This Is How It Always Is(52)

Rosie and Penn had to box up their old lives too. After all the unpacking, it seemed wrong for Penn to be bubble wrapping and hole spackling and slicing the flesh on the underside of his thumbnail in an effort to pry picture hangers out of walls, but that’s just what he was doing. Rosie put pictures up first thing. She said it made it feel like home. She said who cares whether all the plates and books and winter clothes and old phone chargers stayed in boxes for a while; once the beds were made and the pictures hung, the place was yours. For three weeks after the move, Penn’s family montaged the walls, smiling down at him through time. Baby Roo dwarfed newborn Ben the day he came home from the hospital. Carmelo held one turkey-hatted twin on each knee on their third Thanksgiving. Rosie squeezed an arm around each of her parents at med school graduation. She smiled into Penn’s eyes from beneath a white veil, her top teeth sunk alluring into a lip that hadn’t been painted since, while he gazed back at her with awe and wonder, a photo that surely graced the walls of many homes yet still seemed not just miraculous but unique to him, like no one else had ever felt a love quite like that, like this. There were Halloween photos through the years in one of those patchwork frames—pirates and baseball players and magicians, four pumpkins and one Prince Grumwald. There were terrible class pictures he’d fought (and lost) against framing, one for each child for each school year, mugging boys grinning gappy and gappier smiles, hair spiked in more directions than a puffer fish. And, of course, pictures of Claude: infant Claude surrounded by brothers on his one-week birthday, baby Claude being lightly chewed by a yak at a petting zoo (not his person, just his jacket, the look of alarm on his tiny face too precious not to capture before resuming parental duties and removing bovid from child), mortar-boarded Claude at preschool graduation, two-year-old Claude one of eight Santas (Jupiter included) on one winter’s holiday card.

The pictures collaged one soaring wall of the new house, family story, family history, hodgepodged love and time. Penn gazed up at them, helpless. Until everyone here knew Poppy’s provenance, the pictures had to go back in boxes because otherwise who was that fifth little boy with the serious eyes and the small smile? Because what kind of parents lovingly archived the childhoods of the first four kids and ignored the last? Because even though she’d know why, Penn could not bear for Poppy—or Claude—to be lost, banned from their merry band, not just homeless but pastless as well. Poppy’s childhood did matter, and so did Claude’s, but Penn bubble wrapped them all back up anyway until he could find a way to tell this story.

Rosie came home from work and took in the blank wall all alone. The farmhouse had lacked discrete spaces, especially on the main floor where the kitchen/living room/dining room sprawled into one. In this house, it was possible to come home and start unpacking family photos in the living room while Penn made dinner in the kitchen while the kids holed up in their own rooms and feel actually lonely.

Penn came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

“You took down all the pictures.” Not accusation. Observation.

“Had to.” He smiled sadly then added, “You can’t put them back up.”

She nodded. “I miss them.”

“The pictures?”

“I miss … him,” Rosie amended.

“Who?

“Claude.”

“She’s in her room playing with Aggie.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I know. But it should be. Claude’s not gone.”

“He’s changed.”

“They’ve all changed,” said Penn. “They all change. Claude wouldn’t be the same kid he was in his baby pictures anyway. How is this different?”

“We can’t put our family photos on the wall.”

“Not yet,” said Penn.

“When?” said Rosie.

Penn shrugged—he didn’t know—and went back to the kitchen. Roo came upstairs, burrowed into the corner of the sofa, and just watched her. More and more he did this—came and watched and said nothing. She was grateful he still wanted to be near them, but she wished he would say something. And then sometimes he did and she wished that he wouldn’t.

“Look what a cute baby you were.” She held out to him the gilded proof of his thirteen months of only childhood.

“All babies are cute.”

“You were cuter than most,” Rosie assured him. “I’m a connoisseur.”

He looked for a long time at the frame in his hand. He did not raise his head when he said, “I thought the whole point of moving was it’s supposed to be so gay here.”

“Gay?”

“You know. Tolerant. Open-minded. Rainbow flaggy. Whatever.”

“Well. That was part of it, yes.”

“You wrecked our whole lives for this place.”

Rosie concentrated on her pictures, waited for whatever was coming next.

“So why are we keeping Claude this big secret?”

“We’re not keeping it a secret.”

“You’re hiding the family photos.”

“We haven’t told anybody yet,” Rosie said. “We will. We just haven’t so far.”

“If we didn’t need someplace gay, we could have just stayed where we were—”