Permanence (4 page)

The photo was taken from behind Jamie, so that you cannot see his face. But you can see his back. You can see his black hair cut short and close. His body is wrapped in an oversized, dark gray sweater. His pants are baggy and loose. His pants flap in the wind, against his legs. You can see the impression of Jamie’s legs against the fabric. His bare feet are buried in the sand. This is the photograph that turns the clock back for me so that once again I can smell the ocean. I hear the movement of the sea, the waves against the shore. I can feel the mist, like oil smeared against my face. I could travel then.

Listen: this is the photo that was my favorite.

This is the photo that was taken one short lifetime ago, literally. There is the ocean in the background. So much black in the distance. A gray sky blankets the foreground above the sand and above the sea. These are thick clouds. There is the sand, flat and layered like a snow drift. The flatness of the sand is destroyed by the footsteps made by my husband, Jamie. But look closely. You can see Jamie’s footsteps disappearing in the wind.

This is the kind of photograph that provokes thought rather than a grin. The photograph was my very favorite. When I look at it, I feel the weight of the image right here, in my heart. The photo helps me to remember Jamie in a way I want to—without seeing his face.

Now, when I try to remember Jamie’s face, I see only the horrified expression he wore the night baby died: the wide eyes, the trembling bottom lip, the pale face, the disbelieving twisting of the head from shoulder to shoulder.

But there are more photographs.

Look. Here’s a photograph of Jamie holding an ax. He is splitting the wood I would later carry into the cabin we rented above the mountains in Lake Placid nine months before baby was born.

This photo is what you might call an
action shot
.

You can see Jamie coming down hard with an ax into an upright log, a pile of split birch on either side of him. You can really feel the power of the ax if you look closely. That’s how good the photo is.

Behind Jamie, the lake appears as a small blur through the trees. If you don’t already know you are looking at a lake you might never guess that what you are seeing is water. You might never think of water at all. But what you are really seeing through the trees is where the water ends and the sky begins.

At night, in front of the fire, Jamie and I could hear the calls of the animals that went to the lake. We drank from the bottles of wine we brought with us. We got mildly drunk and held hands like little kids. Like teenagers. Already, Jamie’s hands were blistered and callused from having chopped firewood all afternoon. I can still feel Jamie’s hands as if I were holding them now. I can still hear his easy, low tone of voice. That weekend, Jamie seemed to forget about being an engineer. He forgot about logic. He said silly things to me—corny, sentimental things that even now make me feel funny.

For instance, Jamie said this about the animals: the animals that gathered by the small lake in the moonlight were aware of a human presence. The animals, he said, were singing to us. We laughed at such a silly idea. But we loved the idea too. I couldn’t believe Jamie was saying the things he was saying. But the animals made sounds as though they were speaking to us. The sounds were distant, sad sounds.

There was no one around to bother us. No one for miles. We lost track of time.

“No distractions,” Jamie said while holding my hand. “Just you and me.”

Maybe we didn’t plan children. We hadn’t even talked about children. Not seriously. We never discussed the possibility, although children were always a possibility. Children were a possibility before we were married. Children were an almost certainty after we got married. But we never talked about them. Maybe we didn’t need to talk about them so long as Jamie and I were happy the way we were. We might have gone on like that forever, just sitting there, pressed together, holding hands like silly kids in front of the fire.

But one thing is certain. The weekend we spent in the cabin was the weekend Jamie and I made baby.

About my parents

Here is the only photograph I have left of my family. This is the still life of my father, my mother, and me together. We are seated cross-legged around a Christmas tree in the living room of our home. This is the home we lived in until my father burned it down.

Look, the full-color photo must be twenty years old. You can see that I am no more than eight or nine. In the photo I am holding onto a children’s book. I’m staring at the book rather than the camera. But you can clearly see the expressions in the faces of my parents. Their smiles are distant and forced.

The Christmas in the photograph is the last Christmas we had together.

