Page 14 of All These Beautiful Strangers
I knew about the party. My mother’s family had held one every year since she left. When I was younger, I hadn’t been allowed to go. My father didn’t think it was a good idea. And now . . . now it was easy to ignore it since I was at school. Knollwood seemed a world away from Hillsborough, and that was part of its appeal.
“I’ll think about it,” I lied.
“Okay, then,” Uncle Hank said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, as if he wasn’t sure what the proper goodbye was, and I just stared back at him.
For a moment, I tried to see him the way my mother saw him. I knew he was her favorite brother. Growing up, she had told me stories—how he had taught her to drive in their dad’s station wagon when she was only twelve. When she mistook the gas for the brake pedal and leveled their mailbox, Uncle Hank took the fall for her, claiming he was the one behind the wheel. He bore the brunt of three lashes from their dad’s belt, while my mom watched from upstairs, peeking her head between the banisters. When she was in the fourth grade and tumbled over the handlebars of her bike, Uncle Hank had been the one to hold her hand and distract her while the doctor sewed up the stitches on her chin, and he asked for a matching ugly brown Band-Aid to wear on his chin so that she didn’t feel so ridiculous wearing one by herself.
Uncle Hank and I used to share an eternity of summers, of sunburned toes, and rocky road ice-cream cones that melted in the searing July afternoon faster than you could eat them, and the slightly sour smell of lake water and sweat. There used to be so much that reminded me of Uncle Hank. But now, all that connected us was the ghost of my mother.
Strangely, that was what separated us, too.
Four
Grace Calloway
August 4, 2007
4:35 p.m.
I could feel it in the air that day—the retreat of summer. The suffocating heat of July had given way to cooler August afternoons. And it wasn’t just the heat that had abated; it was the girls’ moods. Charlotte and Seraphina were beginning to grow restless, I could tell; the novelty of being at the lake house had started to wear off. Running barefoot through the sprinklers in the front lawn, camping in the backyard, barbecuing on the patio—once great adventures—had started to feel routine. They’d abandoned the tire swing Alistair had hung over the old elm on the edge of the lake, lost interest in racing each other out to the raft and back. The other day I’d found Charlotte and Seraphina marooned on the cold leather sofa in the den, playing their PlayStation 3.
It felt like the end of something. And it was.
I looked over from where I sat on the cushioned seats at the bow of the boat to where Alistair sat behind the wheel. He had Charlotte in his lap; he was teaching her how to steer our new twenty-five-foot Sea Ray bowrider. I couldn’t hear what they were saying to one another over the noise of the motor and the sound of the waves breaking against the hull. Seraphina sat on her knees next to me, leaning out over the edge of the boat, hands splayed to catch the spray of the waves. I had one finger hooked in one of the loops of her life jacket straps at the back, anchoring her to me in the event a bumpy wave caused her to lose her balance.
The lake was just under four hundred acres. It was surrounded by woods and undeveloped land. A few houses dotted the shoreline here and there, and there was a public boat launch on the north side. We passed a fisherman in his aluminum boat at the edge of the lake. He stared out at us from under the bill of his baseball cap, and I raised my hand to wave hello.
I imagined how we must have appeared to a casual onlooker. Just a happy family enjoying a Saturday afternoon boat ride around the lake.
Now I took a mental snapshot. Seraphina’s blond curls floating behind her in the breeze. Click. Charlotte wearing her father’s Knicks hat as she peered over the wheel. The hat was too big even though Alistair had adjusted it to its tightest setting. It kept sliding down onto the bridge of her nose, covering her eyes, and Charlotte kept tilting her head back to clear her view, refusing to take it off. Click. Alistair, the sunlight catching in his blond hair, reflecting off his oiled, toned shoulders. My perfect, handsome husband holding our daughter in his arms. Click.
In college, I’d taken a photography class and there was a quote by Ansel Adams our professor had up on the wall: “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” I’d always thought that a photograph was made not once, but twice. In the first and most obvious instance, the photographer made the photograph—she chose the framing, the angle of the shot, the lighting, the composition of objects. She chose what she wanted you to see. It was staged, artificial, the story she wanted told. But every photograph was made a second time when the viewer looked at it. Because you didn’t just see the photograph as it was, you saw it as you were. You brought your own context to it, your own story, your own perceptions. You made the meaning. I always thought that what people saw when they looked at a photo said more about them than what was actually in the shot.
Now I held my mental snapshots up for review and I tried to erase myself, a great unmaking. I tried to see those snapshots as a stranger would. I held the images far away from my mind’s eye so that all the intricacies blended together, until it became a harmless palette of colors and lines. For just a moment, I wanted things to be only what they appeared to be from a distance.
Five
Charlie Calloway
2017
They were yelling again. I could hear them through the wall. So I put a movie on for Seraphina and turned the volume up.
“Stay here,” I told her, and I padded out of our room and down the hall. I peeked my head in through their half-open door.
My father’s suitcase was on the bed. My mother was by the dresser, a drawer out, and she was tossing collared shirts into it.
“Just go,” she said.
“Damn it, Grace,” my father said. He had just gotten out of the shower. I could see the steam coating the mirror in their bathroom; his cheeks were red where he had shaved. He was dressed in a towel that was tied around his waist.
He grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her toward him so that she was in his arms.
“Look at me,” he said.
“Get your hands off me,” my mother snapped.
“Mommy?” I called out.
