All These Beautiful Strangers

by Elizabeth Klehfoth

  The campus felt eerily quiet that early in the morning as I made my way back from the boys’ dormitory to Rosewood Hall. I shrugged deeper into my jacket and quickened my pace. Out there alone at night in the dark, I couldn’t help but think of the ghost—that dead boy wandering around campus, looking for someone to curse.

  When I reached the abandoned field, which was all that separated me now from the dormitories, I got the distinct feeling in the pit of my stomach that I was being watched.

  Don’t be stupid, Charlie, I told myself. There’s no ghost. No one is watching you.

  Still, I started to walk faster. I heard the faint sound of something moving behind me. Ghosts don’t have bodies. Ghosts don’t have footsteps, I told myself.

  I stopped abruptly and I both heard and felt something very real and solid stop in the distance behind me. Someone, a very real someone, was following me. I started to run.

  The field was mostly barren besides two old oak trees on the far end, and through them, in the distance, I could see Rosewood Hall, with the lights in the kitchen on the ground floor still on. Sometimes Mrs. Wilson, the cook, stayed up late whipping up the batter for the next morning’s biscuits. If I could make it there—to the light that spilled onto the front lawn—then I was sure I would be safe.

  But the thing was, I didn’t know if I would make it. I could feel the blood hammering in my ears, the stitch piercing my side as I ran. And whoever was behind me—I could hear their breath, their footsteps, drawing closer. I ripped my keys from the pocket of my hoodie and laced them between my fingers like claws. I stopped and turned around to face the person behind me, my fist ready at my side. I was winded, but I choked out the words nonetheless.

  “St-stay where you are,” I said. “Or I’ll scream.”

  It was too dark to make out the figure completely, even though he was barely five feet away from me. I could tell that he was male, with a thick beard and big burly shoulders.

  He held up his arms in mock surrender. “Don’t scream,” he said, and the gruff voice sounded vaguely familiar. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just—I waited, and you never showed up.”

  My first thought was that this was all some big misunderstanding. This big burly man stalking me in the darkness had mistaken me for someone else. But then I remembered the note I had found in my mailbox that morning.

  “Uncle Hank?” I asked.

  He took a step toward me and I took a step backward, my heart still in my throat. I raised my fist of keys. He stopped when he saw that he had startled me. His shoulders sank as if I had offended him.

  “Charlotte,” he said, and the way he said my name, with so much tenderness and familiarity, almost disarmed me. “Charlotte, it’s me. It’s okay. I’m not—I would never—hurt you. You have to know that.”

  I lowered my fist, unsure.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “I had to see you,” he said, a little breathless. “It’s about your mom.”

  “I don’t want to hear,” I said.

  “You have to,” Uncle Hank said. “You have to listen. I have something you need to see.”

  “I’m not interested,” I said, and turned to go. I didn’t want to hear any more of his theories, didn’t want to answer any more of his questions, didn’t want to be sucked back into that tangled web he had woven all those years ago. I couldn’t go back there; I wouldn’t.

  “Charlotte,” Uncle Hank said, grabbing my arm to stop me, to hold me there. He was close enough I could smell the whiskey thick on his breath.

  I tried not to panic, not to show him how angry I was.

  “She’s not dead,” I said firmly. “She left us. She’s gone, and she’s not coming back. You have to accept that and move on. The rest of us have.”

  I tried to shrug off his grasp, but his fingers only gripped my forearm more tightly. I winced.

  “Listen,” Uncle Hank started up again. “I know what you must think of your mom, considering the story you’ve been told—”

  “Story?” I said. “I’ve seen the bank tapes, Uncle Hank. The whole damn world has seen the bank tapes.”

  I couldn’t help but think that every moment of that last month with her had been a lie. Every time she tucked me in at night or drew my bath or sliced up the strawberries to put on my morning oatmeal, she must have known she was going to leave me.

