and the lady detective to pull their heads out of their asses and call us?”
“Basically,” Josh says. “That officer said they’re swamped with the search for more evidence where they found Skitzy-Fitzy over by the lighthouse, and I couldn’t even get through to my mom. You want to give Sweeny another try?” He gives me a hopeful look over his shoulder.
“I left three messages while we were waiting for you guys,” I tell him.
His mouth winds up in dismay, and then he bobs his head, resigned.
“Why aren’t you looking through it?” Carolynn asks. She nudges the album, which is resting unopened on my lap.
My fingers have been tracing the frantic design of curling vines on the front cover. “It was just before my eleventh birthday when I snuck into Ben’s room to find this,” I say. “I only had time for two pages before he walked in on me.” Me: hot-faced and caught in the act, my hand hovering above a picture of Ben on a brightly painted carousel tiger. Ben: a wiry figure in the doorway who said in a deadly calm voice, “If you don’t put that back, I’m not going to come to your party and we won’t be friends anymore.”
I didn’t hesitate. I slammed the cover closed, leaped up, left the album where it fell to my feet, and bolted from the room. Funny, but now it’s painfully obvious that it wasn’t really my decision to turn Ben into a magical boy without a past. I was choice-less and made the best of it. That’s me, Lana I-can-make-the-best-of-losing-my-mom-and-my-stepbrother-and-my-friends McBrook. “I might not have even remembered this album if he hadn’t made such a big deal out of it,” I finish aloud.
The sticky album paper with its plastic sheath crackles as I open the cover. Carolynn scoots her thigh flush with mine. Her being here, radiating strength and spine, makes my fingers shake less.
The pictures of Ben as a child and the Ben in my head don’t match up. The photos capture a house of ivied brick; a maze of hedges, overwhelmed by flowering vines; a trellised garden; a terraced brick patio with a white alabaster fountain and a toddler knee-deep and shirtless in its water; a boy in a tiny wool peacoat, hugging an iron lamppost outside a horse stable; a boy on his stomach, his hands propped and cupping his chin as he looks onto an open book by firelight. There are photos on white powdery beaches with the aquamarine sea beyond, and others where the boy wears a miniature tuxedo and poses with other children who are spangled with ribbons and frills.
“Huh,” Carolynn exhales. My eyes cut pointedly to her. “I did not see this coming.” She flurries her pink chipped fingernails over the pictures. “Ben was loaded in his former life. Not Gant rich, but old-white-dude, seaside mansions, ponies, and debutantes loaded. Did you know?”
I shake my head, but it isn’t enough. “I had zero idea. Diane had one dress when she married my dad.”
Carolynn sniffs and looks—for once—impressed. “Whatever made them run and leave all this behind must have been really effing horrible.”
I turn back to the photos. It doesn’t make sense. Ben became angry with Gant over what it had. He spit privilege like it was the dirtiest word he knew.
As each page turns, Ben gets a few months older. He’s up to four or five by now. The pictures capture him mid-jump, leap, or monkey-dangle with two other kids. A tiny girl, about four, with large, grave eyes is usually joined in hands with a boy a year or so younger. His eyes are just as big, but rather than emitting grave intelligence, they’re in a permanent state of alarm. When the three pose on a plaid blanket by the sea, the littlest boy stares at the waves, as if they’re a roaring tsunami. When the three stand along a brick wall that’s no more than two or three feet high, his mouth is drawn into a tight O and his eyes stretch wide, as if he’s about to be pushed.
“Weird that there are no grown-ups in any of these,” I mutter.
Carolynn presses closer to me and taps the photo on the right of the page. “They’re always just out of the frame or else they’ve been cut out. This one is a weird size—square.” She has a point. Many of the photos have been cropped to exclude what’s just on the periphery, their edges slender dark borders.
“I haven’t seen