Chapter 5
His father laid silently in his bed for a good month before Rainier knew that the man's heart was failing.
Rainier's mother stayed with his father for hours on end when the heavy news was brought to their attention. She would sit in the cozy armchair his father used to occupy when he was reading a good book on those warm summer nights so long ago. She was doing this now. Reading him his favorite old French novel that the man had read such a long time ago. She hoped the memories would ease his heart to a comfortable stop instead of a pain-filled one.
Rainier had moved into his old bedroom and had once again been pushing his old sheet music around in hopes of obtaining a brilliant epiphany about the classic language of music.
On this particular heated July night, he found himself in the parlor playing the piano. The old piano had belonged to his grandmother who had carefully preserved it through the hardships of World War II. The same piano he was now banging with furious fists. He could not, for the life of him, come up with his masterpiece. It lay silent in the back of his mind and no matter how desperately he probed for it, it remained in it's secluded spot.
"Rainier!"
It was his mother screaming frantically from his father's room.
He must have died.
Rainier sat silently on the piano bench, a round fist soon lazing into a spread palm. He did not wish to look at his father's corpse like he was forced to witness his sister's. He did not want to-
"RAINIER!"
That was more than just a shout for a death. That was a shout for a life; for help.
Slapping his palms against the hard grained wood, he used the piano to boost himself up and splay the bench to the floor. He rushed to the marble stairs and stomped his way up two at a time.
Please let mom be safe.
He clutched the massive brass door-knob and gave a sharp jerk.
There his father was.
He was slumped sideways on the bathroom door-frame. His face was close to the ground and his arms were ripping something up from the tile floor, something Rainier couldn't quite see.
He could see, though, the toppled armchair, the splay of tubes that once rested in his father's crippled body, and the long slender smear of blood that went beyond the hunched man in the door-frame. Sickening popping sounds echoed from the sterile bathroom and all too soon Rainier realized just what had happened.