Hold Still

  “Jayson.”

  I squeeze his shoulder.

  “Jayson,” I plead.

  And he snaps out of it, lifts his head, climbs out of the car.

  His face is wet. He says, “You have no idea how this makes me feel.”

  And I open my mouth to tell him that I’m so sorry, but he opens his first.

  “Thank you.”

  21

  The next place I drive to I know so well, almost as well as my own house. I pull onto the shady, tree-lined street, stop the car, and just sit.

  It was hard to ring Davey’s doorbell this morning, but this feels worse than hard—it feels impossible. I wipe my hands on my skirt and glance over at the driveway. Her mom’s car is there. Her dad’s is, too. I feel like I’m standing at a high altitude, where the air is thin and icy and painful to breathe.

  I take my bag from the passenger’s seat.

  As I approach the walkway that spans their front lawn to their door, I realize that I should have given them some warning. I should have at least called an hour earlier or something to see if now was an okay time. But if I leave, I have no idea how long it will take me to get the courage to come back. I hesitate on their front stoop, force Ingrid’s drawing of the girl into my head, think, Brave.

  I knock—three quick taps followed by two slower ones—the way I used to when I’d come over all the time, and I didn’t wait for anyone to open the door, just announced my presence and let myself in. Ingrid’s dog starts barking at the door, and I hear Susan calming him. I brace myself for her to look completely different, promise myself I won’t let her see my shock when I see that she’s become a different person, a skeleton, a shell.

  The door eases open.

  Her hair is grayer, longer. She looks a little heavier, but mostly she looks the same.

  I open my mouth, but can’t think of what to say. Last time I was here, I’m sure I breezed past her, hardly noticed her, went straight to hang out with Ingrid in her room.

  “Oh my.” She covers her mouth with her hand, but I can see from her eyes that she’s smiling.

  “Hi, Susan.”

  She touches my shoulder.

  “Come in,” she says, collecting herself. “What a surprise. What a nice surprise.”

  I follow her to the living room, but freeze when I step inside.

  In the center of the main wall, above the fireplace, hangs Ingrid’s winning portrait.

  Susan glances toward the photo, glances toward me. She smiles, gently. “Is it strange to see yourself above my mantel?”

  “A little,” I manage.

  “Veena gave it to us.”

  I nod.

  “She brought it to us the evening after she showed you.”

  It feels strange to hear her mention Ms. Delani, to know that Susan knows little things about me, like what day it was that I saw that photograph. All this time, I’ve been trying so hard to not think about Ingrid’s parents, so hard that for a while it was like they didn’t exist.

  “You look beautiful,” Susan says.

  In the photo, I’m in a plain tank top and grungy jeans. My hair’s messy and I look tired—whatever night Ingrid took it, I wasn’t exactly looking my best.

  “I mean now,” Susan says. Then, “You look older.”

  And I know she doesn’t mean it this way, but I can’t help but think, Older than Ingrid will ever look. I feel my eyes welling up. I thought I’d given myself enough time to prepare for this. Almost a year should have been enough time.

  “Mitch is taking a nap,” Susan says. “He had a tough week at work. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll go get him. He’ll be so happy to see you.”

  I sit on their leather couch, slip my shoes off, and curl my legs under me. I have the entries I’m giving them all picked out, but as I look through them I feel like they aren’t enough. I wish I framed them or bound them in a little book.

  Footsteps come from down the hall, and then Ingrid’s dad is in front of me, his arms around me, lifting me up. I don’t know how to react—Mitch was never like this before. He was always nice, but was never the hugging type. He doesn’t say anything, just holds me tightly, desperately, and from over his shoulder, I can see Susan’s mascara pool around her eyes and streak her face, and this is worse than I thought it would be, and I hate myself so much right now because I know it’s awful, but I want nothing more than for him to let me go. His arms get tighter and I bite the inside of my mouth to keep myself from shouting, I’m not her, I’m not your daughter, stop pretending I’m your daughter. But he holds on. It hurts to breathe. I’m here, I’m in this house, and I’m seeing it the way Susan and Mitch saw it: waking in the morning to the sound of water running from the bathroom down the hall, thinking it must be Ingrid taking her shower a little early, fading back to sleep, waking up again to the sound of the alarm, Mitch asking, Suzy, do you hear that? Susan answering, Yes. Down the hall, the pat of two sets of slippers. Mitch, wait here, I’ll see if she’s showering. A tap on the bathroom door. Ingrid? Another tap, louder. Ingrid! The groan of hinges, the water, the smell—like urine, like heartbreak, like metal. Oh my God. Red everywhere. Suzy, what? Suzy, I’m coming in. Their daughter, naked—breasts and pubic hair, hips, and wounds, and blood, and skin, and half-closed, still eyes. And my legs are trembling, and Mitch’s arms are like a straitjacket, and Susan cries in the doorway, and I swallow the blood in my mouth, force my voice to come out steady when I whisper, “Hey, Mitch,” to remind him that it’s only me.

  22

  I’m back on the couch, sitting kind of awkwardly with my legs tucked under me because I’m not used to wearing skirts anymore, especially short ones.

