HI! I know it's been a long time, but I really had problems with the timeline, like I said. And school started today again. Ugh!

No, really, I am sorry. I could have updated sooner, but, frankly, I suffered under the HL-syndrom, the holiday-lazyness syndrom.

And I am really sorry for that, It won't happen again.

Now, to the timeline problem: Titanic was found in 1985. And this story plays in 1972. The film plays in 1995. ... Shit.

I tried to find a way around it for weeks, but in the end I had to accept that I can't change the rules of math. It's a "mathematical certainty".

So, for this story to work, we have to pretend that Titanic was found 1970 and that the technical standards back then were as high as they are today, ergo: high enough to recover things from the wreck.

I know that is a ummmmm,... well, it's not very nice. I hope it doesn't make the story worse for you. Pretend it's nothing, I do.

And other than that, the update for my other story "Tiny Silver Droplets" should come pretty soon, I'm just working on the end.

The Chest

I was Born 1957, my mother was 44. I know it was a happy and sad day all at once. It was the first day, after mom's and dad's marriage that Rose and Josephine were in contact again. Yeah, I know, sad ,isn't it? I tried to think over it in both mom's and grandma's view, and at the end I came to the conclusion that mom sure had all right to be angry with her, furious even, pained, broken. I would be, too. 27 years old, and still not knowing who part of your family is. I don't think I need to explain what happened back then. Grandma had lost her courage. She never told, just as she never told about the first seventeen years of her life, the lost seventeen years, like I and Shelby call it.

It was Grandma who gave me my name. Jacqueline. Mom told me Rose broke down in tears the moment she saw me. You see, it's not only my left eye that can't be found anywhere else in my family history. It are all my features, too.

My high cheekbones, the straight nose (everyone else in this family has noses that point to the sky), the blond in my hair that makes it a glowing orange-red, not a deep red like my mother and grandmother. My whole jaw. Pretty features, actually. Very pretty, says everybody else, but I hate to get compliments about my looks, it makes me feel self-centred and egoistic out of some way.

I'm not stupid, my mother is not stupid. It wasn't difficult to figure out from where I had got them. From whom. Sometimes grandma looks at me and strokes across my cheeks or eyebrows or chin, and then she has this sad, melancholy look in her eyes.

Another thing she is enticed about me is my sketching. She thinks my hands are wonders. I think my hands are dirty with charcoal most of the time and with bitten down fingernails and I can't think what she sees in them. Anyway, she kept each one of my drawings and handles them like the crown-jewels. She even has my very first one, a huge pink and green ball from which she says that I said it was a kitten in a meadow.

But that's not the point here. My family's story is.

It was 1979 and I was seven years old. Shelby was nine. After the years of my and Shelby's birth (don't get that wrong here, Shelby is my cousin, well half cousin not my sister. Or at least not physically. She's Georges daughter, who married a charming young women just a few years after my mom's marriage), the connection between Josie and grandma was always very tense, but at least they had one. How I understood it, mom didn't ask any more about… you know…because she didn't see the reason in it. And Rose got more and more disgusted with herself. But the fear of something nobody but she herself knew and still knows off was nagging brutally inside her. I'm almost sure it still is today.

Shelby and me, we stayed overnight by a friends birthday party that night. Today, Benetha, or Benni, is our best friend. I don't remember much. I'm not sure if I want to.

My mom, my dad, George and his wife, Lizzie and her boyfriend ( they were as good as engaged ) went out together this night. Kind of a group date, I guess. Taking advantage of the child-less evening. They were in a car together, driving towards their favourite spot, out of town. At the same time, a truck driver decided to drive home in his motor truck from exactly that spot. Drunk. And he got on the wrong side of the highway. High speed. Singing. The car with my family. A turn in the road.

The funeral was two weeks later.

Until today, the one picture burned forever in my mind is the one of the six urns standing between heaps and heaps of flowers.

We lived with grandma then. Like I said, I don't remember much. I remember I stopped sketching. I remember months, nights and days spend in my bed. I remember eating food that had no taste to me. I remember the flowers on the nightstand that had no colour to me. I remember Shelby trying to fall down the stairs and hoping to break her neck in the process. Grandma had to bring her to a psychiatrist.

Grandma.

I remember her breaking. It had been one to many tragedy in her life. I don't want to describe it. You can't describe it. I remember being glad that Charles had died tow years before. He had been Josephine's father in anything but blood, he had been the father of George and Lizzie. I was glad he didn't had to live through this.

That Grandma could heal part way in the end makes me admire her even more today. But back then I didn't feel pity for her. I hated her.

All my mother had ever wanted was knowing who her father was. Parts of her life had been filled with pain because of it. With misery. And now she had died without ever knowing it. She would never know, now. Only when she met him up there, I taught back then.

But over the years I came to see something. The horrible pain that resided in me, still today, let me see something. If somebody asked me to tell about that night with the car and the drunk driver, would I? No. Of course it was something others with mom and grandma, something huge others, but it let me see through grandma's eyes a little bit.

My grandma has made big mistakes in her life. Horrible mistakes. And she knows that.

But we all love her. Because as much as she did wrong, as much she did good things in her life. Not only for her, but mostly for others.

The thing is, I will not let that happen to me. I learned a lot of life, just by watching it over the years. Alas, Josie's and Rose's relationship. Life thought me an even harder lesson.

