Circa Now

by Amber McRee Turner

  “But what about the Memory Wall?” she said.

  Mom’s shoulders dropped with the added weight of the question. “I guess they’ll have to find someone else to do it,” she said.

  “But it’s not someone else’s thing. It’s our thing,” argued Circa. “And no one else can do that stuff like Dad does…I mean, like he did.”

  “Then they might have to make other plans,” said Mom.

  “But they can’t do that,” said Circa. “What about Miss Rempy and Maki and Hank and the others? All those pictures that were going to help them remember?”

  “I don’t know what they’ll do,” said Mom, clapping the checkbook shut. “But I just can’t worry about that right this minute, sweet girl.”

  Circa suddenly felt herself spinning into a panic, like the whole picture of what used to be was fast crumbling into yellowed paper bits at her feet. Unrestorable bits. She turned to look at the picture of Dad again, for any inspiration that might be left there. She found a faint flicker of an idea in the eyes behind those purple glasses.

  “Then let me worry about it,” Circa said with such conviction she surprised herself.

  “About what?” said Mom.

  Circa swiveled around. “Dad’s been teaching me stuff for a long time,” she said. “Let me do the work.”

  Mom sat still in the thick silence.

  “But, Circa, you don’t know enough—” she said. “You can’t expect— I mean, you’re a child.”

  “I can at least try, right?”

  “No, Circa.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…because you just can’t.”

  “Please, Mom,” she begged. “Just let me try.”

  “Circa, doing photo restoration requires a lot more than being able to draw silly glasses on somebody,” Mom said. “I’ll allow you to use Dad’s computer to tinker around if you want, but the answer is no on the Maple Grove thing.”

  “But why? You won’t even have to go up there,” said Circa. “I can pick up the pictures myself.”

  “Circa. I can’t do this right now. I said no,” Mom said, fanning her face with an envelope.

  “Okay, fine,” said Circa, spinning back toward the desk indignantly. “Then I’ll just tinker.”

  Mom’s no had dropped like a heavy curtain between them, only feeding Circa’s need to prove herself. As soon as Mom turned her attention back to her paperwork, Circa pulled up the old soldier picture that Dad had opened for her weeks ago. She had not gotten up the nerve to work on it after he’d left that day. Only now, she replayed Dad’s words again in her head. The day you can seamlessly add a fresh person into a pic, then you can do just about any kind of photo restoration.

  So Circa set to work adding a baby into the picture. With fierce determination, she copied features from their own Monroe family pictures and pasted them in with the soldiers. Then she painted, sized, blurred, smudged, and clicked UNDO a hundred times until she thought her brand-new little Shopt person actually looked very human, somewhat cute, and maybe even printable. Circa swiftly printed the picture, only to feel utter disappointment when she held it in her hands. It looked like a baby sure enough. But it was so very obvious that someone had faked it. So very opposite of seamless. So opposite of Dad. She was embarrassed to see she’d even forgotten to put a right arm on him. Circa crumpled the picture and let it fall at her feet. She turned to see if Mom was aware of what she’d done, only to find her curled up on her side in the beanbag chair. Clearly, the glue was not holding. Mom was coming apart, and thanks to Circa’s failure, so was Dad’s legacy.

  Circa closed the old soldier picture. Then she closed Dad’s portrait.

  Would you like to save your changes? it said.

  No, she clicked.

  Then Circa gazed at the blank background of the monitor, wondering how in the world she and Mom were going to make it. Wishing she could just curl up inside this empty, Dad-shaped hole in the room and disappear. Longing for the power to change other things with just the click of a mouse.

  Dad leaving to deliver the reunion photo. UNDO.

  Tornado. UNDO.

  That tree, that stupid Jeep-wrecking tree at the park. UNDO.

  All of April twenty-seventh. UNDO.

  Every last bit of this. UNDO.

