Diem closed the album and exchanged it for the other.
The first page started at least a decade or more after the first album ended. These photographs were in time-faded color. It showed an older Hazel and Boone outside a house with a baby wrapped in a blue blanket, cradled in Hazel’s arms.
Leroy Krause. Diem’s dad.
I stilled, unsure how Diem might react.
When he spoke, his voice was low. “The doctor said she couldn’t have babies. She suffered endless miscarriages in her twenties. They didn’t have the same testing back then, but after years of trying for a baby, it seemed a forgone conclusion that it wasn’t going to happen. Then she got pregnant with Dad.”
Diem turned the pages of the second album faster than the first, like he wasn’t interested in digesting any more of Leroy Krause’s life than was necessary. Photographs told a story, but the story seemed accurate. The kid displaying a lost tooth, the boy waving from up a tree, and the cocky teen on the football field seemed ordinary. Dozensof memories caught on film, and not one showed the monster Leroy would become.
Near the end of the album was a Krause family photograph like I never expected to see. Hazel and Boone bracketed Leroy and a pretty young woman with bright eyes and a smile untainted by abuse. Marlow Krause. Diem’s mother. In the young woman’s arms was Diem.
Diem stopped on that picture, his chest barely moving. Was he staring at the smile on Leroy’s face or the hint of life behind his mother’s eyes that no longer existed? I’d never met Marlow Krause, but Diem had insinuated on more than one occasion that her fire had long ago burned out.
Was he asking himself why? How come?
I knew what it was like to view photographs of a family dynamic that didn’t make sense. One incongruous with real life. Somewhere in a crowded closet gathering dust were my own family albums. I had a Before family and an After family. The division came during my impressionable teenage years when my mother took me away from my homophobic father and started a new life.
A few years later, she met Heath, who became my surrogate father. Heath loved and accepted me with open arms, but Diem didn’t have a Heath. He continuously waded through the trenches of the in-between in search of his After.
I wanted to be his After. His everything. His forever. I hoped someday he would realize his search was over and he’d already found what he was looking for.
Diem still had nightmares. Despite distance, he continued to grapple with memories of a father who beat him. He suffered abandonment from a mother who turned her back. He battled addiction, attended therapy, yet somehow, he kept his chin above water by sheerforce of will. He’d been reconstructing his life one piece at a time for decades.
But Diem was still stuck in limbo. Until he recognized his After was right in front of him, the fraying threads of Before would hold him back. I wasn’t sure what it would take for Diem to finally let go of the past, but I rooted for him to win the battle.
Diem continued to stare at the family photograph. The air hummed with ancient electronics. Faint sounds from down the hall drifted through the walls. Unsure what to say, I waited, certain Diem was lost in his head, processing, processing, processing.
When the spell broke, and he reacted, it was with violence. He slammed the album closed and chucked it across the room, where it hit the wall and landed in a crumpled heap on the floor. Removing the other album from my arms, he threw it too. Then, he scooped a remote from a shelf within reach and aimed it at the VCR, hitting play. As the TV lit up, he stretched a hand to the laptop, woke it up, and pressed a key.
Settling again, his arms around me stiffer and less pliable than before, heart thumping a punching rhythm against my back, we watched the videos in silence as Diem recorded them onto a USB.
Diem had marked every instance of our suspicious man as he came and went from Evergreen Estate, so we moved through them quickly.
It wasn’t until the final day that Diem spoke for the first time, explaining the variations from the previous visits, notably the difference in time of day, and the boy’s exchange with another visitor.
As I watched our guy exit the building with a woman and pause in the vestibule to ask for a cigarette, I sat upright. “That’s not a visitor. That’s Aaron’s mother.”
Diem scrambled for the remote and hit pause as the exchange ended and the two vanished out the door. He rewound the footage to thepoint before they entered the frame, advancing slowly until he paused on the best view we had of their faces.
“That’s definitely her.”
“How the hell do you know Aaron’s mother?” The bite in his tone suggested he wasn’t in the mood for teasing.
“We ran into her the other day when he was showing me the event room. He got me those albums, by the way. From your dad.” I glanced at the heap of discarded photography.
“He what?”
Realizing I’d poked the bear with an unimportant detail, I created a quick diversion. “He also suggested we invite Magic Mike to the party.”
“Magic… What? Isn’t he a stripper?”
“Yes, played by the lovely and delectable Channing Tatum. That reminds me. I really need to watch that movie again. Teenage Tallus had such a huge boner for him.”
“Are you planning strippers for my ninety-three-year-old grandmother’s birthday party?”
I bit back a laugh. “Yes, Diem. That’s exactly what I’m doing. Aaron gave me his card and everything.”
