The Honest Portrait of a Family

 “Mom! Mom! It changed; I swear.” I said pointing to the family portrait hanging above our mantle in the sunroom. From the couch in the den, I heard an exasperated sigh, “Honey, we have been over this, so many times. Boy who cried wolf ring a bell?” she said with her usual dismissive tone. I ran to the kitchen and tugged at her sleeve, “No but look, it’s true! Come on! Please!” Reluctantly she agreed, putting down her phone and pulling her nest of blankets off of her, all the while groaning in annoyance. I continued pulling her, to make sure she got the perfect angle of the portrait. “Ok, stand right here and just look.”

The portrait hung high on the wall, four feet tall and three feet wide. An ornate picture frame resembling circular brush strokes bordered the edges. It was our family, my father, my mother, and me, posed like you would imagine a family would pose in those old Victorian style portraits, but in color. I was younger at the time, around ten or eleven, dressed in a new white dress with a red sash around my waist and shiny white shoes. I remember feeling so pretty when we sat for the artist. I was sitting in a chair with no back as my mother and father stood behind me. My mother was dressed in an elegant black evening gown. Her bright blonde hair cascading down her back like a waterfall of gold. Meanwhile my father was dressed in a black suit three-piece suit and a grey tie with white stripes. He had his hand around my mother’s waist and the other in his pocket. She gave a half-hearted attempt and stared at the painting. She shrugged her shoulders, “What? It looks like us.” I pulled her a little closer, “No see, right there. Your hand. It isn’t on my shoulder anymore.” She looked at her hand and saw it was hanging by her side behind me. “Emma, I don’t think my hand was ever on you when we sat for the guy.” My face scrunched in anger, “NO! Don’t you remember? I even asked you to move your hand when he was painting because my shoulder was getting hot.” My mother leaned down to look me in the eyes, “First off, don’t you raise your voice at me. Second, you just answered your own question. I probably moved it and then the guy just left it like that.”

“Are we done?” she said beginning to walk back to the couch. I continued to observe the painting, lost in thought. “Was she right? Was the hand there before? No, I clearly remember seeing the hand on my shoulder in the painting before. It even showed my mom’s perfect nails. No, something is going on here.

I let the matter go for now, mainly because I got incredibly bored sitting in the sunroom and looking at the same picture for hours on end. The painting did not change and after a couple of days, my father finally came home from his business trip to London. He was a Claims Adjuster for one of the largest insurance companies in California, so his job required him to travel a lot. I didn’t mind it too much. He was usually only gone for a couple days, and he always managed to bring back some kind of trinket for me and something sweet for mom, usually a dessert. I told him about the portrait in the sunroom changing and he waved it off as a trick of the light from the sunroom windows. “Maybe I was seeing things.” I thought to myself as the painting continued to remain unchanged.

Another few days passed. I was just coming back from a sleepover at a friend’s house. When I passed the sunroom, I saw it. The portrait had moved again. This time it was my father’s hand. It was no longer in his pants pocket. Instead, it had moved closer to my mother, obscured by my own visage in the foreground. Immediately, I screamed for my parents. “MOM! DAD! IT MOVED AGAIN!”

“No, it didn’t honey! You are just seeing things again.” My mother said dismissively from their bedroom upstairs. Growing frustrated with this constant gaslighting, I marched up the stairs to their room. I could hear the faint whispers and giggles coming from the other side of the door, so I knew they were both in there. The door was locked, so I banged my fist heavy on the door. The loud knocks were met with the sound of scuffling through bedsheets and panicked whispers, as my father said, “J-just a minute sweetie, mom and I…” he trailed off as my mother picked up where he left, “…getting ready to go out to dinner.” I banged on the door again, “Dinner can wait! There is something wrong with the family painting.

My father unlocked the door and pulled it open. He was half dressed in his after-work clothes and half dressed in his work clothes. His pajama sweatpants hung off his side, untied at the waist. While he wore his white collared shirt unbuttoned, fully displaying his white undershirt. I couldn’t see mom from the doorway, and every time I tried to crane my neck to see the other corners of the room, dad would position himself in front of me. I pushed on, more concerned about the painting moving, “Dad! Come on downstairs, I swear it happened this time. Wait, weren’t you getting ready for dinner?” My father looked panicked, as he pushed me along away from the door, “Well yeah, but there isn’t a dress code for dinner, we can wear we want sometimes.” He said with a small smile. “Now, show me what you are talking about with the portrait.”

I dragged him down the stairs, excited to show him but more excited that he wanted to see it. I positioned him the same way I had done to mother earlier. He stared at the painting, taking a long time to go over every detail. After about 20 seconds of waiting for him to notice, I burst out, “Do you see it?” He continued looking it over, “No, I don’t. What changed? It looks normal to me.” I walked up to the mantle and pointed above me at his hand, “See? Your hand. It was in your pocket, now it is behind my head, reaching towards mom.” He gave a quizzical look, “I don’t know Em, I remember the artist begin really particular with where our hands were placed. I bet it was just a design choice to put my hand behind your head.” “Who was the artist? Do you remember?” He thought for a second, “I can’t remember his name, but I remember him being really cheap compared to the other artists. I gave him a sad look, “You aren’t listening to me. Your hand was in your pocket. It has been since we got it.” He put a reassuring hand on my shoulder, “Listen, I’m sorry Em. Maybe you saw a similar picture at your friend’s house while you were sleeping over, or maybe the light coming from these windows? They haven’t been washed in months.” Soon my mother came down the stairs to join us, “Well? Did it change?” I yelled out, “YES!”, while my father said “No.” My mother naturally sided with my father and the matter was squashed when she said, “Well, let’s get dinner, maybe it will change after that.”

