French Braid(76)

It was a couple of days afterward that Nicholas emerged from the study with one of the old photo albums David had somehow fallen heir to. He had his finger on a crinkle-edged black-and-white snapshot that must have dated from the 1930s: a strikingly handsome man in a fedora. “Who’s this?” he asked David.

“No idea,” David said.

Nicholas turned next to a picture of a small woman wearing a dress with prominent shoulder pads. “And this?” he asked.

“Couldn’t tell you.”

Same for the photos on the facing page: two little girls crammed into an armchair with a puppy, and a baby whose vast bouffant christening gown seemed to be wearing him rather than the other way around. There were no captions. Once the subjects’ identities must have seemed so obvious; it hadn’t occurred to the album’s creator that the time would come when no one alive remembered them. David said, “I do at least know that this is your grandmom’s side of the family. I don’t think my dad’s people had the money for things like cameras.”

“Oh, here’s one I recognize,” Nicholas said, because he had flipped several pages ahead and was gazing now at a photo of David himself at age six or so, wearing a short white bathrobe. A framed copy of this picture used to hang in David’s parents’ bedroom. David didn’t comment, and Nicholas sank down on a kitchen chair and continued turning pages. “Huh,” he said once or twice, and then, “This must be Lily’s motorcycle mechanic.” David was fairly sure it wasn’t (B.J. had always made himself scarce when a camera was brought out), but he didn’t glance over to check. He was thinking about that white bathrobe.

So much of his past was lost now, whole years of it. (Nearly all of junior high, for instance.) But every now and then some fragment would jump out at him vividly, viscerally. He remembered that the white bathrobe was a beach robe, in fact—the kind worn over a swimsuit. And he knew the precise summer he’d worn it: he’d been seven, not six. It was the summer before second grade, when they’d all gone to Deep Creek Lake for a week. He recalled the coarse texture of the sand underneath his bare feet, and he saw his father standing on the dock next to his new friend Bentley, a tough-faced, muscular guy who made his father look puny. He heard the explosive churning of water as Bentley’s son Charlie swam past, showing off his Australian crawl. In David’s memory, the droplets spattered his face even there on the shore. And his father was saying, “Come on, son. What’s the holdup?” in a bossy voice he would never have used if the two of them had been alone. So David had untied his sash, and let his robe drop, and felt the air on his bare chest as he inched into the lake. The bottom felt like some kind of pudding; it oozed up between his toes with every step. He kept going, though, because he didn’t want his father to feel ashamed in front of Bentley. Deeper and deeper he waded, holding his arms straight out at his sides to keep them dry, clenching his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering. Step after step, until—

Then there was nothing beneath his feet, all at once, and water was filling his nose and he was sputtering and choking. And he couldn’t call for help because that would mean opening his mouth, so he hoped his father would just guess he needed help; but no, it was Bentley who guessed. “Looks like your boy could use a hand,” he told Robin, and Robin glanced down at David from the dock, and he was wearing the oddest…he was wearing the most peculiar expression.

Nicholas said, “Could this next one be a picture of Uncle Kevin? He looks so young!”

“I couldn’t tell you,” David said, and he turned and walked out of the room.



* * *



—

By August, things in New York were getting better. Juana was returning to her own department, and the nanny was coming back to work, and Nicholas and Benny were going home. David was glad for their sakes, of course, but also he felt sad, and he could tell that Greta did too.

On Nicholas and Benny’s last afternoon, Nicholas made an extra-big grocery-store run for his parents while David and Greta took Benny and the dog for a final walk. They started up Kane Street as usual, but when they reached Noble Road, where David was accustomed to turning right, Benny and John continued straight ahead. Evidently they followed a whole different route when they walked in the afternoons. Benny slowed in front of a house David had never noticed before, and an older woman cutting hydrangeas called, “Hello there, Benny!”

“Hi,” Benny said. “Me and my dad are going home to see my mom tomorrow.”

“You are! Well, isn’t that nice!” She turned to David and Greta. “I know you’ll miss them.”

“We certainly will,” Greta said, but by then Benny was on his way again, flinging a “Bye!” over his shoulder, so David and Greta gave the woman an apologetic wave and turned to follow him.

Approaching the next corner, Benny stopped short, and John stopped too and settled on his haunches. When David and Greta caught up, they found Benny fixated on a bumblebee that was hovering in front of his face. “Just keep walking,” David advised him. “He’s not going to sting you.”

“I think he is,” Benny said.

“No, he’s only warning you off. See those other bees, on the rosebush? He’s protecting them.”

Benny didn’t seem persuaded.

“Want to hear something interesting?” David asked him. “You notice how he’s hanging there right in front of your eyes, right? Well, think about it. That means he knows your eyes are the part of you that will see him. He’s figured out where humans’ true selves are, you might say.”