No longer would he be blindsided by the pain. It wasn’t until much later that Seth realized that out of sight didn’t mean out of mind. Pamela’s picture didn’t rest on the piano any longer, but she was with him. Every time he walked in the house she was there to greet him. To welcome him. To tell him she was pleased he was home. Not with words, naturally. But with memories.
After time, when the pain of losing her wasn’t as sharp, he found comfort in those small remembrances. At his loneliest moments, he sat in the living room and wrapped them around himself the way one did a winter coat in the dead of a snowstorm. He closed his eyes and pretended.
Imagination was a powerful thing, and it didn’t take more than a small dose to conjure what his life would have been like had Pamela lived. Even with the solace he’d received from those visions, he’d never crawled back into the attic and retrieved the pictures.
“I’d almost forgotten what Mommy looked like,” Jason said, “until Mrs. Miracle gave me the photograph.”
“Which photograph?” Seth demanded, and Jason flinched with surprise. He didn’t mean to shout. His anger certainly wasn’t directed at them. The incident with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was one thing, but Pamela’s picture was another in a long list of the unexplainable.
“The one in my room,” Jason answered. “I’ll get it.”
He was gone in an instant, flying off the bed with an agility and speed reserved for children. Before Seth could think to call him back, he returned, holding an eight-by-ten-inch frame against his chest.
“This one,” he announced breathlessly.
The photograph was of Pamela soon after the birth of the twins, the very one he’d loved the most. Pamela radiantly happy, a newborn infant on each arm, smiling at him, smiling at the camera.
Seth was furious, so angry that he couldn’t speak.
“What’s wrong, Daddy?” Judd asked, cocking his head to get a better look at his father.
“I need to talk to Mrs. Merkle.”
“She’s in the kitchen.”
Seth climbed out of bed and reached for his robe. As he walked past Jason he took the picture frame out of his hands.
“Where’d you get this?” he demanded before he was all the way into the kitchen.
Mrs. Merkle was standing at the kitchen counter, stirring eggs. She looked up at him, her eyes wide. “I beg your pardon?”
“This photograph of my wife. Where’d you get it?”
“Oh, Mr. Webster, I do hope you don’t mind. The children were filled with questions about their mother. I assume it had something to do with you going out with Miss Maxwell and all.”
“Where did you get this picture?” he repeated between gritted teeth.
“Yes, well…” She hesitated and dried her hands on her apron. “I found it in the bookcase when I dusted the other morning. Someone had stuck it in between two volumes. Apparently it’s been there for some time. Of course I wasn’t sure it was your wife, but with the babies in her arms, I felt it must have been. Judd has her eyes.”
Seth’s gaze traveled to his son, and he recognized that what the older woman said was true. Judd’s dark brown eyes were the precise shape and color Pamela’s had been. Funny he’d never noticed that before.
“In the bookcase, you say?”
“I apologize if I did something I shouldn’t have.” She certainly looked contrite. “I bought the frame the other day. It seems to go rather nicely, don’t you think?”
Seth sighed. He hadn’t meant to make a federal case out of a silly thing like a photograph. Although he’d been in the bookcase himself more times than he could count, he could easily have overlooked the picture. Who was to know how it came to be there in the first place? Perhaps Pamela stuck it there herself. Perhaps he’d been the one to do it. Not that it mattered.
“Mommy had brown eyes like me, too, didn’t she?” Jason asked, looking at him expectantly.
“Yes, partner.”
“Will my new mommy?”
It was all Seth could do to keep from groaning aloud. He looked to Mrs. Merkle to rescue him, but she was back stirring eggs, humming softly to herself.
“Dad?” Judd pulled at his sleeve. “Will she?”
He squatted down so that his gaze was level with that of his children. “There isn’t going to be another mommy, kids.”
They both looked stunned. He might as well have announced there was no such thing as Santa Claus from the shock he read in their expressive faces.