  “That’s not—that’s not what you think,” Uncle Hank said. “Grace would never do that—leave you and Seraphina like that. She loved you more than anything in the world. It’s not what it looks like. It’s not what you’ve been told.”

  “Let go of me,” I said. “You’re hurting me.”

  Uncle Hank looked down at his hand on my arm and seemed almost shocked to find it there. He let go of me.

  “You need to see this,” Uncle Hank said. As he grabbed for the bag that he had slung over his shoulder, I contemplated making a run for it. Now that I had caught my breath, maybe I could make it to the safety of the dormitory. But what if I didn’t make it, and my running away provoked him further? He’d said he wouldn’t hurt me, and maybe he wouldn’t mean to, but he was so much bigger than me, and so desperate, and, frankly, kind of crazy. Who knew what he was capable of?

  While I was still debating what to do, Uncle Hank handed me a manila envelope.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  “See for yourself,” he said.

  I took the envelope. It was old and yellowing. There was a postage stamp in the top right corner, and my mother’s name and the address to the lake house were written in a hasty scrawl on the front. The seal was broken. Inside was a stack of photographs and a piece of paper. I took out the piece of paper first. Someone had written in all capital letters, I KNOW.

  I took out the photographs next and thumbed through them slowly, using the flashlight from my phone to illuminate them in the darkness. There must have been over a hundred pictures. The first dozen were snapshots taken in quick succession from a distance. They were of my mother. She was sitting at a booth next to the window in some diner. Her face was clearly visible in the shot. She looked upset. Across from her in the booth was a man. In this shot, I couldn’t see his face, just his hand reaching across the table to console my mother. In the next shot, his hand was on top of hers.

  I glanced up at my uncle Hank. He was watching me intently.

  “Do you recognize him?” he asked. “The man in the pictures with her—have you seen him before?”

  I looked back down at the pictures. I turned to the next one. This one was taken at a different angle. I could see the man’s face in this one. He had a dark beard and a wide nose. The skin under his eyes looked sunken and gray. He was slightly balding and looked to be in his thirties. He was wearing a suit.

  “No,” I said. “I’ve never seen him before.”

  I flipped through the rest of the shots, but the man didn’t appear in any of the ones taken outside of the diner. They were all pictures of my mother with me and Seraphina. There we were in the front driveway of the lake house. My mother had Seraphina in her arms in one and she was unloading us from her SUV. There were pictures of us coming out of the supermarket in Hillsborough with Grandma Fairchild; the three of us in my uncle Hank’s truck; me and Seraphina swimming in the lake while my mother watched from the shoreline. I thought of the long-lensed camera Mr. Andrews had shown us in class—the telephoto lens he had told us about.

  I came to the last photo, which stopped my heart. Because there was no illusion of closeness in this shot. The photographer was right there, one hand outstretched so that you could see it in the frame of the shot, and there I was by myself in the backyard of my grandparents’ house in Hillsborough, Connecticut, looking up into the lens of the camera, within reach. When I flipped it over, I saw something had been written on the back. Just one word: STOP.

  Stop what?

  “What are these?” I asked.

  “I found them in the lake house. Under a loose floorboard in yo
ur parents’ old room.”

  “What were you doing in the lake house?”

  My father would flip once he found out Uncle Hank had broken into our house, gone through our things.

  “I had questions,” Uncle Hank said. “I went looking for answers myself. And I think I found something. I don’t know what these are yet or what they mean, but I’m sure they mean something.”

  As much as I wanted to argue with him, I couldn’t. Because these photos had left me cold and hollow and breathless. Had someone been following us? Had these photos been some kind of threat? And if so, why? What had my mother done to make someone want to threaten us?

  “Do you remember who took this photo?” Uncle Hank asked.

  I stared at the photo in my hand and shook my head. It unnerved me to the core, but I had no memory of its being taken.

