Darkroom
Page 4
How can you not remember something so bad? she wondered, hating her sister for it. How many times does it take before you tune it out, before you completely forget?
And now Grace hated herself, wondering How many times did it happen to me, and how can I not remember something so bad?
Grace wouldn’t stop until she knew those answers; she’d go back, and back, and back, without the blindfolds, without the ear protection; she wasn’t scared of the dark; she’d see and hear everything from now on. And she’d try to get her sister to do the same.
Should have killed him, dad, Grace thought, shifting back to the darkroom.
“You went back,” Alice said.
“I did.”
“And you saw and heard,” she said, pointing at the items on the table.
Alice stood over the box marked 2007. Next to it were boxes for 2006 and 2005. She’d gone through the last three years’ worth of photography, and by the look in her eyes, she knew.
“I did,” Grace said, “and it happened to me, too.”
She added the latest picture of their father to the back of the flipbook, and slowly passed through the last sixty years of his life, watched him turn from the ninety-four-year-old she’d watched die last spring to the thirty-four-year-old from her latest shift to the past. She watched him change, watched the sadness and the pain take over his features in the earlier years. Flipping from back to front, he aged as she’d watched him do in life.
Grace set down the book and looked at her sister. No words needed to be spoken, there was just a shared understanding of the situation. She grabbed the bandana and the gauze she’d worn these last sixty days, threw them in the trash, and then hugged her sister.
“We need to go back,” Alice said.
“We need to know when all of this started.”
“And we need to know when it stopped.”
“You’re really going with me,” Grace said, not as a question, and then she led her little sister upstairs and into the light.