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.