  “Maybe you remember something,” Uncle Hank said, more desperate this time. He ran a hand through his disheveled hair. “Anybody hanging around that summer that gave you a strange feeling? It could even be somebody who seemed like they belonged there. Lord knows you had an army coming and going. Maybe a gardener or a maid? Maybe your mom was acting nervous or scared? Something small, something off. Any small thing might be something. It could help.”

  “I already told you everything I remembered,” I said, resentment leaking into my words. Well, I’d told him almost everything. And he’d betrayed me.

  He was so sure that my mother was dead, so sure that I had the answer to what had really happened to her—so sure that I held the key.

  “There has to be something else,” Uncle Hank snapped at me. He raised his hand and for a moment I thought he might hit me or grab me, and I tried not to flinch. “There has to be something you haven’t told me yet.”

  I didn’t answer him. “Does my father know about these?” I asked instead.

  “I don’t know what Alistair knows or doesn’t know,” Uncle Hank said. “And he stopped listening to me a long time ago.”

  “Maybe if he saw these—” I started, but Uncle Hank cut me off.

  “This isn’t a Calloway matter anymore,” Uncle Hank spat. “I won’t go to those people again. They long ago made up their hearts and minds about my sister; they’ve made that very clear. I know they’re your family, Charlotte, but I’ll tell you the same thing I told your mother. They’re—they’re cold people. Grace never really understood until it was too late, and maybe you won’t either, but there it is. And that’s all I’ll say on the matter.”

  I handed him back the envelope. “I can’t help you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Uncle Hank reluctantly took the photographs and rubbed his chin. He shook his head at me, as if I had disappointed him. “I know you’re a Calloway, Charlotte,” he said. “But you’re a Fairchild, too. You’re one of us. Don’t forget that.”

  His words stung. I bit my lip and looked away, unsure of what to say.

  “There’s this thing we do every year at your grandma’s house—a party for Grace, on her birthday,” Uncle Hank said, putting the envelope back into his bag, a bit resigned now that he wouldn’t get anything else from me. “She would be turning forty-three this year. It would mean a lot to Ma if you and Seraphina came.”

  I knew about the party. My mother’s family had held one every year since she left. When I was younger, I hadn’t been allowed to go. My father didn’t think it was a good idea. And now . . . now it was easy to ignore it since I was at school. Knollwood seemed a world away from Hillsborough, and that was part of its appeal.

  “I’ll think about it,” I lied.

  “Okay, then,” Uncle Hank said, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand, as if he wasn’t sure what the proper goodbye was, and I just stared back at him.

  For a moment, I tried to see him the way my mother saw him. I knew he was her favorite brother. Growing up, she had told me stories—how he had taught her to drive in their dad’s station wagon when she was only twelve. When she mistook the gas for the brake pedal and leveled their mailbox, Uncle Hank took the fall for her, claiming he was the one behind the wheel. He bore the brunt of three lashes from their dad’s belt, while my mom watched from upstairs, peeking her head between the banisters. When she was in the fourth grade and tumbled over the handlebars of her bike, Uncle Hank had been the one to hold her hand and distract her while the doctor sewed up the stitches on her chin, and he asked for a matching ugly brown Band-Aid to wear on his chin so that she didn’t feel so ridiculous wearing one by herself.

  Uncle Hank and I used to share an eternity of summers, of sunburned toes, and rocky road ice-cream cones that melted in the searing July afternoon faster than you could eat them, and the slightly sour smell of lake water and sweat. There used to be so much that reminded me of Uncle Hank. But now, all that connected us was the ghost of my mother.

  Strangely, that was what separated us, too.

  Four

  Grace Calloway

  August 4, 2007

  4:35 p.m.

