Claiming Her. Marilyn "Mattie" Brahen

my peers thought my work had merit. But that record was like glass compared to the diamonds of my final compositions. And I hoarded them, like a child with a wondrous secret, holding back to dazzle my mates with three new musical triumphs in one fell swoop!” He lapses back to silence, sucks in a breath, and shivers as if chilled. “No one knew they existed but Cecily. Bloody beautiful Cecily. I told her not to tell another soul. I planned to tape them after our return to London from Blackpool. Just shut myself in with the piano and the recorder, put in all the orchestral parts of the symphony, finish it, then record the sonata’s interweaving movements, and finally, get my nocturne, short but excruciatingly seductive, down on tape! I’d only dreamt of creating music like this before, Leigh Ann. That recording you think so highly of equalled my metaphorical toddler steps, learning to walk as a composer before discovering I could run! And that bastard, that absolute bastard, saying the bloody bitch destroyed it all!” He lifts his hands helplessly to me. “I only had one set of it all, written in musical script. My symphony, my sonata and my poor little nocturne. I tucked them all in a large envelope and stuck it inside the piano bench before we left for seaside. So she destroyed them. Cecily destroyed them.” He heaves a sigh. “Not that I couldn’t recreate the music, upside in the afterlife, you know. But you want to leave your greatest work . . . ” He huffs out another sigh. “. . . in the plane of life you created it on. I was waiting. I thought perhaps Cecily would have shown them to my publisher after I died. It’s been three years, hasn’t it? On Earth?”

      I can read the resignation in his eyes, his posture. “Three new compositions? Lost?”

      “Three long leaps in my musical virtuosity. Gone forever, it appears. Not to be part of my scant legacy on Earth.”

      I lift my hand and rest it on his shoulder. He glances at it, unsure of my intentions, but allows it to remain there. “You were eavesdropping on Bael’s taunts this morning. I thought you had left. Bael said you had, but you were listening in.”

      Now he does move, dislodging my hand as he paces to the left. “I went off into the living room. But the words of that wondrous fallen angel of yours were meant as much for my ears as for yours. He means to crush my soul, to ship me to the spiritual boondocks. Away from you, no doubt. And he said my final works were lost, didn’t he? Said they would never be recovered. That Cecily had been particularly spiteful.”

      “Was she?”

      “I . . . umm . . . didn’t attend my funeral nor look in on friends and relatives after I drowned. I really don’t know. I met Patrick shortly after I went through the death process, the transition. He’d been on the upper planes some twenty to thirty years, and they’d assigned him to act as a sort of welcoming committee and messenger to me. The message was that I had unfinished business on Earth and would have to return to take care of it.”

      “Well, the method of return obviously wasn’t reincarnation.”

      He smiles halfheartedly, his melancholy and aching vulnerability visible. “No. Actually they didn’t tell me what the unfinished business was. They said I would know after I’d completed it. I expect it has something to do with my music.” He looks at me expectantly. “I wonder if I could dictate those lost works to you? Can you read musical script, Leigh Ann? I’ve never seen you do it, but . . .” I shake my head. “Well, there goes that idea. Probably wouldn’t work anyway, trying to convey musical notation through telepathy, remembering the exact compositions.”

      “Even if I could, I’d probably mess it up in more than one place. Not to mention the problem of trying to convince others that it’s your music, Terence.”

      Another flicker of hope lights his face. “Perhaps it hasn’t been destroyed.”

      “Maybe we can try to contact this Cecily,” I offer, then correct myself, “Maybe I can try to contact her, in the physical world. Do you remember the address, where you lived with her?”

      His pale brows furrow. “It’s been so long. It’s hard to remember details like that as well when you’re dead. What? Oh, come now, I am dead, you know. In your world, at any rate.”

      I sigh. The word really gives me the willies. I find it difficult accepting the mortal description of death. In the mortal world, one is indeed gone, never to regain one’s physical form in that particular lifetime, when one dies. But I still view Earthly life as the fantasy, the dream from which one awakens. “Perhaps,” I agree. “But death is a transition, not a permanent condition. It’s not my fault that most mortals treat Earth as the only dimension succoring life and the physical body as its only vehicle.”

      “Tell it to the coroner. Look, Leigh Ann. Even if I could remember where I lived with Cecily, what surety do we have that we’ll translate the address correctly? Psychics can miss by a kilometer. It’s one thing to mix up a simple conversation a bit. It’s another to give specific information that needs proving out. I don’t even know if Cecily still lives there. Maybe we should forget this.”

      “No. We’re not giving up that easily. We have to try to recover your lost works. But one thing does bother me. Why didn’t Cecily take them to your publisher or to someone else in authority in the classical music field? No matter how badly upset she was after your death, it would benefit her. She’d become a celebrity. The media would eat it up. The grieving heroine who saved her sweetheart’s music from oblivion.”

      Terence considers that. “You don’t think she did, and the publisher turned it down, do you?”

      “Highly unlikely. Your earlier works had been popular despite the critics. Dead composers with newly discovered works can get more attention than living ones that are still composing. So why didn’t she open the piano seat, scoop it out, and wave it in front of the music world’s face?”

      Terence furrows his brows again, as much at a loss as I am, then his mouth opens, his expression stricken. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God, Leigh Ann!”

      “What?”

      “Dear Lord, I didn’t tell her.”

      “Tell her what? You said you did tell her about the new music.”

      “No, no, no! I mean I didn’t tell her where they were. I lifted the piano seat, placed them in the compartment inside, and locked it, while she was packing the car for seaside.”

      “Well, wouldn’t she have looked for them? I mean, afterwards?”

      “I don’t know. She wasn’t musical, you know.” He sighs again, heavily. “Wherever that piano seat is, my music may still be.”

      “Well, we’ve got to try to contact her. Think! Try to remember the address where the two of you lived.”

      “Umm . . . Doughty Street! In London. I can’t remember the number. Was it 42 or 44? Damn! We lived right up the street from the Dickens House.”

      “The Dickens House?”

      “One of the houses Charles Dickens once lived in. They converted it into a museum.”

      “The street number, Terence,” I remind him. The sound of faint crying begins to distract me.

      “The number . . . yes, yes! It was No. 44. 44 Doughty Street. We rented the second floor. Yes, that’s it. The second floor flat at 44 Doughty Street in London,” he repeats, then peers at me. “Are you all right, love?”

      I can’t answer. For one instant longer, I stand facing Terence in the blue and white ether . . .

      * * * *

      . . . half a second later, my eyes opened to afternoon sunlight brightening the bedroom as Daniel’s loud bawling filled my ears. I got up and picked him up, checking his diaper. “Oh, boy. It’s all right, Danny. Mommy will get you cleaned up.”

      I removed the soiled diaper, wiped him around with a wet wash cloth, then dried, powdered and freshly diapered him. Even his outer rubber diaper had leaked through to the butt and legs of his sleeper. “What a mess.” At least, the crib sheet had stayed dry. I retrieved a new rubber diaper and sleeper from below the bathinet. I redressed