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But when my phone blinked to life, I saw the text notification from my mom.
I opened it. Clicked her stupid link.
And when the website she wanted me to see popped up on my phone’s screen, I gasped out loud.
She’d found the photographer!
The same image that had been the focal point of our home—the focal point of my mom’s entire life—for as long as I could remember was right there in front of my eyes.
I sat up, crisscrossing my legs and scrolling down the page until I came to a description of the picture. The website had been made by an art collective as a place where different artists could share and sell their work. There was a disclaimer at the top of the site’s home page stating that some of the artwork was old and no longer for sale, but that the website owner didn’t have the heart to take any of the artists’ work down even if they were no longer active on her site.
The site itself looked dated, but there was no denying the photograph in front of my eyes was the same one hanging on my mom’s bedroom wall.
The description read:
River of Dreams
Taken with a Nikon F5, using 35mm film, this image was captured near Mount St. John in the Bridger-Teton National Forest on the Holly Lake Trail, approximately half a mile from the southeastern-most point of Holly Lake. The image was taken in late August on a camping trip I took with my wife and my son, Junior. We saw moose that day, but Junior scared them off when he jumped in the water, laughing and dancing because he was so excited. He cried when they ran away, and I captured this image of the creek as his soft, heartbroken sounds filled the air. We saw other animals later that day, though, so he wasn’t sad for too long. But I will never forget this spot in the mountains, a place I hope to take him back to every year. Disclaimer: I am not a professional photographer, just a hobbyist, but I hope you can see the love I have for my son in this picture, and how much I love these mountains. Everybody’s talking about digital cameras these days, but for my part, I will always love film best.
–Redmond Graves, Wisper, WYO
Red Graves was the mysterious photographer? The same one who took the picture my mom loved almost as much as she loved her children?
The owner of The Red Wild Outdoors Red Graves?
Shut the fucking fuck up!
But then I remembered the boxes of photo albums in the back room at Red Wild and the tripod I’d tripped over and broken. Well, shit. Now I would have to replace it.
When I clicked on the highlighted “See More From This Artist,” a grid of photos appeared, seemingly all taken by Red. The pictures were all similar in tone and subject matter, and my mom’s favorite picture popped up at the end of the first row.
None of the photos were clickable, so I assumed that meant they were no longer for sale, or maybe they never had been and the website was just a way for Red to display his hobby. Was that what people did pre-Facebook? Weird.
I saw images of mountains, trees, and lakes, camping tents and evening fires under the stars. There were a few animal pics, some of moose and river otters, their sleek bodies slipping through the water on whatever merry task they had been on their way to do, and there were photos of eagles and hawks, too, but there were also pictures of people.
Four people to be exact.
In one photo, an old-school selfie because I could see Red’s arm holding the camera up above their faces, I saw a much younger Red. He used to be really handsome, tall with a full head of brown hair, and his other arm rested easily around the shoulders of a beautiful woman with long, poufy, ash-blond curls. Both were smiling. Both seeming to be enjoying their time together. It was clear that hiking and camping had been things Red enjoyed with his family.
A little boy featured in many of the pictures, with the same color hair as the woman. He looked to be five or six years old.
Red’s little family looked happy, but as I continued to scroll, another woman began to appear.
At first, she seemed to be a third wheel to the family—she was included with the family, but always off to the side or separate somehow—but as time went on, the new woman was almost always photographed with Red’s wife. At least, that was who I assumed the blonde had been.
The second woman looked eerily like me. Same dark hair, cut similarly like mine in a sharp bob to her chin. She was short, and she laughed a lot.
The little boy always seemed to be captured in pictures taken away from the women, playing in the mud at the edge of a lake or with a plastic bucket and shovel near their campsite. “Digging up ‘clams,’” one picture had been captioned. His smile grew less and less frequent, until, in the second-to-last picture, his eyes looked tired and vacant, like he wished he was anywhere else. Like he had been a witness to his mom falling in love with someone who was not his dad, and it had emptied him.
The very last picture was of the two women embracing. It looked intimate, and it felt as if the photographer was on the outside of a small group of friends, looking in and wondering how he’d gotten stuck out in the cold.
And that was it. I searched the rest of the site but only found that one page of photographs. There was a definite retro vibe to them, like they’d been scanned and then uploaded to the site. They definitely weren’t digital pics, and they’d all been posted years ago at the dawn of the internet, if the dates below each image were correct. Nothing before. Nothing after.
Even I could see the heartbreak in those pictures.
I could practically taste it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
