Page 15 of All These Beautiful Strangers
They both turned then and saw me standing there. My father let her go. I saw my mother’s face—her eyes red and puckered. She quickly turned her back to me again, so I couldn’t see her.
“Why is Mommy crying?” I asked.
My father came over and picked me up, even though I was getting too old for that now.
“What do you say we get an Eskimo Pie?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said.
He carried me downstairs to the kitchen and dug two Eskimo Pies out of the freezer. We sat on the steps of the back patio as we ate them, looking out at the lake.
“Won’t she be mad we’re eating these?” I asked, licking a piece of melted chocolate off my finger. My mother never let me and Seraphina have ice cream this late in the afternoon. She always said it would ruin our dinner.
“Charlotte, I need you to be a big girl and look after your mother while I’m away,” my father said. “Do you think you can do that?”
“You’re going back already?” I asked.
“I have an early meeting in the morning,” he said.
“Don’t go,” I said. “You promised you’d take me out on the boat again tomorrow.”
“Next weekend, okay?” he said.
“Can I come with you?” I asked.
He was silent for a moment.
“I need you to stay here and look after your mother,” he said. “Can you do that for me?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want him to leave me there with her, but I knew there was nothing I could do to stop it.
He got up and went inside to finish packing and I stayed out on the back porch. I didn’t want to watch him leave. When I heard the front door open and close and the sound of his car backing out of the front drive, I went and sat on the tire swing he had built me two summers ago.
I sat there for a while, until the sun started to dull in the sky, waiting for someone to come looking for me, but no one did.
I heard a sound in the bushes. I turned and I saw him standing there—a man. He was dressed in jeans and a dark jacket and he was holding a camera to his eye so I couldn’t see his face.
I stopped swinging.
He came closer.
He was tall. I squinted at him. He seemed both familiar and unfamiliar.
I opened my mouth to ask him who he was, what he wanted, but nothing came out.
He came closer, stood over me, so close I could reach out and touch him if I wanted. I looked up into the lens of his camera.
Click.
He took a picture.
Who are you who are you who are you?
The words reverberated in my mind.
Suddenly, the man stopped as if he had heard me, as if he could read my thoughts as plainly as if they were written on my forehead. Slowly, he lowered the camera and I saw his face.
Or, I saw where his face should have been, when really, there was no face at all.
