8. Old Habits Die

The woman pulled on a plain white t-shirt and some jeans, glancing in the mirror to check how her physical health was doing. Her lips were chapped per being unused to the cold of the island, but her eyebags had all but faded and her complexion was a healthy, even colour. Content enough, she exited the bathroom and wandered down the hall with the initial intention to find Miss Polson.

Halfway down the hall, she paused and peeked down the dimly lit stairwell. It was day forty nine now and she'd yet to venture down there. Perhaps there was an important detail of some variety that could be used for escape later. Steeling her nerves, she looked both ways down the hall before she started creeping down the cold concrete steps. No one had explicitly told her not to go down there, but she still wasn't sure.

When she got to the bottom of the stairwell, a waft of cool air struck her and she brushed her hands over her arms to warm them. Her eyes darted around what appeared to be a basement. The floors were concrete with various rugs splayed atop them and there was not a single window, contributing to the dimness. Finally, in the far back corner, her eyes spotted it and she froze.

There was a beautiful antique piano collecting dust in the basement's corner. Yanire's heart began to slam in her chest as she stared at it. The piano was old, much older than Yanire could understand and there was something haunting about it sitting abandoned on an Icelandic island. On impulse, she draws nearer and nearer to it until it sits directly in front of her.

The stool had indentions atop it, worn in from years of use and the keys looked ever glossy, despite probably not having been touched for a long time. It was beautiful.

The woman could not be sure how long she stared at the instrument. She stared at it the way a starved wolf stares at a rabbit. Her soul ached to touch it and her heart pleaded with her to create even one melody. It was a pull beyond any void she'd known before.

Still, she could not touch it. She could hardly bear looking at it, even being as ethereal as it was. Joeri, her precious Joeri. His essence had seeped into every piano from the many times he'd watched his mother play. From the way his little hands had tried to mimic her slender, practised ones.

No, she could not look at this wonderful device without seeing him, feeling him beside her. It was unbearable agony. The piano was Joeri, and Joeri was dead.

No, Yanire Quema could not play in a world where her boy did not live.

Her grief was interrupted by a rather uninvited voice.

"What are you doing?"

Yanire jumped a little, turning to the stairwell with guilty eyes.

"Err- uh nothing. I was only looking."

Adriel scanned her with a madness inside of him that she couldn't place. He looked as though he couldn't decide between being enraged and being overjoyed. His feet were still as stone but his arms looked ready for some sort of movement. His hair, which had grown a little over his eyes, now hung on edge about him. The light behind him hid most of his expression from view, but Yanire was pretty sure there was a slight smile on his lips.

Yanire didn't understand it, and surely she had no right to question it.

"You didn't play it?"

Yanire shook her head.

"Do you know how to play it?"

There was a curiosity in his words, a madness, an energy. It was a pull, almost like the ache in her own soul to touch the delicate beauty of keys. Only it was an outside pull, Adriel's own.

Yanire wasn't sure how to answer the question. Wasn't sure if she should answer one way or another at all. Staring at the tense shoulders and small smile she felt uneasy. His signal was unreadable.

"I don't play anymore."

It was the truth. Yanire had not so much as set eyes on a piano since her son died.

The light in Adriel wavered as he nodded at her. She almost got the sense that he was disappointed but he wasn't the sort of man who would question or push such a thing.

"Alright."

The conversation died between them and he turned, heading back up the stairs and wandering off. Yanire eyed the instrument one last time before rushing out of the basement herself.

There was something of a temptation to Alvarsson Island now.

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Joeri's raven black locks bounced atop his small head as he rushed through the halls, a giggle in his chest. His mother chases after him, but he was an inventive sort of boy with his own ways of avoiding such capture. He ducked under the dining room table, throwing her off of his trail temporarily.

While she was caught in the chaos of moving chairs, the boy crawled out the other end of the table and took off running again. Yanire groaned and shouted at him to stop running. The boy had halfway turned to face her, laughing gleefully as his short legs carried him farther away from her. His joy was cut short when he miscalculated by a few inches and crashed directly into the living room coffee table, tumbling over and sobbing loudly due to the scrape on his leg.

Yanire caught up to him easily now, hoisting the boy up and carrying him to their downstairs bathroom. She dabbed at the scrape with a wet cloth and then dabbed with a different edge of the towel to dry it. The small boy's sobs were only sniffles now. He watched as his mother took a Paw Patrol bandaid and pressed it over the cut, kissing his knee for good measure.

"Now you see why we don't run in the house?"

The boy nodded, tears long dry now.

"Good boy, now come on, we're going to be late to Oma's house."

