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In another, my grandparents smiled back at me, Sia laughing in their arms.
I pressed my lips together tightly.
Touched the tip of my finger to the frame.
Please. Please let her meet them.
I opened the door to my bedroom and changed out of my stale clothes.
Above my dresser hung the mirror that used to be in the family room. My own reflection stared back at me. My face slack with shock. Wide-eyed with hope.
Flushed with love for Hope.
On my nightstand, the first picture she ever sent me. I took it with me back downstairs, through the hall of frames.
My heart thrummed a beat in my throat.
I ran my fingers along the edges of the frames.
Half stood empty.
In each empty frame, Hope’s handwriting. Hope’s plans and dreams for all of us.
‘Our First Trip to Disney.’
‘Our First Christmas as a Family.’
‘Brayleigh and Sia with Santa.’
‘Brayleigh, Minty, and Lucky.’
‘Viola’.
I told her about Viola once. One time. I closed my eyes. Just once, and she understood what Viola meant to me.
The next frame stopped me in my tracks. ‘Ares, Hope, Brayleigh, and Sia with Grammy and Grampy’.
And the one after that made me laugh. ‘Naughty picture of Hope’, punctuated with a winky face.
Warmth filled my chest. The woman was a one-man wrecking crew. No, she was a surgeon. Stitching this man back together.
I saw nothing that warranted a contractor.
Shaking my head at her antics, I breathed a sigh of relief.
My fingers itched to call her, but I had one more thing I needed to do first.
I hit the family room and laughed out loud as I rubbed a slow circle over my left pec. Slowly, I approached the bookshelf that didn’t exist before I went to Greece.
It took up one entire wall. More frames, most empty save for Hope’s scrawled dreams, sat interspersed between books and DVDs.
DVDs. From the 80s and 90s.
The years I missed.
I ran my forefinger along the spines. Sitcom collections like Friends, Seinfeld, Will and Grace, and The Golden Girls.
Iconic movies like Stand By Me, Look Who’s Talking, and The Princess Bride.
