A Family Out of Focus

*Trigger warning: Familial loss, mental health.

Marla wakes up today much as she does every morning: sobbing and pawing at the damp sheets, screaming for someone, anyone, to save her children. Talk to them a few minutes longer after soccer practice. Invite them to ice cream a mile in the other direction. Pull them from the car before Mac can pop in that old Steely Dan CD and pull onto the highway. Stop the driver, out of his mind on coke, from plowing into the car in the first place. 

But of course no one is here to answer her cries, not in this empty brownstone. Not anymore. And not then, either. It’s been three grueling years since they died and every morning still finds her exactly where she is right now: lying in bed, still shaking from a dream that her subconscious somehow always manages to recreate despite her not having been there to see a single moment of it. 

Marla covers her damp eyes with her forearm and swallows back the sob still punching against the insides of her throat. The voice of her shrink, Dr. Prentiss, replays in her mind. Telling Marla she needs to start moving forward, resist the pull of the daily ritual where she imagines how they would look now if they were still here. But Marla has no intention of leaving them in the past like that and, in fact, kind of wishes now that she had never shared that personal little nugget with her doctor.

Marla rubs the base of her palms against each of her closed eyelids, as if she will somehow get a clearer picture of her children without the dewy filter that her body has sent out as a kindness to diffuse the dream. Marla takes a deep breath and presses her lips together. She pulls the crisp white sheet over her head in an attempt to block out the sun’s first rays, already racing across the bedroom. 

Cocooned under the covers, the images always come easily, so easily that she often wonders if they are perhaps messages from the children themselves. But that would mean that they still exist somewhere, in an afterlife or between worlds, and Marla doesn’t believe her children are anywhere but in the ground, covered in dirt, lying next to their father. 

A wave of fury rolls through Marla and she clamps her teeth down hard, holds back the scream that would surely get the Abbotts’ dog barking something fierce, forces her body to contain it. Without warning, her body bucks slightly and her back arches in a kind of orgasm that seems to originate in her throat, one that sends her nerve endings sparking and twitching. She shivers, appreciating the intensity that her hatred of Mac still elicits, while at the same time hating herself for experiencing something even close to pleasure at the thought of her dead husband. At least the man had the decency to die alongside her children and spare her the torture of a future spent looking at his face, never being allowed to say what she was really thinking. 

How could you let our children die?

Marla balls her hands into fists, pressing her long fingernails into her palms in an attempt to short-circuit this mental detour she has taken. She shakes her head in an attempt to clear her thoughts but the raspy crunch of her short hair against the crisp sheets reminds her of Mac’s beard against her neck. She groans. 

Come on, girl. Save the whole I-hate-my-dead-husband-so-much-that-my-vagina-won’t-wake-up-for-anything-else story for Dr. Prentiss. 

Marla peeks out from under the covers, steals a look at the clock. Her subjects will be arriving for their session in a little over an hour and she knows it won’t go well unless she adheres to her rituals. For Marla, taking photos of children requires her absolute attention. She closes her eyes again, breathes slowly. They come quickly. 

Camden arrives first, grinning in that way of his, like he just ate the handful of cookies Marla told him not to touch before dinner. He would be almost seven now and Marla imagines the baby fat that filled out his cheeks so perfectly in his first few years would have melted away now, and his legs would be long and narrow and so fast. Gilly, despite being his older sister, was always so serious and small for her age, built more like Mac in both body and temperament. In just a few days she would be ten years old. Of course she would still be an amazing soccer player, swift and focused, eyebrows pinched together above her flushed sweaty cheeks, running down the field as though the future of the world rested on her every moment. Perhaps by now she would have decided to take up the clarinet or the flute, or maybe she would have a knack for languages. 

Marla smiles at her children, stays with them until their faces begin to pulse unevenly and then fade. She has learned that no matter how vivid an image she creates in her mind, once it starts to slide away it won’t be back again until the next day. What’s that saying? Change what you can, accept what you can’t. 

So that’s what Marla does as she climbs out of bed and pads along her bedroom’s soft beige carpeting toward the bathroom.

It’s almost nine a.m. when Marla places her NYU coffee cup in the sink, out of view, and the doorbell rings, filling her with the familiar murky blend of excitement and resentment at the possibilities fidgeting on the other side of the door. Even now, the irony of her success is not wasted on her. Before the loss of her family, her photography was good. Pretty good. It was fine, nothing special. Mostly landscape stuff and just to play around. And she rarely, if ever, photographed children. Mostly because as bad as kids are at being the subject of their parents’ photos, they are terrible at sitting for a stranger. Just hellions. 

