“Are you looking for pictures of the O’Rourkes?” Buzz asked, looking up from the computer. Fawn kept her eyes on the screen, fingers punching keys.
Ruthie didn’t answer. She flipped through photo after photo, pulling many of them from the drugstore envelopes they’d never been taken out of, passing over one blurry shot after another, passing badly framed pictures where the tops of the girls’ heads had been cut off. Here were the girls in front of misshapen Christmas trees, playing in the snow, digging in the garden, holding chickens. And some of a younger Ruthie: Here she was at ten, wearing a baseball cap on her first camping trip with Mom and Dad. Modeling a matching set of sweaters with Mom at fourteen. The two of them looked so odd together—Ruthie tall and skinny with dark hair and eyes, her mother short and round with bright-blue eyes and tangled gray hair. Here she was at eight, with the chemistry set she’d begged for at Christmas. Her father was beside her in this one, showing her a picture of the periodic table, explaining how everything on earth, everything in the universe, even—people, starfish, cement, bicycles, and far-off planets—was made up of a combination of these elements.
“Isn’t it amazing to think of, Ruthie?” he’d asked.
Ruthie had found the idea that we were only a series of neatly constructed puzzle pieces or building blocks vaguely unsettling—even at eight, she wanted there to be more to it than that.
Ruthie shuffled back through to the earliest photo of herself she could find: standing in the driveway, holding a green stuffed bear. She guessed she was about three in the photo. It was taken in the driveway one spring. There were still clumps of snow clinging to the grass, but Ruthie could see crocuses poking through. She was wearing a stiff-looking dress and a little peacoat, her hair in two neat pigtails.
She remembered the bear suddenly: Piney Boy. He went everywhere with her. What happened to that old bear? Most of her stuffed animals had been passed down to Fawn, but she hadn’t seen Piney in ages. Suddenly she missed the stupid bear so much her eyes began to water.
“Buzz?” she said, clearing her throat and rubbing hard at her eyes. “Would you say there are more pictures of you or your sister?”
He seemed puzzled by the question. “Um, Sophie, definitely. She was the first kid, you know. They got pictures of everything she did—like, every thing—including her first poop in the big-girl potty. By the time I came along, things like the first poop weren’t quite as exciting. There are pictures of me, sure, but not half as many as they took of Sophie.”
Ruthie nodded. That’s exactly what she’d been thinking.
“Where are your baby pictures?” Fawn asked, looking as owl-eyed as ever as she studied her sister over the top of the computer.
“There aren’t any,” Ruthie admitted.
Fawn bit her lip. “Oh,” she said, the word a disappointed sigh. She went back to looking at the screen, but didn’t seem to be playing anymore.
“Maybe they’re just in a different place,” Buzz suggested.
Ruthie shook her head. “I’ve never seen any. Once in a while, especially when I was younger, I’d ask, and Mom always said, ‘Oh, we’ve got pictures around here somewhere,’ but I never saw one. This photo of me with the bear is the earliest I can find. I’m guessing I’m maybe three years old here.”
Ruthie glanced back down at the picture. She was smiling happily into the camera, her right arm wrapped around the bear. Her coat and dress looked clean and new. She longed to travel back in time, to sit down with that little girl and ask for her story. “What do you remember?” she would ask. “Where have you been up until now?”
She closed her eyes, tried to think back to her earliest memories, but came up with nothing new. She remembered riding her bike in the driveway, being chased by one of the roosters, riding in the truck with her dad to the town dump on Saturday mornings. Being warned to stay out of the woods, told that bad things happened to little girls who wandered off and got lost.
And there it was again, the memory of her father finding her out there somewhere, carrying her back home—running down the hill, her face, wet with tears, pressed against the scratchy wool of his coat. “It was just a bad dream,” he’d told her later, while her mother soothed her with a cup of herbal tea. “You’re safe now.”
She looked back at the photos: there she was with her mother in their matching sweaters, her with the chemistry set, her dad showing her the periodic table.
Liars.
Hello?”
“Hi, Ruthie. It’s Candace O’Rourke.”
Ruthie had put Fawn to bed, and Buzz had gone out to buy them some beer. As soon as he’d pulled away, the phone started to ring. She’d answered quickly, afraid the ringing would wake Fawn.
“You were at my house today,” Candace continued when Ruthie stayed quiet, stunned. “With the wallets.”