  Mitch sits on the opposite couch, looking a little shell-shocked. Every now and then he glances at me and shoots a nervous smile in my direction. Susan comes back from the kitchen, carrying a pitcher of lemonade and three glasses.

  She pours my glass and sets it on the coffee table. “I made this from lemons your mom and dad grew,” she says. “Your mom gave me a whole bagful last week.”

  “I didn’t know you saw my mom last week,” I say, surprised.

  As Susan pours glasses for herself and Mitch, she tells me that she has lunch with my mom almost every week, and again it feels strange that so much could be going on without me even knowing.

  When my lemonade is half gone, and our conversation subsides for a moment, I pull out the pages I chose for them.

  I don’t know how to start explaining, so I just tell them everything—how I discovered Ingrid’s journal under my bed, and only read a little at a time, and found a suicide note at the end. Susan and Mitch watch me intently as I explain all of this. At one point, Susan reaches over, and squeezes Mitch’s hand.

  “These are some pages,” I say, placing the copies on the coffee table, “that I want you to have.”

  After the way they look at each other with tenderness, and at me with gratitude, and pick the copies up, I know that they don’t expect anything more. They start with Me on a Sunday Morning, turn to Dear Mom, I take it back. Susan’s chin trembles, Mitch takes her hand. Next, they read, Dear Dad, I’m sorry. And then they read the suicide note. I just sit quietly and let them go through them all. And even though the entries are obviously really meaningful to them, I still feel like they aren’t enough. I mean, these are her parents, which means that they lost the most, more than I did, and I feel like they should have everything. I reach into my bag, ready to give it all up.

  The bird on the cover is almost all chipped away now. And it feels surprisingly natural, even easy, when I place Ingrid’s journal on the coffee table.

  “You should have this, too,” I say.

  And then.

  All at once I remember everything written inside—the way she wanted Jayson to hurt her, her anger at her mom, the creek, the guys. She didn’t want them to know. I feel the blood draining from my face, get instantly nauseous. I’m not sure this is something I can take back.

  Mitch studies
my expression. He clears his throat. “We have so many of her diaries,” he says. “You should see them. She kept them ever since she was a little girl. We even have a couple boxes in the garage full of them.”

  Susan touches the cover, but doesn’t open it. “We’ve been reading some from her childhood, before she became ill. It’s been a comfort to remember her that way—young and excited about her life.” She shakes her head, picks up the journal, hands it back to me.

  “If Ingrid wanted this to stay with you, then you should have it,” she tells me, and she places it back in my hands. I slip it into its familiar compartment. Part of me is relieved, but later, as I walk out, my backpack feels heavier than it has ever felt before.

  23

  It is late and dark. Dylan is studying for finals, but I show up at her house and convince her to come out with me. I leave my parked car in front of her white picket fence and we walk to the theater. It is one of the first warm nights of the year. A million stars are out.

  I’m relieved to find that the window hasn’t been boarded up. I push the drape aside and we climb in.

  “I can’t see anything,” Dylan says.

  I unzip my backpack, pull out a flashlight.

  When I click it on, Dylan says, “So this was part of the grand scheme of your day?”

  I nod. Even with the flashlight, we have to feel our way down the aisle to the rows of seats. We choose two right in the center, and I tell Dylan everything about my day, from the moment I woke up until now.

  “What about me?” she asks when I’m finished, and holds out her hands. I pull two folders out of my backpack, place one of them in her palms.

  She doesn’t open it. “Do you mind if I save it for later?”

  I shake my head. “I gave you a lot,” I say. “You can read them whenever you want to.”

  She slips the folder in her messenger bag. I open the second folder and pass it to Dylan. I shine the light for her as she flips through the photographs I borrowed from Ms. Delani.

  “What I want,” I say, “is to see these up there.” I move the light away from the photographs and toward the white screen. “Do you think there’s any way?”

  Dylan squints.

  “I mean, it might not be possible, but you’re good at figuring this stuff out, right?”

  I can almost see the procession of ideas filing, neatly and logically, behind her eyes. “Can you make them into slides?” she finally asks.

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll need a small battery-operated generator, but that’s easy. . .”

  She thinks a little longer. Then she says, “Sure. No problem.”

  She takes the flashlight from me, strides down the row of seats, and heads up the aisle. I hear her creak up the stairs to the projection room. Above me, through the projection window, the small beam of light appears—there she is, moving things around, untangling cords, making something out of nothing.

  summers, again

  1

  Like she did on the first day, Ms. Delani calls us according to where we sit, which means that I’ll be last, but that’s okay. She’s taken down all the photographs from around the room, making space for our new ones. I choose a book to look in while I wait. Inside, all the pictures are of the photographer’s mother.

  By the time it’s my turn, there are only a few minutes left of class. Ms. Delani comes out and thanks everyone for a good year, and tells them they can go, and says, “Caitlin, your turn.”

  I clutch my folder to my chest and follow her to the office.

  She closes her grade book. We both know that next to my name are three Ds and a long line of zeros. But I have twelve new photographs in my hands.

