It’s a small stack of images. Mostly individual photographs, pictures of Lili—likely the photos that the department used for placement and identification purposes, photos meant to help potential fosters or adoptive families become familiar with a child.
She hasn’t seen most of these: her in a little denim dress running through grass, her as an adorable baby making grabby hands at the camera, her as an absurdly cute toddler smiling toothily with her hair covered in multicolored finger paint.
A soft, fragile ache starts to reveal itself inside of her, somewhere in her solar plexus, as she slowly cards through the photographs, as if a shell is falling away. She feels both protective of the little girl, and in need of being protected. Because looking at these images, she perceives the sense of her parents. Did her mother take the one of her at Crissy Fields, bundled up in the sunny cold with the beach and Golden Gate Bridge in the background, a stuffed toy deer gripped tightly in her arms? Did her father capture this shot of her grinning at the top of a playground slide, gleaming metal in the sunshine? Their perspective—behind the camera—is the same vantagepoint as hers now, looking at the photographs, seeing the image. As if they are sitting beside her.
“Hey.” Lili glances over her shoulder. Jackie leans in through her doorframe, dressed in pale pink and gray workout gear, not dissimilar to a ballerina. “What’s up? What’s in the box?”
“Um, it’s some childhood stuff. My foster mom sent me her case files.”
“Oh.” Jackie stills. “Is it—are you okay?”
“Yeah, here, look,” Lili offers, waving her over. “Little me.”
Walking around her bed, Jackie settles down beside her. Tentative, as if expecting to be rebuffed. She accepts the photographs Lili hands to her. Her hair is glossy, freshly blown out. Lili thinks about teasing her—a blow out, for barre class?—before the manner in which her friend’s face melts completely overtakes her.
“Oh,Li,” Jackie enthuses, eyes bright, “you were a menace, look at thosecheeks!”
Lili cracks a smile. “Yeah, I was cute.”
“I want one of you.”
She snorts. “You are nowhere near ready to have a child.”
“Okay—pot, kettle.”
Lili huffs a laugh, flipping through more of the photos, papers. Caught between pages, a few errant photographs flicker loose. She lets them fall—will get to them in a second—wondering how many more there are, treading through the files carefully—
“Are those your parents?”
Lili’s heart seizes a little. Jackie has caught sight of the fallen photographs.
“Yes,” she breathes. Gingerly, she sets her case file aside.
Two photographs are in her lap: old images, colors faded. Only of her parents. She has never seen these before.
Her dad on a balcony in a distinctly Middle Eastern city—minarets, construction cranes; peeling paint of a colonial building—bare feet propped up on the table, gray hush of early morning, lush green gardens below, fair hair a mess. He looked like he’d just woken up, wearing a rumpled white T-shirt. She looks at the back of the photograph:1995, Cairo.It was their post-undergrad trip, on their way to Beirut.
She looks at the next photograph. Her mother somewhere in theMarin headlands, hills green with trees, wearing a worn blue hiking backpack, her masses of thick black hair piled atop her head, curls escaping, glancing back over her shoulder. She is grinning, bursting with joy. She looks younger than Lili.
Breath short, Lili flips it over:1992, Mount Tamalpais.It was the year her parents had met in undergrad. Lili does the math. Her mother was nineteen.
“Can I?” Jackie asks, gently. Lili nods, proffering the photographs. She feels a little stunned. She keeps looking at the photos, as her friend examines them. Fresh faces, new views on her parents. She supposes they were part of her adoption file. Potential fosters want to know about the parents, too.
“Your mother was gorgeous,” Jackie observes. Lili has never shown her friends any of the few childhood photos she has, stashed in the closet. Jackie’s fingers are careful, and gentle, around the photograph, as if she’s taking care not to leave fingerprints nor smudge the old ink. Something vulnerable shifts in Lili at the subtle gesture of how she’s handling them. “You look a lot like her, it’s striking.”
Lili nods. “I know.”
“She also looks like her hair clogs the shower drain,” Jackie jokes.
Lili—laughs, surprisingly. A little hiccup of a laugh. “Sorry,” she says.
Jackie affectionately nudges Lili’s shoulder with her own. “You look a lot like your dad though, too.” Jackie glances between the photograph and Lili’s face, as if comparing. She nods, confirming. “Your dad was hot.”
“O-kay,” Lili declares. Jackie laughs, handing back the photos. There are a few she missed, sticking together—degradation of glossy gelatin coating, ages in storage—that she loosens now, so they can breathe before she packs them away again.
“Oh, wait, I love this one,” Jackie says, tapping a finger to pause Lili’s organizing shuffle. “That’s a really beautiful photograph.”
It’s the photograph of the three of them—her mother, her father, little Lili—on the beach: wind, ocean air, sunshine. It’s the one Jane texted her that sent her spiraling. It hurts, like a surge of powerful water, seeing that image, recalling the anniversary that just passed, how hard it hit her, but also—the feeling of Aleksandr holding her. The desperate grasp of her fingers in his jacket. The warmth of his body enveloping her.