But in those early dark days, days when at any given moment Marla couldn’t be sure if she had eaten or showered, something started to rumble deep beneath the surface of her psyche. It wasn’t really an idea that was taking root back then, more like the tiniest seed of a possibility. Initially it made no sense and Marla would just kick it to the back of her mind where she put all the other things she no longer had the energy or the interest for.

Until one cloudy day she took her camera to the park.

Walking along the footpath, stopping to snap photos of the canopy of pine trees arching against a dark calico sky so threatening that she kept checking her lens for water droplets, Marla almost tripped over a young boy. He was running down the middle of the path, crying and looking around frantically.

He looked so much like Camden, her heart fumbled for rhythm for a moment.

Marla grabbed his shoulder, surprising them both. 

“Where’s your mother?” she asked. Her voice sounded different, deeper somehow.

Eyes full, he shook his head, blond curls dancing. His lip quivered slightly.

“Come on.” Marla took him by the hand and walked with him, talking about simple things, asking silly questions. It wouldn’t occur to her until months later that she was giving that little boy all the boring life updates that Camden had missed since he died. 

Fortunately, that day in the park, the frightened boy was too young to understand the pivotal role he was playing in someone else’s grief. And his mother, so grateful to be reunited with her child, was very happy to indulge the kind stranger in a little photo session right there on the nearby park bench.

Looking at the photos afterward, Marla couldn’t deny they were special. Magical even. There was something she captured that was both hauntingly sad and also full of possibility, and Marla was so hungry for the latter that she threw herself into her new work, carving out a career photographing children that she never would have dreamed for herself–definitely wouldn’t have sought out. 

But the work found her, and soon she was being called The Annie Liebowitz For Kids by The New York Times and charging astronomical sitting fees to the lucky families she accepted into her schedule. 

And she only accepted subjects she had screened carefully, though in those early days she hadn’t quite figured out the breadth of the opportunity she was capturing with her camera. For the first two years of her work, Marla tended to select children who were not only similar in look to Camden and Gilly, she also favored the ones who were around the same age her children were when they died. Of course, the life-size dolls–whoever decided to call them dolls, by the way?–she ordered back then were limited too. Marla was basically forced to engage with her children in a bit of a time capsule, which was fine. After some time in her darkroom and the application of a perfectly sized photo of one of the children’s faces onto the dolls, she was able to almost believe she was sitting on the couch, watching tv with her own kids. And the joy that brought was profound. Or was it just a break from the dragging hands of grief? Whatever it was, it saved her. And now things are even better because time has passed, which they say heals all wounds. Also, now she can just special order larger sizes.

Of course, Marla doesn’t turn away much younger children who fit the look well–call it nostalgia–but the seven and ten year olds are her preference.

The doorbell chimes again and Marla jumps slightly, surprised as always by the insistence of the present. She goes to open the door, the nerve endings beneath her skin absolutely buzzing in anticipation of photographing a brother and sister who look so much like her imaginings of how her own kids would look now, right down to the boy’s blond hair and the older girl’s darker hair. If the shoot goes well and her time in the darkroom is successful, the extreme positioning possibilities of the new dolls means Marla’s vision of a family dinner may be happening very soon. The thought almost makes her cry but she shakes away the growing tears as she flings the door open. But it isn't the children Marla’s eyes fall on. 

The man standing on her porch, a protective arm around the shoulders of each of his children and a relaxed smile on his face, looks exactly like Mac, her dead husband. 

A small squeak escapes from Marla’s throat and her chest tightens like an unseen fist squeezing the juice from a tomato. 

“Hello, you must be Marla. I’m Tom. It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” he says.

Marla says nothing. She tilts her head, her eyes running over the familiar features of his face. This man has dark gray eyes instead of blue and they are slanted downward more at the outer corners. He is also an inch or two taller than Mac, with slightly darker brown hair. But still, the resemblance is incredible. Marla feels the anger starting to build in her throat and the ripples of fury and pleasure begin to fill her chest, threatening to run through her right here and now if she doesn’t do something.

She clears her throat and smiles brightly. “Hi, I’m Marla. Welcome to my home. Come inside. I’ve got a beautiful space in the back of the house where I will photograph the kids.”

The family steps inside, gawking at the polished marble floors and ornate staircase off to the right beneath the crystal chandelier sending rainbows of morning light all over the entryway.

“What a beautiful home you have,” Tom says. “It’s thrilling to be here. I’m just so excited that you agreed to photograph my children.”

Marla smiles over her shoulder as she leads them to the large room where she likes to photograph her subjects. “You know, I never do this, but today I feel inspired. Tom, how would you like to be photographed as well? I’m working on a little project and I think you’d be just perfect for it.”