The Final Photo

Mark pulled up to his new house with Lizzy in the back seat. His good girl. Ten years old and wise beyond her years. She had agreed to help him move while her younger twin brothers stayed behind at their mom’s house. His house. His old house.

He wondered if she really just wanted a break from the drama serving as a surrogate parent while her own parents got their stupid lives together. He didn’t blame her. He wanted a break from the drama, too.

She was such a good girl. Still content to read or draw. Talk to her stuffed animals when she thought no one was listening. A sweetheart. Who fooled them into thinking that this parenting thing was easy. A misconception corrected by two rambunctious boys, whose pair-ness amplified their hurricane-like strength.

None of it was easy, of course. His marriage, ending. His family, dissolving before his eyes. A year of separation in a crappy apartment.

He kept moving forward with single-minded determination, though. And this sweet little house gave him hope for a fresh start. The previous occupant had been the sole owner. A woman who lived there for 50 years and nearly to 100 years old. Her own children, now in their 70’s, were relieved at his offer to take the house, contents and all.

He needed almost everything and what was left in the house was a mixed bag of furniture he could actually use and junk that wasn’t even worth donating to Goodwill. A drawer filled with grocery receipts. A desk with a notebook leaving detailed instructions for the pet sitter on how to take care of her indoor cat and feral outdoor cat. Flotsam and jetsam of a life that increasingly shrunk.

Lizzy seemed ready to move on and play house in the new space. She got out of the car and checked the mail. A bunch of flyers and coupons tempting enough to save on the counter, but that he would likely toss with the majority of the other garbage. She wanted to explore the backyard, but the rain had turned it into a swamp, and the clouds threatened more.

Mark unloaded boxes and moved them into the family room while Lizzy twirled around, already in his way.

He was trying to not let his annoyance show. He was glad for the bonus time with her, but there was so much to do and she was slowing him down. It wasn’t time for an adventure or to indulge her overactive imagination. There was just so much to do.

“Do we have an attic?” she asked.

“We do, indeed,” he replied. “Want to check it out?”

He pulled down the stairs and walked up first to make sure that there were floorboards in place. He didn’t remember all of the boxes and junk stashed there that hadn’t been touched in years. More stuff to sort through. He climbed back down and said Lizzy could investigate with the caveat that she tread carefully, take a garbage bag, and fill it up.

She rolled her eyes. God, that look. Just enough like her mom to make his jaw clench.

Up the stairs she went, and he exhaled, realizing that he had been holding his breath. He could finally focus on unpacking while she occupied herself.

Lizzy looked around, eyes adjusting to the dark. The vast expanse of the attic lit by a single, lonely bulb. She obeyed her dad’s stern orders to stay on the plywood boards.

An avid reader, she knew that attics were inherently the place where magic items were lost and found. Would she come across a Ouiji board and conjure her long-deceased grandmother? Did the ghost of the former owner still haunt the dark corners? Would creepy baby dolls with missing limbs and eyes that never fully opened or closed become her new friends?

A few boxes. Dusty enough to make her sneeze.

She gently opened a box closest to her, the yellowed packing tape having long lost its stick. A mash-up of holiday décor, garland so old that there were more needles in the bottom of the box than on the sad strand. Ornaments and a fake poinsettia. A little snow-covered town that held some promise and her dad might let her keep. She tried to not be disappointed and made her way back down the stairs, now covered in dust with cobwebs in her hair.

“Anything good?” Mark asked, thinking that the attic hadn’t held her attention for long at all and considering the day ahead.

“Maybe,” she answered, shrugging.

“Ok, then, how about getting into the boys’ room?”

It had been the old lady’s war room of sorts – a mix-up of an office, crafting zone and catch-all. A cursory walkthrough had netted a garbage bag full of dried paints and pillows ripped from her cat, but there was more to go through and this would keep her busy for a while.

“If there’s anything you want to keep, just let me know,” he said. “Put the trash in here and set anything else in a pile and we’ll have a look.”

The room was daunting but held some possibilities. It was at least more interesting than the attic, and not nearly as creepy.

Starting with the desk, too large for the space, she picked up the tape dispenser and put it down. The roll of ancient cellophane tape had melted into itself. Lizzy thought she might have a use for it and set it aside. A brown pottery mug filled with pens. Doodling on the ink blotter, she found that most of them were dried out. She put them back in the mug and twirled back and forth in the office chair.

She opened the largest desk drawer, full of files, and closed it. Paperwork. Boring.

The next drawer was more interesting. Scissors. A solid ball of rubber bands. A disposable camera – jackpot!

Fujifilm Quicksnap. She wondered how it worked and if she could take it apart. She knew her dad had a big, old film camera that she wasn’t allowed to play with, and her mom said was a waste of space.

Was it like the Polaroid that she got for Christmas last year? She turned it around in her hands, looking for where the prints would come out, and couldn’t find the slot. She peered through the viewfinder and jumped back. A tuxedo cat was sitting on the desk looking at her, yellow eyes, head cocked, where before had just been the scribbled-on blotter.

Lizzy blinked and shook her head, a clammy dampness covering the back of her neck. She looked under the desk. No cat.

Was this what her mom meant when she told her that if things became “too much” to take a break? Was this all “too much” for her? She didn’t feel like she needed a break.

No. It was surely just the light. Dizzy-Lizzy like her brothers called her.

She looked back down at the camera. The number two in the tiny square box. She wondered if this meant there were only two pictures left, or if she had more to play with. Carefully, looking around to make sure no one was watching her, she brought the camera back up to her eye to peer through the viewfinder, finger on the trigger. She held her breath.

And there, as before, the black cat, now licking its white paw. She exhaled slowly, knowing she couldn’t – and wouldn’t – tell her dad or anyone else about this.

