by Harlan Coben
Fuzz Pellet--Grace was warming up to this nickname--flipped through a file of photo packets before extracting one. He ripped off the tag and told her an exorbitant price. She handed him a Val-Pak coupon, one dug out of her purse in an excavation that rivaled the search for the Dead Sea Scrolls, and watched the price drop to something closer to reasonable.
He handed her the packet of photographs. Grace thanked him, but he already had the music plugged back into his cerebrum. She waved in his direction. "I come not for the pictures," Grace said, "but for the sparkling repartee."
Fuzz Pellet yawned and picked up his magazine. The latest issue of Modern Slacker.
Grace hit the sidewalk. The weather was brisk. Autumn had shoved summer aside with a patented gust. The leaves hadn't really started turning yet, but the air had that apple-cider quality to it. The shop windows had started up with the Halloween decorations. Emma, her third grader, had convinced Jack to buy an eight-foot blowup Homer-Simpson-as-Frankenstein balloon. It looked, she had to admit, terrific. Her children liked The Simpsons, which meant that maybe, despite their best efforts, she and Jack were raising them right.
Grace wanted to slit open the envelope now. There was always an excitement with a newly developed roll of film, an opening-a-gift expectation, a hurry-to-the-mailbox-even-though-it's-always-bills rush that digital photography, for all its conveniences, could never duplicate. But there wasn't time before school let out.
As her Saab climbed up Heights Road, she took a small detour so that she could pass the town's lookout. From here, the skyline of Manhattan, especially at night, lay spread out like diamonds on black velvet. The longing tugged at her. She loved New York City. Until four years ago, that wonderful island had been their home. They'd had a loft on Charles Street down in the Village. Jack worked on the medical research for a large pharmaceutical company. She painted in her home studio while scoffing at her suburban counterparts and their SUVs and corduroy pants and toddler-referenced dialogues. Now she was one of them.
Grace parked behind the school with the other mothers. She turned the engine off, picked up the Photomat envelope, and ripped it open. The roll was from last week's annual trip to Chester for apple picking. Jack had snapped away. He liked being the family photographer. He considered it paternal manly work, taking the photos, as if this was a sacrifice a father was supposed to make for his family.
The first image was of Emma, their eight-year-old daughter, and Max, their six-year-old son, on the hayride, shoulders hunched, their cheeks reddened by wind. Grace stopped and stared for a moment. Feelings of, yes, maternal warmth, both primitive and evolutionary, rocked her back. That was the thing with kids. It was the little things that got to you. She'd remembered that it had been cold that day. The orchard, she knew, would be too crowded. She had not wanted to go. Now, looking at this photograph, she wondered about the idiocy of her priorities.
The other mothers were gathering by the school fence, making small talk and planning play-dates. It was, of course, the modern era, post-feminist America, and yet, of the roughly eighty parents waiting for their charges, only two were male. One, she knew, was a father who'd been laid off for more than a year. You could see it in his eyes, his slow shuffle, the missed spots when he shaved. The other guy was a stay-at-home journalist who always seemed a little too anxious to chat up the moms. Lonely maybe. Or something else.
Someone knocked on the car window. Grace looked up. Cora Lindley, her best friend in town, signaled for her to unlock the door. Grace did. Cora slid into the passenger seat next to her.
"So how did the date go last night?" Grace asked.
"Poorly."
"Sorry."
"Fifth-date syndrome."
Cora was a divorcee, a little too sexy for the nervous, ever-protective "ladies who lunch." Clad in a low-cut, leopard-print blouse with spandex pants and pink pumps, Cora most assuredly did not fit in with the stream of khakis and loose sweaters. The other mothers eyed her with suspicion. Adult suburbia can be a lot like high school.
"What's fifth-date syndrome?" Grace asked.
"You're not dating much, are you?"
"Well, no," Grace said. "The husband and two kids have really cramped my style."
"Pity. See--and don't ask me why--but on the fifth date, the guys always raise the subject . . . how should I word this delicately? . . . of a menage r trois."
"Please tell me you're joking."
"I joke with you not. Fifth date. At the latest. The guy asks me, on a purely theoretical basis, what my opinion is on menage r trois. Like it's peace in the Middle East."
"What do you say?"
"That I usually enjoy them, especially when the two men start French-kissing."
Grace laughed and they both got out of the car. Grace's bad leg ached. After more than a decade, she shouldn't be self-conscious about it anymore, but Grace still hated for people to see the limp. She stayed by the car and watched Cora walk away. When the bell rang, the kids burst out as if they'd been fired from a cannon. Like every other parent, Grace only had eyes for her own. The rest of the pack, uncharitable as this might sound, was scenery.
