The Beauty of Solace

Chapter One

It smelled like her, the room, the couch, the drapes and even the kitchen. It was hers anyway so that would have made sense. I never understood why she and dad came to Portsmouth in the first place. One of the only places I could think of in London with so much water. Lana De Lanche, an aspiring musician at the time, uprooted our entire life because she liked the docks, just the docks, not even the water but she visited on one of her tours and she fell in love. Dad was in love with her enough to actually listen as she convinced him enough to move here, but that was it, it was all the past.

It's been three hours, twenty seven minutes and nine seconds since I've been here, since my plane landed, and since I arrived to her dreadful apartment. And it wasn't dreadful because it was ugly, no, it was a beautiful apartment. There was a lovely living room that you would walk into and right on the side was a dining room with a piano. All open concept as the kitchen stood behind it and the two bedrooms that followed.

That certainly wasn't the reason I found it hard to be here, it was dreadful because everything reminded me of her and how much it felt like she was here when she wasn't anymore. So I've just been laying here all this time, on the couch, staring at the piano imagining her playing the keys to the first song she ever taught me. I thought of her every time I played on tour and how much I was like her in that way.

I remember when I was a little girl and I sat on the piano bench and she held my little fingers and showed me each of the keys while Nessa, my sister, read her story books and would roll her eyes when we played. She was always like that on our visits to mom. Mom and dad had been divorced for three years then and Nessa and I were only in our early teens. With Nessa being older she always felt the need to tell me how much I shouldn't be involved in anything in music because of what happened to our family.

"Emily, you shouldn't be playing that right now. It's summer but it doesn't mean you should forget about school and play that thing," she would say.

And here we are almost thirteen years later. While I went away to college overseas, eventually living there, Nessa stayed here in Portsmouth with dad while she helped him ran his small restaurant business. Except it wasn't that easy, they couldn't stay together like we normally see in the movies or the kind of families we read about in books, they grew apart because mom wanted to tour the world and play music and dad loved his restaurant. That's why I moved, because it was a reminder of what our life never would have never been. Everything just fell into place after that, or out of place rather.

"You know you could've just told us what time your flight was coming in so we would have met you at the airport," said Nessa as she rudely interrupted my memory of what this place reminded me of.

"Well I didn't want you to pick me up from the airport. I wanted to come to mom's house so I could rest and not deal with you and dad's questions of me not making time to come see you " I said to her as she walked in.

She looked at me and raised her brow, "I'm not going to dignify that with a response. It clearly is not the time."

I rolled my eyes, " How did you know I was here anyway? I only texted dad like two minutes ago that I'm in Portsmouth and I'm pretty sure you live at least twenty minutes away from here."

"Mom's neighbor called and told us that someone was in the apartment and that he thought she was me but with long hair." Nessa said shyly. She had a smug on her face like she wanted me to say something about the fact that her curls were now short and dark which was in sharp contrast to mines, which was a little past my shoulder and light brown.

So I told her, "You look nice with short hair. Does Jackson like it better that way or you finally felt like rebelling and doing something for yourself?" Jackson was her almost husband. They've been engaged for almost three years now but I've only met him twice before I went to college and once that time I graduated and she brought him to my graduation. I hated the guy. Maybe hate was a strong word but it was way more than dislike. Too controlling, possessive and too laid back for my taste, even though my taste usually began and ended on the road.