It hurts to look at but he digs out the thin stack of photos and shuffles through them anyway. Most of them are of Isobel and River as a baby: her in the hospital, holding him, a smile on her face that even through the long stretch of time and the distance of a photograph he can tell doesn’t reach her eyes. A violent sort of longing exudes from every picture of them together, her expression always far away, like she’s thinking of somewhere else, while baby River is looking up at her or whoever is behind the camera and oblivious to the storm brewing inside of her. The one of David and Rose holding up a tiny baby between them is better. They look happy. Genuinely so. The absence of Rose throbs inside of him, followed by the cold breeze of David’s slow departure, and the infinitesimal smile it had coaxed out of him disappears when he flips to the last photograph.
By all accounts, from a distance, it is nothing more than a family photo. A man stands next to a woman with his arm draped over her shoulder. The woman stands straight and holds a baby on her hip, the one closest to the man, so that the baby, who is looking not at the camera but up at the sky, is nestled between them. In the background there looms the facade of a large house; on the doorstep and out of focus, what looks like three boys looking out curiously and half-hidden in the doorway. The family stands perfectly framed at the bottom of the stairs.
But River recognizes Les Arbres. That red-orange brick, the evenly spaced windows. The grass beside the paved drive still green with summer and the old stone of the stairs leading up to the door. He recognizes Frank: younger, dressed in paramilitary-casual, a bomber jacket over black utility pants and laced up boots. More red and less grey, cigarette dangling from the corner of his gap-toothed shark’s smile. His predator’s eyes with a predator’s grip on his mother who stands pale faced and stoic, unsmiling, her fingers like claws in the fabric of an infant River’s clothes. She had taken him there—to Les Arbres. After he was born. Why? Unfathomable. She had to know what they did there. But he thinks of what Frank had said to him when they first met, that she’d been there for him. That she’d loved him. And River can only think that Isobel had taken him there as some hare-brained attempt to, he supposes, get Frank to love her; to love their son. He wonders now if it had been a mother’s love that got her out of Les Arbres a second time, or the simple indignation at being used, intended as a punishment for a recipient who couldn’t have cared any less.
