Here is Erica, bald and fat and toothless, naked in the grass. Here is Paul Quinn, making her fly, the baby a blur in the air, his fingers spread like branches for the catch. Here are Margaret's hands, one cupping the baby's head, the other rinsing soap from her daughter's potbelly. The baby's face startled by the suddenness of water. The toddler toddles. A circle of three-year-olds around a birthday cake, the candle flames white streaks on the gray tones of the snapshot, its edges scalloped and marked with runiform: Apr 13 61. Sean turned the page and the images sprang into muted color, washed out by the sun.
Here is Erica perched on a tricycle, ready to race past the edge of the frame. Topless at some summer spot, a beach house perhaps, sucking on a nearly empty Pepsi bottle. Holding up her first hooked fish, no bigger than her hand. The colors deepen, become more saturated. She is a ballerina, a Halloween black cat, a girl with one tooth missing. Close up she resembles Norah in some ways: the eyes one size too small, the pert nose, the planes of her jawline. Years go missing, unobserved.
Here is Margaret Quinn, twenty years younger, and next to her, arm around her shoulder, stands a woman close enough to be her sister, he thinks. Diane and Margaret pert in matching shirtwaist dresses, a burning cigarette in Diane's hand, a cocktail glass in Margaret's. Their lips brightly painted, their eyes shining with the glamour of summer. In one corner of the photograph, out of the depth of focus, the blur of a girl. He imagines her chasing the first fireflies of the evening or leaping through the sprinkler or being spooked by an unseen phantom. Then Erica, her back to the camera, looks over her shoulder at the lens. Spread across her outstretched arms is the Andean shawl with the sun aloft.
Here is Christmas morning, paper on the floor, the tree twinkling and forlorn. The barest smiles. The new white skates appear too heavy in her hands. Her father ungainly in a tight leisure suit, her mother done up in a beehive, two steps behind the times.
Here is Erica and her best friend Joyce times four—a photo strip from the new booth at Murphy's. From top to bottom: both girls caught in the middle of the giggles, Joyce's hand covering her mouth; Erica, three-quarters profile, fingers to her lips, and Joyce with her mouth wide open; now Joyce is smiling perfectly, Erica's eyes are shut; then flawless, cheek to cheek, happy to be fifteen.
Here is Paul Quinn, the final time, standing to the knees in a hole; above the ground, a cherry tree, its roots encased in a burlap ball. The camera has captured his little girl half out of the picture. She grips the trunk with such fierce determination that Sean reads first anger, then jubilation in her expression. Her hair hangs down past her shoulders in two curtains. Her body now looks like a woman's, not a girl's, the swell of small breasts against a tie-dyed shirt, her hips wider at the tops of her jeans, but more ineffably, her carriage—the way she squared her shoulders and lifted her head, in full cognizance of her strength and beauty.
Here he is, the boy at the class trip to the amusement park, barely noticeable, only in retrospect. The teenagers took over the merry-go-round, laughing, long hair flying, riding mad snorting ponies, an ostrich, lion, leaping deer. Just beyond Erica, who is centered in the frame, the dark-haired boy stares so ardently that his eyes nearly burn through the paper. There he is again, at the margins of a clowning group before the Tilt-A-Whirl, all eyes forward, devil's horns over the unsuspecting, but only this boy, cascades of brown curls, wearing a shirt with the peace sign, only he is gazing aslant at the object of his desire. And a final time, he stands behind Erica, arms clasped in front of her waist, both grinning out of focus as though photographed through a scrim of ice.
On the last page of the album, here is Erica's junior-year portrait, the one the police and FBI used, the one in all the newspapers and on television, the last known photograph. A formal coda to her childhood. A girl, becoming woman.
18
“She's finally asleep,” Mrs. Quinn told him in hushed tones. “Poor thing. Her temperature is 102 degrees, and she's shaking and chattering like a bag of bones.”
At the stove, Sean stirred the soup. While he was waiting for her to tend to Norah, he had raided her refrigerator, and a pair of grilled cheese sandwiches browned in a cast-iron skillet.
“You added a can of water?” Mrs. Quinn hovered over his shoulder, peering into the pot. “It's condensed, you know.”