Photos, Notes and Notation

Faith stared out the window of her room in her uncle's beach house, watching the waves caress the shore. A lone piece of driftwood caught in the current scratched patterns in the wet sand before the tide pulled it from the beach and washed away its writings. A few moments later, the waves and the driftwood returned to do it all again.

Around her room, sheets of music lay scattered on the floor, on her bed, the table against the far wall and along the window seat on which she sat. She hadn't left the familiar four walls much since she received the phone call from New York. Ryan and Rachael were around; Through her bedroom door, Faith could hear them go about their day as they went about the house. But she wasn't in much of a mood for company, so had seen little of them and vice versa.

Absently, she twirled a pencil in her hand as she looked down at the sheaf of papers in her lap, more pages littered with musical notation. Picking up the first page, she frowned, crumpled it up and tossed it across the room, not even bothering to aim for the waste basket. It was garbage, all garbage.

Not for the first time, she wondered what her cousin had been thinking when he asked her to join his band. Sure, it was loads of fun, but having fun doing something didn't necessarily mean you were any good at it. The critics seemed to believe that their band had some talent; Ry was always floored by the reviews they'd get the next day.

Sighing, she stood up from the window seat and crossed her room, the paper in her lap falling to the floor like a cascade of water. As she approached her dresser mirror, she watched as her twin in the glass closed the distance between them. Her tan complexion told of her mother's Hispanic roots, but her eyes shone with the piercing blue hue that came from the European blood of her father.

Gently, she tugged loose one of the photos tucked into the mirror's frame.

Her big sister at six years old smiled up at her from the picture with their father's same blazing blue eyes. Faith had always thought she'd see Isa again. She had been wrong.

Her finger traced the worn edges of the photograph as she stared. Two more pairs of her father's eyes smiled back with matching grins: those of her two-year-old self and those of her big brother, Nic.

She frowned suddenly at a thought. Carefully pocketing the photo, she began to rummage through her dresser, then her closet, throwing various articles of clothing onto a hockey bag sitting in the corner.

An hour later, pages of a new song sat on the kitchen counter beside a note for Rach and Ry, in barely legible handwriting scribbled on a crinkled piece of previously-discarded sheet music.

"Need to go to NY.
Sorry I wasn't much company.

-Faith"

Lost Connections

Faith was skating some warm-up laps around the artificial-ice rink when her cel phone rang. Gliding to where she had left it, she picked it up from the boards at home bench and stared at the number on the call display.

She only recognized that the area code was from New York, but her bandmate, Rachael, was the only person she knew from the 'Big Apple', and Faith would have recognized the number if it were her. Confused, she flipped open her phone to stop its desperate ringing and greeted the caller.

It was a doctor from a New York hospital.

Her sisters were dead.

She could only reply with stunned silence.

"Si-sisters?" She managed to whisper after what felt like ages. Her voice sounded small and lost in her ear.

The doctor expressed his condolences as he described the cause of death, some sort of brain-eating disease.

When the call ended, she flipped closed her phone and stared blankly past the boards of the rink.

She had had sisters.

She remembered Isa. She had kept the old photo taken at her big sister's birthday party years ago. Faith, with her short hair and baby grin at the age of 2, had sat between Isa, then 6, and their brother Nic, 5, as their father had taken their picture. Isa had been bright and bubbly; she looked like an angel with her cherub face and halo of blonde locks. Faith had always imagined she looked... had looked beautiful all grown up. Her big sister was... would have been 21 now.

Faith wiped a tear she found rolling down her cheek.

Stepping through the gate in the boards, she sat on the home bench and with stiff motions, untied the laces of her skates.

The other names the doctor had listed, Sophie, Trinity and Adaline, were unfamiliar.

She knew her father had continued to live his life without her and her mother after the friendship between her parents dissolved. But when she was in New York, Faith had caught glimpses of him from a distance as they lived their separate lives. She had seen the love he had for 'His Special Lady', the phrase her father used when she was too young to understand the term 'wife', and watched as the size of that side of her family grew without her. Eventually, there were many more children than just Nic and Isa vying for their father's love and attention.

She had never learned the names of any of her other siblings until today.

As she mechanically put away her skates and locked up the empty rink, she wondered who her sisters were. She knew their names now, but she couldn't put faces to them.

Her roller blades hung forlornly from her shoulders by their laces. She usually skated along the road to and from the beach house and the rink, but she didn't feel like skating anymore today. Instead, she walked the dirt beside the road, the pavement already too hot for her bare feet despite not yet being past noon, until it curved where it met the beach. Then she walked onto the sand and followed the rhythmic shoreline the rest of the way home.

Sophie, Trinity, Adaline... who were they? What were they like? Had they been as bubbly and full of life as Isa? As musically talented as their father? As pretty as Papa's 'Special Lady'?

She didn't know.

And now she never would.