The Year We Left Home (26 page)

Torrie lifted the glass and drank. “Thank you,” Audrey said. “Now what do you do?”

Torrie took the napkin from her lap and blotted her mouth with it. “Well then, that’s just fine.” She was surprised, a little. Maybe it would be one of her good days. “How about some sandwich now?”

Torrie ate half of her sandwich and some graham crackers. Her table manners were so much better now, that is, she could be said to have some.

“Mom.”

“What, honey?”

“Show me me.”

“Finish your milk first.”

Audrey brought the hand mirror to the table. Torrie tilted it back and forth so it caught the light. Her mother watched her watch herself. Her hair had grown back a few shades darker and they kept it short because that was easier. Before the accident the first thing you’d noticed about Torrie was her long yellow hair, a rope down her back. Now it was ordinary, like anybody’s hair.

Torrie put her fingers to her face. All the surgeries had left her facial muscles rigid, so that none of her expressions seemed entirely natural. Sometimes if they were out, and if Torrie’s hair was combed so that the scars around her scalp didn’t show, Audrey saw people staring at Torrie, or trying not to, as they asked themselves just what it was that seemed wrong about her.

Of course she looked older. And her features had thickened. Maybe some of that was the accident, or maybe it would have happened anyway. There was no way of knowing.

“Show me me in the book.”

Audrey cleared the lunch plates, went into the den, and brought back the leather-covered album with Torrie’s pictures. Each of the kids
had one, from babyhood up through high school and beyond, and there was a box of loose pictures somewhere: group shots of Christmases and vacations and different combinations of kids so that sorting them out had been difficult. The things she used to worry about.

Torrie opened the album to its first leaf, the pictures of her at the hospital, a pink bow in her topknot of wispy hair. In one her mouth was open in a yawn or a squawk and her eyes were shut. In others she was sleeping. Audrey held her while her brothers and sister peered at her with cautious expressions. Other pages documented her crawling, standing, walking, then there were gaps and leaps in time to Torrie’s older self. She’d been the youngest and picture-taking had fallen off over time. Anita’s album was probably twice as large. Audrey used to worry that Torrie had been deprived of her due portion of attention. Well, she was making up for it now.

Audrey moved her chair closer to look at the album with her. “Yes, that’s you. Baby Torrie.”

“Baby me.”

“That’s right.”
You aren’t a baby anymore. Can you grow up again?

Torrie turned the pages. Some days they didn’t get very far. She’d spend a long time looking and either her energy or her interest lagged and Audrey put the book away. But today she made it through to the end, to the empty pages that followed the last pictures of herself with her high school friends, with the volleyball team, and the very last one, where she posed with somebody’s new puppy, a dog that would by now be sleeping its way into old age.

Torrie put her hand flat on a blank page. “Where are more?”

“Sweetheart, we don’t have any.” All that had stopped. There were months and years when it would have been a cruelty to take Torrie’s picture.

Torrie shook her head. Sometimes all her old stubbornness surfaced, as if that was the bedrock of her personality. “I want more.”

“Well I can’t just make pictures out of nothing.”

“Make out of me.”

“We need a camera, sweetie.”

“Then get a camera,” Torrie said, sounding for a moment so much like her old self, pert, impatient, mocking, that Audrey gave her a startled look.

There was an old camera of Ryan’s in some closet or drawer, she remembered. She rummaged through the back rooms, thinking as she always did what a hopeless mess the house was, crammed with the leftovers of her family’s lives. Things no one wanted, but had not yet been able to throw away, so that it was a purgatory for sports equipment, old clothes, and balding stuffed animals. But she found the camera, a Canon with a fancy embroidered neck strap. Her husband cleaned it, peered through its lenses, and pronounced it sound. He brought home film and loaded it.

“What does she want a camera for, anyway?”

“I don’t know why she wants anything.”

He had nothing to say to that, only went back to reading his newspaper. She knew he grieved for Torrie. She knew his heart hurt just as hers did. But a man didn’t show such things, and that only made for more lonesomeness.

