me wash as many times as I wanted, until he said it was possible the soap could burn a hole in my skin.
There is fear in my eyes. I see the fear clearly even in the blurred snapshot. The adults waiting in line with their children must have seen it too. Fear like I have seen in my sister’s eyes when she stood outside the kitchen door, craning her neck inside. Her back arched, she was prepared to turn away if Father was still seated in front of his orange juice and toast. When she saw that his spot was empty, that his juice glass had been drained, her eyes lost their intensity. It is the same fear the artist captured in the painting he made of my sister, myself, and my brother that hangs above the love seat in our parents’ house, although he didn’t put the fear into my sister’s eyes, but into mine.
Years later when I visualize my death it is in the same woods where the swarm rose from the ground. My clothes are on and I am wearing my winter coat. Once settled into a tiny pit I have dug with my hands, I cover myself with fallen leaves and swallow the pills I have been stealing from my sister and Mother and hoarding ever since I first went to the Photographer’s house.
A mucus-like patch more brown than red and now I cannot keep my favorite pair of underpants. I carry them to school and stop in the alleyway behind the five-and-dime where I plan to toss them into the Dumpster. What if someone sees me or finds them and knows they belong to me? Then he or she will know what happened.
Instead, I will need to take a bus to a nearby town where I don’t know anyone and find a quiet backstreet with a trash bin. When I’m sure I’m alone, I’ll take the underpants, stuffed between American history and algebra, out of my school bag. When they are in the trash I will cover them with the garbage already there, the browned apple cores, the leftover spaghetti, and the wad of paper towels stained with rot and rain, and wait at the nearest corner to make sure no one has seen me.
After all the planning, I go to the Dumpster in the alleyway and fling the stained underpants over the side. They catch on the metal rim and hang there, the pattern of lilacs laced together with purple ribbons.
Mother calls upstairs. Dinnertime.
I already ate, I call back. Which could have been true, because the first time I went to the Photographer’s house he made me dinner.
My pajamas are striped in red and white like the twine used to close a bakery box. Grandmother embroidered my name and Helen’s on the shirt pockets to distinguish us. They insist on dressing us the same. I don’t mind but Helen hates it and lets them know. Had Helen been home that night maybe I would have told her. I do not know if I would have said it was good or bad, or if I would have told her I had agreed.
I wake up gagging and run to the toilet, throwing up slippery water, and even when there is nothing left I do not feel better.
If Mother had asked to see the photographs the Photographer took I could not have shown her, not even one, as in almost every shot I am naked, and if I am clothed, I am either posed or making an expression that is inappropriate.
You said things to me, all sorts of things about my talent for photography. I now know it isn’t a talent. But this was not your crime. You were nearly the same age as Father.
Young girls, you said, fill canvasses, and gave me a book of photographs of paintings by Renoir and Gauguin. I liked the one by Renoir where the girls, I imagined them to be sisters, maybe even twins in identical party dresses, are draped alongside a grand piano. They are awkward in their bodies and it shows in the way their shoulders are positioned. Still, they know how to be watched.
Helen preferred a photograph of a painting by Gauguin. A bare-breasted woman looks directly at the painter without shame, but without joy either.
You catalogue the pictures of me and file the negatives in a locked metal cabinet, occasionally offering me a print if there is one you are especially proud of. Anything you gave me is gone now, as are mostly all of the photographs I took then. I never took one of your face and I always had my camera with me.
The Photographer and I shower in my parent’s bathroom just one time. Afterwards, I don’t know where to take him, so we go to dinner at the same restaurant we went to as a family on Sunday nights. Mother and Father would sit on the opposite side of the three of us. It always happened that Jake had to switch seats with Mother because he and Helen fought.
The Photographer is soon on his third bourbon.
I can’t eat what I always order, a small steak served on white bread where the blood from the meat turns the bread a brownish red. It had always been my favorite part of the meal, the doused bloody bread.
When we return as a family I tell the waiter steamed mussels. Mother notices but doesn’t ask why. I wish she had asked.
The first funeral I went to was on a day of record cold. The son delivered the eulogy, and when he finished, the family took seats in a perfect line in the back of a limousine. The old lady wore black satin gloves that disappeared into her coat sleeves. A caravan of cars followed with their lights on. A thin veil of snow hit our windshield and made an icy sound that echoed. The ice stayed ice, it didn’t melt or run.
No one took photographs even though he was painted back to life and his shirt collar was pressed. His cologne was so sweet it filled the funeral parlor and made my eyes tear. It seems now, because his frozen face is still so vivid, that I had been given a photograph of him as he lay there to take with me.
The coat Mother was wearing had once been alive. Silver fox, she said even though the fur was not silver and in picture books foxes were always red or brown. I rubbed my hand up and down her furry back until she pushed me away. I couldn’t help myself and kept going back. There was nothing about the feel that made me think it was something that had died or that had been killed. Finally she said loudly, go away. Others must have heard because at that moment the machine lifting the casket paused and the creaking stopped. The casket, now lightly dusted in white, was suspended above a gaping hole.
When he was lowered into the ground, each mourner was expected to throw a shovelful of dirt across the coffin’s shiny-varnished surface. My fingers were numb and Mother had forgotten my mittens. Still, she made me take the shovel, heavy with soil. The skin on the palm of my hand stuck to the handle the way my tongue stuck to cherry ice in summer. Helen turned away when I tried to give it to her. Rather than make a fuss, Mother took the shovel and passed it to the old man next to her. For that one time I wanted to be Helen.
The story we heard the rest of that winter and into the spring was how Patty Hearst had been kidnapped and sealed inside a coffin buried in the ground, even though she was still alive. The dead man looked so alive I was sure he, too, was breathing, that a mistake had been made. Even the newscaster couldn’t say if Patty Hearst was kidnapped or if she had gone willingly, and he didn’t answer the question everyone was asking, was she dead or was she alive?
Mother didn’t cry at the funeral, and when I asked why, she said there wasn’t anything that could have been done.
Father was a hunter. He turned into our driveway after having been away all weekend. Strapped to the roof of his gold-colored Buick were two dead deer. A trail of blood had hardened on the back windshield. I stared at the carcasses because at first I didn’t know what they were. At the same time Helen realized it, so did I. She screamed so loudly Mother rushed outside wearing her apron with the pine trees, her hands covered in ground meat. Daddy, Helen cried in the direction of the house, killed Bambi and her little sister.
He
