"After you and Dad threw everything out, I don't think it will be the same."
Laura grimaced. "I'm not suggesting you go back in time, but I thought you might like something familiar."
"Trust me, nothing is familiar anymore."
They pulled up in front of the house. "Well, Lulu and your grandmother will be glad to see you." Sure enough, they were waiting on the porch. Lulu ran straight to Lucky and gave him a hug, which Lucky returned much to Laura's relief. "How's my best girl?" he whispered. He stood upright and Lesley embraced him. "Oh, Lucky, it is so good to see you. I was so worried."
"I'm sorry," he said. "The last thing I want to do is cause anyone pain."
"Oh honey, I'm not in pain. I am just happy to see you."
No one really knew what to say, so they entered the house. Lesley Lu ran to the table and brought Lucky a picture. "I made this for you."
"For me?" Lucky asked enthusiastically.
Lulu nodded and pointed at the picture. It was a drawing of a person underneath a huge rainbow. "That's you," she said, pointing to the person.
"Really? Well, it's beautiful. Thank you."
"Lulu? Why don't we go in the kitchen and make Lucky some lunch?"
Lulu nodded and followed Lesley into the kitchen.
Lucky sat at the table. Laura spoke up. "So your brother and Elizabeth will get your things and bring them soon."
"After I eat, I'd just like to go to sleep."
"Ok, Lucky." Laura looked at her son. She wanted so desperately to reach out to him, but she felt she couldn't cross the divide between them. Lucky might as well have been ten thousand miles away.
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Sly picked up his blue acoustic guitar and strummed it a little. "Emily, do you know when I started playing guitar?"
"No. Didn't you always play?"
Sly laughed a little. "No, although I wish I did." He strummed a few more chords. "My Aunt Jenny gave me my first guitar for Christmas in 1996. Actually, it was an early Christmas present. She gave it to me on the anniversary of my father's death in November. That's Aunt Jenny, a big believer in the power of distraction. Luckily, it worked for the most part. I was feeling pretty lost at that time." Sly looked away. "It's also when the three of us began to grow apart, remember?"
"Yeah, I remember," Emily said softly. Her struggle with substance abuse started around that time.
"It was around the time when the Spencers faked Laura's death. I was feeling pretty depressed, so the guitar became an outlet for me. I would just play every day. I didn't care about much of anything except that guitar. Well, soon we found out that Laura was alive after all, and I had a big fight with Lucky. I remember feeling very betrayed."
"They made us grieve for someone who wasn't dead."
Sly turned to Emily. "Exactly. Do you remember how we gave Lucky the cold shoulder his first day back at school?"
"Yeah. I was so mad at him."
"Well, Lucky and I had a big falling out after that. I thought the one person I could count on had broken our trust. Lucky was pretty distracted by Nikolas and later that girl Sarah, anyway." He picked something on the guitar before continuing. "Then one night, I went through some of my father's things in the attic. I happened to find a box of old pictures. Well, my Dad was quite the ladies man, because they were mostly photos of his old girlfriends. I was about to give up looking through them, when I found two pictures at the bottom of the box." He started to play the intro to a song as he paused his story. Emily thought that was interesting. It was like he was drawing strength from the music, or the movement of his hands.
Sly sighed and stopped playing. "The first picture was of my parents. My mom was really pregnant, and the photo showed them in profile, their heads together, their hands on her stomach, and get this- they were smiling!" Sly had a slight smile on his face. "Let me explain that my parents had a shot gun wedding. I was born four months after they got married. They only got married because of me. I wondered if they wanted me. I remember asking my dad that just before he died. Of course he said he wanted me, but I never really believed it until I saw that picture. You can't fake that kind of emotion, Em." Emily nodded. "So, for one brief moment, they were happy, and I was wanted. It was enough for me."
"What was the other picture?" Emily asked.
"It was an even earlier picture of my mother that my dad took when they were first dating. He wrote 'Nancy, with the laughing face' on the back."
"From the Frank Sinatra song?" Sly nodded. "Yeah, Alan listens to him a lot," Emily explained.
"But in the picture, my mom wasn't smiling. She's sitting on the hood of this old Grand-Am. She couldn't have been more than twenty years old. She was wearing this sundress and she had such long, blonde hair. She's looking into the camera, and she just has the saddest eyes. I couldn't stop looking at this picture. I had never seen her look so vulnerable in all of my life. She was always so cold and disinterested all the time. She was also usually drunk."
Emily's heart was breaking for Sly, but she felt like he hadn't come to the worst part of his story yet.
"But when I saw this picture, I discovered another side of her. I realized I knew nothing about her at all; who she was, how she met my father, what her family was like. I felt like I was missing a part of myself by not knowing her." He stopped talking and played a couple of ominous minor chords.
Emily noticed Sly had changed his posture. He sat rigidly in his seat and his hands ran up and down the neck of the guitar. "Sly, if you want to stop, I'd understand."
Sly looked at Emily, and she couldn't help but notice his pain, but he said, "No. I want to tell you. I want to."
He played a rather dark sounding riff and continued. "I wanted to find out as much as I could about my mother. Unfortunately, my Aunt Jenny was no help. She was away a lot during that time, and my Dad was a lot older than she was anyway, so he didn't live at home. I wouldn't let it go, however, so I looked up my mother's family back in Oregon, where I was born. Sure enough, my mother's sister, Cheryl, and their father, Jack, still lived in Portland. I started writing letters to them, and they responded. They wrote me and told me some things about my mother, but they would ask a lot of questions about me. Naturally, I poured my heart out, and told them everything about myself," Sly said with bitterness in his voice.
"I was having some problems with Paul and Jenny. Paul tried to use some tough love discipline plan with me when I was in that stage. I remember having quite a few fights with him, usually ending with, 'You're not my father.'"
Emily sighed. "Sounds like the fights I used to have with Alan and Monica."
"I told my grandfather all about it, and he was very sympathetic. We would talk on the phone for hours. One time, he asked me to move to Oregon and live with him. I said yes right away."
Sly looked away from Emily. She thought that he looked as if he was taking a step back into the past.
"Of course, I fought with Jenny and Paul about it. We argued and argued, but I stood my ground. It was my life, and I could do with it as I pleased. Finally, my aunt decided to let me go, since she was my legal guardian. My grandfather was thrilled, and so was I. I packed up all of my things in my car and I went back to Portland. I drove cross country by myself with the most incredible sense of freedom."
"Then it all fell apart."