What I Had Before I Had You (4 page)

JAMES GAVE ME
my camera on my tenth birthday, and I will never need another. It's an old boxy Olympus, unbreakable. Even my mother couldn't have predicted how I would neglect the Casio keyboard she gave me that year, forget to wear the little silver locket, but spend weeks upon weeks buried in photography books. This little black-and-silver box presented a way to make the world my own. I was riveted.

Over the years, I have converted our basement into a darkroom. I steal the expensive chemicals from the darkroom at my school, where the stained counters and battered old cameras-to-lend indicate that it has seen more popular days. I crave privacy, especially from the art teacher and her terrible critique wall. The photo club kids have to pin up their work for public ridicule, and they would ruin my plain-truth pictures with their technical speak: composition, cropping, balance. I like the solitude of my dirt-walled basement, where I set up a counter made of a door I found in a trash heap and screwed a low-wattage red bulb into the naked fixture that swings from the ceiling whenever my mother slams the oven door above me.

I buy cheap black-and-white film and crack it out of its plastic shell by feel in the dark, wind it on reels, and plunge it into chemical baths. I watch with reverence as scenes take shape in my tray of developer, first the high-contrast areas and then the mid-values. My photos tell me the truth; when I photograph something, I have proof of it. I have secured most of Ocean Vista in this way: the toddlers leashed to the boardwalk fence, the deep-creased faces of the very old men who sit on benches doing nothing for hours, the cellulite-heavy women who stretch out to dry like caught fish. In a photograph, a person is either present or absent but never in between, and you can stare for as long as you like. In real life, people move so fast it's hard to see their lights and darks.

I develop the film of my sisters with held breath. I had taken most of a roll before I found them fighting in the sand. I have heard conflicting things—that ghosts show up on film as streaky orbs of light and that ghosts don't show up in pictures at all. I clip the film to my strung-up clothesline and stand watching. Slowly, from the eye-ache of a blank, emerge the unmistakable bodies of my sisters, their hands flung out to hit, the spray of sand like a curtain. Their hair is snarled and appears bright white against the black negative sand. Their faces are full of ire and play. They rest taut in midair or curled into the ground. Their hands grip each other's arms, ankles, hair. My sisters are real.

 

3

S
WIMMING CALMS DANIEL
down. I spread my palm beneath his small soft chest so he can stretch his limbs out and be Superman. Carrie lies on her stomach on a towel and reads a book about, as I understand it, werewolf doctors. By day they perform open-heart surgeries; by night they ravage the recovery ward.

Daniel hasn't given up entirely on crying, but now he must keep his mouth shut if he doesn't want to swallow salt water, which he hates, and that physical necessity has mellowed his anger. There is new scientific evidence along these lines that smiling makes you happier. Sometimes I try it when I'm alone at home, grinning at the dark windows.

We wade out of the water, and I towel Daniel off with his big blue pelican towel, then burrito-wrap him. Carrie flips onto her back. “So I guess these aren't working, either,” she says. She means Daniel's new meds. I dig a plastic bucket out of our beach bag and get Daniel started on a castle so I can talk to Carrie covertly, in an attitude of sunbathing.

I lie on my back and turn my face to hers. Her skin is flawless. She has grown tall early, and sprouted delicate teacup breasts, but she hasn't started in on the greasy or gangly qualities of adolescence. She has my mother's auburn hair instead of my common brown. She is a beautiful tall child, a nymph. Men look her over before they notice me at her side, and then they look away. I am nervous for her and also, I admit, jealous. The rule is supposed to be no bikinis until she turns sixteen.

“No, they're not working,” I say to her. “But we have an appointment with the guy in New York on Tuesday.”

Carrie groans. “If I don't kill him by then.”

“Don't talk about killing. He picks stuff up from you.”

“Whatever.” I can see beneath her enormous sunglasses that her eyes are closed.

The kids wanted to stay with their father, but he preferred that they come with me,
at least for now.
He meant that until Daniel is returned to an even keel, he is my responsibility, because the gene that makes Daniel bipolar is from my genome and not his. Then he added that he thought we should keep the kids together, and in this he revealed himself. Carrie would love a break from Daniel, and Daniel wouldn't mind my undivided attention. It is Sam who wanted a break, not just from me and Daniel but from Carrie, too. From all of us.

Of course, the kids don't know any of this. All they know is that I'm the divorcer and Sam the divorcee, so they think that I'm the one refusing them a choice, dragging them away to a colorless Yankee life while their father weeps for them, all alone in our wonderful tumbledown ranch house in Austin. I loved that house. I can't bring myself to tell the kids that their father doesn't want them, and this makes me a little proud. It seems like the high road. Already, I bet he is not alone.

