Footsteps(115)
Sabina loved old homes like this, with distinct rooms and long hallways. She supposed they weren’t ideal for large entertaining, but they were cozy. Even this big house was cozy. Auberon’s house—his mansion—had also been old, but he’d had it gutted and remodeled, so that there were large, flowing spaces with easy movement from one room to another. And everything had been done in light neutral tones. To Sabina the whole house had seemed like the inside of a refrigerator.
She walked down the long hallway between the living and dining rooms and the kitchen. Carlo Sr.’s study, the guest room, and a bathroom fed off this hallway. It wasn’t a particularly wide space, and it seemed all the narrower because both sides were almost entirely filled, ceiling to floor, with family photos. Sabina adored this hallway of history. She had lingered a little several times, but there were too many photos to take in all at once. And she had yet to ask Carlo to give her the tour of them. She would like that, to have names for all these wonderful faces.
Sabina didn’t have this kind of history. She had no photos of her family in Buenos Aires; it had not occurred to her grieving, lost, eight-year-old self that she should want them. Tia Valeria had been impatient with photographs, insisting that people spent too much time peering through viewfinders and not enough time looking around at the wide world, so she had no photos of her time with her aunt. And she wanted no photos of her time with Auberon. Ironically, because he was a person of whom people took photographs, and she had often been at his side, there were probably hundreds of photos of her time with him.
But this, this beautiful, various archive—no, she had nothing like it.
The photos ranged from very old, toned in sepia, obviously heritage photos of ancestors—posed shots clearly taken in Italy, of dour-looking women and men standing in front of olive trees or cottages. Other old pictures were even more formal and dour, the kind of professional portraits of the time. Sabina thought it odd that people in very old photos never, ever seemed to smile.
There were black and white photos from the 40s, 50s, and 60s—she could tell by the fashions—and these people were all smiling, sitting around tables, dressed to the nines. On lounges at swimming pools, dressed in bathing suits and big hats. At the beach—this beach—dressed likewise. Sabina wasn’t sure who most of these people were—except that in photos starting in what Sabina thought were the 1960s, she recognized a young, handsome Carlo Sr. with an absolutely gorgeous, raven-haired woman, almost as tall as he. She must have been Teresa, Carlo’s mother. There were photos, too, of the Uncles as young, dashing men, and their wives, as glorious beauties. These photos were mostly in color. There was something extra alive about the colors and patterns of 60s and 70s fashion. So wild, so big, so vibrant. So sexy.
And then the photos of the children. These, Sabina could identify without trouble. So many photos of Carlo, Carmen, Luca, and John wearing wetsuits, surfing, skateboarding, having birthdays, graduating. Vacations at the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls. Trips to Europe. Baseball games. Football games. John playing his guitar. Carlo smiling next to a model of a building. Carmen surrounded by green plants. Luca in a boxing pose, bare-chested, wearing red shorts and what looked like boxing gloves with much less padding. That must have been a promotional shot from the ‘MMA’ he’d done. She knew that, because there was also a photo of him fighting, his bare foot connecting with another man’s face.
There were far fewer photos of Joey and Rosa. Baby pictures, toddler and young child pictures. But the few there were petered out quickly, while Rosa was still a flat-chested little girl in pigtails, and Joey was wearing braces. Then high school graduation photos, and nothing else. There were more photos of Trey on this wall than of Joey and Rosa combined.
Until this day, taking this extended time to appreciate every photo while she waited for Carlo to bring poor, sweet Trey home, Sabina had not noticed how comparatively few the photos of Joey and Rosa were. She thought she understood why—most likely, Teresa had been the family archivist, and she had probably been the one who had selected and framed photos for the hallway. Perhaps she’d even been the frequent photographer, too. When she fell ill and died, the family had lost its historian. And Joey and Rosa lost their place in the family a little.
Sabina knew the timeline, and knew that Carlo, Carmen, Luca, and John were all grown when Teresa died. She also knew that Carlo and Carmen had taken up the raising of Joey and Rosa, and that they had not been neglected. But standing here, steeped in a dense, loving history, Sabina recognized something that perhaps the Paganos themselves were too close to see. Joey and Rosa had been neglected. Not in an active way, not on purpose, but simply because they had been raised in a different family than the others. Their history was broken in two.