Page 88 of A Wish for Us

The fight drained from me, leaving only the florescent print of everything I was fighting in my mind. My tongue ring rolled in my mouth, trying to rid it of the bitterness.

“Cromwell!” Lewis shook me, and my shoulders sagged.

“I can’t take them,” I said, my voice breaking. Lewis’s eyes saddened. I stared down at the blood still on my hands. I hadn’t even washed off Easton’s blood. “He tried to kill himself.” My voice was shaking. I squeezed my eyes shut. “She’s dying.” I palmed my eyes, trying to take away the navy-blue pigment that washed over any other color in my mind. A navy canvas, blotting out everything else.

I fucking hated navy blue.

“She’s waiting on a heart. But I don’t think it’s coming.” Lewis’s hold slackened, but he didn’t let me go. I stared at the painting of brightly colored swirls on his wall. “She’s getting weaker and weaker every day.” I shook my head, seeing Bonnie at the hospital. Being wheeled toward me, eyes sunken and huge. She looked so weak.

She looked like she was losing the fight.

“She’s going to die,” I whispered again. Pain so strong and blue so dark drilled themselves into my every cell, knocking the air from my lungs. “She made me want to play again.” I smacked my fist over my chest…over my still-working heart. “She made me listen to the music inside me again. Shemade me play. She inspired me…She made memeagain.” I swallowed the lump that I was sick of feeling. “She can’t die.” All the fight drained from my body. “I love her. She’s my silver.”

The emotions rose higher again, like a tsunami ready to demolish an unsuspecting shore. Then Lewis was leading me somewhere, his hand on my arm. I didn’t even register where we were going until I blinked and we were in a music studio. Only this was better than any I’d seen since I’d gotten here. I looked around the polished room, at the instruments perfectly laid out and ready to play. They were all new and high spec. And then my eyes drifted to a grand piano in the corner. The glossy black finish was like a magnet to me. My feet were moving across the light wooden floor. I felt I was gliding as I arrived at the piano I’d played on numerous times in concert as a kid. As packed theaters heard me play…as my dad stood in the wings and watched his synesthete son share the colors of his soul.

“You must play,” Lewis said. He was standing in the center of the room, watching me. In this moment, he looked like the composer I’d watched all those years ago in the Albert Hall.

Tyler Lewis.

I winced as the emotions took their hold. My head felt like it was in a vice, pounding, throbbing. “Release them,” he said. I let his voice hit my ears.

His voice was burgundy.

I liked burgundy.

My hands spread on the keys. The minute I felt the cold of the ivories under my fingertips, everything calmed. I kept my eyes closed as everything from tonight morphed from images into colors. Into shapes that danced and shimmered, stabbed and flexed.

And I followed them, just like my heart told me to. With every key, with every chord played, the emotions lessened. I played and played until I no longer thought. I let the music lead me, eyes closed, into the dark. I breathed, my chest relaxing. My muscles became one with the piano, the tension seeping from the fibers into the melody. And with the sonata that was materializing in this music room, the emotions were appeased. My head lost its ache as the notes danced and scattered into the air, lifting their burden from my body.

I played and I played until the music chose to end, and I was replete.

I breathed. I inhaled and exhaled, in and out, until my hands chose to fall to my side. I blinked my eyes open and stared at the black and white keys. Despite tonight, despite the pain and sadness that I knew were only going to get worse, I smiled.

Bonnie would have loved that smile.

When I looked up, Lewis was still standing where he had been when I started playing. Only his expression was something else entirely. And his eyes were wet.

“That, Cromwell,” he said, voice hoarse, “was why I wanted you here, at this school.” He took a step closer. “I’ve never heard anything like that, son. Not in all my years of composing and conducting have I heard anything as raw, asreal,as I just witnessed.”

He came to the piano and leaned on its top. He was silent. I stared down at the piano, running my hands over the black gloss.

“I want this,” I whispered and felt the final string that tightly bound my passion for chords and melodies, rhapsodies and symphonies, break free. The lump that had been clogging my throat all but disappeared. I breathed, and I felt my lungs truly exhale for the first time in years—maybe even since before I lost my dad—because this was my choice.

The music had been screaming at me to compose from the minute I was born…and now I was ready to listen. “I want this,” I said louder, with a conviction I hadn’t ever had before. I looked up at Lewis. “I need to do this.” I needed to create. To compose.

Then I thought of tonight, and the story this Steinway had just told. I felt the sadness well up inside me, clawing its way to the surface. My finger dropped to a single key, and I pressed on the E. E, I always liked. It was mint green.

“He slit his wrists.” I moved on to the G. “Bonnie’s brother, Easton. He tried to kill himself tonight.” A scale started as I walked my way up the keys. “I found him.” My voice sounded like razor blades.

“Is he…?”

“He’s stable. That’s what his dad said.” Scale after scale tapped its way along the piano. I put my free hand on my chest. “The emotions…” I shook my head, not knowing how to explain it.

“They consumed you,” Lewis said. “Broke you.”

My hand froze on the keys. I met his eyes. “Yeah.” I drowned in confusion. He’d understood.

Lewis pulled an orchestra chair beside me. His fingers found their way to the keys too. I watched as his hands moved as if of their own accord. I saw the colors in my mind. So I started playing similar colors that meshed. I played a harmony. Lewis’s lip hooked into a smirk. I followed his cues. Spectrums refracted in my mind. And I chased them until Lewis pulled his hands back and dropped them to his lap.

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