SO NOW WHAT? I thought. There’s nothing left for me but to face photo 4,209. But then, as if solving Miriam’s problem had cleared up part of the dense fog of my mind, an idea struck me that had all the logic in the world: maybe that visit to the cemetery didn’t mean anything. I mean, obviously it meant something, but maybe she was only honoring Chris’s memory. An homage paid to him a year after his death by a person who had known him and cared about him. Chris had been visiting the island a long time. Having the kind of gift with people that he had, being as extroverted and nice as he was, he must have made some solid friendships. And besides, why had I assumed she knew I was his wife and Olivia and Ruby were his daughters? I had been hiding it. There was no reason for her to know.
Photo 4,209 of 4,344. She had been there the same day as us. The day of the anniversary of Chris’s death. A little before. How long before? Hours? Minutes? I hadn’t paid attention the hour in the upper-left-hand corner of each of the photos. I didn’t think there was anything interesting to find anymore. Just us when we got there. From shock, I got stuck on photo 4,221. I hadn’t seen the whole sequence of photos. I hadn’t seen her leave the frame. How long had she been there?
She had arrived at 9:56 AM. That meant she took the first ferry from Robin Island, the 7:30. Nice and early, to keep from running into anyone, I thought. From 4,221, which is when she stood in front of the grave, to 4,222, there was a time-lapse of three minutes. She stood in front of the grave for three minutes without moving. Between 4,222 and 4,224 she sat on the edge of the grave. At 4,226 she got up to go, five minutes later. She left the frame where she had entered nine minutes later and disappear in 4,223. At 10:05.
I looked over the sequence of photos again, trying not to make too many snap judgments. Trying to keep my cool, struggling to suppress the welter of emotions that piled up at the main exits for my anxiety: head, heart and stomach.
She had left something on top of the stone. Before she got up, she had placed it there. Because her back was to the camera, the gesture wasn’t clear, but there was something there that hadn’t been there before. It looked like a paper, a card, a note. No matter how much I zoomed, I couldn’t make out what it was. Something the wind must have carried off, because in photo 4,254 it wasn’t there. Fifteen minutes before we showed up at 4,267, at 11:35—a little more than an hour and a half after she left—and hogged the rest of the photos until I went over to take out the memory card.
Was I sure she hadn’t been there before? I started to doubt. In any case, was that relevant? Well, yes, I must have thought so, because I went back through the 18,358 photos again. It took me two days, and I barely slept, using whatever free time the girls left me.
The result was even more disconcerting. Yes, she had been there. On three other occasions in the course of the year. She didn’t go over to the tombstone. She walked past it from behind, along the road and sat on a bench in the distance on a bench. It was practically impossible to make out her face. It was normal that I hadn’t noticed her. It seemed like she was visiting another grave or simply resting after taking a walk through there. Three times she had sat in the same place, facing the entrance to the cemetery. Was she waiting for me to appear? Why so far away? From fear? Respect? Shame?
Three times. The first for twenty minutes. The second, sixteen. The third, eleven. With an interval of a month and a half between the first and second visit. Two months between the second and the third. Two months and twelve days between the third and the fourth, the last, from photo 4,209, when she left something on top of the slab.
Three days had passed since that paper had flown away. It was absurd to go look for it. A waste of time. Maybe that’s why I did it.
On my way to the cemetery, I asked myself what it meant that the visits got shorter and more spaced out over time. Was she getting over his death? Her grief? Could she maybe help me get over mine? Four visits in one year. Was that a lot or a little? A lot, obviously. Four times meant much more than a simple gesture of saying goodbye to an acquaintance or even a friend. That created a bond between them as evident as it was suspicious. Especially because she was alone. She was hiding something too. She needed a place to cry alone, and that place was the cemetery, even if it was far away. But how did she know Chris’s grave was there? From the bench she was sitting on, you couldn’t read the gravestone, so she’d already been there before and had found the grave. The first time she was there must have been before I placed the camera. She had been five times, minimum. I felt a great deal of hatred at that moment. I needed to in order to keep standing and not sink.
The first thing I did when I arrived back at the cemetery was look at the new photos on the LCD screen of the camouflaged camera. Little time had passed, but I wanted to know if she’d gone back. She hadn’t.