Daniel has moved off a bit down the beach, absorbed in the construction of a long winding ridge of sand. The light has cooled, and the beach crowd is thinning out. We should get to Kandy's; I didn't call to tell her we'd be late. I stuff the sunblock and the water bottle back into the beach bag and stand to shake out my towel.

Daniel runs up to me, panting, clutching the bucket, which he has filled with shells. “Mom,” he says, “I made a monster, and it came alive!”

“Cool!” I say. “Do you want to take those shells with us or leave them on the beach?”

“Listen!” he shouts. “I made a monster, like a long dragon monster, and when I put in the eyes, it
blinked.
And then it crawled into the ocean, and look, it's gone.” It's true that the long ridge of sand he was building is no longer there. The tide has come in quickly.

“Did you make him legs?”

“Her. Yes.”

“That explains it.”

Carrie sits up. “He's thinking of that sea-turtle movie.” She's right. Daniel is thinking of an IMAX nature documentary we saw a few months ago, about the life cycle of the sea turtle. We stared up at the domed screen, and when the baby sea turtles first trundled down the beach and were lifted on the outgoing tide, Daniel reached out for my hand in the dark.

“No! It's not from a movie, I saw it! I'm not lying!” His face contorts miserably; his eyes search me for faith. “You don't believe me.”

“I believe you.”

“No, you don't,” he says. “I can see in your head you don't.”

I shouldn't be surprised that he is so volatile today. He is uprooted, kidnapped, betrayed. His schedules are off. He has been battling carsickness all day. I probably let him have too much sugar. Shouldn't I be better at this? My own disorder is so slow-cycling by comparison, and so easily managed, that I sometimes forget what it used to feel like. His diagnosis is early-onset bipolar, and comes with a whole host of new and surprising troubles. Psychotic symptoms. Night terrors. Rapid cycling: a demon pulling levers inside my boy, winding him up tight, letting him spin out, and then jamming him up again. No rest for either of us, not one day of rest.

Carrie grabs the bucket from him and starts going through the shells, picking out the pretty ones. “I saw it, too,” she says, and looks at me sidelong. Though we're supposed to be flexible with Daniel, nobody has told us to lie.

“Carrie. Pick up your towel. Let's go.”

“No, I totally saw it,” says Carrie, her eyes mock-wide, and now I see that this is an act of aggression. “It walked down the beach and floated away. There it is! A giant fucking dragon Daniel made!” She points at the horizon, where the light is a purple gray, pressing down on the smoggy, striated neon-orange band above the farthest ocean. In the water, nothing but motorboats.

“Yeah,” breathes Daniel, and looks joyfully back at us, lagging, before he reads his sister's sarcasm. Before his symptoms began to manifest, he adored Carrie, but she recoiled from him the fastest and most completely of anyone. Now it has been so long since she invited him into a game or took his hand to cross the street that I wonder if he even remembers what that sisterly guardianship felt like. I take this moment to grab the bucket from Carrie and thrust it into the bag, along with our sodden towels. Daniel glowers but puts his shoes on, first the left and then the right, in his normal methodical way. I think, as we head back to the turnstile, that for once, whatever her intention, Carrie may have helped me. Ha! I think, as if we are opponents.

The boardwalk is changed in that familiar twilight way: the day people vanished and the night people materializing, stepping out from doorways. It's only seven, but some of these women must be hookers, in all that mesh. Is it possible that Ocean Vista has gone even further downhill than it had when I was a kid? The promises of night in this town feel attractive in a way they shouldn't, not to me, not anymore. It's too easy to imagine myself younger, childless, unencumbered. I need to get out of here. A group of girls around Carrie's age passes us, licking ice-cream cones and laughing. Carrie looks at them hungrily. “Are we coming back out here tonight?” she asks.

We are not, but I don't want Carrie to see how urgently I need to leave this place, or she will fight me just to fight me. I hurry us across the boards. “I think we'll see what Kandy and her kids are up for.”

“She has kids? This fucking sucks.”

“Watch it,” I tell her, and immediately regret this approach. Carrie didn't curse at all before this year. It's not the words themselves that I disapprove of, but her tiresome need for emphasis.

We pass a storefront selling Italian sausages and pizza by the slice, with a white pasteboard menu sign. Daniel is transfixed by the grill cook, who throws a shower of onion onto the hot black griddle. From the corner of my eye, I see a bench where I sat with my mother countless times, right at the top of the boardwalk ramp. I can picture her there, knitting, her legs thrust out and crossed at the ankle, her lips in their resting smile. I can feel the press of her calf against my shoulder as I play with a plastic truck on the boards. It hurts impossibly much to feel the warmth of her skin and then recall myself to the present and know that she died, and that I left her long before.

I realize I am standing still.

