"It was so long ago now," Logan murmured, as Tegan sipped her mochaccino. It was easy to tell that this was hard for him as well, and Tegan could understand why. Ness's mother would presumably have been Logan's wife at some point, or at least a partner. And this sounded like it was going to be a story of an intense betrayal, unless she'd completely misread the situation. She wondered then if she should have considered other possibilities; if Ness's parents had discussed splitting up but not shared it with their son, that would certainly have explained his trust issues. But she had no idea if that was likely, or even possible. All she could do was try to suppress the guesses in the back of her mind while she waited for the truth.
And, a little more pragmatic but no less important, she had to avoid doing anything that might somehow imply she had wet her pants. She shifted position slightly, and tried to pay full attention to Logan. To his words, not just his voice.
"It's something that stuck with him?" Tegan asked, although she gathered that much was pretty obvious. For Tegan, her parents' separation was still a fresh wound. But Ness was still angry years later. A part of her wondered if she could possibly have remained angry for so many years. "He told me he was going to play the piano. The keyboard, I mean. For his mum."
"Right. The keyboard has something like three hundred voices, you know? It was a gift from his uncle, it was top of the range back then. With its own minidisc player, you can import samples from. I don't know if that's a gimmick that's fallen by the wayside, or something they all do now. But Ness said he didn't want to get distracted by all the features, he wanted to learn to play first. He was surprisingly mature for his age. He set it up to sound like a piano, and always practised with it on the same settings. Sometimes we could hear him playing in his room, but I'm sure sometimes he used headphones. Hours every day. We could hear sometimes, but he never played for us. He was embarrassed by his mistakes to start with, and wanted to get better before anyone else listened. So we would listen in when we could, and he really was getting better. And then one day he said he was ready."
Logan hesitated then, and topped up his coffee. The mug was still almost full, and Tegan got the sense that he was just looking for something to occupy his hands. Maybe a little displacement from the story he was telling, so it didn't hit him so hard. She did notice that after adding another shot of coffee to his drink, he decided that a shot of spiced rum would help the taste. She didn't know if putting booze in his coffee was a usual thing for him, but it just drove home the impression that this was a story he still didn't like to remember. Finally, he was ready to continue.
"We put a date in the calendar. Set up the keyboard in the lounge, in front of the TV, with two armchairs opposite. I'd heard him more often, because I would often bring him snacks when he was practising. It was his mum he wanted to impress really. And the closer the day came, the more excited he got, practically bouncing in his seat at breakfast this morning. And she... she told him how excited she was to hear it, but encouraged him to go to school. He wanted her to hear him play, and said it was a special occasion. That was a surprise, he was normally so dedicated, but we told him to wait until later. So he went into school, and his teachers said he was distracted all day. He told them that he was putting on a little concert for his family, and some of them said they'd love to hear him play too. I don't think he talked much about music at school, but they probably gathered that he'll be good at anything he's so excited by. And he told them he'd love to show them what he can play, once his parents agree that he's good enough."
Another pause. Tegan couldn't even imagine people being so enthusiastic. The only comments she'd received in school were people echoing her brothers' teasing. Her teachers hadn't been supportive of anything outside their own specific disciplines, and she only started getting useful feedback when she could save up her allowance to get violin classes in the evenings. But she put those thoughts to the back of her mind now and focused on the story, maybe just beginning to understand why Ness's feelings about music were so intense. He'd been excited, obsessed even. Maybe he'd been as intrigued as she was when they'd been young. But the one time he'd tried to show someone else, it had turned into the last thing he expected. But that brought her mind back to the big question that could make all the difference in the world: what had Logan been thinking on that day?
"Were you expecting him to wow you?" she asked. "I mean... you knew he was good, right? But did you know before he did? Or did you even suspect that something was coming? Were there any clues, things that you brushed off, or that you wished you'd noticed in hindsight?" She was willing to bet that there was something; that would have explained the drinking. Maybe he thought that keeping it from the kid was somehow a kindness, or maybe he'd been blindsided. But he had to keep looking back now, wondering when he should have said something if he'd wanted to stay together as a family.
"There were no clues," he said, shaking his head, and then downed the whole cup of coffee. "Nothing we could have done. I know, I've thought about it since then, wondering if there was something I should have seen, thinking about how different things could have been. I mean, there were weeks I did nothing but reminisce and wish that things were different. But I honestly don't think there was any way we could have known. It was just..." A long pause, and he refilled his cup. More rum this time, more coffee, less water and milk.
"Anyway, when he came home from school Ness wanted to get ready right away. Rehearsing. Setting up his music on the keyboard. He sat there and waited for thirty minutes, even knowing she wouldn't be out of work until five. He said he didn't want to risk missing the start. But after a while he probably realised that was a bit silly, and came to the kitchen for a snack. We talked about his day at school, and his homework, but I could tell that there was only one thing on his mind. Impressing his mum. I was sure that she would be delighted... I never even thought...
