Chapter 38
The photographs arrived in my inbox the next afternoon.
She’d attached them to a blank email. Why?
Was she somehow upset with me, offended that I’d taken Ida without saying goodbye to her?
As soon as I opened the photos, any umbrage I felt was silenced.
Here was Ida in her essence, staring calmly into the camera, hair shorn, eyes wells of black, like the seconds when only her head was born and for that brief span between contractions she remained indefinable, neither boy nor girl.
While most of the images Louise had sent were of Ida alone, the one I looked at the longest was of the two of them.
They sat slightly left of center on a low wall that I recognized as being in the little churchyard near her house.
Louise’s face was aimed squarely at the camera, Ida’s turned to regard her, each an echo of the other, like a meditation on time and age.
Even the litter of cigarette butts in the foreground was poignant, the way the two conjoined shadows extended toward them.
For days, I habitually reopened it, always confronted anew by that sense of tenuousness and erasure; how little our lives belong to us, and how limited our belonging to one another, even our own flesh and blood.
I knew my admiration for the photograph—my ability to see it as a work of art, and as such extraordinary—would have infuriated Tom.
I heard his objections without his even speaking them—how could something born from a violation of trust and power be beautiful; how could I ever admire something “wrong”?
—as when, of late, I would speak about sexual encounters I’d had as a child, or the violence I’d experienced, almost with nostalgia, a certain gratitude for what they had taught me.
I don’t like you to act as if any of it is okay, he would admonish me in these moments.
Then I would rebut him: It was my life; what did he want, for me to pretend otherwise?
Sometimes I would become philosophical: Brutality was intrinsic to nature; lift up any rock in the woods, and you’ll find violence and annihilation.
For all these philosophical wonderings, and as long as I studied the photograph, there was one question I never thought to ask myself.
Namely, who had taken it? Whose eyes had gazed at the two of them, the field and the sky, composing it all within the camera lens, struck like me by the echo in the way their heads leaned sideways, their fierce determination, even in repose.
The love between them. Those things that at once moved and frightened me.