“Yeah!”
“Probably. It’s just a black grand piano.”
It’s just a black grand piano. There must be hundreds of thousands of them in the world. Maybe I am being crazy.
My eyebrows pinch together.
Were the initials even EML?
The doubt only makes everything a bigger, confusing haze.
“Let me look. I might have a picture.” Scarlet starts digging until she finds more memory boxes that Anthony had made. Each one is labelled with a different occasion.
“Umm... Eclipse, Millennium, Christmas of ‘89. Oh, this one! Christmas 1990. Mum was pregnant with me at the time. I’ve seen this one.” She beams at me, falling to her knees and connecting the tape to the TV.
A few moments later the screen lights up.
The camera shakes as the person holding it wobbles along the wood floor. A child, I’d suspect. “Mase, he stole the camera. He is so unbelievably cute in this.”
Scarlet confirms my thoughts.
“Mason, come here!” a deep but playful voice calls out, making the little boy giggle and run faster, but then two feet come into view, and suddenly he stops. “Mummy. No!” He spins, running in the opposite direction, but as he does, the camera falls perfectly on Anthony’s young face. “Gotcha!” his hands come out to catch his son. “Daddy, no, put me down, no tickle, no tickle!” Mason squeals, trying to catch his breath between his hysterics. “Careful, Anthony, you will drop him,” a soft voice mutters, the camera now upside down and coming to focus on the woman in the kitchen doorway.Ellis.She’s wearing a blue floral dress, her stomach a perfectly round shape.
I swipe the tear that forms in my eye.
“Come on, boys.” The camera shakes as Ellis leans down to take it, then it spins to Anthony and Mason.
Mason hangs upside down, Anthony’s hands locked tightly around his ankles. Moving through the hall, they enter the lounge we are in now. Mason is placed down on the sofa then lifted into his father’s arms, his podgy hands wrapping tight around Anthony’s neck.
My heart aches for them.
Why couldn’t they have had more time?
“Mummy, play! Play!” Mason cries.
I dip my head to the side as my throat burns because I already know I’m right.
Anthony tells Ellis to pass him the camera, the blurred image from before becoming perfectly clear. Mason climbs onto his mother’s lap, his hand wrapped lovingly around her baby bump, and his head rested against her chest.
Ellis begins to play, and my eyes drop to the initials on the back of the piano. The very piano that has been sat in my studio for the past year. The piano I have layed out on whilst feeling so far from him.
My studio always felt like home to me, and his mother’s piano was always a part of that—maybe even the very essence of it.
Ellis looks into the camera, and I feel her eyes onmebefore they flick higher—beyond the camera. A loving smile graces her face that’s directed at her husband.
“She was beautiful. You look just like her.”
“Yeah,” Scarlet sobs. “Sorry, I’ve seen this a hundred times before.”
“Don’t apologise,” I tell her, moving to sit on the sofa.
I pull her into a tight hug just as the tape cuts off.
Vinny arrives late in the afternoon to take me home, and I dread it. I pushed the piano to the back of my mind for the remainder of the afternoon, not allowing my brain to make sense of it. But I know I need to.
Especially before I face Mason.
“Hey, Vin.” I smile as I slide into the back of the Audi.
