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My phone buzzes with an email from the film transfer place and a link to the digital file. I’m tempted to watch it here but decide to wait until I can be somewhere private. Where I can have the space to see what secret Poppy needed to share with my father, the secret that got her killed.
***
I return to the shop and the man gives me a funny look as I hand him my credit card. “You know the people on that film?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “But the camera was my aunt’s, back in the seventies.”
He shakes his head as he hands me back my credit card but doesn’tsay anything more. I take the shoebox with the camera back to my car and head toward home.
***
When I enter my house, I feel a loosening of my shoulders, my muscles finally unclenching. The air feels stuffy after being closed up for two months and I open the sliding doors to the patio, letting the cool canyon air inside, then look in my freezer for something to eat. I pull out a couple of Trader Joe’s tamales and put them in the oven, then sit at the dining room table, my laptop in front of me, trying not to think about how different this would feel if Tom were here to greet me with a hug and a hot meal. A back rub after the long drive home.
A quick pass through my bedroom had revealed that he’d been here, clearing out his things. The stack of books that usually sat on his nightstand was gone. So were the shirts he keeps in my closet. His toothbrush. I found his key on the kitchen counter next to the coffee maker. No note. No goodbye. Just an emptiness.
But I refuse to believe this is the end. I have a plan. A way forward, to show Tom that I can be honest with him. That there aren’t any more secrets and that I don’t want to live a life like my father’s. Or my mother’s, for that matter.
Her words from this morning come back to me.Information is power, yes. But it’s also a burden because once you know something, you can’t pretend you don’t.I stare at the link to Poppy’s last film, hesitating. Remembering the strange look the man at the transfer place gave me. Knowing that whatever is on this film will give me answers I might not want.
Poppy
June 13, 1975
6:48 p.m.
I wasn’t supposed to die. I know that now, as I fight for air, as my blood pools beneath me and my brother stands over me, terrified.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, tears making his cheeks shiny and wet. In his words I hear everything left unsaid—the lies he told to protect himself, the pain he’s carried for so long. His chest heaves with suppressed sobs. “I can’t… I wish…” He can’t finish his sentences, and I want to tell him it’s okay. We’re okay.
They say when you die, your life flashes before your eyes, but I only see pieces of it. My world, as if viewed through the lens of a camera. Moments in time, delivered out of order, like a movie cut and spliced together again.
Christmas lights and hot chocolate.
Roller skates and wind rushing through my hair, the sun warm on my shoulders, adrenaline racing through me like quicksilver.
Spinning spinning spinning in my backyard, until the sky is the ground and the ground is the sky. The soft scratch of grass as I fall. Danny’s voice, telling me to get up. To try again. My mother’s laughter and the smell of tobacco from my father’s cigarette.
My father’s birthday toasts—fourteen of them.When Poppy was born, she was beauty and grace and light. And she continues to be that, all her beautiful days.
Snippets of memories, fragments of conversations. When you’re living it, you can’t see how it all fits together, or how it’s all going to end. But here, in this space, all your days line up like pearls on a string, each one leading to the next. You get to touch them, live them one last time and finally understand.
Pain radiates outward from where the knife plunged—such a surprise, how easily it went in. How deep it went and how much it hurt. The blood soaks into the bed beneath me, where I’ve fallen, and my hands grip the bedspread, the new one I got a few weeks ago. Margot and I are supposed to paint my room this summer. Color samples are splashed on the wall by my closet. Creamsicle. Cool Mint. Buttercup. We just decided last week on buttercup. My senses are heightened, the suffocating smell of my own blood, the bedspread beneath me still scratchy new, yellow rosebuds now soaked in red. My mother will be mad at the mess, but for once I’m not worried.
Danny begins to pace the room, panic taking over. I want to tell him to go for help, to call someone, but I can’t draw enough air to do more than a quiet whisper. He grabs at his hair, sound erupting out of him in giant, choking sobs, and then collapses in the corner of the room, my blood all over his hands. His arms. My oldest brother, once my biggest hero, his dark hair matted against his sweaty forehead, his skin pasty white. I open my mouth to tell him I forgive him, but I can’t. My throat fills with blood and I can’t seem to swallow it back down.
He must hear me, because suddenly he’s up again, standing over me. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” he says.
I wonder,Which time?The bruises on my arms are only a couple days old, the mottled purple where he’d grabbed me, squeezing so tight I could feel the blood pound in my fingertips. The cuts on my elbows and knees from when he’d tackled me are still fresh. And my camera. I can still see it pinwheeling through the air, the sound as it smashed against a tree.
Danny had snuck into my room the following night, his breath hot and laced with alcohol as he whispered into my ear. “Where’s the camera, Poppy?”
He asks me again now. “Where did you hide it?”
I shake my head, just a fraction of an inch left and right, unable to speak. Then I close my eyes so they don’t cut to my window or toward my closet. Vince will find my diary and my film reels. Vince will keep looking for my camera and figure it all out.
The pain is increasing with every inhalation and the room flickers, to another place and time. Me, sitting on the bottom of a pool holding my breath, listening to Danny call for me from the deck. I think of the way he used to laugh—big and loud—and the way it would fill me up, like helium, until I felt like I might fly. When was the last time he laughed like that?
I open my eyes again and he’s gone. Did I imagine him? I’m worried about who will find me. How long it will take for someone to come, whether they’ll be able to help. It won’t be my parents, who won’t be back for hours. Will it be Margot, who will surely come looking for me when I don’t show up at the Tilt-A-Whirl? I hope not.