Mutant by Peter Clement Page B

“Come here,” and she pulled him weakly to her for what would turn out to be the last time they made love.
    The day she’d died he shut and locked the keyboard cover. She wouldn’t want him to, he knew, but the thought of hearing anyone else play the instrument she’d poured her soul into proved too much for him.
    One night Martha asked, “Do you want me to sell it? It’s morbid how you sit and look at it all the time.”
    “No!” he’d snapped.
    She never raised the subject again.
    “Returning to Daily Activity”
was what doctors called the portion of the printed schedule that allowed him more and more leeway. In his case it left him knowing less and less what to do with himself. As a result, he resorted to dropping by the hospital, hoping to chat with colleagues and get caught up on the institutional gossip with the staff of his own ER. At first they welcomed him with open arms.
    “Thank God you’re all right.”
    “We sure miss you!”
    “But we’ll scrape by until you’re back.”
    When he started checking files, hovering over physicians’ shoulders, and giving unwanted second opinions, he quickly became such a nuisance that eyeballs shot skyward at the mere sight of him.
    “Dr. Steele, you’re here again?”
    “We’re managing okay, really.”
    “Excuse me, Richard. Gotta run.”
    He ended up spending his afternoons strolling in Central Park instead, trying to find warmth in the thin sunshine of midwinter. Failing that, he added a detour to his excursions, dropping by a bar in the Plaza Hotel with an armload of newspapers for a drink. By week’s end, the waiters considered him a regular and even knew his name.
    At home, relations between him and Chet remained as strained as ever. It seemed the boy couldn’t get out of the house fast enough as he headed off to school each morning. When Steele did get up sufficiently early to join him for breakfast, the teenager hurriedly gulped the remainder of his food in sullen silence, making it evident that he preferred his father’s absence. Evenings proved no better. The boy routinely arranged to do his homework at a friend’s house, and if father and son did encounter each other at supper, the meal became a repeat of breakfast, Chet staying at the table only as long as it took for him to wolf down Martha’s excellent cooking.
    “If it wasn’t for his appetite and your culinary skills, I’d never see him at all,” Steele lamented as he and Martha finished supper one evening after the boy had gone off as usual.
    “I’ll keep making the meals to get him here. Getting him to talk, you’ll have to do on your own.”
    “And how do I accomplish that?”
    “With more of what you said to him in ICU.”
    “He spoke with you about that?”
    “Yeah. And he also wanted to know if I thought you meant it.”
    “Oh, my God!”
    “I told him, ‘Of course, he did,’ but Chet needs to hear it from you.”
    An hour later Steele had already poured himself his drink and sunk into the overstuffed cushions on the sofa, settling in for his nightly brood, when the doorbell rang.
    “I’ll get it,” Martha called out cheerfully. “I forgot to tell you. Your friend Greg Stanton called this afternoon and asked if it would be all right to drop in. I told him, ‘Sure, come ahead.’ That you’d be glad to see him.”
    Over the years he’d learned for certain that the woman never forgot anything. “Martha!” he exclaimed sharply. “You deliberately didn’t mention it.”
    “Now, why would I do that?” she called over her shoulder, her voice filling with innocent surprise as she made her way to the door.
    Because maybe you figured I wouldn’t let anyone, not even an old buddy like Greg, interrupt my nightly feeling sorry for myself, thought Steele, growing surlier by the second.
    The tall man who strode into the room wore an immaculate dark suit with a gray shirt and charcoal tie. He also looked fit and lean. Even with frizzy blond hair retreating to the