“Do you want me to take your picture?” Audrey asked, but Torrie grabbed the camera from her. “Here, at least put the strap around your neck so you don’t drop it. Do you want me to show you how it works?”

Torrie knew, or at least she thought she did. She took the camera and went out to the backyard. Audrey watched her from the kitchen window. There was nothing out there that any of them hadn’t always seen. Why take pictures of the old picnic table? Why lie on the ground taking pictures of dirt?

Torrie used up one roll and demanded another. Audrey tried to load it for her and Torrie took the camera and set to work on her own. Her hands were slow, like the rest of her. Audrey wasn’t supposed to help her do things but sometimes she did. It was just easier. But from that moment on, Torrie never let anyone else near the camera.

That was how it began. Her parents, and everyone else in Grenada, grew used to Torrie walking the streets with her camera, poking the lens into anything and everything.

At first Audrey tried to keep her in her own yard, or at least, their own street, but Torrie was too determined to escape her, and Audrey was too reluctant to follow, and you had to hope that Torrie, who had grown rather heavy over the last few years, heavy as well as tall, would be able to fend off any trouble by herself, at least on such familiar ground.

Everyone told Audrey how good it was that Torrie had an interest now, something that got her out of the house. That was what they said to her face. She could only imagine the kind of jokes they made among themselves, or their annoyance when Torrie jammed her camera into the windows of their parked cars, or appeared in their front yards, clicking away. She was out in all weathers, bad leg and all, patrolling the streets of town, or what was left of it.

Times were supposed to be good again, but not here, where too much damage had been done during the farm troubles, and too many people in the county had lost their livelihoods and moved away. The high school had to be consolidated with the one fifteen miles away. Two restaurants and one of the drugstores closed, and the Fashionaire, and the pie shop, and one of the banks, and the library went to reduced hours. The little country towns were in worse shape, some of them without even so much as a post office anymore.

Sometimes Audrey found herself thinking that she’d been born into one world, hopeful and normal, and now she lived in another, full of sadness and failure.

The pictures Torrie took were an odd lot. Some of them were just patterns of light or shade, or ordinary things like gravel, or telephone wires against a clear sky. With people, she favored close-up portraits. There was a range of faces and expressions, from those who were clearly annoyed, clearly trying to avoid the camera, to those who seemed to pose, no matter how uneasily, offering up their tentative smiles. Audrey recognized neighbors, shopkeepers, even some of Torrie’s old friends and schoolmates, grown up now, peering down through the camera at something they didn’t want to see.

Because that was how the pictures made the most sense: It wasn’t
so much Torrie looking out at the world as the world looking back at her. So that clouds or railroad tracks or buildings had a peaceful aspect, nothing there to judge or react, and every shot Torrie took of Audrey showed her exhaustion and wariness.

The only picture Torrie put at the end of her old baby album was a portrait of herself that she’d managed to take, with a timer? With someone else pushing the shutter? There was no telling; it was another occasion when she’d gone off on her own. She stood inside someone’s old garage, her face just visible through a window of cracked and shattered glass.

One day Torrie came into the kitchen where Audrey was scrubbing out the cupboards. She held the camera out with both hands. “Cook it.”

“You don’t cook a camera, Torrie.” Audrey still found herself explaining such things.

“Cook pictures,” said Torrie patiently, with a smile lurking in one corner of her mouth as she waited for her mother to get it.

It made sense to set up a darkroom for her in the boys’ old bathroom, and to get someone from the camera shop in Ames to come and show her the basics of developing. They had been spending quite a bit of money getting film processed at the Walgreens. Torrie caught on quickly enough—it seemed easier for her to learn new things than to remember old ones—and hung strips of negatives along a clothesline in the old bathtub, printing different versions of the same shot, lining them up on the kitchen table and scrutinizing each for a long time. That unnatural slow patience seemed to serve her well. “I like that one,” Audrey might say, pointing to one of what seemed to her ten identical pictures, and Torrie would shake her head no, seeing something different.

