I stumbled through the door, half a bottle of vodka sloshing around in my stomach. Somehow I managed to make it past the living room, past the same photographs that had been hanging on the wall since I'd moved into the house, and into my cramped bathroom to remove my contacts.
But as I bent over the toilet, pushing back my glasses to keep them from plopping into the water, I realized something. Those pictures. I hung them myself. Took some of them myself. Looked at them every single day after work (or late nights at the bar) to remind myself of the family I rarely got to see.
After wiping the vomit from my purple painted lips, I retreated to the living room, just to prove that I'd been seeing things, that the alcohol had been messing with my mind. But no... When I looked at the twenty-year old family portrait, one of my mom and dad and me, I saw an extra face hovering in between my parents. A face that didn't belong there.
He looked like he was around the same age as my dad, with the same red hair and overload of freckles. The same round glasses and the same suit. Even their facial expressions matched. They were completely identical...
Fucking idiot.
I must've been seeing double. I saw two door handles on the way inside and two toilet rolls in the bathroom. I'd drank half my body weight in liquor, after all. What else should I expect?
Without bothering to brush my teeth or slip out of my little red dress, I threw myself onto the couch. I needed sleep.
The sun greeted me along with a headache, one big enough that no amount of Advil could cure it. It took all of the effort I had to pull myself up in the hopes of making a cup of coffee that tasted as good as mom used to make. But on my way out of the living room, I paused to look at the picture that had spooked me last night.
Or, at least, I tried to look at the picture. The damn thing was gone, missing from the frame. There was only plastic and an empty piece of cardboard stuffed inside.
The rest of the photos were all intact. I had fifteen of them covering the walls, in rows of five, and they were all right...
No. One of them was different. It was there, but different. It showed me and my cousins sitting around a tree at Christmas. We each had a present in our tiny hands while all my aunts and uncles, who were standing behind us, held glasses of Eggnog in their hands. But there was an extra face in the photo. A face that looked like my father's.
My dad had been around when I was a baby, when we took the family portrait I loved so much, but he left us for a while. Had a fling with some waitress when I was a toddler and then came crawling back when I was in my teens.
I didn't care how long ago that holiday photo was taken or how shoddy my memory was. That was not him. It couldn't have been. No way in hell.
But I called my mom to make sure. I asked her if she had any contact with dad during their "break" and she went off about how she wouldn't have answered any of his calls, even if he would've bothered to make them. She went on and on about what an asshole he'd been for twenty minutes before I found an opening and told her I'd call her back some other time. They probably fought that night, because of me.
But I would've rather heard their arguing than what I ended up hearing. When it was time to end my day with a bottle of wine (that I could've sworn I hadn't opened yet but already had the cork removed), I heard the noises. Creaking and squeaking and groaning.
Instead of getting up to investigate, my wimpy ass just pulled the covers closer to my face and forced myself to sleep.
In the morning, before I ate breakfast or even checked Facebook, I checked the wall of photographs. The picture from yesterday, the one from Christmas time, was missing. Just an empty frame dangling from a hook.