I started combing the area in a ten-yard radius, looking among the shrubs, bushes, trees and tombs for whatever it was she had left there, like someone looking for a needle in a haystack, though I had already proved to myself that that wasn’t something that frightened me, but the opposite. And so the fact that it took just five minutes to find the photo, curiously very close to the tree where I had hidden the camera, left me a little unsettled. It was facedown. The white mat around the back of the photo was dirty, almost blending in with the soil. It was a Polaroid, distorted from the inclement weather it had been through. When I crouched down to pick it up, I knew it was what I was looking for. Turning it over, I saw nothing because it was covered in mud and dried earth. I wiped my finger over it to clean it. The first thing I saw was my face.
It was a family photo. My family. Olivia sitting on Panda’s back, wearing a helmet, holding the reins by herself, proud she didn’t need any help. Ruby on top of Sunset, while I held her so she wouldn’t fall. And Pony looking frightened, because she thought Olivia and Ruby were in danger and were going to fall. That photo was from our last visit to Horse Rush Farm.
After cleaning the front side, I did the same with the back, and I found a handwritten note. You finally did it, LeCaptain. Your trip was worth it, my beloved Invisible Man. It was signed Bresnam.
That photo was taken by the same person who had left it on Chris’s grave. The same one who had gone there at least five times in his honor. Suspect number thirteen. The suspect who became a suspect during my mental torment at the end of the year. The suspect who was a suspect because she had sky blue cat eyes and her dimples made me jealous, and because she was taking a break from her long-time boyfriend, Jeffrey the pilot. The one with the father with Alzheimer’s who was like a grandfather to Olivia now. Frank. Panda. Sunset. The one who had gotten lightheaded when I gave birth. The veterinarian from Horse Rush Farm. Barbara Rush. But all those Barbaras I had known had disappeared in one fell swoop. Now all there was in my mind was: Chris’s Barbara.
That photo confirmed that she definitely knew who we were and had known from the beginning. She had taken it on herself to snap that picture. A family photo. No, not you this time, Dad.
And Frank, Why not, if it’s my family?
And me, Let him get in, Barbara.
And Barbara, No, no. This is a girls’ photo. Just girls. The five girls.
And Frank, Oh, OK, all right, you should have said so before.
And Barbara, Come on, Pony, sit still. Smile. Cheese.
Two photos. She gave me one, and kept the other, the one she put on his grave.
I could put cameras and snitches in every corner of the farm, go through her house, turn it upside down and look for the lock the Master Key opened, follow all of her movements, even get closer to her. But I knew it would do no good. She knew who I was. Had she known from the beginning? Why hadn’t she told me anything? Oh, hey, you’re Chris’s wife, right? But leaving the photo, wasn’t that like leaving a visiting card?
Mentally, I went back over our first encounters, straining my memory to figure out if I’d overlooked something. The first time was during Ruby’s birth. She was very attentive and took the reins with Mark until she started feeling ill, right after wrapping Ruby up in a towel and putting her in my lap. I had taken it as her being overwhelmed and then the tension draining out of her after what she’d been through, but could it be that she recognized me?
There was one strange thing: she had never come over to greet me or speak to me of her own accord. Had she been avoiding me? It was obvious Barbara didn’t make many social appearances on the island; she stayed out on the horse farm, almost like a recluse. Was she running from something like me? Before Karen’s birthday dinner at the inn in December, we had barely crossed paths. And afterward? After that came Frank, his Alzheimer’s and his visits to the house looking for Rose. That had brought us closer. And the ponies, of course. Panda and Sunset. In that way Barbara entered our lives, and our visits to the farm turned into a habit. Which had done us a lot of good, especially Olivia, however much it now turned my stomach and made me want to vomit. Our meetings were always friendly. Cordial, never intimate. Barbara never asked personal questions. Which I was thankful for because I thought I was the one who had something to hide.
