Just One Look (2004) Read Free Page B

on the hayride. Next came Max with his arm stretched up to pick a Gala apple. There was the compulsory 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