Saint Maybe - Anne Tyler [67]
“But she gives us presents,” Thomas said. He sat on her bed and swung his feet. “Maybe we should’ve made her something bigger, a picture for her wall or something.”
“I mean it, Thomas. You’re trespassing in my private room.”
“It’s Daphne’s room, too,” Thomas said. “Daphne would be glad to have me here.”
“Get out, I tell you.”
“Agatha, can’t I just watch you put the mustard seed away?”
“No, you can’t.”
“She wasn’t only your mama, you know.”
“Maybe not,” Agatha said, “but you don’t keep secrets good.”
“I do so. I didn’t tell about the jewelry box, did I?”
“You told our father’s name, though,” Agatha said, screwing up her eyes at him.
“That just slipped out! And anyway, I was little.”
“Well, who knows what’ll slip out next time?”
“Agatha, I implore you,” he said, clasping his hands. “How about I look at the picture and nothing else?”
“You’ll get it dirty.”
“How about I hold it by the edges, sitting here on the bed? I won’t ask to look at anything else, honest. I won’t even peek inside the box.”
She thought it over. She had taken the mustard seed from her pocket and he could see it glimmering between her fingers, so close he could have touched it.
“Well, okay,” she said finally.
“You’ll let me?”
“But just for a minute.”
She crossed to the closet, which was only more attic—the lowest part of the attic, where the ceiling slanted all the way down. It didn’t even have a door to shut. Thomas would have been scared to sleep near so much darkness, but Agatha wasn’t scared of anything, and she stepped inside as bold as you please and knelt on the floor. He heard the box’s bottom drawer slide open, and then the clink of the mustard seed against other clinky things—maybe the charm bracelet Agatha had let him sleep with once when he was sick, with the tiny scissors charm that could really cut paper and the tiny bicycle charm that could really spin its wheels.
She came back out, holding the picture by one corner. “Don’t you dare get a speck of dirt on it,” she said. He took it very, very gently between the flat of his hands, the way you’d take an LP record. The crinkly edges felt like little teeth against his palms.
It was a color photograph, with JUN 63 stamped on the border. A tin house trailer with cinder blocks for a doorstep. A pretty woman standing on the cinder blocks—black hair puffing to her shoulders, bright lipstick, ruffled pink dress—holding a scowly baby (him!) in nothing but a diaper, while a smaller, stubbier Agatha wearing a polka-dot playsuit stood alongside and reached up to touch the baby’s foot.
If only you could climb into photographs. If only you could take a running jump and land there, deep inside! The frill at his mother’s neckline must have made pretzel sounds in his ear. Her bare arms must have stuck to his skin a little in the hot sunshine. His sister must have thought he was cute, back then, and interesting.
It was spooky that he had no memory of that moment. It was like talking in your sleep, where they tell you in the morning what you said and you ask, “I did? I said that?” and laugh at your own crazy words as if they’d come from someone else. In fact, he always thought of the baby in the photo as a whole other person—as “he,” not “I”—even though he knew better. “Why were you hanging onto his foot?” he asked now.
“I forget,” Agatha said, sounding tired.
“You don’t remember being there?”
“I remember! I remember everything! Just not why I was doing that with your foot.”
“Where was our father?”
“Maybe he was taking the picture.”
“You don’t know for sure?”
“Of course I do! I know. He was taking our picture.”
“Maybe you’ve forgotten, too,” Thomas said. “Maybe these aren’t even us.”
“Of course they’re us. Who else would they be? I remember our trailer and our yellow mailbox, and this dirt road or driveway or something with grass and flowers in the middle. I remember this huge, enormous rainbow and it started in the road and bent all the way over our house.”
“What! Really? A rainbow?” Thomas said. He had an amazing thought. He got so excited he slid