Sightless

Chapter Four

Music was one of Alex’s hidden talents. Something he kept very private. Only his parents and his teacher Miss Penvency knew. She taught him how to play piano. It took a lot of the fresh-out-of-college teacher’s time, but she didn’t mind it. She picked teaching because she loved seeing a hungry mind absorb what knowledge she had to offer. Even if it wasn’t schoolwork she was teaching Alex.

Why he holed his talent away he wasn’t sure. He just didn’t want to be judged on that aspect of his life. But he hadn’t touched the piano since his family moved. They had to sell his baby grand for lack of space. They tried making it up to him by buying him a small cheap heap of keys that could fit in corner of his father’s office-away-from-the-office. But it wasn’t the same. He hadn’t as much as slid his fingers across the keys yet.

His mother used to beg him to play for her long after his fingers had grown sore from a long days practice, but he would almost always oblige her to make her happy. He loved making his mother happy, he loved being able to hear the smile in her voice since he could not see it on her face.

He would play anything from children’s songs to complicated Beethoven symphonies and Bach suites. It didn’t matter to him, music was still music. It all sounded great to his ears, well for the exception of a certain few screechy genres.

But as he sat alone is his room listening to some of his old CDs that weekend a song came on that had a very complicated piano piece. His fingers raced along playing the keys of an air-piano. He hated playing along that way; he couldn’t feel the cool keys beneath his fingers and made silly mistakes. It bothered him so much so that he got up and cleared the dust of the unused instrument and began nailing down the song.

Of course he mastered it in minutes, but he kept playing; something new and foreign to his ears. His fingers kept flowing, almost dancing across the keys, while he wracked his brain as to what he was playing or at least where he had heard it before. When he could retrieve no prier memory of the notes pouring out of him he realized that it was not in fact a song he had heard before and mimicking. It was something that had come from his own mind.

Finally his hand struck the last note and he started playing the string of notes once more. He found out that he could play them in the same order each time. Alex played the music in his head over and over again until his mother returned home from the grocery store. She dumped the bags of food onto the counter and crept quietly into the room, unbeknownst to Alex. She felt tears prick her eyes as she saw her little boy playing again. She was so worried that he stopped playing because he was unhappy and would never again fill the house with music in the evenings.

It also let her know that Alex was happy, if not with the move, at least with how things were going at school. She had suspected he had a crush, but she knew that was the case now as she saw him, his back arched towards the piano and his head bent in concentration.

“Alex, I’m so glad to hear you playing again,” Mrs. Cruz said once Alex had taken a break from playing.

He turned to face her. “Mom, you scared me! I was concentrating so hard I didn’t hear you come in.”

“Sorry,” she apologized, crossing the room to sit in her husband’s work chair.

“It’s okay,” Alex murmured getting lost in thought again.

“That music you were playing, I don’t recognize it, dear. What’s it called?”

Alex thought for a moment. It didn’t have a name. It was his. His very first composition, he didn’t have the slightest inkling on what to name it, or even if it was something worth naming. “It doesn’t have a name yet.”

“What do you mean? It’s got to have a name, dear.”

“I haven’t named it yet. I don’t really know if it’s worth naming,” Alex answered thoughtfully.

“That’s yours?” Maria asked in disbelief.

Alex nodded his head. “I was listening to an old CD when I decided I had to play one of the songs on there, only I didn’t stop playing when the song ended I started playing that. At first I thought it was just something I heard, but then I realized the notes had been buzzing around in my head for days. I just hadn’t paid them any attention.”

For about the hundredth time Marie felt extremely proud of her son. She was sure it was a symphony by a new composer. Something she just hadn’t heard yet. But it was her own son’s work, her own, sixteen-year old, son’s work.

She was musician herself what with being trained to play the violin, but she had never written her own pieces. She just simply played what her instructor put in front of her. She lacked creativity in that sense. But she hadn’t played since before she met Alex’s father.

“Play it for me again.”

And Alex did. Again. And Again.