Fragile

Hope

I haven't looked out a window in 3 years.

I finally get out of bed, mostly because of hunger. On any other given day I would have breakfast ready for Jace before he goes to work down at the guitar shop on Main Street, but once in awhile he has Saturday's off and on those days Gideon is right on Jace's heels, whisking him away to do heaven knows what. Gideon is reckless, there's been more then one occasion where the cops have chased the two of them home, though Gideon could never get into any real trouble since his family is Brier Creek Royalty.  I can't help but worry though, Gideon may not understand it, or maybe he just doesn't care who he takes down with him, but Jace is all I have left. 

I start my descent down the stairs, but I stop when the hand that I have out to steady myself grazes over a picture frame. I've spent so much time in this house that if it burnt down I could rebuild it from memory, down to the last wooden plank. I've seen this picture and every other in the house thousands of times, and most days I can ignore the smiling faces that remind me of my once happy family, but today I'd rather let the pain come. 

I trace my index finger over my mother's face, wincing as the familiar memory begins to come into focus. We were at the park this day, Jace chased me around the playground and pushed me on the swings while Mom and Dad laid out a picnic. We ate our ham sandwiches and salty chips, laughing so hard at some joke that Jace had told that our stomachs were sore. We took this picture just before we left. Dad rushed over to some random person and shoved his camera into their hands before they could even begin to protest. We stood in front of a giant oak tree, Jace stuck two of his fingers behind my head to look like bunny ears while Mom and Dad each put a hand on our shoulders. Each of us had grins spread so wide across our faces that you wouldn't have guessed that they were last grins we were to have as a whole family.

I let a few tears slip down my cheeks, their warmth was a contrast to the bitter cold I had felt all morning. All it took was an icy road and an on-coming semi for my parents to be gone. I used to think their untimely death was the greatest tragedy, but that was before my own so-called "accident." It's surreal really, when your home becomes your prison. I still feel safer here then anywhere else, which is why I haven't left after all this time, but memories of my parents, of my old life, are everywhere I look. They hang on the walls, they live inside the grand piano that sits in the living room, and I see them every time I look in a mirror. That's the greatest tragedy, my house has become a ghost and I just let it haunt me.

I rest my forehead on the top of the frame and breathe in deeply, whispering the sentiment that my parents used to say to us every time they left for work or we left for school, and that Jace still says, sounding just like my dad when he does.

 "I love you to the moon and back."

I take my hand off the wall and make my way down the rest of the stairs, not bothering to wipe the tears from my cheeks. I get out the milk and the box of my favorite cereal, sitting down to pour myself a bowl. It isn't worth the effort today to make a real breakfast when it's just me that is going to be eating it, so I eat my cereal in silence and try to drown out more memories of my past with the crunching sound of the cereal in between my teeth. There were plenty of days when I would be sitting here with Jace and Roe, our legal guardian. After our parents died the only family we had left was Roe. He had always just been the next-door-neighbor/makeshift babysitter, but after that night he became solely responsible for us. Nothing really changed, Roe knew that Jace was more then capable of taking care of both me and himself (despite being only ten) so he would buy the groceries, pick us up from school, make sure our homework was done on weeknights and spend weekends playing Yahtzee with us. But after the PJ'S were put on and the teeth were brushed he would always say his goodbyes and go back to his house next door. It was a system that worked, and the older we got the less we saw of Roe, even after my accident he only stuck around long enough to make sure I was okay. I suppose I didn't blame him, I had created enough trouble for both him and Jace in the last three years to last them a lifetime. Now we only saw Roe when the social worker came by to make sure we were still a happy family, and we were pros at pretending like we were. 

I finished my cereal and dropped the bowl into the sink, deciding I would do the dishes tonight after Jace and I had dinner, if he was even home in time like he said he would be. With Gideon calling the shots, having Jace home for dinner would be a miracle.  

But there was still several hours between now and then, unlike school days where I only had to survive without Jace until 3:30 in the afternoon. Apparently Jace took that literally, because taped next to our landline was a sticky-note with all the local emergency contact numbers, including the suicide hotline. There was no use telling Jace that I had no intention of ending my life, because at one point that thought had been the only one my logical brain seemed to be able to conjure, and for Jace the possibility that I could always change my mind and he'd come home to my corpse hanging from a ceiling fan was more then enough leverage to keep him terrified.

I might have been the one initially trapped in this house by my own proverbial demons, but somehow my brother had become a prisoner to them as well, and I knew that was the real reason he would never leave this town. I would never be able to forgive myself for that.

I walked into the living room and let out a long sigh as I plopped myself down in the reclining chair with the tattered leather arms and footrest that barely stayed up. It had been my father's favorite chair to sit in and read, whether he had the morning paper or a book in his lap, and I had always felt that this chair did for him what the grand piano did for my mother, it provided them places where they could be at peace for a few moments of the day, and now both the chair and the piano did the same thing for me.

I smiled this time, instead of crying. I walked over to the piano once I was done admiring the old chair and ran my fingers along the keys, humming various notes to myself. I would usually spend hours trying to avoid what was going on inside my head with the sound of the music that flowed through this instrument. I didn't understand it near as much when my mother was playing, but when I was sitting at the bench with the swell of the music surrounding me and the vibration of the keys beneath my fingers, I got the message. On the days when I longed more then anything to be outside I would sit down at the piano and allow myself to cry, to laugh, to feel whatever I needed to through the music. It saved me a lot of pain, and it beat the alternative.

I was just about to sit down and dust off the keys when a sound as shrill as the top key of the piano rang throughout the house.

I practically jumped out of my skin. I had only heard this sound once or twice in the past three years but it made the hair on my arms stand up. I was usually the one dialing the familiar numbers that either belonged to my brother's cell-phone or Roe's. Nothing good had ever come from the telephone ringing, and I dreaded to think what would happen if I picked up. What bad news would I get this time, that my brother had been slashed to bits by the yacht's propeller (did yachts even have propellers)? Or that he had been chomped to death by man-eating piranhas (even though piranhas probably didn't live in a small-town Virginia lake)? These were the kind of irrational thoughts that went through my head, and call it anxiety or post-traumatic stress or some other mental disorder I had, but picking up the phone seemed like a bad idea. No answering phones, no opening doors, even before I had locked myself up in the house I had dreaded those two forms of interaction, because I associated them with one thing: death. I blinked rapidly to clear my head of those terrible childhood memories once again and made the rational decision to face whatever was on the other end of that call. So, I stood up from the piano bench and made my way over the cordless house phone that was in the foyer.

I picked it up with shaky hands and brought it to my ear, but before I could even get out more then a breath the voice on the other end talked first, and it only said one word.

"Hope."