While Smaolach and Luchóg raided the pantry, I tiptoed through the rooms to locate the front door and an easy exit. On the walls of the living room hung a gallery of photographic portraits that read mainly as uninteresting shadows, but as I passed by one, illuminated by a white shaft of moonlight, I froze. Two figures, a young mother and her infant child, lifted to her shoulder to face the camera. The baby looked like every other baby, round and smooth as a button. The mother did not stare directly into the lens but watched her son from the corners of her eyes. Her hairstyle and clothing suggested another era, and she, with her beguiling smile and hopeful gaze, appeared hardly more than a child with a child. She lifted her chin, as if preparing to burst out laughing with joy at the babe in arms. The photograph triggered a rush of chemicals to my brain. Dizzy and disoriented, I knew, but could not place, their faces. There were other photographs—a long white dress standing next to a shadow, a man in a peaked cap—but I kept coming back to the mother and child, put my fingers on the glass, traced the contours of those figures. I wanted to remember. Foolishly, I went to the wall and turned on the lamp.
Someone gasped in the kitchen just as the pictures on the wall jumped into clarity. Two older people with severe eyeglasses. A fat baby. But I could see clearly the photograph that had so entranced me, and beside it another which disturbed me more. There was a boy, eyes skyward, looking up in expectation of something unseen. He could not have been more than seven at the time the picture was taken, and had the snapshot not been in black and white, I would have sooner recognized his face. For it was mine, and me, in a jacket and cap, eyes awaiting—what? a snowfall, a tossed football, a V of geese, hands from above? What a strange thing to happen to a little boy, to end up on the wall of this unfamiliar house. The man and woman in the wedding picture offered no clues. It was my father with a different bride.
“Aniday, what are you doing?” Luchóg hissed. “Hush those lights.”
A mattress creaked overhead as someone got out of bed. I snapped off the lights and scrammed. The floorboards moaned. A woman’s voice muttered in a high, impatient tone.
“All right,” the man replied. “I’ll go check, but I didn’t hear a thing.” He headed for the upper stairway, took the steps slowly one by one. We tried the back door out of the kitchen but could not figure out the lock.
“The damned thing won’t budge,” Smaolach said.
The approaching figure reached the bottom landing, switched on the light. He went into the living room, which I had departed seconds earlier. Luchóg fussed with a rotating bar and unlocked the deadbolt with a soft click. We froze at the sound.
“Hey, who’s there?” the man said from the other room. He padded our way in his bare feet.
“Fuck all,” said Smaolach, and he turned the knob and pushed. The door opened six inches but hung fast by a small metal chain above our heads. “Let’s go,” he said, and we changed to squeeze through the gap one by one, scattering sugar and flour behind us. I am sure he saw the last of us, for the man called out “Hey” again, but we were gone, racing across the frosty lawn. The floodlight popped on like a flashbulb, but we had passed its circle of illumination. From the top of the ridge, we watched all his rooms light up in sequence, till the windows glowed like rows of jack-o’-lanterns. A dog began to yowl madly in the middle of the village, and we took that as a sign to retreat home. The ground chilled our bare feet, but, exhilarated as imps, we escaped with our treasures, laughing under the cold stars.
At the top of the ridgeline, Luchóg stopped to smoke one of his purloined cigarettes, and I looked back one last time at the ordered village where our home used to be. This is the place where it had all happened—a reach for wild honey high in a tree, a stretch of roadway where the car struck a deer, a clearing where I first opened my eyes and saw eleven dark children. But someone had erased all that, like a word or a line, and in that space wrote another sentence. The neighborhood of houses appeared to have existed in this space for ages. It made one doubt one’s own story.
“That man back there,” I said, “the sleeping one. He reminded me of someone.”
“They all look alike to me,” Luchóg said.
“Someone I know. Or knew.”
“Could it be your long-lost brother?”
“I haven’t one.”
“Perhaps a man who wrote a book you read in the library?”
“I do not know what they look like.”
“Perhaps the man who wrote that book you carry from place to place?”
“No, not McInnes. I do not know McInnes.”
“A man from a magazine? A photograph in the newspaper?”
“Someone I knew.”
“Could it be the fireman? The man you saw at the creek?” He puffed on his cigarette and blew smoke like an old steam engine.
“I thought it might be my father, but that can’t be right. There was that strange woman and her child in the blue suit.”
“What year is it, little treasure?” Luchóg asked.
It could have been 1972, although in truth, I was no longer sure.
“By now, you must be a young man near the end of thirty years. And how old was the man in the picture window?”
“I’d guess about the same.”
“And how old would his father be?”
“Twice that,” I said, and smiled like an idiot.
“Your father would be an old man by now, almost as old as I am.”
I sat down on the cold ground. So much time had passed since I had last seen my parents; their real age was a revealed mystery.