Pictures of You (41 page)

He took out his cell phone and, before he could change his mind, called Isabelle, his fingers gripped around the phone.

“Hello?” she said, and hearing that voice, he pressed the receiver against his forehead and shut his eyes. His whole life came back to him. “It’s Sam,” he said.

“Sam!” She sighed his name. “I didn’t know if you’d call. I’m so glad you did.”

“I almost didn’t.” Behind him, a nurse was whistling. “But here I am.”

“That article about you! You’re all grown up.” She was silent for a minute.

“I haven’t been a child in a long time.”

“I know that.”

“So. Why didn’t you write before this? Why didn’t you call?” He knew it sounded rude, but he couldn’t help himself.

“Oh, not on the phone,” she said. “I can’t do this on the phone. Please. Can we see each other?”

Talking was hard enough. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually see her, how he might feel. He tapped his fingers
on the phone. Behind him, he heard two people arguing. “They charged me for an aspirin!” a voice said.

Did he really want to see her? Was this really a good idea? He could hang up and tear up her number and that would be that. He could pretend she had never called him and his life would go on the way it always had. He’d have his father still. He’d have Lisa and his work.

“Sam?”

He could pretend this had never happened.

“I’ll come to you,” he said. “Just for a few hours.”

Babies in the womb got their senses mixed up. There was an eerie phenomenon where they could hear colors. They could see sounds. He felt as if he finally understood what that must be like, because surely, every sense of his had gone awry. He went to his house and dug out the old Canon. He had stopped taking pictures with it years ago; now he used a digital that required nothing but a steady hand. Still, he had kept it. He traced the camera with his hands.

He made plans. He called his father, attempting to be casual. “Isabelle wrote me,” he said, and Charlie was silent.

“I’m going to visit her. Would you like to come?” Sam asked.

“Another time,” he said. Sam’s father would never talk about Isabelle with him, no matter how many questions Sam would ask. “Did you love her? Did you love her the way you loved Mom?” Sam kept asking. “Why did she leave us?” over and over until he was old enough to see how such questions hurt Charlie, how his father would retreat into the other room, how maybe there really weren’t any good answers, and only then did he stop.

Still, the day before Sam left, Charlie called. His father coughed into the phone and Sam felt the hesitation. “You tell her hello from me,” Charlie said.

B
Y THE TIME
Sam got to Woodstock, it was midafternoon. It was a lively little town, full of shops and restaurants and
people ambling on the street. He turned down a road, following the directions she had given him, and there was her house, a big white Colonial with a green lawn, and as soon as he saw the child’s jump rope, like a squiggle, his legs buckled. He wondered if he had made a terrible mistake, if it wasn’t too late to turn around and go home.

He sat in the car, tense and angry, with the motor running. He could be back before Lisa got off her shift. He could go home and pretend none of this happened. He felt nine years old. He had thought she had wings. He put his hand on the gear shift, and then the front door opened and Isabelle flew out.

Her hair was still long but mostly gray now, which somehow made her even more arresting to look at. She was still thin, but her features were softer, and there were fine lines around her eyes.

She was still beautiful.

Slowly, he got out of the car. She hugged him close, but he couldn’t bring himself to put his arms up around her, and instead, he forcibly stepped back. She was crying, but his heart still felt hard. “I’ve missed you so much,” she said. “I can’t stop looking at you.”

“You wouldn’t have missed me if you’d kept in touch.”

She startled. “Do I deserve that, Sam?” she said quietly.

He shifted his weight. Something was burning inside his stomach. “Why did you want to see me?” he said finally.

“Come inside and meet everyone,” she said. “Then we’ll talk.”

Everyone, he thought. Who was everyone? As soon as he stepped inside, he heard music, something jazzy, and there were voices in the back. It wasn’t raining, his shoes were clean, but he stamped his feet on her rug. The house was big and roomy. Everything was polished wood and white walls, which were full of her photos. They were all black-and-white images of peoples’ faces, and in every photo a different part of the face was hidden in shadow. Then, there, toward the back, there was an enlarged one of him, at nine, set slightly apart from the others. Maybe she’d hung it up just before he got there. Did
she really think that that would make him believe she had cared? There were photos of Nelson, too, his mouth open and yawning. “Nelson,” Sam said. “He was a great tortoise.”

