Red Leaves

PART IV

A figure appears beyond the diner's rain-streaked window, and for a moment you think it is the one you're waiting for. You recall it in photographs, but so much time has passed that you can no longer be sure that you would recognize the eyes, the mouth, the hair. Features sharpen then blur as they mature, and time has a downward pull, creating folds where none existed when the photographs were taken. And so you scan the onrushing faces, preparing your own, hoping that time has not ravaged your features so mercilessly that you will go unrecognized as well.

You notice a little girl, her hand tucked inside her mother's, and it strikes you that everyone was young back then. You were young. So were Meredith and Warren. Keith was young and Amy was young. Vincent and Karen Giordano were young. Peak was no more than fifty; Kraus no more than forty-five. Even Leo Brock seems young to you now, or at least not as old as he seemed then.

The figure who first called your attention vanishes, but you continue to stare out the window. An autumn wind is lashing the trees across the way, showering the wet ground with falling leaves. You think of the Japanese maple at the end of the walkway and recall the last time you saw it. It was fall then, too. You remember your last glance at the house, how your gaze settled on the grill. How desolate it looked beside the empty house, its elaborate and sturdy brickwork awash in sodden leaves. You wonder if you should have taken a picture of the cold grill, the unlit house, something to replace the stacks of family photographs you burned in the fireplace on your last day there. In a movie, a character like you would have fed them one by one into the flames, but you tossed whole stacks of them in at once. You even tried not to look at the faces in the photographs as the fire engulfed them, turning every life to ash.