Lost Girls

part 3

chapter 22

I think of the single photograph in my space in the city. How its details are more distinct here than if held directly to my eyes, the faces assuming a life they've been denied in their time spent behind the frame's glass. The smiles turning to laughter in the moment after the shutter closes, my mother's high and breathless, my father's a regular series of quarter notes, the same rattling string plucked on a stand-up bass. What caused them to laugh this way, to fall into each other's arms, dizzy from its release? It's the recognition of their own foolishness, the spectacle they're making --married adults made giddy by posing for a vacation snapshot--this is the fun part. Otherwise serious people whose company could still wipe all seriousness away, a shared joke passing wordlessly between them.

Slide my hand over the papered walls of the honeymoon suite and work my way back. My mother first, the chances always better with her. But the effort only yields the same jittery super-8 clips, over and over: sitting behind the wheel of a station wagon, turning to face me while she talked and me wishing she'd just keep her eyes on the road; raising a glass of white wine to her lips with one hand while lowering dirty plates into the dishwasher with the other after the dinner-party guests had finally left; lifting the lid of a mother-of-pearl jewelry box to pull out a pair of earrings while inspecting her wrinkles in the bureau mirror. What else? Her mouth. Thin, but generous with kisses.

At least with my father I've got the facts. All the handed-down accounts and loving testimonials from various peripheral Cranes, the caretakers for the remaining years of preadult purgatory that followed my parents' death. With them I was brought up on sighed repetitions of how great my father was and how kind, examples of the infinite extent of his patience, and always, in hushed wonder, a word about his renowned devotion to his wife. Always, too, a hand placed on my cheek. The same cheek, the very same face as my father, it was said. So much your father's son!

For all the years I spent at boarding school I refused to look at myself in mirrors. Wore my hair in a crew cut so I never needed to find where to part it. When I was old enough to shave I did so in the dark, feeling for the missed patches with my fingertips. Through these habits I came to forget my own face. I wanted enough time to pass so that when I looked again I would see neither father nor mother, and only myself. They were gone now, and what little they'd left me with was slipping away. And if I couldn't know enough to make them whole, I would know nothing at all.

When I looked again in the mirror I saw all the same things I thought I'd forgotten, except now less distinct, anonymous, a face made up of used parts.

The next time I looked I was a man.