He nodded, hair flopping about and large eyes calm.

Yanire awoke in a cold sweat, body shaking with the vivid nature of the dream. It felt so real, so very real that it shook her to wake up back on Alvarsson island and not beside her son. Having lost Joeri all over again, Yanire started to cry. She cried loudly, with a reckless sort of abandon which loss gives you. The salt of her tears began to burn after enough time had passed but she didn't care. Joeri was dead. He was never going to be with her again. She would never again hear his little laugh. The woman wished desperately now that she had kept the phone with his videos and pictures on it. She cursedMartien for getting him killed. In short, the woman was an emotional mess.

The predicament of dreams hardly ended with the first. It happened again the night after. Then again on the third night. She managed to catch one night of dreamless sleep before the cycle picked up all over again and she was condemned to a hell of seeing what she would never have again.

Yanire felt that she was going insane. There was no one on the island who she felt trustworthy enough to speak to about it. Not even Secoiya, who had been nothing but kind to her since she'd ended up there. No, there wasn't anyone she could turn to. Though she wasn't sure that'd be any different were she off the island either. Yanire had always found it difficult to speak to people about things such as this.

On the seventh sleepless night, Yanire gave in to the temptation and crept quietly down into the basement. The piano still stood there with a head held high and an air of elegance unparalleled by anything else the Alvarsson's owned. It was long past any reasonable time to be creeping around now and thus she made extra sure not to make a sound.

At first, she only gazed at the teasing mistress, making no move to enter its atmosphere. Eventually she gave up on the longing gazes and stepped up to the stool before it. Yanire was very careful when she sat on the stool, both for the sake of maintaining silence and out of a great reverence.

She sat then, right before the beautiful and haunting instrument, eyeing its keys somewhat suspiciously. Maybe this was some trick by the gods, some flaw in the matrix. It seemed the piano was a spectre, watching her every move and waiting to see what she would do. Yanire only stared down at the beautiful glossy keys, making no move to touch them at all. Eventually, she left the room and retired to her bedchamber, being met with the comforting arms of a dreamless sleep.

Unbeknownst to Yanire, someone had witnessed her silent dance with the old mistress of the basement. Adriel had watched closely as she stared down on the keys with an expression he couldn't possibly understand. Whatever exchange had happened between the instrument and Yanire, it was alien to Adriel. He simply stared for a solid moment before turning and creeping up the stairway.

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It wasn't long before Yanire figured out a cure to her ailment of the heart. On the days where she visited the basement, even if it were just for a measly ten minutes, she was free from nightmares of Martien or memories of Joeri. It felt like a simple sacrifice to make at first. A form of penance, perhaps, for not being in the car to protect Joeri that night. Though the more she stared at her stunning and elegant mistress, the more her soul sought to intertwine with the instrument.

For a while, the piano became a lifeline to the woman. She clung to it the way a child does their first blanket, or the way a squirrel does it nuts. It was something of an enigma, the skeleton in her closets were doused in a brilliant light whenever she stood beside its visage, and the warmth of it all was not lost on her.

She was falling in love all over again, and this time, without ever touching the object of her affections. Perhaps, she thought, perhaps one key wouldn't hurt. Perhaps one symphony, one nocturne. She didn't try it, no. She was not ready yet. Yanire was not sure she would ever be ready. Still, the piano was beautiful and Joeri would have loved it.

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The interlude of dreamless, blessed dreamless sleep was a very short one. Her mind was ravaging itself, its targets set with the intention to kill she had personally felt. She was rotting from the inside out and it got to the point where Miss Polson worried for the young woman. Yanire had not halted her housework, but her otherwise smooth and precise hands had started to waver and it was obvious that Yanire was dissociated from reality entirely.

Miss Polson did her best to pull Yanire back to shore, but the heart was a fragile, desperate thing. She would play upbeat melodies and comb the woman's hair back into pretty designs. Secoiya did what any mother might have done in such an instance, and she found all the old children's movies that Adriel had liked, playing them to soothe Yanire some nights.

In some ways, Secoiya's efforts were not fruitless. Yanire's hands had stopped wavering and the precision returned itself to her limbs. Yanire had also recognised that she was worrying her companion and put a little more effort towards keeping things together.

Though in other ways, Yanire's ailment was inconsolable. A mother who has lost her child is a wounded beast of its very own kind, and we can never be sure what to do in these situations.

Despite it all, the woman carried on living. She fought through the nightmares and the borderline hallucinatory state in which she now lived. She fought through the isolation of being stranded on Alvarsson island and she fought through the urge to throw herself into the icy waters and be done with it.

What else could be done?