It would have been easier.
I didn’t want to look at my son’s photographs through the eyes of the boy who’d stolen them. It felt like walking into the funeral home all over again.
But then I looked at the folder name again.
Bestest photos of 2000 my luv
And I heard Daniel’s voice in my head. One letter adds up, Mom. Over a lifetime.
I clicked the folder.
Owen thought he’d returned my son’s photographs to me.
He had no idea he was returning a secret Daniel had taken to his grave.
The first photograph opened.
It was Daniel.
Making a face at the camera. Holding it out at arm’s length, the way he always did. His eyes were crossed. His cheeks were puffed out like a blowfish. His hair was sticking up on one side.
A laugh came out of me before I could stop it.
“Oh, sweetheart,” I said to the screen.
The next pictures came slowly. One after another.
Me. Standing in our old kitchen with flour on my shirt and a wooden spoon in my hand, glaring at him. I remembered that day. I was making pie crust and he kept sneaking up behind me with the camera.
The house across the street after the first snowfall of the year. Everything white and soft and perfect.
A crooked photograph of our Christmas tree. The one with the paper star he’d made in third grade on top.
A pigeon sitting on top of a trash can. Looking very important. Daniel had apparently considered that pigeon worthy of being preserved forever.
The fog over the river. The newspaper man on the corner. A puddle with the moon in it.
By the tenth picture, I was crying and smiling at the same time.
I kept scrolling.
Then a woman appeared.
I frowned.
She was standing next to Daniel outside a coffee shop. Both of them smiling into the camera. Daniel was holding it out at arm’s length again. It was a little blurry.
She had long dark hair and big brown eyes. A dimple in one cheek. She looked about twenty.
I’d never seen her before in my life.
Maybe a coworker, I thought. Daniel had worked at a camera store downtown that year, part-time, after his classes at the community college. Maybe somebody from work. Maybe somebody from school.
Then came another photograph.
The same woman. Sitting on a bed with her knees pulled up.
She was wearing Daniel’s gray sweatshirt.
His favorite one. With the hole in the cuff where he’d chewed on it during exams.
Another.
The two of them on a park bench. Holding hands.
Another.
Daniel was looking at her. Not at the camera. At her. She was laughing at something, with her head thrown back, and he was looking at her with an expression I knew immediately.
I’d seen it on his father’s face, once, a very long time ago. Before everything fell apart.
He loved her.
That hurt more than I expected.
It hurt in a deep, quiet place I didn’t know was still there.
My son had been in love. Really in love. And I hadn’t known anything about it.
Not one thing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered to the screen.
I clicked again.
And I stopped breathing.
Daniel was kneeling on the floor in front of the woman.
She was standing in a small, sunny room with yellow curtains. Wearing a long white T-shirt.
She was pregnant.
Visibly pregnant. Five or six months, maybe.
Daniel’s hands were resting gently on either side of her round stomach. And he was kissing the curve of it. His eyes were closed.
I stopped crying.
For several seconds, I just stared.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think.
Then I clicked again.
Daniel standing behind her. His arms wrapped around her waist. Both his hands on her stomach. His chin on her shoulder. Both of them grinning.
Another photograph.
An ultrasound image. Black and gray and grainy. Somebody had taken a picture of the printout, held up against a window.
A tiny curved shape in the middle of all that gray.
Then several photographs that were very clearly a maternity shoot.
The woman standing by a window in a long blue dress, her hands on her belly. Daniel had set up the shot carefully. You could tell. The light was perfect. The way it came through the yellow curtains and fell across her face.
He’d been good. He’d been so good at it.
I grabbed a pad of paper off the desk and a pen.
My fingers were trembling so badly I could barely hold it.
I right-clicked on the photographs, one after another, and looked at the dates. The camera had stamped every one.
The maternity pictures were from late August. Two weeks before he went into the hospital.
I counted on my fingers. If she was six months along in late August, then the baby would have been born in…
November. Maybe December.
Daniel died on September 30.
He’d died two or three months before that baby would have been born.
“Who are you?” I whispered at the woman on the screen.
Was it Daniel’s baby?
It had to be. The way he was kneeling. The way he was looking at her. The way his hands were on her stomach.
But why hadn’t he told me?
Had he planned to?
And then came the question that made my heart pound harder than all the others put together.
What if that child was still out there?
He’d be twenty-five now. Twenty-six, maybe.
A grown man. Somewhere.
My grandson.
