Untamed (Hearts 3)

“This came for you, boss,” he said and handed it over. On top of the box was a cream envelope sealed with wax. It had the imprint of the Morelli family crest.

I thanked Raj and took the box into the living room and set it down on the table in front of the couch.

I understand these belonged to your mother, so now they belong to you, the letter said. The job offer still stands

Signed Leo Morelli.

It was weird that my hand trembled as I pulled open the box.

Whatever I’d been expecting, little-girl diaries and high school scrapbooks and the like, that wasn’t what was in there. There was art. Tons of it. Faded pencil drawings of cats and brighter drawings of flowers and people. One, a woman with dark hair and sad eyes was just marked Eve. Bryant was immortalized in another; she captured his smug upturned nose perfectly.

There were hands, lots of hands, and I had to think they were hers. I held my own up to compare them and then felt foolish. She did a series of watercolors of a black dog at a beach and she captured the dog’s joy and the sparkling water so perfectly it felt real. She’d been so talented.

Compelled, I pulled from the wall the picture of the woman I didn’t know on a sand dune I’d never been to. There was paper on the back and I tore it off and then carefully pulled the photograph from the glass and replaced it with one of the dogs. I did it with two other pictures. They didn’t fit perfectly in the frames, but I liked that about them, too. That I could see the edges of the paper where she’d torn it from the notebook. The smudge of her thumbprint at the bottom corner. It framed the art and its maker.

I took down the rest of the stranger’s pictures and found Poppy’s framed photographs—the ones Zilla brought when she brought Poppy’s jewelry, salvaging the only things Poppy might need from that house. They were sweet photographs of two girls in matching bikinis, their little-girl bellies poking out. I recognized Poppy from her smile. The light that bounced off her. There was another one of Poppy when she was older, high school maybe, with some very unfortunate hair. It was Christmas and she wore a red velvet dress and Zilla wore a sneer and black satin and they stood, hugging a glamorous woman with a distant expression. Their mother. I hung up the photographs on the wall with my mother’s art. It didn’t make much sense. The sizes of the frames were out of balance, but it was better. It was ours.

Us. I cleared my throat and sat back down. The only thing left in the box was a tin lunch box with an old-school Betty Boop on it. When I opened it a waft of skunky weed floated out from the three joints and Ziplock bag of ancient marijuana in the bottom. Beneath the joints, there was a thin strip of pictures that you get from a photo booth. Four pictures in a row of a young girl with long dark hair. My mom. In the first picture she stared out at the camera, her eyes glittering, her mouth curved into a smile.

She had the look of a person who knew herself.

And who wasn’t scared.

There was a guy sitting next to her, with blond floppy hair. Gwen was looking at the camera, he was looking at her like she was his whole world. Loving a Morelli had cost him his life. The second picture he was holding out what looked like a ring box. The third she was crying, her hands over her mouth and the fourth they were kissing. A proposal. She looked so happy.

I flipped over the back of the picture and it said Me and Danny. The date was a year and a half almost to the day before I was born. This kid proposed to her, she said yes, her father killed the poor guy and she ran away to England.

Where her whole life ended. Fuck. It was just so sad.

I set aside the picture only to find in the corner of the lunchbox a small faded red velvet ring box.

Impossible, I thought, but opened it anyway. And there on the velvet was a round diamond twinkling madly in the sunlight. It was small. A young man’s ring. Bought with a young man’s money. But it was a ring that should be worn. Too beautiful to be put away in a box with old memories.

“Hey,” Poppy said, walking, sleepy-eyed and wearing one of my tee shirts, into the living room. She yawned with her whole face, a hand over her mouth. “Sorry.” She shook her head. I could watch her wake up for years. “What are you doing?”