I
The negatives terrified me, and I couldn’t keep myself from looking at them. I watched my father manipulate the tools of his trade, reels and clips and tongs and rollers, working with sober grace, as if his fine-boned hands were mere extensions of his implements, his body one more mechanism in this mysterious craft. Sometimes he held me in the crook of his arm and I peered over the enamel trays, nose near to skimming the chemicals, the vinegar of stop bath so sharp it burned my eyes, and watched as he conjured faces from nothing, summoning them from their burial within the cloud-white paper. How had anyone ever come up with it? Mix this with that, soak this in the other, do all of it in the dark and call forth an image of a person as they were but are no longer. Pluck a vanished moment from the sea of the past and lock it in forever.
Ana, standing on the porch, barefoot in her nightie, the silhouette of her clenched body visible through the thin material, hair unbrushed and tangled like our dolls’ hair. She walked to the edge of the top step and unleashed a wail. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, down from the clouds and up from the earth and from inside me, like my bones had all along been tuned to the frequency of that wail and had now been set vibrating by it.
Smoke tendriled into the sky like vines climbing the air, and when it reached the clouds it joined them. She was truly gone now. The clouds held her, as they held all our gone mothers, and at night when we opened our windows and invited the clouds in, they would enter us: memories we could not touch, a feeling we could not name.
II
One day on our walk, as we made our way through the forest to the river, we heard a rustling in the undergrowth. Peter put his arm out in front of me protectively, and we watched a red fox slip out from the bushes and patter off. The next day when Peter met me outside of Rapid for our loop, he handed me a small white box. Inside was a carving of a fox, fine and delicate, a few curled shavings still clinging to it. ‘My hand slipped, just there,’ he said, pointing to a groove in the wood and shrugging good-naturedly. I kept the fox under my pillow. At night I took it out and stroked the smooth wood, rubbed it against my cheek, my neck, slipped my fingernail into the groove. Our bond deepened quickly. It felt less like we were building something, stone upon stone, than like we were uncovering it, a structure hidden in the forest, pulling away the moss and ferns to find what had been waiting there. In truth, I had never given Peter much consideration before. At school he had been well-liked though not at all prominent, diligent enough with his cello and his studies but with no notable talent in any particular direction. All I had really known about him was that he was the dentist’s son and he wanted, or perhaps simply expected, to become a dentist himself. Yet it was now these very qualities, Peter’s temperate and guileless nature, the translucence of his inner life, that drew me to him. It seemed a kind of miracle that a person should exist this way, as if it were no burden at all to be just who he was.
I had stayed too long in the mountains. The clouds were gathering, cold in my mouth and heavy in my braid. I’m not sure what compelled me to stretch my hand out in front of me. Maybe I knew already what I would see, or wouldn’t; maybe this was what had drawn me into the mountains to begin with: my fingertips gone, vanished into the clouds. I could see the silhouettes of trees in the distance, but I could not see the edges of myself, inches away.
III
She snuck away from her shift at Holleman’s in the afternoons to watch him play tennis on the grass courts at Queensgate. ‘I’m his good luck charm. He never drops a set when I’m there. Did you know in tennis when you’ve got nothing, it’s called love?’
You do not get to keep what is sweetest to you; you only get to remember it from the vantage point of having lost it.