“What do you mean was? He still is. Want to see him?”

“He’s alive?”

“He’s going to outlive us all,” she assured him. She led him to a small room in the back and showed him the tank. Nelson arched his neck when Sam came in, and for a moment, Sam felt that same crazy disorientation. “Remember me?” Sam said, touching Nelson’s smooth shell. Nelson hissed and slid his head back into his shell, making Isabelle laugh.

“Nelson’s unsociable as always,” she said, and then she turned back to Sam. “Are you taking photographs these days?”

“I stopped taking them when I was a kid.”

She put her hand to her face. “How is Charlie?” she asked, and her voice got all funny.

“He’s seeing someone now. She teaches Spanish at Oakrose High.”

Isabelle nodded. “Good. I’m glad. Is he happy?”

Sam thought of his father and Lucy, his new girlfriend. Did they seem happy? Or was it more just a kind of contentment? The last time he had visited, Lucy cooked paella and kissed Charlie and held his hand across the table, but Sam noted that they still kept separate addresses.

“He’s as happy as anyone,” Sam finally said.

Isabelle looked as if she were about to say something, but then a big wooly black dog sprang out from the kitchen, and then a little girl tumbled out, too, Chinese, with almond eyes and straight black hair cascading down her back. Isabelle gave a half smile. “Ah, here’s Grace,” Isabelle said. “She’s six. Elaine, my oldest, is at college.” A man came out, balding and steel-haired, grinning. “You must be Sam,” he said, and he draped an arm about Isabelle, drawing her close, kissing the curly top of her head.

Dinner was long and delicious. Grace had to be coaxed to eat
vegetables. “Please don’t eat your zucchini,” said Frank. “Because I really want it for myself!” Grace giggled and grabbed a bite. “And don’t even think of touching the carrots,” he said meaningfully.

Grace shot a glance over at Sam and then pronged a carrot with her fork, popping it into her mouth.

All through dinner, Sam compared Isabelle’s husband to Charlie. Frank was probably the last kind of person he’d expect Isabelle to end up with, big and boisterous, and clearly older than she was. But even though he tried not to, Sam liked Frank. Frank told him how a critic had come in with a fake mustache that had fallen into his soup, how the pastry chef had inadvertently lost her ring in a cupcake and served it to a young woman who thought her boyfriend was proposing. (“He proposed anyway.” Frank laughed.) Frank asked Sam a million questions about his job, about his life. The whole dinner, no one mentioned Charlie at all, but he seemed a presence, anyway.

After dinner, Sam helped with the cleanup. “Why don’t you show Sam the park?” Frank asked Isabelle. “Gracie and I can man the fort here.”

Isabelle nodded. “Go,” he said.

The park was green and leafy, with a fenced-off playground of jungle gyms and swings and a big sign,
NO ADULTS WITHOUT CHILDREN ALLOWED INSIDE
. He felt Isabelle’s eyes on him. “What?” he said.

“Can I take your picture?” Isabelle asked, lifting the camera.

“You’re now too rich and famous for my budget.”

“Hardly,” she smiled. She moved to another angle and the camera whirred. “Still not using a digital?” Sam asked, and Isabelle laughed.

“I like film,” she said. “It captures every detail. It’s a shame you don’t take photographs anymore. You had a good eye.”

She crouched and he felt prickles all over his skin as she focused on him. When he was a kid, he used to love it when she took his picture. He loved all the hours in the darkroom with Isabelle, not
seeing her, but knowing all he had to do was reach out and he could touch her. Watching her, he felt a pulse of anger.

Still crouching, she took another shot. “I’ll send you the prints,” she said, and then she asked, “How is Charlie, really?” Her face was hidden by the camera.

“He’s good. I told you. He loves the Cape. He’s still working. He has Lucy.”

Isabelle stood up, and looked down at her camera. “One of these days I’m going to just show up to see him.”

“Maybe you should.”

She stared down into the camera again. “Is he happy?” she said carefully.

“Are you?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” She took two more photos in rapid succession and then stood up, putting the camera away. She shielded her eyes from the sun. “God, it goes so fast, doesn’t it?” she said wistfully.

“I almost didn’t come,” Sam blurted, and Isabelle turned to face him.

