Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

door on his friendly goodbye.
    I drove with caution, conscious of the danger my hyper state created. I laughed at the thought of having an accident and afterward trying to explain to Mother why the box was in my car. My gaze strayed to it, sitting beside me like a smug silent passenger with a story that would, in time, come out.
    Back in Mother’s study, I sat on the floor and opened the box. A photo album. I lifted it and found a second album underneath. And a third.
    Pictures locked away in the back of a closet. Why?
    Would I find something here to jog my memory? I plopped an album onto the carpet and opened the cover. On the first page was an 8x10 color photo of Mother, young and lovely in a white satin wedding dress, a cloud of veil floating around her head. Her smile was joyous. I’d never seen this picture before. I’d never seen her smile that way. 
    I turned the page. Now she was joined by a young man with blond hair, dressed in a wedding tuxedo. My father, the man in the picture Mother kept on her dresser. The man whose other pictures I’d supposedly destroyed in my grief.
    Confused questions crowded my mind. I searched the pictures for answers.
    Leaning close, I looked into my father’s eyes and tried to feel a connection. If he’d been a monster, if he’d done unforgivable things to me, some part of me must remember. But he remained a picture, nothing more. It was hard to believe he had anything to do with my life.
    I turned to the next page. Snapshots, four to each sheet, probably honeymoon photos. Her, him, the two of them together, in some place with palm trees and a beach. Pages and pages of them smiling, laughing, kissing. Then came a photo of them posed before a house I didn’t recognize, white with blue shutters and door. More pictures taken in the yard. My young mother planting a rose bush, standing proudly beside the same bush in flower.
    I wandered through the early days of their marriage. The entire first album was filled with photos of the two of them, separately and together. They’d been happy. Their love was palpable in their eyes, their smiles, their touching hands.
    Suddenly choked with tears, I closed the book and put it aside. Now I understood, more completely than ever before, what my mother had lost. A whole life, a whole future. Love.
    With a kind of dread, I lifted out the next album. I wasn’t sure I could look at any more pictures of their brief shattered happiness. But I had to see it through. They were my parents, and this might be the only way I’d ever learn about their life together.
    I took a deep breath and turned back the cover.
    The two of them sat on a blue sofa, and Mother held a blanket-swaddled infant. The parents smiled down at the baby, whose eyes were squeezed shut. I had the sensation that I was hurtling back into another time. This must be me. Their first-born.
    I bent low over the photo to study the baby. I recognized nothing of myself in the child, but that wasn’t surprising. Infants seldom resemble the adults they’ll become.
    Eagerly I flipped the page to more baby photos, many of the child alone, others with the parents, one or both. I soon realized that these weren’t pictures of me. The fuzz of hair growing in on the baby’s scalp was blond, not red. Her eyes were blue. Michelle.
    I turned the pages with increasing puzzlement. Where was I? Why wasn’t I in any of the pictures with my little sister and our parents? I looked through to the end without finding myself.
    I sat for a few minutes with the third and last album unopened in my lap. Surely this would be the one with pictures of me, pictures of all of us together. If I saw myself with my father, something might shake loose and rise to the surface of my memory.
    I found more photos of Mother, Father, Michelle, and dozens of pictures of my sister as she grew from a baby to a toddler to a beautiful little girl of two or three.
    I fumbled through the album, faster and faster. Where were the pictures of me? Why were the pictures of Michelle separated this way, all together, with no sign of me?
    Swallowing back the sourness that rose in my throat, I forced myself to think. One thing was clear: Mother had lied to me when she said I’d destroyed all the pictures of my father. But had it been a complete lie? Why would she make up something like that? Maybe I’d destroyed the photos that showed me with my father. Yes. That must be what happened. I couldn’t imagine what else would explain