Staccato (Magnum Opus #2) - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,12

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. Everything smelled the same, sounded the same—the quiet pings of impending death and the people pushing carts around to erase the evidence of it.

It was oppressive and horrifying, and there were days Nik wanted to rip his father out of the bed and let him die at home with something resembling dignity. Only…neither he nor his brother were equipped to handle it. He couldn’t put his students any farther down the list, and his father needed more care than they could provide and more nursing than they could afford privately.

If he had done better, if he had been a sort of child prodigy like Nicolas Michaud—the English composer who rivaled Mozart at the age of six—maybe he’d be in a different position. Maybe he could have kept his life and paid for his father’s care and sacrificed nothing.

But that wasn’t his luck nor his lot in life.

Nik pasted on a smile when his hand found his father’s door with more ease than he cared to think about. He didn’t bother knocking, and he tilted his ear toward the center of the room, but he was pretty sure they were alone.

“Are you awake?” he asked in French. His father had lost English months back, and occasionally he would babble nonsense words, but his mother tongue was the only thing he had left of his old self. “Papa?”

“Mon âme?”

The name he used to call his mother rang out between them, and Nik was pretty sure his father didn’t even have his eyes open. “Papa, it’s me, Yanik.” His cane found the edge of the bed first, tapping from side to side to make sure no one had moved the equipment around. It was clear, so he held out a hand and searched for the table before depositing the food Van had whipped up earlier.

Relieved of his burden, Nik set his cane to the side, then found his father’s hand and ran gentle fingers over bones and paper-thin skin. He was nothing like the strong man who used to hoist him up and toss him what felt like miles into the air so he could pretend he was flying. This man was a cruel, sadistic impression of the person who had given Nik all the strength and poise to be the man he wanted to be as he got older and faced opposition from people who wanted him to exist