But there is more to see.

Look at my eyes. I have my father’s eyes—the enormous, deep-set, brown eyes, the eyes Jamie would later say were “mysteriously attractive.” Almond eyes, my mother called them. And from my mother I have inherited a slightly lanky build, although I am no more than medium height. If you look closely you can see she also gave me my fine, light brown hair and a light complexion that in the summertime will burn if I’m not careful. I have her high forehead and her smile when I laugh, a smile Jamie called contagious.

But from my father I gained a sense of seriousness, a quality I still remember my mother telling me was not a quality at all, but a burden.

“Life,” she would say with a small laugh, “is too short to be lived seriously, afraid of every little loss.” But I remember being very serious about my schoolwork or about the way I dressed or wore my hair, even as a nine-year-old, and how sometimes I might fall into a deep sadness for no reason at all.

I was too young to understand why my father burned our home. I know only this: I lived through the fire, but only because my mother woke me in all the smoky confusion and placed me out a bathroom window onto a second-floor overhang that served as a porch roof. Why she did not save herself I can only guess. Perhaps the overhang was not sturdy enough or maybe she couldn’t fit through the window. I was so young. But I do remember this: the fire spread so quickly that we became trapped inside the second-floor bathroom. The window inside the bathroom was our only way out.

And for my father?

He lost consciousness from toxic fumes and heat in the living room. They found charred cans of kerosene scattered all around his remains.

My father was not a murderer

I have managed to piece together some information about my father—bits and pieces of truth as told to me by my aunt and uncle, the childless couple who raised me after the death of my parents and who helped put me through college in later years.

“Your father was not a murderer,” my aunt insisted. She was the younger sister of my father. “Your father was merely the victim of his own loss.” My aunt went on to tell me that when my father lost his construction business, he lost everything, literally. He lost his money, his possessions, and his self-respect. He lost any hope for a future. He was about to lose his home and so one night he burned it while my mother and I were asleep upstairs.

But did my father want to kill his family?

My aunt found this impossible to believe. My father was not capable of hurt. When he lost his business he was not himself. He became a different man entirely.

But when I try to remember my father today, I do not see a frightened man. I see a strong man who was always working for his construction business. I remember him in his basement office, reading his blueprints or pounding the keys of his adding machine. I remember his serious expressions and the feeling I had that he was always behind with something. If we took time out for a short vacation or even to go for a drive, the entire atmosphere was clouded in a sense of seriousness and urgency. But I know this: my father was trying to do well for my mother and me.

I remember my father having sleepless nights. I remember his long trips away from home. I remember being with my mother more than my father. I can still recall sitting in front of the television on Saturday nights with my mother, while my father worked. I remember learning to cook with my mother, taking all day on a Sunday attempting to make soup or a casserole. I remember my mother, always forcing a smile, parading around the kitchen with a spatula in hand. Listen, she was not much of a cook—something else I’ve inherited from her. But she would laugh and tell me never to be too serious or risk losing my sense of humor. Then my father would shout from the basement for us to try and be quieter. He had a deadline, he would say. And my mother? She would make a mock look of deadpan, scrunch her nose and lips, and whisper: “I. Have. A. Deadline.”

But I also remember the way my mother cooked peanut butter and jelly sandwiches fried in butter, a taste I craved especially when I carried baby.

But I do not remember everything because I was too young. And, being that young, I was not able to recognize the signs that accompanied my father’s failing business. There were only the more frequent arguments between him and my mother. He was home less and less. He drank. I remember mother receiving telephone calls from strangers and her just hanging up. Or sometimes strange men coming to the door and asking for money. Life went on like that for quite some time. Almost a year past Christmas when this last photo of my family was taken.

Wedding day

I have some permanence in my life.

For instance, there is the formal wedding photo which hangs above the bed Jamie and I once called “ours.” In the photo, Jamie and I are posing in front of the big tree at the country club where our wedding reception was held. As always this image remains the same.

