He had taken what could be called a painful delight in Lindsey’s graduation ceremony. Buckley had sat beside him, dutifully prompting him when to smile and react. He often knew when, but his synapses were never as quick now as normal people’s – or at least that was how he explained it to himself. It was like reaction time in the insurance claims he reviewed. There was an average number of seconds for most people between when they saw something coming – another car, a rock rolling down an embankment – and when they reacted. My father’s response times were slower than most, as if he moved in a world where a crushing inevitability had robbed him of any hope of accurate perception.
Buckley tapped on the half-open door of my father’s den.
“Come in,” he said.
“They’ll be okay, Dad.” At twelve, my brother had become serious and considerate. Even if he didn’t pay for the food or cook the meals, he managed the house.
“You looked good in your suit, son,” my father said.
“Thanks.” This mattered to my brother. He had wanted to make my father proud and had taken time with his appearance, even asking Grandma Lynn that morning to help trim the bangs that fell in his eyes. My brother was in the most awkward stage of adolescence – not boy, not man. Most days he hid his body in big T-shirts and sloppy jeans, but he had liked wearing the suit that day. “Hal and Grandma are waiting for us downstairs,” he said.
“I’ll be down in a minute.”
Buckley closed the door all the way this time, letting the latch snap into place.
That fall my father had developed the last roll of film that I’d kept in my closet in my “rolls to hold back” box, and now, as he often did when he begged just a minute before dinner or saw something on TV or read an article in the paper that made his heart ache, he drew back his desk drawer and gingerly lifted the photos in his hand.
He had lectured me repeatedly that what I called my “artistic shots” were foolhardy, but the best portrait he ever had was one I took of him at an angle so his face filled the three-by-three square when you held it so it was a diamond.
I must have been listening to his hints on camera angles and composition when I took the pictures he held now. He had had no idea what order the rolls were in or what they were of when he had them developed. There were an inordinate number of photos of Holiday, and many a shot of my feet or the grass. Gray balls of blurs in the air which were birds, and a grainy attempt at a sunset over the pussy-willow tree. But at some point I had decided to take portraits of my mother. When he’d picked the roll up at the photo lab my father sat in the car staring at photos of a woman he felt he barely knew anymore.
Since then he had taken these photos out too many times to count, but each time he looked into the face of this woman he had felt something growing inside him. It took him a long time to realize what it was. Only recently had his wounded synapses allowed him to name it. He had been falling in love all over again.
He didn’t understand how two people who were married, who saw each other every day, could forget what each other looked like, but if he had had to name what had happened – this was it. And the last two photos in the roll provided the key. He had come home from work – I remember trying to keep my mother’s attention as Holiday barked when he heard the car pull into the garage.
“He’ll come out,” I said. “Stay still.” And she did. Part of what I loved about photography was the power it gave me over the people on the other side of the camera, even my own parents.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father walk through the side door into the yard. He carried his slim briefcase, which, years before, Lindsey and I had heatedly investigated only to find very little of interest to us. As he set it down I snapped the last solitary photo of my mother. Already her eyes had begun to seem distracted and anxious, diving under and up into a mask somehow. In the next photo, the mask was almost, but not quite, in place and the final photo, where my father was leaning slightly down to give her a kiss on the cheek – there it was.
“Did I do that to you?” he asked her image as he stared at the pictures of my mother, lined up in a row. “How did that happen?”
“The lightning stopped,” my sister said. The moisture of the rain on her skin had been replaced by sweat.
“I love you,” Samuel said.
“I know.”
“No, I mean I love you, and I want to marry you, and I want to live in this house!”
“What?”
“That hideous, hideous college shit is over!” Samuel screamed. The small room absorbed his voice, barely bouncing back an echo from its thick walls.
“Not for me, it isn’t,” my sister said.
Samuel got up off the floor, where he had been lying beside my sister, and came to his knees in front of her. “Marry me.”
“Samuel?”
“I’m tired of doing all the right things. Marry me and I’ll make this house gorgeous.”
“Who will support us?”
“We will,” he said, “somehow.”
She sat up and then joined him kneeling. They were both half-dressed and growing colder as their heat began to dissipate.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I think I can,” my sister said. “I mean, yes!”
Some clichés I understood only when they came into my heaven full speed. I had never seen a chicken with its head cut off. It had never meant much to me except something else that had been treated much the same as me. But that moment I ran around my heaven like… a chicken with its head cut off! I was so happy I screamed over and over and over again. My sister! My Samuel! My dream!
She was crying, and he held her in his arms, rocking her against him.
“Are you happy, sweetheart?” he asked.
She nodded against his bare chest. “Yes,” she said, then froze. “My dad.” She raised her head and looked at Samuel. “I know he’s worried.”
“Yes,” he said, trying to switch gears with her.
“How many miles is it to the house from here?”
“Ten maybe,” Samuel said. “Maybe eight.”
“We could do that,” she said.
“You’re nuts.”
“We have sneakers in the other pannard.”
They could not run in leather, so they wore their underwear and T-shirts, as close to streakers as anyone in my family would ever be. Samuel, as he had for years, set a pace just ahead of my sister to keep her going. There were hardly any cars on the road, but when one passed by a wall of water would come up from the puddles near the side of the road and make the two of them gasp to get air back in their lungs. Both of them had run in rain before but never rain this heavy. They made a game of who could gain the most shelter as they ran the miles, waltzing in and out to gain cover under any overhanging trees, even as the dirt and grime of the road covered their legs. But by mile three they were silent, pushing their feet forward in a natural rhythm they had both known for years, focusing on the sound of their own breath and the sound of their wet shoes hitting the pavement.
At some point as she splashed through a large puddle, no longer trying to avoid them, she thought of the local pool of which we had been members until my death brought the comfortably public existence of my family to a close. It had been somewhere along this road, but she did not lift her head to find the familiar chain-link fence. Instead, she had a memory. She and I were under water in our bathing suits with their small ruffled skirts. Both of our eyes were open under water, a new skill – newer for her – and we were looking at each other, our separate bodies suspended under water. Hair floating, small skirts floating, our cheeks bulging with captured air. Then, together, we would grab on to each other and shoot up out of the water, breaking the surface. We sucked air into our lungs – ears popping – and laughed together.