Fortissimo by E.M. Lindsey

Author:E.M. Lindsey [Lindsey, E.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: E.M. Lindsey

Four

Nik left New York permanently three days after his father took a fall and broke his hip and was officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in the same week. It was in the middle of concert season, and he had to cancel seven shows. He sat on the plane with his head resting against the back of the seat, and he was choked by tears that he wouldn’t let fall. His heart felt shattered into a billion pieces, but he only allowed himself those handful of hours to grieve before stepping into his new life.

This is what children do, eventually, he told himself as he waited for a cab. Parents raise us, care for us, protect us. Then they start to age, and break down, and that’s when the roles reverse.

It was a sort of mantra that carried him to the hospital the first night he set foot back in his little hometown. The air was sweet, and it was humid, and it felt like it had claws which sank deep beneath his skin to drag him back to a past he thought he’d once escaped.

He didn’t resent it now. His father’s march toward death was agonizingly slow and painful, and it terrified Nik beyond all reason. Relegated to a hospital bed, almost all language forgotten, memories no more than fragments he had no hope of piecing together. And the slide into nothingness had taken years. It had gone from morning confusion to afternoons of wandering off where Nik would be called into the main office at the school because the local sheriff caught the man trying to buy golf clubs at the gas station, and no one could get through on Van’s work line.

It plateaued for long enough that Nik started to wonder if maybe his father was one of those men who would just be old and doddering, but harmless and healthy. Months passed, and Nik started to compose again. He started to research plane tickets and venues, and had six unsent email drafts to the conservatory, hoping maybe he could earn his way back in and prove that his music and that life was important to him.

Then his father took the car and crashed it into a park. He hit a tree hard enough to knock down a tree branch that broke a kid’s arm, and it was then Nik understood beyond a shadow of a doubt, this was it. This would be it, at least, until he died. And by then, the world would forget about him. The people in his world who mattered, who once held his name on their lips and tongue, would have moved so far beyond him, he wasn’t even a ghost.

That’s when his heart broke a second time.

The recovery was slower, but he loved his father, and it was that love which carried him right then out of the mall and to the hospice. He struggled at first, with the long twists and turns of hallways that lacked any real braille indications on doors about where he was.

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