Janice Johnson - Lost Cause

His mother. His father.

People who might have loved him.

Very softly, his big sister said, “Do you see why I burst into tears at the sight of you?”

He lifted his gaze but didn’t really see her. “Yeah,” he said, voice hoarse.

More wedding photos followed, some including another young woman who resembled the bride as well as an older woman who must be…his grandmother?

Silent, staring with a hungriness he didn’t want either of his sisters to see, Gary kept turning pages. He saw the young couple with a Volkswagen Beetle, then a tiny house, run-down in the first photo but painted and edged with a white picket fence in later ones. The woman acquired a radiance along with an enlarging belly, and then suddenly a shrivelled, frowning infant appeared. He had to look up after seeing that picture, as if to measure it against the beautiful woman who sat at the table, the one who’d been that infant.

He could see it better as she became a laughing toddler and a stick-thin girl with pigtails tied with red bows. Gary tensed when he saw that the woman was pregnant again, but still felt unprepared when he turned a page to reveal a photo of another newborn baby, this one wrapped in a pastel blue blanket.

That was him. He stared for the longest time, then shifted his gaze to the cluster of photos on the next page, all showing the baby at the center of attention. The woman held him against her shoulder and had her head turned. She looked at him with so much love, it tingled in the air. The pigtailed girl making a horrible face at him in one photo, cradling him in another for a staged picture. The man—his father, giving him a bottle, smiling down at him.

In a daze, he turned the page again and saw himself sitting up, eating in a high chair, crawling, in virtually every picture guarded by his big sister. He was walking when they apparently moved into another run-down place, but a bigger one. It was decorated in colors that reminded him of the famous Painted Ladies in San Francisco, Victorian houses that flaunted their lacy trim and gaudy hues. A garden bloomed in a yard that had been bare in the first picture. He was running around, soaring on a swing set, crouching in a sandbox frowning with intense concentration at something out of sight.

The mother was pregnant again, and he tensed at how close the story was to over.

This newborn looked like the others, red-faced and raisinlike, but he and Suzanne seemed to find her fascinating nonetheless. A studio portrait appeared in there, the three kids dressed up like dolls and posed, with him sitting next to his baby sister and Suzanne hovering protectively over both.

His third birthday choked him up. His face held such wonder as he stared at a birthday cake with three lit candles.

On the next to last page, Gary—Lucien—rode a fire-engine-red tricycle down the sidewalk toward his father, who seemed to be saying something to him.

Hand not quite steady, Gary turned the final, stiff page to see mother and kids around a dining room table that looked a hell of a lot like the one he sat at now. The father must have been taking the picture. Baby Linette appeared to be banging a spoon on the tray of her high chair, Suzanne to be talking, him to be stuffing a cookie in his mouth, their mother smiling lovingly at them.

The End, he realized. As if he were unmoved, he closed the cover, but kept his hand splayed over it. It seemed as if through his fingertips he felt the life within, so much he didn’t remember but had ached for since he was little.

“It’s yours,” Suzanne said. “I made one for Carrie, one for you. There are other pictures we can look at some day, but I made copies of the best ones.”

He swore and scrubbed a hand over his face. “Thank you.”

Carrie’s smile was painfully like their mother’s in some of the photos, gentle and caring. “Feel wrung out?”

Startled, he said, “How…?” then knew. She’d looked at an album just like this—her album—not that long ago. He met her eyes and saw in them a complete understanding of everything he felt. Nobody had ever, in all his life, seen inside him the way she did at that moment. It was the weirdest damn feeling.

“We looked…close,” he said, glancing down again at the closed book.

“We were,” Suzanne said. “Mom and Dad would have hated more than anything in the world to think of us all split up, not even knowing each other anymore. I hope they can see us now, together again.”

“I hope so, too,” Carrie murmured.

Gary wasn’t so sure he liked the idea of these parents he didn’t remember gazing down on them with saintly smiles. If they could see them now, what about the rest of the time? Had they seen him, locked by his adoptive father in the old outhouse for punishment, spending the night bloodying his fists trying to beat his way out? Had they seen him screwing women and leaving before first light? The idea both angered him and encroached on a sense of privacy that was important to him.

“When you’re ready, I’ll show you a packet of love letters that Dad wrote Mom,” Suzanne told him. “And Mom kept baby books for each of us with the dates of milestones. You know. First smile. Rolled over. Crawled. For you and me, first word. They even have locks of our hair from our first haircuts.”

The panic that felt like claustrophobia had been nudging at him, but now it swelled to fill his chest again. He took a hasty swallow of wine. Shouldn’t he be happy to know that he’d been loved as a little boy? Why did the knowledge fill him with resentment and something too much like the fear he’d felt when he lost it on that curve?

“If you want to go settle in…” Suzanne suggested.

He shot to his feet. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I’ll do that.” He meant to leave the album on the table for now, to show himself if not them that it didn’t mean that much to him, but he couldn’t do it. “Thanks for, uh, doing this.” He gripped it, white-knuckle tight.

Carrie rose, too. “I’d better get going. But I’m sure I’ll be seeing you in a day or two.” She held out her hand.

He shifted the album to his other hand so he could shake.

“Big brother,” she said, with a saucy grin, then kissed Suzanne on the cheek. “Wow. This is amazing.”

“Amazing,” Suzanne echoed.

Okay. Yeah. He guessed it was. Suzanne hadn’t been that old in the last photo, and yet she’d held tight to a memory of them all together.

He envied her that memory, but was glad he hadn’t kept it to taunt him all those years.

He escaped to the bedroom while the sisters said goodbye and made plans for what to do with him while they had him. In the quiet after he shut the door, he set the album atop the dresser, lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, his gut churning.

Give him a choice between another day like this and a dive from his Harley at seventy miles an hour, he’d take the dive. Without a second thought.

REBECCA WAS SAILING down I-5 when her car died. Just like that, with the car still going sixty miles an hour, the power steering and brakes were gone.

Swearing, she wrestled with the wheel to steer onto the shoulder while she stamped on the brake pedal. She hated to think what a dead car in one lane would do to traffic. The wheel moved as if the column had rusted fifty years ago, but it did turn. The car slowed and finally came to a stop on the shoulder.

Whispering her thanks for small mercies, she sat shaking, adrenaline coursing through her body. It was several minutes before she felt steady enough to turn the key and try to start the engine again.

Absolutely nothing happened. It didn’t even make an effort. Did that mean her starter was out? But then why would the engine have died? Something electrical, she supposed. All she knew about cars was how to drive one and how to fill it with gas.