  I could feel it in the air that day—the retreat of summer. The suffocating heat of July had given way to cooler August afternoons. And it wasn’t just the heat that had abated; it was the girls’ moods. Charlotte and Seraphina were beginning to grow restless, I could tell; the novelty of being at the lake house had started to wear off. Running barefoot through the sprinklers in the front lawn, camping in the backyard, barbecuing on the patio—once great adventures—had started to feel routine. They’d abandoned the tire swing Alistair had hung over the old elm on the edge of the lake, lost interest in racing each other out to the raft and back. The other day I’d found Charlotte and Seraphina marooned on the cold leather sofa in the den, playing their PlayStation 3.

  It felt like the end of something. And it was.

  I looked over from where I sat on the cushioned seats at the bow of the boat to where Alistair sat behind the wheel. He had Charlotte in his lap; he was teaching her how to steer our new twenty-five-foot Sea Ray bowrider. I couldn’t hear what they were saying to one another over the noise of the motor and the sound of the waves breaking against the hull. Seraphina sat on her knees next to me, leaning out over the edge of the boat, hands splayed to catch the spray of the waves. I had one finger hooked in one of the loops of her life jacket straps at the back, anchoring her to me in the event a bumpy wave caused her to lose her balance.

  The lake was just under four hundred acres. It was surrounded by woods and undeveloped land. A few houses dotted the shoreline here and there, and there was a public boat launch on the north side. We passed a fisherman in his aluminum boat at the edge of the lake. He stared out at us from under the bill of his baseball cap, and I raised my hand to wave hello.

  I imagined how we must have appeared to a casual onlooker. Just a happy family enjoying a Saturday afternoon boat ride around the lake.

  Now I took a mental snapshot. Seraphina’s blond curls floating behind her in the breeze. Click. Charlotte wearing her father’s Knicks hat as she peered over the wheel. The hat was too big even though Alistair had adjusted it to its tightest setting. It kept sliding down onto the bridge of her nose, covering her eyes, and Charlotte kept tilting her head back to clear her view, refusing to take it off. Click. Alistair, the sunlight catching in his blond hair, reflecting off his oiled, toned shoulders. My perfect, handsome husband holding our daughter in his arms. Click.

  In college, I’d taken a photography class and there was a quote by Ansel Adams our professor had up on the wall: “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” I’d always thought that a photograph was made not once, but twice. In the first and most obvious instance, the photographer made the photograph—she chose the framing, the angle of the shot, the lighting, the composition of objects. She chose what she wanted you to see. It was staged, artificial, the story she wanted told. But every photograph was made a second time when the viewer looked at it. Because you didn’t just see the photograph as it was, you saw it as you were. You brought your own context to it, your own st
ory, your own perceptions. You made the meaning. I always thought that what people saw when they looked at a photo said more about them than what was actually in the shot.

  Now I held my mental snapshots up for review and I tried to erase myself, a great unmaking. I tried to see those snapshots as a stranger would. I held the images far away from my mind’s eye so that all the intricacies blended together, until it became a harmless palette of colors and lines. For just a moment, I wanted things to be only what they appeared to be from a distance.

  Five

  Charlie Calloway

  2017

  They were yelling again. I could hear them through the wall. So I put a movie on for Seraphina and turned the volume up.

  “Stay here,” I told her, and I padded out of our room and down the hall. I peeked my head in through their half-open door.

  My father’s suitcase was on the bed. My mother was by the dresser, a drawer out, and she was tossing collared shirts into it.

  “Just go,” she said.

  “Damn it, Grace,” my father said. He had just gotten out of the shower. I could see the steam coating the mirror in their bathroom; his cheeks were red where he had shaved. He was dressed in a towel that was tied around his waist.

  He grabbed her by the wrist, pulled her toward him so that she was in his arms.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  “Get your hands off me,” my mother snapped.

  “Mommy?” I called out.

  They both turned then and saw me standing there. My father let her go. I saw my mother’s face—her eyes red and puckered. She quickly turned her back to me again, so I couldn’t see her.

  “Why is Mommy crying?” I asked.

  My father came over and picked me up, even though I was getting too old for that now.