The second is a picture of Friday and her crazy little dog. Coralie composed the image to make it look like some sort of Victorian family portrait, Friday glancing austerely down the lens out of her eye as she petted Algie. The third image is of me—a profile shot. The background is bright and overblown, so much so that I’m almost completely in silhouette. I can still make out the deep frown on my face, though. The look of intense concentration in my eyes. I have no idea what I’m doing or why I look so focused. After a while, Coralie grew clever about the way she took her photos. She would find the right moment when I was well and truly distracted or involved in some task and that’s when she would get me, like a goddamn sniper.
I move onto image number four and disappointment wells up deep inside me. Seems I am going to lose a few of the photographs after all. The paper remains white. I give it an extra minute to make sure nothing will develop on it, but it remains blank. Or at least I think it does until I’m taking it out of the developer, letting the fluid run off it, and I notice the small dark smudge in the bottom left hand corner. I squint at it, trying to figure out if it’s an accidental shot Coralie took or if it’s something else. The small dark patch is too small to be sure either way, so I slide it into the fixer and let it sit while I move onto the next image. It’s the same deal. A bigger dark patch this time, a scribble of black against a white background. It’s definitely something. Perhaps writing? Something she wrote out for me?
I move quickly, shifting over the paper and setting five new images in the developer. Each of these comes out the same way, with random dark shapes and lines on them. I rotate them into the fixer and shift the other images out to hang dry on the line overhead. It doesn’t take long to finish up the whole roll of film. There are more pictures of me in there, plenty of Coralie smiling happily, but there are nine of the white shots with the black markings on them.
Once the paper has dried a little, I take down the photos and place them in a grid on the floor, three wide and three high, and I stare down at them, waiting for them to make sense. It takes some rearranging, but I eventually figure out where the lines and smudges connect.
It’s not writing after all. It’s a painting. A painting of a bird. It would have been huge. It’s on a canvas—must have been painted onto the material I bought for her, since her father refused to buy her supplies. It’s beautiful. Now that I’m looking closer I can see that there isn’t just one bird as I’d first thought, but actually three, one inside the other, the smallest just a tiny little silhouette made with three twists of a brush. It’s such a simple painting, definitely not the most complicated thing Coralie has ever painted, but it’s beautiful because I know what it represents. It’s me and her. And our baby.
This is how she was going to tell me. She came over to the house one day when we were fighting and she wanted me to develop her camera. I’d been a stubborn asshole and refused. So this is what she’d wanted to show me. I crouch down, looking down on the photographs, my heart stumbling all over the place. I’m not used to feeling like this, so torn, being tugged and pulled in so many directions all at once.
I’m angry with her. She messed up. But then I messed up, too. We both did. If it hadn’t been then, perhaps we would have done something later on, hurt each other, done something stupid to send us hurtling away from one another on different flight paths. I was so sure of us back then that I never thought it would happen, but who knows.
I’ve wanted our paths to cross again, for us to find one another and fix the hurts of the past twelve years, but Coralie’s confession has changed things. The question is, has it changed things enough to make me give up the woman I love? I can’t stop staring at the painting Coralie painstakingly took shots of for me to tell me that she was carrying my child. She was so afraid at the time—petrified, in fact. I remember all too well. But this painting isn’t carrying a message of bad news. It’s simple and fragile, but it looks to me like a message of hope. Sure, she was nervous at first about what I was going to say, but she was hopeful. The way the tiny bird in the center of the picture is being cradled by the other two is loving and protective.
We’re a family in this picture; the three of us would have been a perfectly flawed family, so full of happiness and joy. It would have been hard. It would have been difficult, but it would have been worth it.
Carefully, I collect up the photographs and stack them one on top of the other, sighing under my breath. I’ve been so fixated on Coralie failing to tell me the truth about how she lost the baby that I haven’t really focused on the real person I should be angry at.
Malcolm.
That motherfucker took so much from his daughter. He took her childhood from her. He took her innocence. And then he took our baby.
Rage floods through me, polluting me from the inside out. What kind of a man would raise his fists to a child? Especially his own child? Coralie is tall for her age, but she was willowy and hardly strong. Not compared to him, anyway. She was vulnerable, and he abused his strength, used it to control and manipulate her to his will. He was a vile old man without a single compassionate bone in his body.
It’s taken me a long time to reach boiling point, but now that I’m here, now that I’m on fire and I’m so choked with rage that I can hardly breathe, I can’t seem to calm myself down.