Max emerged in the second exodus. When Grace saw her son--one sneaker lace untied, his Yu-Gi-Oh! backpack looking four sizes too big, his New York Rangers knit hat tilted to the side like a tourist's beret--the warmth rushed over anew. Max made his way down the stairs, adjusting the backpack up his shoulders. She smiled. Max spotted her and smiled back.
He hopped in the back of the Saab. Grace strapped him into the booster seat and asked him how his day was. Max answered that he didn't know. She asked him what he did in school that day. Max answered that he didn't know. Did he learn math, English, science, arts and crafts? Answer: Shrug and dunno. Grace nodded. A classic case of the epidemic known as Elementary-School Alzheimer's. Were the kids drugged to forget or sworn to secrecy? One of life's mysteries.
It was not until after she got home and gave Max his Go-GURT snack--think yogurt in a toothpaste-like squeeze tube--that Grace had the chance to take a look at the rest of the photographs.
The message light on the answering machine was blinking. One message. She checked the Caller ID and saw that the number was blocked. She pressed play and was surprised. The voice belonged to an old . . . friend, she guessed. Acquaintance was too casual. Father-figure was probably more accurate, but only in the most bizarre sense.
"Hi, Grace. It's Carl Vespa."
He did not have to say his name. It had been years, but she'd always know the voice.
"Could you give me a call when you have the chance? I need to talk to you about something."
The message beeped again. Grace did not move, but she felt an old fluttering in her belly. Vespa. Carl Vespa had called. This could not be good. Carl Vespa, for all his kindnesses to her, was not one for idle chitchat. She debated calling him back and decided for the time being against it.
Grace moved into the spare bedroom that had become her makeshift studio. When she was painting well--when she was, like any artist or athlete, "in the zone"--she saw the world as if preparing to put it on canvas. She would look at the streets, the trees, the people and imagine the type of brush she would use, the stroke, the mix of colors, the differing lights and casts of shadows. Her work should reflect what she wanted, not reality. That was how she looked at art. We all see the world through our own prism, of course. The best art tweaked reality to show the artist's world, what she saw or, more precisely, what she wanted others to see. It was not always a more beautiful reality. It was often more provocative, uglier maybe, more gripping and magnetic. Grace wanted a reaction. You might enjoy a beautiful setting sun--but Grace wanted you immersed in her sunset, afraid to turn away from it, afraid not to.
Grace had spent the extra dollar and ordered a second set of prints. Her fingers dipped into the envelope and plucked out the photographs. The first two were the ones of Emma and Max on the hayride. Next came Max with his arm stretched up to pick a Gala apple. There was the compuls
ory blurry shot of flesh, the one where Jack's hand had slipped too close to the lens. She smiled and shook her head. Her big doofus. There were several more shots of Grace and the children with a variety of apples, trees, baskets. Her eyes grew moist, the way they always did when she looked at photographs of her children.
Grace's own parents had died young. Her mother was killed when a semi crossed the divide on Route 46 in Totowa. Grace, an only child, was eleven at the time. The police did not come to the door like in the movies. Her father had learned what happened from a phone call. Grace still remembered the way her father, wearing blue slacks and a gray sweater-vest, had answered the phone with his customary musical hello, how his face had drained of color, how he suddenly collapsed to the floor, his sobs first strangled and then silent, as if he could not gather enough air to express his anguish.
Grace's father raised her until his heart, weakened from a childhood bout with rheumatic fever, gave out during Grace's freshman year of college. An uncle out in Los Angeles volunteered to take her in, but Grace was of age by now. She decided to stay east and make her own way.
The deaths of her parents had been devastating, of course, but they had also given Grace's life a strange sense of urgency. There is a left-behind poignancy for the living. Those deaths added amplification to the mundane. She wanted to jam in the memories, get her fill of the life moments and--morbid as it sounds--make sure her kids had plenty to remember her by when she too was no more.
It was at that moment--thinking about her own parents, thinking about how much older Emma and Max looked now than in last year's apple-picking photo shoot--when she stumbled across the bizarre photograph.
Grace frowned.
The picture was near the middle of the pack. Closer to the back maybe. It was the same size, fitting neatly in with the others, though the backing sheet was somewhat flimsier. Cheaper stock, she thought. Like a high-end office-supply photocopy maybe.
Grace checked the next picture. No duplicate this time. That was strange. Only one copy of this photograph. She thought about that. The picture must have fallen in somehow, mixed up with another roll.
Because this photograph did not belong to her.
It was a mistake. That was the obvious explanation. Think for a moment about the quality workmanship of, say, Fuzz Pellet. He was more than capable of screwing up, right? Of putting the wrong photograph in the middle of her pack?
That was probably what was going on here.
Someone else's photograph had gotten mixed in with hers.
Or maybe . . .
The photograph had an old look about it--not that it was black-and-white or antique sepia. Nothing like that. The print was in color, but the hues seemed . . . off somehow--saturated, sun-faded, lacking the vibrancy one would expect in this day and age. The people in it too. Their clothes, their hair, their makeup--all dated. From fifteen, maybe twenty years ago.
