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.