  Surely after that whole mess of undoing, Circa Monroe would no longer be rocking herself nauseous in an office chair that was too big for just her. And Laurel Monroe wouldn’t be crumpled up in the middle of tear-spattered bills and sympathy cards on the studio floor. And most important of all, Todd Monroe would not be just a collection of ashes inside a wooden box on top of a computer monitor. Instead, he’d be right here filling these chair dents and reminding his daughter that one forty-nine a.m. is oh so very past her bedtime.

  It seemed like mere moments later when the sunshine streaming through Circa’s window stirred her awake. She was surprised to be lying in her own bed, since she had absolutely no recollection of walking to her room. In fact, the last thing she remembered were the hazy letters of Dad’s keyboard as her head bobbed over it. How had she gotten upstairs? Circa wondered. It couldn’t have been Mom that did it. Mom always had to ask Dad to help her with carrying even just a few sticks of firewood. “A little help over here, sweetie?” she’d always say after a little grunt of effort, and Dad would come running.

  Circa rolled over. She suddenly felt so very alone. It was the first morning in weeks she’d woken up without Nattie one sleeping bag over. The Boones had been so generous to let them stay until the shock of Dad’s accident had worn off. In that time, Circa had grown accustomed to the routine at the Boones’ house. A home-cooked breakfast every morning, the noise of a busy bustling family all day long, and a best friend who pretended not to notice when Circa needed to sneak home for a cry. All these things had made the giant gaping hole in her heart feel a little more bearable. In fact, many things had been more bearable at the Boones’, Circa realized now that there was no smell of bacon wafting up the stairs.

  Circa climbed out of bed. Her head was swimmy with exhaustion as she padded to the bathroom across the hall. Tired or not, she had to get herself ready as quickly as possible. Circa had something to prove, and today was going to be the day to do it.

  Circa quickly brushed her teeth, wiped her face with the cleanest washcloth available, and then smoothed her thick brown hair over into its usual sloppy side ponytail. She hurried back to her room to get dressed in the one thing that could do without ironing, then finished off with sandals and a small purse slung across her. She felt a sense of victory when the purse fell into place right as Mom’s phone sounded its wake-up crickets down the hall. As Mom fumbled around to silence the chirps, Circa quickly made her way down the steps and through the foyer, passing sympathy plants in various stages of shrivel.

  Circa had been dreading going into the kitchen, the source of all that stink. She held her breath, pushed the narrow doors open, and threw as much fuzzy fruit and green bread as she could in the garbage before exhaling. Then she checked the fridge. There was the milk. That definitely had to go. But then where was all the rest of the food they’d left behind? Almost everything was already gone. Maybe Mrs. Boone packed them all up, Circa figured, as she found herself one nonmushy pear on the door of the fridge.

  From above, she could hear the squeak of the water turning on upstairs and felt relieved that Mom was okay enough to get up and shower. Despite staying bedded down at the Boones’ for the last two Sundays, church was something her family didn’t like to miss, because the people there were always so sweet to them, especially when Mom was having a hard time. Aside from the doctor visits and a couple of attempts at grocery shopping when Dad was in bed with the flu, church was the only place other than the Boones’ that Circa had ever known Mom to go. If Mom ever felt panicky there, she could just go sit in the room at the back of the auditorium where peopl
e rocked their babies. The Cry Room, they called it. Circa felt sure that’s where they’d be sitting this morning.

  Even for Circa, church was a place so different from school, where kids whispered junk about her family and how weird they were for “hiding out” inside their studio most of the time. It didn’t help things any that Circa also had a funny name and only one pinkie finger, small facts that had added up to a measure of difficulty in finding friends at Wingate Elementary School. Normally to Circa, it would be heaven that all the schools around had closed early for the summer because of the damage in the areas where buses ran. But she would have gladly been a fifth grader all year-round if it would take back that storm.

  Circa grabbed the sharpest knife from the wood block and tried to cut the pear into a stack of thinnest-evers. Mom had left the air conditioner running all night long to make things less musty, and the house was awful chilly for May. Not to mention awful quiet without Dad’s precoffee Sunday morning hymn, a racket that Circa had never really appreciated before this moment.

