Harlan Coben: Just One Look

The message light on the answering machine was blinking. One message. She checked the Caller ID and saw that the number was blocked. She pressed play and was surprised. The voice belonged to an old… friend, she guessed. Acquaintance was too casual. Father-figure was probably more accurate, but only in the most bizarre sense.

“Hi, Grace. It’s Carl Vespa.”

He did not have to say his name. It had been years, but she’d always know the voice.

“Could you give me a call when you have the chance? I need to talk to you about something.”

The message beeped again. Grace did not move, but she felt an old fluttering in her belly. Vespa. Carl Vespa had called. This could not be good. Carl Vespa, for all his kindnesses to her, was not one for idle chitchat. She debated calling him back and decided for the time being against it.

Grace moved into the spare bedroom that had become her makeshift studio. When she was painting well-when she was, like any artist or athlete, “in the zone”-she saw the world as if preparing to put it on canvas. She would look at the streets, the trees, the people and imagine the type of brush she would use, the stroke, the mix of colors, the differing lights and casts of shadows. Her work should reflect what she wanted, not reality. That was how she looked at art. We all see the world through our own prism, of course. The best art tweaked reality to show the artist’s world, what she saw or, more precisely, what she wanted others to see. It was not always a more beautiful reality. It was often more provocative, uglier maybe, more gripping and magnetic. Grace wanted a reaction. You might enjoy a beautiful setting sun-but Grace wanted you immersed in her sunset, afraid to turn away from it, afraid not to.

Grace had spent the extra dollar and ordered a second set of prints. Her fingers dipped into the envelope and plucked out the photographs. The first two were the ones of Emma and Max on the hayride. Next came Max with his arm stretched up to pick a Gala apple. There was the compulsory blurry shot of flesh, the one where Jack’s hand had slipped too close to the lens. She smiled and shook her head. Her big doofus. There were several more shots of Grace and the children with a variety of apples, trees, baskets. Her eyes grew moist, the way they always did when she looked at photographs of her children.

Grace’s own parents had died young. Her mother was killed when a semi crossed the divide on Route 46 in Totowa. Grace, an only child, was eleven at the time. The police did not come to the door like in the movies. Her father had learned what happened from a phone call. Grace still remembered the way her father, wearing blue slacks and a gray sweater-vest, had answered the phone with his customary musical hello, how his face had drained of color, how he suddenly collapsed to the floor, his sobs first strangled and then silent, as if he could not gather enough air to express his anguish.

Grace’s father raised her until his heart, weakened from a childhood bout with rheumatic fever, gave out during Grace’s freshman year of college. An uncle out in Los Angeles volunteered to take her in, but Grace was of age by now. She decided to stay east and make her own way.

The deaths of her parents had been devastating, of course, but they had also given Grace’s life a strange sense of urgency. There is a left-behind poignancy for the living. Those deaths added amplification to the mundane. She wanted to jam in the memories, get her fill of the life moments and-morbid as it sounds-make sure her kids had plenty to remember her by when she too was no more.

It was at that moment-thinking about her own parents, thinking about how much older Emma and Max looked now than in last year’s apple-picking photo shoot-when she stumbled across the bizarre photograph.

Grace frowned.

The picture was near the middle of the pack. Closer to the back maybe. It was the same size, fitting neatly in with the others, though the backing sheet was somewhat flimsier. Cheaper stock, she thought. Like a high-end office-supply photocopy maybe.

Grace checked the next picture. No duplicate this time. That was strange. Only one copy of this photograph. She thought about that. The picture must have fallen in somehow, mixed up with another roll.

Because this photograph did not belong to her.

It was a mistake. That was the obvious explanation. Think for a moment about the quality workmanship of, say, Fuzz Pellet. He was more than capable of screwing up, right? Of putting the wrong photograph in the middle of her pack?

That was probably what was going on here.

Someone else’s photograph had gotten mixed in with hers.

Or maybe…

The photograph had an old look about it-not that it was black-and-white or antique sepia. Nothing like that. The print was in color, but the hues seemed… off somehow-saturated, sun-faded, lacking the vibrancy one would expect in this day and age. The people in it too. Their clothes, their hair, their makeup-all dated. From fifteen, maybe twenty years ago.

Grace put it down on the table to take a closer look.

The images in the photograph were all slightly blurred. There were four people-no, wait, one more in the corner-five people in the photograph. There were two men and three women, all in their late teens, early twenties maybe-at least, the ones she could see clearly enough appeared to be around that age.

College students, Grace thought.

They had the jeans, the sweatshirts, the unkempt hair, that attitude, the casual stance of budding independence. The picture looked as if it’d been snapped when the subjects were not quite ready, in mid-gather. Some of the heads were turned so you only saw a profile. One dark-haired girl, on the very right edge of the photo, you could only see the back of her head, really, and a denim jacket. Next to her there was another girl, this one with flaming-red hair and eyes spaced wide apart.

Near the middle, one girl, a blonde, had-God, what the hell was that about?-her face had a giant X across it. Like someone had crossed her out.

How had this picture…?

As Grace kept staring, she felt a small ping in the center of her chest. The three women-she didn’t recognize them. The two men looked somewhat alike, same size, same hair, same attitude. The guy on the far left too was not someone she knew.

She was sure, however, that she recognized the other man. Or boy. He wasn’t really old enough to call a man. Old enough to join the army? Sure. Old enough to be called a man? He was standing in the middle, next to the blonde with the X through her face…

But it couldn’t be. His head was in mid-turn for one thing. That adolescent-thin beard covered too much of his face…

Was it her husband?

Grace bent closer. It was, at best, a profile shot. She hadn’t known Jack when he was this young. They had met thirteen years ago on a beach in the Côte d’Azur in southern France. After more than a year of surgery and physical therapy, Grace was still not all the way back. The headaches and memory loss remained. She had the limp-still has it now-but with all the publicity and attention from that tragic night still suffocating her, Grace had just wanted to get away for a while. She matriculated at the University of Paris, studying art in earnest. It was while on break, lying in the sun on the Côte d’Azur, that she met Jack for the first time.

Was she sure it was Jack?

He looked different here, no doubt about it. His hair was a lot longer. He had this beard, though he was still too young and baby-faced for it to come in full. He wore glasses. But there was something in the way he stood, the tilt of his head, the expression.

This was her husband.

She quickly sifted through the rest of the roll. There were more hayrides, more apples, more arms raised in mid-pick. She saw one that she’d taken of Jack, the one time he’d let her have the camera, control freak that he was. He was reaching so high, his shirt had moved up enough to show his belly. Emma had told him that it was eeuw, gross. That, of course, made Jack pull up the shirt more. Grace had laughed. “Work it, baby!” she’d said, snapping the next photo. Jack, much to Emma’s ultimate mortification, obliged and undulated.