Family Portrait

The day we got back from the hospital was the first time dad let me come to the back of his studio. He clicked on the fan and opened a safe, the big one, the one with all the chemicals. He explained through his mask how, if he mixed the wrong ones, they would create deadly chlorine gas. Dad said if he told me to run, I should run, and don’t take time to think about him. It was a parent’s duty to make sure their children outlived them.

After the photo developed he led me to the front of the store. No customers that day, of course, not in person, but their pictures hung on every wall. Mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters smiling around a Christmas tree or posed with the family dog. I watched as my father framed the photograph, long experience guiding his fingers, his tongue stuck to his top lip as he concentrated. He hung the frame behind the counter and I stared at it even though I knew what I’d see. Me, front teeth missing and curly-haired, and mom, wisp-thin and pale, sitting on the couch, both of us laughing as I pushed her wig loose.

“There, you see, Claire?” Dad kissed me on the top of my head. I had never heard his voice crack before. “As long as someone’s picture is on the wall, they’re still with us.”

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After he unlocked the door to the studio, the janitor slipped the master key onto his ring and stepped back. I walked past him and into my father’s studio. Even once the janitor turned on the lights it felt dark, darker than I could ever remember. There was no place on Earth I belonged more than the studio my parents had built, this temple to my father’s craft and my mother’s intelligence, yet as I walked to the counter I felt like an intruder.

“Lot of dust in here.”

The janitor’s grumbling profaned this sacred place. I ignored him and ran one finger along the frame of the photo, that photo, the one of me and mom that we developed twenty years ago. The right side of the frame was smoother than the left, worn down with finger oil, caressed again and again for years. The wood felt like mom’s skin from before the treatment, from when she would swing me in her strong arms and I would laugh and laugh until hiccups forced us to stop, her joy still ringing in my ears.

If only there was a picture of my father on the wall. I wanted to hear him too. It had been so hard, the two of us alone during that long first year after mom passed. We spent all our time filling scrapbooks with every photo we could find.

Pictures of mom as a baby, cooing at us from the page. Pictures of her at prom on the arm of Rocky what's-his-name, the quarterback, that jerk. We cut him out. Pictures of mom leaning against a railing with a waterfall behind her, their first road trip, her happiness flowing and tumbling through us like a river. Pictures of her at their wedding, bouquet in one hand, her long, brown hair done up like a movie star. Pictures of mom holding me to her chest, as if I could feel her arms around me still, as if I were sleeping against her and nothing since had happened.

I asked my dad once why he wasn’t in any of the pictures. He rubbed my head, mussed my hair, and told me his mug would have broken the lens. I had known he was teasing, I could always tell, and I informed him that answer was no fair. He said he was the one who took pictures. Every relationship had one person who took pictures and one who was in them. Then he leaned back and brought his camera up. I had smiled a missing-toothed grin back at him, click. Then I asked, since he wasn’t in the pictures, when he died would he be gone for real? I never got an answer.

I can feel mom in the studio, her presence stronger even than the janitor. I can feel some of the people in his sample photographs, some of those happy smiling mothers and fathers. I even feel one of the little girls, the one with red hair and braces and a dachshund that my dad had somehow coaxed into looking at the camera. They were here with me. Dad wasn’t.

“Jesus Christ!”

The janitor ran out from the dark room, sweating and stammering, keys jangling on his belt. He paused in the middle of the room, looked at me, looked through me, then kept running, a stream of profanities chasing him.

It was quiet now. No grumbling, no swearing, no hum of the ventilation fan. I walked to the back, knowing what I was likely to find and still drawn forward, one step after the other. Nothing so dramatic as a yellow cloud of gas, no, that had long dissipated, but dad had left the safe open and chemicals out. His body slumped against the wall across the room, a trail of coughed-up blood marking his path. A photograph, crinkled by his tight grip and only released after death, lay next to him. I smiled out from the picture, my husband behind me, my nose red against my white parka. I waved him forward in the picture, come on dad, put the camera away and ski with me, it’s an easy run. Everything will be fine.

He’d left a note on his desk, I noticed, perhaps written while he waited for the reaction. I reached to my shoulder and squeezed mom’s hand. I had pictures of us all at my house, I told her. We could be together there as soon as I forced myself to read his note, his one last, simple sentence.

No parent should outlive their child.