Chapter 4
JENNA
The costume bin lives in the basement on the second shelf of the metal rack by the furnace, under the Christmas linens, next to the beach stuff we haven't opened in years.
I went down for it Sunday afternoon while Eric was at the hardware store and Lucy was at Maya's.
It's one of those clear tubs with the blue snap lid, and the lid doesn't sit flat anymore because there's more in there than there's supposed to be.
I had to work it out from under the Christmas bin with my knee braced against the rack, and the dust came off the top in a sheet.
It only fits up the basement stairs sideways.
I set it on the kitchen table, which was clean now, and took the lid off.
The fox ears came out first. Last year's. Orange felt over a headband, white insets, the tips folded at an angle they never had when they were new, a bobby pin still caught in the elastic.
Under that, the astronaut helmet — a five-gallon paint bucket, sanded, primed, sprayed white, the visor cut out of the bottom of a two-liter bottle with silver duct tape around the seam.
Lucy insisted on a NASA patch and I couldn't find one anywhere, so we drew it.
It's still there on the shoulder ring in Sharpie, slightly crooked, because she was six and her hands weren't steady.
Then the jellyfish, from when she was four.
The umbrella had gone soft at the joints, but all forty ribbons were still attached, cut in three lengths so they'd hang in layers.
We did those on the living room floor during a storm that knocked the power out for two hours, working by flashlight, Lucy holding the light in her teeth.
Then the dragon tail.
The dragon tail was the first one, when she was three.
Two feet long, stuffed with polyfill, covered in green fleece, with felt spikes running down the back that get progressively worse as they go, because I made the first six carefully and then it got to be eleven at night.
There's still a safety pin hooked at the base where it attached to the back of her pants.
I picked it up and it weighed absolutely nothing.
There was more, the way there always is in a bin like that.
The cardboard robot chest plate from the year she was five, painted silver, bottle caps glued on for buttons and a hole in the side where we ran a wire to a flashlight.
The owl wings from the year she was seven, my first and only attempt at individual feathers, four hundred of them cut out of craft foam, a mistake I made once and will not make again.
A pair of white paper antlers. A tin-foil sword she used for about four days.
Underneath all of it, flat at the bottom, sat the layer nobody thinks about.
Fabric scraps in a gallon bag, sorted by color, because in year three I got organized.
Two spools of thread, half a pack of felt, three glue sticks.
A folded piece of graph paper with a sketch of the fox head in Lucy's handwriting, the ears drawn twice because she wanted them bigger than I did.
I stood in my kitchen holding a two-foot dragon tail and didn't cry, because I had something I wanted to do and I wanted to do it while the house was empty. I set the tail on the chair back instead of putting it away, where I could see it, which is a thing I did on purpose.
In the very bottom corner, under the scraps, there was a receipt. Not one of Diane's. Mine, from the craft store, three Octobers ago, folded twice and gone pink the way thermal paper goes. Wire, foam sheets, two bottles of acrylic, a rotary blade. Forty-one dollars and sixteen cents.
I keep everything from that store in a way I don't keep anything else, because somewhere in the back of my head is the idea that one day I'll add it up. There are probably nine more of them in the kitchen drawer under the takeout menus. I put this one in my pocket without being able to say why.
The photo albums are in the bookcase in the front room. I'm the last person in my zip code who prints pictures — four times a year I upload a batch to the drugstore site, pick them up, sit down with the sticky-page albums my mother gave me, and stick them in while Eric makes fun of me.
I brought three albums to the table, then went upstairs for the shoebox of loose ones from before I got organized, and laid it all out by year.
Row one, the first year. Lucy at this table at three years old, green fleece all over her lap, a look of ferocious concentration on her.
Lucy holding the tail up over her head. Lucy in the tail in the backyard, in the driveway, on the front steps with a bucket.
Then the party photos from that same October: Diane's kitchen, the orange tablecloth, the wall of grandkids lined up for the annual shot, and Lucy in a store-bought Cinderella, blue satin, white gloves.
Row two. Six pictures of the jellyfish going together — the umbrella on the floor, the ribbons, Lucy underneath it in the dark hallway with the lights on, laughing so hard her eyes are shut. Party photos: Lucy as a bumblebee, inflatable wings, grinning. She looks great.
