The Encore of Us novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Same Hands
Anders walks Linnea out past his mother's guards and drives her to the children's hospital, where Tove drums his own nervous rhythm on her blanket and asks if he is the piano man.
Two security guards came down the aisle at a jog.
Anders stood up from the piano so fast the bench scraped across the stage.
"Stop," he said.
His voice wasn't loud, but it had the same weight it used to have when he cut off a rehearsal.
The guards stopped.
"Mr. Brandvold, your mother wants her removed."
"My mother is not the director of this hall tonight. I am."
He turned to the audience and bent his head in a small, stiff bow.
"Ladies and gentlemen, there will be a short pause."
Then he took my elbow, hard enough that I felt each finger, and walked me into the wings.
Nobody in the dark house said a word.
The stagehand pressed himself against the curtain as we passed.
"The stage door," Anders said, and the stagehand pushed it open.
Cold rain blew into the corridor.
Ingrid was already waiting on the loading dock above the iron stairs.
She had beaten us there through the lobby, in her heels, in her coat.
"Anders." She said it like a verdict. "Eleven hundred donors are sitting in that hall, and the mayor is in the second row."
"Then they can listen to the cellos."
"That woman is under a court order. One call and she goes back to Shakopee tonight."
"Make the call," I said.
Ingrid looked at me for the first time.
Her eyes were the same pale color as the rain.
"You always did know how to make a scene, Linnea," she said. "It's the only thing you ever learned from my husband."
Something hot went through my chest, and I kept my hands in my pockets.
"Mother," Anders said. "Go back inside."
"You cannot seriously believe a word she says."
"I believe in arithmetic." He took a breath. "Go back inside."
For a second I thought she would strike him.
Instead she smoothed her gloves, one finger at a time, and went back through the door.
It closed behind her with a soft, expensive click.
Anders went down the fourteen iron steps ahead of me.
Halfway down, he stopped, and put his hand on the wet rail, and didn't turn around.
I knew why.
I stopped two steps above him and waited, and neither of us said what we both saw on those stairs.
Then he kept walking.
His car was a dark gray sedan parked in the staff row.
I got into the passenger seat, and the heater roared, and for six blocks neither of us spoke.
The wipers beat across the windshield.
"Is she mine?" he said.
"Yes."
"Tell me you're not lying. Tell me that you didn't walk in there for money."
"I've never asked you for a dollar."
"You asked me for plenty, once." His jaw worked. "Why now?"
"Because she's dying, Anders. Not because I wanted to see you."
His knuckles went white on the steering wheel.
"Seven years," he said. "Seven years, and you let me think you didn't want me. You didn't want anything of mine."
"I wanted you to stay out of prison."
He laughed once, a short ugly sound.
"By sleeping with my father."
I turned my face to the window and watched the lights smear.
I had practiced for seven years what I would say if he ever asked me this.
None of it was allowed yet.
"She's six," I said instead. "She's got a bad temper and a bad kidney. She likes the dogs in the lobby, and she hates peas."
His breath caught.
He didn't say anything else until we reached the children's hospital.
The night nurse on the dialysis floor knew me by now.
She looked at Anders, then at the clock, then at me, and said, "Room nine. She's been awake all evening."
Rhea was in the chair by the bed with a library book open on her knee.
She saw him, and she stood up so slowly the book slid to the floor.
She didn't say a single word to him.
Tove sat propped on four pillows with her braids coming loose, drawing something on the back of a menu.
"Lin," she said. "You smell like rain."
"I know, bug."
Her eyes slid past me to the man standing in the door in a black dinner jacket.
He stood very still.
Her fingers tapped on the blanket, restless.
Thumb on the second knuckle. Three taps, then two, then three.
Anders looked at her hand.
I watched him look at his own right hand, which had started to do the same thing against his leg.
Tove squinted at him.
"Are you the piano man?" she asked.
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