“These are early in his fourth year, Terry. Do you know what image you’re looking for?”
“It’s me and Matt, wrestling, maybe. Or maybe I’m hugging him. I’m not sure. But I know that I’m kind of bent over, on top of him, with my weight on one arm, and the other around his neck — maybe cradling his head. I don’t know exactly.”
“I think those were taken earlier.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, then go through and see what you find.”
I started with the first book. But I didn’t find the shot that I knew I had seen before, the shot that looked so much like the one of me joining a very young girl in sexual congress. I moved through the pages quickly, because they were painful to look at. Matt. Ardith. Me. There were three or four pictures on most pages; two enlargements on others; and some held only one large blowup of a particularly fine photograph. All were held neatly in place by gummed sheets and clear plastic overlays.
There were seven books in the box and I looked through all of them.
“That was the time period,” I said. “Maybe a little more recent.”
“I know you’re going the wrong direction, Terry.”
“Then you go back and I’ll go forward. All right?”
We wrestled out two more boxes. I methodically started at the beginning. Ardith put hers on the floor and sat down beside it, leaning her back against the wall.
I flipped the pages fast, then faster. Matt and me at the beach. Ardith and Matt walking the shoreline — slightly out of focus, poorly centered, my handiwork. Matt taking cuts at the T-ball. Matt hefting a ball toward the bright yellow backboard of a kid’s basketball setup. Ardith getting dressed for a dinner date, standing in front of the mirror with her little black dress on and her hair curled up, fastening a string of pearls around her elegant neck. That was quite a night.
“Oh,” she said.
I put away the book and took out the next: first bike with training wheels, me and a new fishing rod I’d just bought, shots of Matt and me in a little rented boat on Irvine Lake. I was whipping the pages. Too much memory, too much past.
“Terry?”
“What.”
Flip, flip, flip.
“It’s not here.”
“Then look in the next one.”
Flip, flip, flip.
“I mean, they’re gone. The whole series — all of them.”
Flip, flip, flip.
“Gone where?”
“Don’t snap at me. I’m not your wife anymore. Get your butt over here and look for yourself.”
I set my book into the box and moved across the room to look down at Ardith’s. The open pages were blank. She flipped backward to show me two more empty pages, then forward. Six pages, nothing but adhesive and clear overlay.
“They were shots of you and Matt in bed. Remember? It was that morning back four winters ago when it was raining so hard the roads were closed? You called in stranded and we all got in bed and listened to the rain come down? Then we wrestled around like alligators? Remember? I got the camera and shot you and Matt goofing off. Matt had on his pajamas with the—”
“—And I had on my boxers. No top.”
“That’s right. Really nice shots of you guys thrashing around, pulling the bedsheets over your heads. I blew one up to nine by twelve — you on your knees in bed, holding Matt under your right arm and bracing yourself with your left. It was just before you crashed down on top of him, you know, made that growling alligator noise. He was on your forearm, on his back, giggling like crazy and looking up at you and in the picture your faces are so close it looks like you’re about to kiss. And your eyes were shut — remember that shot?”
“Perfectly.”
“Well, somebody stole it. And all the others of that morning. The whole series is gone.”
As would any cop, any doubter, any ex, I studied Ardith’s face for falsehood. There was none.
“Terry... what did you want that picture for?”
“I’m not sure.”
“For Melinda?”
“No. It... I was reminded of it when, well...”
So I explained it to Ardith. She looked at me a little unbelievingly, at first; then I could see she understood.
There were other photographs missing, too. We spent the next three hours going through each book. Eight more pages were blank. Gone was a series of pictures of me lying on a towel in the sun, and a series of me hamming it up on the living room carpet one hot summer evening, jeans on, shirt off, doing muscleman poses. As Ardith described the pictures to me, I remembered them. And I remembered that she had used certain filters and had dimmed the living room lights to produce shots that were forthrightly, harmlessly erotic.
“They were all of you, Terry. They took the ones that showed your body.”
When we were finished, we stood amid the stacks of boxes and piles of photo albums. I picked my way across to the window and slid it open. The warm breeze wafted in.
“Ardith, when was the break-in here? The burglary?”
“February the twenty-eighth. It was a Wednesday. Do you think that’s when... this happened?”
“It never did make sense, the way you described it. They break into a house that’s unoccupied, and steal some costume jewelry and clock radio? But they leave the TV, VCR, stereo and the pearls sitting out on the dresser? What the hell kind of burglary is that? Any thirteen-year-old kid would have enough sense to take some of the good stuff. It wasn’t burglars looking for loot. It was somebody looking for those photographs. So they could use them.”
“But who could possibly know that I had them? Know exactly where they were?”
I looked at her for a moment, then out the window. My old neighborhood stretched out before me, a huge tract of duplicate two-story town homes vanishing over a distant hilltop. Tan stucco. Red tile roofs. Then I turned back and looked at Ardith.
“Nobody knew, except you and me,” I said.
“Well, I didn’t steal my own pictures, Terry. Get that look off your face.”
“I know.”
“But who else knew?”
I shook my head. “They didn’t know until they found them. They bet on a hunch and the hunch was right. They stole a few trinkets to throw you off the trail. It worked.”
I was three steps outside Ardith’s front door when the figure in the bushes sped past me, stopped, knelt and hit the autodrive on his 35 millimeter. The lens protruded insultingly. You know how I can get The film was still chattering forward when my toe sent the camera into a quick flight that reversed itself at the end of the strap. The heavy thing slammed back down into the photographer’s head. He yelped. Then he tilted onto his butt. I put my foot on his chest and pushed him the rest of the way over. He spread out his arms and opened his hands, like he was trying to assure me of his innocence.
I knelt down beside him. “How do you do?”
“Not so good. I was trying to do my job.”
“No more hot pix today, friend. I’ve had enough of those to last a lifetime.” I picked up his camera.
“Dick March, the Journal. That’s a six-hundred-dollar Nikon, Mr. Naughton.”
“What a time to run out of film.”
I popped the roll and stripped out the film, dropping it to the lawn. Then I stood up and offered Dick a hand, which he reluctantly took. I yanked him up, then got into my car. Pulling away from the curb, I could see him fumbling to get another canister into his camera, but it was too late: I stood on the pedal and screeched around the bend.
Twenty-Two