Look Closely - Laura Caldwell [67]
I leaned forward and found a small, maroon, leather-bound album. Photos of my family.
The room had grown dimmer as the darkness outside crept in. A light was on in the kitchen, and a lamp was lit across the room, but I still needed to switch on the barrel lamp on the end table.
In the first photo, Dan stood with his arms at his sides, smiling into the camera. It must have been moving day, because he was in the very room where I now sat, but none of Sharon’s drawings hung on the wall and no drapes covered the windows. Dan’s hair was much shorter than I remembered it, his blond bangs pushed up in front. I stared at his face, the white flash of his teeth and the dots of his eyes, but the photo had been taken at least ten feet away from him. So while I tried to read something there, all I saw was a man I once knew, who looked very pleased to have his own house in Santa Fe.
The next few pictures were of Sharon and Dan together. Some were clearly taken at a wedding or some other function because they were both dressed up, Dan in a suit. The others appeared to have been taken around Santa Fe—at sidewalk cafés or parties where there were crowds of people in the background. Those were closer shots, and I noticed that Dan was smiling in each, his arm usually tossed over Sharon’s shoulders. The smile never really left his mouth, though. Instead, his lips seemed set, while the rest of his face was flat. Had he always made such a face in pictures?
I moved on through the album, the rest of it devoted to the decorating of their house and the birth of Annie. She had been an adorable baby, with fat, rosy cheeks and curly tufts of hair. Her light brown eyes, my mother’s eyes, had been large at birth, making her look startled.
“That’s me,” I heard, and I nearly jumped. Annie had come into the room and was standing at the other side of the end table, peering at the album.
“You were a very pretty baby.”
Annie just nodded as if this was obvious.
“Do you want to look at these pictures with me? You could tell me where some of them were taken.”
Annie nodded again. She climbed onto the couch and settled in next to me so that our legs touched. I tried to act as if this happened all the time, as if I sat this close to a child to whom I was related. But in reality, I’d had little exposure to kids. I felt inadequate around them.
Annie clearly knew how to entertain herself, though, because she was soon pointing at pictures, naming people, telling me how old she was in various photos. As I listened to her, asking a few questions for clarification, I realized that my niece was a lot like myself, an only child who couldn’t rely on others for amusement, who had to learn to play by herself or not play at all.
“That was my fourth birthday,” Annie said. She gestured to a photo of herself in a pointed red birthday hat, Dan at her side, holding up a white frosted cake for the camera. “They were already divorced then, but Mom let him come to my party, even though it wasn’t a Wednesday or Saturday.”
“Oh.” I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. I had grown up without any siblings, just like Annie, but I never had to deal with warring parents. I wondered if having no mother at all was better somehow than having a father who disappointed you, who didn’t show up, who made you worry.
I looked closer at the birthday shot. While Dan was lifting the cake for the benefit of the picture, his eyes were on his child with a look of adoration. He certainly didn’t appear to be a parent who would go on a drinking binge and not show up or call for weeks, but then what did I know? Maybe it was as simple as that. Yet in the corners of my mind, I knew it couldn’t be that easy. Dan had seemingly disappeared on the same day as Caroline, a few days after I’d received the letter, one week before I went to Chicago and Woodland Dunes.
“Do you miss your dad?” I asked Annie, to fill the silence of the living room. I had never been comfortable with open spaces of quiet, certainly not with a young girl who seemed so foreign and yet familiar.