  “Ooch!” Circa winced. At the end of the pear, she’d nicked her own thumb just enough to produce a squirt of blood that made her go a little woozy. Composing herself, she carefully wrapped a paper towel around the cut and carried her breakfast into the dark studio, which was even colder than the rest of the house. Circa didn’t turn on the lamps in the studio, but instead woke up Dad’s computer and ate the pear slices by the monitor’s glow until the tiny red soak-through spot on her thumb wrap grossed her out too much to finish. Then, with her good hand, she set to work.

  Circa wanted to try another Shopt addition to a photo, and definitely something easier than yesterday’s soldier baby. Instead of exploring Dad’s files, Circa decided to start on something fresh. She looked around the studio and found Mom’s small point-and-shoot camera. The camera was a little hard to maneuver with the paper towel on her thumb, but Circa managed to snap a picture out the studio’s front window, a great upward shot of the pine tree growing next to her bedroom.

  Circa popped Mom’s memory card into the slot on Dad’s computer and opened her picture up in Photoshop. Then she began to work. Quickly, but carefully, Circa added the one thing she thought she could pull off in a short amount of time. She added a scraggly nest full of blue speckled eggs tucked into a gap in the top of the tree. This time, her addition was scruffy where it needed to be scruffy and smooth where it needed to be smooth, and somehow, just seeing that little Shopt nest in there made the dim, lump-throated day a bit more bearable. She even started to conjure up a Shopt story about how those eggs had been laid by some kind of time-traveling bird, when suddenly, she heard Mom bellowing upstairs.

  “Circa! Get up and get ready, okay?”

  Circa didn’t bother to tell Mom she was already dressed and in the studio. She just kept improving the little nest right up until she heard Mom thunking down the steps in her flats. Then she rolled the chair backward to get a good look at her work. Her little addition was nestled enough, it was pretty enough, and, on top of all that, it actually looked real.

  “This one will do the trick, Dad,” she whispered, then clicked PRINT. She fanned the ink dry, folded the picture over twice, and stuffed it into her purse. It would be kind of soothing to have it along with her for the morning.

  “Circ? You coming?” Mom called again.

  Circa quickly closed the nest picture without saving it, deleted the tree pic from the memory card, and returned the card to Mom’s camera. Then she walked into the kitchen, startling Mom when she entered from the direction of the studio. Mom sat at the table steeping a little teabag into a cup of hot water. Circa noticed that her hair was pulled back soaking wet into a ponytail. She’d put on a little bit of lipstick, but no other makeup, and her eyes were bloodshot and swollen all around. It was clear Mom was going to have a hard time being Sunny Backdrop today.

  “I was just messing around in the studio,” said Circa, trying not to stare.

  “Okay, baby,” Mom said, hovering her eyes over the steam. “You look nice this morning.”

  “Thanks,” said Circa, hearing a light rapping at the front door.

  “Oh me,” said Mom. “Circa, will you…never mind,” she said, patting her damp face with a napkin.

  “It’s okay,” said Circa. “I got it.”

  Circa made her way to the front of the house, closing the narrow double doors between the kitchen and foyer behind her. She opened the front door and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that it was Nattie. Sweet Nat, standing on the front porch holding an armload of paper flowers.

  Nattie smiled and held the flowers out to Circa, who noticed right away that they’d been crafted out of at least a dozen kinds of old wrapping paper. “It’s kind of like a whole year’s worth of leftover happy,” Nattie said cheerfully, looking fancy as ever in her favorite church hat. Circa had never known Nattie to not be pretty. Especially today, the way her dark skin contrasted against the pale yellow of her dress. Circa recognized it as Nattie’s Easter dress, but modified somehow. Like she had snipped off a doodad here and there to make it more suited for a regular Sunday.

  “These are amazing,” Circa said, grabbing the bunch of flowers and catching herself almost sniffing them. “Thanks, Nat. Mom’ll like these too.” She stepped inside to grab a vase from the living room, plunged the flowers into it, and set the arrangement in the middle of the coffee table.

