Every Note Played(26)
But he presses on, every step a grueling punishment. He hears Bill’s, Kathy DeVillo’s, and his neurologist’s voices scolding him in his mind. It’s dangerous for him to keep walking when he’s tired like this. His coordination gets sloppy. He’s especially worried about the possibility of dragging one of his tired feet, stubbing a toe on the uneven pavement, tumbling him to the ground. With no arms or hands to break his fall, every wipeout is a potential head trauma, broken bone, and trip to the emergency room.
Twenty feet from his goal, he’s fast running out of gas and faith. Still heavy, his legs now also feel flimsy, a teetering tower of wooden blocks that threaten to collapse beneath him with every step. His blood races through the vessels of his body, rushing through the chambers of his heart, begging him to hurry up and get to the bench before he falls. He looks around. He counts five other people close enough to hear him if he yells, but they might as well be in Timbuktu because he’ll never ask any of these strangers for help.
And he’ll never ask his father or brothers in New Hampshire or his daughter in Chicago. And he can’t ask Trevor in New York or his medical team at Mass General or even Bill, who is somewhere with his next client. He is alone in the Public Garden. He’s alone in his home. He’s alone in his ALS. And he’s suddenly, overwhelmingly terrified.
He can barely breathe, but it’s fear that’s strangling him, not ALS. Each inhale seems to stoke a building terror, as if his blood now carries panic instead of oxygen. The fear grips his entire body like a vise, a cage around his lungs, more paralyzing than his disease, and he can’t move. Sipping sharp tastes of air, he has to keep going if he’s going to make it to the bench. He finds a pep talk, a mission statement. Keep going. He takes small steps, small breaths. His eyes are married to the bench, and when he’s close enough, he leans forward, forcing his legs to keep going. It’s the bench or bust. Keep. Going. Keep. Going.
Two more wobbled steps, and he crash-lands face-first into the bench. His right cheek, shoulder, and hip already throb. He’ll have bruises by morning, which Bill will demand explanations for. He rights himself and sits victorious but feels nothing like a winner. The panicked fear flushes out of his system, leaving him rattled, wrung out, warned. He looks back along the path he traveled and beyond the garden gate. A little more than three blocks and a long way home. Too many steps to estimate. Too many steps, period.
Worst-case scenario, he’ll spend the next two hours on this bench. Melanie will call him at 1:30 and retrieve him. But he hopes for better than the worst-case scenario. Always has. He’ll rest awhile and hopefully recharge his leg muscles and courage enough to make the journey home on his own.
The garden is tranquil this time of year. He spots a couple of ducks in the pond, but the swans and swan boats are gone for the season. The tourists are gone, too. The people walking by him are Bostonians: a young Asian man, likely a student, bent over at the waist, hauling a backpack thicker than he is; a woman in sneakers and a massive black winter coat carrying a large black umbrella, her eyes focused on the ground—Richard looks up at the clear blue sky, perplexed—a corporate woman carrying her dry cleaning with two fingers, the winter wind blowing the clear plastic sheath covering her hanging clothes behind her like a sail, her purse bouncing off her hip on the downbeat of every left step, her heels beating the ground in a half-time tempo, late for something; a short Italian guy, his stomach leading way out in front of him, gabbing on his phone in a thick Boston accent, his walk a swagger in expensive-looking leather shoes.
Most of the people who pass Richard are traveling alone, stone-faced, white cords dangling from their ears as if they’re robots powered by the devices they hold. No one looks at him. It’s not that they see him and look away. They never notice him in the first place. He’s part of the background, as uninteresting as the bench he’s sitting on.
A sparrow leaps onto the wooden seat a brazen few inches from him and tilts its head from side to side. They make eye contact, and then the sparrow hops to the ground. It pecks at something there and flies away.
Everything living is in motion, going somewhere, talking, walking, pecking, flying, doing. Life is not a static organism. Every day, he’s a little more shut down, shut in, turned off. A little less in motion. A little less alive. He’s becoming a two-dimensional still-life painting, slipping inexorably into the alternate dimension of the sick and dying.
A woman passes him. Something about her reminds him of Karina twenty years ago. Her long hair and that purple scarf. He met Karina in Sherman Leiper’s Technique class. Although he noticed her on the very first day, it took him most of the semester to talk to her. Fresh out of public high school in New Hampshire, he had no experience with girls yet. When he was a teenager, his father regularly discredited Richard’s masculinity in obvious digs and under-his-breath derogatory comments. In a home and town where jocks ruled, a boy who loved tickling the ivories was seen as unmanly and decidedly uncool. Already cast aside by his father and brothers and boys in his grade, he couldn’t risk adding more rejection from Jenny or Stacey or any of the other cute girls he had crushes on. Instead, he channeled his private feelings of longing and unrequited love into his playing. He devoted his attention to piano instead of girls, and he insulated his young heart from the pain of being judged weird or wrong or not good enough by pretending not to care what anyone thought of him.
At Curtis, music ruled, not athletics. Every girl there was attracted to music, and even better, to musicians. Like a seed waiting for healthy soil and sunshine, Richard’s confidence around girls blossomed at Curtis.