A diverging chapter, maybe enough for a cup of tea.

[Paul \\ Every Night]

Chapter 5

The storm seemed, if anything, to be growing even stronger now. The world beyond the confines of the train seemed to have disappeared behind layers of driving white snow that streaked by on the other side of the glass, but suddenly Rebecca sensed that the train was moving along more slowly than before.

Sam was asleep again, his head on her lap, and she couldn’t help but rub his temples. His body seemed to relax when she did, like his body seemed to completely fall away into her enveloping touch, and she found she enjoyed giving him such a gentle respite from his pain. He hadn’t been able to hold anything down, but at least the Zofran was controlling his nausea – and the fentanyl patch was helping him rest a little.

The lumbering car moved over a switch and lurched to the right and he stirred, then opened his eyes a little. She looked down at him and smiled when he caught her eye, and then a little boy’s smile crossed his face. Innocent, not a care in the world.

The she saw a tremor of pain crease his brow and his eyes shifted.

“Have I been down long?” he asked.

“Maybe an hour. Are you feeling any better?”

He sat up gingerly and immediately closed his eyes as waves of vertiginous nausea came for him, then he took a deep breath and held on for a moment, waiting for it to pass. “Light headed,” he sighed as he tried to come to terms with this latest development. “What the devil is going on?”

“The Zofran. It’s not a common side effect, but it happens. Take it a few more times and your blood pressure ought to stabilize.”

“I’m having the weirdest dreams. Really lucid, like wide screen technicolor epics…”

“That’s the Fentanyl.”

“Damn, I think I like that stuff. Great ideas for new music in there,” he said, suddenly grinning at the thought. “But I guess a lot of music has been written ‘under the influence.’”

“You think that still goes on? I thought that was kind of a sixties thing…”

He chuckled at that little slice of naïveté. “I think you almost have to be under the influence of something to write good music, but…I don’t necessarily mean booze or drugs…”

“Oh, what do you mean…?”

“Well, writing anything is on one level a reflection of the moment, and all our moments are under the influence of…something. Things like love or anger…or despair…” His eyes drifted as he said that last word, and she saw another change come over him.

“Is that what you feel right now? Despair?”

He closed his eyes, drifted into her question and tried to feel his way to an answer. “I guess I do, yes. Maybe a lot, but it comes and goes. Not so much since last night.”

“Oh? Why’s that?”

“I think running into you changed something. Something about the direction of…or maybe…”

“Maybe…what?”

“I’m not sure…I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something feels different…”

“Could you, I don’t know, maybe put these feelings into a song?”

“I don’t know,” Sam replied, his voice now little more than a coarse whisper as he turned and watched the streaking snow.

“I think maybe you need to, Sam. To me…it feels like you’re holding onto your feelings, not letting them go.”

He nodded in understanding, but then he shrugged, and she saw an ambivalent toss of his shoulders and wondered where that had come from. “Maybe some feelings are better left alone,” he sighed.

“Not if holding them in makes you sick.” 

“Do you really think that’s possible?”

She gently shook her head. “Are you kidding? Sam, stress will wear anything down, and it affects people in all kinds of unexpected ways. Stupid things like skin problems when you’re a teenager, but heart attacks and stroke when you get to be our age.”

“One of my oncologists told me that stress can impact survival rates.”

Rebecca nodded.

“So,” he continued, “what stresses you out?”

The question hit her hard – because suddenly she couldn’t recall ever experiencing stress, and she knew that wasn’t possible.

“Well?” he added, now prodding her, wanting to reassert some kind of control over his dwindling reserves of emotion.

“You know…I can’t remember feeling…anything…”

“What? You can’t remember…?”

“No, Sam, that’s not what I’m saying. I can’t remember anything. Anything at all.”

He looked at her again, scowling as he watched waves of sudden fear cloud her eyes. “You alright? You look kind of pale…”

“Images. Sam, it feels like I’m seeing images flash by. Images – like memories – only I don’t think they’re – my memories…”

“What?”

“Like old eight millimeter film clips, the colors are all faded and I can see splotchy flashes of light…”

As he watched the snow he also took in her reflection in the glass, and she seemed to fade away.

+++++

She went to the record player and gently laid her ancient copy of West Side Wind onto the turntable, then hit the ‘play’ lever to start the mechanical ballet that seemed hidden within, waiting to be called into action; she watched the platter spin-up to speed, then the tone arm as it lifted from it’s cradle and then swung out over the platter, settling over the opening track on side one before floating down to the shiny black surface of the pressed vinyl recording…

“Do you remember when he wrote this one? You were still so little…” Rebecca asked Tracy. She held out her arms as his daughter came back to her side, and Rebecca closed her eyes as his music came for her once again.

And as Tracy held onto her mother, she too closed her eyes and waited…

And then, as her father’s voice filled the room once again, there he was. Soft, flickering images from the camera in her mind, her father sitting on the stone hearth by the fireplace, gently cradling the old Martin guitar that had never been far from his side, his strong fingers finding their way to the perfect chord. She felt his love coursing through his fingers before his words took shape and began streaming through the air to her soul, and once again she felt the eternal connection he had created for her. For them. 

She felt her mother beginning to sway as his words caressed the air around them, and Tracy couldn’t help but move with the sudden reunion, and she felt like she and her mother were as waves of wheat bending to a wind that had just passed over the fertile prairies of his music.

Her memory was completely alive now, and in her mind’s eye her father was sitting across from her – his music playing in her mind’s eye as he watched. He had by then been fighting his cancer for almost two years, and she remembered wondering about that. She’d been too young to really understand, yet even so his pain had shown on his brow, even now – in her recollections of him.  He had lost all his hair, even his eyebrows, and though he had always been quite thin, as he sat there in the stereopticon’s flickering light he radiated an emaciated sickness – yet his voice was, and would always be sonorously clear. His voice…as imprinted within the vinyl grooves of remembrance…would always be pure to her.

Her mother was trembling now, Tracy knew her own tears would come soon enough. They always did, and she resented her weakness. She wanted smiles to come when she listened to her father’s music, not sadness, not the memory of him slipping away into the warm embrace of Morpheus. Most of all, she wanted to be strong for her mother.

When the last song on the first side played, a quiet piece of lights and trees that spoke to their last Christmas together, she gently pulled away from her mother and walked to the fireplace – and sat where he had. She felt the solid stone underneath give way to the moment, her fingers searching for communion within the rock, her face upturned, her eyes closed as she searched for him, and she watched again as he opened his present on their last Christmas morning together.

His smile. Always that smile.

That’s what she remembered most of all – that smile when he opened the beribboned box and watched in utter amazement as a puppy, a fuzzy-black Bernese Mountain Dog puppy, bounded out of the box and into his arms. He’d always wanted one and there he was in her flickering memory, all smiles with his arms around the pup, and right then and there he’d promptly named the little critter Max.

Then she remembered that afternoon a year later, holding onto Max as she watched her father slip away from the light, then burying her face in the pup’s neck, feeling his soft tongue chipping away at her denial, and she’d wondered then as she wondered now if she’d ever really be able to feel anything ever again.

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, every last word of it…

[Randy Newman \\ Red Bandana]