“Bye, Sara.”

“Bye.”

I hung up and practically dropped the phone on the carpeted floor. I was weak all over. Pushing through this sadness I was getting pretty fucking well acquainted with, I looked over at a box and hastily grabbed it. Using only my hands, I pulled on a flap until the tape loosened, and then I grabbed the tape and tore it off.

I won’t be scared and weak anymore, I told myself as I continued to tear the lines of tape off. I won’t run away. I won’t be a coward because it’s the easier way out. The easier way out is the wrong way out.

My breath caught in my throat as I looked inside. Reaching in, I pulled out a big and thick black cover photo album. There were more photo albums beneath it too. In fact, I counted six. Looking down at this cover as I sat back in a cross legged posture, I wiped away a thick cover of dust and opened it.

Being hit with photos of me as a baby felt like a ton of cement had been poured over my head. It glued me down in place until I was fighting a foreign kind of pain: a pain of losing her. Oh, God, there were so many photos. I flipped through them, astounded and breathless, taking in picture after picture of her and me as a baby. My father wasn’t anywhere in sight, but there was an older man posing next to her and me, and judging by the similar features between him and Mom, it was obvious he must be my grandfather.

I couldn’t get over how young she was, how gorgeously shaped her body was, how soft and happy her face looked. The first album was my first year, and I was dressed in all kinds of cute baby outfits, some in a crib at a house I don’t remember ever being in. Steadily, through every photo album, I was growing more and more. Pictures of me making a mess in my baby seat; eating ice cream beside a pool; petting a dog four times my size; going down a slide with the goofiest smile on my face; on a swing with a massive straw hat over my head; on a tricycle that was red and brand new; at a beach filling a box with sand; in bed in Mom’s arms as she looked fondly down at me; asleep beside my grandfather who looked proudly at the camera… I was completely flooded with the early years I’d been brought into the world.

My curiosity peaked when I saw a few photos of a dark shaggy haired boy with almond shaped brown eyes posing next to two year old self. He must have been at least ten years old. Was he a relative? A neighbourhood boy? The son of one of Mom’s friends? I wish I knew. It would have been nice gathering that kind of info about Mom back when she was… normal.

By the time I hit around four years old, the photos died off and that was the end of that.

Sadly, I didn’t remember any of those years. Even if I had, I’d long buried every bit of my childhood away, associating it with pain. I pondered for a long while what might have happened after that, but it didn’t take a brainiac to piece the most logical explanation: he must have walked back into her life somehow, and ruined it, bringing me along for the ride. Such a shame if that was true because it appeared like life was going well for her at the start with the support of her father, in a house that looked homely and family oriented. These were just assumptions I had no real answer to, but that I suddenly had a deep yearning to get to the bottom of.

I sorted the albums aside and moved onto the next box. Inside were random belongings, like souvenirs of some kind: a snow globe and a trinket with an Egyptian mummy imprinted on it and weird shit like that. This box was her little treasure trove. I was impressed at the amount of tickets to concerts she’d stacked aside. My mother was an avid concert goer, and that made me smile.

There were photos too. I gasped at what she looked like. This is what I was curious about the most. She was beautiful in recent years. All cleaned up. The alcohol and cigarettes had aged her, but she was head and shoulders different than the woman I left. She was also standing beside a young dark haired woman that appeared somewhere around my age. She was beautiful, tall and slim with bronze skin and mocha brown eyes. This must have been Rita.

I spent a couple hours getting to know my mom little by little. Her harboured treasures spoke volumes of the kind of woman she became before her death. I also admired the tidbits from my childhood. There were baby outfits I’d seen pictures of me wearing as a baby all bundled up in another box– outfits of me she’d put aside for keepsake. There were drawings I’d made when I was in kindergarten of boxy stick figures with a corner sun and a garden of what I assumed was flowers.

I was overwhelmed when I finished. I neatly stacked everything back inside, and by then I received a call from Frank keeping to his promise that he was on his way. I waited by the front door until he showed up, two moving trucks following his black Mustang Fastback. He climbed out of his car looking cryptically stern like before and made his way over. He greeted me with a nod and a curt hello and entered the house. He was overall impressed with the condition of the furniture and four burly large men emptied the house within the hour.

On his way out, he handed me an envelope. “What’s this?” I asked.

“You didn’t really think I’d take all of your mother’s possessions without a price, did you?” he replied. “There’s a few grand in there.”

“I don’t want your money.”

His safe softened for the first time. “It’s not up for negotiation, Miss Nolan. Have a good afternoon.”

With the slight misstep in his walk and the slump of his shoulders, he headed back to his car, leaving me to wonder just how well he’d known my mother.

Twenty

I was bending over to pick up the final box in the bedroom to haul downstairs to the living room when I heard a loud slam of the front door downstairs. I stood up straight, holding my breath as I cautiously listened. I forgot to lock the door after Frank had left with the men, and now someone was here.

At the sound of heavy footsteps ascending the staircase, I hurriedly raced to my cell phone, heart thumping against my chest.

“Sara?” Jaxon’s voice sounded at the top of the stairs.

I let out a relieved breath. “In here.”

He followed my voice to the bedroom and stood in the doorway -- and the doorway never looked so small; I kept forgetting how big and brawny he was when I didn’t have anything to compare it to. He looked striking in his jeans, red tight slim fit sweater and black leather jacket. His hair was messy, as if he’d raked his hand through it ten thousand times in the last hour, and his face calm but conflicted as he regarded me standing beside the boxes.