Chapter 11 - The Other Pictures
My father didn't say anything at first. He just carried the box from the hall closet and set it on the living room rug between us.
It was a white keepsake box with a gray lid, the kind with a faded department store sticker still stuck on the corner. I'd seen it on the top shelf before when he reached for blankets, but he'd never taken it down while I was awake. That Saturday morning the repaired silver frame was already back on my bookcase in my bedroom, the new glass clean and cold to the touch. I kept checking it. I had placed it facing my bed the way Mom had told me to, so she could still see me.
He sat cross-legged on the floor and patted the rug beside him. "Come here, Sofi," he said. His navy sweater was pushed up at the sleeves and his silver watch caught the window light. His wedding band was still there. He hadn't taken it off, not even after Jenna moved her suitcase into the hall closet.
I sat down and pulled my knees up. Jenna stood in the doorway of the kitchen with a dish towel in her hands. She didn't come closer.
Dad lifted the lid. Inside were stacks of photographs, not loose like the junk drawer, but sorted into small envelopes. There were also a folded hospital bracelet and a dried corsage. The air that came out of the box smelled like old paper.
"This was your mom's box," he said, his voice quiet. He breathed once, slow, before he kept going. "I've been keeping it up there because I didn't know how to show it to you without it hurting."
He slid the first envelope toward me. Inside were prints from before I could remember. Mom holding me as a baby in our old apartment kitchen, both of us laughing. Mom with her hair pulled back at the park, me asleep against her chest in a carrier. Mom and me in the bathtub with bubbles up to my chin. Dozens of moments I didn't know had been saved.
I picked one up with both hands. In it, Mom was looking right at the camera while I looked at her, my cream bow a little crooked.
"She took so many," Dad said. "She wanted you to have them later."
I didn't answer right away. I was thinking about the silver frame on my bookcase. For weeks I'd thought that one picture was the only way Mom could see me. That if I didn't hold it right, or if the glass broke, the line between us would cut off. Now there were twenty, thirty pictures spread on the rug, all with Mom's eyes on me at different ages.
"Did she see me then too?" I asked.
Dad looked down at the photos, his brow furrowed the way it had been that night in my bedroom. "Yeah, baby. She saw you every single time."
Jenna stepped into the living room then, but she knelt on the other side of the rug, not between us. She didn't touch the pictures until I nodded.
"Do you want to put some of these up where you can see them?" she asked me. "Not just the silver one alone. Together."
I carried the small stack back to my bedroom. Jenna followed with a little wooden ledge shelf Dad had bought at the hardware store that morning. It was plain pine, only as long as my bookcase, with a thin rail so things wouldn't slide off.
She held it up against the wall next to my bookcase, low enough for me to reach. "Here?" she asked. "Or higher? You decide."
I pointed to the spot right at my eye level when I stood. Dad handed her the small level and she checked it twice before marking the screw spots with a pencil. She let me hold the screws in my palm while Dad drilled, and she never put her own picture up there, didn't even suggest it.
When it was up, I took the repaired silver frame from the top of the bookcase and placed it in the center of the new shelf myself. Then I set three of the other photos around it, leaning them against the wall the way Jenna showed me, so they all faced out. Mom holding me as a baby on the left. Mom and me at the park on the right. Mom with bubbles in the middle beside the silver one.
I stepped back and looked. The silver frame was still special — it was the one Mom had given me and said would let her see me — but it wasn't alone anymore. It had company. My breathing slowed a little without me trying to make it.
Dad crouched behind me and rested his hands on his gray pants, not on me, just close. "She can see you from all of them," I whispered, more to myself than to him.
"I think so too," he said.
May you like
Jenna stayed by the doorway, her hands empty now. "It looks right," she said. "All of you together."
I didn't worry about the glass breaking again as much after that. There were other eyes watching, other moments where Mom had already seen me.
