My first morning at home is uneventful. I sleep in until 11:30 am; Mother offers to warm up some pancakes, but I choose to eat a bowl of Honeycombs. Father is outside, and when he comes in for lunch, Mother announces that Stephen has something to show us all.
But Stephen does not look enthused. “Do I have to?” he says. Mother gives him one of her steely looks, so he sighs. “Fine.”
Mother, Father and I settle into the couch while Stephen hooks a laptop to the back of the TV.
“It’s a slide show,” Mother explains. “About our family. He made it for school.”
Father dims the lights, Stephen clicks something on the computer, and the title Grenier Family appears across the screen. Classical music drifts out of the speakers.
The first photo is of Mother as a child, her grin revealing two missing front teeth. Mother groans and acts embarrassed. All I can think is Oh, she used to smile. Then comes Father, maybe around Stephen’s age, riding a horse. A cowboy hat twice the size of his head slides down over his ears. The classical music fades, and the perky beat of a pop song begins. The screen fills with a shot of Father with a funky beard, kissing Mother on the cheek. She’s got long flowing hair and a gaga look on her face.
“Stephen! Where’d you get that one?” Mother squeals, obviously delighted.
“I have my sources,” he says.
A few more photos of the parents’ dating days, set to “Moves Like Jagger,” and we arrive at the wedding pics. Father reaches for Mother’s hand. She is pretty in her white lace dress, and he’s dashing in a tux, except maybe for the oversized blue bow tie.
Then there’s a photo of a white house, Mother and Father sitting on the front steps.
“Where’s that?” I say.
“That’s where we lived before we moved here,” Father says. “In the city.”
“The city?” I say. “Seriously?”
He laughs, but Mother has a funny look in her eyes. “Yes,” he says, “we lived there until right before Stephen was born. Before we decided to come out here and experience country living at its finest.”
“Your father wanted to get back to his roots,” Mother says. She’s smiling, but there’s a hint of something in her voice. Bitterness maybe?
Stephen clicks again, and now a photo of a chubby-cheeked baby fills the screen. A caption on the screen announces: Watch out, world! Here comes Jessica. I am propped up between two pillows on a couch, a tuft of hair sticking straight out of the top of my head.
“Awww,” Father says. “I remember that one. That was Easter. Your mother made you that dress.”
The outfit has fuzzy pink pompoms dangling from the neckline.
“Made with love,” Mother says.
Father chuckles. “And a little cursing thrown in for good measure.” Mother doesn’t take her eyes off the screen, her arms crossed in front of her like she is hugging herself—or the memory. I picture her young like in these photos, long hair hanging in her eyes, sitting at a sewing machine, concentrating on a tiny dress. Maybe I was sleeping in my crib in the next room as she tried to finish it, late at night, in time for Easter dinner. How she wanted her little angel to be perfect in that dress. And how perfect I was in her eyes.
“Okay, okay, move it along now,” I say. Stephen clicks to the next shot: me, elephant legs and double chin, taking a bath in the kitchen sink. Then on and on, more of Baby Me. I lose the big cheeks and get longer hair, and then another caption appears: And the handsome little devil arrives. And there’s Baby Stephen, leaner than Baby Jessica, with big round eyes.
“Chip off the old block,” Father says.
Mother has shorter hair in the pictures, but the glow in her face is as bright as when she held her firstborn. “It feels like yesterday,” she says.
We speed ahead through Stephen’s babyhood, and in almost every shot I am hovering nearby, the protective—or jealous?—big sister. Then there are shots of us playing together. I am pulling him in a wooden sled; we’re wearing giant sombreros and playing maracas; we’re all standing in front of a tent.
“That’s the time the tent blew away,” Stephen says. “Remember? We were chasing it around in the middle of the rain?”
“We?” Father shouts, laughing. “You were crying in Mom’s arms because you were scared of the thunder! Right, Jess?” He turns to me, a huge grin on his face, and for a fraction of a second I can see in his eyes that he actually expects me to get in on it, to tease Stephen with him. I struggle to think of something light to say, something not to wreck the mood, because even if I don’t remember, I like hearing them talk about it. But before I can, the grin slides away and his cheeks redden. “Or maybe that was another time. Yeah, I think that was near Vancouver somewhere.”
“Yeah, the trip to Vancouver—” I begin, because there was a photo from that trip on the bulletin board in the hospital, but Stephen pushes his remote and the next picture grabs my attention. Father and I are standing in front of a fence, and a huge bison peers through the barbed wire to our left. The hump on his neck is covered in thick, dark fur, and his horns have curved tips. This, I’m guessing, is the infamous Ramses.
“Whoa,” I say. “He’s no cuddly toy.”
“Stephen!” Mother protests. Stephen is watching me carefully, like he either feels bad about his choice of photo or is checking my reaction. Or both.
“No worries,” I say. “It’s not as if it’s going to give me flashbacks or anything.”
Stephen turns his gaze back to the TV and switches to a new photo.
Mother sighs. “Thank you.”
On the screen, Father and I are riding a big green tractor. Then there’s the young me, bottle-feeding a bison calf. “That’s baby Ramses, believe it or not. You loved the farm from the very beginning,” Father says. “Like it was in your blood. Not exactly in your mother’s though.”
He looks over at Mother and winks, but she does not look amused.
Then there are photos of us carving pumpkins and roasting marshmallows and with baskets of chocolate eggs. The last photo to appear on the screen is the one of us on the beach, the very first photo Mother and Father showed me when I woke up from the Big Sleep.
“Happy times,” Father says.
Mother stands up suddenly, her cheeks flushed. “Thanks, Stephen,” she says softly. “That was beautiful.” She touches the top of my head as she goes by on her way up the stairs. I hear her bedroom door close.
Father and I sit there, watching Stephen unhook the cables. And I wonder if Mother is thinking the same thing I am: things might be different if we had never moved out here to the farm.