"Hey," Duke said, turning to show him a glossy 8 by 10. "This you, Paul?"
Paul sat very still, his arms folded around his knees, his breath a wild rush in his lungs. He didn't move, he couldn't. Duke let the photo slip to the floor and joined the others, who had gone a little wilder now, scattering photos and negatives all over the shiny painted floors.
He sat very, very still. For a long time he was too scared to move but then he had moved, he was inside the darkroom, hunched in a warm corner, against the filing cabinet his father kept locked, lis?tening to what was going on outside: swirls of noise, laughter, and then a bottle crashing. Finally, it grew quieter. The door opened and Duke said, Hey, man, you in here, you okay? And when Paul didn't answer there was a hurried conversation outside and then they left, clattering down the stairs. Paul stood slowly and walked through the darkness, stepping into the gallery space filled with piles of ruined photos. He stood in the window, watching Duke coast silently down the driveway on his bike, his right leg swinging over the bar before he disappeared into the street.
Paul was so tired. Drained. He turned and surveyed the room: photos everywhere, lifting in the breeze from the window, the negatives strewn like streamers from the counters and the lights. A bottle had been broken. Green glass was scattered over the floor, and the counters were splashed with beer. There were words on the walls, crude drawings and graffiti. He leaned against the door, then slid down until he was sitting on the floor in the mess. He would have to stand up again soon, he would have to clean this up, sort the photographs, put them right.
He lifted his hand, looked at the photo beneath it, then picked it up. It was no place he knew: a ramshackle house fastened to the side of a hill. In front of it stood four people: a woman in a dress to her calves, wearing an apron, her hands clasped in front of her. Wind blew a stray strand of hair across her face. A man, gaunt, bent like a comma, stood next to her, holding a hat to his chest. The woman was turned slightly toward the man, and they both had suppressed smiles on their faces, as if one of them had just made a joke and in another instant they would burst out in laughter. The mother's hand rested on a girl's blond head, and between them was a boy, not far from his own age, staring seriously straight into the camera. The image looked strangely familiar. He closed his eyes, feeling drained from the pot, near tears with exhaustion.
He woke to dawn blazing in through the eastern windows and his father silhouetted, speaking from the center of the light.
"Paul," he said. "What the hell?"
Paul sat up, struggling to realize where he was and what had happened. Ruined photographs and film scattered the floor, covered with muddy footprints. Negatives unfurled like streamers. Broken glass littered the room and had left deep scratches in the floor. Fear rushed through Paul; he felt like throwing up. He shaded his eyes from the blinding morning light with his hand.
"Good God, Paul!" his father was saying. "What happened here?" He moved out of the light at last, he was bending down, squatting. He lifted the photo of the unknown family from the chaos on the floor and studied it for a moment. Then he sat back against the wall, the photo still in his hands, and surveyed the room.
"What happened here?" he asked again, more quietly.
"Some friends came over. I guess things got kind of out of control."
"I guess," his father said. He pressed one hand to his forehead. "Was Duke here?"
Paul hesitated, then nodded. He was fighting back tears, and every time he looked at the ruined papers something tightened like a fist in his chest.
"Did you do this, Paul?" his father asked, his voice oddly gentle.
Paul shook his head. "No. But I didn't stop them."
His father nodded.
"It will take weeks to clean it up," he said at last. "You'll do it. You'll help me reconstruct the files. It will be a lot of work. A lot of time. You'll have to give up rehearsals."
Paul nodded, but the tightness in his chest grew stronger and he couldn't hold it back. "You just want an excuse to make me stop playing."
"That's not true. Damn it, Paul, you know that's not true."
His father shook his head and Paul was afraid he was going to stand up and leave, but instead he looked down at the photo in his hand. It was black and white, with a scalloped white border around the family standing in front of the low small house.
"Do you know who this is?" he asked.
"No," Paul said, but even as he spoke he realized that he did. "Oh," he said, pointing to the boy on the steps. "Oh. That's you."
