Chapter 1 The things we tell ourselves (Chiara)

We are ticking away in the silence of the old eight millimeter, flickering in and out with fall light dappling the ground of the park, flashing in spots where the film has been eaten through by the heat of the attic we have been stored away in for twenty years and better. My brother and sister and I have left Pop and Ma behind in the wind and cold to stare after us, Ma smiling and waving and Pop chasing after us with the bobbing camera. Marianne breaks away from us, feeling guilty that Matty and I have forgotten our parents in our glee. She turns her head to make sure Ma and Pop are still behind us. She looks to make sure they haven’t tricked us and quickly jumped into the car to head back home or to some far away place that children can’t go.

Matty leaves the worrying to Marianne. He is a big boy with hair sticking up in blond feathers from the crown of his head. He stretches his arms out like an airplane to show how much he’s not worried about them, buzzing down the browning grass toward the lake, away from Pop and away from Ma. He zazooooms! to the brink of the water, baring his teeth to the wind and cold.

I stop pelting through the crackling grass and turn toward the camera. I am so small and still that Pop has to stop running before he knocks me over with his stride. There is a shift, a lowering of the point of view.

There I am!

Staring up into the open mouth of the clicking camera, looking into its face, looking for its eyesnoseandears, and I smile because there’s no need to talk (it can’t swallow my voice the way it swallows my shape). I couldn’t if I wanted to--I am still years away from speaking out loud.

I am so small that anything could take me away, so tiny that my legs don’t have real knees yet, so round that all you can see are eyes, mouth, nose. The camera angles so sharply downward that the earth all around me is warped, coke-bottled, seen through a fish eye.

I used to think that the camera grew out of Pop’s right eye on the days we went out to the park or on vacation. I thought it would suck up all the sound and light that made me up and then—

Where would I be?

I didn’t sit still when the camera came out of its case and Pop started chasing us around with it. In the first days, when I learned to walk, I learned to escape. I wouldn’t let it catch me, hold me. The friends and neighbors who gathered around the tiny screen hanging in our apartment would never see my face flashing before them in Pop’s movies. They might see the edge of my houndstooth coat brushing past the lens or the back of my honey-colored hair as I made for the nearest tree or bush.

Later, I saw the work of the camera and understood at last that the thing couldn’t take me whole out of the landscape. It flickered on the wall in patterns of light that looked a little like us--sort of like us. I would look around and count heads: we were all still there. Ma and Matty and Marianne and me. I didn’t have to worry about Pop. He hardly features in any of the films—always the taker. But we were all there, in body and voice. If we had moving pictures to remember our days together, we still had to store the words in our memories. The eight millimeter was deaf.

Now we sit in Matty’s apartment watching the images of ourselves sliding across a smooth white wall. Joe sprawls, belly down, on a squashed beanbag chair. He looks like a leggy blackbird trying to squeeze through a gap in the back door of a grocery. Joe picks bits of paper and lint from Matty’s carpet while the rest of us stare at the wall, deeply interested in ourselves.

But Joe isn’t flashing on the wall with the rest of us. The films come from a time before him, when Pop and Ma were there every morning in the kitchen to greet us. When there were outings to the park and a camera to avoid. If there were voices to put to the bodies on the wall, he might look up from the dirty carpet. But there’s nothing new for him here, no role for him on that fall day that stands out so brightly in the minds of his sisters and brother. This is not Joe’s story.

The rest of us are enthralled by the clicking and darkness and flickering light surrounding us. The heat from the projector warms the room and makes Marianne’s dark curls frizz at the ends. In the films we seem younger and paler and more alive than the day we ran through the park away from Pop and Ma. Film has a way of doing that: making children look like wind-up toys skittering through leaves, black and white painting skin and sky in matching tones.

The film shows the day we remember—just another outing to the park--but it’s also extraordinary. For one moment, Pop steps away from the camera and appears in the shot, no longer the invisible man. The camera that cannot hear and cannot speak can see, and seeing is the only sense that counts. Once you see and have been seen, there is nothing to take it back. The image always stays on the edge of the seer’s mind. The voice fades from memory instantly.

In the unsteady light Pop makes his appearance. He wears a maroon sport coat and gray lambswool pants, slicked black hair and dark sunglasses. He is all swagger, walking backward through disintegrating leaves. He curls up one corner of his lips at the camera (or maybe at Ma behind the camera). We run away towards a sparkling lake in the distance beyond his shoulder. It’s all there in the images flipping past on aging film stock, playing on the wall in Matty’s apartment. But I’m not watching.

I am seeing.

Sunlight, naked, scratchy trees, a child too small for knees bending over a puddle of freezing water; a father hovering over her, miming for her to look into the unhearing camera; a mother with long, black, wavy hair and heavy white eyeshadow silently cursing and asking if this thing was really working. Then come the flashing white frames: over, over, over.

The story of this day never ends.