  “Want to walk to church?” asked Nattie, shuffling her shiny white sandals around. “It’s real nice outside.”

  Nattie was four months younger than Circa but was an inch taller and far wiser on any given day. The two of them had been in class together since kindergarten, but in the fall, Nattie would be going to the North Georgia Academy of Science Charter School, which Mr. Boone had said would be better for Nattie’s “fascination with the intricacies of the earth.” In Mrs. Boone’s words, it was because gophers made her laugh and grammar made her cry.

  Circa considered Nattie’s walking idea a no-brainer. Some fresh air sure would be a welcome thing.

  “We don’t have to talk a lot if you don’t want to,” added Nattie.

  That sweetened the deal even more. Circa wasn’t up for much conversation.

  “Hey, Mom, can me and Nat walk?” Circa called out toward the kitchen doors.

  “I suppose so,” Mom said. “Just be careful and be on time.”

  Circa pressed on her purse to check on the folded nest picture.

  “Hi, Mrs. Monroe,” said Nattie to the double doors. “And bye.”

  “Bye, Mom,” said Circa.

  “Love you girls,” said Mom. “See you there.”

  Circa and Nattie stepped outside and headed up Delp Street in the direction of the old town square. Circa knew that such a sunshiny, beautiful day should make her feel better, but as they moved along, she felt more and more like it was everybody else’s beautiful day but hers. At first they walked in silence, just like Nattie had offered. Then after they passed Nattie’s house and a couple more, Circa became vaguely aware of her friend asking a question, only she wasn’t quite sure what it had been. She was distracted by how all the giant oak trees around had thickened up green and lush. It was normally such a beautiful thing, but today it somehow felt threatening, like they were flexing their muscles at her. Like they all might have been brothers to the one that got Dad.

  “How was last night?” Nattie said a little louder. “My mom wanted me to ask if you guys need her to get some groceries or anything.”

  “Oh. It was okay I guess,” said Circa. “Kinda weird, though. I think it’s just going to take my mom a while to get used to doing house things.”

  Circa looked to the sky, wishing she could find a trumpet-shaped cloud. “Plus the fridge is empty, so maybe yes on the groceries,” she said.

  The entire walk to church was only four blocks, made up of mostly sidewalk, then a drainage ditch wi
th a little bridge over it, and a railroad track. Nattie was kind enough to fill in the many empty spaces in conversation with random wildlife facts. Because it was the only noncussing channel on their TV other than the one with the snoozy antique specials, Nattie was allowed to watch as many shows as she wanted on the Animal Wonders Network. On any other day Circa might have teased Nattie that part of the reason she knew about outdoorsy stuff is because of the goofy crushes she got on all the swamp-exploring, cave-diving hosts of those nature shows. Today though, hearing about how the hummingbird has the largest brain of all birds and how very rare it was to find a nine-spotted ladybug was just the sort of temporary distraction that Circa needed.

  Nattie stopped along a fence to grab a plump white honeysuckle bloom, eased the stringy part out the bottom, and held it out to Circa to slurp the tiny clear bead of sweet. Circa plucked one honeysuckle after another to try to return the favor, but had a hard time finding a juicy one. So Nattie found another one for her.

  “Hey. Pretty cool we don’t have to see Chad Betts’s mean face, thanks to—” Nattie stopped herself short. “I don’t mean the storm is cool. Just the no school part…oh…you know what I mean, right?”

  “Yeah, Nat, I know. Extra cool for you. You won’t have to see him ever again.”

  Circa’s gaze dropped to the ground. It had only just occurred to her that part of the unofficial storm damage included that terrible windy day being the last official time she’d get to walk home from school with her best friend.

  “I guess when you start your new school, you guys will have to drive,” she said.

  “Let’s not even talk about it,” said Nattie. “Sorry I even mentioned all that, Circ. I’m a major shmoo.”