· 19 ·
MY PARENTS STAY UP LATE TALKING. I listen to the sound of their voices through the wall. Mom’s goes up and down, fast and slow, soft and loud. Dad’s stays steady through all the sharp turns.
At one point she yells, “I’M HIS MOTHER! YOU SHOULD HAVE TOLD ME!”
Then I hear his voice, then hers. His, then hers.
No more yelling. Just vibrations through the wall.
After that it’s quiet.
After that I fall asleep.
In the morning, I wake up to Mom sitting on the edge of my bed.
“Charlie,” she says. “I’m so sorry I didn’t know.”
I yawn and rub the sleep from my eyes. “He said you had enough to deal with,” I tell her. “He said we shouldn’t add one more thing.”
“That was wrong. I should have known. You needed me to know.”
She makes me promise I won’t disappear again like that. “Not on a bike. Not on a bus. Not ever again.”
“I promise I won’t disappear,” I say.
And she says, “I promise I won’t either.”
She puts her arms around me, and that’s when I start to cry. For the first time since Andy died, the tears pour out. A whole year’s worth, in wave after wave. I can hardly breathe. I just keep on crying and crying like . . .
Yeah, like a mama’s boy.
And the mama whose boy I am holds me. She holds me with all eight of her arms.
In Andy’s darkroom Mom sets up the tools she’ll need. A bottle opener to pop the canister, a reel to take up the film, and a drum to put it in. She fills a bucket with hot water from the teakettle and cool water from a jug. When the temperature is just right, she tugs on the light bulb chain and suddenly it’s pitch-black in here. She snaps open the canister, snips the end off the film, and winds it onto the spool. Once she has the film on the reel and the reel safely inside the drum, she tugs the chain again and the light comes back. She pours in the developer and asks me to rock the drum while she gets the next chemicals ready. The room smells like fresh copies from the ditto machine at school. And like Andy’s clothes when he’d work in here.
When enough time has passed, Mom unspools the negatives, rinses them, and hangs them up to dry. While she’s filling the trays with new chemicals, we hear footsteps and then a knock on the darkroom door.
“Safe to come in?” Dad asks from the other side.
“Safe to come in,” Mom says. I pull open the door. Dad comes in and stands beside me.
“We’re ready to print,” she says.
Dad shuts the door and snaps on the Mystery Light. That’s what Andy called the red light he’d develop by.
Mom slides the strip of negatives into the enlarger, dials up the focus, and does a test strip to get the exposure right. Then she begins to print ten of my brother’s favorite things.
The first picture is of Dad on his Vespa. He’s wearing his white tennis jacket, an extra can of balls strapped to the rack.
Mom sets a sheet of Kodak paper on the easel, turns the timer to eight seconds, and flicks on the enlarger light.
Andy and I used to love getting rides on the Vespa. All that speed and wind felt like skiing, only uphill. And there was something else. As far as dads go, Marty Ross has never been much of a hugger. But when you’re on the Vespa, you have to wrap your arms all the way around him. You have to hug him to hold on.
The enlarger light snaps off. In the red glow of the Mystery Light, I see Dad wipe his eyes.
Mom slides the paper off the easel and drops it into the developer tray. She rocks the tray back and forth for about a minute. The same image we saw on the enlarger plate now comes swimming up in the tray. She moves the print to the stop bath, then to the fixer. Then she rinses the photograph and hangs it up to dry.
Next is a shot of me in our Thinking Tree. Not the nicest angle. He got my butt hanging over a branch.
Number three is a cover from MAD magazine. It shows a hand with a finger sticking up—I’ll bet you can guess which one—and the headline “The Number One Ecch Magazine.” “Ecch” was MAD’s word for disgusting. Andy loved his subscription to MAD. If you can laugh, he used to say, you can live through anything.
Then there’s Kathy. He took her portrait at their make-out fort as the sun was going down. She’s got her skateboard in her lap and a daisy in her hair.
Next comes the ski hat Andy wore when he was the Masked Marvel. The print is a double exposure over the Mammoth Mountain trail map.
Six is Mom’s Mr. Coffee machine. When he turned ten, Andy started to wake up earlier than the rest of us. Somehow he knew, without ever being asked, to flick the switch for her.
After that comes Dad’s KitchenAid stand mixer, the paddle dripping with chocolate frosting. A Neverfail Sunday.
Eight is a portrait Andy took of Mom and Dad and me. We’re at the Farmers Market, standing under the bull’s horns at Bryan’s Pit Barbecue. Instead of one, two, three . . . SMILE, it was one, two, three . . . BITE. Andy caught us with our mouths full of his favorite sandwich, chins covered in dark sauce.
Nine is our back slope in spring, looking down from the neighbors’ yard. The calla lilies look like soldiers waving white flags.
The last picture is a giant capital A with a Rudolph light on top. It’s the radio tower on the hill above the Mulholland Tennis Club, the tallest point in Laurel Canyon. You can see the tower from our Thinking Tree and from way out in the valley. You can see it from the window of an airplane landing at Burbank Airport. Mom calls it our very own Eiffel Tower. Andy hoped to climb it someday all the way to the top.
Maybe now he has.
We watch the tower floating in the fixer tray. Then I realize something and say it out loud.
“I’m not his little brother anymore.”
Mom and Dad both look at me.
“From now and forever, I’m older than Andy ever was.”
I feel two arms come around me, one from either side.
“Charlie,” Mom says, “in many ways, you’ve been older than Andy for a long time.”
We stay awhile in the darkroom. My brother’s ten pictures dry on the line.