"Yes. I was your age. That's my father right behind me. And be?side me is my sister. I had a sister, did you know that? Her name was June. She was good at music, like you. This is the last photo that was ever taken of us all. June had a heart condition, and she died the next fall. It just about killed my mother, losing her."
Paul was looking at the photo differently now. These people weren't strangers after all, but his own flesh and blood. Duke's grandmother lived in an upstairs room and made apple pies and watched soap operas every afternoon. Paul studied the woman in the picture with her barely suppressed laughter—this woman he had never known was his grandmother.
"Did she die?" he asked.
"My mother? Yes. Years later. Your grandfather too. They weren't very old, either of them. My parents had hard lives, Paul. They didn't have money. I don't mean that they weren't rich. I mean that sometimes they didn't know if we were going to have food to eat. It pained my father, who was a hard-working man. And it pained my mother, because they couldn't get much help for June. When I was about your age, I got a job so I could go to high school in town. And then June died, and I made a promise to my?self. I was going to go out and fix the world." He shook his head. "Well, of course I didn't really do that. But here we are, Paul. We have plenty of everything. We never worry about having enough to eat. You'll go to any college you want. And all you can think to do is get drugged up with your friends and throw it all away."
The tightness in his stomach had moved to his throat, and Paul couldn't answer. The world was still too bright and not quite steady. He wanted to make the sadness in his father's voice go away, to erase the silence that filled up their house. More than anything, he longed for this moment—his father sitting next to him and telling him family stories—to never end. He was afraid he would say the wrong thing and ruin everything, like too much light flood?ing onto the paper ruined the picture. Once that happened you could never go back.
"I'm sorry," he said.
His father nodded, looking down. Briefly, lightly, his hand passed over Paul's hair.
"I know," he said.
"I'll clean it all up."
"Yes," he said. "I know."
"But I love music," Paul said, knowing this was the wrong thing, the pulse of sudden light that turned the paper black, yet unable to stop himself. "Playing is my life. I'll never give it up."
His father sat in silence for a moment, his head bent. Then he sighed and stood.
"Don't close any doors just now," he said. "That's all I'm asking."
Paul watched his father disappear into the darkroom. Then he got on his knees and began to pick up shards of broken glass. Dis?tantly, trains rushed, and the sky beyond the windows opened up forever, clear and blue. Paul paused for a moment in the harsh morning light, listening to his father work inside the darkroom, imagining those same hands moving carefully inside a person's body, seeking to repair what had been broken.
September 19JJ
I "'' AROLINE CAUGHT THE CORNER OF THE POLAROID BETWEEN
her thumb and first finger as it slipped from the camera, the image already emerging. The table with its white cloth appeared to float on a sea of dark grass. Moonflowers, white and faintly lumi?nous, climbed the hillside. Phoebe was a pale blur in her confirma?tion dress. Caroline waved the photo dry in the fragrant air. There was thunder far away, a late summer storm gathering; a rising breeze stirred the paper napkins.
"One more," she said.
"Oh, Mom," Phoebe protested, but she stood still.
The minute the camera clicked she was off, running across the lawn to where their neighbor Avery, age eight, was holding a tiny kitten with hair the same dark orange as her own. Phoebe, at thir?teen, was short for her age, chubby, still impulsive and impassioned, slow to learn but moving from joy to pensiveness to sadness and back to joy with an astonishing speed. "I'm confirmed!" she shouted now, turning once on the lawn with her arms flung high in the air, causing the guests to glance her way, drinks in their hands, and smile. Skirt swirling, she ran to Sandra's son, Tim, now a teenager too. She wrapped her arms around him, kissing him exu?berantly on the cheek.
Then she caught herself and glanced back anxiously at Caroline. Hugging had been a problem earlier this year, at school. "I like you," Phoebe would announce, enveloping a smaller child; she didn't understand why not. Caroline had told her again and again, Hugs are special. Hugs are for family; slowly Phoebe had learned. Now, however, seeing Phoebe rein in her love, she wondered if she'd done the right thing.
"It's okay, honey," Caroline called. "It's okay to hug your friends at the party."
