When the Lights Go Out(54)

My eyes are so caught up in what’s happening on the floor that at first I don’t see the small compartment dug into the wall. A little recess carved there into the drywall, hidden behind where the mirror should go. A hole that’s been fitted with a sturdy box.

And I think for a moment that my eyes deceive me. That I’m only imagining the compartment is there. Because why in the world would there be a secret storage compartment on Mom’s closet wall? I rub at my eyes, certain it will disappear as I do. But sure enough, it’s still here.

For at least twenty seconds I stare at that box without moving.

Mom had a stash of personal stuff she kept hidden from me.

I think of all the times Mom and I looked together in the mirror when I was a girl. All I ever saw was a mirror—our own silly expressions looking back at us through the glass—but for Mom it was a portal to her private world, a gateway to the things she didn’t want me to see.

It feels an enormous invasion of privacy for me to snoop but I can’t help myself. I reach my hand inside Mom’s secret box. There’s only one item there. It’s a scrap of glossy white paper pressed into the corner of the box. My chest clenches. I hold my breath.

This could be something.

Or, like the plastic storage bins hidden in the crawl space, this could be nothing.

I have to use a fingernail to emancipate the scrap. When I do, I turn it over in my hands to see. It’s a photograph that some part of my memory reminds me I’ve seen before.

But with the memory of the photograph comes the memory of Mom’s face. Openmouthed and afraid. She knew I’d seen it. But what happened next has been wiped clean from my brain’s hard drive. Either that or entombed beneath a gazillion other memories, harder than others to dig up.

Mom hid this photograph from me.

It’s the kind of photograph that looks a little dated, a little old. Not crazy old, like archaic. But older than me. The colors are faded, the blues a little less blue, and the greens a little less green than they used to be. It’s a picture of a lake. A long seashore of blue. Tan sand, darker where the water hits it. White ripples of waves. Evergreen trees line the edges of the lake. There is a pier suspended over the water, one that looks unsound, unsafe. Like at any moment it could sink into the lake and get carried away with the waves. If I squint my eyes up tight, there’s a boat out there on the water. A sailboat, just a simple sloop with a single white mast. That’s what I see.

Mom knew a whole lot about sailboats, which she relayed to me when we used to walk past DuSable Harbor on occasion, hand in hand. See that one over there, Jessie? she’d ask, slipping her hand away long enough to point at it. I’d pretend to look. Pretend to look because I didn’t really care, her words falling on deaf ears. That’s a cutter, or, that’s a catamaran, she’d tell me. She had a book on them, a heavy coffee-table book called Sailing. Though as far as I knew, Mom had never once stepped foot on a sailboat in her entire life. At least not since I’ve been alive. I forget sometimes that Mom had a life that preceded mine.

But the lake and the sailboat are only an afterthought to the image I see, because there’s also a man in the photograph, one with brown hair and a large stature. He’s tall and husky with thick wrists exposed by a flannel shirt that’s rolled up to the elbows. There’s a watch on a right wrist, a hat in his hand. He stands with his back to the camera, blurred at the edges because he wasn’t standing still when the shutter button was pressed. He’s not centered on the photo paper, as if he was moving away when the picture was snapped.

The photograph wasn’t meant to be of him.

The central object is the sailboat. The picture is of the boat. And the man only got in the way. By today’s terms, a photobomb.

The man stands with his hands on his hips, left knee bent a bit. His head is pitched to the right. He has blue jeans on—saggy ones, not formfitting. The ends are fraying, turning white. One of his gym shoes is untied. Strands of hair move in the wind.

I wish that he would turn and look at me, so that I could see his eyes, the shape of his nose. Whether we look anything alike.

Is this man my father?

Why did Mom hide this photo from me?

Why did she not want me to know anything about this lake or this boat or this man?

I think of all those times I sat cross-legged on the closet floor beside her feet, watching as she stared sullenly at her own reflection in the mirror. What I thought was that she didn’t like what she saw. A modest, unpretentious face, a bit earthy with dark hair and dark eyes.

And then, years later when the cancer settled in, that same face became cadaverous. She lost more weight than she had to spare, face thinning, cheekbones hollowed out—an image she despised. That’s what I thought she was looking at when she stared in the mirror.

But now I think that maybe she wasn’t looking at herself as much as she was looking through the glass, reflecting on the life she left behind, the one she kept hidden from me behind that mirror.





eden

July 21, 1997 Egg Harbor

What Aaron told the emergency room physician was that there was blood, “Some blood,” he said, “spotting,” which to me equated to a teaspoon or two, enough to dirty a single pad, but the amount of blood I saw was measured in liters and gallons.

It came gushing out of me, a deluge of blood pouring down from the sky, rivers and streams overflowing their banks, dousing the earth, sweeping homes from their foundations. Everywhere I looked there was blood.