She sat for a while, watching through the viewfinder as the cat strolled off of the desk and leaped onto the floor, settling on a pillow that had been destined for the garbage pile, stretching in a ray of sunlight. CLICK. Her finger pressed the button. The wheel turned to number one.

“Lizzy!” her dad called as she jumped. “How’s it going in here?” her dad asked as he looked around, dismayed to see that virtually no progress had been made.

“Fine,” she mumbled, tucking the camera into the pocket of her sweatshirt. Looking around and seeing what her dad saw, too. “I promise that I’m going through everything!”

Mark sighed and knew it wasn’t fair to expect any real help from her. Cleaning out an old lady’s leftovers wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of a good time. At least it was a diversion, he thought.

Lizzy started to move through the room, looking around for traces of the cat. She pulled out the tattered pillow from the garbage bag that the cat had been sitting on.

“Moving in the wrong direction, Lizzy-girl,” he said, picking up the garbage bag and filling it relentlessly, and indiscriminately.  “No!” Lizzy yelped. “I want that pillow. I’ll fix it. I’ll clean it. I promise.”

Mark hesitated. Torn, between the need for a truly fresh start – fresh paint, fresh carpet – and his desire for Lizzy to feel like she had a place in his new house. Their new home.

“Lizzy, listen. You can keep the pillow. But this room has to be empty by the end of the day. I need to be out of my apartment by next weekend. Then we’ll get settled in here, got it?” Mark said.

“Totally understand,” said Lizzy, her hand resting on the camera in her pocket.

Lizzy sat in her room later that night and looked around her bedroom. Well, one of her bedrooms, she thought. Her mom’s house, previously just her house. Her bedroom in her mom’s house, she thought, ordering the words correctly. And now, she’ll have a bedroom in her dad’s house. Her other house. Maybe this is what “too much” meant?

She was still buzzing from the experience with the cat earlier in the day and wondered if she was coming down with something. The camera was still in her pocket.

Did she need a break? Maybe an ice cream break, she thought, and wandered down the hallway to her kitchen. One of her kitchens. She stood and looked at the kitchen table and wondered about the last time her family had eaten there together. Did her parents know it was the last time? Or did it just happen? There was certainly no ceremony, nothing to mark the occasion.

She looked around. Safe in the knowledge that everyone was asleep, or at least in their rooms, she removed the camera from her pocket.

She looked around again and slowly brought it up to her eye. And gasped.

She saw her family eating dinner. She was younger, as were her brothers, one fussing, one crying. Her parents seemed older, though. Without thinking, CLICK! The wheel turned and the number zero appeared in the square. The scene in the viewfinder disappeared.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no, no, no.” Tears pricked her eyes. Her skin tingled. What had she done? She wanted to go back, but it was gone. It was gone.

She told herself she was losing her marbles, but her disappointment shook her little body. She went back to her room and stuffed the camera in her own desk drawer, soon to become forgotten, along with the day, as is the way of 10-year old girls.

***

Another moving day, 20 years later. This time, her mother, finally downsizing, “right-sizing!” she chirped, and moving into a smaller, more manageable townhome. Lizzy and her brothers were well on their way to adulthood.

Her bedroom, preserved like a time capsule for so many years. Baby furniture that morphed into child and teen furniture. Thumbtack holes in the walls from posters. Carpet stained from at-home dye jobs and spilled nail polish. The walls would be painted. The carpet replaced. Soon, another family would take their place.

Garbage bag in hand, she sorted through her old art supplies and school textbooks, kept simply for the reason that they had cost so much money. Time for them to go. Into the bag they went.

She pulled out her desk drawer and was about to unsentimentally dump its contents into the garbage bag when she stopped. Oh God. That disposable camera. A true relic from this archeological dig from the one time in her otherwise stoic childhood when she indulged herself with a nervous breakdown. She picked it up. And put it down. And picked it up again to look through the viewfinder. No magic. Just a messy girl’s room.

Still, though. She tucked it into her purse.

Later that week, without giving herself time to come up with reasons not to do it, she tracked down a photo processing company, packaged up the camera, and sent it off. At 30, she felt like she needed some closure. Her parents had moved on, literally and figuratively. It was time for her to do the same.  

Two weeks later, long enough to nearly forget that she sent the camera off, the package arrived. She held it in her hands for a moment. Feeling, willing, magic to be in the envelope.

The first picture on the pile of glossy prints was a blur of gray-brown. No discernable shapes or figures. The butterflies in her stomach settling into embarrassed shame that she had been so foolish.

She started flipping through the stack. One after the next. The film must have been exposed at some point, ruined. The memory had been a figment of her imagination.

And then. A black and white cat on a pillow, stretching in a ray of light. She stopped. Tears welling up, for some unnamed reason. She bit her lip and shuffled to the final photo.

A family. Her family. Sitting at their old dinner table. Her family, intact. She breathed and looked closer. Her mother, looking frazzled, holding one of her little brothers, the other one crying, chubby toddler arms outstretched to her. Glaring across the table. Her father, looking helpless. Shoulders frozen and square. Grim mouth set. Weary. Staring ahead, not meeting the daggers coming out of her mother’s eyes.

She hadn’t known. She couldn’t have seen it then. She felt such love for that family. For those imperfect people who were so mismatched and who could never be what they needed for each other, but somehow managed to be what they needed for their children. How miserable they looked. Because they were. She knew now, and for some reason, just now, that they were better apart.

She had stopped asking herself a long time ago why they split, why it had to happen to her. For the first time, she saw in full color that it didn’t happen to her. They had tried. It just happened.

She took a sharp breath in. Pressed her lips together. And forgave them.