periods. Just me, my dad, and some pimply teenage advertisement for celibacy who’d loved my dad’s first book.
I saw that photo the moment I woke up every morning, and it was usually the last thing I saw before I went to bed. And why? Just to prove to myself that I hadn’t forgotten him?
“That’s a good one,” Zelda said, handing me back the notebook. “But I have to ask—what inspired it? I haven’t known many men who write short stories postcoitally.”
It’s for my applications. I want you to see I’m serious about going to college.
“I know you are, darling.”
She kissed me on the cheek.
But do you really think I’m arrested? I wrote.
“I think you’re arresting,” she said with a smile.
I’m being serious. Yesterday you told my mom you thought I was arrested. Did you mean it?
She wrapped her arms around me. “Yes. But I didn’t say it to be hurtful. And I think things are already changing. Can’t you feel it?”
I nodded. The rain was playing music on the shingles over our head. Out the attic window I saw it patter on the crooked trees and bent weathervanes and wrought-iron fences of the Sunset. I’ve always liked the rain, maybe because I grew up with it always coming around. It kept things clean. It washed things away. I’d often wondered what people did in cities where it never rained. How could they ever start fresh?
“Where are you going?” Zelda asked.
I climbed out of bed and down the attic ladder. In the kitchen, I got a garbage bag out from under the sink. The only question was where to begin.
SYMBOLIC GESTURES
I NOTICED THE ONE ABOVE the television first, because how could I miss it? How could anyone miss a foot-tall photograph in a wide silver frame, its subject staring down at you like some sort of judgmental religious icon every time you just wanted to relax with the tube? When I took it down, a rectangular shadow of white was left on the wall. It reminded me of this photograph we’d seen in history class, taken in Hiroshima after the bomb had been dropped, in which someone’s silhouette had been permanently etched into the cement by the force of the blast.
In the kitchen, a tiny photograph of the three of us at Disneyland hung from a nail above the toaster. I’d had it framed for my mom last Christmas. In the picture, I was small and chubby, smiling hugely, with a pair of black plastic mouse ears on my head. My mom wore a neon fanny pack. There was a crack of splintering glass when it landed in the garbage bag with the other photo.
Three different pictures were mounted on the wall of the stairway. One of them was a cartoon someone had drawn, in which my dad’s stubbly beard became a wide bush with a bird inside it and my mom’s tiny ears had been transformed into mere nubs on the side of her head. NYC, 2004 was written at the bottom. Crack. Next to that was a wedding photograph, taken at some epically shitty photography studio. My parents were posed against a swirly blue background, spooning standing, the way people always stood in pictures but never stood in real life. My mom’s dress made her look like a cheap cupcake, and my dad’s suit made him look like a bad waiter. Crack. The topmost picture was again of all three of us, but I was just a baby in this one. My parents were co-cradling me, staring down at me with this look in their eyes like this kid was going to be the solution to all their problems. Crack.
The upstairs hallway was a veritable museum of photographs, and it included the true centerpiece of the collection. At first glance, the image in question looked pretty ordinary—hardly deserving of the big bronze frame. My dad was sitting on the couch in front of his laptop, looking up at the camera with his usual annoyance.
It was the last photograph we had of him, taken just a week before the accident. Crack.
In my mom’s room, I did my best not to look at the photos as I picked them up and dropped them into the bag, but I accidentally caught sight of one that had been taken on our trip to Colombia, in which my dad and I were making a sand castle on the beach. The whole trip came rushing back to me in one enormous wave-crash of memories. My