The spy clock I had in the Rushes’ house was a painting of horses, hers, running freely on the beach. It was probably one of the prettiest ones I had done. They had hung it in the dining room over the fireplace. And what had I seen through that fishbowl? Nothing relevant. A very close and traditional everyday life. Barbara and her father had dinner together every day, without watching TV or anything, just chatting, talking things over. Once a week, on Sunday, Jeffrey would join in, because even though he and Barbara were taking a break, Frank was like a father to him—he was an orphan—and Jeffrey was like a son to Frank. During those family dinners they talked almost exclusively about animals. It was rare to hear them mention someone from the island, unless it was directly related to their pets. They weren’t at all gossipy. And me? Did they talk about me? Or Olivia? Of course they did. But it was always Frank who brought us up, talking about our comings and goings at the clinic and telling stories about Pony. Or about Olivia and the Flint saga. Or one day: It’s funny that they live in the same house as Rose when she was a teenager, where I used to go and flirt with her, listening to records and eating pancakes, always with your grandparents staring us down, of course. Barbara always listened attentively without wanting to know more, without showing any particular curiosity. She only brought my name up once during their conversations. When I bought Sunset. She was happy because it would be a financial relief for them, not just because of the money from the sale, but also for the animal’s upkeep. And that was it, not another single mention.
I remembered hardly any of that, because it had barely attracted my attention. I created that recap after going obsessively over all the recordings from her fishbowl. One by one. Looking for glances, gestures, uncomfortable silences, hidden words. I didn’t find anything concrete, but there was something general. There was a kind of aura in that forced distance: maybe I was inventing it, but she seemed to have made a decision not to involve herself emotionally with virtually anything that had to do with us. At least at first. Little by little, she let herself go. Even showing real satisfaction at Olivia’s progress riding Panda. But if you ask me, it was probably all a product of my imagination. I couldn’t trust myself any longer.
“Free ride on Panda! Yay!”
I shook when I heard the phrase. Frank had just entered the house. For a moment I decided to stay upstairs, holed up in the attic, until he chose to leave. But something inside me needed, to put a word on it, vengeance.
I almost ran downstairs.
“Mommy, Grandpa Frank’s here. Let’s go to the farm!”
“Hey, Barbara,” Frank said to me. He had confused me with his daughter more than once. What I had found funny before now made me sick.
“Frank, I’m not Barbara. I’m Alice,” I said drily. And before he could say anything, if he was going to say anything, “This isn’t Rose’s house; it’s our house. Rose isn’t here. So I’m asking you please to go. Now. Please.”
“Mommy, don’t talk that way to Grandpa Frank. Let him stay.”
“Be quiet, Olivia. He’s not your grandfather!”
That dose of reality must have awakened Frank, because he immediately felt embarrassed. He lowered his head like a boy who had peed in the middle of class.
“Sorry, I . . .” He turned around to leave.
What part does poor Frank play in all of this? I thought regretfully. Maybe a big one, what do you know? I answered.
“Wait, Frank,” I said, without any real intention of stopping him, knowing he wouldn’t turn around. He had left the old portable record player.
“Wow, Mommy, you made him sad,” Olivia said, on the verge of tears. But more than sad, she seemed frightened of her own mother.
I reacted immediately. I hugged her and kissed her. She cried.
“Sorry, Oli. I’ve just had a really bad day.”
“Worse than the day Daddy died?”
“No, not that bad, honey. We’ll never have a day that bad again. Don’t get scared, OK?”
“OK . . . But one thing.” I knew perfectly well what was coming next. “Why don’t we go to the horse ranch?”
Ever since photo 4,209 burst into my life, almost a week earlier, we hadn’t gone near Horse Rush Farm.
“I told you, they’re doing renovations.”
“My friend Kendall told me she was there last weekend . . .” Pause. “Did Panda or Sunset die?”
“No, Oli, don’t start.”
The clumsy excuses I was giving my daughter had started to be unsustainable. How was I going to deprive my daughter of one of her greatest pleasures, her best therapy? Because of the fury that was still bubbling inside me, I thought in a nasty way that I wasn’t going to give Barbara the pleasure of becoming—even more so—a friend to my daughter, as if I thought she wanted to take her away from me.
I didn’t dare go see her because I didn’t know how she was going to react. I didn’t think I could fake it, pretend everything was normal, be pleasant and friendly as I’d always been. I might break down and start crying, or beg her for an explanation. Any excuse to avoid facing her, facing the truth. But I was starting to run out of hiding places.