Free Bridge of Scarlet Leaves by Kristina McMorris

Maddie dredged up a smile, held it as his glassy blue eyes panned past her face. The routine persisted in delivering a sting.
    Before the window, the nurse eased him into a chair. He angled his face toward the glass pane. “Your daughter’s going to play for you today. Won’t that be nice?”
    Holiday garland swagged above him. The fading afternoon light bent around his slumped shoulders. For an instant, time reversed. It was early Christmas morning. He wore his bathrobe over his pin-striped pajamas, his brown hair disheveled. Bags lined his eyes not from aging sorrow, but from a late night of assembling Maddie’s new dollhouse, or TJ’s bicycle for the paper route. Maddie could still see her dad settling on the davenport, winking at his wife as she handed him a cup of strong black coffee. Nutmeg and pine fragranced a day that should have lasted forever.
    “If you need anything, I’ll be at the desk,” the nurse said to Maddie, doling out a smile. The pity in the woman’s eyes lingered in the small, stark room even after her departure.
    Maddie shook off the condolence and retrieved the violin from her case. She methodically tuned the strings. Photographed composers stared from the lid, always in judgment.
    Today, theirs wasn’t the approval she sought.
    She took her position before the music sheets. Each lay in sequence side by side on her father’s bed. Height-wise, the pages weren’t ideally located, but she knew the composition forward and backward. The wrinkled papers, strewn with penciled finger markings, merely served as a security blanket.
    “I’ve been working on a Paganini caprice for you. His ninth, one of your favorites.”
    He didn’t respond, not so much as a blink.
    She reminded herself that the title alone would carry little impact.
    As she nestled the violin between her chin and collarbone, she played the opening in her mind. There was no room for error. The perfection in her phrases, her aptness of intonation, would wake him from his solitary slumber. Lured out of his cave and back into their world, he would raise his eyes and see her again.
    She lifted the bow, ticking away two-four time in her head. Her shoulder ached from relentless practices. Scales and arpeggios and fingered octaves had provided escape from gnawing doubts over her looming nuptials.
    If only life could be as well ordered as music.
    Maddie closed her eyes, paced her breathing, and sent the bow into motion. The beginning measures passed with the airiness of a folk dance in a gilded palace, where women with powdered unsmiling faces and tall white wigs tiptoed around their buckle-shoed partners. Soon, the imitative notes of a flute alternated with dominant horn-like chords, and after a brief rest, the strength of the strings pushed through an aggressive middle section. Maddie’s fingers leapt up and down the fingerboard. The bound horsehairs hastened through ricochets and over trills. Any ending seemed miles away until a soft high-B floated on melodic wings. Only then did the prim courtiers return. They lent their limelight to a ruler’s abrupt pronouncement, before trading bows and gentle curtsies. When the final note drifted away, Maddie opened her eyes.
    Her father’s seated form appeared in blurred lines. As they solidified, her anxiety climbed the hill molded of hope and dread. Her technicality had been pristine, a rendering her instructor would deem “admirably spotless.”
    But had she chosen the right piece? The right composer?
    Violin held snug to her chest, she watched and waited for the answers. In the silence, her father inched his face toward hers. A trembling of anticipation spread through her. Their gazes were about to connect when an unexpected sound robbed her focus. At the door a matronly nurse stood behind a woman in a wheelchair, pit-patting their applause.
    Maddie jerked back to her father—whose attention had returned to the window. His expression remained as dispassionate as those of the composers in