"Anyway, it came around to five o'clock, and he was sitting in front of that keyboard again. That was her clocking off time at work, and he wanted to be there, ready to play as soon as she came in the door. He asked me to get dinner ready, so me and mum could watch him play as soon as she came in, and she wouldn't have to cook or anything. Well, that seemed like a great idea, so I made something we could eat on trays. Can't even remember what it was, now. Maybe a noodle bowl, it doesn't really matter. But all the time, Ness was sitting there at his piano, ready to play as soon as the door opened. It was his little obsession. It got to half past, and dinner was ready. I left it in the oven to stay warm, so we'd be ready as soon as she was home. Another ten minutes, and he was still happy to wait. Another ten, and he was starting to worry. She'd been that late before, if traffic was bad, but it would be rare. And normally if something was holding her up she would have called me, especially when she knew Ness was waiting."
"She didn't call?" Tegan asked. That sounded a little harsh. Even if she was leaving them, she could have told them once she was gone. Or called Logan during the day, unless she was scared he'd show up at her work and make a scene. She didn't really understand, and she got the feeling that she was misunderstanding something pretty major now.
"She tried," Logan said, and it was clear that he'd thought a lot about that over the last ten years. About how it might have been different, or what he could have said if they had been able to talk. There was a local outage with WNet, so our mobiles were only working for outgoing calls somehow. We didn't find out that little detail until a few days later. We were just sitting waiting. After a while I got dinner out of the oven and ate mine, but I was too stressed to pay attention. She'd never been that late before, so I called her office to see if there was some emergency making her stay late. There was a lot of weird interference, but I didn't realise it was on my end. And all they could say was she'd left at the usual time. So we kept on waiting. Ness wouldn't move away from the keyboard, because he wanted to be ready. I brought him snacks and a drink, and we chatted while we waited, but he knew there was something wrong. We didn't know what could have delayed her that much. I mean... we even joked that she was putting off coming home because she was nervous about his performance. But the longer we waited, the more we started to worry. And Ness, well, somehow he seemed to be blaming himself, and by the time I realised it there wasn't much I could say to reassure him without sounding like an empty platitude. The thought was just burrowing into his brain, and I didn't know how to stop it. You know how that can be, right? When there's nothing you can do, so you jump on any reason to blame yourself just because it's too scary to not be in control?"
"Yeah," Tegan mumbled, remembering what she'd said about Ness's mother running away to avoid his piano playing. If he already had a complex about that, she could have been touching a raw nerve; or opening wounds he'd never really recovered from. For a moment, she even wondered if she had gone too far, but she told herself that there was no way she could have known. And that Ness would have been fine if he hadn't been messing around with drugs or whatever to make her wet the bed. And when she thought about that, she almost felt okay about what she'd said to him.
"The longer we waited the more emotional we got," Logan continued, sipping again at a mug long empty. "And I think we were terrified to admit that this performance he'd invested himself into wasn't happening. It was like all his energy for months had been building up to this point, and cancelling it would be such a big deal. In the end, it was three hours before I was desperate enough to call her family and see if they heard anything; something that would have dragged her to the far end of the country or whatever. And then the police, and the local hospitals. Anywhere I might find out that something kept her from coming home."
He paused then, building up the courage to say the next few words.
"They called it arrhythmogenic right ventricular dysplasia. Long words that I've spent way too much time trying to understand. Can be triggered by exercise, they said, if she was hurrying to the car. She could have called her family or friends when she woke up, but she kept on asking them to call us. And they kept calling, but got no answer. I wonder what she thought; WNet had so much downtime, but did she ever wonder if we just weren't answering? When I got through to the ward liaison, she said she'd been there three hours, in and out of surgery. I got in touch three hours late, and just in time for some middle manager to tell me that if I'd called five minutes earlier my wife would have still been alive to say goodbye."
Tegan stared into space, the impact of those last words more than she could deal with. She'd only known Logan as a considerate and sensitive guy her dad was going to marry; and when she'd heard that he had a son around her age, she had assumed similar stories of adultery and betrayal. Something like this had never crossed her mind, and she felt terrible now. She could understand how it would have messed Ness up as well, and she wondered if she needed to apologise for being so hostile.
But while it might have explained his attitude, she didn't know if his past could excuse it. And knowing that a genuinely traumatic experience lay at the root of his problems, she could only speculate how he might respond to her latest comments. This was the kind of revenge she was sure she wasn't prepared to deal with, and for the first time since moving in here, Tegan was truly afraid of how far her new brother would go.