Grace put it down on the table to take a closer look.
The images in the photograph were all slightly blurred. There were four people--no, wait, one more in the corner--five people in the photograph. There were two men and three women, all in their late teens, early twenties maybe--at least, the ones she could see clearly enough appeared to be around that age.
College students, Grace thought.
They had the jeans, the sweatshirts, the unkempt hair, that attitude, the casual stance of budding independence. The picture looked as if it'd been snapped when the subjects were not quite ready, in mid-gather. Some of the heads were turned so you only saw a profile. One dark-haired girl, on the very right edge of the photo, you could only see the back of her head, really, and a denim jacket. Next to her there was another girl, this one with flaming-red hair and eyes spaced wide apart.
Near the middle, one girl, a blonde, had--God, what the hell was that about?--her face had a giant X across it. Like someone had crossed her out.
How had this picture . . . ?
As Grace kept staring, she felt a small ping in the center of her chest. The three women--she didn't recognize them. The two men looked somewhat alike, same size, same hair, same attitude. The guy on the far left too was not someone she knew.
She was sure, however, that she recognized the other man. Or boy. He wasn't really old enough to call a man. Old enough to join the army? Sure. Old enough to be called a man? He was standing in the middle, next to the blonde with the X through her face. . . .
But it couldn't be. His head was in mid-turn for one thing. That adolescent-thin beard covered too much of his face. . . .
Was it her husband?
Grace bent closer. It was, at best, a profile shot. She hadn't known Jack when he was this young. They had met thirteen years ago on a beach in the Cote d'Azur in southern France. After more than a year of surgery and physical therapy, Grace was still not all the way back. The headaches and memory loss remained. She had the limp--still has it now--but with all the publicity and attention from that tragic night still suffocating her, Grace had just wanted to get away for a while. She matriculated at the University of Paris, studying art in earnest. It was while on break, lying in the sun on the Cote d'Azur, that she met Jack for the first time.
Was she sure it was Jack?
He looked different here, no doubt about it. His hair was a lot longer. He had this beard, though he was still too young and baby-faced for it to come in full. He wore glasses. But there was something in the way he stood, the tilt of his head, the expression.
This was her husband.
She quickly sifted through the rest of the roll. There were more hayrides, more apples, more arms raised in mid-pick. She saw one that she'd taken of Jack, the one time he'd let her have the camera, control freak that he was. He was reaching so high, his shirt had moved up enough to show his belly. Emma had told him that it was eeuw, gross. That, of course, made Jack pull up the shirt more. Grace had laughed. "Work it, baby!" she'd said, snapping the next photo. Jack, much to Emma's ultimate mortification, obliged and undulated.
"Mom?"
She turned. "What's up, Max?"
"Can I have a granola bar?"
"Let's grab one for the car," she said, rising. "We need to take a ride."
* * *
Fuzz Pellet was not at the Photomat.
Max checked out the various themed picture frames--"Happy Birthday," "We Love You, Mom," that kind of thing. The man behind the counter, resplendent in a polyester tie, pocket protector, and short-sleeve dress shirt flimsy enough to see the V-neck tee beneath it, wore a name tag that informed one and all that he, Bruce, was an assistant manager.
"May I help you?"
"I'm looking for the young man who was here a couple of hours ago," Grace said.
"Josh is gone for the day. Something I can do for you?"
"I picked up a roll of film a little before three o'clock. . . ."
"Yes?"
Grace had no idea how to put this. "There was a photo in there that shouldn't have been."
"I'm not sure I understand."
"One of the pictures. I didn't take it."
He gestured toward Max. "I see you have young children."
"Excuse me?"
Assistant Manager Bruce pushed his glasses up off the end of his nose. "I was just pointing out that you have young children. Or at least, one young child."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"Sometimes a child picks up the camera. When the parent isn't looking. They snap a picture or two. Then they put the camera back."
"No, it's not that. This picture had nothing to do with us."
"I see. Well, I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Did you get all the photos you took?"
"I think so."
"None were missing?"
"I really didn't check that closely, but I think we got them all."
He opened a drawer. "Here. This is a coupon. Your next roll will be developed for free. Three by fives. If you want the four by sixes, there is a small surcharge."
Grace i
gnored his outstretched hand. "The sign on the door says you develop all the pictures on site."
"That's right." He petted the large machine behind him. "Old Betsy here does the job for us."
"So my roll would have been developed here?"
"Of course."
Grace handed him the Photomat envelope. "Could you tell me who developed this roll?"
"I'm sure it was just an honest error."
"I'm not saying it wasn't. I just want to know who developed my roll."
He took a look at the envelope. "May I ask why you want to know?"