The pictures grew larger, eight by ten, twelve by fourteen. Audrey and Randy framed a few of them and hung them on the walls, but frankly, they were often too odd or disturbing or puzzling to want on display. Here was a dog’s open mouth, its eager tongue, and its teeth like a miniature mountain range. Here was an elderly man photographed
with such high contrast that the lines around the mouth and eyes became crevasses. Here was the abandoned high school, Torrie’s old school, the windows boarded up, a school for ghosts. The photos bewildered Audrey. She liked pictures of gardens or playful animals, things polished up or made fanciful. Maybe Torrie’s pictures were more real, but that didn’t mean you wanted to spend all day looking at depressing things. You could see that anywhere!

Now it seemed they hardly saw Torrie. She was either out taking pictures or shut in the darkroom, developing them. She sat at the table with them for meals, but she was always impatient to get back to her work. “Why do you like taking pictures so much?” Audrey asked her, but Torrie only said, “Photographs. Not pictures.” Her speech was getting better too. She no longer sounded like a deaf person speaking, guessing at the words.

As much as Audrey had chafed at taking care of Torrie, now it felt as if she had been left behind. It was lonesome in the house without her, which was probably why each new picture Torrie took of her mother looked a little sadder than the one before.

He was
twelve and in a hurry to get to thirteen and then sixteen because you could drive and then twenty-one, when no one could tell you what to do.

Sunday morning. If he stayed quiet in bed long enough, there was a chance the rest of them would sleep in and they wouldn’t have to go to church. Sunday school was at nine thirty and often hit-or-miss, but church wasn’t until eleven, so it was harder to avoid. He’d gotten up very early, while the house was still dim and shadowy, fixed a bowl of cereal in the kitchen, and brought it back to his room to eat. Then he got into bed again and waited, doing nothing, which was boring but not nearly as boring as church.

Just before ten he heard his sister get up and turn on the television in the den. He got up and padded down the hall after her. “Hey, turn that down,” he said in a whisper that he tried to make loud.

She waved the remote at him, smiling her triumphant smile.

“Gimme that.”

“No.”

“Bitch.”

“I’m telling you said that.”

He started to say it again but his attention was caught by the television screen. “What’s that?”

“Hurricane stuff.”

The hurricane had been going on for a while in places like tropical islands and now it had come to the United States, which made it more interesting. There was a picture from the weather satellite, a huge white flat saucer of cloud slicing into the map. Then the television showed pictures of wrecked buildings, cars upside down, huge trees leveled.

“Cool,” Matt said.

“Do we have hurricanes here?”

“Nah, just tornadoes.”

“I don’t like hurricanes,” his sister said. She was small for her age, a thin-wristed girl with hair that was nearly white at its ends, darker near her scalp.

“That’s because you’re a dork.”

“Shut up.”

“Make me. A hurricane would be”—he tried to find the best word—“majorly cool.”

“Yeah, because you’d die in it.”

“No, you would,” said her brother, but he was no longer paying attention to her. The television was showing pictures of the storm coming ashore. Waves smashed into the beach and the little houses in its way staggered and fell. Palm trees bent double. Their leaves streamed behind them like hair. It wasn’t fair that he had missed it all.

From upstairs, footsteps, a toilet flushing. Matt and Marcie looked at each other. “Shit,” Matt said, but under his breath so his sister wouldn’t hear it and add it to her list of things to report.

Their mother came in, wearing her bathrobe and slippers. “Morning, guys.”

They said good morning, sort of, their eyes on the television. She went into the kitchen and they heard her making coffee. When she came back in she said, “What’s this you’re watching?”

“The hurricane.”

“Those poor people,” she said, watching, then, “Why aren’t you getting ready?”

“Are we going to church?” Matt asked. As if there was any room for argument.

“You have twenty minutes to get dressed.”

“Is Dad coming?”

“I don’t know, he’s still asleep.”

Behind their mother’s back, Matt made his fist into a beer can, popped the top of his thumb, and raised it to his mouth to drink. Marcie giggled.