The photo is not a simple snapshot. This is the professionally framed image of Jamie and me with our arms wrapped around one another. I am dressed in what you might expect to see inside a wedding photo: pure, billowing, white taffeta dress with a transparent veil and a train that extends and expands outside the borders of this photograph. But Jamie is not dressed in a tuxedo. He wore a conservative blue blazer, yellow and blue striped necktie, and loose-fitting eggshell trousers.

Not a sign of wedding day jitters.

But I remember this: Jamie was so frightened at the altar he could hardly utter his wedding vows without his voice cracking.

What you do not see in the photograph is also something you might expect: the photographer pulling at our arms, licking the tips of his fingers and running them through our hair, smoothing out the creases in our clothing, adjusting Jamie’s tie, making us smile, speaking to us from behind his box camera set up on a tripod, directing us, making us pose, making us forget about acting natural.

Looking at the photograph now, in the half-light of the bedroom, I can see that our faces were like children’s faces—smooth, tan, alive—as if the four years that have gone by since that late summer day are really four decades.

Look. See for yourself. Jamie and I have these bright, excited smiles that now seem like a bad joke.

“A boy or a girl, “ Jamie said. “Definitely.”

Here’s a photograph of Jamie sitting on the couch in our apartment. He is looking completely frazzled. His tie loosened about his neck. His hair in disarray. His smile distant. The evening this photo was taken was a special evening. This was the night we both found out about having baby.

When Jamie came home that evening he placed his briefcase to the wood floor as though resting a tray of eggs. He stopped short, said nothing, took on the expression of a shocked man. But he was gentle, considering how I must have looked. I was at the edge of my seat, at the dining room table, dressed in Jamie’s pajamas—the same clothing I had been wearing ten hours before when Jamie had left for work. I had a Kleenex stuffed into the breast pocket of my pajama top and I was wearing wool socks. I hadn’t been to work at all that day. I hadn’t even called the agency.

Jamie smiled a nervous smile.

“What’s going on here?” he asked, his voice just a whisper. “What’s all this?” As if he had no idea. Jamie must have recognized the torn test-kit boxes that littered the floor near his feet. Sixty-five dollars worth of test kits. He recognized everything, I’m sure.

The vials on the table were filled with pink liquid.

I had a funny, dull cramp in my midsection.

Jamie removed his overcoat. He took the time to hang it in the closet despite the melting snow that dripped from it. Jamie never took the time to hang his coat before. His hair was matted and wet. His suit was wrinkled. The skin of his face was pale and heavy. He moved in slow motion, lifting each leg and removing his shoes one at a time—something else Jamie would not have done if circumstances were more ordinary.

Then I said it. “We’re pregnant.”

Jamie’s face went ghostly white, his expression blank.

I was smiling an ear-to-ear smile.

“We’re pregnant?” asked Jamie. “What do you mean, we?”

I began to laugh. I don’t know why I was laughing. I felt like crying at the same time. My emotions were shooting through my body at lightning speed. I was crazy with feeling. I wanted to scream, laugh, cry. I could have sprinted a mile I had so much energy.

My husband and I did not hug and kiss.

My husband, Jamie, just stood there in his stocking feet, wet from the melted snow that covered his shoulders and his short, black, matted hair. Water dripped onto his face and ran like tears. I thought Jamie was crying. Maybe he was. Until he broke out into a smile.

“We’re pregnant?” he asked again. He placed an open hand to his belly. “You and me?”

“All of us,” I said.

“A little baby,” Jamie said.

“I want a boy,” I said. “Or a girl.” I sat there at the head of the dining room table, dressed in the pajamas I had worn to bed the night before. Suddenly, it was night again. I hadn’t been to work. I hadn’t even called in to warn them. There was no dinner prepared for me or for Jamie. Regardless of my job, I always had dinner for Jamie so that he could count on it, so that nothing was unusual or out of place.