Half of a Duet
an excerpt

Prologue

His eyes were closed… Long, thin fingers scurried frantically over the ivory keys, looking very much like little birds, frenzied in an attempt to free themselves from his wrists… And yet his eyes remained closed… a small smile played his lips, even! The music rising from his instrument began to enclose him, much like a golden blanket, warming and a consistent comfort to the teenaged boy. The chaos that was being unleashed in his hands was, obviously, being diffused before it reached the other parts of the young man, leaving his face tranquil, his features relaxed as though he were merely watching, detached from the pandemonium he, himself, was creating.
Of course, he wasn’t completely oblivious. He knew that he was sitting inside the parlor of his home (Which was, obviously, large enough to have a room known as the parlor), with wafts of whatever his mother was cooking in the kitchen tempting his nose as he played in the next room over. He vaguely felt a heated weight on his right foot, which tended to be a real burden when one needed to make use of the sustain pedal, but, typically speaking, he didn’t mind. The weight came from his collie dog, Bruno, named after the famous pianist, Bruno Canino, of course… The boy had really been proud of himself for being clever enough to see that “Canino” was similar to “canine”… which, all things considered, was quite a feat for a boy of twelve years of age at the time.
All while he was considering his surroundings, he had yet to miss a note of the sonata that he was currently devoting his attentions to. His thoughts spiraled back down into the depths of his piece, allowing, once more, for that blanket to wind its way around his shoulders… Allowing it to envelope him… Allowing it to slow his breathing…

… And then came the D#.

The note’s incorrectness rang throughout his body like a tuning fork, instantly seeping into his blood and freezing his hands so that they lay right atop the traitorous note. The celadon-colored eyes flew open, their lids drawn so wide it seemed that they would never again be able to shut. So strange was the error, it drew the boy’s parents in from the other room, their brows knitted with concern for their son.

Truth be told, it had been years since they had heard an error emerge from the parlor at their son’s hands…

Still having yet to blink, the boy rose from his piano bench… The, wood that had been worn away to hug his behind after all these years, sliding out from underneath him as he nearly kicked Bruno in his need to escape from the room. He tore his coat off of a rack on his way out of the back door and into the woods of Maine that surrounded their home, leaving his parents to look at one another, open-mouthed. The father lead his wife back into the kitchen, sitting her down at the grand table set off to the side of a nearly commercial-like kitchen, the gleam from state-of-the-art appliances dancing across the pale skin of his wife’s face…
Her expression was pinched, her mouth tight and her eyes small and wet. She gazed up into the face of her husband and whimpered out “… but Maxwell… What… what happened?” His eyes rose to meet hers from behind his thin, wire-rimmed glasses as he brushed a lock of blonde hair, matching that of the son who had just made a rather dramatic exit out their back door, out of his face.
“I… really have no idea… Obviously, he’s taking it hard as well… Perhaps we should look into a new mentor for him?” At this, his wife pounded her fist, which made a shockingly loud noise for such a small physical presence, onto the hard wood of their table, her eyes narrowed as they burrowed into her husband.
“A new mentor?! Maxwell, he’s been gifted with the title of prodigy! What kind of mentor or professor or instructor is going to want to claim that they teach someone who, at the age of seventeen, has already surpassed their skills?!” With this, her energy that had seemed so apparent but a moment ago as she blew her wall of emotion all over her husband, appeared to be draining out of her and leaking onto their fine hardwood floors as her hand found her forehead, supporting the weight of it with her elbow, sky blue eyes closing gently, as though in defeat. “Now… if this becomes a new trend… He’ll never make it into Julliard…” At that last statement, Maxwell turned his head away slightly so that his wife wouldn’t be able to see, even though her lids were clearly shut, as he rolled his eyes quickly before doubling over, his tall stature diminished with the need to comfort his melodramatic wife.
“Firstly, Felicity, he’s prodigal… Julliard takes in plenty of students who haven’t got even close to the same talent as our son… And besides… Who says that he really wants to go to Julliard anyway? He really hasn’t said very much about it to us, after all…” He fingered a few of the applications that his wife had scattered over the top of the table for their son to “look through”, but he knew that they were really being filled out by her for him at night when she thought that he was asleep… His hand returned to him and then went to cover hers. “He’ll cool off soon enough and then be back in the parlor, error-free as per the usual…” He offered up a small smile to her and was horribly shocked when it was returned with hard, dark, sapphire slits that shot daggers his way and a mouth so tense it almost seemed to disappear.
“How can you say that?! Our son hasn’t erred in years… and you write it off as just a mistake?! There’s no way… And I see that I’m the only one that knows this… I see that I’m the only one that knows our son!” And after hurling those hate-drenched words at her husband, who sat there in stunned silence, she turned tail and continued her warpath up into the bedroom that they typically shared… but Maxwell knew that would most certainly not be the case tonight… Instead of chasing after her, he opted for the more peaceful route of leaning against the doorway and looking outside at the woods that his son had, no doubt, run to… He wasn’t worried for his son’s safety… Nothing dangerous really lived in these woods anymore… Otherwise he wouldn’t be nearly as comfortable leaving the dog runs so near the tree line… His wife wouldn’t have thought much of it, even though it was, essentially, her breeding business… As though he knew what was being thought of, Bruno came up and bumped his cold nose up against Maxwell’s hand. The man lowered himself and scratched behind the dog’s ears… The only one that was allowed to live inside the house was Bruno… When he had been a puppy, Felicity had rejected him from the rest of her first litter because of a darker brown patch that mottled his, otherwise flawless, sable coat… Because of this, he was given to their son… and the two of them treasured each other with a love so pure it seemed to be incomprehensible to anyone outside of them themselves at times… Maxwell could tell that Bruno was worried… and he wasn’t surprised… He was worried, too… But, unlike his wife, Maxwell had faith that their son would come back and would be fine… So long as he was allowed to do what he felt he needed to do.
Getting Felicity to understand that would be another story altogether… and as he made this realization for what felt like the thousandth time, he opened the door, allowing the cool New England air to hit his face as he whispered to the night “Arden…”