  She peers at me, apprehensively, through her glasses.

  “Tell me you have something good to show me,” she says.

  I shift all my weight to one foot and stand there like an ostrich. “I have a series.”

  She exhales. “You have no idea how glad I am to hear that. Why don’t you arrange them on the table. Call me out when you’re finished.”

  So I go back into the classroom and lay them all on the big table under the window, where the light is perfect, and makes all the details show. Then I tell Ms. Delani I’m ready.

  I don’t look at her face as she evaluates my photographs. Instead, I look at my images with her.

  I got slides made of Ingrid’s photographs and used my savings to buy a small generator. Dylan rigged everything so that a single image covered the entire movie screen. It was incredible, how sharp and bright and vast they looked. Dylan sat above in the projection room while I worked downstairs with my tripod and camera. I had to expose each picture for a long time because, apart from the screen, the room was dark.

  “These are . . .” Ms. Delani says, and doesn’t finish.

  “At first I didn’t know if it would work,” I say. “You know, photographing a photograph.”

  “But you’ve done so much more than that,” Ms. Delani says.

  “Just by the act of enlarging the images, you’ve given her photographs heightened significance. They demand to be seen.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “And the theater is important, too. It was her favorite place to go, but she never got to see the inside of it. I thought this would be a way of letting her in.”

  She nods. “Yes,” she says. “When standing back and looking at them as a group, I see the lighted images first.” She looks from photograph to photograph, saying, “The record player. The bedroom. The rain-spattered window. Bare feet. But then the details of the theater emerge and I see that there is much more going on here. The rows of empty seats are telling; they imply that though the images are enormous and commanding, they are going unseen. There is a secret here. Something private being exchanged between photographer and image.”

  “And there are the curtains, too,” I say. “See this one?” I point to Ingrid’s self-portrait with her camera. I pulled the heavy velvet curtains in a little on both sides so they cut the image off, narrowed the screen. “I was trying to make it seem like she was being hidden.”

  “Yes.” Ms. Delani nods. “The light is still cast on the drapery, but the folds in the fabric obscure the image. As if the film is ending before it’s finished.”

  “Like it might be able to tell me more if it weren’t being forced away.”

  We study my photographs in silence for a little longer.

  “Have you titled it?”

  “Yes,” I say. “It’s called Ghosts.”

  “Caitlin,” she says. “This is stunning work.”

  I feel so good it aches—not just because she’s said it, but because I know it’s true.

  “Hold on.” She disappears into her back office, and I remember the entry I brought for her in my backpack, the one where Ingrid talks about how much Ms. Delani inspired her. I had been planning on giving it to her today, but now I don’t really want to. Maybe it’s selfish, but I want this afternoon to be about me. So I grab the entry out of my bag and turn it facedown.

  When Ms. Delani comes back into the room with a jar of push-pins in her hand, I say, “This is for you, but for later, so I’m just gonna drop it on your desk.”

  She nods, then she gathers my photographs and drags a chair to the front of the classroom. She hangs them there, one next to another, until they line the center wall.

  The first pictures for the new year.

  2

  I’m perched on the edge of Henry’s diving board, arms straight in the air.

  “Dive!” Dylan shouts.

  “Or stay,” Taylor calls after her. “You look good up there. Look at your arms!”

  “She is a carpenter,” Dylan says.

  “A what?”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  I jump. The pool is so warm I barely feel the transition from air to water, but in a moment I’m immersed. I open my eyes to clear blue. Several pairs of board shorts and boys’ legs, bikini bottoms, and red toenails. Turquoise tiled walls. I surface. Hear
Henry ask, “So, your girlfriend. Is she hot?” Dylan answer, “She’s gorgeous.”

  Finals have ended. This is the last-day-of-school party I always wanted to attend but never had the courage to. “Remember,” Dylan said when we got to Henry’s door an hour ago. “Drink beer, talk about who’s hot, and spend some alone time with Taylor in the parents’ bedroom.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Or, you know, you could just swim.”

  I swim. Slowly, deep enough to run my hands along the smooth white floor. Someone grazes my back. Taylor. We kiss underwater. When we surface, drops cling to the tips of his eyelashes.

  “Hold still,” I say. He closes his eyes and I lick them off. I taste chlorine, summer.

  “You’re a carpenter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dylan just told me. And a photographer?”

  “Yes.”

  I think, And a daughter, and a friend. I shut my eyes and try to picture myself as all of these things. I can almost see it. I open my eyes to him, beaming.

  “You’re beautiful,” he says.

  “You’re beautiful.”

  We swim together to the other side. I wish I had an underwater camera so I could capture the way his hair fans around his ears. The movement of his ankles as he kicks through the pool.

  Hours pass. Taylor and Jayson are outside on the lawn chairs, having a silly conversation about superpowers. “You already run crazy fast,” I hear Taylor say. “You should, like, shoot from here to the city in a millisecond.”

  “Zeptoseconds are faster,” Dylan informs me. We’re across the backyard, sprawled out on the grass.