Days went by with no change. My father went on a few more trips for work, and life continued normally for a while. There were days where I noticed something had changed in the portrait. My mother’s smile fading slightly, my pristine white shoes getting less shiny, there was even a moment where I thought I had moved further away from my parents as they moved further into the background. I stopped going to my mother when I saw the picture change slightly. She would always wave it off as my own overactive imagination, eventually I stopped going to her.

I started keeping a photo log of the portrait. One picture in the morning and one picture before I went to bed. But to my own amazement, whenever I noticed a change and went back to yesterday’s photos to compare, the change would be reflected in all previous iterations of the portrait. I tried memorizing every detail of the painting, even going so far as to get on a chair and use a magnifying glass to study the different aspects of the painting. This did nothing but worry my mother. I even started to think I was merely seeing things like everyone said. Another instance of a child’s overactive imagination.

Nobody believed me and any evidence I could get to prove I was right would become useless once it changed. My mom started getting worried about my obsession over this painting and made the decision to put it away for a little while. She took it down above the mantle, put a tarp over it, and stowed it away in the basement. I actually liked this, as the routine of worrying over this portrait was over. No longer waking up and first thing checking the portrait. No more up-close observing going over every finger, every facial feature, every position in painstaking detail. I would check in on the painting every now and again, but without seeing the picture daily, it was hard to compare if anything changed or not.

Until one night when my father came home late from one of his business trips. He had been going more frequently than before, blaming it on the expansion of the company and appeasing new clients. I was asleep in my bed when I heard the crash of glass shattering and my mother screaming. “YOU BASTARD! YOU ABSOLUTE PIG!” I stumbled out of bed and walked down the hall to their room. As I got closer I could barely make out what they were saying, “Abby, please calm down. It isn’t like that. You are going to wake up Emma.” While my father was speaking softly, my mother had no control over the volume of her words. “CALM DOWN? LIKE HELL I WILL! Get your stuff and leave! I can’t believe you would do this to me, to Emma!” My father started raising his own voice, “I TOLD YOU IT ISN’T LIKE THAT! It just sort of happened!” I stood on the other side of the door desperately listening to their argument.

I could hear the sound of bags being opened and clothes stuffed tight into them. “This is your stuff; you can come get the rest whenever. You are not welcome in this house anymore.” My mother said through tears.” In a soft voice, “Abby, please don’t do this.” She didn’t care, “You disgust me. Leave.” Suddenly, the door swung open, revealing my eavesdropping to the both of them. Their bedroom was a mess. The toiletries from my father’s bag were strung about haphazardly across the floor, shards of broken glass from my mother’s vanity mirror were scattered everywhere, and my father stood in the doorway, bag in hand.

The look of shock on both their faces instinctually made me tear up. My father leaned down and gave me a big hug. He leaned in close and said, “I am sorry Em, dad is going on another business trip. But I don’t know how long this time. I love you, so much.” With that he got up and walked down the stairs and out of the door. My mother walked over to me and said, “Go back to bed sweetheart. We can talk in the morning.” She walked with me back to my room and tucked me into bed. “Good night Emma, I love you.” She shut the door, but I could still hear her stifled cries. She cried all night and even partially into the morning.

I helped clean up my mother’s room the next day, and over the next few days, I saw father for a few minutes of the day while he loaded up some of his stuff. An old guitar, his computer, a couple of desks and chairs, until I didn’t see him anymore. My mother told me not to text or call him. I didn’t understand why. We never had the talk in the morning like she promised me that night.

As we were loading the stuff he didn’t take with him into a dark corner of the attic, on a whim I decided to check the painting. Old habits, I suppose. I pulled the tarp down and what I saw stunned me. I called mom up from the second-floor landing, “Mom, come look at this.” She crawled up the ladder to the attic and squeezed her way to where I was. “What is it?” She noticed I the tarp on the floor, “Not this old thing again, are we really going to revisit….” She stopped mid-sentence, mouth agape.

The portrait had contorted to an entirely new design. We were no longer posing together, instead we were apart on opposite ends of the painting. My father was on one side, with a woman I had never see before. The two were embracing in a passionate hug while holding each other’s hands. His clothes had changed from his usual suit and tie to that of a more relaxed khakis and polo shirt. The woman had bright blonde hair like my mom and I, but she was shorter than my mother with a pointy nose and decked out in diamonds. Meanwhile, my mother and I were on the other side holding hands. I was still dressed in my white dress with the red sash and my mother still had on her elegant black evening gown, but instead of holding my father, she was clutching her engorged stomach. She looked similar to when I saw old photos of her when she was pregnant with me.

We stood in front of the portrait for what seemed like minutes. The vindication of being right seemed so trivial at this moment. The days of frantically checking for the slightest changes felt so far gone. Our family was broken, and the portrait cemented that fact in both of our heads at the same exact moment. I looked to my mother, to gauge her reaction. “Is she mad? Sad? Happy?” I thought as I studied her face. She looked at my father with the other woman and whispered, “They look so happy.” A single tear rolled down her face.