… Arden had been outside for nearly an hour, huddled up near the dog runs, his head resting on his knees so that he sat in a relatively contorted position. In his skull, that erroneous note continued to resonate inside of him… Echoing off of his internal organs and reverberating on his heart, that D# sounded. He gently picked up his head and dropped it repeatedly against the bones of his knees. “It was such a strange mistake… I’ve made slight errors with dynamics… Maybe tempo… but my hand physically betrayed me… A wrong note? What the hell, Arden…” he thought, as his heads ceased its pounding against his kneecaps. One of the dogs barked softly, probably in sleep, from the runs out back and, for the first time in awhile, Arden decided that he had a genuine interest to go see the puppies… Mostly because they were about as far away from piano music as one could get… He approached the special puppy run and opened the door and stepped in, and once he did that, he was instantly swarmed with the little wriggling, whining fat things. A soft smile played his lips, returning to his face the handsome nature that had been replaced with a look of self-loathing during his flight from the parlor. He reached down to one of them, picking up the puppy, so small that his long fur was only just beginning to come in. He reminded him of Bruno, and that was probably why he was smiling so much… Thinking back, he wished he had brought Bruno outside with him… At least then he’d have someone to share the loneliness that he was feeling now with someone… After all, misery loves company, right?
He set the puppy back down and warded off his siblings, of which there were five, using his foot the block off their attempts to escape from their prison, which was really the only home that they knew, being as they’d never lived anywhere else. After much careful maneuvering, he was finally able to latch the gate that lead into their home and was free from them… And it wasn’t until he was able to back away from their home that he realized the stench of it… Not entirely unbearable, he knew his mother kept the runs, as well as her dogs, clean, but it was still something that caused him to turn towards the woods and take a few steps so that he could inhale the fresh scent that only New England could give.
The more he stepped into the wilderness, the more of that unsullied air he felt that he needed… He was being drawn into the forest to the point where he felt that he no longer had control over just what his limbs were doing… For some reason, immersing himself in those trees had just become a physical need… He had to get there… and it took him some time of wandering to figure out just why he was drawn in…

… It came in the form of a high, sweet sound… A pure sound…

He walked towards where from he felt the sound was coming, his pace quickening with each step, his pulse becoming more rapid and turning over into more of a trill than the two distinct beats that it should have had.

… But he wasn’t scared.

No… This wasn’t fear. This was a strange form of magnetism… It wasn’t just curiosity, either. This was a need. It was almost as if he had returned to a more primal sense of being, for if he had been thinking clearly, he never would have wandered this far into the woods that he wasn’t horribly familiar with… He never would have begun running toward a strange sound as opposed to away from it… And when the face of a girl about his age appeared from the top of a boulder, a piccolo to her lips, he would have never had the courage to say

“... Hello?”