It began here, after this silent moment that now fades by the second. Marianne can’t remember this day in the time before baby Joe was born. She can’t even remember seeing the film before tonight. In her mind, I’d made it up. In a second it will be gone, lost to the imperfect chemistry of emulsion swallowing itself with age.

Its loss means nothing to Marianne. For me, it’s everything: the beginning of my memory. Nothing lives in my mind before this. I return to this point always, like the film itself playing out again and again, spooling on a farther spindle for the next viewing. I can project that day endlessly on the back of my eyelids, playing the image of my father in his sport coat until I can almost read the maker’s mark on his buttons. I am arming myself against loss; the holes in the fragile film stock widen by the second. I know that one day soon, the memory of that day will be nothing more than scattered splinters inside cracking plastic cases. But the images are pressed in my mind, like Uncle Alex’s old-fashioned seal into hot wax. They will stay there, flickering and flaring whenever I close my eyes.

I tell myself the story because words were never part of that day:

We are ticking away in silence on the reel of the old eight millimeter, flickering with fall light across the barren ground of a park, flashing in spots where heat has eaten through film. It’s the time before baby Joe, before Pop’s leaving, before Beatrice’s death and resurrection. Matty and Marianne and I skitter like wind-up toys ahead of Pop and his camera. He follows us, bobbing up and down in the white sunshine. Look, now: Three dots in coats disappear into the rainbow-edged holes of decaying film, disintegrating from thoughtlessness and summer heat. They won’t come out the other side.

I don’t know exactly what Matty and Marianne think as the film plays out on the wall. Matty, always with his mouth slightly open, stares with dilated blue eyes at the images before him. Marianne smiles and closes her eyes, as though she’s trying to keep something from escaping through her eyelids. She doesn’t remember the film, but it pleases her. She watches Pop backing away from the camera, smiling rakishly, and puts her chin down on her folded-up knees. This memory isn’t part of the story she tells herself about Pop, but she has so many others. I can see from her pose that she is moving away from the images in front of her, reaching for other days in her mind.

Joe has fallen asleep face down on the beanbag chair. Memories don’t touch him. He needs action, a solution to a mystery that has existed his whole life. The story doesn’t interest him. The ending does.

On the wall, Pop becomes another tiny dot to the camera’s eye. Matty and Marianne have fled far beyond its scope and I am straggling past the lens’ peripheral vision, no longer interested in the chase. Ma quickly gets tired of waiting for everybody to return and stops filming.

Marianne uncurls herself from the floor and flicks on the buzzing fluorescent lights. For a minute, their noise takes me over completely. I’ve entered a mechanical hive, with hundreds of robot bees murmuring to each other. The light awakens Joe. He stretches and rolls off the beanbag chair onto his back and reaches a long arm up to Matty, who stands above him.

“Good nap?” Matty says and grabs Joe’s hand like they might wrestle. Joe easily twists Matty’s arm and brings him to his knees. Matty laughs.

“Did you figure out how to get around Ma and NoNo yet?” Joe asks.

Marianne moves to look out the window. The film has made her dreamy and slow, unable to find words. Matty grabs the top of Joe’s hair and pushes him playfully backward. Too many beats pass after Joe’s question. It makes me uncomfortable.

“Maybe we just bring them, too,” I say.

I haven’t really thought this through.

Marianne is the first one to be alarmed at my suggestion.

“Oh, no, Kiki,” she tells me, “I don’t think that’s the thing to do.” She leans against the windowpane and considers her words, which are slow to return to her.

“Well, there’s not enough room in the car,” says Matty. He makes it sound like the most important consideration of all, though we all know he’s bluffing.

“I can’t drive from here to Florida with NoNo breathing down my neck,” says Joe.

There’s no reason for Joe to mince words. He’s the youngest and not interested in peacemaking.

“It’s just that we shouldn’t involve NoNo and Ma until we confirm what’s in the letter,” says Marianne.

I suddenly feel uncomfortable because I realize that the careful language coming from my older brother and sister isn’t for Joe. It’s for me. They are making things all right for me by telling me the best version of the story. We aren’t keeping our mother and grandmother in the dark because we fear them or dislike them. We’re doing it to protect them.

It’s not about our own comfort.

It’s a good lie.

Marianne calls this “modeling good behavior.” She’s been doing it for me since I can remember and it’s very useful. But right now, I want her to take Joe as her model.

“I see your point,” I say. I want her to understand that I’ve been listening to everything she’s ever said about the give-and-take of conversation.

“But what if we find out that the letter is true? What do we do then if we haven’t told them why we’re going on this trip?”

Joe is utterly bored by this conversation. He’s already looking at an old road atlas that Matty has given him, sliding his finger down the blue I-95 corridor running south. NoNo isn’t in his plans. The conversation slides past him as if it—and the speakers—didn’t exist.

But Marianne is thinking about what I’ve said. She’s back at the window, staring over the tops of light posts casting pools of lemon-colored light on the sidewalk below.

“If that happens, Kiki,” she says, “If that happens…”

She isn’t sure what will happen if that happens.

She hasn’t thought it through, either.