Row three is the robot, most of it blurry, because that was the year I was shooting on a phone with a cracked lens.
Row four has one of Lucy asleep on the couch at seven in the evening with the astronaut helmet still on, chin strap and all.
Row five is the owl, and in every single frame there's a bag of foam feathers somewhere in the shot.
Row six. Row seven. Row eight. By the last few she's tall enough that I'd stopped shooting from above, so the angles change, and you can see more of the table in them. In two of those there's a mug of tea I don't remember making.
By the time I'd gone through all eight years there were two distinct populations of photograph on my kitchen table, and it took me a while to look straight at what they were.
Every making photo has two people in it. Not both in frame, usually — usually it's just Lucy, because I was the one with the camera — but you can see me in them anyway. My hand at the edge holding something. My coffee cup. My scissors. The wreck of my kitchen behind her.
Every party photo has one girl in it, in something that had a tag on it that morning.
Eight years. Eight costumes made at this table, worn to the mailbox, worn around the house, worn to the school parade when the school allowed it, worn once in the backyard for pictures while the light was still good.
Zero worn to the party.
The party is the one with the photographer, and that's the part I'd never let myself say.
Eric's cousin Rob brings the real camera every year, and those are the pictures that go up on Diane's stair wall, into the group text, into the Christmas card, into the frame by her back door where you take your shoes off.
The house record of my daughter's childhood Halloweens is a record of things my mother-in-law bought.
There's one more picture that doesn't belong in either row.
It's from the year there wasn't a party.
Diane cancelled that one in October, so there was no photographer and no wall of grandkids, and Lucy went trick-or-treating on our own street with two kids from down the block in a cardboard chest plate with a flashlight wired into the side.
It's the only October in eight years without a purchased costume, and not because anybody decided anything. There was just nowhere to wear one.
I put it back in the shoebox. It didn't prove what I needed it to prove and I wasn't going to use it.
Then I sat down.
Nobody had died. Nobody had cheated. My husband hadn't lied to me about money or hidden anything or raised a hand to anyone.
Twenty years in medical billing, though. I've watched people fight for an hour over a forty-dollar copay, then sign a plan that pulls two hundred a month out of them forever and never once pick up the phone about it, because it never arrives as an event.
Eight small, warm, reasonable Octobers, every one of them fine. I'd said so out loud each time.
My phone buzzed on the counter. Lucy, from Maya's.
can I stay for dinner they have taco night
Yes. Home by 8.
ILY. also maya says the wings are insane
I looked at that a second, then put the phone face down. I got a glass of water and drank the whole thing standing at the sink, then came back to do what I'd gone down to the basement for in the first place.
I cleared the middle of the table and laid them out by year, left to right, making photo on top, party photo underneath. Two rows, seven pairs, because of the year there wasn't a party.
They didn't come out straight. About six years in I stopped caring whether the columns lined up, and year six ended up half on top of year five because I ran out of table.
It didn't matter. I wasn't doing it to be neat, I was doing it because I was not going to have a conversation where I said it feels like and he said you're remembering it wrong — a conversation I lose every single time.
I'm not fast when I'm upset. I go flat and reasonable, and then I go to bed.
Photographs don't go flat and reasonable.
Around three o'clock I did think about not doing it.
I sat there for ten minutes with the pictures half laid out, thinking about putting the whole thing back in the shoebox and just getting through the week.
I could see that version clearly, because I've run it seven times: you let the party happen, you take the good pictures, you're pleasant to your mother-in-law, and on the second of November you hang the thing in the basement and you're fine by the weekend. Nobody gets hurt. Halloween stays fun.
The trouble was that I could also see year nine.
At four thirty I heard the truck in the driveway. I put the fox ears back in the bin, snapped the lid, and set the bin on the chair at the end of the table where he couldn't miss it. The wings were still in the front room against the wall, and I left them there.
He came in with a bag from the hardware store and a coffee, and got two steps into the kitchen before he stopped.
"What's all this?"
"Sit down," I said. "I want to show you something."