I turn to Daniel, but he is not where I expect him to be. I thought he was at my elbow, watching the man at the grill. I look up and down the boardwalk. The tall iron street lamps blink on helpfully. Vacationers throng past. I force my eyes into a slower panoramic sweep; maybe I am not being thorough. Mothers bend down to their children. Small black birds land skittering across the boards. I look for the salmon man, but I don't see him. Daniel is nowhere.

“Carrie?” I say. “Do you see your brother?”

She is texting. I rip the phone out of her hands, and she makes an affronted face. “What the fuck? He's—Oh.”

We both yell his name a few times, but I can feel it: He is hiding somewhere, he doesn't want to be found. People follow us with their eyes as they walk past. Although we are evidently having a problem, it doesn't concern them.

Please not this. I have managed, I have corralled, I have done passably to convey my children from Texas to New York, from one life to the next, despite everything. Not this, not
here.
I look at the cell phone in my palm and see that I am gripping it white-knuckled. Carrie's half-composed text says this:
on rd w freakshow miss u will—

“Is that what you call your brother?” I snap at her. She stares at me with a rabbitty fear. “Freakshow? Do you think that is helpful? Who the hell is Will?”

“No, Mom,
will,
like, will call you soon. I was texting Alana.”

I thrust Carrie's phone in the beach bag. Alana. It will be good for Carrie to find new friends in New York, less princessy. I should send her to wilderness camp or something. Drop her off unwilling and pick her up improved.

“Should we split up?” Carrie offers weakly. “To look for him?”

“No. You stick by me.” We walk down the boardwalk, close to the storefronts, scanning the crowds for Daniel, his lime-green swim trunks, his gray T-shirt, his thick brown curls. Of course I would lose him here; this is where I lose people. My past is leaching into my present, and even in the midst of this panic, I feel a sensation of walking a few steps behind myself.

Carrie is dawdling. What is she doing, doesn't she care? “Come on,” I snap at her. She stands up, and I see she was tying her shoelace.

“Shouldn't we call the police?” she asks.

“Maybe. No. Not yet.” Just the thought of having to deal with the police. And how stupid I would feel if, as I suspect, Daniel is crouched behind a bench watching us. We didn't believe him, and now we are being punished. He will come back when he feels we have received his message. But there was that salmon man with the boat.

I cup my hands over my mouth and yell, “Daniel, we're sorry!” A few passing faces turn to us, puzzled. Daniels, maybe, but not our Daniel. Carrie slumps at my side, almost as tall as I am, her narrow shoulders round, her chest caved in. “Daniel,” she calls halfheartedly, and it is her voice that gives me a moment of terrific clarity—my daughter calling out for my son who is lost.

My son is lost.
I've lost my son.
When I grant my thoughts this directness, I feel as if I've woken up straitjacketed—that helpless, constricted terror.

The sun has ignited the orange chemical glow where the ocean meets the sky and soon there will descend a moonless dark. Sequins on a dress passing by. Little boys who are not mine licking cotton candy off their palms. If anyone can find Daniel here, it should be me. I once knew every pier, every crawl space, every alley. And it is my fault; I am the one who brought us here. Unless this is my mother's work, and I a dangling marionette she manipulates from some high, dark balcony. Imagine: She has stolen Daniel from me to keep me here, searching, forever. This is my punishment. She wants me to know what it is to lose a child. I swallow this thought and feel ashamed. I've been in Ocean Vista for hours only, and already I am trying to blame her for what is wrong with me.

Carrie and I start by retracing our steps back out to the beach, where the tide has continued to rise. She jogs to the far pilings. I watch her slim running form in the twilight, her tangled hair switching back and forth with her gait. She comes back red-faced and shakes her head. We crouch in the beach grass to look into the sinister, bottle-strewn space beneath the boardwalk. The shadows extend indefinitely over mud putrid with dropped rotting things, a dead, spread-winged gull, twisted shapes of old windbreakers and wet cardboard, somebody's bed. “Daniel!” we shout, and the wet space absorbs the sound so quickly that I start forgetting whether I've called out at all.

When we have exhausted the dark spaces, we remount the boardwalk and stand blinking under the street lamps. Where would I go, if I were Daniel? He would know only the options visible from this spot, unless he chose to wander, but that would be unlike him. He is purposeful and decisive. Behind us, the searched beach. Ahead, a strip of storefronts: restaurants, novelty shops, candy shops, bars, pizzerias, arcades. Ocean Vista proper is visible through the alleys and down the big central boardwalk ramp: aluminum-sided buildings looking gray in the fading light, dark trees, parked cars. Over the boardwalk shops, I can see the Ferris wheel and the new spiky spinning rides. The Ocean Spirit is gone, replaced by a metal roller coaster with corkscrew loop-the-loops. I wonder how it went—a death and a lawsuit or a simple collapse. The whole thing tumbling down like Popsicle sticks.