Page 215 of ClickBack

She comes back to the sofa and picks it up.

For a while she says nothing. Her eyes move over his face, then back to the beginning. I remember doing the same thing when I first had the photograph, looking for a part I hadn’t studied yet. I watch my daughter discover a face she should have known.

“Can I keep it?”

“Yes.”

She turns it over, reads what I wrote on the back, and puts it with the ultrasound.

“I’m sorry, Rae.”

“I know you are.”

It doesn’t sound like forgiveness. I don’t ask it to.

She stays beside me, looking at the pictures. Then she says, “I was sixteen, too.”

“I know.”

“You knew the age. I don’t think you knew what I was thinking.”

I turn toward her.

“When I found out about Zion, I thought about what people would say about you. How hard you’d worked. School, the house, everything. I thought I’d made them right.”

“No, Rae.”

“Let me finish.”

I put my hands together and listen.

“I loved my baby. I wanted him. I also thought you would look at me and wonder why you had done all that if I was going to make the same mistake.”

“I was scared for you.”

“I know that now. Then I thought maybe you were ashamed of me and loved me too much to say it.”

I look at the pictures in her lap. Two versions of my daughter, one a small gray shape and one sitting beside me telling me I had failed to reach her.

“I didn’t want anyone to hurt you the way they hurt me,” I say. “I thought I could keep you prepared enough.”

“Don’t give people anything to use against you.”

I look up at her.

“You said that all the time,” she tells me.

My mother’s voice comes back so clearly that I can hear which word she would stress.

“My mother said it to me.”

“You never told me.”

“I thought I was doing things differently.”

“You did. You came when I called. You helped me finish school. You loved Zion from the minute you knew he was coming.”

She presses the corner of the photograph flat against the envelope.