had barely been complete before her mother had died. If her father had simply lived with her mother until she died, he could have saved all the money and married the bitch he wanted Ellen to call "Mother." The difference would have been just a few months.

  Life sucked.

  * * *

  Ellen had spent a lot of time thinking about the piano in the last few months. The piano she had used when growing up was at her father's house. Ellen suspected he would let her come to use it, even after their last fight. He might even give it to her. Only the price he would demand was not one she was willing to pay. She didn't know exactly what the demands would be, but they would involve stepping over--no, stomping on--any boundaries she might try to set.

  Why had she given up the piano? She had asked that question a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. She had no good answer. That her heart had died was indeed true. And yet that didn't seem to be the answer. It had just hurt too much, and she couldn't bear the pain.

  At the same time, she remembered playing for … years longer than she wanted to because she knew that she should keep playing. That she would be … "bad" if she did not. "Bad" in the sense of a bad person, not a bad piano player. Though playing without heart had kept her playing from being what it should be as well.

  The last few months had brought back the older feeling that she wanted to play the piano again, along with a resurrection of that feeling of guilt that said she must play. The former tantalized her with her memories of the wonder of being totally at one with the music. The latter nagged her like a leaky faucet. More than one pleasant mood had been destroyed by a nasty sense that she was … a bad person.

  * * *

  "Hello!" Kris said as she opened the door for him.

  He came in, and they kissed. It was a now familiar pattern. It was warm, even passionate--like a sip of a favorite wine--and yet equally constrained. While a sip was comfortable and pleasant, sometimes she wanted a whole glass. And she thought more and more often what it would be like to drink this particular bottle to its bottom.

  "Ready?"

  "Just let me gather my stuff."

  Her stuff was a purse and a light jacket. The day looked like it would be warm, but if they stayed out into the evening or found a bench in the shade to sit and chat, it might not be warm enough in just the blue, cotton, tailored blouse she wore with a pair of slacks. She had dressed up a bit as they were going to visit a former mansion turned museum.

  "Nice outfit," Kris commented when she returned.

  "Thanks."

  * * *

  The brochure said the house was thirty thousand square feet.

  "That seems big enough for a family of four," Kris commented wryly as they entered via the front door. To the left was a sitting room, probably twice as big as the living room of Ellen's apartment.

  Chuckling, Ellen responded, "Maybe. But what if the children wanted separate game rooms? It would be bad for their little psyches if they had to share."

  "Too true. Perhaps a basement? You don't want outside light in a game room anyhow."

  "And what if they had had another child?"

  "Horrors. The house would be totally inadequate. Clearly, they'd have had to sell and move to something more appropriate. You could never squeeze three children in a house this size. Why, every other day, they might see each other!"

  Ellen found herself chuckling at his dry comments, as she so often did. His sense of humor was one of the things that she found most attractive. Well that and his nicely shaped rear end, she chuckled to herself, but she would not reveal that last fact even under the thread of torture. Well, not to Kris. To Millie, she had already confessed.

  "What?" Kris asked, sensing that she was laughing at something other than his joke.

  "Nothing," Ellen responded, coyly. "Nothing at all."

  "Hmm," Kris countered. "If it were not for the priceless relics, I would tickle torture the information from you. Fortunately for you, I can barely afford to look at them. Replacing them would take more lifetimes than I have at my disposal."

  They moved from room to room. The ceilings seemed like they were twenty feet high. The library was lined with books nearly to the ceiling and had a rolling ladder that was needed to access all but the lowest shelves.
A dining room with a table that could seat for fifty or so. And down at one end of the house, a ball room.

  "A ball room!" Ellen exclaimed. "For a family of four?"

  "Well, what if they had guests. The Wii hadn't been invented yet, so they couldn't actually stand in one place and dance. Without access to DDR, they would have had to make do by actually moving around. That requires space."

  "I guess it does," Ellen chuckled. "Enough space to house an olympic swimming pool."

  "Perhaps, but the pool is over that way," Kris answered, after taking a moment to look at the map on the full color brochure they were handed as they came in. "It's not clear if Mount Olympus would fit in it or not. I am guessing it would stick up a little."

  They moved out into the great space of the ballroom.

  "It's huge," Kris said. "Hold my hand," he said, taking her hand, "so that we don't get separated. We might never see each other again."

  She laughed, clutching tightly to his hand.

  "Don't worry. I won't let you go!"

  The room was suddenly filled with piano music. At one end of the ballroom, dwarfed actually in the vast space, was a grand piano. And sitting on the stool set in front of it was a woman in her forties. She was playing the famous Blue Danube Waltz.

  The instrument pulled on Ellen. She in turned pulled Kris along. It was a Steinway and Sons, though not with the traditional black lacquer finish. Rather it was a deeply figured wood, polished to a mirror shine.

  "Beautiful," she commented, hardly aware of Kris or his hand in hers.

  The pianist was good, but not great, Ellen thought critically. She played the song correct technically, but her heart was not in it. Not unreasonably, Ellen supposed, playing for random people just to set a mood.

  And her own mood was swinging back and forth. Desire and guilt. Desire to sit and play. And guilt about … something. About having let her mother die. About her part in that death. And about giving up the playing. She had promised her mother… She had promised her mother that she would keep playing.

  Only she hadn't. She had quit. She had promised and then she had quit.

  She didn't actually raise her hand, but her right hand, the one not holding Kris's, twitched. She wanted to touch the piano. To play the piano. To be lost--no found--once again in the music.