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“Ma?”
Eliza looks towards her daughter, having been reading a book quietly in her library.
“Yes, Angelica?” Eliza responds, matching her child’s soft tone.
“When is Philip coming back?” she asks, and Eliza has to make a conscious effort to control her face.
“Soon,” Eliza replies, and Angelica frowns.
“How soon is soon?” her child questions, and she sounds so convinced that her brother is coming back that Eliza has to remind herself that she held her baby as his soul left his body. That she was at the funeral.
“Soon, sweetie. Why don’t you come here and read with me?” Eliza suggests, and Angelica, her sweet 17-year-old angelica, slowly walks closer and settles close to her mother, leaning against her arm. Eliza knows her sleeves will be wrinkled later on, but she cares not. Eliza shifts to get comfortable again, eyes searching the page to find where she had left off.
She begins to read aloud, “While she had asked her father if he had been the one to chase him off, he denied it-”
That is not the first, nor will it be the last time the Hamilton family lies to their eldest child.
“John?”
The 9-year-old boy looks up from his wooden train, eyes immediately locking onto his eldest sister Angelica.
“Hi,” he says simply as Angelica crouches next to him.
“Have you seen Philip?” Angelica asks gently, smiling sweetly at her brother, and John pauses to think.
Momma had told him Angelica wasn’t the same after their brother Philip's death. He knows that, he can see it, but Momma also told him that Angelica sometimes thinks Philip is still alive.
‘Lie to her,’ his momma had said. ‘I know I told you to never lie, but lie to your sister when she asks about Philip okay? Try to send her momma’s way.’
“I think I saw him inside,” John says finally, and Angelica lights up at the news. “I think he’s with momma.”
“Thank you, John!” Angelica says happily, pulling the boy into a brief hug and planting a kiss on his head before she stands, grabbing her dress and lifting it so she can run back inside.
John watches her go quietly, before turning back to his train set. He doesn’t know why his sister thinks Philip is alive. Or why she screams and cries when they try to tell her the truth, but if it keeps her smiling like that, then John doesn’t feel bad lying to her.
“Well I do think so…You disagree? Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t ask then-”
James quietly watches his sister talk to the air like there’s someone there to respond. James talked to the air when he was younger, younger and in need of friends to spend his day indoors with.
Now he talks to real people, mostly the boy down the street from the new house they have uptown. But what matters is that he’s real, and Philip was real, and now he’s not.
“James!”
James scoots his gaze over until he catches his sister's eye from where she sits on the swing.
“What do you think?” she asks, and James tilts his head.
“What do I think about what?”
“Haven't you been paying attention?”
“Well you’ve been talking to Philip, not me!” he points out, and she chuckles, glancing towards the space of air she’d spent the last 20 minutes talking to. “Well, it doesn’t matter I suppose, i’m right anyway!”
“I’m sure you are…” James mumbles, and Angelica goes right back to talking to air.