I looked at the photographs for another long moment.
The woman in the blue dress by the window.
My son, kneeling on the floor, with his eyes closed.
Then I pulled a notebook toward me across the desk.
I had lost Daniel once without knowing the whole story.
I wasn’t going to walk away from it now.
Somewhere in those photographs was a woman who might have carried my son’s child.
And I was going to find her.
I stopped looking at the photographs like a mother.
That was the only way I could do it.
I started looking at them like evidence.
I went through every single image again, from the very beginning. All two hundred and forty-one of them. I enlarged every one. I wrote down anything that might matter in my notebook.
Dates.
Street signs in the backgrounds.
Store names. Restaurant names.
License plates on parked cars, if I could read them.
Names on envelopes. Names on mailboxes.
Anything printed clearly enough to read.
It took me four hours.
Paul came home from the hardware store around three. He found me hunched over the computer in the study with a notebook full of scribbles and red eyes.
“Nora? Honey? What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t explain. Not yet. I just turned the monitor toward him and pointed at the photograph of Daniel kneeling on the floor with his hands on the woman’s stomach.
Paul looked at it for a long time.
Paul never met Daniel. We met four years after he died, at a grief support group in the basement of the Methodist church. His wife had died of breast cancer. We sat next to each other on folding chairs for six months before he asked me to get coffee.
But he knew Daniel. Through me. Through twenty-two years of stories.
He put his hand on my shoulder.
“Oh, Nora,” he said quietly.
Then he pulled up a chair and sat down next to me.
“Okay,” he said. “What do we know?”
The ultrasound photograph gave us the first real clue.
I enlarged it as far as it would go. Until the edges blurred into squares.
Most of the patient information on the printout had been cut off when Daniel took the picture. But one thing was still visible, in the top corner.
RACHEL.
Just the first name. The last name was cut off.
And below it, the name of a clinic. Westside Women’s Health. And a date. 06/14/2000.
I stared at that date for a long time.
It fit.
If the baby was Daniel’s, Rachel would have been exactly that far along when the picture was taken.
The next morning, I called Westside Women’s Health.
It was still there. Same name. Different address. They’d moved to a newer building across town.
“Hello,” I said to the receptionist. “I’m trying to locate someone who was a patient there in the year 2000. A woman named Rachel. She would have been about twenty years old. She was pregnant.”
The receptionist was quiet for a moment.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said kindly. “I’m really sorry. But we can’t confirm whether someone was ever a patient here. Patient privacy. Even after this long.”
“Even after twenty-six years?”
“Even after twenty-six years. I’m so sorry.”
I understood. I did. It was the right thing for them to do.
That didn’t make hanging up any less frustrating.
So I went back to the photographs.
Again.
And this time, I noticed something I’d missed before.
It was a candid shot. Rachel was sitting at a small kitchen table, laughing. Mid-laugh. Daniel had obviously snuck up on her and taken the picture without warning. She had her hand up, trying to block the camera.
Behind her, on the edge of the table, there was a little stack of mail. Envelopes.
I enlarged the image.
One envelope was mostly hidden under a coffee mug. Another was turned sideways. I couldn’t read either one.
But on the third envelope, peeking out from the bottom of the stack, I could make out part of a street name. And an apartment number.
…lmwood Ave. Apt 3B.
I wrote it down. Elmwood Avenue? Apartment 3B.
That afternoon, I went to the public library downtown.
The big one, with the stone lions out front. I hadn’t been there in years.
I searched old city directories first. The kind that list everyone who lived at every address. They had them going back decades, on microfilm in the basement.
Elmwood Avenue. 2000. Apartment 3B.
The name listed was R. Delgado.
My heart jumped.
Then I searched archived newspapers. Birth announcements. Wedding announcements. Obituaries. Anything with the name Rachel Delgado.
Nothing.
I searched for two hours. Nothing.
I was about to give up when the librarian, a young man with a nose ring and very kind eyes, came over to my table.
“Can I help you find something?”
I explained. Not everything. Just that I was looking for a woman named Rachel Delgado who’d lived on Elmwood Avenue in 2000.
He thought about it.
“Have you tried the church bulletins?” he asked.
“Church bulletins?”
“A bunch of the old neighborhood churches donated their weekly bulletins to us. We scanned them into the local history archive a few years ago. They’re full of stuff. Births, deaths, baptisms, people looking for roommates. Elmwood Avenue is right by St. Brigid’s. You might get lucky.”
