I touch its matte surface. It’s been a long time since I held a real picture rather than simply scrolling through memories on my phone. It’s a happy photo taken at a backyard barbecue. There’s a date stamped on the back. Two years ago, almost to the day.
“The judge had all this information,” Jenny says.
“Correct,” Franny answers. “But he didn’t have the mug, and her DNA is clearly on it. It was matched to the DNA we have on file for her.”
“But it’s the mug she used every day, right?”
“Your point being?”
“It isn’t any better evidence she was there than anything else we have. Not based on the criteria you insisted we put in place.”
Everyone waits for Franny to respond. She takes a moment, possibly counting to ten in her head before proceeding as we’d discussed when we’d prepped for the meeting on the phone last night.
“I agree with you. It alone doesn’t prove anything.”
“Then why are we here?”
“Hush, Jenny,” I say. “Let her make her case.”
Jenny slouches down and thrusts out her bottom lip. I can count the ridges in her spine through her cream linen shirt.
Franny gives me a grateful smile. “I think if you turn to the last page of the packet, you might feel differently.” We do as she asks. There’s a grainy photograph of a woman standing at the elevators. It is time-stamped 9:56 a.m. “They found this in a cache of backups on the cloud,” Franny says.
She explains. The company that owned the building used a cloud service to back up its security camera footage. But since all the passwords and people with authorization were blown apart in the blast—their offices were located on the first floor, next to the day care—access had proven difficult. We’d get packets of information at a time without, it seemed, any rhyme or reason.
“Look at the time stamp,” Franny says. “It’s her. She’s in the building right before it happened. The lipstick on the cup matches her DNA, the cup she washed meticulously every day, according to anyone who knew her. I think there’s sufficient evidence to bring this to a vote. Do I have a second?”
“I second,” Jenny says, perhaps to make up for her former criticism.
“The vote has been seconded. I call the vote.”
The voices ring around the room, and I don’t have to count to know.
The ayes have it.
• • •
“Thanks for the support in there,” Franny says at the coffee shop where we go after our meetings to grab a coffee and decompress. “What’s gotten into Jenny?”
I poke my finger at the foam in my latte. The server’s made a smiley-face pattern in it, perhaps sensing we have something to celebrate but don’t quite know how to do it.
“It’s hard, all of this. It gets to all of us sometimes.”
“I know.” Franny picks up and then discards the cookie she bought. Though she’s thinner than she was, she still struggles with her weight, something I’ve tried to get her not to care about. “Why don’t I feel happier?”
“About what happened today?”
“Yeah. I mean, I got what I wanted . . . for the family.”
“For your family.”
“It’s hard for me to think of them like that sometimes.”
“Has something happened?”
“What? Oh, no. They’ve been so kind, especially Mr. Ring.”
“I’m sure you can call him Joshua.”
She nods. There’s something about the gesture that reminds me of her mother, and I’m struck again at how her face has changed since I first met her. She looks younger now, freer, though she wasn’t old to begin with. “He’s told me that many times, and I do mostly. Emily and Julia call me Auntie Franny, even though that’s not right.”
“It does rhyme, though.”
“You’re trying to cheer me up.”
“Is it working?”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.”
“But you have to take care of yourself, too. That’s one of the things I learned in group. It feels good to help other people, but you can’t give all of yourself to them. You have to reserve something for yourself. There was this woman . . . kind of like the group leader, you know, but unofficially? Her name was Erika. Anyway, she called it boundaries. ‘You need to boundary up.’ That’s what she’d always say.”
I put my hand on her forearm. The hair on it is thick for a woman, like I’ve seen on some anorexics, though Franny has enough meat on her bones. “You’re wise beyond your years. And your mother would’ve been very proud of you.”
“You think so?” Franny’s eyes are brimming with tears.
And even though I actually have no idea, because what do I know about her mother now, if she’d keep something like Franny from me, I smile and say, “Of course I do. Now eat your cookie.”
10
THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
KATE
If Kate hadn’t already shattered her glass, it would’ve dropped to the ground as surely as gravity. Instead, her eyes moved reflexively to the television, where she saw not herself but images of her children. Her husband. Her best friend. Photographs she didn’t remember taking but that showed them all at their best. Missing front teeth and dress-up clothes and toys scattered under a Christmas tree. Ghosts, all of them. She was looking at ghosts.
“Aren’t kids funny?” Andrea said, half to herself and half to Kate. “Sometimes people look like other people, Willie. It happens.”
Willie frowned and looked at Kate. “Not Kwait?”
“No, honey,” Kate said. “I’m right here, see?”
She stuck out her tongue, catching a disapproving glance from Andrea but a laugh from the boys. She walked to the television—the announcer was focusing on another broken family now—and tapped it twice to snap it off.
“Who wants to go to the park?”
• • •
Although it had been her suggestion, an hour later, bundled up and with a cold wind whipping against her that made her cheeks feel raw, almost bruised, Kate regretted her mention of the park. The boys loved it, their small
