A New Life for Hope

When we got back to the house, everyone was still out, trying to find me.
I was glad for the respite in many ways, because the relative quiet of the house gave me time to clean my tear-stained face and clear my mind while Frank called the others.
I stared at my reflection in the mirror for a few minutes, wondering just when I had become so drawn and tired-looking – but the limpness of my once wavy hair, and the dark circles below my eyes told me harshly that it had been coming for some time.
I wasted as long as I could wandering around my new bedroom, but before long I heard the sound of tires crunching on the gravel path outside, and knew that I didn’t have any longer to sort myself out.
I walked reluctantly down the stairs as the door opened, pausing as I heard hushed voices – probably Frank calming Gerard down, if he was as worried as I’d been told.
By the time the voices quieted, I had reached the bottom of the stairs – and this time I wasn’t going to run away.
I took a breath and looked around the wall dividing the hall and the living room – Gerard was sitting on one of the couches with his back to me, while Frank was opposite him – looking directly at me.
Frank smiled reassuringly at me – a glance I’m sure Gerard didn’t see, because he didn’t move until I stood in the doorway and cleared my throat nervously.
Gerard jumped and span around in his seat – the judging, irritated look I had been fearing nowhere to be found; instead, he was looking at me with a concerned, but relieved expression.
“Hope! Thank god you’re okay, I thought I’d lost you again,” Gerard paused, somehow managing to smile but still look worried.
“What happened?”
The question hung unanswered in the air for a moment while I digested the unexpectedly calm reaction.
“I… I went for a walk,” I said eventually, simplifying the truth. “I just needed some time alone, to think about everything.”
I looked at Frank over Gerard’s head, hoping he would understand why I thought Gerard, or anyone else, didn’t need to know about what else had – almost – happened while I was out.
He nodded at me, smiling slightly, so I hoped that was a good sign.
Meanwhile, Gerard had been silent, seeming to be just thinking about what I’d said, but asking no questions.
Eventually, though, he looked up, and I braced myself for more questions.
“Are you okay now, then?” was all he said.
I thought for a moment, then nodded.
“I think so,” I smiled at the two men before me, who were the closest things to family and friends that I had now.
There was a silence for the moment, with nothing to say, so I took the chance to move from my awkward position standing by the door and went and sat on end of the couch Frank was on.
Suddenly, Gerard squinted at me, then his eyes widened.
“Hey, where did you get that necklace, Hope?” he asked quickly, motioning to the pendant I always wore.
“Oh, this?” I gently touched the pendant, a green crystal dangling from a leather thong.
“Mum gave it to me when I was little… she said it used to be hers, and that it was very precious.”
I smiled as I remembered the day, a little sadly when I thought of mum, but still glad to have this memory of her in happier days.
Gerard, though, had gone a deathly white, and Frank was looking bemusedly between us, with as little idea as I, of what was going on.
Gerard soon regained his voice; an incredulous tone in his words.
“I can’t believe she kept it…” he began, and the moment started to make more sense.
“I gave that to her when we first started going out together – she swore she’d keep it forever, but when she left… I thought she would’ve gotten rid of it, and forgotten me by now.”
Gerard had slight tears in his eyes as he spoke, but a smile on his face, and suddenly I realised the sacrifice my mother had made when she left Gerard with me for what she thought was the best.
“I’m glad you have it, though… it’s like you’ve always had a part of me with you, even though I didn’t know you existed,” Gerard added after a moment, and at the same time I saw Frank slipping away, leaving us to talk.
And it took a lot of talking.
Gerard told me everything, from when he and my mother met as teenagers and fell in love, to the bitter confusion when she disappeared from his life, then later the dark times when he fell prey to depression and addiction; and finally following the path to fame that my mother knew he could, and wanted him to when she first ran away.
After that long story, I told Gerard bits and pieces of mine and my mother’s life, from my childhood happiness travelling from place to place wherever we liked, to how I was never told about him, and the day we found out mum was ill, to, finally, the last time I spoke to her, as she told me to find my father.
These two different lives, so separate yet so closely intertwined; and now I was finally beginning to feel like I knew my mother – who she really used to be – and my father as well.
By the time we had finished catching up on more than seventeen years of missed experiences, it had grown late, and Gerard and I were both surprised when we heard the front door open, and a moment later, two men around Gerard’s age came into the living room.
On first impressions, both were tall and thin; the tallest sporting an impressive auburn afro and a serious look – the other had longish, straightened brown hair half hidden in a beanie, and wore glasses before intelligent, mischievous eyes.
All of this I noted in the space of a few seconds, and at the same time I felt the same uncomprehending familiarity that I had known when I first saw frank by the lake.
These must be the other guys in the band, I realised, quickly placing the serious, fro-headed one as Ray Toro, and the clever-looking one with glasses as Mikey Way – Gerard’s brother.
While I was doing all that mental reckoning, Ray and Mikey had greeted Gerard and sat down, and now Gerard was introducing me.
“Mikey, Ray,” he said, pointing to each in turn, “This is Hope,”
They smiled at me, so I waved, feeling vaguely awkward.
“Umm,” Gerard went on, “Hope is my daughter, who I mentioned this morning, she’s going to be staying with us now…”
Although Gerard sounded like he was having trouble finding the right words, the mood seemed to relax with the ‘big news’ having been said.
Frank had come in from wherever he had been by then, and he sat by me, with Gerard, Mikey and Ray on the other side of the room.
There was a pause for a few seconds, while I looked at everyone, and everyone looked at me, then Mikey stirred and looked around at Gerard and I.
“So, I’m like her uncle now, right?” he said to nobody in particular, raising an eyebrow in a way that made it unmistakeable that he was Gerard’s brother.
“Yeah,” Frank answered before anyone else could say anything.
“But it is kinda weird, isn’t it? The whole ‘instant family’ thing…” he said only half-seriously, then grinned impishly, “at this rate, by next week there’ll be like… a herd of them!”
Frank giggled at his own joke, the only noise in a silent room, until Mikey snorted, unable to hold back a laugh – even if the joke wasn’t that funny – and set the rest of us off.
When the laughter stopped, I looked around at everyone, and grinned – not only was I thinking of how easily they had all accepted me into their lives, but I had just realised that I had begun to think of us as ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ and ‘them’.
It was a promising start, and maybe – just maybe – this wouldn’t be as hard as I had thought.