“For a long time, I didn’t want to, I was so angry,” Sam said. He felt it all building up inside him, all over again, all the feelings he had tamped down.

She was about to say something, but Sam held up his hand. “I was a little kid when you left,” he said. “I couldn’t believe you would just go like that, that you didn’t write or call or want to see me. That you wouldn’t even answer my letters. All I ever got from you was one phone call, Isabelle, and then I got sick—remember that day when I called you and I was wheezing so hard I couldn’t talk? I kept waiting for you to come see me. How could you do that? Didn’t you even want to contact the hospital to see if I was okay?” he said.

“Sam—” Her face grew pained.

“How could you just leave me? I was a
kid
. I loved you. Do
you know what it did to me? How I blamed myself when you vanished?”

She opened her mouth to speak but no sound came out, and he was suddenly so hopeless with anger, he had to shut his eyes for a moment. He swallowed, and when he looked at her again, she looked as if a layer had been peeled away from her, as if she were a thousand years old, all her beauty gone.

She put the camera down against her body, and he saw her hands were shaking. “It didn’t happen that way,” Isabelle said.

“What didn’t?”

Isabelle shook her head. “I’m so sorry, but that’s wrong, Sam—”

“I thought we’d always be friends,” Sam said. “How was it so easy for you to vanish? Do you know what it was like for me? For my dad? Especially after all that had happened?”

“I was always your friend. And it was far from easy.”

“No. You weren’t a friend. You left.”

Isabelle stared past Sam. Her fingers moved on her camera, as if she were reading it like Braille. “You really don’t know, do you?” she said quietly.

“Know what?”

“I called the store,” she said. “I called every hospital on the Cape until I found where you were admitted. I called Charlie.” She grabbed for Sam’s arm and he stepped away from her. “Sam, I was ready to get on a plane and go there, but Charlie saw my phone number scribbled on your hand and got to me first. He told me to stay away. He was so scared you would call me and get worse that he scrubbed my number off.”

“What?” Sam looked at her, astonished. He remembered the numbers he had inked on his hand, how frantic he had been when he had found them gone.

“Sam, I’m so sorry.”

“Why can’t you take responsibility?” Sam said. He felt his voice
tightening. “Why can’t you just admit that you did something wrong?”

Isabelle shook her head violently. “You don’t understand! They couldn’t get the asthma under control and Charlie was terrified you might die!” She swiped at her eyes. “Every time I wrote you, every time Charlie even mentioned my name, you were ending up in the ER. Emotions can exacerbate asthma, you know that. Charlie begged me to just stay away. And when I did, he told me that your asthma disappeared. I knew asthma sometimes disappeared, but it seemed so sudden, so miraculous. How could I not think that my not being there was making you better? How could I tempt that?”

Sam tried to swallow but he couldn’t. His head swam. He tried to imagine his father doing such a thing, knowing how Sam had waited for the phone, the mail, how he had run crying after the postman, sure there must be a letter for him. He thought of his father sleeping on a cot by his bed in the hospital and every time Sam woke up, his father was awake, too, and watching him, his eyes damp.

“He thought you were going to die, Sam!”

“I didn’t die.”

“Did you know that I wanted the two of you to come to New York with me? Didn’t Charlie tell you?

“My father wouldn’t lie to me.”

“I suppose he was protecting you.”

Sam felt his anger burning like a match flare. His mother used to bend the truth as easily. His father used to tell him that the worst thing a person could do was to be dishonest and now Isabelle was telling him how his father had lied.

He was furious with his father, furious with her, and even angrier at himself for thinking that coming up here might be a good idea. “You could have stayed on the Cape. You had a life there, too.”

“No, I didn’t. You were the only reason I stayed. Both of you.
And then I was losing my job and my money was dwindling. All I had was you, and I was losing that. I was making things worse for everyone, and this school opportunity came up for me in New York.” She wet her lips. “I loved your father. I loved you. But I was making you sick. What else was I supposed to do, Sam?”

Sam tried to remember. The late-night phone calls his father made to Isabelle. The way Sam would sometimes wake up and find Charlie pacing, or baking loaves of bread at four in the morning that no one ever ate. Once he found his father scrubbing the kitchen floor, tile by tile, even though the cleaning lady had been there just the day before. He remembered how sad his father was, and how he had thought it was because Isabelle had left them both.