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“It’s at the end of the hall to the left,” Mom said from somewhere behind me, but Adam was already there, flicking the light switch as if he’d lived here for years. The ladder stairs to the attic came down with a groan, and a scattering of dust fell into Adam’s hair.
There was more dust under Adam’s feet, and Richard pointed to it. “Gee, I hope that’s not asbestos,” he said, in a tone that suggested he’d like nothing more than for it to be asbestos, that asbestos was just the thing to liven up this boring party.
“There’s a trunk,” Mom was saying as Adam began climbing. “Actually, there’s more than one. Big old-fashioned ones. I’m not sure which is the right one. Do you need a flashlight?”
Adam’s voice floated down from above. “I’ve got my phone. Yeah, Isee the trunks. Okay, just a sec—” He broke off, and for a while there was only the sound of objects scraping across the floor, old hinges creaking, the occasional cough. Then: “Huh.” He reappeared in the opening above us. “The albums aren’t here,” he said.
Diana made a squawking noise. “What? But you’ve barely looked, they have to be—”
Adam’s voice was apologetic. “Sorry, I mean, they definitely were here. I found one trunk with a big empty space where they could have been, and there’s one photograph loose, wedged in the liner. But things are kind of a mess up here. There’s a bunch of trunks open and everything’s tossed around. Maybe someone came up looking for Christmas ornaments and ended up moving the albums at the same time?”
“Moving them?” Diana put her hands on her hips and glared up at him and then around at the rest of us. “Stole them, you mean.”
“I can look some more,” he said, but Diana ignored him.
“Somebody stole them,” she said again. Her accusatory gaze skated past me, past her husband, lingered briefly on my mother, and settled on Richard. “You.”
Richard put a hand over his heart and went wide-eyed. “Moi? If that’s not the most ridiculous—”
“Of course you! You knew I wanted them! I told you I was planning to look at them with Mother on Christmas morning. Our holiday photos, her wedding photos—you know how she loves to reminisce about Daddy. I was going to...” She trailed off. Her voice was shrill. “It was going to be so lovely, and you had to ruin it. Youalwayshave to ruin it. You wanted to hurt me.”
He scoffed. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Diana’s tone turned bitter. “Then you did it to upset Mother. And don’t you dare try to tell me you don’t have any bad blood with her.”
Richard had gone very still. The hallway was dim, lit by a single low-watt bulb in a brass sconce on the wall—but it was clear from the way his features pinched together that Diana had struck a nerve.
“No,” he said finally, “I won’t deny that. Why should I? MaybeI do want to hurt her. Maybe she hurt me plenty, and I’d like a little payback after all these years. But more importantly, maybe I think that the way you’re all coddling her, pretending like she was some great mother, is a repulsive fucking farce, and you should all be ashamed of yourselves. Including you, you simpering little shit,” he said, pointing a finger at Adam, who was frozen halfway down the attic stairs with his mouth hanging slightly open. “How’s that? Enough honesty for you?”
Nobody spoke. My mother looked stricken. Richard said, “I thought so,” pushed past me, and started down the stairs.
“You’re going to tell me where you put those photographs!” Diana shrieked, and Richard’s voice floated up, singsong, from somewhere on the stairs.
“Sisters,” he crooned. “Sisters, there were never such deluded sisters!”
Diana disappeared after him.
William, who had been so silent throughout this exchange that I hadn’t even realized he was there, followed his wife—but as he left, he paused in front of Adam. “Welcome to the family,” he said.
Adam didn’t come back downstairs with us. “I don’t want to be in the way,” he said, and nobody had to ask of what. Richard and Diana were still arguing loudly in the kitchen, nominally about the photographs, but with so much bitterness and contempt that it was clear the missing mementos were just a front for a lifetime’s worth of grievances. I came back in just as Diana stopped shouting and started wheedling: “You don’t even have to tell me exactly where they are, just give me a hint.”
It was entirely the wrong tactic to use on my uncle, who looked at her with open disgust. “If I knew where they were, and I’m not saying I do, but if I did? I certainly wouldn’t tell you,” he said, then grabbed his wineglass and a fresh bottle of red and added, “For your own good,” before he stalked out of the room.
My mother came in and laid a hand on Diana’s shoulder. Her otherhand held the one photograph Adam had found wedged in the liner of the trunk. It was a picture of my grandfather, dressed for fishing, taken at a distance so that you could see both him and the name of the boat whose bow he was standing on:Red Sky.The photo was badly creased. On the back, in faded pencil, someone had written a caption:Theo, August 1950.
“Here,” she said, “we’ll find the rest, don’t worry.”
Diana sniffled. “He probably burned them. Or tore them into little pieces.”
“I’m sure he didn’t.”
Another sniffle. “You don’t understand. You were so much younger, you never knew how vicious he could be. You don’t know him like I do.”
I thought about Richard putting Mom in a basket and trying to float her out to sea. Mom didn’t say so, but I thought she was thinking of it, too.
“I guess we all know Richard in our own way,” she said hesitantly. “But I don’t believe he took those photos.”
“Oh, I suppose they just grew little legs and walked away,” Diana snapped.
