Back up the stairs and through the kitchen, I slogged with the boxes. Mother trotted ahead of me and turned through an arch that led away from the carport end of the house. I followed, still sneezing and humping boxes.
The living room was filled with flattering, cool light filtered through pale aqua curtains. The sheer panels over the windows moved in the breeze entering through the open French doors and turned the blue canyon light into rippling motes of color on the white walls. The furniture was all light and soft-looking also, made of curling gray metal and puffy overflowing cushions in pale watery colors. The coffee table looked like a mermaid’s forest of silver seaweed holding up a floating slab of sandblasted aquamarine glass. My mother scooped an arrangement of seashells and beach glass off the table and put it in the hearth of the small, white-plastered fireplace. It looked like a magical blaze of blue and green cold flames.
“Put the boxes here while I find a pencil and some towels,” Mother ordered.
She scampered back to the kitchen and returned with a handful of writing implements and yet another pile of clean white hand towels. She didn’t seem to own paper towels—at least I hadn’t seen any in the kitchen. Maybe she held stock in a laundry.
I had to give my mother credit: She wiped down the boxes herself to remove the dust and plunged into the project of shuffling through and identifying the photos with relish.
Most of the photos were just family and friends stuff that meant nothing to me or my current quest. Dad’s family seemed to have no talent or luck with cameras. There were a lot of wedding and baby photos contributed by them with the tops of heads, hands, legs, or other bits out of frame, or with dust spots and lens flare, or with color problems as well as the usual lack of focus and composition. There was even one of me as an infant double-exposure, apparently the child of a headless mother.
She held a photo in front of my face. “I didn’t know we had this! This is your father and your uncle Ron—his brother—when they were kids. Oh, my God, look at that hairstyle! Did we all have no taste at all?”
“Do most teenagers have any?”
She laughed. “Well, I did!”
I fished out a high school photo of her with an overteased Jackie Kennedy hairstyle lacquered into shape with enough hair spray to make a small hole in the ozone. She was wearing a horrendous striped dress that made even her Twiggy-thin figure look bloated. “Sure. ”
“It was very trendy.”
“My point, exactly.”
But I wasn’t paying as much attention to her and the photo as I seemed. I was peeking at the discarded photo of my father and uncle from the corner of my eye. There was an odd smear on the picture next to my dad. Most of his family’s photos were bad, but this one was particularly messed up. I picked it up again and looked harder. There seemed to be a bit of light damage or water vapor right behind his shoulder. It wasn’t on the photo, though; it was in it.
I pointed it out to Mother. “What’s this?”
“I have no idea. Probably cigarette smoke—your uncle smoked like a chimney. Probably still does,” she sniffed.
I put it down and went back to shuffling. Mother would identify anything I stopped at—I had to wonder how she knew or remembered all of those faces and details, especially when the photos were of Dad’s family or her short-term second husband and his equally short-term friends. Once IDed, the photos were carefully marked on the back with soft pencil if they hadn’t been marked before. Then she put them aside to rebox later.
We worked through the first box and got into the second, which seemed to have a lot more photos of me as a child and fewer of friends and family. There was one particularly funny picture of me at about three years old, wearing a white dress with a red sash and an incongruous brown cowboy hat and matching boots. My posture, with elbows bent and hands near my hips, seemed to imply I was challenging the photographer to a gunfight. My father was just in the corner of the picture, out of my sight, smothering a laugh. The photo was well-framed, but had been disfigured by a constellation of fingerprints and water spots on the lens.
“Which one of Dad’s family took this and why am I wearing that silly outfit?”
Mother glanced at the photo. “Oh, I took that. You loved that ridiculous hat and boots your grandfather gave you for Christmas. He said you were a real little cowgirl and you decided to wear them all the time. I never could understand it: You hated the ranch—a girl after my own heart—but you loved that stupid cowhand hat.”
“Cowboys are cool. Cows are not. At least when you’re three.”
“Trust me, sweetie. Cowboys may remain cool but cows never get better.”
We both giggled, which was very odd to me; when you’ve gotten used to despising someone, sharing a joke with them feels weirder than bathing in gelatin.
A few pictures later I stopped and stared at a snapshot of a bunch of teenagers and younger kids goofing off in bathing suits on a river-bank. Yet another execrable Blaine family photo complete with spots and smears, except that this one showed me and a pretty blond girl with a long ponytail—longer than mine had been when it was caught in the doors of my fatal elevator—standing off to the side with our arms over each other’s shoulders in the classic Best Friends Forever pose. We were thirteen or fourteen in the photo, and she was the girl whose watery specter had accused and harangued me through my flight to Los Angeles.
I held the photo out to my mother. “Who’s this? With me?”
Mother took the photo and glanced at it. Then she put it facedown on the table and frowned at me. “That’s your cousin Jill. You don’t remember her?”
“No.” Well, at least not from that photo or that age. I could recall a younger girl named Jilly who I’d liked, but not this living version of a dead teenager. And yet the photo indicated a close friendship. How could I forget that?
My mother sighed. “This is so painful. Jilly drowned. About three days after that picture.”
“What happened?” I demanded.
Mother recoiled a little from my tone. “I just told you: She drowned.”
“How?”
She put her hands over mine and squeezed a little. “Oh, baby, I know you don’t want to remember this—maybe that’s why you made yourself forget Jilly. Are you sure you want to hear this.?”
“Yes, Mother. Tell me what happened.”
She swallowed, looking down at the concealed picture. Then she licked her lips and drew a long, slow breath. “Well. You and Jill. wanted to swim in Danko Pond, down at the bottom of your uncle Ron’s property. Do you remember that?”
“I think I remember the pond—it had a little dock someone had built for a sailboat no one ever sailed.”
She looked up and met my gaze with hers, her brow puckered in concern and unhappiness. “Because the pond wasn’t safe. There were snags and holes down there and current from the river that came in underground to feed it. But you girls wanted to prove to the boy cousins that you were as tough as they were, so you two wanted to swim in the pond. We all said no—the parents, I mean—so of course you and Jilly snuck off to do it anyway.”
“And Jilly drowned.”
“Baby. You almost drowned, too. If it hadn’t been for Jilly’s hair floating on the surface, they wouldn’t have known where to look. Ron and your cousin Grant got you both out from under the snag, and you were both not breathing, and it was so horrible—” She started crying but she didn’t take her eyes off me. “You started coughing up the water as soon as Grant picked you up, but Jilly. She didn’t.”
“Was it my fault?”
“Oh, no, baby! No! It was just a stupid, stupid accident. If we’d all just not made such a big deal about that stupid pond, you wouldn’t have cared and the boys wouldn’t have cared and it would never have happened. Now you see why I get so worried about you and your crazy job? You’re my only baby and I almost lost you once!”