Monday was the day of the party. The day of the wreck. Which might or might not be going to happen, and Al hadn’t come back to let him know. Not since Friday night.
Bethica was supposed to be involved in that wreck, he remembered. So this Leap did involve her. He wondered if it involved her baby, too. He wished Al would show up so they could figure things out. Did Bethica tell Rimae about the baby? Did she lose it, give it up, abort it?
He found himself considering the possibilities with an objectivity that he would once have said he didn’t possess. Too much experience with Leaping had changed him; it
wasn’t like him to be so detached from the people around him. A lot of things were unlike him, Sam decided. He’d been wondering for a while, in fact, just what “like him” was supposed to mean anyway. He taped paper over the broken windows and went back over to the bar.
Davey was already there, sweeping the floor. Rimae was behind the bar, setting clean glasses back in place. The boy spared him not so much as a glance. Rimae looked up indifferently. “Oh, there you are.”
“Here I am,” Sam agreed, and wondered if he too had some assigned task.
“You’re spending a lot of your free time around here lately,” Rimae said. She was checking stock now, counting bottles and making notes on a clipboard. “What’s the matter, aren’t there any more fish in the creek out there?”
No assigned task. Well. He considered telling her about the vandalism, decided not to. Maybe he could get the windows fixed before she found out. The rest of the place was in pretty good shape—better than when he’d Leaped in.
He sat down again on the piano bench. The presence of Rimae and her son put a hole in his plans for the piano; he had a feeling the classics would be out of character. Wickie wasn’t a Rimsky-Korsakov kind of guy.
But he was unable to keep his hands off the keys. Rimae looked up as the first notes began to ripple through the air, snorted and went back to what she was doing.
Davey, on the other hand, stopped sweeping to watch him. Sam registered the change in activity level, looked up and smiled at him.
The broom clattered to the floor, and Davey came over to stand beside him.
“He’s always liked music,” Rimae called out. Sam gave out with a jaunty jazz riff.
Davey grinned, a stiff and awkward smile, reached out and began pounding on the keys in the upper register, a pounding completely out of sync with Sam’s playing, dissonant, unrhythmic, harsh.
Sam stopped at once. “Would you like to play?”
Davey nodded jerkily and continued pounding. Sam caught at his hands. “Hey, hold on. Let me show you.” He moved over to make room on the bench for the boy.
As soon as he took his hands away, Davey resumed pounding at the keys.
“No,” Sam said. “Sit down.” This time he held on to the boy’s hands until Davey was seated beside him.
“Now look.” He let go to demonstrate the first three notes of “Chopsticks.” Davey instantly pounded on the keys.
Rimae chuckled. “Now you’ve got him going,” she said, polishing the top of the bar. “He won’t quit.”
Sam had the feeling she might be right, but he wasn’t ready to give up yet. “That’s quite a tune you’re playing, Davey,” he said soothingly. “That’s a good tune. Would you like to learn another good tune? Then you’ll have two of them.” And the piano might survive a little longer, he added to himself.
He placed Davey’s hands—small, bony hands—on the proper keys and pressed down. Oh, Nicole, if you could only see me now, he thought wryly. I’ll bet you never had a student like this one. Nicole had been his piano teacher when he was younger than Davey was now. And in about-—Sam calculated absently—four years from now, she’d be hired as an understudy for an out-of-town production of Man of La Mancha, and she’d meet a man she used to know and love. Only it would be Sam Beckett.
It was still the future for her. It was part of the past for Sam, one of innumerable loops of the past. He still thought about her. She had been, would be, a wonderful teacher, in more ways than one. “ ‘Sancho, my armor!’ ” he whispered to himself, smiling wistfully. The boy sitting beside him didn’t notice.
Davey let Sam move his hands, unresisting, over the keys. He didn’t cooperate, either. Sam couldn’t even tell if the boy understood that the music was being played as
a result of his pressing the keys. He stared at the yellowed ivory uncomprehendingly.
Sam moved his hands through the pattern once, twice, three times. “There. See? Now you try it.”
Davey went back to indiscriminate pounding.
Rimae laughed. “Now you know why I keep that old piano closed up,” she said. “But you play pretty good.”
“Ever tried teaching him?” Sam asked, trying to catch hold of Davey’s hands again. He finally succeeded. Holding them with one of his own, he pulled the cover closed.
Davey recognized at once that he could no longer reach the black and white keys. He touched the wood of the cover, an oddly light touch, sighed, and then got up, went back to pick up his broom, and resumed sweeping, all without saying a word.
“He’s always been that way,” Rimae said, shrugging. “Slow.” There was regret in her voice, but no self-pity, and no pity for Davey, either. He simply was, and she obviously refused to think of it in terms of something “wrong” with the boy. He was slow, that was all. He was hers. Sam remembered seeing Bethica, the morning before, protectively holding Davey’s hand, and decided Rimae’s acceptance wasn’t the worst thing in the world to pass on to her niece.
Davey dropped the broom on the floor and ran out the door. Rimae looked at Sam and shrugged.
Retarded. Handicapped. Intellectually challenged.