Phoebe relaxed. She and Tim went off to pet the kitten. Caroline looked at the Polaroid in her hand: the luminous garden and Phoebe's smile, a fleeting moment caught, already gone. There was more thunder in the distance, but the evening was still lovely, warm and beautiful with flowers. All across the lawn people moved, talk?ing and laughing and filling their plastic cups. A cake, three tiers and frosted white, stood on the table, decorated with dark red roses from the garden. Three layers, for three celebrations: Phoebe's con?firmation, her own wedding anniversary, and Doro's retirement, a bon voyage.
"It's my cake." Phoebe's voice floated over the rise and fall of con?versations, the physics professors and neighbors and choir members and school friends, families from the Upside Down Society, all sorts of children, running. Caroline's new friends from the hospital, where she'd started working part-time once Phoebe was in school, were here too. She had brought all these people together; she had planned this beautiful party unfolding in the dusk like a flower. "It's my cake." Phoebe's voice came again, high and floating. "I'm confirmed."
Caroline sipped her wine, the air warm as breath on her skin. She didn't see Al arrive but he was suddenly there, sliding a hand around her waist and kissing her cheek, his presence, his scent, sweeping through her. Five years ago they had married at a garden party much like this one, strawberries floating in champagne and the air full of fireflies, the scent of roses. Five years, and the novelty had not worn off. Caroline's room on the third floor of Doro's house had become a place as mysterious and sensual as this garden. She loved waking to the warm, heavy length of Al sleeping beside her, his hand coming to rest, lightly, on the flat of her belly, the scent of him—fresh soap and Old Spice—slowly infusing the room, the sheets, the towels. He was there, so vividly present she felt him in every nerve. There, and then as quickly gone.
"Happy anniversary," he said now, pressing his hands lightly on her waist.
Caroline smiled, filled with pleasure. The evening had deepened and people were moving and laughing in the lingering warmth and fragrance, dew gathering on the darkening grass, the white froth of flowers everywhere. She took Al's hand, solid and sure, and almost laughed because he'd just arrived and didn't yet know the news. Doro was leaving on a year-long cruise around the world with her lover, a man named Trace. Al knew that already; plans had been evolving for months. But he didn't know that Doro, in what she called a joyful liberation from the past, had given Caroline the deed to this old house.
Doro was arriving even now, coming down the stairs from the alley in a silky dress. Trace was just behind her, carrying a bag of ice. He was a year younger than she, sixty-five, with short gray hair, a long narrow face, full lips. He was naturally pale, conscious of his weight, and fussy about his food, a lover of opera and sports cars. Trace had been an Olympic swimmer once, had almost won a bronze medal, and he thought nothing, still, of diving into the Monongahela and swimming to the opposite shore. One afternoon he'd risen out of the water and staggered up the riverbank, pale and dripping, into the middle of the annual picnic for the department of physics. That was the story of their meeting. Trace was kind and good to Doro, who clearly adored him, and if he seemed aloof to Caroline, a bit distant and reserved, it really wasn't any of her business.
A gust swept a pile of napkins off the table and Caroline stooped to catch them.
"You're bringing the wind," Al said, as Doro drew near.
"It's so exciting," she said, lifting her hands. She had come to re?semble Leo more and more, her features sharper, her hair, short now, pure white.
"Al's like those old mariners," Trace said, putting the ice on the table. Caroline used a small stone to weigh down the napkins. "He's attuned to atmospheric changes. Oh, Doro, stay just as you are," he exclaimed. "God, but you're beautiful. Honestly. You look like a goddess of the wind."
"If you're the wind goddess," Al said, catching the paper plates as they lifted, "you'd better cool your jets so we can have this party."
"Isn't it glorious?" Doro asked. "It's such a beautiful party, a wonderful farewell."
Phoebe ran up, holding the tiny kitten, a ball of pale orange, in her arms. Caroline reached out and smoothed her hair, smiling.
"Can we keep him?" she asked.
"No," Caroline replied as she always did. "Aunt Doro's allergic."
"Mom," Phoebe complained, but she was distracted at once by the wind, the beautiful table. She tugged on Doro's silky sleeve. "Aunt Doro. It's my cake."
