I read each slip, pulled the designated frame from stock, cut the glass, and leaned the completed work against the wall behind me. After that I wiped the counter and sat down on the short aluminum stool behind it.
I don't know how long I sat silently, waiting for the relief of an approaching customer, before I noticed the glossy edge of a photograph tucked just beneath the corner of the developing machine. It was crumpled badly, but when I placed it on the counter and smoothed it out, I saw that it was a picture of Amy Giordano. No doubt Neil had inadvertendy dropped it on the floor some days before, one of the 'free doubles' we gave out with each order.
In the photograph, she was standing alone at the edge of a glittering blue pool, clothed in a one-piece red and white polka-dot bathing suit. An enormous beach ball rested beside her, beads of water clinging to its soft plastic sides. A crinkle in the photograph sliced Amy's body diagonally in a cruel, jagged line, so that her raised right arm appeared severed from her body, as did her left leg at midcalf. Other than this accidental bisection, there was no suggestion of Amy's fate, and yet I felt a sudden, terrible presentiment that she had been murdered, and in that instant, without in the least willing it, I saw Keith standing at the end of an imagined corridor that led to Amy's room, his hands closed in tight fists, fighting the impulse that raged within him, trying desperately to control himself, the urge so fierce that he felt it as a hand shoving him from behind, heard it as a voice shouting madly inside his head, the force growing ever more furious until he finally gave way before it, fixed his eyes upon the closed door at the far end of the shadowy hallway, drew in a long breath, and began to move toward it.
'Eric?'
I blinked quickly and glanced toward the voice, half expecting to find a demon standing there, horned and red-eyed, incarnate evil. But it was only Mrs. Phelps, holding two rolls of film in a slightly tremulous hand. 'I hope I can have this by Tuesday,' she said as she placed an eight-by-ten photo of her granddaughter on the counter before me. 'Isn't she lovely?' she asked.
I quickly pocketed the photograph of Amy and concentrated instead on the other little girl. 'Yes,' I said, 'she is.'
I closed the shop at the usual time, and headed back home. Meredith was just hanging up the phone when I came into the kitchen.
'I was talking to Dr. Mays,' she said. 'He's having a cocktail party next weekend. We're invited. Do you want to go? I think we should.'
'Why?'
'So we look ... normal,' Meredith said.
'We are normal, Meredith.'
'You know what I mean.'
'Yeah, okay,' I said. 'You're right. We can't let people think we have something to hide.'
She nodded. 'Especially now.'
'Now? What do you mean?'
'Now that we know why Leo asked Keith if he'd ever been to the water tower.'
'What are you talking about?'
'They found Amy's pajamas there,' Meredith said. She looked at me quizzically. 'Haven't you been listening to the radio?'
I shook my head. 'No, I guess I prefer to avoid things.'
To my surprise she said, 'Yes, you do. Keith's the same way.'
'What do you mean?'
'You're not confrontational, Eric. You're passive. So is he.'
'What does that mean, exactly?'
'It means what it says. That you don't confront things.'
'Like what?'
'Jesus, Eric, where should I begin? Like Keith's grades, for one thing. I'm the one who makes demands. And the way he just slouches around the house. I'm the one who gets on his back, makes him take out the garbage, rake the leaves.'
This was true. There was no denying it.
'And it's not that you don't think that he should do these things,' Meredith added. 'It's just that you don't want to confront him. That's the way you are, passive.'
I shrugged. 'Maybe so. I don't feel like arguing about it.'
'My point exactly,' Meredith said crisply.
Her tone struck me as unnecessarily harsh. 'Well, what had you rather me do, argue with him all the time? Argue with you? Make a big deal out of everything?'
'But some things are big deals,' Meredith shot back. 'Like whether your son is fucked-up or not. That's a big deal.'
'Fucked-up?'
'Yes.'
'How is Keith fucked-up?'
Meredith wagged her head in frustration. 'Jesus, Eric. Don't you see anything?'
'I see a teenage boy. What's so fucked-up about him?'
'He has no friends, for God's sake,' Meredith said emphatically. 'Lousy grades. No sense of direction. Have you ever seen a spark of interest in anything, the slightest sign of ambition?' She looked oddly defeated. 'When he graduates from high school, he'll work for you in the shop, that's what he'll do. He'll deliver pictures the way he does now, except that he'll use a car instead of a bicycle. Eventually, he'll take over Neil's job. And when you die, he'll take the shop over completely.' She made no effort to conceal her disappointment in such a course. 'That will be his life, Eric, a little frame and photo shop.'
'Like my life?' I asked. 'The poor, pathetic bastard.'
She saw that she had struck too deep. 'I didn't mean it like that. You had nothing. Your father went bankrupt. You had to fend for yourself. But Keith has all the advantages. He could go to any school, follow any star.'
I waved my hand and turned away. There was something in this I couldn't bear. 'I'm going for a walk,' I told her irritably.
'A walk?' Meredith asked. She looked at me quizzically. 'At this time of day? Where?'
I never went for walks, but I knew I had to get away. It didn't matter where I went, only that I got out of the house, away from Meredith and the sense of failure and disappointment that wafted from her like an odor.
I turned and headed for the door. 'The woods' was all I said.
In Frost's famous poem, they are lovely, dark, and deep, but the sun had not yet set on the woods that evening, and so every detail of the undergrowth was visible to me, save its function, which was to hide whatever lay beneath it.
There were no trails in the woods behind the house, no route through the bramble, so I made my way slowly, cautiously, pushing aside low-slung limbs and clinging vines.
I remember the things that came to mind as I walked: Amy's disappearance, Keith's interrogation, the trouble I feared might be ahead. But more than anything, when I think of that last lone walk, I consider not the bare facts I knew at the time, nor the problems I reasonably anticipated, but the darker currents I knew nothing of, nor could have imagined.
Now, so many years later, as I wait in the corner booth of a diner on a rainy autumn afternoon, I review the long course of my unknowing. Then the words return again,
PART II
