“Who’s that?” I asked, indicating the driver.
“Some boyfriend of my mom’s,” he said with a shrug. “There was a string of them for a while there. Then she went back to school and didn’t have time to date.”
“Did she ever remarry?”
“Nope.” He squinted down at the shot again. “I think I remember that car, actually. It was huge. The guy was small. Probably compensating.”
I looked again as well, but you couldn’t really tell much by just an arm. “My dad was the opposite. Didn’t date anyone for years, just threw himself into work. Tracy was the first woman he brought home, and now they’re married.”
“You like her?”
I nodded. “She’s nice. She makes him happy. Plus, she likes to sail, which I hate.”
“Ticks every box,” Roo said.
“Exactly.” I picked up the album. “Okay if I look at this one over on the couch?”
“Sure. I’ll keep digging, see if there’s another one.”
I got through two full pages before I saw something that brought me to tears. Weirdly, it was not the shot of Bailey and Jack with my parents in the background, my dad with his arm over my mom’s shoulders. Or the one of Celeste and my mom, posing together in front of what I was pretty sure was the same gardenia bush where we’d taken our pictures before Club Prom. Instead, it was a picture I’d almost passed over. It was of an older woman in a lawn chair, taken from behind, and the composition was weird, everything in the picture over to one side and just empty lake on the other. It was only when I looked more closely that I saw she had a child in her lap, blond-headed, and that they were holding hands. You could see a gold bracelet, braided and thick, on the woman’s wrist. The child held a stuffed giraffe in her arms. Me, Mimi, and George.
By this point I’d seen my own face and that of my parents, cousins, aunt, and grandmother repeated in square after square of snapshots. But there was something about seeing my beloved giraffe there as well that made this one picture feel like the ultimate proof that the trip really happened. When things were hard between my parents, and later, when my mom moved out, he was the one I cried to most, burying my face in the soft, nubby fur of his neck. He’d stayed on my bed all the way up until high school before I’d moved him across the room to a shelf, where he remained close enough for me to see before I fell asleep every night. Even now, I knew exactly where he was: in the final box I’d packed up from my room at Nana’s, with my books and favoritepictures. It would be the first one I would unpack in the new house, once I got there.
“I think that’s the only album you’d want,” Roo said now. I swallowed over the lump in my throat, turning the page as he walked over and sat down again. “Although you’re welcome to keep looking. My dad’s albums are someplace as well. Probably tons of shots of your mom there.”
“This is great, actually,” I said, studying a shot of Celeste, my dad and mom, and another man, with Jack’s same nose and slim frame—Silas, I assumed—sitting at the picnic table. “These are all new to me.”
“Really?” he said. “That’s crazy. I’ve probably looked at them all a thousand times.”
“Yeah?”
He crossed one leg over the other. “I had a lot of questions about my dad when I was old enough to finally ask. My mom usually just showed me these for her answers. That’s why I was kind of freaked out that first day Jack brought you out to the lake.”
I thought back. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It was just when I heard your name,” he said, shifting slightly. His shoulder bumped mine. I didn’t move, even as he did to add space again. “It was like you were actually real. Or something.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, I guess,” I said with a laugh.
“Okay, maybe that’s the wrong word.” He turned, looking at me. “It was just, you know, those pictures were partof a narrative for me. So you were, as well. Does that make sense?”
I wanted to say yes. It wasn’t like I hadn’t spent a fair amount of time lately thinking about stories, the ones we told and those we didn’t. But the truth was, it didn’t exactly track.
My face must has shown this, because he said, “Okay. So when I was nine or ten, I started to get really interested in my dad. I wanted to hear all about him, what he was like, all the time. It wore my mom out, so she’d often just give me these albums and tell me to go nuts. But of course, when I dug through them, I had other questions. Like who you were, and what happened to you.”
“Why me?”
“Because, like him, you were in all these pictures. Until you weren’t. Here, I’ll show you.” He pulled the album over into his lap. “See, this one of you with Bailey and Trinity at the table? That was the day your parents brought you. You just appear, after all these books filled with other faces I still knew. A stranger.”
I looked down at myself, the Popsicle gripped in one hand. “You didn’t remember me.”
“I sort of did,” he said. “But we were four. Like I said, I was in a thing. I had questions.”
I felt my face get a little warm, suddenly, knowing I’d been discussed. It was the same finding that shot of my mom on the fridge: like I, too, had been here all along, even if I hadn’t known it.
“And then,” he went on, turning a page, “this was the first time we met, which was probably a few minutes later. She literally got the exact moment.”
I looked at the picture. It was of the shoreline, littered then as it was now with various floats and beach toys. I was standing at the water’s edge in the same bathing suit, holding a plastic flowerpot, as Roo, crouched in the sand, gripped a shovel and looked up into my face. Behind us, a white boat was sliding past, out of frame.
