“You’re welcome, honey.” She takes one last sip of coffee. “Okay, I really should get going.” She turns my stool so we’re face-to-face. “One last thing—and this is important. Don’t answer the house phone, and if anyone comes to the door—anyone you don’t know—don’t answer that either. And give your dad a call and let him know right away.”
I look at her for a long moment and think of so many questions I want to ask, but I know if I ask them they’ll make her nervous and she’ll probably decide to stay home, and I really do want to be alone right now. I need space to think.
“Okay,” I say.
“And call me. For anything. I’ll be home right away.”
“Okay.” I stand up and put my hands on her shoulders, steering her toward the stool at the end of the counter where her purse is hanging.
“And make sure you eat a little something with your medicine so you don’t get queasy. I stocked the fridge and pantry with all your favorites—I mean the things you normally ate and liked—before. But it’s okay if that’s changed. If you want something different, just call or text and I’ll pick it up on the way home, okay?”
“Okay.” I smile. “I’ll be fine, Mom. I will. Go.”
Her eyes well up, and she shakes her head like that’ll somehow keep the tears from coming. “All right. I’m going.” She pulls me into a hug. “You are so strong, Liv, and I am just so . . .”
I hug her back. “I love you. Now go to work.”
She nods into my shoulder. “Okay.”
We part, and she grabs her purse and keys, and I walk her to the door. After she steps out, she waits for me to close and lock it like she used to when I was little and she started leaving Sam and me for short times to go the grocery store, or run some other errand. I make sure the lock clicks into place, just like I used to do. Satisfied with that sound of safety, she heads down the walkway to her car.
I wait for her to get inside and pull away before I turn from the window and look around the quiet living room in the empty house that is familiar but not, at the same time.
And then I decide to try to find some answers.
I walk over to the dining room table where my mom has tried to help me. Spread over the entire length of the table are my high school years. My lost years. There are four rows—each neatly labeled with Post-its detailing the year and my grade in school, along with its yearbook and corresponding family photo book.
I recognize the photo books and am happy that this hasn’t changed. Since Sam was born, my mom has made one every year. The older ones, from when we were babies, are actual scrapbooks with the fun paper and little cardboard shapes and stickers and themes, but I think that got to be too much to keep up. Somewhere along the way, she switched to annual photo books, the kind you upload your pictures into and create the layouts, and then it arrives all put together, shiny and finished, and bound with the year embossed on the spine.
These books are a big deal in our house because they’re a big deal to my mom. There are very few pictures of her childhood and her family, neither of which was very happy, so she’s always made a point to document that ours have been. She’s almost never without a camera when we’re all together, and she’s always snapping away—candid shots when we’re not looking, trying to capture something that might otherwise go unnoticed. She’s the one who taught me about photography, about the magic of capturing a moment just right. And even though she’d since bought a digital camera, she always said that there was something she liked more about actual film. Something special, which couldn’t be replicated digitally.
I think that was why, when I’d asked for my analog camera for my thirteenth birthday, she’d gone outside her normally frugal self and gotten me a nice one. I’d read the instruction booklet cover to cover. Learned how to thread the film and use the different aperture settings. How to take the time to really see what the camera lens would see. But my favorite part was always the moment of surprise when I finally got to see what I had captured when the film was developed.
I think she felt the same way about her photo books when she was finished. I think she liked to see the span of what had developed over the course of each year.
I sit down with the first photo book on the table, which begins with the second half of my eighth-grade year. I flip through pictures I remember—New Year’s with just me and Sam and Mom. Dad almost always works the New Year’s Eve shift, so it was just the three of us. The opening shot is of Sam and me on the couch in shiny party hats, raising our glasses of Martinelli’s sparkling cider and blowing on noisemakers in the glow of the TV. I remember him being so mad that he had to stay home that year when his friends were starting to go to parties. But there was no convincing my dad, and secretly, I was happy Sam was there. As much as he bugs me sometimes, he always makes things more fun.
Next is my birthday, in February. I remember this too. There’s a shot of Paige and Jules and me, scarves looped loose and bright around our necks, holding on to each other for balance at the skating rink. We’re laughing so hard there were probably tears running down our cheeks, pink with the cold. I don’t remember what we were laughing about, but I do remember the feeling of that day, of turning fourteen and celebrating with my two best friends, and thinking we’d always be together like that. Again, a pang of sadness at the loss of Jules hits me. I need to find out what happened—to find her—because it doesn’t feel right that we’re not friends anymore.
I flip through the next few pages of events, and land on our spring break family camping trip up the coast in the motor home. All of us but Sam got deathly sick and spent most of the trip inside that motor home, but you wouldn’t know it from the pictures. There we are, standing among the towering redwoods, and there we are sitting around the campfire. There we are, our silhouettes watching the sun set over the ocean. It must’ve been hard to make that trip look good in the book, but Mom did. She chose the very best moments and made them the only ones for anyone who hadn’t actually been on the trip. Like a highlight reel.
I don’t really think about it too much until I flip past Fourth of July, and a whole summer spent on the lake, because that was the year we got a new boat. These are pictures and experiences I remember—Sam and me screaming on the inner tube, jumping off rocks into blue-green water, wakeboarding until the wind came up and the sun set behind the golden hills. Looking at them, I can smell the sunscreen, and feel the heat, and the freedom of summer—the joy of it. These moments are there in my mind, and being able to call them up from memory is a comfort. I sit there awhile, soaking in this feeling, before I turn the page, ready for another memory to unfold.