I’m still too high-strung to have a meaningful dinner conversation and there’s no chance fine dining will chase away the ghosts of the past few days. It's best to just blurt out what I need. Maybe then I can focus on being a daughter to my mother who has just gone through a terrible loss.
“Hey, Mom,” I say as I pick up my cup of tea, “can I look at some old photo albums? The ones from my teen years?”
“Of course, honey. You don’t have to ask, you know where they are.”
She’s right, it’s a silly question. I’ve never asked permission to look at family photos before but a guilty conscience can play tricks on you. My mother thinks I’m here because of our shared grief over what happened to Madison when in reality my priority is to search for answers to the great mystery of why my pictures are on Jax’s iPad. That’s how mixed up I am right now.
As soon as I’m done with the tea, I excuse myself and take the photo albums out on the porch while my mother does the dishes. My hands shake a little as they get busy turning pages until I reach some of the images I have seen in Jax’s photo folder. I observe the photos closely, comparing them against the images on the iPad, trying to discover a connection.
I page through album after album, looking for any kind of clue that would lead to some form of recognition until I begin to lose hope. I honestly don’t know what I was hoping to find in the first place. These images are identical whether in an album or on someone’s iPad.
Then my eyes fix on a single photo—one that’s not on the iPad. I’m about seven or eight, standing next to a boy I can barely remember. He’s skinny with thick, ugly glasses on his small face. We’re both squinting against the hot sun of a summer afternoon at the beach.
Memories flow back in bits and pieces. I remember now the ten-year-old boy who once helped me get down from a tree when I froze up—probably the cause of my mild fear of heights. Then I remember him cleaning the blood from my knees after a bike spill when my mother was at the store and I wasn’t supposed to be out of the house.
One by one, glimpses of that distant summer return to me. The boy’s mother was the wife of a man who worked with my father. I remember rumors in the neighborhood that the boy’s father had run off and never returned. I asked my father about it and said he was travelling for business.
I could not tell you what business that would be as my father shared almost no details about his work. Not that I remember. My father’s secrets led to a lot of fighting with my mother. I tuned them out. I didn’t care. I loved my father and was grateful whenever he was home.
The boy and his mother visited our house a few times that summer and I hung out with him, taking him down to the ocean to collect shells and letting him ride my bike once or twice. He was shy and clumsy and often bullied at school for that and for being small for his age, not to mention those horrible glasses he had to view the world through.
My hands get sweaty as I turn the album pages faster and faster until I find a clearer picture of him, his face close up. I stare at his boyish features for a good minute, scrutinizing every detail and feature—the shape of the nose, lips and eyebrows and how it all fit together. My heartbeat accelerates as the truth comes slowly at first and then like head-on collision.
His face takes on a new power. It’s as if the boy looking at the camera knew I would be looking at him someday from the future. It would be almost eerie if not for the absolutely astonishing beauty I can see in his face now. Even after all the years and the extraordinary changes that turned the boy into a man, I can see Jaxson Cole staring at me, knowingly.
“What the fuck?” I whisper softly to myself.
His name was Jack Caleb, the boy with the glasses. We spent a few days together playing in the neighborhood while our parents hung out in the house having their grown-up conversations.
“It feels nice out here,” my mother says, startling me. “It’s finally starting to cool down.”
My pulse quickens as I contemplate asking her to confirm my suspicions. Right now I can’t be entirely sure I’m not making this shit up. Could my tired, anxious mind be playing tricks on me?
“Do you remember this boy?” I say, pointing at the album.
She takes the album as she sits beside me. “Ah, yes, little Jack. Poor thing. You were so nice to him, Ella. He hung on your every word. Nobody else was nice to him. He was an odd kid. I don’t think he had many friends.”
An iciness penetrates my bones. I was nice to him when nobody else was. Could that be it? Could that be the only reason for his interest?
“Did he and his mother visit us?” I say, doing my best to compose myself.