Wendy Hornsby - The Color of Light

Kevin blushed at that. He looked over his shoulder and around the room where, nearly three years after his death, my father’s presence still hovered. Leaning close to me, Kevin whispered, “Was your dad always out there, watching you? Us?”

I shuddered at that awful notion, thinking about some of the stupid stunts we pulled as kids. Fortunately, the statute of limitations had run out on even the worst of our transgressions.

“He couldn’t possibly have been out there all the time,” I said. “I think someone tipped him off whenever she was in the country so he could keep an eye on me.”

“She? Your mother?”

“Isabelle,” I said.

“He was afraid Isabelle would snatch you?”

“Among other things,” I said. “When my dad took me away from her, my arm was in a cast. Dad had a restraining order against her.”

“Did she ever try to kidnap you?”

“Not that I’m aware. But she did lurk,” I said. “In the strongbox where I found the film I showed you, there were a dozen more film reels, and she is on every one of them.”

“You are a big snoop, Maggie,” he said, laughing. “You couldn’t resist seeing what was on the old reels so you went out and had them converted to digital so you could see them, didn’t you?”

“Occupational hazard I guess, just like you, Mr. Detective,” I said, feeling no chagrin. “What would you have done?”

“Exactly what you did. If I could squeeze the processing fees out of the department budget.” Kevin glanced toward the television. “Is she on that film?”

“She is.”

“Show me.”

I hesitated before restarting the disc where we left off, with Larry Nordquist running away down the street and his pals quickly dispersing.

My little group, triumphant, reassembled and continued on toward school. When we crossed the next intersection, a busy commercial street, Dad stopped following us and remained focused instead on the front of a neighborhood pharmacy. Behind the reflections of the street on the shop’s front windows, people can be seen moving around inside the store. Someone-a silhouette-stands inside the door, looking out. After we passed by, the door opened and a slender woman-Isabelle-stepped outside. She watched us for a moment before she began to follow in our direction. Suddenly, she stopped and turned as if someone had called to her. Her face registered alarm at first, and then great pleasure when she must have seen that it was Dad who called out to her. Seeing her face light up chilled me; Dad did have that restraining order for good reason.

“That’s her?” Kevin asked, moving forward for a closer look. “Your real mother?”

“The woman who gave birth to me, yes. But she wasn’t my real mom.”

“Can you zoom in on her?”

“Not very much.” I paused the last frame and enlarged it until the image dissolved into a disorganized mass of pixels. “The film stock Dad used has low resolution. There isn’t much that can be done with it.”

“Did you ever meet her?”

“The only time I ever spoke with her was the night she died. But I didn’t know who she was until later.”

He cocked his head to study me. “Why weren’t you going to show her to me?”

“Because she is not germane to the issue at hand.” I hit Stop and watched Isabelle’s scrambled image fade to black.

“ Germane ? Give me a break. I only went to San Jose State, not to Cal like you and your egghead friends.”

“You chose to go to State because you thought you wouldn’t have to work as hard.”

He conceded the truth of that, a cocky grin on his face as he rose and crossed to the television. “I wanted to play football, but I didn’t want to get hurt. Those guys at Cal are big.”

He ejected the disc. “I need the original film reel, too.”

“Thought you might.” I went to the desk and took it from the drawer.

“Copies, too, please.” He held out his hand.

“You have the only one.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“It’s true,” I said. “When the TeleCine technician at the San Francisco affiliate of my network made the digital conversion of the original Super 8 reels yesterday, he burned one disc each and downloaded the files to the Cloud.”

“I have no idea what you just said.”

“I can access the film from any computer, anywhere I can get Internet. But there is only one disc. So far.”

“God, I feel like a dinosaur.”

I was ready to say good-bye-I had work to do-but he began to walk a slow circuit around that very familiar room, probably for the last time, looking at pictures on the walls, books in the cases, various little mementoes my father kept around where he could see them. Reminders of a good life.

One beautiful spring afternoon, Dad sat down on a bench in the backyard for a little nap, and never woke up again. My mom stayed in their big old house in Berkeley, alone, until late this spring when I persuaded her to move closer to me and my college-age daughter, Casey, in Southern California. In early summer I had spent a few days with her in the house where she and my father had lived for half a century, the house where they raised my older sister and brother, and where they brought me when I was very young, helping her to decide what she wanted to take with her to her new apartment. The rest she left for me to deal with; the task was too huge for her, too fraught. So, there I was, spending a July week-maybe two-stirring up dust and occasional ghosts buried among the family’s accumulated treasures and detritus as I cleared out the place for the next tenant, the university’s housing office; the University of California, Berkeley, where my father taught, and my alma mater, was only a few blocks away.

Kevin lingered beside the leather sofa set in a niche among bookshelves. It was on that couch during the summer before my senior year in high school, on the night before Kevin left for college, that I surrendered to him that which Sister Dolores of Perpetual Sorrows, the morals and standards officer at the convent high school where my parents stashed me, referred to as my most precious jewel. Or as Kevin called it, my cherry.

Running a hand over the arm of the sofa, a wistful smile on his face, Kevin asked, “What are you going to do with the sofa?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“If you’re going to dispose of it…”

“I can just see you dragging that home to your wife. How would you explain it?”

“Did I tell you we’re not-”

I put up my hand to stop him. “I’m seeing someone, Kevin.”

“Mrs. Nussbaum told me.”

I laughed. “I don’t know why anyone in this town bothers with the Internet when we have an information resource like Gracie Nussbaum.”

“You gotta love Gracie.” He flashed a smile that was so full of sweetness that I remembered why I had once found him so irresistible.

He picked up a small framed photo of the two of us in high school, flicked something off the glass and turned it to face me. “Your prom or mine?”

“Could have been either,” I said, walking over for a closer look. “Since we went to different schools I wore the same dress to both.”

“May I?” He had already slipped the picture into his pocket before I nodded assent.

I saw the grin that suddenly lit his face, but I didn’t see his move coming. There was an arm around my shoulders and one under my legs and when I had re-established a relationship with gravity I was prone on the sofa with Kevin’s substantial bulk atop me.

“Clever move, Kev,” I said, pushing against his chest. “What’s this about?”

There was the strangest look on his face, as if he were more surprised than I was about the position we were suddenly in. Ages ago, when we were dating, he thought that particular maneuver was just awfully funny. But he wasn’t smiling as he gripped my side in his big hand and gently squeezed my rib cage as if he were checking a tomato for ripeness.