I had been expecting the return. I had thought about it, in the way I thought about things I was waiting for, not dwelling, just maintaining a background awareness of the pending variable. I had known it was coming and I had thought I was prepared for it.
I was not quite prepared for it.
The photograph was in a protective sleeve. I slid it out carefully and held it in both hands and looked at it, my mother at twenty-five, the table I didn't recognize, the room I didn't recognize, the laugh that was aimed at something outside the frame. Thomas Reyes beside me, careful eyes, the posture of someone who didn't quite relax.
I looked at my mother's hands. The way she was holding herself, easy, unlabored, the posture of someone who was comfortable in the space. I had been comfortable with Reyes. Had trusted him. Had chosen to be in this photograph in this room with this man on a day in 1999 when I had already been feeding him information for a year.
I thought: Who else were you comfortable with? What else did you laugh at? What did you think about when you were alone?
I thought: I spent twenty-six years with the fact of you and almost none of the content.
I put the photograph back in its sleeve. Then I picked up my phone and called my father.
"Come for dinner," I said. "Tonight. I have something to give you."
* * *
He arrived at six-thirty.
I had cooked, genuinely cooked, which was something I had been doing more of in the last thirty days, not because the situation required it but because I had discovered that I liked it, which was a discovery that had surprised my and that I was treating with the same careful attention I treated most things that surprised my about myself. I had made the kind of food my father liked without thinking about it, without consulting him, in the same automatic way that Dominic made my coffee, the knowledge that accumulates without being asked for, without being filed deliberately, just settling into the architecture of knowing someone.
Dominic had come to the kitchen doorway at some point during the preparation, looked at what I was making, and gone back to the office without comment. I had appreciated that. He had an instinct for the things that needed space.
My father knocked at six-thirty-one. I let him in and they moved through the short domestic ritual of arrival, jacket, glass of water, the brief inventory look he gave me every time that I had come to expect and to find, now, something close to comforting.
They ate. Talked about practical things, his new engagement, a consulting arrangement through one of my contacts that was using skills he had spent thirty years developing. His apartment above the bookshop. The neighbor who brought him things from the garden and had started treating him with the specific concerned attention of someone who had decided he needed looking after, which he was allowing in small quantities.
After dinner I cleared the table and brought out the envelope.
I set it in front of him without preamble.
He looked at it. Then at me.
"Tran returned it today," I said.
He picked it up. He held it for a moment the way I had held it, aware of the weight of it, which was not a physical weight.
I watched him open it and slide out the photograph and look at his wife at twenty-five years old.
I had thought he might cry. He didn't, he sat very still and looked at the photograph with the expression of someone who is doing something enormous in a very small space. His jaw moved once. His hands were steady.
He looked for a long time.
"She was laughing at something Thomas said," he said finally. "I can tell. She had a specific laugh when something surprised her into it, you can see it here, the way my eyes are, I wasn't expecting whatever he said."
I looked at the photograph. I could see it. "What did she laugh like?"
He was quiet for a moment. "She had three laughs," he said. "There was the polite one, guests, professional situations. There was the real one, that one was loud, I was always slightly embarrassed by how loud it was. And there was this one." He touched the edge of the photograph lightly. "This one wasquieter. Just when something caught my completely off guard." He paused. "I haven't thought about the three laughs in years. I don't know why I stopped thinking about it."
"Because remembering hurts," I said. "So you learn to not remember."
He looked at me. "Yes." A pause. "Did you..." He stopped. "You don't remember me."
"Almost nothing." I said it evenly, without the performance of ease and without the performance of pain, just the fact of it. "I remember a smell. I remember that I was tall. I remember a song I used to sing but I can't remember the words, just the shape of the melody." I paused. "That's everything."
My father looked at the photograph.
"She was tall," he said. "Five-nine. She was self-conscious about it when she was young, she told me that, early on, that she had spent years trying to be smaller and then at some point decided not to." He paused. "The smell was probably my soap. I used the same soap my entire life, this particular brand that was difficult to find and I ordered it from a place in Baton Rouge." He paused. "The song was a French lullaby. My grandmother taught me."