And I will not let that happen to me. I have a right to know about my past. I want to know about my past, eagerly, I want to know about the man I so reassemble to. Because that's the only thing I know about him. That I reassemble him, very much so. I want to know him. And sooner or later, Grandma has to face up to that.

."I think it is somewhere on the right beneath the window. You should recognize the suitcase immediately, the blue-yellow flicks are very flashy.", chuckled Rose.

"Is anything else in it? The suitcase, I mean.", asked Jacqueline as she took the long pole with the hook on it's end and hooked it into the ring on the lid in the ceiling.

"Oh yes, I think so. A few other costumes and a wig. And photos could also be in there, I don't remember that exactly. Please be careful with them, Dear."

"Sure, Nana." With a strong pull the lid fell open and a ladder lowered itself, together with a huge cloud of dust. Jacqueline jumped to the side, coughing and laughing at the same time.

"Man! We were last time up there three months ago!" Every time somebody of the Calvert-Dawson household went up to the attic, he or she had to sweep the area around the lid and the lid itself before they went down again. This ´tradition was founded years ago, as Josephine and Lizzie opened the lid the first time in two years and a true avalanche of dust and dirt came down. The two sisters could jump out of the way, but George, who stood direct behind them, got the whole thing in his face. Naturally, everybody, except him, found that incredible funny. But as George still sneezed two days later, the ´sweeping-rule was founded.

Rose laughed as Jacqueline sneezed. She shot her grandma a playful glare, laid the pole on the ground and began to climb up the ladder.

The attic had been since ever one of Jacqueline's favourite places in the house. With all the colourful suitcases and boxes and closets and the green painted walls it looked like a huge pile of XXL-building bricks. When she was a little girl, she would crawl in the spaces between two boxes or try to climb up the different piles. She never had had a problem with dust and dirt. You just had to shower, later. Shelby could never understand that. She could easily win a ´Who has the cleanest room competition.

But what Jacqueline liked the most about the attic was what was inside all these boxes. The collection of a whole life laid here. A life that had been lived to the fullest. Her grandma's life. All the memories of Africa, Indian, Australia, Paris and New York and all the other lands and places her grandma had been in the time of her life.

In the past sometimes Jacqueline had got lost in this little world for hours, searching through the boxes with all the books and little statues and jewellery, all the paintings her art-fanatic grandma had bought , clothes and keepsakes like walking sticks, umbrellas, cigarette lighters and masks and all this stuff. Naturally the old costumes from Rose's time as an actress and, Jacqueline's favourites, the big albums, filled with photos that showed Rose, often with her family, in places all over the world. But these hours in the attic were just an other thing that had changed with the death of their parents two years ago. Since then Jacqueline just couldn't sink in it anymore, not when she would find again and again things that reminded her of her parents, especially her mother.

So, as Jacqueline stood now in mitts of all these, she tried hard to ignore the tight feeling in her chest.

"Yellow-blue flicks, yellow-blue… ah, there!", she murmured as she bent down to the staple and picked up a little red cartoon from the suitcase. She put it to the side, kneed down and opened the lid. She smiled as she took a blond wig out of it. When it came to the things in the attic, you could count on it that Rose almost exactly knew were everything was.

" Here we have it."

Jacqueline pulled out a long red dress with little white wings attached to it's back. She put the other things back in the suitcase and closed it. Then she folded the dress again, took it, stood up and turned around to go back to the lid. She had the half way when something caught her eye and she turned around again.

There, at the very back of the huge room stood it in the corner. A large black wooden chest. Slowly Jacqueline walked to it and stroked with her fingertips across the dusty lid. A sad smile formed on her lips. This chest stood here since Jacqueline could remember. It hadn't changed the place in all the twenty-four years sine it was placed here, because of two reasons. The first one was simply that the chest was very heavy. And the second one was that it was a sanctum. It was the only container up here from which Jacqueline didn't know what was in it. To be exact, nobody knew what was in it. Nobody, except Rose, of course. And Rose told nobody about it. She didn't even speak of it. Never. And the last time it was open was as Rose put in the things she wanted nobody to see and then closed it and locked it. That had been about seventy years ago.

Jacqueline's mother once asked about it, but she never got an answer. And Charles had told them that Rose already had the chest when he met her. Even he never knew what was in it.

Jacqueline kneed down before it and blew the dust away from it's lid. Smiling she looked at it.

The secret wasn't the only thing why she liked this chest so much. The other reason was simple. It was beautiful. All over it were painted silver stars. Not the jagged stars how you see them in the circus or so, but real tiny stars how Jacqueline looked at them every night. On the case they were scattered, with spaces between them, but on the lid they came together to a real painting. The milky-way. So detailed and fine that it could have been a photo.

And something other. The lock. It was a beautiful padlock and it was a secret for it's own. Silver, shaped like a heart. And the heart was framed from waves. From gentle waves, like the heart would sink into the water. A sunken heart.

The whole thing was Jacqueline's favourite peace up here and there had been a time when she would have given everything to know what was in it. But, like said, the theme was almost forbidden in this house and , like with every other thing, the death of their parents let also this challenge sink in the background.

But so or so, Jacqueline knew what was in it. It hadn't been too difficult to figure out. She guessed it already years ago. She thought, no, she was sure, that in this chest laid the lost seventeen years. And with them maybe her own past.

.